Boston Church Keeps Revival Movement Low-Key in Southland : Controversy: Beliefs of Boston Church of Christ have come under fire in some parts of the country. College campuses have been a major focus of the church.

The Boston Church of Christ has often been criticized for using authoritarian methods on its converts.

But congregations started in Los Angeles and Orange counties a year ago have apparently been free of controversy.

“We’ve sort of laid low here,” said Marty Fuqua, who oversees about 20 congregations the church has started in the western United States.

Fuqua acknowledged that the church has been subject to criticism elsewhere and that it has been banned or restricted on college and university campuses such as Boston University, Northeastern, Vanderbilt and Marquette. “As with any revival movement, there is a sense of unrest by those who don’t want to be revived,” Fuqua said.

After 10 years of existence, church officials say membership has reached 25,000 worldwide.

The beliefs of the Boston Church of Christ resemble those of conventional evangelical Protestant denominations, but its practices emphasize intense teacher-disciple relations that limit members’ personal freedoms.

College campuses have been a major focus of the church.

“The movement seems to treat the university as its fishing pond,” but then converts tend to abandon their studies and become alienated from their families, said the Rev. Giles Asbury, the Episcopal chaplain at UCLA.

Campus ministers at a regional meeting last spring discussed the movement’s alleged “cultic methods” and “subterfuge.” However, Lutheran chaplain Will Barnett at USC said the church has “not been active at USC in any way that is obvious or open.” Asbury said UCLA has had few calls from worried parents. Roger Lamb, a church spokesman in Boston, attributed the problems at some U.S. colleges to the “closed community” nature of campuses and to chaplains who feel threatened. The church seeks converts on campuses, Long said, because “young people generally are a little more idealistic and looking for something to give their lives to.”

The Los Angeles Church of Christ began officially 12 months ago, bringing its Bible study groups together for Sunday services at the Wiltern Theater. The Los Angeles church has grown to 575 members.

The movement first came to California with pioneer congregations in San Diego and San Francisco. San Diego leaders launched an Orange County congregation last September, with 622 members at the first service and a large start-up collection of $74,600 in contributions.

On Thursday night, the organization’s first West Coast Discipleship Conference opened at the Anaheim Convention Center, with an expected turnout of 3,500 members.

Scheduled to address the meeting tonight is Kip McKean, the evangelist who in 1979 transformed a 100-member Church of Christ in the Boston area into a booming congregation worshiping on Sundays in Boston Garden, home of basketball’s Celtics.

McKean, still preeminent as the movement’s leader, moved to Los Angeles early this year to help the long-planned congregation get started. He was unavailable for an interview.

Lamb, editor of the movement’s quarterly Discipleship Magazine, said McKean took charge of the Los Angeles church after problems developed in the marriage of the couple that had been running operations here.

Also, Lamb said, the West Coast is a “good base for getting to Asia.”

Recent issues of Discipleship Magazine reflect the strong spiritual authority held by McKean and the thinking behind “disciplining” policies that have disturbed some outsiders.

Quoting unnamed critics’ charges that the church is “blindly following Kip McKean,” evangelist Steve Johnson wrote that he is following the founder with eyes wide open.

“I guess I’m just not as strong as some folks and I need help in following Jesus,” Johnson continued.

Another article by Johnson claimed that the Bible points to the “mentor-protege relationships” used in the church, but he added that groups of disciples should always aim to be “a family functioning together” in which the leaders must settle “for nothing less than totally united hearts and minds.”

Group sessions may become rough, Johnson said, because “personal sins will be exposed, confessed and dealt with.” Some will be “on the hot seat, under the gun, so to speak,” he said. After allowing no feelings to be hidden, the sessions should end on positive notes, Johnson advised.

Critics claim that members are forced to be totally dependent on the group’s approval.

The Chicago-based Cult Awareness Network said that it receives about as many troubled telephone inquiries each month regarding the Boston Church of Christ affiliates as they do about Scientology and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Last May, 32 out of 365 calls on specific religious groups were about the Boston-based movement--tops among all groups for that month, according to Cynthia S. Kisser, executive director.

Steve Cannon of Phoenix, a member of Personal Freedom Outreach, a nationwide research group on what it regards as cult-like religious movements, charged that confessions drawn from members are “passed up along the line, and often used to keep wayward people in line.”

The mainstream Churches of Christ, a loose national fellowship of 13,000 theologically conservative congregations, has usually sought to distance itself from the McKean-led movement. A Churches of Christ magazine in 1987 called the Boston church divisive, authoritarian and “dangerous.”

Tom Olbricht, who chairs Pepperdine University’s religion department, said the Malibu school is affiliated with the mainline Churches of Christ. “We make it clear that Pepperdine is not associated with or supportive of the Boston Church of Christ.”

“In some ways, they have some fine things going, but they are very domineering,” Olbricht said.

Fuqua, speaking for the movement, said. “Obviously, there has been controversy. But there have been scores of families united, couples brought together who were on the brink of divorce.”