“According to the history of the ‘Church of Christ,’ God used certain men to ‘restore’ the New Testament Church in the early 1800’s. Where was the true New Testament church before then? Jesus said that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church (Matthew 16:18). What happened to the church and where was the truth it was responsible for preaching before God restored it?”

According to Matthew 16:18–19 the church that Jesus built in the first century will never cease to exist even against the gates of hell.

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven

Matthew 16:18-19

1 Corinthians 15:23-24 and Daniel 7:13-14 say the same thing.

But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.

1 Corinthians 15:23-24

I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed

Daniel 7:13-14

If you look up “Church of Christ” on the internet from sources that are not from the churches of Christ or secular sources like Wikipedia, you will find that many religious historians state that the “Church of Christ” was founded in the Restoration Movement around 1830. Many will say that Alexander Campbell started the “Church of Christ.”

This is however, wrong. The churches of Christ existed well before the 1800s. Alexander Campbell certainly didn’t start the churches of Christ. Christ started the churches of Christ, hence the name. In response to our position that we hold, many skeptics will ask questions like this one.––“If the Church of Christ existed before the Restoration Movement then, where was it?“

The name “Restoration Movement” can sometimes be misleading, and we have to remember that God doesn’t call what happened in the South during the 1830s, the “Restoration Movement.” This was a name given by historians and other Christians at the time.

Restoration theologians in the early 1800s, when there was a boom in church attendance and conversions, saw themselves as restoring the teaching of God’s original church to a world that had let the teachings become unpopular or had drifted away from it. Perhaps Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone saw themselves as reviving a teaching that had been forgotten by the majority of the world. These men had come out of denominationalism and had never heard the teachings of the church before, so for them, there was a goal to restore the popularity of the teaching, not to mean that the church stopped teaching it or that the church Christ built ceased to exist.1

There is evidence throughout history to show that the church Christ built, today called the “Church of Christ,” existed before the 1800s.

Keith Sisman, Wayne Jackson, and Hans Grimm have written and researched extensively about the history of the Lord’s church before the Second Great Awakening or the Restoration Movement.

Keith Sisman researched the history of the Lord’s church in England throughout the Middle Ages in his book, Traces of the Kingdom. He found that even before the Protestant Reformation, there were people in England calling themselves by no other name than “Christians” and teaching believers baptism as a requirement for salvation, weekly adherence to the Lord’s Supper and only on Sundays, and they worshipped without instruments. Furthermore, they were teaching the plan of salvation as we know it today. We have records of these people through their testimonies in public trials. Before the Reformation, such a church would have been illegal and seen as heretical by the Catholic church, so many of these Christians were being arrested and put on trial for heresy. These Christians defended themselves with their knowledge of the Bible, which was recorded and preserved in court records.2

Sisman also records in his book documents and records that were found in an old abandoned church building in Sunny Bank England that dated to 1678. The records reveal a group of people met there, calling themselves the “Church of Christ” and recorded names of their elders and deacons. The papers even mentioned new members that had moved to Sunny Bank that had come from other churches of Christ.3  

Wayne Jackson wrote an article in the Christian Courier called, “The Indestructible Church of Christ.” Gives an account of letters between churches before Alexander Campbell was ever baptized into Christ. These letters were given to people that were moving from one town to another, and they wanted to move their membership to a new eldership. Their previous eldership would write them a letter stating that the certain individual was a faithful member of the churches of Christ and that the person should be received as a brother or sister in Christ. Such letters date back to the later 1700s.4

Jackson also records documents from where my wife and I grew up. The Old Philadelphia Church of Christ in McMinnville, Tennessee first assembled to worship in 1805. The local town historians have kept track of the church records and ledgers within Warren County. The church later built a building in 1830 that still stands today.5 Why is this relevant? According to the Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, he and his family never arrived in America until 1808. At which time, he was still an ordained preacher of the Old Light Anti-Burger in the Seceder Presbyterian Church. He and his family were Scots-Irish immigrants. Alexander Campbell devoted his life to preaching a new doctrine in 1809. At which time, he and his father helped to advance the Christian Association of Washington. This man was nowhere near Tennessee in 1805, and he certainly did not call himself a member of the churches of Christ at that time!6

In addition to all this, Hans Grimm wrote a book called Tradition and History of the Early Churches of Christ in Central Europe. He was a theology professor in the 1940s in Germany and had to move around because of the war, which led him to some missionaries from the United States that tried to convert him. These missionaries where members of the churches of Christ, and Hans sat and listened to them for several days. After which, he explained that his family had been teaching this exact doctrine in central Europe for generations.7 They were a small group but had been teaching everything that the Church of Christ taught since before the Reformation in the 1500s. However, they didn’t call themselves the Church of Christ, they called themselves as it translates to English, “servants of Christ” or “ministers of Christ.”8 A name used to identify Christians in 1 Corinthians 4:1-2. It was the same group of people, the same church, the Lord’s church. At that earlier time, they used a different biblical name than American Christians today, which is why the history of the churches of Christ is a bit scattered and hard to find, but it is there.

We haven’t always used the same name as we do today, but we have always taught the same doctrine. The church that Christ built has always existed around the world. At certain times throughout history, the church went into hiding. At other times, they used various names because the Bible does not give an official, proper name to have on the building. The names by which God called His people were more like descriptions than a proper title. If the church wanted to put “Church of God” on the building that would be fine so long as they used a name biblically designated by Jesus and taught what the Bible taught (1 Corinthians 1:2; Colossians 3:17). The church existed in various cultures, teaching and writing in different languages, but they always taught the Bible.

Today, the Lord’s church may look different than it did in the medieval age because what many see today is the Americanized version of the Lord’s church, which would obviously look different than the central European church in the medieval ages. However, the doctrine has not changed, only the traditions and customs. What is taught in the Bible and what is bound in worship will always be the same throughout history.

There has always been Christians of the Lord’s church teaching what we teach today since the 1st century.

  1. Earl Irvin West, A History of the Restoration Movement 1800–1865. Vol. 1, The Search for the Ancient Order, (Delight, Arkansas: Gospel Light Publishing Company, 1990), 53–75. ↩︎
  2. Keith Sisman, Traces of the Kingdom, (Ramsey Huntington, UK: Forbidden Books, 2010). ↩︎
  3. Ibid., 598–600. ↩︎
  4. Wayne Jackson, “The Indestructible Church of Christ,” Christian Courier (February 2019), https://christiancourier.com/articles/the-indestructible-church-of-christ. ↩︎
  5. Ibid. ↩︎
  6. Robert Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell: Embracing a View of the Origin, Progress and Principles of the Religious Reformation Which He Advocated. Vol. 1, (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1868), 87–112, 200. ↩︎
  7. Hans Godwin Grimm, Tradition and History of the Early Churches of Christ in Central Europe, trans. H. L. Schug (Austin, TX: Firm Foundation Publishing House, 1963), 1. ↩︎
  8. Ibid., 19–21. ↩︎

Leave a Comment