The Crossroads Commentary

How I got to the steps of St. Anthony’s Antiochian Orthodox Church is a long story. I do not intend to drag it all out here, but I will hit the highlights.

First, if you have read my previous writings you now already know quite a bit about the non-denominational, non-institutional church of Christ (NICOC) and what they believe. One thing I may not have emphasized properly was our determination to be, well, non-institutional. That means that we prided ourselves on being different from the Reformation Movement and its ilk in that we did not have any “manmade institutions” coexisting alongside our independent congregations. We strictly adhered to the Bible, meaning that if there was not an example of something being done in the first century, we did not do it either.

However, over twenty years ago (and even further back than that, really), a schism began to arise in the NICOC. Florida College (FC), a community college based out of Tampa, was making waves as the NICOC’s “college.” I will admit it is a little telling that Protestantism and Catholicism founded incredible centers of learning—from Oxford to Harvard—yet the best the NICOC could do was a two year college in a swamp. Still, that was not what caused the schism. The problem was the existence of a “Bible college” at all. That is a manmade institution. Nowhere in Scripture is an example given of a Bible college existing, so the question arose: how is this scriptural?

Over the proceeding years, I was vehemently anti-FC. I would argue with anyone who would listen. However, as the years passed I slowly noted a shift in the discourse over FC. Where at the beginning there was genuine debate over whether or not we should have a college, the dialogue slowly shifted to silence. People who supported FC did not debate its merits, they just smiled when you brought it up and moved on. From the pulpit, preachers began openly advertising FC’s Bible summer camps (again, not rooted in Scripture) out in Louisiana. Kids would come back from camp newly baptized. College-age kids would come back from school newly engaged. And, slowly but surely, the battle over FC was lost.

What was all the more enraging about this evolution was the fact that those same preachers from those same pulpits still railed against Protestantism and its “manmade institutions.” The belief was that, technically, FC did not take any money from congregations, and thus there was no formal connection between it and the NICOC. However, FC was headed by NICOC-belonging faculty, and its “professors” of theology were NICOC preachers. Moreover, the default expectation had become that those who wanted to preach needed to attend FC. Not to mention that, despite what I perceived to be lackluster academic credentials, it was well-known that FC was an exceedingly expensive school—far more expensive than public state universities. Thus, because the NICOC’s money, children, and clergy were all tied up in FC, in my mind this made it a NICOC institution. 

I say the insistence we were still non-institutional was “all the more enraging” then, because it was hypocritical. The NICOC generally believes that all sins are the same in the eyes of God, but even as a member I never really subscribed to that theory. One needed to look no further than Matthew 23 to see the complete contempt Christ held for religious hypocrites, and that is exactly what I saw in the pulpit with regard to FC.

So, back in 2018, I began wondering: if I am going to go to a church that has manmade, non-scriptural institutions, why am I going here? As I have noted above, I realized there were much better schools founded by other Christian groups. These same schools had much deeper, stronger theology departments, as well. It made me think if I was going this way, then I should become a member of a church that properly educated its laity and clergy. Additionally, if I believed that manmade institutions related to churches were wrong, then I still needed to leave the NICOC and either find a place that held the same beliefs that I did, or start my own congregation.