Saturday, November 28, 1998

Max Lucado puts a new face on the Churches of Christ

By Paul R. Buckley

The Dallas Morning News

Max Lucado has heard the joke. Of course he has.

A guy goes to heaven. St. Peter gives him the tour, stopping at room after room of various believers: Baptists here, Methodists there, and Catholics over yonder. Tiptoeing past the last room and shushing the wide-eyed newcomer, the great saint whispers: "And there are the Church of Christ folks. They don't think anybody else is here."

It's an old one, but Max Lucado still laughs because he knows as well as anyone the Church of Christ's no-one's-saved-but-us reputation. He's a Church of Christ minister, after all, as well as the hottest Christian writer around.

And he believes that there really are Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics in those other rooms.

Lucado, an easygoing man of simple faith, has done what no other Church of Christ minister has done. He has become an immensely popular figure outside the tight circle of his own tradition. His books and his participation in Promise Keepers have put him in a league with evangelicals such as Charles Swindoll and James Dobson.

But not all of Lucado's own Church of Christ brethren are rejoicing. Some fear that the readers who've made him so popular -- a multidenominational lot -- are going to hell. And, to their dismay, they also know that more and more Church of Christ members are thinking what he's thinking.

People in the pews, even many preachers, have begun to regard professing Christians at the church down the street as the real thing.

Even if they sing their hymns with organs.

Even if they take Communion quarterly rather than weekly.

Even if they were sprinkled rather than dipped.

The shift in thinking that's under way is momentous, born of tensions loosely parallel to those that have racked the Southern Baptists for 20 years. The shift isn't something that Lucado started. He does embody it, however.

If Lucado, the minister at Oak Hills Church of Christ in San Antonio, Texas, lacks the hard edge often associated with his tradition, it isn't for lack of exposure. He grew up in it. He was baptized, at the Parkview Church of Christ in Odessa, Texas, when he was 10.

But "I don't think that a lot of the more strict teachings ever became a part of my DNA," he says.

One of the strictest is the belief that baptism -- by immersion and for the forgiveness of sins -- is an act that saves the soul.

As much as he cherishes baptism, Lucado says, "we are saved by grace."

"Baptism is a response to God's gift, not a way to earn God's gift."

Lucado, who is 43, has become the Christian writer of the moment. "His Just Like Jesus" (Word), released in August, tops one best-seller list. "In the Grip of Grace" ranks 10th.

Presbyterians and Baptists and charismatics are reading his books, conversational works full of storytelling that aims to challenge and encourage. Some people even study them in Sunday school. To millions of readers, Max Lucado is the guy who speaks straight to the heart about the love of their heavenly Father.

To his most exacting critics in the Church of Christ, he's a "pseudo Gospel preacher," an ear tickler, a man to be numbered among those who "love not the truth."

Robert Oglesby won't go that far. Oglesby, for 36 years the minister at Waterview Church of Christ in Richardson, Texas, thinks that Lucado's a great writer. As far as he's concerned, no one can beat Lucado when it comes to setting a scene or making a point.

And yet he is cautious. When Oglesby opens his New Testament, he finds verses like this: "Repent and be baptized ... for the remission of sins" (Acts 2:38). When he opens a Max Lucado book, he finds something that less clearly links baptism and forgiveness. It isn't that Oglesby thinks baptism works like magic; it's just what God commands.

One of Lucado's critics is a friend, F. LaGard Smith, who teaches law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. Smith believes that the Churches of Christ are suffering an identity crisis, and he has written a book about it, "Who Is My Brother?" (Cotswold Publishing). The epilogue is an open letter to Lucado that gently takes him to task for sending mixed signals about baptism.

The professor declined to comment about his differences with Lucado, saying that "Who Is My Brother?" is "an in-house book."

His open letter suggests that Lucado is unwittingly leading his readers astray. Lucado has expressed his indebtedness to a range of believers. A Pentecostal taught him about prayer. A Baptist taught him about grace. A Catholic taught him about the tenderness of Jesus.

Smith feels the same sort of indebtedness, but he cannot easily regard such people -- unimmersed or immersed for wrong reasons -- as Christians. He acknowledges that God has the prerogative to do as he wishes on Judgment Day, but later he urges Lucado to "tell our 'Christian' friends about redemptive, saving baptism. It's you, of all people, they'll listen to!"

Lucado turned down an invitation to write a response that would have been included in the book. He says he might have thought differently if he and Smith had corresponded privately and then decided together to publish their letters. Otherwise, Lucado says, "I felt it was too staged."

Lucado is pleased that Churches of Christ -- with 2.25 million members, the 16th-largest church body in the United States -- are changing. He senses an "exciting revival." But he is no crusader. He toes nobody's party line. To be a good husband and father, to be a faithful minister to his church, to write well -- those are Lucado's priorities.

"My call in life has never been to either reform or represent the Churches of Christ," he says. "I don't know how I could represent the Churches of Christ. We're kind of an ill-defined group."

The churches are a "brotherhood" of independent congregations that claim no authority but the Bible. "We speak where the Bible speaks and are silent where the Bible is silent" is a favorite slogan. Many members regard their church as nothing more or less than the church of the New Testament, founded by Jesus and restored in these latter days to a doctrinal and practical purity not known since apostolic times.

C. Leonard Allen says it's not so simple as all that. Dr. Allen taught theology at Abilene Christian University, a Church of Christ school, for 15 years.

As an American phenomenon, the Churches of Christ are the fruit of a "restoration movement" that began early last century. According to Allen, its founding fathers were swayed not just by the Apostle Paul but also by the philosopher John Locke, among others. The result: a tradition that stumbles along with an Enlightenment hangover, claiming all the while to be nothing but a first-century church.

Still, Allen and Lucado say that even the movement's founders were more ecumenically minded than many 20th-century Churches of Christ. And they like to think that's a part of the tradition they're restoring.

Life at Oak Hills Church of Christ, where more than half of the members come from other church backgrounds, is decidedly upbeat. Three Sunday morning services draw a total of 2,100 people. The music is contemporary, enthusiastically sung. Although instruments are used during some weeknight services, Sunday worship is strictly a cappella. Communion is observed weekly, as it is in every Church of Christ.

And baptism is by immersion.

Lucado sees none of it as an end in itself. It's all about grace, especially for him.

After a decade of successful ministry at Oak Hills and seeing book after book become a best seller, he hasn't forgotten how different life could have been. At 20, he was on the road to alcoholism.

He hasn't forgotten, either, the radio preacher God used to turn things around. Lucado didn't catch the man's name. He doesn't even know what church he belonged to. Could have been Baptist or Pentecostal. It didn't matter.

What mattered was the message, and Lucado, a young college student, had ears to hear.

God forgave him. Lucado is sure of it. God graciously, lovingly, freely forgave, and Lucado is still amazed.

That, he says, is probably what draws people to his books: that sense of being a man forgiven, that wonder at the wideness of God's mercy.

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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