International Churches of Christ

The International Churches of Christ is a decentralized fellowship of cooperating, religiously conservative, and racially integrated Christian congregations. With its origins in the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, the ICOC emerged from the discipling movement within the Churches of Christ during the 1970s. Under the leadership of Kip McKean, a key figure until 2003, the church expanded from its beginnings in Gainesville to Boston, becoming one of the fastest-growing Christian movements by focusing heavily on US college campuses. While experiencing rapid growth, McKean's leadership also attracted criticism. As of March 2024, the ICOC reported a membership of 112,000.
The ICOC operates under a cooperative leadership structure divided into regional families, each with its own representative delegates. The church views the Bible as its sole authority and emphasizes its identity as a non-denominational body united under Christ. Its doctrines advocate for salvation through faith and baptism, rejecting the concept of "faith alone," while stressing global unity. Historically, the ICOC practiced exclusive baptism and strict "discipling." However, since 2002, it has shifted toward a more decentralized and voluntary approach to discipleship. The church promotes racial integration, opposes abortion and recreational drug use, and supports international service efforts through HOPE Worldwide.
According to David V. Barrett in 2001, the ICOC faced significant criticism from the anti-cult movement throughout the 1990s. A major point of contention was the church's discipling system under Kip McKean, which some former members claimed humiliated vulnerable individuals. The ICOC was also criticized for "love bombing"—a tactic of showering new recruits with affection that later turned conditional, which was seen as preying on the lonely and vulnerable. These practices led to the church being barred from recruiting or gaining student organization status on many university campuses.
More recently, the ICOC was implicated in 2022 US federal lawsuits alleging that its leaders covered up child sexual abuse and financially exploited members from 1987 to 2012. Although the plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed these federal cases in July 2023, they subsequently filed similar lawsuits in the Superior Court in Los Angeles, California.

History

Origins in the Stone-Campbell Movement

The ICOC has its roots in a movement that dates back to the Second Great Awakening in early nineteenth-century America. Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell are credited with founding what is now known as the Stone-Campbell or Restoration Movement. The Restoration Movement itself has several branches, and the ICOC was formed from within one of them, the Churches of Christ. Specifically, the ICOC originated from a discipling movement that emerged among the Churches of Christ in the 1970s. This discipling movement began within the campus ministry of Chuck Lucas.
In 1967, Chuck Lucas was the minister of the 14th Street Church of Christ in Gainesville, Florida. That year, he initiated a new project called Campus Advance, which was based on principles borrowed from the Campus Crusade and the Shepherding Movement. Centered on the University of Florida, the program emphasized strong evangelical outreach and an intimate religious atmosphere through "soul talks" and "prayer partners." Soul talks were meetings held in student residences that involved prayer and sharing; these groups were overseen by a leader who delegated authority over the members. The term "prayer partners" referred to the practice of pairing a new convert with a more experienced guide for personal assistance and direction. Together, these practices led to what was described as the "in-depth involvement of each member in one another's lives".
The ministry grew as its younger members appreciated the new emphasis on commitment and the models for communal activity. This activity was associated by many with the broader forces of radical change characterizing American society in the late 1960s and 1970s. The campus ministry in Gainesville thrived and maintained strong support from the elders of the local congregation, the Crossroads Church of Christ. By 1971, the church was adding as many as a hundred new members per year. A particularly significant development was the creation of a training program for potential campus ministers.

From Gainesville to Boston: 1970s–1980s

Among the converts in Gainesville was Kip McKean, a student who was baptized by Chuck Lucas. McKean was introduced to the Florida Church of Christ’s controversial recruitment methods in 1967. Born in Indianapolis, McKean completed a degree while training at Crossroads, after which he served as the campus minister at several Churches of Christ locations. By 1979, his ministry had grown from just a few individuals to over 300 members, making it the fastest-growing Church of Christ campus ministry in the United States.
McKean then moved to Massachusetts, where he assumed leadership of the Lexington Church of Christ, which would later be renamed the Boston Church of Christ. Building on Lucas’ initial strategies, McKean agreed to lead the Lexington church only under the condition that every member would be 'totally committed'. Under his leadership, the church grew from 30 members to 3,000 in just over a decade, a period known as the 'Boston Movement'. McKean taught that the church represented "God's true and only modern movement". Under his direction, the church established a tightly structured community that sought to replicate the doctrines and lifestyle of first-century Christian churches, with the goal of evangelizing the world within a generation. According to journalist Madeleine Bower, “The group became known for its extreme views and rigid teaching of the Bible, but mainstream churches quickly disavowed the group”.
Sociologist David G. Bromley and religious historian J. Gordon Melton note that while the International Churches of Christ experienced rapid growth in the 1980s, its relationships with several established religious institutions deteriorated. The church’s doctrine emphasized its perceived superiority over other Christian groups, teaching that it alone had rediscovered essential biblical doctrines for individual salvation. It also insisted on rebaptizing new members to ensure their salvation. Bromley and Melton also point out that tensions increased due to the ICOC’s “aggressive evangelizing tactics” and its practice of 'discipling' or 'shepherding', in which new members received spiritual guidance and their personal lives were closely monitored by more established members. “Members were taught that commitment to the church superseded all other relationships”, they write. As a result, “the main branch of the Churches of Christ disavowed its relationship with ICOC; a number of universities banned ICOC recruiters; and ICOC became a prominent target of media and anticult group opposition”.
In 1985, Dr. Flavil Yeakley, a Church of Christ minister and professor, administered the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test to members of the Boston Church of Christ, the founding church of the ICOC. Yeakley distributed three MBTI tests, which asked members to evaluate their past, present, and future personality types. Of the over 900 members tested, 835 completed all three forms. The results revealed that a majority of respondents adjusted their perceived or imagined personality scores to align with a single type. After analyzing the data, Yeakley concluded, "The data in this study of the Boston Church of Christ does not prove that any certain individual has actually changed his or her personality in an unhealthy way. The data, however, does prove that there is a group dynamic operating in that congregation that influences its members to change their personalities to conform to the group norm".
By the end of 1988, the churches associated with the Boston Movement had effectively become a distinct fellowship, marking the beginning of a fifteen-year period with little interaction between the Churches of Christ and the Boston Movement. By that time, McKean had become the recognized leader of the movement. During this period, the Boston church launched Hope Worldwide, a program focused on outreach to the poor. In 1988, McKean selected a group of couples whom he and his wife, Elena, had personally trained, naming them World Sector Leaders. In 1989, mission teams were sent to cities including Tokyo, Honolulu, Washington, DC, Manila, Miami, Seattle, Bangkok, and Los Angeles. That year, McKean and his family relocated to Los Angeles to lead a new church that had been “planted” there months earlier. Within a few years, Los Angeles, not Boston, became the central hub of the movement.

The ICOC: 1990s

In 1990 the Crossroads Church of Christ broke with the movement and, through a letter written to The Christian Chronicle, attempted to restore relations with the Churches of Christ. By the early 1990s some first-generation leaders had become disillusioned by the movement and left. The movement was first recognized as an independent religious group in 1992 when John Vaughn, a church growth specialist at Fuller Theological Seminary, listed them as a separate entity. TIME magazine ran a full-page story on the movement in 1992 calling them "one of the world's fastest-growing and most innovative bands of Bible thumpers" that had grown into "a global empire of 103 congregations from California to Cairo with total Sunday attendance of 50,000". A formal break was made from the Churches of Christ in 1993 when the group organized under the name "International Churches of Christ." This new designation formalized a division that was already in existence between those involved with the Crossroads/Boston Movement and "original" Churches of Christ. In September 1995, the Washington Post reported that for every three members joining the church, two left, attributing this statistic to church officials.
Growth in the ICOC was not without criticism. Other names that have been used for this movement include the "Crossroads movement," "Multiplying Ministries," and the "Discipling Movement". One Church is formed per city, and as it expands it is broken down into "sectors" that oversee "zones" which have their own neighborhood Bible study groups. Claims that this structure too authoritarian were responded to by McKean saying, "I was wrong on some of my initial thoughts about biblical authority". Al Baird, former ICOC spokesperson adds, "It's not a dictatorship,"; "It's a theocracy, with God on top". The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in 1996 that "The group is considered so aggressive and authoritarian in its practices that other evangelical Protestant groups have labeled it 'aberrational' and 'abusive'. It has been repudiated by the mainstream Churches of Christ, a 1.6 million-member body from which it grew".
Growth continued globally and in 1996 the independent organisation "Church Growth Today" named the Los Angeles ICOC as the fastest growing Church in North America for the second year running and another eight ICOC churches were in the top 100. By 1999, the Los Angeles church reached a Sunday attendance of 14,000. By 2001, the ICOC was an independent worldwide movement that had grown from a small congregation to 125,000 members and had planted a church in nearly every country of the world in a period of twenty years. In his 2001 book The New Believers: A Survey of Sects, 'Cults' and Alternative Religions, David V. Barrett wrote that the ICOC was "currently causing perhaps more concern than almost any other" evangelical church in the United Kingdom. Barrett writes that "In the last decade ICOC has attracted a huge amount of criticism and hostility from anti-cultists", noting that it had been made aware of various criticisms "but unlike some of the other movements founded in the 1970s, does not yet have appeared to reached the point in its development where it becomes sensitive to the genuine distress of some of its members and their families have experienced, and willing to modify some of its practices to reduce the possibility of causing such distress". In 1998, Ron Loomis, an expert on cults and leader of a cult-awareness program at the College of Lake County, called the ICOC "the most intensive cult in existence since the mid-1970s".
Barrett also noted in 2001 that as with other new religious movements, membership turnover in the ICOC was high, with "many leaving after a few months because they find the discipline of life in the movement too demanding or oppressive". He concluded that "There are probably far more ex-members of ICOC than current members", though noted ICOC attempts to discourage members from leaving and that communal living arrangements and the fact that the ICOC encouraged the breaking-off of friendships with non-members made it difficult for some to leave.