The shared center — held across the tradition
Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where they are silent, we are silent.
Thomas Campbell's rule of 1809 was meant to end division by removing everything not in the text — creeds, titles, denominational names. It produced instead the movement's permanent argument, because two people can read the same silence in opposite ways.
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Held by most — broad, but not universal
Baptism is immersion, of a believer, for the forgiveness of sins.
Not a symbol of a forgiveness already received but the point at which it is received, from Acts 2:38. This is the doctrine that separates the Churches of Christ most sharply from evangelical Protestantism, and it is why the movement has historically not counted the unimmersed as Christians — a position many members now hold more loosely than their grandparents did.
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