Belief — The International Churches of Christ

The International Churches of Christ

Movement·Founded 1979 CE·About 112,000 members in roughly 700 congregations across 147 or 148 nations, on the movement's own March 2024 reporting; its own site gives 107,000 in 767 congregations for a slightly different date. Membership peaked at about 135,000 in 2002 and fell after the 2003 crisis. All figures are self-reported and there is no independent audit.

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle All 1 →

K Kip McKean — thirty members in 1979, and a hundred thousand by 2002. He took a small Massachusetts congregation and built a worldwide movement in twenty years by planting churches from a mission team and requiring every member to be discipled. He stepped down as world missions evangelist in November 2002, left the ICOC, and in 2006 founded a separate body. Domain Discipling, church planting, the Boston movementStanding Founder, then removed; the ICOC and McKean now describe each other at a distance Meet them — context →

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum All 2 →

The shared center — held across the tradition

You are not baptised into Christ unless you were baptised as a disciple. The doctrine that defined the movement and separated it from its parent: a valid baptism requires that the person already be a disciple who has counted the cost, which meant almost every previous baptism was void. Converts from other churches, including from the Churches of Christ, were routinely rebaptised. Go deeper — context →

Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others

Nobody grows alone — so everyone is discipled by someone. Every member was paired with a discipler to whom they confessed and from whom they took direction on evangelism, money, relationships and time. The movement taught this as the New Testament pattern; former members describe it as the mechanism through which control ran, and the movement's own leaders apologised for how it was used. Go deeper — context →

Cosmos & Afterlife

how reality is built, and what follows death

The nature of reality

A world divided between the saved, who have been baptised into this fellowship as disciples, and everyone else

After death

Resurrection and judgment, preached with a strong emphasis on the small number who will be saved