Restoration or Reformation

While I was with my wife in the hospital after the birth of our twins I had the rare opportunity to see what was on TV. Looking at the TV Guide channel I saw there was a show called "American Restoration" and went to see if it might actually be about the American restoration movement to bring us back to the Bible and the New Testament church. I did not really expect it to be, but wanted to know what it was if it was not. Of course it had nothing to do with Christianity at all, but with a guy named rick who takes old junk and "restores" them. I watched and thought it was kind of interesting. What was most interesting to me was how often he would say that they had changed something or added something, painted it a different color than it was when it was new, etc. It seemed like on almost every item they "restored" it differently from what it was like new. In one case they took a Coke vending machine and "restored?" it to be a Pepsi one. What they did was fascinating and I watched longer than I would have under normal circumstances, but I think they mistitled the show it should have been "American Reformation" because that is what they were really doing. It was impressive that they were able to put some of those things together at all, one had to be nearly rebuilt from the ground up, but there were very few that they actually restored. Now I am not talking about the fact that they used modern painting techniques in place of old or that they used modern tools that did not exist 100 years ago when the item was new. You can use new methods and tools and still restore the original, but they changed the item itself on several occasions.

I think about what has happened with the church in the past few decades. The church in this country has made the same mistakes that Rick and his restoration team make. We are supposed to be the New Testament church we should be restoring New Testament Christianity, but too many times we want to change something, add something, leave something off, and still claim to have restored the body of Christ. That is reformation and we don’t need another reformation there has already been one of those and it was a disaster that left the world with hundreds of denominations. What we need to do is strive to exactly replicate the church as blueprinted in the Bible in our modern society. There are many who believe that because we teach the Bible plan of salvation or have eliminated worship elements that were traditions of men that we have arrived and all is restored. The problem is that in too many cases a denominational tradition has been removed only to replace it with another extra-biblical tradition. In other cases we have decided that certain aspects cannot or should not be recreated and we are satisfied to leave them out. I realize that no congregation is perfect, just as no congregation in the first century was, the question is are we still endeavoring to restore New Testament Christianity?