Summon the Heroes

I’ve often said that if I moved to a town without an independent Christian church, I’d have very little hesitation about worshiping with a traditional Church of Christ. So when my friend Dr. Orpheus Heyward joined me on this week’s Better Preaching Podcast, I was eager to hear what a brother from the a cappella side of our family thinks about unity. I wasn’t disappointed.

Orpheus has served the Renaissance Church of Christ in Atlanta since 2003 and has been its minister since 2007. Some of you heard him deliver our 2023 commencement address at Great Lakes. (People are still talking about that message.) He grew up in Churches of Christ in New York, where, as he put it, there was no real mixing between his churches and ours. We came from the same root, but we kept our distance.

Through time and study, that changed. Orpheus came to believe that if we accept the same gospel and believe in the same sovereign Jesus, we can at least admit we’re family. Not family without differences, but family with them. Part of that journey came through our mutual friends at The Solomon Foundation. What began as a lending relationship for his church’s building became, in his words, the discovery that “these are not just lenders, they’re actually brothers and sisters in Christ.”

I asked him what surprised him most as he got to know his Stone-Campbell cousins. His answer was how much we agree on: the gospel, how a person is saved, the Lord’s Supper, the second coming, moral conviction, and the authority of Scripture. “How little did I know,” he said, about the places where we already stand together.

That doesn’t mean the work is easy. Orpheus has been attacked for building bridges. He admitted he was once groomed to view men like Rick Atchley as liberal, only to discover through conversation a tremendous mind and a lasting friend. He warned that exclusivism, the belief that only those within our lines of fellowship are Christians, is dangerous and can border on a cultic mentality.

So what keeps him going? God first, and a deep conviction that Scripture, not the endorsement of a brotherhood, is our authority. Fittingly, it’s that same commitment to the text that has led him toward his brothers and sisters rather than away from them.

He stands in a long line of bridge-builders, from Carl Ketcherside to Max Lucado. I’m grateful to count him a friend, and I’m convinced this is work both branches of our movement need to be about.

I’ve listened to a lot of sermons in my day, and most of them I forget by Tuesday. But every so often a preacher says one sentence that just lodges itself in your chest and won’t leave. Jeff Walling gave us one of those at the 2006 North American Christian Convention, and twenty years later it’s still rattling around in my head: “The time for being nice is over. It’s time to be family.”

Let that sit for a second.

Walling, an a cappella Church of Christ preacher, was standing in front of a room full of Christian Church folks — instruments, praise bands, the whole works — on the hundredth anniversary of the year our two branches of the Restoration Movement got listed as separate religious groups by the U.S. Census Bureau. A hundred years apart, and he had the nerve to say what a lot of us have thought but rarely said out loud: being polite to each other isn’t the finish line. It’s barely the starting block.

He told this story about getting invited to speak at an instrumental youth conference decades earlier. He discovered, after several increasingly awkward phone calls, that “instrumental Church of Christ” was in fact a real thing. That night he sat stone silent on stage while 3,000 teenagers worshiped with a guitar. And somewhere around minute fifteen, watching all that unashamed praise, he realized the problem wasn’t the guitar. It was his own attitude.

That’s the whole sermon in miniature, honestly. Grace doesn’t just save you. It humbles you, it makes you holy, and then it makes you do the hard work of loving people you’ve spent a career keeping at arm’s length. Walling put it more plainly than I could: “It is not duty that drives me to do good. It is how good God has been to me.”
And then — I still get a little misty thinking about this part — he called Dave Stone up on stage, both of them preacher’s kids who’d buried preacher fathers, and traded Bibles with him. Right there in front of everybody. College presidents, seminary heads, worship leaders, all swapping Bibles like it was nothing, when it was actually everything.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been nice to plenty of people I had no intention of calling family. Walling’s sermon won’t let me get away with that anymore. Nice is easy. Family is a mess. His words, not mine, though I’ve certainly earned the right to borrow them.

You can listen to the whole sermon on The Better Preaching Podcast. And you should. It’s worth every minute.