Jesus Christ Build His Church: Biblical Authority Without a Papacy
Acts 2:23 teaches us that God respects our free will while remaining sovereign enough to outwork even our failures for His holy ends. In summary: God's plan was the Salvation, evil man's choice was the Crucifixion, and God's power was using the latter to achieve the former.
Church of Christ: The Quest for Primitive and True New
Restorationism seeks to ignore existing institutions as unauthorized and recreate the 1st-century model from scratch using the Bible as the sole blueprint. It does not seek to "fix" the Catholic Church or the Lutheran Church; it seeks to start where the Apostles started. Because their aim was to restore the "Ancient Landmark" rather than reform a late-developing hierarchy, they represent a logically distinct category of Christianity that exists outside the Catholic-Protestant binary.
Jesus Christ Build His Church: Biblical Authority Without a Papacy
For many seeking to follow Christ today, the most vital question is: How did the first generation of believers live out their faith before the rise of complex traditions and centralized institutions?