The Tragic Traditions
W. Carl Ketcherside
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My heart goes out to a number of young preaching brethren in these days. Many of them are forced to work under conditions of servitude to censorship and criticism which tend to make life intolerable and destroy the desire to excel in love. I fervently pray for each one as I learn of his plight and entreat the Father in his behalf. To illustrate what I mean, here is a rather lengthy excerpt from a letter I have just received.
"I am the youth minister here, or the assistant minister according to our letterhead. I took this position when I graduated from college and have been here now less than a year, but the hopes and plans I had when I came have already faded, and I am disappointed and disillusioned. The regular minister is a legalist whose sermons are a rehash of traditional arguments. He does not really study or think objectively, but gives a different title to his talks which he dutifully extracts from his little bag of tricks. The audience is starving to death, but never having had real food, they are unable to diagnose their condition and do not know they are hungry.
"Recently in a circle of high school kids the question was asked if God had any children out of the Church of Christ. I expressed my feeling that the family of God was not limited by our activities and a God we could capture in our box was not big enough to be the God who loved the whole world. One of the kids evidently blabbed it because for three straight Sundays we were assailed from the pulpit about the dangers of liberalism, which was spelled out to mean thinking that there were Christians outside our group.
"There are four elders and one bishop. The latter owns the largest automobile agency in the area, and rules the congregation like he runs his business. The other elders are stooges and attend the officers meetings simply to get their orders. There have been two divisions of the group in the past over the dogmatic attitude of the leading elder, who is very arbitrary.
"He asked me to have lunch with him this week and informed me that reports had filtered in that I was advocating 'Ketcherside doctrine.' I asked him what it was and he said he could not tell exactly as he did not always know what Ketcherside was talking about. I asked if I could borrow his books or material by Ketcherside, but he admitted that he had never actually read anything you had written, had never met or heard you, and had never corresponded with you. But he attended a noonday luncheon for elders and preachers last year at which the evangelist who was conducting a local meeting had warned that the greatest threat in the United States today was Carl Ketcherside.
"This evangelist said you were sweeping the young people off their feet and there was now an underground cell of Ketcherside workers in every college, and the worst part of it all is that the students who were generally influenced by your teaching on fellowship were the most brilliant in school. He also said you had cleverly offered to appear at Abilene Christian College, David Lipscomb College, and Pepperdine College, and present publicly before the student body your views on fellowship and be questioned by a panel of faculty members and the whole audience. But he also said that to accept your proposal would be suicidal because there wasn't a man on either faculty who could handle you.
"The elder ended up by cautioning me to watch my step and said they were considering a raise in salary for me next year if the congregation considered I was sound in my teaching. But if the word got around that I was shaky on the fellowship question it would ruin me here and all over the brotherhood. Now, what shall I do? Shall I conceal my thinking and take the raise in salary, or tell the truth and ruin my future in the Churches of Christ?"
Characteristic of young people in our day, our brother put it bluntly as you will agree. In my reply to him I pointed out
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I commit my own life to the Father and surrender it completely and He sometimes opens up doors in what I thought were solid walls. He also closes some doors and later I am thankful that I did not barge through them just to have my way. I have a great deal of compassion for my younger brethren who are caught up in the politics of the institutional meat-grinder but I am optimistic about them. With that unquenchable courage of youth they will find the way out!
My real concern is for the brethren who have created a narrow and intolerant sect which forces men to sacrifice integrity and personal honesty to be retained within its fold. Nell and I are old-fashioned enough that we still like Harold Bell Wright's book The Shepherd of the Hills and the interesting sequel to it, The Calling of Dan Matthews. Wright was originally a preacher in the restoration movement and his portrayal of the struggle of the young preacher, Dan Matthews, against the solidified and rigid institutional church in the fictitious town of Corinth was ahead of its day. I was reading it for about the third time recently and I was struck by some things said by the old Doctor, who, although not a member of the congregation, was a better friend to the young preacher than were the elders. Read this:
"It is their religion to worship an institution, not a God; to serve a system, not the race. It is history, my boy. Every reformation begins with the persecution of the reformer and ends with the followers of that reformer persecuting those who would lead them another step toward freedom. Misguided religious people have always crucified their saviors and always will.... There is no hatred, lad, so bitter as that hatred born of a religious love; no falsehood so vile as the lie spoken in defense of truth; no wrong so harmful as the wrong committed in the name of righteousness; no injustice so terrible as the injustice of those who condemn in the name of the Savior of the world."
What has happened to us is that we took simple scriptural statements, ran them through our theological wringer, and fashioned them into a parody or burlesque for which we claimed scriptural sanction. Our traditions became the fuel to stoke the fires of human ambition and feed the insatiable maw of pride. We have thus made what we call "the eldership" into a dictatorship, exercising power in some cases by threat, insinuation and innuendo. While deploring papal authority we have borrowed the idea of the Spanish Inquisition, and a little group of men meeting behind closed doors can decide the fate and the future of a humble brother not even allowed to present his case before the saints.
The word of God does not teach the absolute power of any group of men over the family of the Father. There is no government, in the divine plan, without the consent of the governed. The word of God does not teach that I must dump all of my money allotted to relieve human needs, into institutional coffers to be dispensed by those who will not deign to consult me. It does not teach that I must contribute financially every Sunday or suffer the pangs of eternal damnation. It does not teach that all of my alms must pass through that humanly-created device dubbed "the local treasury," and that the only way I can do good is by proxy and single-handedly.
I think that we are rearing up a group of younger brothers and sisters who are fed up with the political maneuvering which passes for the will of God to the unthinking who mistake fellowship in Christ for conformity with the system. Things will change and that for the bet-
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