My hands were shaking. I was loitering outside the squat white building in the early morning Florida humidity, sweating in my suit and tie. Before me were two large wooden doors with metal handles. I walked up, grabbed the handles, stood there a moment, then backed away. I did this at least three times.
I was hesitant, and even scared. I had never done this before. The funny thing was that I had offered to, many times. When trying to convert friends an easy opening salvo to lower the other side’s guard was to offer an exchange: “I’ll go to one of your services, and you can come to one of mine.” Somehow, the exchange never played out that way.
Now, though, I was standing outside of St. Anthony’s Antiochian Orthodox Church, bracing myself to step across that threshold. To be honest, I do not know what I was afraid of specifically. I suppose I was worried this was my first step towards Hell, rather than Heaven. This fear was well-grounded in my upbringing in the church of Christ.
The non-denominational, non-institutional church of Christ (NICOC), to which I belonged the first 32 years of my life, is a group that believes it is neither Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. Rather, they were born not of the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but rather the Restoration Movement of the nineteenth century.
“Restorationist Church” may inspire some unflattering imagery to those students of Church history: this is the same movement that gave birth to Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventism. Unlike those movements, though, the NICOC does not claim any extra-scriptural authority. Rather, its Presbyterian founders believed first-century Christianity could be ascertained via scripture alone. Through this belief, they rejected many tenets of Protestantism, including sola fide, as well as Presbyterian practices like paedobaptism.
One belief the NICOC does have in common with the other Restorationist movement churches, though, is that the early Church fell almost immediately into apostacy following the death of the apostles. The story that I was often told from the pulpit growing up was that wolves in sheep’s clothing quickly infiltrated the early Church. This is scriptural, as can be seen in the book of Revelations when John—in his own lifetime—felt the need to warn various congregations they were going astray.[1] However, the NICOC, as well as other Restorationist churches, teach that the wolves ultimately prevailed and led the early Church into sin. Some in the NICOC claim that there was an “underground Church” during the prevailing centuries, but of course this theory is historically unsubstantiated, and also fails the common sense litmus test. After all, if there were a group of “Bible-believing Christians” hiding underground from 100 A.D. to 1800 A.D., why did they not emerge the moment the Reformation occurred and Catholicism’s hold on Europe was broken? Why did they not join the Pilgrims in running away to the New World to worship as they saw fit? Why did they only appear in Kentucky and Pennsylvania several hundred years later?
Another theory I have seen floated is that, although Christ promises “the gates of Hell shall not prevail” against his Church, he did not mean this in a literal, physical sense.[2] Rather, because Christ is God, and God is outside of time and space, Christ meant the spiritual Church would not be prevailed against, although his physical Church would. However, because the NICOC is strictly Scripture alone, and interprets almost all Scripture literally (including creation), this was a hard theory for me to digest even at the height of my time in the church.
Regardless, the NICOC holds itself to be a restoration of the first century Christian Church, and as such believes that anyone outside of it is likely going to Hell. Again, there are differences of opinion on this point—being non-institutional means there is no guidebook explaining what each congregation of the NICOC believes. Some believe God will show mercy to those who earnestly tried to reach him in this life, although they failed to attend the correct church. Others, though, truly believe basically everyone between 100 and 1800 A.D. are lost because they did not properly follow the Bible. Bad luck to be an illiterate peasant in thirteenth-century France. Even worse to be a Roman soldier in the third century before the books of the Bible had been fully collected and recognized as canon.
This belief that they are the one true church, then, caused me a great deal of consternation as I stood outside of St. Anthony’s that sunny day in July. If I opened this door, was I leaving the one true Church?
However, I knew I could not go back to the NICOC. So, scared, my hands shaking, I took hold of the metal handle, yanked the door open, and walked in to the dark building filled with the sounds of chanting and the smell of incense.
[1] Revelations 2:5.
[2] Matthew 16:18.
The Crossroads Commentary 
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