Let The River Run - Christ Church Nashville

[CC1]

Dan Scott, Pastor of Christ Church Nashville, has just written a book about a period of tremendous growth and transformation at Christ Church a couple of decades ago.

During this time many ministries were birthed that continue today including Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace work / ministry.

The book will be for sale in printed form but is online free at the link I am pasting below. Below that link I am pasting a quote from the book pertaining to when Christ Church left the UPC. This is not the focus of the book but thought some here would find it interesting.

http://www.christchurchnashville.org...rRun_ebook.pdf


"It is difficult to tell the history of Christ Church
without including some of our reasons for separating from our
parent denomination. Like most such stories, this one
involved pain, and still looks different from the various
perspectives of those who experienced it.
It is not necessary to tell that story in detail, of course.
It would not even be helpful for our purposes here. What is
necessary is to explain that the denomination within which
our church was birthed went through a
number of political and doctrinal purges
in the nineteen seventies and eighties.
As a result, its original allowances for
local and regional differences were
replaced by an insistence on doctrinal
uniformity. During that period, it also
ended its historic tolerance for those
members with relationships to the
broader Christian world.

Because of our deep love and
respect for those Pentecostal leaders who brought us to faith
(and who mentored us in ministry), our church tried for
several years to maintain its formal connections with our
denomination.

By the early eighties however, Christ Church
had become increasingly embarrassing to the denomination‟s
newer leaders. This came to a head in 1986, when the
denomination asked Pastor Hardwick to cancel a speaking
engagement he had planned in a non-aligned congregation.
Because the event was less than a week away, he decided to
formally withdraw his membership.

It would be difficult to explain to those of younger
generations how traumatic this was at the time. Nowadays, it
is common for a church and its leaders to lack denominational
affiliation. That is a relatively new development though.
Throughout history, local churches have been expressions of
larger entities. These larger bodies – denominations – have
historically provided leadership, resources, and most
importantly, an identity for their affiliated local churches. For
these reasons, until the last few years, most pastors would
have thought it rebellious and irresponsible to minister
outside the corporate covering of a denomination.
That was certainly our anxiety. For example, we
wondered how we would ordain young ministers. Without the
visible succession to past ages that our denomination
represented, what authority would we have to ordain anyone?
How would we do missions work? Where would we find
fellowship with other believers in other places? Although we
knew other Christians in our area and other places, they were
“not quite the same as we." We wondered how we would fit in,
or whether we would even want to fit in.

Strangely enough, we might have never formed real
relationships with other kinds of Christians had our former
denomination not forced our hand. However, once we were no
longer affiliated with the denomination, its members were
discouraged from speaking in our church or from receiving us
in theirs. This act of corporate shunning forced us to make
new friends and alliances."