Fellow Christians,

Are you disheartened by the state of the Church?

So am I.

After spending fourteen years studying Scripture and theology, after obtaining a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in these fields, and after being labelled a deconstructionist for asking why we hold to certain doctrines as Christians, I’ve come to the unfortunate realization that God’s intention for the Church is being missed.

  • “Correct” theology has become an idol
  • Politics have been exalted over Jesus
  • Many Christians prefer self-righteousness to fellowship

If these realities bother you too, I want to invite you to subscribe to my blog, where we will:

  • Make much of Jesus and seek to reflect him by our lives
  • Try to break down the walls between denominations
  • Dive deeply into Scripture and theology

What can you expect here?

  • Jesus (a lot of him), because he is our example and all Scripture points to him
  • Challenges to live like Jesus, because Jesus wants to draw everyone to himself, and we are more likely to draw people to him when our lives look like his
  • Bible exposition, because the better we know the Word, the better we can navigate this world

Warning:

This is not a path to walk casually. Living like Jesus will lead to conflict and difficulty, and must be done with extreme care.

Allow me to tell you a story.

One of my childhood best friends found a church toward the end of high school and got me involved in it shortly after we graduated. This church fostered my love for Scripture, encouraged me in my perceived call to ministry, and helped me pursue Bible college. Throughout Bible college my conviction that Christ has called his people to “live in Love to find [their] true reward” (FYTR) was only strengthened. As a result of a paper I wrote my last semester of college,1 I could no longer call people “heretics” who held different theological positions than I did; within six months of graduating, I wrote the following on my former blog: “The whole point of the Bible is love. Each of the 66 books in our canon emphasizes a different aspect, but they all describe and promote love.”2

I wrote a commentary on Galatians with this theme in mind (more on this below), and continued reading, writing, and studying with this theme at the forefront of my mind. In the end, I returned to seminary for a Masters of Theological Studies and ended up becoming even more convinced of this thesis.

As Saint Augustine of Hippo explained, “Whoever, then, appears in his own opinion to have comprehended the Sacred Scriptures, or even some part of them, yet does not build up with that knowledge the twofold love of God and his neighbor, ‘has not yet known as he ought to know’ (1 Corinthians 8:2).”3

My friend who’d introduced me to the church ended up getting busy with work and wife and kids, and his church attendance ended up suffering as a result. The church responded by excommunicating him and ordering its members to cut off all communication with him, unless it was to call him to repent (a lack of love if I’ve ever heard of one). When I challenged them on this position—as a result of my education and experience—they excommunicated me as well (with the same “no-contact” order).

I’ve since moved elsewhere and found a different church to worship with. But I must emphasize that trying to love people the way Jesus loved people is not for the faint of heart: many religious institutions may not respond well to the promotion of this theology (some will certainly call it “woke”). But Jesus was killed for his love for people (Mark 3:1-6), and if we call ourselves his people, why should we expect to be treated any differently?

What will you get by subscribing?

1) Better Bible knowledge

The Bible points to Christ, and as such, the Bible is the foundation of all of the content here. The only articles here that don’t include a Scripture reference are ones focused on creative writing (whether encouraging others to write or samples of my own fiction).

Peruse this site (or check out my scripture index) to see just how important the Bible is here.

My favorite thing to do with Scripture is to choose a book and work through it verse-by-verse. To date, I’ve done this with Galatians (on my former blog; more on this below); the first 12 chapters of Joshua; half of the first chapter of Mark; and 20 chapters of Revelation. The first entry of 1 John is scheduled for January 29, 2025.

A note on future expositions:
If you’ve already clicked on a “subscribe” box above, you’ll have noticed that it asks you to choose a plan: monthly or yearly or FREE. Perhaps this caused you to not subscribe at all (if so, I’m glad you’re still reading and allowing me the chance to change your mind). In order to help cover some of the operating costs of this site, and to help provide some extra income for my family (maybe even pay for a PhD program at some point), I have created a subscription plan — one perk of which is continued access to my verse-by-verse expositions. These will eventually be turned into Bible commentaries (like I did with Galatians), so becoming a paid supporter of this site allows you to read the book as it is being written (the already-written expositions [including the rest of Revelation] will not be locked behind this paywall). Other perks of becoming a paid subscriber can be found here.

But back to the importance of the Bible:

In order to come to a theological position, we must pay attention to what the Bible says. The better we understand what the Bible says, the more we can be sure we are following Jesus’ will for us. The more sure we are of following Jesus’ will for us, the more certainty we will have in life. The more certainty we have in life, the bolder we can be in our mission to look like Jesus to the world.

2) A life that looks more like Jesus’s life

The Bible is how we learn about Christ. The Church is where we exercise that knowledge in practical, day-to-day living. However, maybe you’ve noticed this too: The Church pays more attention to the letters of Paul than it does to the Gospels. We’d rather spout off correct doctrine than have our lives look like Jesus’s life.

But this is a dangerous game to play. Jesus won’t send people away because they had faulty doctrine but because their lives were not right (Matthew 7:21-23). His specific phrase is “workers of lawlessness.” Lawlessness is failure to follow the law. The law Jesus gave his followers is “love God and love one another” (Mark 12:28-33). Failure to do this is to work lawlessness and to prove yourself to not belong to Christ.

If we are to be confident in our salvation, we must know the Bible—specifically who Jesus is and how he lived his life–and we must live likewise in the Church.

Jesus prayed to God that his people would be unified so that the world would come to believe and be saved. When we fail to love our fellow Christians and promote unity, we are working lawlessness and helping damn the world.

I’ve been a substitute teacher for the past six years, and I recently overheard a student make the following, unprompted statement: “I feel like Christianity has the most different branches of any religion.” He’s not wrong, and it’s a saddening reality.

The fact of the matter is that with so many denominations vying for our allegiance, people can fall into option paralysis and fail to ever make a decision. And if people fail to make a decision for Jesus – because they’re worried about making the wrong one – they ultimately make the worst one by not making one, and end up damned for eternity.

We will probably never dissolve denominations, but we should reimagine them as different parts of a unified body, rather than as warring factions that accuse each other of being heretics. Because, when the accusation of “heresy” is carelessly thrown-around, it can lead to doubt and uncertainty about one’s standing with God.

3) Assurance of salvation

  • Have you ever wondered if you are truly a Christian?
  • Have you ever wondered if you committed the “unforgivable sin”?
  • Have you ever wondered if you can have more confidence about your future state?

I certainly have.

And when churches claim that theirs is the only true Church, it makes it more difficult. I was told by the church previously mentioned that if I didn’t repent and say they were right to kick out my friend and support their “no-contact” commandment that I’d end up damned by Christ, based on passages like Matthew 16:19; 18:15-20; John 20:23. But is that what those verses mean?

No. In fact, it’s incredibly prideful to insist that your church has the sole power to declare people saved or not. As John Huss stated, “For whoever excommunicates another for temporal gain or chiefly for his own honor or to revenge an injury against himself or without any known cause of criminal offence this man excommunicates himself.”4

It is a myopic view of the church that leads to this sort of pride. To think that my refusal to return to an abusive congregation would imply that I’m not saved is to think that only your congregation is saved—your congregation has only existed since the 2000s. Way to cut off 2,000 years of Christ-followers from salvation, and betray that you don’t actually confess the Nicene Creed that states, “we believe in One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church.”

So here, we take a larger view of the Church. We converse with Christians from all stages of the Church—from the Old Testament prophets to the Apostles, to the Church Fathers, to Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, to the Reformers, to modern Bible scholars. And in so doing we realize that Christians have had many different views on many different topics throughout history, and only a handful of those were cause for excommunication. Loving people like Jesus loved people was never an excommunicable offence; and actually, the Apostle John declared that this kind of love is supposed to give us confidence in the Day of Judgment (1 John 4:17).

What do others say?

The Bible and Church history are in full support of the goal of this website:

  • “I do not ask for these alone, but also for the ones who are believing in me through their word, in order that all of them might be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I am in you, in order that they also might be in us, in order that the world might know that you sent me.”5
    — Jesus
  • “[we believe] in one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.”6
    — Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed
  • “If ever you hear of any that are called Christians taking their name not from the Lord Jesus Christ, but from some other, for instance, Marcionites, Valentinians, Men of the mountain or the plain, you may be sure that you have there not the Church of Christ, but the synagogue of Antichrist.”7
    — Saint Jerome
  • “There is that other heartache of seeing heretics, too, using the name and sacraments, the Scriptures and the Creed of genuine Christians. They realize how many would-be converts are driven into perplexed hesitancy because of heretical dissension, while the foulmouthed find in heretics further pretext for cursing the Christian name, since these heretics at least call themselves Christian.”8
    — Saint Augustine

If you want to better love the lost and foster unity amongst the people of God, you’ve come to the right place.

All of this is FREE!

You can enjoy this site and continued topical blogs here for no charge. I want you to grow in your love of God and others without feeling like you need to pay anything to receive this. This ministry is my gift to you. Subscribe by typing in your email address, and when it asks you which plan you’d like, click “free,” so that you can be notified of new content (excluding verse-by-verse expositions) without paying a cent.

If you’re blessed by the content you see here, sign up for a paid subscription and support this project

Unfortunately, I do have operating costs, and rather than placing tacky advertisements all over this site, I have created a subscription plan where you can pay either $7 a month or $75 a year to support my continued and regular writing on this site.

I have dreams for this ministry in the future, but before those dreams can be realized, this site will need to be able to supplement (or even replace) my family’s income. I’d like to be able to pay others to contribute articles here; I’d like to work with churches to implement these realities in the life of their congregations; I’d like to help train young men to pastor like Jesus.

Some of the perks of becoming a paid supporter:

PDF Commentary Access

Thank you for considering becoming a paid supporter of this site. If you choose to join a paid plan, enjoy this first free pdf version of my Galatians commentary – Live Free or Die Lawfully:

Subscribe

Subscribe now – for free or as a supporter!

Join me on this mission to help the Church fulfill its God-given mission in this world

Thank you!

Are you in this with me?

Notes

  1. Joshua Wingerd, “Love Wins: Paul and the Content of the Earliest Christian Gospel,” November 18, 2015: https://www.academia.edu/25063760/Love_Wins. ↩︎
  2. Joshua Wingerd, “Living to Love (3 of 3), live in Love; find your true reward, May 20, 2016: http://lilfytr.blogspot.com/2016/05/living-to-love-lil-fytr-explanation-3.html. ↩︎
  3. Saint Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine, I.40. The excerpt above was translated by John J. Gavigan in the Fathers of the Church (FC) series (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 56. ↩︎
  4. John Huss, The Church, trans. by David S. Schaff (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 272 (https://archive.org/details/deecclesiachurch00husjuoft/page/n49/mode/2up). ↩︎
  5. My translation of John 17:20-21. ↩︎
  6. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., “The Second Ecumenical Council: The First Council of Constantinople,” in The Seven Ecumenical Councils, trans. Henry R. Percival, vol. 14, NPNF2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 163. Emphasis added. ↩︎
  7. Saint Jerome, “The Dialogue against the Luciferians,” in St. Jerome: Letters and Select Works, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W. G. Martley, vol. 6, NPNF2 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1893), section 28, page 334. ↩︎
  8. Saint Augustine, The City of God, Books XVII–XXII, trans. Gerald G. Walsh and Daniel J. Honan, FC (The Catholic University of America Press, 1954), section 18.51, pg. 173. ↩︎

2 thoughts on “Fellow Christians,”

  1. Jesus Christ is the church on whom His church is built. All other ground is sinking sand. As God spoke to Jack Parson more than 100 years ago. After he got saved and filled with the Holy Ghost, the preacher told him he had to go and join “A” church to be able to work for God. Jack said he went over into the woods to pray, and talk to God about what church to join? He knelt down by some big rocks, and was asking God what church He wanted him to join? He said as he was praying, there was a bright light shown down from heaven over him, and a voice spoke and said. ‘’Do not put your name on no man made church book, for they are all Babylon, as long as your name is written in the Lambs Book of Life, is all it takes for you to be able to work for Me.” That was God speaking direct to Jack, from heaven. Jack Parson never put his name on no man made church book. While he was on his death bed in a hospital, they had tubes all in him. He had sat up in bed a while, then ask Mary, his daughter did she see the three men dressed in white coming up the hall? He said, “They are coming to take me where Ruby is” Mary said he pulled out all the tubes in him, looked at her and said – Bye! Laid back on his pillow and was gone. Ruby was his wife’s name who had gone on to heaven. Before she passed away, she said two or three times, that she saw her mother and her daughter who had gone on, up in heaven, saying to her- “Ruby, come on up here where we are, it is a better place than where you are.” — I have watched this very thing come to pass. Every denomination has become ONE BIG Cesspool of confusion. Thank God, I have never had my name on no man made church book.

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    1. I understand that you have your own perspective on Christianity, but despite the denominational confusion, it is a dangerous game to go churchless: Jesus said he would build his church, the New Testament describes churches throughout and how we should live in them, and some of the earliest post-Apostolic writers emphasized the need for the Church. Cyprian wrote “He cannot have God as a father who does not have the Church as a mother.”

      The Church is to nurture and guide our development in the faith. Doing it on our own risks going into dangerous, unchristian territory. Ultimately, it is pride that keeps people from the church, just like it is pride that says only one denomination is right. And there’s a reason pride is one of the seven deadly sins.

      Please join a church, even if you don’t immediately sign a membership covenant.

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