This particular morning, I overheard two young men talking at the next table. I found myself unable to tune out their conversation, though they spoke softly. Both of the speakers were Christians, and they were discussing the topic of Christian community. One was apparently older, or at least more mature in his faith, and he encouraged the other to get more involved with his church and a Bible study.

“You’ve got to be in community, brother,” he said. “You can’t do this discipleship thing on your own. Let’s see what it says in First Corinthians. . . . ”

I glanced over. They had a Bible, open between them on the table, and the older one used it to illustrate various points.

“One part of the body can’t operate without the rest. You can’t grow, brother, unless you’re in fellowship with other disciples.”

As a Christian myself, I was happy to see two students with such a lively spiritual life on campus. Silently, I thanked God for them and prayed He would speak to them through one another. Then I bent back to my notebook and started writing again.

A few minutes later, I paused in thought and looked up. The two students were standing up, preparing to leave, and the younger one caught my eye.

“You’re writing very diligently there,” he said. “Are you a writer?”

I was a little startled by the intrusion, but I nodded.

“Are you working on a book?” he asked.

“Yes, a novel.”

For the next few minutes, I was pulled into a conversation, not entirely of my free will, about various small-talk topics. He told me his name was James (or something like that), and that he was a junior psychology major. The interruption was mildly annoying, since he was a stranger and I had work to do, but I let it go. I assumed he was a fervent young Christian, looking for a chance to evangelize, and that soon he would ask about my faith.

Finally, the moment came. “So, do you go to a church?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “A Presbyterian church in the city.”

“Great! That’s fantastic!” He seemed inordinately excited at this somewhat mundane fact. I chalked it up to what I assumed was his new faith; I had been excited like that too, once. “Are you involved in a Bible study?”

“Yes,” I said. “In fact, I lead one. It meets at my apartment in Brooklyn Heights.”

His excitement only grew. He introduced his friend, and told me they were Christians, too, part of a new congregation that met at a college auditorium just blocks from my apartment. It was called the New York City Church of Christ, and was, in his words, “small but growing.” He asked several detailed questions about my Bible study, how the meetings were structured, what we read, what the discussions were like. I nodded and answered his questions politely, and he informed me at every turn that his own group was exactly the same. And of course, he couldn’t stop exclaiming at how exciting it all was. Then he threw me for a loop.

“So would you like to visit one of our services this week?” he asked.

I didn’t want to be rude, but I didn’t want to say yes either. “I’m a little busy on Sundays with my own church,” I said.

“I understand. But we have services Tuesday nights, too. And Bible study once a week.”

At this point, I was eager to end the conversation, so I asked if he had a card. He didn’t, so he pulled out a notebook and wrote the pertinent information on a scrap of paper. While his notebook was open, he flipped to another page, which was filled with names and phone numbers. “Why don’t I get your name,” he said, “so I’ll remember it. And where I can reach you.”

I declined to give him my phone number, but offered my email address, and he wrote it down. “Great to meet you, brother,” he said on his way out. “And let me know when your Bible study meets; maybe we’ll stop by for a visit.”

As I sat alone in the cafe later, I couldn’t fully explain why my encounter with the young men had left me unsettled. Nothing entirely out of the ordinary had happened, yet I felt physically sick, with the stomach-queasiness that normally accompanies nervousness or dread. Outside the window, I saw the young men hand a few tracts to students as they walked. I didn’t do any more writing that morning, but sat and thought more fully about the situation, and tried to work through my uneasiness. Four things, I concluded, had struck a wrong chord with me.

The first was their evangelistic method. Most evangelism (most effective evangelism, anyway) begins with meeting people in a neutral or friendly environment. Of course, the most effective evangelism of all occurs in a friendship, where advice and wisdom are exchanged in an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust. But this church’s evangelism, at least in my case, began with disrupting a stranger at work. Only my sympathetic politeness had kept me from ending the conversation immediately.

The second was their persistence at inviting me to their church and Bible study, even after receiving word that I was a Christian; was a regular attender, in fact, at an evangelical church, and a Bible study leader. Not that there is any perfect litmus test for another person’s faith, but those traits are often fairly good indicators. If these young men were truly intent on saving souls, why would they linger so long on mine, once they knew the work was finished? I had the creeping suspicion that perhaps they thought their work wasn’t done in my case — which would mean they practiced a different breed of Christianity than my own.

The third factor was their insistence on collecting my contact information, and the list of names. After I had their information, wasn’t it up to me to take the next step? I wondered what kind of e-mail I might receive if I didn’t show up.

But most unsettling of all was the name.

As an undergrad, I had heard of a denomination called the Boston Church of Christ, though I had never actually met any of its members. Among my Christian friends, the church was always mentioned in the same breath with the word “cult.” I knew, however, the vast destructive potential of such a label. It was a word that could effectively end all reasonable conversation from the sheer weight of its vague negative connotations, akin to calling someone an “alleged child molester.” At the time, though, the church never entered my sphere of concern, and I didn’t investigate further.

Now I didn’t have much choice. I shared my concerns with an older Christian man, the director of a drug rehab center for which I do freelance work. He had never heard of the church, but agreed that its tactics sounded suspect. At home, I logged on the Internet and searched Google’s directory for “New York Church of Christ.” I learned it was part of a denomination called the International Churches of Christ (which, by the way, is not related to the better-known Church of Christ), so I searched for that, too. What I found then was illuminating.

I should mention, before I begin my discussion of the ICC, that one of my purposes for writing this article is to help those who are interested in the ICC to sift through the mountainous piles of information available on the topic. Most of my research can be replicated with a brief Internet search, or simply a conversation with a chaplain at virtually any college on the East or West Coast.

The first listing a Google search turns up is the denomination’s official Web site. Nothing particularly eyebrow-raising here, besides a disproportionate emphasis on Christian community and “discipleship” as a necessary element of salvation. The church is presented as upbeat, lively, and growing. A brief but far from complete history is presented, dating from 1979. There are also sites for various individual congregations: the Indianapolis Church of Christ, the Dallas-Fort Worth Church of Christ, etc. But these were not what caught my attention.

My most striking discovery was that for every official Web site for the ICC and its affiliates, there are at least three that warn against it. I personally found about 75 sites (and there are almost certainly more) that portray the ICC in a negative light. These sites range widely in style and content, from vicious rants, to support groups for former members, to humorous parodies, to academic compilations of articles. One thing all of these sites have in common is a strong warning for spiritual seekers to avoid the church. And all use the four-letter “c” word.

One of the most prominent sites is from an organization founded by former members of the ICC, called REVEAL (www.reveal.org). This site includes a comprehensive history of the church, dating back to 1967, testimonies of former members, crisis counseling resources, statistics, and links to stories in the mainstream press. Most helpfully of all, the REVEAL site outlines precisely why the ICC deserves the cult label — a judgement echoed by many others. In summary:

1) The ICC believes itself to be the only true church of God. In other words, it is necessary to be baptized in the ICC to achieve salvation, thus explaining the young men’s disregard of my Presbyterian involvement. To its credit, the church’s online literature is fairly up front about this fact: “To our knowledge, we are the only group that teaches the biblical principle of discipleship as a necessary part of the salvation process.” The young men who spoke to me, of course, were not up front about this issue at all, preferring to feign excitement about my church involvement to win favor.

2) The ICC emphasizes “discipleship,” a biblical principle of encouragement and accountability which, under the right circumstances, can be very good. In practice, however, ICC discipleship is less encouraging than coercive. The church demands “total commitment” from its members, which includes relinquishing control of major life decisions. Each new member of the church is assigned a “discipler,” an older member who guides the younger in living out Christian principles. In almost every case, if reports from ex-members are true, the discipler makes decisions for the new disciple on every issue including college major, college activities, roommates, friends, employment, tithing, dating, and marriage. Adherence to or rejection of this “advice” determines a member’s good standing in the church. According to a REVEAL survey, “100% of former members said members are encouraged to imitate their disciplers . . . with 83% saying members are chastised if they fail to imitate.” What I had seen in the cafe was most likely a discipler instructing his disciple to witness to me, a performance that would be evaluated later.

3) The ICC places an inordinately heavy emphasis on evangelism — and again, not evangelism in the usual Christian sense of the word. Aggressive evangelism, or “fruitfulness,” is virtually the sole yardstick by which spiritual growth is measured. Bring visitors to church, earn salvation. Thus the bold interruption.

4) The ICC places very little emphasis on the loving and graceful aspects of God’s character . . . so little one might suspect they do not exist. With its insistence that disciples follow all of the Bible’s moral teachings before they become baptized and saved, the ICC denies the Pauline doctrine of grace, the fundamental Christian belief that God meets us before we meet Him. As one ex-member puts it on his Web site, the church instructs members to “obey [God’s] commands first, then trust [His] promises.” Every work of orthodox Christian theology teaches precisely the opposite.

To make a series of long stories short, most ex-ICC testimonies end with members waking up months or years later and realizing that college education, career, family, and social relationships have been put on hold or completely derailed in favor of the church’s interests. Disgruntled members often extend their stays simply because social support outside the church has eroded. The ICC itself estimates that currently there are at least two ex-members for every member in the church. With worldwide membership at around 130,000, this means there are more than 250,000 ex-members at large. Thus the lopsided number of anti-ICC Web sites.

But ex-members are not the only ones who have spoken out. According to a recent article in U.S. News and World Report, the ICC has been banned at one time or another by 39 college campuses in the U.S. This includes, according to the Boston Globe, a 1991 injunction against the ICC by every state-supported campus in the Boston area, the organization’s national headquarters. To meet challenges on First Amendment grounds, schools cite the church for aggressive proselytizing in off-limits areas such as libraries and dining halls, as well as for harassment and risks to students’ mental health.

A week after my initial encounter, I spoke with my friend Todd, who spent three years working with InterVarsity student ministries, and discovered that he is well acquainted with the ICC. When I told him my story, he marveled at the group’s ability to stay alive, despite nearly every Christian and secular authority’s opposition.

Todd takes an incredibly hard-line stance toward the cult. His advice to every student, Christian and non-Christian alike, is to stay as far away from the ICC and its members as possible. In fact, he gave the same advice to me. Do not attend a single church service, he said. Do not invite the young men to my Bible study. Politely decline e-mail invitations to ICC events, then block their addresses. He is convinced that only God can pull a person out of the ICC, not friends or family or church leaders, and certainly not outside strangers. The most effective action I could take, he said, was simply to pray for the young men I had met. I have always been a firm believer in open dialogue, but in this case he insisted: Engaging the ICC on its own terms could only lead to fruitless debate and confusion.

Several weeks later, I was in the cafe again, and one of the young men passed my table. He was the younger of the two, and this time he was alone. I didn’t recognize him at first, but he knew me.

“We’ve met before,” he said as he extended a hand. “I invited you to my church.”

It all came back to me, and I felt the nervous dread rise in my stomach. In a tense situation like this, I knew that my actions were often unpredictable, even to myself. I could only hope that God would guide my words, and keep me from foolishness.

“Yes, I remember,” I said. “Sorry I haven’t kept in touch. I have to tell you, I’ve done a little research on your church.”

“Oh?” He sounded genuinely interested, as if I could not possibly have turned up anything but good.

 While my heart pounded, I gave him a brief summary of what I had found, and he listened. No, he hadn’t heard that the ICC had been kicked off of every Boston campus. No, he hadn’t looked up the ICC on the Internet, wasn’t aware that hundreds of Web sites spoke against it. No, he’d never heard anyone refer to the church as a cult.

“Well, the Bible says the wisdom of God is foolishness to the world,” he said. After his initial surprise, he was weakly trying to strike back.

“Yes, and foolishness can be foolishness to the world, too,” I said. “Tell me something, are you a leader in this church?”

“Well, the Bible says that if we’re disciples of Christ, we’re all leaders in the church. Right, brother?”

I didn’t want to get dragged into a chapter-and-verse debate. He obviously had done a lot of Bible reading, and found it to confirm his church’s every practice. Common sense was the only avenue open to me.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know how long you’ve been involved with this church, but if it hasn’t been long, I would advise you as a Christian brother . . . get out.”

“But you see, the Bible says . . . ”

I wouldn’t let him speak. I’m usually all for give-and-take conversation, but this situation felt different. He was too polite, too willing to let me cut him off, so I took advantage. “Do something for me, would you? Go home tonight and look up your church on the Internet. Then read what other people have to say about it. Read the testimonies of people whose lives were destroyed.”

“But the Bible says the world . . . ”

I raised my voice. “These aren’t good people you’re mixed up with. They will ruin your life.”

“But the . . . ”

“And this conversation is over.” My voice was at its loudest now. “I’m not going to visit your church. And I’m not going to discuss it with you any more.”

Other people in the coffee shop were looking at us now. The young man had given up on the biblical rejoinders. In the end, he just nodded to me and walked out.

I felt sick. Mostly it was the rapid tapering of the adrenaline surge that had seized me. But my stomach sank as I watched him walk outside and immediately make a cell-phone call. His discipler was on the other end, no doubt, consoling him, instructing him, guiding him toward his next strategic move.

One of the students from my composition class approached, paper in hand. “Whoa,” he said. “That was pretty intense.”

I took a deep breath, aware that I had just caused a minor scene. “Sorry about that. Do you need me to look this over?”

He looked at me with a half-amused, half-impressed expression. He handed me the paper, but wanted to talk about something else. “So are you religious?” he asked.

“Well, I’m a Christian, yes.”

“That’s interesting. I’m an atheist.” He pulled up a chair beside me. “So what was your problem with those guys? Aren’t they Christians, too?”

I might never be sure if my outburst at the unsuspecting ICC disciple was exactly the right thing to do. But as I sat in the cafe with my student, talking through the basics of my Christian faith, the incredible propositions of grace and free salvation, then listening to his own reasons for unbelief, I wondered at a God who could work good even in the midst of foolishness.

But that’s another story altogether.