Passing the Torch

Cover Article

by Michael Jones · Week of June 21, 2026

Picture a flame cupped in weathered hands, steady, warm, alive. That is the image of a father’s faith: not a trophy to display on a shelf, but a living fire meant to be passed, hand over hand, from one generation to the next. Every father who has watched a child step into the world knows that holy tension, the ache of releasing and the quiet hope that the flame will hold. Scripture paints this scene in vivid strokes. Moses, at the edge of the Jordan, knew he would never cross over, yet he poured every ounce of his trust in God into Joshua: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6). Moses did not hand Joshua a strategy manual. He handed him a God, the same God who had split the sea, rained bread from heaven, and kept an entire nation alive in the wilderness. That is the torch. Not advice. Not a list of rules. A living trust in the living God. Paul echoes this charge to every father: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). The word translated “bring them up” carries the tenderness of nourishing, the same care a gardener gives a young vine. God is asking us to cultivate, not control; to nurture, not merely manage.

What does that cultivation look like? It begins with presence. A father does not shape his children from a distance. He sits at the table, asks the hard questions, and stays quiet long enough to hear the answer. Discipline means giving children the gift of boundaries, teaching them that choices carry consequences, that “no” spoken in love is still love. Instruction means opening the Scriptures together, talking about Jesus not only on Sunday mornings but “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:7). Faith is not a compartment of life; it is the air the whole household breathes. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). That training is not mechanical. It is relational and deeply personal, a father walking with God so visibly that his children learn to recognize the path.

The psalmist understood the stakes. “We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done…so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments” (Psalm 78:4, 7). Do you hear the urgency? Each generation stands one act of silence away from forgetting. When fathers stop telling the story of God’s faithfulness, the next generation is left to invent its own story, and the flame goes out. But here is the grace that steadies every trembling hand: the torch does not stay lit because we are perfect. It stays lit because God is faithful. “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). You do not have to be a flawless father. You have to be a faithful one, a man whose children see him pray when he is afraid, repent when he is wrong, and cling to God’s promises when the road is dark.

So on this Father’s Day, let us remember: the greatest inheritance is not a bank account or a family name. It is the knowledge of God handed down with trembling, grateful hands. Paul told Timothy, “I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well” (2 Timothy 1:5). Timothy’s faith was a generational flame, kindled by those who loved him enough to live it before him. Fathers, the torch is in your hands right now. Your children are watching how you handle suffering, how you worship, how you love their mother, how you speak about your neighbor. They are learning what it means to follow Christ by watching you follow Him. You may feel inadequate. Every honest father does. But take courage. The God who called you is the God who keeps you (1 Thessalonians 5:24). Hold the flame high. Pass it on. Trust the One who lit it in the first place. - MJ

Other congregations are welcome to reprint this. It may be reproduced in another congregation’s bulletin or newsletter without asking permission. An acknowledgement of Orange View Church of Christ is appreciated but not required.

Bible Questions & Answers

Why are there so many different churches and denominations?

This is one of the most frequently asked and most important questions in all of Christianity. When someone looks at the religious landscape and sees hundreds of competing groups, each with its own creed, hierarchy, and set of traditions, the honest reaction is confusion. Jesus Himself never intended such a picture. On the night before His crucifixion, He prayed earnestly “for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (John 17:20–21). The unity Jesus envisioned was not a vague, sentimental togetherness but a visible, doctrinal oneness patterned after the unity of the Godhead itself. Paul reinforced this standard in the strongest terms: “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment” (1 Corinthians 1:10). The Greek word Paul uses for “divisions” is schismata, literally tears in a garment. Division was never treated as an acceptable feature of the church; it was a defect to be corrected.

So how did we arrive at the present situation? In the early centuries after the apostles, the church began to drift from the New Testament pattern. Human traditions, philosophical influences, and political pressures gradually reshaped both doctrine and practice. Offices were created that have no basis in apostolic teaching. Practices were introduced that departed from the simple pattern found in the New Testament: the use of mechanical instruments in worship, infant sprinkling, and the elevation of church councils above Scripture. Instrumental music is a clear example. Though instruments were common in the worship of Old Testament Israel, they were foreign to the worship of the New Testament church, which sang without them, and they were not added to Christian worship until centuries after the church was established. By the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, reformers like Luther and Calvin recognized that something had gone terribly wrong. Theirs was, in a sense, an aborted restoration: they rightly saw the need to return to the Bible, yet they carried a great deal of man-made tradition along with them, reforming existing institutions rather than restoring the original pattern. The result was not a return to the model for Christian worship and practice that we see in the Bible, but the creation of new denominations, each organized around the peculiar teachings of a human leadership. Denomination after denomination followed, each one fracturing further from the others and further from the apostolic blueprint found in Scripture.

The New Testament itself provides a clear and sufficient pattern for the church. Christians in the first century met on the first day of the week to break bread (Acts 20:7), sang psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs from the heart without mechanical instruments (Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16), were baptized by immersion for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38; Romans 6:3–4), and recognized no creed or governing body beyond the authority of Christ as revealed in Scripture. There was one church, the one Jesus built (Matthew 16:18), and it was not a denomination. It was simply the body of the saved, composed of those who had obeyed the gospel (Acts 2:47).

Paul declared there is “one body and one Spirit…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (Ephesians 4:4–6). That sevenfold “one” leaves no room for competing institutions, each teaching different plans of salvation and different forms of worship while all claiming to represent the same Lord. In fact, Scripture uses the word “church” in only two ways. Sometimes it names a single local congregation in one place and time, as when Paul wrote to “the church of God that is in Corinth” (1 Corinthians 1:2). Other times it names the entire body of Christ, every Christian everywhere, without regard to time or place, as when Paul wrote that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). A denomination fits neither sense; it typically claims to be more than a single congregation, yet less than all the saved in every place. That middle category, a family of churches bound together by a shared human creed and organization, simply does not appear in the New Testament.

The answer to denominationalism is not to form yet another denomination or to pretend the differences do not matter. The answer is restoration, a plea as old as the prophets: “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it” (Jeremiah 6:16). Churches of Christ reject the very idea of being a denomination. Instead, each congregation strives simply to be a local church committed to actually following the Bible, holding to the local-church practice and teaching we find in Scripture. Where the Bible speaks, we speak; where the Bible is silent, we are silent. That second half is as binding as the first, for where God has chosen to remain silent, no one has the right to bind his own rules and opinions on the conscience of another. This is not arrogance; it is humility before the authority of God’s word. Jesus warned, “In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men” (Matthew 15:9). The standard is not what any church tradition says but what Scripture says. When every believer resolves to follow the New Testament pattern alone, to wear only the name of Christ, to worship as the apostles taught, to submit to the gospel plan of salvation, the prayer of Jesus in John 17 can become a reality. The path to unity is not compromise; it is a shared willingness to lay down human tradition and let the Bible alone shape the faith, worship, and practice of every congregation. - MJ