The story of the International Churches of Christ (ICOC) is an important story in American religious history. In truth, every story of every religious movement is important, but this tradition is unique. The stunning growth it achieved through what many viewed as unorthodox techniques catapulted this movement into headlines around the country, especially in the early 1990s.
TIME magazine, for example ran a full-page story on the ICOC at that time known as the Boston Movement in 1992. TIME called this movement "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."
In this text, Foster Stanback provides the first book-length, historical study of this movement. Though a member of the ICOC, Stanback has sought to write with detachment and objectivity, insofar as detachment and objectivity are possible. The result is a stunning good analysis of this tradition, its historical roots, its cultural milieu, its activities, its organiztion, its theology, and its phenomenal growth.
Members of the ICOC will find this book an indispensable guide to the roads they have traveled since 1967 when the ICOC had its earliest beginnings in Gainesville, Florida.
–Richard T. Hughes, Pepperdine Universty (From the Forward)