ent which started among theAssemblies of God in the late 1950s, and to some extent by the general "Jesus People"revival which accompanied the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s in theUnited States.This sounds like an odd combination to an outsider, but the rather rigid and legalisticintellectual approach of the mainline Churches of Christ, with its emphasis on Scripture,Scripture, and more Scripture complemented the more emotional Assemblies of God, whovalued the personal touch in spiritual development. While the early Crossroads movementdid not have direct contact with the Assemblies of God, the influence of such Assembly ofGod ministers and teachers as Robert Coleman and Juan Carlos Ortiz on the thinking ofthe early movement is difficult to overstate.The early Crossroads movement took most of its theological fundamentals, though, fromthe mainline Churches of Christ, and that is where someone trying to understand themovement must start.The mainline Churches of Christ are a conservative evangelical fundamentalist groupconcentrated in the "Bible Belt", the southern and midwestern states of the United States.They originally came from an American religious movement of the early 1800s called the"Restoration Movement", and represent the conservative wing of that movement. Theindependent "Christian Church" and "Disciples of Christ" are the other two largedenominations that came out of the Restoration Movement.The Churches of Christ should not be confused with the United Church of Christ, whichcame from a different branch of the Protestant Reformation and holds very different beliefsthan the Churches of Christ or Restoration movement as a whole.The Restoration movement was founded by several Protestant evangelists of differentdenominations and backgrounds who grew tired of the religious bickering of the periodand who became convinced that the key to ending it was to believe the Bible only and tossout all creeds and other measur...
