History & overview · every faith gets one
The Restoration Movement with a discipler assigned to you.
A movement that grew out of the a cappella Churches of Christ through the campus ministry of the 1970s and the Boston Church of Christ founded by Kip McKean in 1979. It kept the Restoration doctrine of baptism and added two things the parent body had never had: a central hierarchy, and discipling partners — every member paired with a more mature member to whom they confessed and from whom they took direction. It grew to 135,000 by 2002 and then broke apart in public.
Since December 2022, more than twenty women have brought civil actions in the United States alleging that the International Churches of Christ and affiliated churches and leaders facilitated and concealed sexual abuse of children and young members. An initial set of federal lawsuits, filed in the Central District of California and including federal racketeering claims, was voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs in July 2023; the abuse claims were refiled and expanded in the Los Angeles Superior Court in filings from July 2023 through October 2024. The claims include assault, negligent supervision and failure to report. These are allegations. No court has entered a finding of liability against the ICOC on them as of this writing, and the movement denies the allegations.
Why it is filed this way
The ICOC is classed as a movement rather than a denomination because of its origin as a discipling network inside another body, its central hierarchy, and the intensity of its membership demands. It has been called a cult by campus ministries, by former members, and in the pleadings of litigation against it; it rejects the term, and Panfaith uses it only to report who applied it.
The movement reorganised after 2003, when the central hierarchy collapsed. Kip McKean left and in 2006 founded a separate body, now called the International Christian Church, which is a different organisation from the ICOC.
The founding
Kip McKean, formed by the discipling ministry at the Crossroads Church of Christ in Gainesville, Florida, took a struggling congregation in Lexington, Massachusetts, in June 1979 with about thirty members and rebuilt it around a requirement that every member be discipled by another. The Boston Church of Christ grew rapidly, planted churches in city after city, and in 1993-94 formally constituted itself as the International Churches of Christ, separate from the Churches of Christ it came from. Campus chapters were banned at a long list of universities through the 1990s.
Its founding is bound to Kip McKean — 1979 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world divided between the saved, who have been baptised into this fellowship as disciples, and everyone else.
The divine. The Trinity, held conventionally. The distinctive doctrine is not about God but about what it takes to be saved: baptism as a disciple, after counting the cost, into a church that will hold you to it..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment, preached with a strong emphasis on the small number who will be saved.