A Statement of Faith

“We murder to dissect.”   

C.S. Lewis 

When I interviewed for Southeast Asia, no one told me my team was planting a church.  

Our city only had one expat church, and attending church with the locals made us look suspiciously like missionaries. 

Most of my team barely considered it a church at all. My coworkers were bent out of shape about topical preaching and spiritual gifts and they threw out the word “heresy” more often than I was comfortable with. My team said the church had problems I hadn’t been around long enough to see. For the most part, they were right. 

But there were also problems they’d been around too long to see. Namely, that our team lived in an echo chamber of our own ideologies. For me, it didn’t matter so much that the worship at church was mostly Hillsong, or that I disagreed with something in every sermon. I had the world wide web available to me. I could listen to any sermon I wanted. I had a house where I could worship to any song on Spotify. I had the whole Bible in my own language. And sure, it wasn’t my ideal church, but it was the one space in my life where my area leader didn’t have the final say, and it was good and right for it to be that way. 

Other people saw it differently. 

And so there was dreaming and scheming; there was talk of theology and Nine Marks; there were gatherings on Sunday that weren’t officially church, and I attended because I didn't want to distance myself from my team. 

Months passed, and eventually there was a committee. 

“We’re forming a committee to officially establish a church. We’ll meet over the next six months to discuss the church’s values, bylaws, and statement of faith. Raise your hand if you’d like to be on the committee.” 

This was my chance to have a say in how the church turned out— my chance to do something rather than passively disliking it.  

I raised my hand. So did my area leader, my teammate, and two other expats. 

In retrospect, it was a tactical error—a decision I wished I could unmake. I thought that joining the committee would make me a valuable stakeholder in the decisions—that we would each bring an equal part to the table and build something together. More often, I felt like an obstacle to be overcome, like I was there to approve my area leader’s ideas rather than bring my own. 

Quite honestly, I don’t know that he ever wanted me there. Maybe he saw me as a barrier to planting the kind of church he’d always dreamed about. Maybe he didn’t know how to tell me he wanted me off the committee—that I was cut from a different cloth. Maybe I was just too committed to making something fit when it didn’t. Maybe I wrongly assumed we could agree on the essentials and compromise on everything else.  

So it began—nine months of committee meetings.  

We prayed and we talked and we edited Google docs, and maybe that sounds innocent enough. But we argued about the strangest of things, like limited atonement and particular redemption and what it means to be “very God of very God.” This couldn’t possibly be what it meant to start a church.  

I was glad for the days we drank bourbon— like all good theologians do— because it gave me the courage to say a fraction of what I was really thinking.

Like, for example, that we shouldn’t ask members to sign an exclusively Calvinist statement of faith, especially if we believed we were the only biblical church in town. Especially if we worked for a nondenominational organization. Especially if attendance was required for our students. 

Or that we didn’t need to bicker about which Person of the Trinity saves us. 

Or that it was wrong for us to spend more than six hours discussing church polity and only eight minutes discussing the role of women in our congregation. 

Or that the locals (and my expat friends, and my teammates, and the students I mentored, and the visiting staff) whispered to me about how the church gave them a weird vibe. 

Or that the Church was founded on the inspired Word of God, and that we were wasting our time trying to create another infallible document. That many before us had lived and died defending the creeds, and our five-person committee wouldn’t produce anything better. 

Sometimes I voted to approve things I didn’t like because I was so exhausted by the conversation. Sometimes I voted a certain way because I knew it would affect the way people perceived me at work. And sometimes I voted to approve decisions because I actually agreed with them—because, somewhere in there, I saw an honest desire to establish a church that honored God in the best way we knew how. 

After nine months, it was finished: our statement of faith. Yes, the wording was exactly right, and yes, every potential heresy had been considered. It seemed to me, however, more like a statement of faith in our own theology—faith in all the things we thought we knew. Faith in a document, faith in being right, faith in being better than them. Faith in a lot of things besides Jesus.  

And then, the first sermon. 

It was on church discipline.  

They asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to become members. No heads bowed, no eyes closed. Hands slipped up around the room, committing to sign the document we wrote. My hand twitched in my lap. I can’t sign this knowing the manipulation I saw behind closed doors. My face burned with every eye on me. My missions pastor warned me not to give my area leader more control over my life. My heart raced. I’ll tell them I need more time to pray about it. I took a deep breath. But they’ll think I’m a traitor, undermining the work of the church. Unwilling to come under its authority. I had a decision to make.

In front of my whole community—in front of the precious few Christians involved in my life—I chose not raise my hand.

Because somewhere deep down, I knew something was wrong.