A movement that removed its own hierarchy.
After 2003 the ICOC had no world leader and no central authority for over a decade, and congregations reorganised into voluntary regional families; a Catalyst Team and regional family chairs were established in 2017. The reconstruction is real and the litigation now pending concerns the years before it.
What exists now is a substantially different organisation from the one that peaked in 2002: congregations hold their own property and appoint their own elders and evangelists, and coordination runs through voluntary regional families with a Catalyst Team established in 2017 to serve them. The movement reports about 700 congregations in 147 or 148 nations. The record before the reorganisation includes the campus bans of the 1990s, when a long list of universities in the United States, Britain and elsewhere withdrew recognition from ICOC campus chapters over recruitment practices, and the sustained criticism from countercult organisations and from the parent Churches of Christ. The civil litigation filed since December 2022 concerns conduct alleged to have occurred largely in the 1990s and 2000s; it is at the pleading stage, no liability has been found, and the movement denies the allegations. Anyone reading the movement's own account should read the Kriete letter and the litigation reporting alongside it.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.