Some churchmen failed Charles Octavius Boothe, but the Lord of the Church never did. Some Christians in America still ignore his life and voice, but the Lord of the Church does not. Theology got bent to fit fashion and economics several times in his life, but the Lord of the Church changes not.
There are many kinds of prophecy, though commonly we only recognize the jeremiad. Dr. Boothe called the church to holiness and Jesus. He saw the church as she should be and the comparison condemned much of the church as it was without needing to say more.
He held up Jesus and drew all good men to Jesus. The church was first:
… the whole family of the redeemed, who are to be builded upon that faith (called a rock) which Peter professed, and built together in it.
If you are redeemed, you are in one family, the kingdom of God. There is one kingdom “. . .a body of believers, united together in one place according to the teachings of the New Testament.”
Boothe sees the church as local, no “councils or conferences of churches or ministers.” For those of us who disagree with Boothe, his experience of the failure of national church groups should at least give pause. Injustice can be easier to maintain from a distance.
Yet Boothe is making a case that is global, timeless built on a great transcultural Book. Other times he would press for “social uplift,” but this book of theology was to describe what a man would do after being lifted up. The church are the people of God that know no borders.
Who is in the church? Repentant, redeemed men are in the local church. They will have been baptized as they were from ancient times: by immersion. Boothe appeals both to the meaning of the Biblical Greek on baptism and the practice of the first centuries of the church.
Boothe argues for two orders of officers in the church (pastor and deacon) to care for the spiritual life of the church through teaching:
But the saints who must be edified live in bodies of flesh which must be fed, clothed, housed, and cared for. In other words, because the church is wearing the form of matter, there is of necessity a material side as well as a spiritual side. This calls for men to serve tables, men to look after money, lands, houses of worship, and temporal affairs in general.
Boothe envisions a simple organization with a complex mission. Pastors will meet spiritual needs and deacons will see to the temporal: pray and work.
What is the work? The church will worship together, observe the Lord’s Supper, and baptize the repentant. The people of God will make a place to worship as the children of Israel did. Those delivered from slavery, hardened for conquest by years in the wilderness, still took time to build God a house before they seized their God given inheritance.
Boothe was a man tied to historic Christian theology that sprang from the life of Jesus, his church, and the Bible. As a result, “the church should make some suitable provision for the poor and helpless of its members.“
The Lord God has been careful in all ages to speak on behalf of the poor. His ear has ever been open unto their cries, and his eye has always watched over their trying lot. . .
Only after he points out that how we treated the poor will be the measure of our holiness at the Last Judgment, does Dr. Boothe mention that the church should also pay the pastor. The poor get provision, then the pastor gets paid, but Boothe is not finished. A local church must make worldwide connections of teaching, preaching, and serving the poor. The church should be educating members for a global mission: local but not parochial.
There is nothing of the small minded, sectarianism of some latter day Evangelicals in C.O. Boothe. He also has a church that disciples for formative change, and disciplines for corrective change.
Boothe’s church is local in organization with a global mission. It is Christ’s church:
“More like Jesus would I be; Let my Saviour dwell in me, Fill my soul with peace and love, Make me gentle as a dove.”
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