Everyone agrees that there are no perfect churches, and that the church of Jesus Christ should always be diligent about following Christ and His Word more closely.  Through the years churches have fallen away from truth and done things which were shameful, sinful, disrespectful of God, and totally unworthy of the name of Christ.

Throughout the Christian centuries two solutions have been proposed: one, that the church should renounce everything that has happened in history to that point, go back to the early, apostolic pattern, and reconstruct the church of the first century; or,  the church should undergo a reforming along Biblical lines while retaining the basic church that has been in existence through these years.

The advantage of restoration seems to be that the church can find its original purity at the source: the days when the apostles lived and taught, when Christianity was fresh and uncorrupted, when doctrine was simple, and when people were filled with great love and devotion to a recently-risen Christ. 

However, the truth is that the church was not so pure in those days.  Even though the apostles were alive and teaching, Christians often misunderstood or disregarded their instruction.  For example, we have only to look at the Corinthian church which was divided into factions, followed human wisdom, went to the courts with private church quarrels, tolerated horrible sin in their midst, were confused about what the will of the Lord was on marriage and eating of meats in pagan temples, corrupted the Lord's Supper, disregarded appropriate behavior in worship, fought like babies over spiritual gifts, and were all mixed up about the resurrection.  Besides that, they were behind in their pledge!

In addition, there were teachers destroying the Galatian churches by totally perverting the gospel and turning it from grace to works.  Paul was furious with them over that.  Jesus found all kinds of faults with the churches in Asia Minor.  When we think about restoring the early church, we have to ask "which one?" because many of them would present a very bad model!

Another problem with restoration is that it does not allow us to take advantage of what the church has learned over two thousand years.  Christians have wrestled with understanding the nature of Christ, the way we are saved, the structure of the church, how we know truth, and all kinds of important matters.  The early church did not have a clear picture of doctrines, even though they had the apostles.  For many years the early church fought just to survive persecution.  They had no time to think through Biblical truth.

The reformation of the sixteenth century, as well as earlier reform movements, advocated using the Bible as the standard of right, but learning from the teaching and example of all the earlier centuries of Christian thought and practice.  The reformers did not believe that they "had arrived," and that their efforts represented the final, perfect church.  Unfortunately, restorationism tends to leave us with the impression that we have reached that perfect state.  Reform is ongoing, as the church continues to learn and apply the lessons of the past, and strive to draw ever nearer to the ultimate perfection of the revelation of GodÌs complete will in holy Scripture.