I’ve been meaning to weigh in on Jeff Woods’ column from last week’s Nashville Scene, the one where he takes the Campbellites (better known as the Church of Christ) to task. This is the column where Woods omits the words “from forty years ago” after “typical Christer:”

It is a loose network of independent churches with no creed, so it’s hard to generalize about its beliefs. But in addition to the standard conservative Christian articles of faith, the typical Christer thinks a church piano is the devil’s instrument, it’s wrong to celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ birth—and, oh yes, everyone but members of the Church of Christ is going to spend eternity in hell. [Emphasis on "typical" added.] Some church members dispute that last tenet as a mite judgmental, so we asked Dozier to explain.

“That isn’t true” that the Church of Christ thinks everyone except its own members is going to hell, Dozier says. “Probably years ago there were some who may have said that, unfortunately. They’re all dead, I think. We don’t believe that now.”

That’s good, because heaven would be a sparsely populated place if only Church of Christ members went. There aren’t many in the world—something less than 2 million. Nashville, though, has been blessed or cursed with a lot, depending on your point of view.

As a Church-of-Christ preacher’s kid’s kid with zero plans of preaching from the pulpit, I have plenty of frustration for, irritation toward and disagreement with the denomination, one I stopped attending in the fourth grade. Having attended a denomination-based school from grades one through twelve, though, I take issue with Woods’ use of the word “typical.”

In my experience on the Lipscomb campus, I’d say plenty of the students didn’t espouse at least the latter two of those beliefs, though some of the faculty did. There weren’t too many would-be dorks among the student body looking to champion the cause of accapella music, either, now that I think about it. To say that the beliefs Woods describes are representative of the typical church attendee today, I think, is inaccurate.

I won’t be voting for Carolyn Baldwin Tucker or for Buck Dozier this summer–unless, and Heaven help us if it happens, Dozier winds up in a runoff with Clement as his only opponent–but it doesn’t have much to do with their feelings about instrumental music. I personally just don’t think either candidate is representative enough of the more cosmopolitan and progressive community Nashville has become since the “typical Christer” started letting go of some of his or her exclusivism.

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