There’s an expression you’ll find in some religious circles, particularly among the churches of Christ in the United States:

“We must search for the Ancient Order of things…”

The statement basically means “There is an old and established and right way to do things in religion. We owe it to ourselves to find it and emulate it.”

That statement is right and the call to action that statement advances is good.

However the statement is often misused and abused. The “ancient order” that we are searching for is not “the way we did things in the 1950’s.” It is likewise not “the way we did things in the 1850’s.”

The 1850’s was a time when Christianity made a comeback in the western world. It’s when intellectuals and scholars right here in the USA (and in parts of Europe too) started saying “there’s too much confusion and chaos in religion; let’s go back to the Bible and just do Bible things in Bible ways.” A century later, in the 1950’s, the churches of Christ—who advocate that same philosophy—were among the fastest-growing religious bodies in North America.

Because of that, it’s easy to say “let’s not do ______ because that’s not how we did things in the 1950’s and we were really growing back then!” But that’s actually a silly thing to say. The church grew a generation(+) ago because a unique set of circumstances existed in the culture and the Lord’s church was “on the ball” and ready to tap into those circumstances. Here’s the thing: Every generation has a unique set of circumstances that define it. The reason the church grew so rapidly in the 1950’s is connected to the reason the church declined in membership throughout the 1970’s. Half a generation later the church was no longer “the” fast growing, nor was it “among” the fastest growing; it was barely growing at all. Why? Because 1950’s methods were being used on a 1970’s culture.

The phrase “search for the Ancient Order” doesn’t mean “search for how they did things in the 1950’s” because their success will not be ours. We have to make our own soul-winning success. The phrase “search for the Ancient Order” doesn’t mean “do it like they did in the 1850’s” either, because that figure of speech came from the 1850’s. So if it came from that time that means they were searching for things that were already ancient back then.

You have to go back more than a fifty years, more than seventy-five years, even more than two-hundred years to find the Ancient Order. You have to go back two-thousand years, look past all the ways in which culture has changed over the millennia, and see the simple truth of the Gospel and the simple plan for faithful Christian living.

Find that Ancient Order, preach it to this culture and the church will grow. That’s how the church has always grown.

That’s our responsibility as the stewards of this generation’s Gospel message.