The Restoration Movement launched in the early 19th century on a premise that was as simple as it was ambitious. The church had buried the New Testament under centuries of human tradition. Strip it all away. Go back to the text. Restore what the first century Christians actually did and be the church Jesus actually built.
It was a noble premise. It produced genuine fruit in many ways. And it contained an irony so complete and so visible — once you know where to look — that it deserves to be named plainly and without apology.
The men who set out to restore the New Testament pattern of the church walked out of their studies, stood behind their pulpits, and conducted Sunday morning in a format that looks nothing like what the New Testament describes.
Called it.
The previous post in this series said the responses were coming. It named the passages that would be cited. It described the argument that would be made. And right on schedule, with the reliability of a car alarm going off in the church parking lot during the third verse of the invitation song, the responses came.
Romans 16:17. Matthew 18. You have not done the exegesis. You do not understand the Greek. Paul said mark and avoid. Jesus said treat him as a Gentile and a tax collector. The text supports the application and if you understood the original language you would know that.
Fair enough. The text deserves the full treatment. So here it is — the Greek, the scholarship, the context, and the argument the original language actually makes when you follow it where it leads rather than where the institutional machinery needs it to go.
That destination is not where the machine has been sending people.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series laid out a seventeen-century paper trail connecting the institutional church's control machinery to Saul Alinsky's documented playbook and back again. By this point a significant portion of the readership — particularly those with a Churches of Christ background — has been composing a response in their heads since approximately the third paragraph of Part 2.
The response goes something like this. What about Romans 16:17? What about Matthew 18? The Scripture addresses this. Paul told us to mark and avoid. Jesus himself laid out a process that ends in treating an unrepentant brother as a Gentile and a tax collector. You can't critique the mechanism without dealing with the text.
Fair enough. Let's deal with the text.
Because here is what a careful reading of both passages actually produces — not a defense of the institutional playbook, but an indictment of it. The machinery has been using Scripture as cover for behavior the Scripture itself does not authorize. And the gap between what those passages say and how they have been applied is wide enough to drive a bus through.
Part 1 ended with a question. If Saul Alinsky learned his organizing principles by watching institutions operate — and one of the primary institutions he spent his career embedded in was the Catholic Church — then who taught whom?
The answer requires going back considerably further than 1971. It requires going back to the moment the church stopped being a called-out people and started being an institution with property, power, and political arrangements worth protecting. Once that happened, everything that followed was predictable. Institutions protect themselves. That is not cynicism. It is documented historical fact. And the church has been doing it longer than anyone else.
Alinsky did not invent the playbook. He watched it run, wrote it down, and dedicated the documentation to the appropriate party.
I have a confession to make.
When I started seeing Saul Alinsky's name showing up in conservative commentary around 2008, my first instinct was the same as every other right-leaning blogger at the time. Here is the radical. Here is the playbook the left has been running. Here is the manual that explains Obama, explains the organizing machinery, explains why everything feels coordinated even when nobody admits to coordinating it.
I read the rules. I wrote about the rules. I nodded along with Glenn Beck going wall-to-wall on it and Rush laying it out for the audience that had never heard the name before. And I filed it where most of us filed it — under political threat, leftist origin, something the other side does.
I was wrong about that last part. It took me a while to figure out why it all felt so familiar. It was not until I started watching the same moves run in a fellowship hall that I understood what I had actually been reading.
Alinsky did not write a political manual. He wrote an institutional power manual. He just had the honesty to admit what it was.
The church never admitted anything.
Start with what the New Testament actually establishes about entering Christ because the table question cannot be answered honestly without it.
Romans 6:3-4. Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death. ESV. Galatians 3:27. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. ESV. Acts 2:38. Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. ESV. Acts 2:41. So those who received his word were baptized and there were added that day about three thousand souls. ESV.
The pattern is not ambiguous. You are baptized into Christ. You put on Christ in baptism. You are added to the body at baptism. Baptism in the New Testament is not an optional ceremony performed after salvation has already been secured. It is the point of entry into Christ — the moment of burial and resurrection Paul describes in Romans 6, the moment of putting on Christ Galatians describes, the moment of being added to the body Acts describes.
Being in Christ and being baptized into Christ are not separable categories in the New Testament. That is what the text says. The Lord's table belongs to people who belong to the Lord. Belonging to the Lord in the New Testament framework means having been baptized into him. That much the text supports and the Churches of Christ have been right to say so regardless of how uncomfortable it makes the traditions that have tried to separate the two.
Bubba’s been at this since the mid-90s — back when blogging meant something and an opinion had to earn its keep. South Mississippi. Semi-retired, happily opinionated, and done writing for anybody’s approval but his own. Conservative by conviction, contrarian by habit, and harder on his own side than yours when it’s got it coming. Pull up a chair or move along. Either way, you were warned.
Recent Posts:
Stepping Off the Porch for a While
July 16, 2026
I Was There When the Internet Ate Itself
July 13, 2026
Forty Years on a Spool of Wire
July 10, 2026
July 6, 2026
July 3, 2026
You can read what I think on these pages.
What are your ideas, opinions, etc?
Let me know here.
