CHARACTERISTICS OF TRUE CHURCH
The true church of God, comprising all Christians, has in her normal state under her divine head certain essential characteristics which make her exclusively the church, the whole and not a part. These might be expressed as follows:
1. Possession of divine spiritual life. If the church does not possess this she is not Christ's body and therefore not the church. She must know the Spirit of God.
2. Disposition to obey all Scripture and to let the Spirit have his way and rule. This constitutes her safety in matters of doctrine and government.
3. An attitude receptive to any further truth and light. This safeguards against dogmatism and a spirit of infallibility and intolerance, against interpreting Christianity in the light of traditions and old ideas.
4. Acknowledgment of good wherever found and the placing of no barrier that would exclude any who might be Christians. This makes salvation, a holy life, and a Christian spirit the only test of fellowship, and disapproves all human standards of church membership and fellowship.
We repeat that these constitute the Scriptural standard of the church and characterize her in her unity and integrity. It is by lacking in one or more of these essentials that a sect is a sect. In the rise of the church out of apostasy any reformation that does not develop to the full the essentials that characterize the church in her wholeness and completeness must necessarily fall short of being the final reformation and must leave a cause for further reformation. This is the explanation of the existence of the so-called Christian sects, viewing them in the most charitable light. The Wesleys and their early associates sought for deeper personal spirituality as well as better spiritual association than was afforded in the state church of England. They brought to light and gave particular prominence to the doctrine of sanctification by faith and the witness of the Holy Spirit. Their work was a reform; but as in that day the question of division among Christians was not prominent, nor was the question of the one true church understood or appreciated, their work took definite form in a body humanly organized and called Methodist. The Campbells had considerable light on the unity of the church, and proposed the Scriptures alone as a basis on which all Christians could unite. But they blindly shut themselves in on a point of doctrine by associating entrance into the kingdom or church with the act of immersion in such manner as to make a wall between them and other Christians who should give evidence of having received salvation and therefore church membership, otherwise than through baptism. Thus they made themselves a sect. John Winebrenner had the correct idea of the church as comprising all the saved, and his work was on an unsectarian basis. Lacking, however, in the quality of letting the Spirit of God rule, eldership organizations were soon set up, a man rule came in, and they also became a sect. Inflexible as to doctrine, they closed the door of progress on themselves, rejected the truth on holiness, and became one of the most narrow of sects, though bearing the Scriptural name, Church of God.