The Bond of Union

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     "The church of Christ -- not sects -- is a Divine institution. We do not recognize sects, with sectarian names and symbols and terms of fellowship, as branches of the church of Christ, but as unscriptural and anti-scriptural, and therefore to be abandoned for the one church of God which the New Testament reveals. That God has a people among these sects we believe; we call on them to come out from all party organizations, to renounce all party names and party tests, and seek only Christian union and fellowship according to apostolic teaching. Moreover, while we recognize the seeming necessity of various denominational movements in the past, in the confusions growing out of the Great Apostasy, we believe that the time has now come to expose the evils and mischiefs of the sect spirit and sect life, and to insist on the abandonment of sects and a return to the unity of the

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Spirit and the union and co-operation that marked the churches of the New Testament. We therefore urge the word of God against human creeds; faith in Christ against faith in systems of theology; obedience to Christ rather than obedience to church authority; the church of Christ in place of sects; the promises of the gospel instead of dreams, visions and marvelous experiences as evidences of pardon; Christian character, in place of orthodoxy in doctrine, as the bond of union... --Isaac Errett in "Our Position."