I Became an Anglican Priest. Here’s Why I Left. — David Bercot — Ep. 209

The Anabaptists don't talk about the early churches. They don't realize that they're following the historic faith closer than these other churches that, like to trumpet, they are. That, you know, we really—we have a a gem that we don't even make use of.

David, welcome back to the podcast. It's fantastic to have you on again. It's been probably a good little while since we've interviewed you. It has, and it's a pleasure to be back. Yeah. So, I mean, you probably don't need much of an introduction, but yeah, David Brissot, you've written a bunch of books. You've done a lot of different things, as we talked about in one of the last episodes we did with you, was how you were once a Jehovah's Witness and your story of coming out of that. So that'll be linked down below if people want to watch that or listen to that episode. But once you went through that period of leaving that movement, where did you go from there?

And what was that like? Okay, so after leaving Jehovah's Witnesses, I went on a quest, you know, where is true Christianity? What does it look like today? And we visited a number of churches. After a few years, we ended up in a Bible church, just a standard evangelical church, and with a great, great pastor who was just a really, really big help to Deborah and I, he and his wife, reaching out to us, helped us kind of across the bridge into, you know, more Orthodox Christianity. And so that was super. But yeah, there were some things that church taught that didn't seem to be what the scriptures were teaching. And I wanted to make sure I wasn't just being influenced by my Jehovah's Witness background.

So probably the biggest one was, "Once saved, always saved." And it's like, man, I'm just not seeing that in the scriptures. It seems like there's so many verses that indicate the opposite. And then that pastor went to Haiti, and we got a new pastor. And so, you know, I re-raised the issue with him, and he was adamant, "No, no, this is what Christians have always believed." I thought, well, if that's true, I'm not—I don't want to go against the historic faith, you know, but I thought, you know, I'd like to see that for myself. So that's what, you know, I bought a set of the Anti-Nicene Fathers, and that's what got me reading the early church.

Yeah, just what did they believe right after the apostles on "Once saved, always saved," on the Trinity, on a whole host of subjects. Yeah, I was very curious. So yeah, that's how I didn't know it was going to change my life. It was, you know, I was just getting answers to questions, but yeah, it ended up being life-changing for me. And that was fairly soon after you left Jehovah's Witnesses. Well, that would have been, oh, like nine years after I left. Okay, so a little bit of time. You're in just a, what, pretty standard American evangelical church before that, or in this time? Yeah, for five years. And before that, like I said, we were just visiting different churches, trying to find something.

Almost we found a Quaker church that interested us a lot. A Quaker? Interesting. Yeah, that was—wow. That was it. They were called the Evangelical Quakers. So they were Quakers who were not the liberal ones that you generally come across. These were more, you know, Bible-believing in that. And I was going to college and law school at the time. So it was like I didn't have as much time to devote to the search until I got out of law school. And, but during that time, you know, my wife and I were thinking, we thought, yeah, I think the Quaker, I think that's going to be the best, our best choice. So on the way home from moving, from where I'd gone to law school, moving back to our hometown, I called them up and said, "Yeah, Deborah and I have decided to join you guys."

And I got the—it was a couple that we had met. And I was talking to the wife. She said, "Oh, no, I hate to tell you, we just last weekend disbanded, you know?" Oh. Oh, and it was—wow. So there's an alternate future possibility there that you would have been a Quaker, at least for a time. It's a possibility. Wow. Yeah, that—oh man, did that hit hard. Yeah. Wow. So it sounds like this is a period of like just trying to find like, oh, where, you know, what kind of church, where do we fit in? And this is all, at least initially, would have been all very new coming out of Jehovah's Witness and stuff. And just before we started this episode, actually, we were talking about one of your books, the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs by Hendrickson Publishers.

And on the back of that book, it identifies you as an Anglican priest. So somewhere we go from—where does that come into this story? From Quaker to Anglican. Yeah, exactly. So actually, when the Quakers didn't work out, then it was after that that we joined the Evangelical Church.

And then, like I say, I got into the early church. And then I could see, wow, yeah, Evangelical, I thought, yeah, there's got to be something a bit closer. That this is—there's too many differences. Not that I still appreciated the Evangelical Church, appreciated the, wow, helped me restore my faith in God and all that. Played a crucial role in my pilgrimage, for sure.

But yeah, so then I started, you know, continuing checking out various churches. Came across the Anabaptists during that time period, but there weren't any conservative Anabaptist churches near us. So yeah, we were looking in other directions, Holiness Churches, a number of things. I wrote the book, "Will the Real Heritage Please Stand Up?" And one of my motivations, it wasn't the main one, but one of them was I was hoping, you know, God would see the book would get somewhere and I'd hear from someone and say, "Hey, this is exactly what our church believes," you know? And I did get a lot of letters from Anabaptists. So yeah, I initially was looking that direction. And of course, it's where I eventually ended up.

But yeah, there was an intermediate period. So yeah, the Anabaptists really were enthusiastic about the book. And I was invited to a lot of places to speak. And you know, it was really well received. And it was, yeah, really exciting. And then I wrote the book Common Sense.

And yeah, that had the opposite reception. And I got—yeah, I got really lambasted by not most people, but in a few quarters, yeah, I got attacked pretty strongly because of that book. And so it was very discouraging. And at the same time, the book found its way into different Orthodox circles. And so just to be clear, you're getting a lot of—initially, you write your first book, everybody's like, "Wow, this is great, the Anabaptists." You know, so you're in that world and you write the second book and you're hearing this from some of the Anabaptists, right? Where it's like, "Whoa." Yeah, really strong. So I go from hero to villain. I mean, overnight. It was so sudden.

I mean, I was stunned. I mean, it's just like, wow, I can't believe it that, you know, I was so, yeah, warmly received. And I'm not saying this in criticism or anything. I'm just saying, you know, obviously, I wasn't careful in saying some things in the book that—because it was mainly—the criticism was mainly misunderstanding the book. Yeah, was—and I hope someday to revise it. It's on my list of things. Well, please do. Because I had read it. I have one of the few remaining copies, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, and I remember being like, "Whoa, okay. I could see how this could rouse some people the wrong way." So you were on the receiving end of that.

And that was probably a pretty shaky time then. Yeah. So that really discouraged me. I thought, well, I don't seem to be welcome in the Anabaptist world anymore. So what do I do? And then at the same time, I'm getting all these letters and calls from Orthodox people, you know, mainly people who converted from Evangelicals to Orthodox. And they say, "Oh, this is a fantastic book. Wow. You know, you belong in the Orthodox church." You know, and I said, "I don't think so." You know, well, yeah, can I come out and talk to you? You know, one guy. And so he spent the weekend with us. He was, yeah, a very good apologist, you know, for the Orthodox faith.

I mean, he didn't convince us to go that route, but he certainly made us rethink some things. And like I say, it was just nice being appreciated, you know? And when I was being attacked, you know, by the people, I thought, you know, I was going to embrace, you know, and it's like, oh, I just felt like that door was maybe closed. You know, it wasn't that I couldn't take criticism. I just felt like, I don't think I'm welcome there anymore, you know? So, but yeah, the Orthodox was a bit of a leap. We'll maybe talk about that a little bit later, why I didn't choose them.

But it got us interested in what I call the ancient churches, the churches that can trace themselves back, you know, to the beginning. Historically, it doesn't mean they're teaching the same things, but that, you know, that they would have a direct lineage, you know, one way or the other. And on that journey, Dean Taylor was with us. I know he's been on the list as well. So we were all—we were looking into every kind of, I mean, churches most people have never even heard of, you know, but we were looking for ancient churches that maybe had not gotten into venerating Mary and, you know, icons. You know, there were a number of things that, you know, we were—we knew were not early church.

We weren't going to embrace. And so then he discovered this group called the Continuing Anglicans. And they were the conservatives who had broken off from the Episcopal Church here in the U.S. And they were trying to get—and I think it finally succeeded—but they were trying to unite with the Anglicans in Africa and Asia who tended to be more conservative in those countries. And so they were trying to, you know, get in communion with them. But anyway, but they broke away from the Episcopal Church. So he said, "Hey, we ought to look into these guys." You know, I mean, one of two people that we both admired a lot were William Law, who was a writer who influenced John Wesley.

And then, of course, John Wesley was one of our favorites. So—and they were both Anglicans. So we thought, well, yeah, I mean, so there's been a lot of good things come out of the Anglican Church. And one of their things is we liked in their statement of faith, "No one shall be required to believe anything that cannot be proven from the Holy Scriptures." You know, so we thought, okay, this is good. We can maybe, you know, fit in here. So anyway, so yeah, we got acquainted with them and they were, yeah, very welcoming. You know, they liked both, "Will the Real Heritage Please Stand Up?" and "Common Sense," you know? And yeah, we're, yeah, very eager to have us join.

And we asked if we could come in as a religious society, kind of like the Methodist Society that John Wesley had started. You know, we said our lifestyle is more Anabaptist. You know, we would look, I mean, you know, our sisters wore head coverings and, you know, we're, you know, dressed modestly and we were, you know, embraced non-resistance. I mean, we were, I'd say, Anabaptist in most aspects. And they said, yeah, that would be fine. You could draw up your own rule of life. And if one of you wants to get ordained, yeah, you could, yeah, then, you know, have your own priest there and, you know, and so. So this is like a small group that you were meeting with at the time that was doing this stuff?

Started off as a house church. So we had a house church that had started off, you know, maybe quasi-Anabaptist and then, yeah. Wow. Yeah. So yeah, and then, and then, you know, like I say, with all the criticism of Common Sense and other things, yeah, we kind of started on this journey. So yeah, we thought, okay, the Continuing Anglicans looks like, yeah, a place we can fit where we still have one foot in the biblical world, you know, we can relate to the Protestant world and then one foot in with the ancient churches. And so then I and another brother who was with us, Tom Shank, he and I both then started working on getting ordained.

I forget how long that took, two years or something, you know, our studies on that. But so yeah, I eventually got ordained. And so I was telling you before we went live, so when I started the project of the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, which that wasn't my title, that was Hendrickson came up with that title. I had a different one, but I wrote them to see if they would be interested in it.

I picked them because they did a lot of academic books. I mean, so many of the books, reference books, Christian reference books. And I thought, if they'll print it, it'll help get it into seminaries and theological libraries, which, yeah, I wanted to have that kind of influence at a level, not just the common Christian reading it, but the people in seminary and that sort of thing. So when I wrote them, I just mentioned I'm an Anglican priest. I was at the time. And so yeah, they were interested in the project and they said, yeah, you know, go for it. And so I did. Well then, yeah, when I finished the project, I ended up leaving the Anglicans.

And I, yeah, I never brought it up again. They never presented the back cover to me. I didn't know they were going to, that was coming in the back cover because nothing had ever been said. And I was shocked as anyone else when I was like, "Oh no." And now it's permanently, you know, on that book. Yeah, they're not inclined to want to change the stuff. Because I didn't know this part of your story. And someone gave me a copy back in the day. And I'm very grateful to have it in my library, which all of y'all should get a copy, I would say. But I remember flipping it over and reading that and being like, "David was an Anglican priest?

This is wild. I have to ask you about that." Because it was, I think it was after I'd interviewed you the first time on the JW thing. And anyway, so I did. And I heard some of the story. Yeah, but that's kind of a wild experience. It doesn't sound like it lasted very long. But you were initially there. Like you were an Anglican priest for a bit. You had your church group. You did that for a bit. Eventually that, obviously you're not that anymore. So tell us that part of the story. Okay. So, you know, as I said, you know, we were Anglican, but it was more, you might say, working under their umbrella. Since we were a religious society, not monks, but like I say, just what the Methodist Society had been.

But we were a little different. We were, like I say, basically Anabaptist. So someone looking at us would have thought we were an Anabaptist church. But our service on Sunday, they said the only thing we had to do was use the Book of Common Prayer on Sunday morning, their communion service for Sunday morning. So we used the Anglican liturgy for Sunday morning. So our worship service on Sunday would have looked, and it was very Anglican. We actually grew very much to enjoy it. It's a very reverent service, very totally biblical. There was nothing in there that was not biblical, well thought out. So yeah, we actually enjoyed that part. But then our Wednesday night service was just more like a, you know, Evangelical or Anabaptist, you know, prayer meeting, Bible study, you know.

So yeah, we were kind of a hybrid group. It was, but yeah, we were just some of the issues. I mean, the issue that made us leave the Anglicans, that was a very big issue to us, was divorce and remarriage, which we did not want to be, you know, part of a church. Well, we knew they allowed it, but, well, what they told us when we asked, I mean, like the Orthodox, I mean, they allow three divorces and to get remarried three times, which is like, that was, yeah, one reason we didn't want to go that route. So we talked to the Catholics, at least held a pretty strict line, but they've gotten loose on annulment, you know.

Originally, annulment was only for if you married like your sister or, you know, your daughter, something that would be forbidden in the Book of Leviticus. Then the marriage would be, you could get it annulled or you were supposed to get it annulled because it was an illegal, you know, marriage under church law. Yeah, now the Catholic Church has expanded that.

Well, it turned out the Anglican had just pretty much followed the Catholics in that respect. So they told me when I inquired, yeah, we don't allow divorce and remarriage. And we go, okay, well good. You know, we don't, yeah, it's one of our convictions. But then we found out, okay, yeah, what they mean is they don't allow, they allow annulment, you know, and then you can get a secular divorce. Oh, okay. And then it was pretty easy to get an annulment, you know. So. So over time, this turned into enough that it's like, you know, we had to break away from this. Yeah, it became an issue. Well, we found out our bishop had had an annulment, you know, and it was like, okay, this, yeah, we thought, yeah, we're not comfortable with this.

So we broke our affiliation. We kept meeting as a church for another five years. And we kept using the Book of Common Prayer just because we had grown to really like the service. But then we were, you know, we didn't have to. We just, like I say, we enjoyed it. But then we started incorporating various things that were more early Christian and that. So that's a story there. That's definitely a story. So it's like your group didn't fracture and splinter over this. It was like, it seems like you stayed together fairly well, but it's like, we can't be part of this larger, you know, church group. We lost. We did lose some families, but enough remained that, yeah, we were able to carry on.

Sure, sure. So that is an interesting window into different, I'm not very familiar, honestly, with Anglican or really just the different, what I call, I don't know if this is the right word, but you know, the high church forms, Orthodox, Catholic, things like that. And I think that's, I think it's pretty important to understand what that's like. And so one of the immediate questions I had when I was working through the script and we were emailing some about this, what about this whole thing of apostolic succession? And were you attracted to that? Did you find that, ooh, that's interesting? And like, explain what that is first off. And let's dive into that a bit. Yeah, so that would have been maybe one of the big attractions that we, we as a house church, like I say, we would have started off more Anabaptist, free radical, whatever you'd want to, you know, describe us.

And but as different ones in the group, you know, others started reading the early Christians, which was up to that point, you know, I had read them and then I was sharing with other people, but I didn't have anyone I could really converse with. But now, yeah, there were other people in our group reading it. And yeah, some of them got interested in apostolic succession. They see the term, you know, succession of bishops and things like that in some of the writings. And so, yeah, we got, started looking into that. And yeah, I got convinced that, okay, there's something to this. Never to the point that I felt like, oh, other people aren't Christians or their communion isn't valid or, you know, if they didn't have apostolic succession.

But I thought maybe it did help bring about more unity, that there was some value to it. So that was, I think, one of the things we were seeking. So, and of course, I got ordained. I've got a, it's probably back here, somewhere, a big long scroll. And my ordination supposedly goes back to the Apostle John. Really? Wow. Okay. So that's what we're saying when we're saying the apostolic succession, at least in the sense that you had with the Anglican Church. Like they actually made that, like actually had a scroll with, yeah, wow, going all the way back to the Apostle. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's interesting.

Man, if we could take that out, I would love to see that. Actually, I would love to see that. So they, yeah, I mean, they were really bought into that as like, this is one of the key pieces. Oh, yeah, they would feel that's very, yeah, very important. I mean, another reason we chose the Anglican, the Anglican Church in America, the Episcopalian was never a state church in a national sense. It was never a, some of the states, it would have been an official church of like Virginia or something like that. But it was never like the national church of the United States or something like that. Now, the Anglicans in England were definitely a state church.

Yeah. But here in this country, we felt like, okay, yeah, we felt like a closer connection than we would have been comfortable with. But we felt like, okay, at least this is much further away. And yeah, today the Episcopal Church, you know, would not believe in church and state being one and that kind of thing here in the United States, you know. Well, back on the, so back to, so you mentioned apostolic succession as something initially it seemed to, oh, this is, you know, one of the, this is a positive. And as you get into this church group, you're starting to see some more of the negatives with some of these different things. Somewhere along the line, I'm guessing apostolic succession was not as important anymore, which I know that is a really big deal to a lot of these different church groups, right?

It is. Somewhere along the line is like, oh, actually maybe this isn't as important. What changed your mind? What changed there? It wasn't that it wasn't as important. It was that it's not what the early Christians teach. That's what, yeah, see, see the interesting thing is when I originally read the early Christians on my own, I was not convinced of apostolic succession in the way that it is taught. Of course, I didn't know what it meant. I'd heard the expression apostolic succession. And then I see they talk about the succession of bishops and all of that. And I thought, oh, well this is maybe what it's meant. But no, then when we got around the Anglicans and the Orthodox and all that, what they mean by apostolic succession is, yeah, you aren't validly ordained unless, yeah, you've been ordained by someone who was ordained by someone who you can trace yourself all the way back to one of the apostles who ordained.

And so you've got this kind of line that this, you know, chain of apostolic succession is passed through on the ordination, okay? And so you're not really validly ordained. And so therefore it's not, I don't know if the Anglicans would not say this, but the Orthodox said it's not a valid communion, you know, that you're having in your church if the minister who is presiding, you know, does not, was not ordained through apostolic succession. But what the early church, but what they're talking about is who ordained whom. I realized it was when I was working on the dictionary. Okay. So I'm starting over fresh. I go to the Ante-Nicene Fathers. I start in chronological order from the beginning.

Okay. And I'm just writing these quotes on a Julian subject, you know, anything I thought was important. And, you know, since I was Anglican, I was trying to be very neutral on both from the Catholic side, small c Catholic, and the Protestant side. I was, you know, just what do they say? And I was thinking of topics that were of interest to Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican topics that were of interest to Anabaptist, to Baptist, whatever, you know, just things that would be of interest. So I had, you know, one of them was apostolic succession. So I'm looking at the quotes and I'm realizing, okay, they're not talking about who ordained whom when their list of succession is a list of who followed whom in office, not who ordained whom.

So like, normally a person stayed in office till he died. So they didn't ordain their successor. You know, it doesn't have anything to do with the laying on of hands by someone who's been, you know, someone got zapped by the apostles and then they can zap the next person, that kind of thing. They're not talking about that at all. And the only reason they even bring it up at all is because the Gnostics, they were, they had, you know, these weird, strange doctrines. I mean, so strange that you can hardly call them Christian. I mean, it's like the God of the Old Testament is not the same God as the God of the New Testament.

And they rejected most of the books of the New Testament and stuff like that. But anyway, Jesus never came in the flesh for, you know, anyway, their teachers were saying, oh, well, yeah, I was a companion of Paul and, you know, we got this from the apostles. And so Irenaeus' response was, well, our churches, we can show the succession of the bishops that we can trace ourselves to the apostles. He's talking about the doctrine, you know, that this person got his doctrine from the apostles and then this one got it from that guy and all of that.

Yeah, where's your list? Where did you come from? Nowhere. You know, you just popped up and you come up with this doctrine. We can trace ourselves back to the apostles. But he's not talking about ordination that, yeah, this made your ordination valid or invalid. It was that, yeah, you're carrying on the historical faith. It's being handed down from the apostles. And it's a good argument. I mean, Irenaeus wrote about 170, 180, somewhere in there. It's a very good argument just 70 years after the apostle John died. Now, it breaks down when you get, you know, 300, 400, 1000, 1500 years. Well, yeah, you're not necessarily still carrying it on. In fact, you can show very positively you're not teaching what they taught back then.

So I saw that when I worked on the dictionary of early Christian beliefs that, okay, yeah, this teaching that the Catholic Church, the Orthodox, the Anglicans, that they have on apostolic succession, it's just, it's not what the early Christians are saying. It's, yeah, that's totally false. It's invalid. And so, yeah, so from that point, yeah, it didn't, it was of no particular importance to me.

Now, not everyone in our church, I had not tried to necessarily convince them. Some of them still felt fairly strong about it. And so I did not want to split the church over. You know, we had a nice group there. I mean, eventually, I guess I did make an issue of it. And it did kind of create a stir in the church. And then at that point is when we broke up because it was like, okay, if apostolic succession isn't important, which it's not, and it's not even valid. I mean, I realized looking at my scroll, it's like, this is fake. I mean, it's purporting to say who ordained whom. Well, we don't even have a record.

Their record is who followed whom in office. There's no record of who did the ordaining. Oh, yeah. Okay. And there's big gaps in the historical record that they've filled. And I just realized this isn't even valid, you know. That's so ironic though, that you're kind of coming to terms with this while an Anglican priest and while you're actually writing the one book that identifies you as such. Yeah. And in that process of re-going through the early church fathers, you know, Ante-Nicene Fathers, is actually when you started re-evaluating this and saying, wait, I'm actually reading this wrong or like I got this wrong. Yeah. That's fascinating to me. Yeah. It was a number of other doctrines.

We won't go into them now, but yeah. Oh, it was a learning experience for me because I'd never had that luxury. See, today people who are researching the early church, well, one thing, now it's available electronically. So you can do word searches. You can do things like that. There's AI stuff where you can do topical searches now. I mean, back then there was nothing. There were some Catholic source books that, you know, had different topics and then they had their proof quotes. But yeah, that was it. There wasn't the dictionary of early Christian belief. So, you know, when I wanted to research something, I just had my notes and they were just by writer, not by topic, you know.

So you had just brute force, like go through, I mean, the set is however many books is in the Ante-Nicene Fathers or whatever it is you're studying. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So, I mean, I would have done the dictionary of early Christian beliefs for my own research if I hadn't done it for publication. I was just like, I hate that I don't have all of the needed quotes, particularly in chronological order, you know, so you can see like, whoa, they've all been saying this and now they're suddenly saying something different. See, I didn't have that option. I just, it was a kind of a jumbled sort of thing.

And so, yeah, it busted a lot of myths doing the dictionary. And I'd say by the end of it, yeah, I realized I still appreciated a lot of things about Anglican worship, about the ancient churches, you know, that some of the things are accused of as being false actually is genuinely early Christian. But then a lot of stuff is definitely something that was added on through the ages.

So I'm not sorry for the experience, but I feel like it's made me a better, well-rounded Christian. But I definitely saw the Anabaptists, the lifestyle I saw in the early church, which rereading them again and compiling the dictionary, it just stands out so much. Their emphasis on living the Sermon on the Mount, you know. And there's so few churches. I mean, the Anabaptists, the Bible-believing Quakers, which there aren't very many of those. I mean, that's about it. I mean, that, you know, are centered on, we live, we take the Sermon on the Mount as a way of life, not as an ideal that's unattainable, which is what most evangelicals teach that either it's a different, it applies to a different dispensation or it's unattainable.

Jesus gave it to just show we can't live by laws, you know. I hear that a lot. Yeah. And so out of this experience, you're actually coming back around to that and saying, wait, this is a real, this is a core piece of what I want.

And so from there, what did you say? Because at the beginning of this interview, you were saying how the second book you published, Common Sense, kind of ostracized you in some ways from the Anabaptist world or however you want to say it. You went through this Anglican thing. And now, as you've given up on apostolic succession or seen it's not as important, did you find yourself heading back to the Anabaptist world then at that point? Like, where does the story go from there? Yeah. So at that point, we actually, our, I call it a house church, but by this time we were meeting in a church building.

We disbanded and I didn't think, I didn't, I honestly thought when I demonstrated that apostolic succession was not what the early Christians taught. It wasn't biblical and it wasn't essential that, yeah, then we'd just carry on, you know, and maybe it would free us up. We could affiliate, we talked about affiliating with charity or something like that. But yeah, it turned out it just, wow, it kind of threw people off. People didn't know what they wanted to do. So yeah, the church ended up just, fortunately, it was very amicable. I mean, you know, there was no friction or anything, but we just realized we didn't have a clear vision anymore. And Dean Taylor was hoping maybe we could join charity.

We invited Danny Kenniston to come down and do a weekend of revivals and stuff like that. But yeah, the group decided not to go that way. And like I say, just everyone had something different that they wanted to pursue church-wise, you know. And so Dean and Tonya, they moved up to Pennsylvania and joined charity. And so, yeah, so then, yeah, I was, my family was like, okay, you know, what do we do? For a while we just had house church at home, just us. I wasn't real eager to get another house church going. It's a hard struggle, you know. House churches don't tend to have long lives, you know. And I did appreciate the Anabaptists.

They've kept this thing going 500 years. That is not easy, you know. I mean, there's been a lot of perfectionists, what I call perfectionist churches. I don't mean that in a negative sense. I mean, churches that are centered on, hey, we live by what the scriptures say. We don't water it down and that. But yeah, most of them don't last more than a generation if they last that long, you know. I mean, there's been so many. You could fill pages with all of these different groups that had these wonderful ideals. And like you say, you know, when their founder dies, that's the end of them. Or often they don't even last that long. And like, okay, a group that can last 500 years.

I like this stability knowing that they would be here for my family and my children, grandchildren. But yeah, there was the issue of the early church that was how I was going to cross that bridge. But yeah, maybe that would be better for another interview.

No, that's an important part, you know, where, yeah, so it's a bit, everybody's path in life is a little different, you know. And as you've bumped into some of these things and it's like, wow, that actually didn't work. And you find yourself coming back to the Anabaptists, you know, even after initially there was some, I don't know what you would call it after that second book and some challenges. And that's actually something I've been thinking about a lot. When people go through things like this, it is very easy to just say, you know what, fine, I'm just out of here. I don't ever want to be a part of this again. And the fact, you know, you did come back and say, hey, there is something really valuable here that I want.

And you come back and now I guess, you know, you're part of the Anabaptists and you've been that way for quite a while now. Yeah, I think that's significant. Yeah. So like I say, working on the dictionary, I realized that the center of early Christianity, what they talk about the most when they present the gospel to the pagan Romans, I mean, the thing they talk about the most in addition to the person of Jesus, his incarnation in that is the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus, yeah, how he taught us to live. And that none of the ancient churches, the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Anglican, the Coptic, I mean, any of those, they don't even come close.

I mean, that doesn't even begin to describe how most of them live. Now, there have been outstanding Roman Catholics. There have been outstanding Anglicans. You know, I've mentioned William Law, you know, John Wesley, who lived these, you know, really godly lives, you know. Same with the Orthodox. I mean, there have been individuals, but as a people, no, that doesn't describe them. They wouldn't even claim, yeah, we lived the Sermon on the Mount. And so, yeah, I realized the Anabaptists don't talk about the early church. They don't realize that they're following the historic faith closer than these other churches that like to trumpet they are. That, you know, we really, we have a gem that we don't even make use of that, you know, like, wow, yeah, we can really say, hey, we are following the historic faith.

Now, there are a few doctrinal differences, but I mean, I can only think of really two main ones, you know, and as far as theology, you know, and so even theologically, the view of salvation, the view of, you know, one saved, always saved, our general not putting the emphasis on theology. The early church, as I said, their emphasis was on Christian living. That in itself is a significant part of early Christianity that it was not doctrinity. It was not built on, you got to, this long, you know, list of things. The Apostles' Creed was all you had to believe theologically, which every group that calls themselves Christian just about believes the Apostles' Creed. And so, yeah, just the fact that the Anabaptists are not big theologians actually, yeah, brings them closer to primitive Christianity, you know, that, you know, that wasn't their emphasis either, trying to dissect these, you know, complex doctrines and that sort of thing.

And so, yeah, I realized I maybe did a poor job of kind of presenting things in common sense. I could definitely have presented it better. But yeah, the Anabaptists don't realize, yeah, that they've got these, you know, fantastic ties that other churches who want to trumpet it, like the Catholic Church, I mean, they're nowhere near as close as the Anabaptists are when you take into account the whole picture, not just, you know, certain doctrines, you know.

So there's a lot of others out there that are reading the early church writings, Ante-Nicene Fathers, the Patristics, so forth. And that is taking them to some of the more high church traditions, you know, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Orthodox, whatever, Catholic.

You've been reading these for quite a long time. You've written many books about it. And you ultimately went the Anabaptist route. And you've said a little bit of why that is, but like, how are they reading these texts different than you? Or what are you doing that's different than they are, I guess, when you read this material? Yeah. So the problem is, and you know, I'm working to, you know, change this within the Anabaptist world. And it is changing. I mean, a lot more people now, I've found just in many places are reading the early Christians, are becoming more familiar with the historic faith. And, you know, realize it's not in any way incompatible with Anabaptists and that it fits us closer.

What happens to people is exactly what happened, you know, to me with common sense. Now, they don't get attacked the way I did, but the Anabaptists, because, you know, generally throughout history, they didn't read these writings. They've never, you know, thought about them. So yes, there are views the early Christians had that are not Anabaptist views.

But yeah, there's an awful lot of views there that are not Orthodox or Catholic either, you know. But the ones who generally do the reading of the early Christians, like, you know, most, you know, I've got a bookshelf just, you know, laden with all kinds of writings and things about the early church. Well, almost all of them, if it's an early Christian writing, the translator is invariably usually Roman Catholic, you know, sometimes Lutheran, not usually Orthodox, but occasionally.

Books about them tend to be, again, it's either Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, something like that. They've made that their field. And the Catholic Church, you know, their doctrine, their teaching, official teaching is doctrine developed. And so God gave the church the authority to develop doctrine. So yeah, they can read Justin Martyr and all that. And okay, he said this or that, and that wasn't wrong in his day because that's all God had revealed up to that point. But now we understand things a little better, you know. I mean, like Tertullian points out, you know, Mary's failings and, you know, her sins and things like that. And they would say, well, okay, yeah, they didn't have a clear understanding of Mary that later then the church defined that, you know, Mary was sinless and things like that.

So for the Catholics, it's not intimidating because, yeah, well, we've just developed beyond that. Now, the Orthodox would say, oh, we haven't changed anything, which at least the Catholics, I'll give them credit, they're honest. I mean, you know, that, you know, it's developed. Yeah, we're not claiming that, yeah, we're practicing the same thing they were back then. I didn't realize that. Okay. That's interesting. But you're saying the Orthodox are not that way. Yeah. They say, oh, no, we haven't changed anything. And okay, I heard all the time from them, you know, Luke painted the first icon and it's like, come on. I mean, just, you know, throughout total legends and, you know, it just, I don't know when that developed, you know, that one, you know, long after Constantine.

But yeah, and so they can throw out proof texts from the early church that makes it look like, oh, I see this fits what we teach. I mean, you can proof text the Bible why there's so many different denominations to make it say almost anything. And you can proof text the early Christians and people who just look at those proof texts and they're being enticed. Well, see, yeah, this is the historic faith. And on the other end, see, up until the present time, and you know, like I say, it's changing, but Anabaptists haven't been saying, well, no, see, you can go back and show that what we practice is what the early church did, you know.

I mean, there would be a couple of things I wish the Anabaptists would maybe be a little bit more open on, on a couple of doctrinal issues where what the early church taught is so literally what the New Testament teaches. I mean, you know, it was an overreaction against the Catholic Church. But like I say, there's only a couple of doctrines that really are like that. For the Orthodox, you've got all these problems with Mary and icons that, you know, the early church, you know, is definitely nobody was sinless. I mean, there's no teaching of Mary, you know, immaculate conception or that she was born without sin or that she is, you know, ascended to heaven or the Orthodox don't say, we don't say she was assumed.

They have a little twist on everything, but it's basically the same thing. She went to heaven. They both say she's the queen of heaven. They both pray to Mary. They both, you know, she's the most exalted figure. I mean, none of that's in the early church. You read the early church, I mean, you go a whole volume and there's hardly any mention of Mary. I mean, she's not this central figure. It's just like the New Testament. After the book of the first or second chapter of Acts, I guess the second chapter of Acts, she's never mentioned again in the whole New Testament, you know. So yeah, I mean, it's people taking the early church and proof texting things.

And because most people aren't well read, yeah, they can't answer. It makes me think when I was a Jehovah's Witness, the easiest people to convert were Catholics because they didn't know their Bibles at all, you know. It was a closed book to them. So it was very easy as Jehovah's Witness. And we could, you know, take the Bible, show them this proof text, and you know, the Bible says this, the Bible says that. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, they didn't know anything. They couldn't, you know, defend themselves. And it's the same way, you know, so few people know the early Christian writings so that it's like, oh, maybe this is historic. But, you know, we were talking at lunch about this, that it always alarms us when someone leaves the Anabaptists and goes Orthodox or Roman Catholic.