As I am sure you know it is often difficult to separate the two ‘Churches of Christ’ from each other. The older church dates back to the 1800’s when the founders came to the realisation that full immersion (and as TNT’s joke implies they mean full- not even a finger above water) was necessary to salvation. A split developed when the leader of the Boston Church of Christ (Bart Brewer, I think that was his name) came to believe that ‘discipleship’ was a key Christian doctrine. Every church member was to be a disciple and evangelise. Your status in the church was determined by how ‘fruitful’: you were i.e. how many converts you made. The good tree bears good fruit. Of course as your fruit became fruitful you increased in status. A kind of pyramid marketing scheme for religion.
The “discipleship” system leads to exceptionally tight control. Each disciple reports to his or her discipler and your discipler reports to his discipler and so on until you reach the Boston Church. You are ‘discipled’ by your discipler, who will you ensure you act as a disciple i.e. evangelise, attend meetings, social events and public confession sessions. These have been described to me as the equivalent of Maoist self-denunciation exercises. During one particular session I was told that the group began making up more and more outrageous sins and that the group would go up and denounce the sinner by saying things like “You are spitting in Jesus’ face”.
Disciplers often encouraged new disciples to leave home and move into a church-run commune. Family members who resisted these moves and criticised the church were instruments of Satan and all contact was to be broken. Disciples were encouraged only to socialise within a church context and also to marry within the church. This tight organisation, isolation from family or friends and a grueling evangelisation schedule that often left very little time for anything else has lead the church to be described as a cult. See Combating Cult Mind Control by Steve Hassan.
About 10 years ago a couple of friends and I were able to help four people leave the ‘church’. Through God’s grace one of them reverted to Catholicism and two others converted to the Faith. We found that straightforward doctrinal argument was most effective. My most successful tactic was to say “show me just one thing in the Bible that contradicts the Catholic Church’s teaching and I will leave the Catholic Church.” This seems like taking candy from a baby and so they are quickly into the ‘Call no man Father’ and Mary and the Saints type arguments. My aim here was never to win these arguments but merely to show that my interpretation was as likely as their interpretation. Catholicism and Fundamentalism and the CA Tracts are very useful.
Once you have sown some doubts you can move onto issues such as salvation especially the question of whether you can lose your salvation or not. I would then usually discuss the Eucharist, and move onto Tradition. I would ask them to read 2 Thess 2:15 from the NIV, the version they usually use. They would read ‘teachings’ and I would refer them to the footnote which says ‘or traditions’ and then show them this in a Catholic bible. This seemed to bring home to them the fact that some questionable biblical translation had taken place. After going through the rest of the tradition argument they would usually have serious doubts. I would also ask them to show me the history section of their ‘discipleship manuals’ and ask where was your church before 1800? What about Christ’s promise not to let the gates of hell prevail against the Church? Why is there no record of the nasty Catholics persecuting people who held your beliefs? This would usually shake them up and then I would introduce the topic of Purgatory. I would finally bring up 2 Macc 12:44 and the whole issue of Sola Scriptura would come up. Eventually they would see that only the Catholic position made any sense. I have found that it is important not to start with this argument as any appeals to logic or extra-biblical sources are easily dismissed as the ‘vain philosophisings of men’.
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but I came across this during a Google search just now. Since I used to be a member of the icoc, I figured I should chime in. The older COC denomination was very influenced by John Locke, his idea that Christian unity would be more attainable if we focused on doing the right actions (which he thought was cut and dry) than debating doctrine. Thomas and Alexander Campbell, both Trinitarians built this denomination with Barton Stone, a non-Trinitarian. This denomination had changed its beliefs a lot as it went from the first generation to the 3rd and 4th generation as they tried to hold onto the idea of oversimplified Christian unity but seeing that it didn’t work and it was hard to develop any depth from doing so. The ICOC (aka Boston Movement) actually has its roots in a COC campus ministry in Gainesville, FL during the 70’s. They were very influenced by the Jesus Movement and a book by Evangelical Robert Coleman, The Master Plan of Evangelism. They became very focused on results of membership growth, snd VERY utilitarian in its approach. They are very works focused. You never hear them talk about topics such as dignity of the human person or Incarnational theology. Since their growth is built on pyramid scheme evangelism it is hard to tell for sure what are common errors in their ideas versus what are their official teachings.