Church of Christ Bible Study

First, Which Church of Christ

Start here, because the name causes real confusion. Churches of Christ in this sense come out of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, which began in the eastern United States in the early 1800s under Thomas and Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone. The Bible is the sole authority. There is no additional scripture.

This is not the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, holds additional scripture, and has centralized leadership. Both movements used the language of restoring primitive Christianity, both were active in the same decades in the same part of the country, and they were competitors rather than relatives. There are also small groups within the Latter Day Saint movement that use the words Church of Christ in their names, which muddies it further. If someone means the Restoration Movement congregations described on this page, they mean the Campbell and Stone tradition.

The New Testament as the Only Rule

The founding conviction is easiest to see in the movement's own first document. Thomas Campbell's Declaration and Address, published in 1809, opens its propositions with the claim that the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one, consisting of all those in every place that profess their faith in Christ and obedience to him in all things according to the scriptures.

The third proposition is the one that shapes how these congregations read. Campbell wrote that nothing ought to be inculcated upon christians as articles of faith, nor required of them as terms of communion, but what is expressly taught, and enjoined upon them, in the word of God. The document urges believers to take the divine word alone for our rule.

Congregations today put it in plainer terms. As one congregation's own statement has it, we are not interested in man-made creeds, but simply in the New Testament pattern, and this is the reason the New Testament is the only rule of faith and practice we have in churches of Christ.

A note on a famous line. The saying often attached to this movement, that where the Scriptures speak we speak and where the Scriptures are silent we are silent, does not appear in the text of the Declaration and Address. It captures the principle accurately and it is genuinely part of the tradition's language, but it is not a quotation from that document, and you will see it misattributed constantly.

No Headquarters, and Why That Matters for Study

There is no central office to consult, and that is deliberate rather than accidental. In the words of one congregation's own description, there are no governing boards, neither district, regional, national nor international, no earthly headquarters and no man-designed organization, and there are no conventions, annual meetings, nor official publications.

Each congregation is autonomous, self-ruled, and independent of every other congregation, governed locally by a plurality of elders selected from among the members. The only tie which binds the many congregations together is a common allegiance to Christ and the Bible.

Even the name resists denominational reading. The term church of Christ is not used as a denominational designation, but rather as a descriptive term indicating that the church belongs to Christ.

This has a practical consequence for anyone writing or reading about this tradition, including this page. There is no Book of Concord here, no Book of Discipline, no catechism that settles a question for everyone. So be suspicious of any source, this one included, that tells you Churches of Christ believe X as though a central body had ruled on it. What can be said accurately is what the movement's founding documents argued and what congregations say about themselves.

How That Shapes Reading a Passage

If the New Testament is the pattern and nothing may be required beyond what is expressly taught, then the pressure of study falls on what the text actually says rather than on what a tradition has concluded about it. Context, the plain sense of the words, and what the passage meant to its first readers carry the weight.

That makes historical background genuinely useful rather than decorative. Knowing what a first-century congregation in Corinth was dealing with, or what a Greek word carried that an English one loses, is not adding a layer on top of the text. It is getting closer to what was expressly taught. When a passage stops you, paste it into WordDecoder for the setting and the plain-language sense, then go back to the text itself.