Thoughtfully considering where we’ve come from brings understanding of where we are today. For me, that means remembering the Church of God Reformation Movement. Here’s some selected quotes from the History of the Church of God which I find incredibly relevant for today:

On October 1, 1881, a group of about thirty people met together in a church in the little village of Beaver Dam, Indiana. The village sat on the shore of Yellow Creek Lake in Kosciusko County in the northern part of the state. One of the people, a man named Daniel S. Warner, rose to his feet to speak to the group…

All eyes in the room turned to Warner as he asked for permission to speak. His exact words were not written down, but we know that his speech attacked a problem in the lives of Christians in America. D. S. Warner saw that the problem was that Christians had divided into too many different church groups, “Why should there be so many different churches?” he asked himself and the people around him. “Why must we divide ourselves into Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and all the others? Why can we not live together as brothers and sisters in one great church family under God?”

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Warner believed that it was possible for Christians to live together in the unity that comes when God’s love is present in people’s hearts. At the Beaver Dam meeting he stood up to say that he was forever finished with all religious groups that divided Christian people from each other. From then on, he said, he would be part of God’s church (or, the Church of God) and not others…

Early Church of God people were very determined not to be organized like the churches of their day. So they did not have church buildings and congregations as we do today. Instead they often met outdoors in what were called “brush arbors” when the weather permitted them to be outside.

Every summer since I was ten months old until I was about 26, I went to a campmeeting at Yellow Creek Lake. My family still owns a lake cottage on the campgrounds. I plan on going to the cottage the next time I am in Indiana. I’ve heard the story of the Church of God Reformation Movement often, and my family goes back to the earliest days of the movement. There’s a “Hartung Hall” at Anderson University named after my great uncle, and my great grandfather was a pastor at the same church where I served as youth pastor. My father still leads worship at a Church of God in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I am sympathetic to the movement, and I credit my parents and the upbringing I received in the Church of God as the instrumental tools God used to draw me into the Kingdom of God.

So when I offer critique, it is not coming from a place of bitterness or anger. My thoughts are more of a warning to the emerging church than a criticism of the Church of God.

D.S. Warner’s simple vision ignited a fire in fellow Christians across the country and eventually much of the planet. While the movement never grew into being a major denomination, the impact of the Church of God went way beyond its borders… much because its borders are very loosely defined. Before planting a church in the Vineyard, the Vineyard I was part of actually was still incorporated as a Church of God! While it was considered a “black sheep” of the Church of God family in some ways, and most of the members really weren’t aware of the affiliation it held, the Vineyard church which was still a Church of God testified to the loose structure that exists even today to some extent.

What struck me tonight in thinking of my roots is the similarity between the vision God gave D.S. Warner and the passion I have for the Church today, acted out in my work in the emerging church. Warner saw the many divisions in the Church as harmful. Unfortunately, the early Church of God was still captive to its era. What started out as a movement to call all Christians into life together, ended up being another denomination (though even today, with their int’l headquarters and everything, most deny it is a denomination). In fact, I remember several people in the Church of God who had a difficult time recognizing the faith of Christians in denominational churches. Instead of being a beacon of unity, much of the Church of God became another division… If you didn’t see the evil of denominations, so the logic went, you obviously did not have the Spirit of God!

To be fair, many in the Church of God today recognize the spread of nondenominational churches and the improved relationships between denominations as the work of the Spirit unifying the Church. But what I really want to draw out is how the purest of intentions, and I believe a God-inspired vision, ended up producing the antithesis of the vision. The simple message became diluted in yet another theological system (try being anything but amillenial in your eschatology and Wesleyan in your theology while in the Church of God…).

The emerging church runs the same risk today, except it is not likely a unifying theological system which will dominate the movement. Rather, the risk is the treatment of theology within the emerging church becoming universal. While I personally share the value of openness to theological questions with my emerging church brethren (that’s right, I said brethren… but I include the sisthren, too ), we run the risk of dividing the Church once again if we make that openness a defining trait of true or good Christians. In valuing the mystery of God, we could easily divide the Church yet again by creating a group identified not simply by their love and pursuit of Jesus Christ but by a theological construct valuing mystery and charity (both extremely good things in my opinion) over propositions. Propositionally-based Christians can still pursue Jesus. That’s what most Christians were during the entire Modern era.

A fact I had forgotten about the early Church of God was their disdain for buildings and other organizational structures. Does this resonate at all with you today? I find it fascinating that 125 years later, the renaissance in church structure comes back to something a small group of believers figured out in the 1880s. But what happened? By the early 1900s, the COG had buildings. The church I was a youth pastor at went back at least into the 20s, maybe further. With the buildings came the burden of the church owning property, which meant incorporating, organizing, structuralizing the body of believers. They kept their membership as loose as possible (some churches you just had to show up to three meetings and be a professing Christian to become a member and stick around for six months to get voting privileges), but it was still an organization. The storm of criticism experienced by Emergent and the backlash of emerging churchers who don’t affiliate with the organization Emergent stand as a warning of where we are headed. While we can’t treat all organizations as bad, and we can value the work of organizations like Emergent, we must be concerned with becoming the very thing we were given a vision to emerge from. The temptation is to organize our local churches in practical ways… but by practical I do not mean organized in the best way to live out our visions for the local church, I mean practical in making it easy on us to meet or accomplish other goals which may be peripheral to the vision.

Another similarity I found is the concern for social justice. I did not quote from the last half of the article linked to at the top of this post, but it goes on to talk about the huge steps the Church of God made in civil rights. In a time shortly after the civil war, the Church of God had meetings where white and black persons worshipped together! And some of their buildings were blown up because of it. Also, women had a prominent role in ministry in the Church of God, especially in the early years of the movement. Both of these issues today, however, play out very differently.

For one, there are very few women pastors in the Church of God today. And black persons in the Church of God? Yes, there are black churches in the Church of God, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a mixed, for lack of a better term, congregation.

Right now, there’s a huge call for action in the area of social justice. We care deeply about those who are oppressed and seek freedom for the captives. I don’t know how the Church of God lost its focus in this area, so I haven’t drawn any competent warnings for the emerging church, except to realize that we too could marginalize one of the greatest parts of the movement as we evolve or emerge into whatever it is we are headed towards.

A part of the history not dealt with in the article I linked to was the power of the Spirit in the early Church of God movement. They were basically Charismatic without the speaking in tongues. Healings, words of knowledge, prophecy… these things were prominent at one time in the Church of God. But a fear of the Charismatics taking over, due to the Church of God’s loose structure, led many to disdain the works of the Spirit which were more extraordinary and could be described as “manifestations” of the Spirit’s power.

The emerging church also runs the risk of minimizing the power of the Spirit. In an effort to be relevant and shed unnecessarily offensive parts of the church today, we risk shedding the necessary offensive parts of the church. There are some. We cannot escape the weirdness of someone being healed. If we pray for it, we better believe that God at least might actually heal! If we ask God to speak to us, we better understand that God could speak and give us knowledge, wisdom, prophecy for today. (Please note I use prophecy not in the sense of telling future events, but prophetic wisdom for today)

These things will not make us feel relevant in today’s culture. And we should not demand these manifestations from God. We should, however, be legitimately open to them and seek after God for the gifts, as they are to used for the building up of the body of Christ.

The Church of God reformation movement began with the power of God’s Spirit and a vision from God birthed in the hearts of a few that spread to many. The emerging church began in the same way. We are as much captives to our era as they were to theirs, and we will not be able to see everything coming. But we can learn from the mistakes of our godly predecessors, the body of Christ before we were, and seek to stay on the path of God’s vision for the Church.

So be it.

This article was first published as a blog post on A Different Perspective.

Alan Hartung is the General Editor of THEOOZE and the founder of a new Spiritual Formation website providing an online community for persons practicing spiritual disciplines. He is also an actor and web developer living in Los Angeles, CA.