Forty-four people quietly gathered In Lansing, MI on
December 28, 1920 and found enough consensus between them to elect officers for
a new Michigan Assembly that included all ordained/unordained ministers and
one lay member from each congregation. Officers of this new organization
were: C. S. Sisler of Lansing, Chairman; William Hartman of Kalamazoo, Vice
Chairman; and Secretary E. C. Grice.
They adopted sufficient bilaws to govern them as they worked
in three specified areas of need that had prompted them to meet and organize.
The problems prompting them were: 1) ministers circulating with dubious
credentials; 2) pastors experiencing difficulty transitioning from one
congregation to another; and, 3) internal conflicts within congregations. Gale
Hetrick later noted that “These three concerns would dominate the business
sessions of the Assembly for nearly two decades) (Laughter Among the
Trumpets/119).
The group included twenty-five pastors, five evangelists,
several female spouses that included ten women, one of whom was Allie Fisher
Allen. Michigan was the first state to organize in this manner; thus, the
succeeding organization of the Church of God in Michigan is today the oldest of
its kind in the movement. As it approaches its coming centennial in 2020 it
currently represents more than 14,000 people in 102 churches, down from the
peak number of 136 churches.
Brown later described this effort as a “daring thing” for
which the officers were called on the ecclesiastical carpet and admonished by
national leaders the following Anderson Camp Meeting. It was a new and daring
experiment because these were people of the Reformation Movement, sometimes
known as “come-outers.”
Beginning with Warner, Fisher and the Coles,the primary thrust had been to call people out of sectism into spiritual unity and to avoid all
appearance of the denominationalism we so severely thrashed.
Until C.E. Brown
finally convinced us that we could organize to do the work of the church,
although we knew we could not organize the church itself, we [the Movement] had been
vigorously anti-organization and we are still plagued with that disease. That bias seemingly went far beyond Warner’s perception of
the church as something created and organized by God. To some of us it appears
to run hand in glove with Warner’s loss of credentials in the General Eldership
of the Church of God, almost like an emotional hangover, that Warner himself never got over and forever after had this vendetta.
I offer this backward peek to make a couple of observations
relating to our transition into a new period of ministry and growth under the
leadership of Dr. Jim Lyons. It has been my observation that we are unclear
about our identity and our core DNA. As a result, we have proclaimed vigorously
our message of holiness and unity but we have avoided coming to the table of
dialogue with that segment of the church our earlier literature designated as
“Babylon.”
Out of our antipathy to Babylon and to organization we have
become relatively ineffectual in serious cooperative evangelism, working
together and reaching out to win the none-churched. We have, in fact, become a
comfortable private membership, YMCA of sorts for spiritual health addicts,
disinterested in getting socially involved in redeeming either society or the
people in it.
I BELIEVE IT IS
IMPERATIVE THAT WE DECIDE WHO WE ARE AND WHAT OUR MISSION IS. TO DETERMINE
THIS, WE MUST ONCE MORE BECOME PEOPLE OF THE BOOK.ONCE WE DO THIS, WE WILL
HOPEFULLY DISCOVER THAT WE ARE PEOPLE OF GOD NOW. And with this, I draw
some conclusions:
1. As people
of God, our mission is that unique mission given God’s people in the
Scriptures--reveal God to the
inhabitants of the world. In other words, our primary mission is missions itself, or evangelism and since
that was God’s mission, that is our primary mission, around which our whole
church ministry should be singularly organized. Building buildings and
institutions, doctrinalizing the church, and teaching our distinctives are not
our primary mission. The church is about searching for that one lost sheep,
while we provide for the ninety and nine
2.
As people
of God, we are His people NOW, not at some future time of fulfillment. Our
generation is run in the ground with garden varieties of millennialism, while
we have no one proclaiming a forthright amillennial apologetic. Instead; we
must go outside our circles to find scholarship like N. T. Wright, who reminds
us with refreshingly with sound reason and biblical basis for proclaiming that through
Jesus we live in a new era of GOD’S KINGSHIP and that we ignore that at our own
peril.
3.
If we are God’s
people, and if we presently live under
God’s authority and the mentoring of Jesus, we cannot be like Jesus and be
independent consumers, autonomous and untrusting of each other, but we must
organize our cooperative work to do whatever it takes to win the world at any
cost, and the rest of our institutional life will be shaped by our mission and
by who we are.
We will do what we do because of who we are
and this will determine whether or not we are a loosely
connected association or the tightly-knit Body of Christ. This will determine
whether we as the Church of God attempt to be an evangelical holiness Lone
Ranger or we come to the table of dialogue with holiness churches, Pentecostal
churches, Calvinists and Arminians and we find ways to cooperate and complement
to win the lost at whatever cost.
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