Hi, I'm David Bercot, and tonight I'm going to be sharing with you the story of my spiritual pilgrimage from the time I wrote the book Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up in 1989 up to the present time. Last April, I made a recording entitled My Testimony, which covered the period of my life from my conversion up to my writing the Heretics book.
Actually, I had originally intended for that message to cover the story of my spiritual life all the way up to the present day, but the simple truth is I ran out of time. And I decided that instead of condensing the first part of the message in order to make it all fit, I would simply end my testimony with the publication of the Heretics book. Actually, I seriously doubted that there would be very many people who would want to hear the rest of my pilgrimage anyway.
Well, I've been amazed at the number of letters and emails that Scroll Publishing has received asking why I didn't tell the rest of my story. Specifically, a whole lot of people have wondered, "What's this about your being an Anglican priest?" and "I hear you're now a Mennonite. What's that all about?" So I've decided I needed to tell the rest of my story for those of you who are interested. But I have to say it's pretty difficult to sum up 15 years of a very intense spiritual pilgrimage into one 70-minute message.
So I'm going to be having to leave out an awful lot of things, and most of the story I'm going to be relating tonight will concern my brief encounter with Anglicanism and how I've ended up in the Mennonite Church. Let's begin with the publication of my book, Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up?
My target audience for that book was the evangelical church, and my hope was that there would be some Baptist or Nazarene minister out there who would read the book and would be all excited about the message of it and would start teaching those things in his church. And then my family and I would move and join his church, and we would live happily ever after. Well, that never happened.
In fact, the book was essentially ignored in evangelical circles except by some homeschoolers and by a few evangelicals seeking something more than what their churches had to offer. Instead, the largest single group of my readers were the Anabaptists, that is, the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Brethren. At the time I wrote the Heretics book, I had had little personal contact with the modern-day Anabaptists. Most of what I knew about them came from reading their literature.
I had made a few encounters, but when I did meet them in person, my first impression was that they were nice people, but they looked like they had just stepped out of another century. I didn't think it was very likely that I would ever be joining them.
Now, from day one, when people asked me in general to describe early Christianity, I would always say, "Well, if you could meld together Eastern Orthodoxy and the Anabaptists, you would have early Christianity." Theologically, the early Christians were closer to the Eastern Orthodox, with some major exceptions, three of which would be their worship of Mary and the saints, their veneration of icons, and their total blindness to the doctrine of the two kingdoms.
And these are all very, very serious theological errors. In fact, they're serious sins. In contrast, the Anabaptists were much more like the early Christians in matters of lifestyle and the general ethos of Christianity, a people called out of this world. And certainly, living the Christ life is far more important than theology. And that's why I was drawn to the Anabaptists versus the Eastern Orthodox or one of the other ancient churches.
In fact, the original Anabaptists of the 1500s weren't that far from the early church on theological matters either. Now, over the first couple of years after the Heretics book went to press, I became quite well acquainted with a number of different Anabaptist churches and also with Charity Christian Fellowship in Leola, Pennsylvania, which is sort of a blend of Anabaptism and Holiness Revivalism.
Well, once my family and I got past our initial culture shock with the conservative Anabaptists, we began looking to see which group we could perhaps join. Now, also during the 1990s, my family and I had extensive contacts with a group called the German Baptist Brethren. Now, they're from a separate movement from what the Mennonites and Amish came out of, but in most areas, their beliefs and practices are fairly similar.
So when I use the term Anabaptists, I'm including them in it as well, and also the Apostolic Christian Church, which also was a separate movement but with very similar beliefs. Actually, on a few issues, the Brethren are theologically closer to the early church than are the Mennonites and Amish, but they tend to be weaker in the area of evangelism. Anyway, by the fall of 1991, our family was getting very close to making a decision to join an Anabaptist church, either Mennonite or Brethren.
But one of the things that really broke my heart, and it still does today, was the fragmentation and divisions among the different Anabaptist groups. I felt like no matter what group I joined, I would automatically alienate myself from the other groups that I didn't join. Furthermore, I found a lot to appreciate about both the Anabaptist groups and with Charity Christian Fellowship and the churches associated with it, which have come to be known as remnant churches.
Yet there was rather bitter animosity between Charity and the traditional Anabaptist churches. I was friends with all of these groups, and I hated having to choose one of them at the expense of losing my friendship with the other ones. I couldn't help but wonder if there would be a way to bring about more unity among Christians who are committed to radical Christian discipleship, particularly the Anabaptists, but for Christians in general who really want to follow Christ in life.
And it occurred to me that many of the divisions among Christians were because we couldn't agree on how to interpret various scripture passages. If we could all agree on what the scriptures meant, perhaps we could all be united. And the early Christian writings give us an objective standard by which to interpret the scriptures. So if we would just all adopt the interpretations of the early church, then we could all be united again.
Well, in retrospect, I have to admit that that thesis was a bit naive, but it was a sincere attempt to work towards unity of Bible-believing Christians. Anyway, I wrote up this thesis, my proposal, in a book entitled Common Sense. Well, right after writing the manuscript for the book, before it was published, I shared it with a brother who had written me, and the two of us decided to start a fellowship in Tyler, Texas, that would put into practice the thesis that I was proposing in Common Sense.
That is, we would use the early Christian writings as our sole objective interpreter of the scriptures. This gave me an opportunity to test my proposition and see if perhaps this was the answer that could unite all Bible-believing Christians. So this brother and his family moved to Texas, and we planted a fellowship there in Tyler that grew fairly rapidly. And our basic statement of belief was that we would interpret the scriptures in accordance with how the early Christians interpreted them.
Well, it took only about six months to prove my thesis wrong. Number one, there are all kinds of issues that a church has to deal with that are never discussed in the early Christian writings. Bible principles that you have to make a decision, how do we apply that today? Number two, just as we can disagree on how to interpret a scripture passage, we can just as easily disagree on how to interpret a passage in the early Christian writings. Let me give you a case in point.
One of the early Christian writers said something to the effect that we do whatever the word tells us. Now, from the context of that passage, the other brother and I both understood that the writer was talking about Jesus, the word of God. Today, it's very rare for someone to be referring to Jesus and calling him the word unless they're giving an exposition from the first chapter of John or something. But the early Christians talk about Jesus a lot as the word, or in Greek, the Logos of God.
But I interpreted the writer to be saying that we Christians do whatever Christ has taught us in the scriptures. The other brother understood it in a more pietistic sense, that we receive personal prophetic directions from Christ, and we obey those. Now, this wasn't simply some academic disagreement. It concerned a vital issue that was threatening the unity of our fledgling fellowship.
You see, we had attracted a large number of what I'll call self-appointed prophets who felt that they should be the leaders of the group because they were considerably more spiritual than the two of us who were leaders because they were directly in tune with God, and we weren't. In fact, the other leader and his wife eventually sided with these prophets, believing that we should expect to be receiving extra biblical revelation and instruction. And part of the congregation aligned themselves with this other leader.
Well, meanwhile, the rest of the group felt like we were quickly becoming a cult and asked me to do something about it. So in the end, merely seven months after we had started, we ended up splitting into two groups. Now, in all fairness to the other brother, his desire was that we would stay together and try to work through all of this. In my mind, there was no way to work with the chaos that we had, and I just saw continuing problems down the road.
I felt we could both prosper better spiritually following out our own vision and ethos. So the basic proposition of Common Sense had already been shot down after a mere seven-month trial. What's worse, by that time, the Common Sense book had already gone to press and was being distributed. And that's when the roof began caving in on me.
As I've mentioned in Common Sense, I defended the fact that the early Christians were in a much better position to understand the New Testament writings than we are, which I think is definitely true. If I had just stopped there, I think things would have been okay. But I went even further, and I said that not only should we use them as our guide to more correctly understand the scriptures, we should also rely upon them for evidence of what the oral traditions were that the apostles had passed down.
Well, the negative reaction to the book was quite swift. In just a matter of weeks, literally, I went from being a hero to a villain in a lot of circles. People said that I was elevating the early Christian writings to the level of scripture, which is certainly not true, but in retrospect, I can see how that could be misinterpreted.
Others said that I was teaching that the scriptures are inadequate and that we need the early Christian writings to supplement them, or else we'll never come to a full knowledge of the faith. Again, that's not what I was intending to say, but I can certainly see how someone could read that into the book, or that's what it would sound like the book is saying.
Well, in response to the book, Charity Christian Fellowship yanked the tapes of the messages that I had preached at their church, and they quit distributing them. On top of the split in our own church, this was a very hard time for me, both spiritually and emotionally. I felt like I was getting hit from every end. But not everyone who read Common Sense was critical of it.
I began receiving calls and letters from persons in what I'll call the ancient church movement, which is not a united movement headed by somebody. It's a journey that quite a few thousand people are going on. These are former evangelicals, quite often evangelical pastors, who've concluded that we need to return to one of the churches with apostolic succession, such as the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, or the Anglican. Well, at first, I just brushed these people aside. Oh, that's an absurdity.
But after a while, I thought perhaps they were saying something worth looking into. I mean, after all, my proposition was obviously not the answer just using the early Christian writings. Maybe it was correct, but it wasn't the full answer if it was. Well, over time, from many discussions that I had with these former evangelicals, and like I say, most of them evangelical pastors, I came to the conclusion that apparently there was some validity to the doctrine of apostolic succession.
And once I started believing that, it was easy to read that back into the early Christian writings and even to some degree back into the New Testament. I couldn't help but notice that over a period of nearly 2,000 years, the ancient churches with apostolic succession have split into only six groups. You have the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox, the largest two, but then you have the Coptic Church of Egypt, which is also connected with Ethiopia.
You have the Oriental Orthodox churches, like the church in India or Armenia or the Jacobite Church of Syria. Then there's the church of the East, the ones who were mistakenly called Nestorians for many centuries. And then finally, there's the Anglican Church. Like I say, just six divisions in nearly 2,000 years. In contrast, in less than 500 years, the churches who don't have apostolic succession have splintered into around 40,000 different denominations and independent churches.
So I thought to myself, okay, maybe the thesis of Common Sense was basically correct, but we also need apostolic succession to have unity. And I shared this idea with the rest of the group there in Texas, and they all thought it was something worth looking into. Now, right off the bat, none of us were particularly interested in looking into the Roman Catholic or the Eastern Orthodox because of their worship of Mary and statues and icons.
And the Anglicans and Episcopalians seemed far too liberal and worldly to be a place where we would ever fit in because our lifestyle was basically Anabaptist. To most people, we looked like Mennonites. So we began digging through books to see if there was an ancient church in existence that didn't have worship of Mary or prayers to saints or icons and statues that were being venerated, and yet still held to the Bible as the word of God.
Well, we discovered that there was such a church, the ancient church planted in Persia by Thaddeus in the first century, the one that I mentioned earlier, the church of the East is its proper name, but for many centuries, they were mistakenly called Nestorians. Well, for quite a number of centuries, this church of the East was the most missionary-minded of all of the Christian churches.
They took the gospel to parts of India where it had not yet reached, into China, even down into Southeast Asia, places like Cambodia and Vietnam, or places that today would be them. Well, eventually, we were able to contact these Christians, and it was a fascinating interchange that we had with them for about six months. And I flew up to Chicago to meet with one of their churches up there, and then another trip out to California to meet with the church that they had there.
And we asked them if our little church could join up with them. But in the end, the bishop who was assigned to us to look into us came to the conclusion that we would never really fit in with them. He said, "You're going one direction, trying to get back to the ancient ways. We're going the opposite direction. We're trying to get into the 20th century." And he felt like our Mennonite way of life really wouldn't fit in with where they were at, and I'm sure that he's correct. So we were back at the crossroads again.
Should we try anything further with the ancient churches, or should we just forget the whole thing and try to connect somehow with charity or the Anabaptists? Well, the congregation felt we should check out all of the ancient churches before we made a final decision on the matter. So we did.
We visited or spoke with representatives of the Egyptian Coptic Church, the Church of India that can trace itself all the way back to the Apostle Thomas, the Armenian Church, the ancient Jacobite Church of Syria, and even the Eastern Orthodox churches. And I have to say, it was extremely educational to personally visit these churches and get to know them as real people, what they really believe and stand for, instead of simply relying on things we had read or upon rumors.
And it definitely cleared up some misunderstandings that we had had. Now, it was during this fact-finding search that we learned about the continuing Anglicans. These are churches composed of conservative Episcopalians and Anglicans who have broken off from the mainline Episcopal church here in the US or the Church of England in the British Isles.
They got started back in the 1970s, and they strongly opposed the liberal trends of the mainline Episcopal church, such as the ordination of women, the acceptance of homosexuals, things like that. Now, they would feel that they represent true Anglicanism because the mainline Episcopalian and Anglican churches have apostatized.
In fact, when we first contacted them, they were hoping to unite with the various third-world Anglican churches who are generally quite conservative and be recognized by them as the legitimate Anglican church in America. Well, this presented a new possibility to us because here with the Anglicans, there would be no veneration of Mary, no icons, no Eastern culture to have to deal with, and a lot of the other trappings that you would have in the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches.
Yet at the same time, our congregation and myself held firmly to all of our kingdom convictions. Our ethos was still primarily Anabaptist. It was not Anglican or Orthodox or something like that. You could sum it up by saying that we were basically Mennonites who believed in apostolic succession.
So we really couldn't decide whether we should continue on looking into joining one of these ancient churches, particularly at this point, the continuing Anglicans, or go back to where we had been, retrace our steps, and try to link up with an Anabaptist church or with Charity Christian Fellowship. Unfortunately, given the reception that Common Sense had received in those circles, I felt like we wouldn't probably be very welcome there. But we went back and forth on the issue for several months.
We prayed and prayed about the matter, but we didn't feel any clear direction from God either way. Well, finally, it reached the point that either we were going to make a decision or just disband the fellowship because this indecision was killing all of us. Well, it was at this time that I began reading some of John Wesley's works. Like most Christians, I had always assumed that John Wesley was a member of the Methodist church, but not at all. He spent his entire life as an Anglican.
In fact, he was an Anglican priest. Now, like most of you, I've always had a real revulsion for the word priest, and I still today, I don't like that title for a Christian minister. But I did discover that our word priest is actually the English form of the Latin word presbyter. And the Latin word presbyter is simply a Latin transliteration of the Greek word presbyteros, which means elder. So originally, in the English language, priest and presbyter were interchangeable words.
Now, I would say the usage of the past three or four hundred years, that's no longer the case. You don't think of a priest as a presbyter, but originally, that's what it was. But back to John Wesley. What he organized was not the Methodist church. Rather, he organized the Methodist Society, which was a society or spiritual organization within the Anglican church. So I thought, could this maybe be the answer?
Now, the Anabaptists and other kingdom groups like the Waldensians, they had no choice but to leave the Roman Catholic church of their day. They could not have stayed within and held to their same convictions. But today, we do have an option. Perhaps we kingdom Christians could exist within one of the ancient churches as a semi-autonomous spiritual society, like the Methodist Society had been within the Anglican church of the 18th century.
So I wondered, is this perhaps God's way for us to have unity and yet at the same time not to compromise any of Christ's teachings? As we thought about it, we felt that not only would this help us to stay united in one body if we were under the umbrella, so to speak, of a church with apostolic succession, but quite possibly and hopefully, we would have a beneficial witness there within that church and a beneficial effect on other Christians who attended such a church.
The more we discussed it and prayed about it, the more we felt that this was God's answer. We would form a society like the Methodist Society, but our ethos would be Anabaptist rather than Wesleyan, and then we would join the continuing Anglicans as a designated spiritual society. That way, we could keep all of our kingdom teachings and lifestyle without fear of their being compromised by being associated with a group that didn't practice the same lifestyle.
We would be able to still maintain our separation from the world. At the same time, our leaders could be ordained by a bishop with apostolic succession, and we would be part of something larger, something worldwide, instead of being this small, isolated little house church. And who knows, we thought, with God's help, perhaps we can have an impact on the entire worldwide Anglican communion composed of millions and millions of people, particularly in places like Africa and Asia, we hope to have a witness.
We carefully reviewed the Anglican 39 Articles of Faith, and we were quite surprised to find that their Articles of Faith are not the least bit Catholic as we would have thought. They're actually more Calvinistic, in fact, a bit too Calvinistic for our liking.
At the same time, we took enormous comfort in Article 6 of the Anglican Articles of Faith, which states, "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation, so that whatsoever is not read therein nor may be proved thereby is not to be required of any man that it should be believed as an Article of the Faith or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation." Well, here we had the Bible as a solid theological foundation we could stand on.
We didn't have to worry about something being imposed upon us that was not in Scripture. So with those comforts in mind, I wrote a letter to the bishop who had oversight of the primary body of continuing Anglicans. I told him about our situation and our desire to perhaps join them as a spiritual society. Well, about a week later, one Saturday morning, a car pulled into our driveway, and we were a little surprised.
I wonder who this could be because we lived out in the country in a very remote place, and we didn't just get people dropping in very often. We were looking out the window at the car, and suddenly a man got out. He was a black man, but he had a clergy collar on. We thought, "Hmm, who could this be?" Well, it turned out he was from the South American country of Guyana and that he was pastoring a continuing Anglican church that was only 30 miles from where we lived.
We thought probably the closest one would be hundreds of miles away, and here was one right in our own backyard, so to speak. Well, I quickly phoned up one of the other brothers in the fellowship, and he came over, and we bombarded this priest with a whole host of questions. Could we join them as a religious society with our own set of lifestyle standards?
If we joined, would we be able to have our own services limited to just members of our society and not be a conventional congregation within the Anglican community? Would I qualify to be ordained as a presbyter or priest, or would I be required to get further schooling? Would our teaching of non-resistance and separation from the world be an issue to them? Would it bother him that our sisters wore head coverings and didn't wear makeup?
We asked him, "If we become Anglicans, will we have to use the Book of Common Prayer for all of our services, or could our services remain more evangelical or Anabaptist?" I asked him if I would have to wear special vestments at our services, or would black pants and a white shirt be sufficient? We also asked him, "Would we have to believe all 39 Articles of Faith, particularly the ones that were so Calvinistic?" Well, the answers we received were all very encouraging. Yes, we could have our own spiritual society.
We could conduct our own meetings that would be limited to just members of our society. No, I wouldn't have to wear special vestments during church service. Black pants and a black shirt would be sufficient. As for the Book of Common Prayer, he said we would have to use it for the communion service, but the rest of our meetings we could conduct any way that we had been used to doing.
He said I would have to get some additional training, but because of my extensive background in biblical and early Christian studies, he thought the training would only be a matter of a few months. And he assured us, "No, we wouldn't have to accept all of the Articles of Faith because he himself didn't accept them." Well, after further prayer and discussion later on, this would have been the next day, our entire group voted to enter the continuing Anglican church as a distinct spiritual society.
And to our great surprise, we soon found that we actually enjoyed the communion liturgy. It was the most reverent and majestic worship that any of us had ever experienced. And we saw that the prayers and the instructions in the liturgy were all very biblical, and they were deeply spiritual. They were not written by somebody who had no relationship with Christ. Now, I know probably most of you hearing this, and I know how I thought most of my life, you probably think of liturgy as being dead.
The reason we think that is because the majority of people in churches that use liturgy, like the Roman Catholics or the Eastern Orthodox, are spiritually dead or at least spiritually nominal. But what we found is that when liturgy is practiced by people with a fervent love of God, it is a very rich experience.
People would ask me, "David, how can you say a prayer that's already been written out and it still have any meaning?" And my answer was, "Well, hymns and praise songs are usually prayers that have simply been put to music. Do they lose their meaning because they are already written out? When we sing songs that have been written out in advance, does that make for a dead service?" Well, no, not at all. And it's the same way with liturgical worship where you have a lot of it written out.
Some of it is still extemporaneous, but a lot of it is written out. You can go through it as a dead ritual and your mind and heart be somewhere else, or you can really enter into it as deep worship. On the other hand, we still enjoyed our Wednesday night Bible study and prayer meeting, which were very evangelical or Anabaptist in nature. What I felt was a little liturgy can be very enriching because of its worshipful nature.
But to have nothing but liturgy at every gathering isn't something that's spiritually edifying, and I think that is something that has hurt most of the liturgical churches. Yes, we do need times of worship, and sometimes that's neglected in certain biblical settings, but we also need times of teaching, of Bible study, and also of extemporaneous prayer. Anyway, at first, it seemed that we finally had the best of all worlds.
We lived a Mennonite lifestyle like we wanted to, and we preached the kingdom gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet we were in a setting where the early Christian writings were respected, and we could hold to early Christian theology without it being an issue to anyone. Not only that, we were part of a worldwide church that could trace its origins back to the second century. Now, that last statement might surprise you a little bit.
If you're like me, you've always thought of the Anglican church as something that was created by Henry VIII in the 16th century when he broke from Rome because he wanted to divorce his wife. After all, that's what we all learn in school. But the facts aren't quite that simplistic. Christianity came to Britain, not from Rome, but from the East, sometime in the second century and perhaps as early as the first century.
The British or Celtic church was part of the one worldwide church you had in the first three centuries, but it wasn't under the authority of Rome or anyone else. Even after the rise of Constantine, the British church remained independent and autonomous. However, once the Roman troops pulled out of Britain during the decline of Rome, the Picts and Scots from Scotland came across Hadrian's Wall and raided the villages of Britain.
So the inhabitants of Britain invited the Angles and Saxons to settle in what is today Northern England to serve as a buffer between them and the Scots and the Picts. Well, the Angles and Saxons had no difficulty driving back the Scots and the Picts, but sadly, they decided to take over the whole country, slaughtering the native Britons and driving the survivors across the mountains into what is today Wales.
And so the British church that had occupied most of what we know today as England, it was reduced to just that area that is today Wales. Well, eventually, Pope Gregory sent missionaries to England to convert the Angles and Saxons, and the Roman Catholic missionaries were quite successful converting several of the Angle and Saxon kingdoms. Meanwhile, the exiled British church in Wales and the Celtic church in Ireland, they began sending their own missionaries out.
They converted the pagans in Scotland, and they successfully converted the remaining Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity. Now, by this time, Christianity had changed its nature quite a bit. Everybody was accepting the idea of marriage of church and state. But anyway, for a period of time, you had the autonomous British church or Celtic church and the Roman Catholic church existing side by side on the island of Great Britain. And this caused some difficulty, a little bit of friction.
So in the year 664, at what is called the Synod or Council of Whitby, the main Anglo-Saxon ruler who belonged to the British church decided to switch his loyalties to Rome, and he pretty well brought the rest of the people with him. Now, that wasn't the end of the independent British or Celtic church. They continued on in Wales and in Ireland all the way till the 12th century as an independent church.
And yet, even that part of the church in Great Britain that had decided to go over to Rome, they didn't follow Rome in a number of areas. For example, the church in England allowed its priest to marry even after Rome had forbidden that. And that was one of the reasons why the Pope had actually encouraged William the Conqueror and his Norman armies to invade England in the 11th century to bring the English church in line with that of the Roman church, which the Normans did.
So the basic view of the English people in Henry's day was that, "Look, we had originally been our own independent church. We voluntarily decided to come under Rome's authority, and now we have voluntarily decided to leave Rome's authority and return to our original autonomy." So most Anglicans don't think of their church as originating with Henry VIII. They merely see Henry VIII as the tool who freed the British church from Roman domination.
And by the way, to set another fact of history straight, Henry wasn't trying to divorce his wife in the sense of what divorce means today because the church at that time did not allow divorce. What he was seeking was to have his marriage annulled, and he had pretty good grounds for it because centuries and centuries before Henry VIII, the church had adopted the Levitical rules on marriage and made them canon law of the church. I'm talking about the laws in the Old Testament about whom you could marry.
You couldn't marry your sister or your aunt, etc., etc. Well, one of those laws in Leviticus says that you are not to take your brother's widowed wife. Now, the exception would be if it was what is called a levirate marriage, where you took her so that she could bear children in the name of your brother, but that was generally a form of polygamy, which, of course, the church didn't accept. So the basic Old Testament law you have is you cannot take your brother's wife after he dies.
And Leviticus states that if you violate that and you do that, then you're going to be childless. Well, in violation of Leviticus, Henry had taken his deceased brother's wife, Catherine of Aragon. And it turned out that all of their babies had died except one sickly girl, and it truly did seem that God was punishing them for an unlawful marriage. I think Henry VIII very honestly believed that. And so Henry was afraid that he would not be able to leave a male heir on the throne.
And the War of Roses had just ended in his father's time. He felt quite certain that without a strong male heir, England would be plunged into civil war again. So he petitioned the Pope for an annulment of what really was an unlawful marriage. And the Pope, in general, was willing to give him the annulment. The problem was that the King of Spain felt that to grant this annulment would be an insult to Catherine of Aragon, who was his aunt.
And his troops, this would be Charles I, King of Spain, who was also Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Anyway, his armies had besieged Rome and taken the Pope captive. So the Pope was not able to grant Henry's annulment unless he wanted to be put to death. Well, Henry could see that this was no church of God if earthly rulers could control what the Pope did.
And the university professors in England assured him that he had the right to make the English church autonomous again because it had originally been autonomous. And so that's exactly what Henry did. Anyway, back to our situation in Tyler, Texas. At first, things worked pretty much as we hoped they were, except for one thing. We got a new bishop who wanted me to get a seminary degree before he would ordain me.
Now, thankfully, through the intervention of the priest from Guyana, who was temporarily conducting our Sunday services, I received permission to be excused from seminary if I obtained a diploma in religious studies from Cambridge University in England. This was a program our priest was familiar with because he had grown up in a British Commonwealth country. The way it works is that you sign up with Cambridge University, you pay your fees, and you have to meet their educational requirements.
Since I already had a doctorate in jurisprudence, this helped me get my feet in the door for that program. Anyway, the university sent me a syllabus for their diploma in religious studies. This laid out a brief outline for each course that I was required to take and what I was expected to know from it. Now, you did have some choices among these courses, and as you might guess, I primarily signed up for ones that dealt with church history.
Cambridge University also provided me with a list of books to read for the course, and the professors there sent me copies of some of their previous exams so I would know what kind of questions to expect on the coming exam. But beyond that, I was on my own. I couldn't correspond with the professors, and they didn't send me copies of their lectures.
Yet I had to pass the same final exams in each course that the students at the university were taking, and they had the benefit of listening to the professor's lecture every day. Well, I had only about three and a half months before June when the exams would be given, so I had to immediately get busy. I read and studied during every spare minute of the day. I was still practicing law part-time, so it made for an extremely long day.
I allowed myself only two hours a week of family recreation, and everything else was studying around the clock. Thankfully, I didn't have to fly to England to take the exams. They forwarded them to Northwestern University near Chicago, which is where I took them. And all of the exams were essay, and they were quite grueling. But in the end, I did manage to pass all of them, and I even got an A in Reformation history. But it was an exhausting experience that I had no interest in ever going through again.
But anyway, I was eventually ordained as a deacon and later as a presbyter or priest, enabling me to conduct all of our own meetings there. However, the one thing that worked differently than what we were expecting was this. I had hoped, and all of the rest of us had hoped the same thing, that we would have a beneficial influence or witness on these conservative Anglicans. But in the end, it was Anglicanism that influenced us far more than we influenced anybody else.
Now, the influence was less in our congregation there in Texas because we didn't have a lot of interaction with other Anglicans. Once in a great while, we would visit the nearby church, but there were other people across the country who wanted to be affiliated with our spiritual society, and a lot of them were going directly to Anglican churches. And these people were reading all of these apologetic books that had been put out by former evangelicals who've become Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic.
And this was causing a lot of these people to join one of these other two churches. So I finally ended up making a series of tapes pointing out what was seriously wrong with the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches and why that wasn't the way to go. Well, at first, the tapes had the effect of stopping people from going that route. However, we kept running into disappointment after disappointment with the continuing Anglicans. The biggest disappointment was their lack of unity.
I mean, our original premise was that having apostolic succession would serve to maintain unity. But the more time we spent with the continuing Anglicans, the more we discovered how splintered they were. There were three main continuing Anglican groups, and instead of moving towards unity, they seemed to be moving further and further apart. And then there were at least a hundred smaller continuing Anglican groups.
All of them had apostolic succession, but none of them could unite, even though they believed almost exactly the same doctrines and worshiped exactly the same way. Well, finally, the group that we belonged to, which was called the Anglican Church in America, had a major scandal involving one of its archbishops, and this was followed by a huge schism in the church by which this group of continuing Anglicans lost about a third of its members.
Well, at that point, a lot of the people who had held back from going to Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy, based on my counsel, decided that the Anglicans could not be the true church and that the only place to find permanence and unity was in Rome or in Eastern Orthodoxy. So by now, it was quite obvious that the mere fact of having apostolic succession did not bring unity. This experiment had definitely failed.
And not only had we not found the unity and permanence that we were seeking, we had even failed at being salt and light in the midst of the continuing Anglicans. As I said, we were far more influenced by them than they were by us. As a result of all of these things, our spiritual society just about collapsed. We were down to three families, including my own family among those. And those of us who were left decided that we would all find individual churches where we lived because of the three families.
One of us was in Tyler, and the other two were in Dallas, but that we would get together twice a month as a society and at least try to keep the flame going that way. At the time, this all seemed like a total disaster, but it proved to be a huge spiritual blessing to me. Freed of the responsibilities of church leadership, I finally had the time to do something I had been wanting to do for years, and that was to prepare a topical digest of what the early Christians believed.
I had just recently been ordained as a presbyter or priest, and I had not left the Anglican Church in America. And the bishop wanted to use me as a traveling presbyter to serve various congregations throughout Texas that didn't have a presbyter of their own. But I finally convinced him that I could serve Christianity better by devoting the next year of my life to preparing this topical digest, and so he gave me his blessings to do so.
Well, as I began the project, I wrote to Hendrickson Publishers to see if they would be interested in publishing the work once I was through with it. I explained to them in my letter of introduction that I was an Anglican priest, and I presented some of my qualifications for undertaking the project I was doing. Well, to my utter delight, they said they would be quite interested in it.
So what I did next was to make a list of all of the early Christian writings contained in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, a list of the writings in chronological order. I then started with the earliest writings, like the Didache, the Letter from Clement of Rome, and the Letters of Ignatius, going through them page by page and arranging various excerpts I was taking by topic. It was a big job, but I thoroughly enjoyed doing it.
Now, when I started the project, there was no doubt in my mind that from the earliest writers on, they all taught apostolic succession. That's what I had come to believe. So I was quite amazed when I actually started the project to find that none of them talked about any such thing. For example, the church in Corinth had thrown out the leaders that the apostles had ordained and set up their own set of new leaders.
Now, these new leaders wouldn't have had apostolic succession, so their ordinations would have been invalid under this doctrine. However, when Clement and the other elders in Rome wrote the church in Corinth, they didn't say one word about the new ordinations being invalid. They only said that if the apostles had appointed presbyters, that those men should not be removed from office unless there was really a good reason that they were spiritually disqualified.
Similarly, Ignatius in his letters, now he talks a whole lot about submitting to your local overseer or bishop, but he never said a word about how that bishop was to be ordained, nothing about any kind of succession. More importantly, with each topic that I was putting in this digest, I started out with the scriptures that the early Christians were interpreting. And for apostolic succession, there were no scriptures that I could put there. Neither the scriptures nor the early Christians taught any such doctrine.
Well, I wasn't very far into the project before I realized I had been duped. I had let other people influence me and persuade me with proof texts from the early church. It was so ironic because here in my book, Common Sense, I had stressed the importance of starting off with a blank slate when you approach a subject. Well, I'd had a blank slate when I first read the Ante-Nicene Fathers 10 years previous to that, and I had not seen the doctrine of apostolic succession in those writings at that time.
That is, not in the sense that it's taught today. It was only after I let other people's preconceptions and their teachings color my vision, and then I imagined, yeah, I'm seeing it here in the early Christian writings. I even thought I was seeing evidence of it in the New Testament.
And there were two or three other doctrines I had picked up during this Anglican sojourn that I now discovered had little or no support from the early Christian writings, and much more importantly, they could not at all be established from scripture. Well, by the time I finished the topical digest, which was published under the title of A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, I knew I was forever through with Anglicanism. Before joining the Anglicans, I had agonized for many months over this whole issue of schism.
Should our forefathers have left the historic visible church? But now there was no doubt in my mind that there is a point where schism is far preferable to heresy and to union with the world. A point had come in the course of Christian history when leaving the visible state church was the best way to follow the kingdom teachings of Jesus Christ and to abide as a branch on his vine in an obedient love-faith relationship with him.
So now, once again, I could be at peace with the thought of joining a church that had broken off from the original core visible church. I also saw the dangers associated with assuming that every practice followed by the early church that's not discussed in scripture represented an oral tradition handed down by the apostles. Now, that's not an absurd premise in itself.
In fact, things we read in the second century may have been apostolic practices, but I saw that once you turn to oral tradition, it opens a whole Pandora's box because Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, they claim all kinds of traditions as being handed down by the apostles. And once your mind is open to receiving tradition that's not written in scripture, then I saw that so many people are going to get sucked into these claims of Rome and of Eastern Orthodoxy.
Once we acknowledge any sort of extra-biblical authority, there's no end to where it can take us. Well, Scroll Publishing continued to distribute Common Sense, but now when it went out, we shipped with it a free cassette in which I emphasized the need to use the early Christian writings only as a valuable commentary on scripture, but never as an authority in their own right. So was our two and a half year sojourn into the Anglicans a total waste of time? No, certainly not for me.
I honestly believe it was a journey that God wanted me to go down. The reason is that anyone who studies the early Christian writings is automatically faced with the reality that some of the doctrines that we think of as "catholic" were actually what the early Christians believed.
Now, in the vast majority of instances, the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have either embellished or modified the original doctrines to make them contradictory to scripture, but certainly those writings put Catholic teachings in a different light. Furthermore, anyone who reads the early Christians can't help but notice how strongly they denounce schism and how equally strongly they maintain that we must remain within the historic body that the apostles had started.
So anyone who reads those writers is naturally confronted with the question, does that counsel still apply today? Because the church had not yet apostatized when those writers made those kinds of statements. Would they give the same counsel if they were faced with today's Roman Catholic church or Eastern Orthodox church? Well, that was an investigation that I knew I personally needed to make.
If I had first gone out and joined the Anabaptist or Charity or some other church like that, that question would always be nagging me at the back of my mind. Should I have checked out the ancient churches first? Is there a possibility there? But now that question is forever settled in my mind, not just for myself and my family, but for anyone I might give counsel to.
Certainly, some of the ancient churches are better than others, but they are all a snare that will inevitably cause any kingdom Christian to lose his commitment to Jesus's radical teachings like non-resistance and non-conformity to the world. Now, on the positive side of our Anglican sojourn, I learned an enormous amount about the Catholic side of Christendom, so that now I have a fairly accurate understanding about what they truly believe and how they worship and what their worship means.
And I'm glad to have that information because there is so much falsehood, rumor, and misinformation floating around out there. And Christians shouldn't be attacking other churches based upon falsehoods and misinformation. Nevertheless, as I have said, both Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy are huge snares, huge traps for any Christian. I think any Christian who truly wants to live in an obedient love-faith relationship with Jesus Christ should leave those churches as soon as he or she can if they're already in them.
And for Christians who aren't inside of them, they should avoid them like the plague. And I don't say this based on rumor and falsehood. I say it based on reading their own materials and visiting their churches firsthand. Now, I don't paint the continuing Anglicans with the same brush. However, sadly, they serve as a springboard by which far too many Christians have ended up in Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy. And so likewise, any committed disciple of Jesus Christ should stay as far away from them as he can.
Because for all of their good intentions, they just make it that much easier for Bible-believing Christians to accept the lies of Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy. Now, let me pick back up with my spiritual pilgrimage. After leaving the Anglicans, I was able to enjoy some very sweet interaction with a whole host of different churches who were discovering my book, Will the Real Heretics, Please Stand Up, for the first time.
For example, various holiness churches, descendants of the Wesleyan movement of the 1700s, were being blessed by the book and telling me it supported many of the things that they believed. Likewise, I had extensive contact with various individuals who belonged to churches that had descended from the Stone Campbell Restoration movement of the 1800s. And I had some very precious interaction with them.
I did a good bit of background reading on these various groups who were contacting me, and I learned that a number of them originally taught non-resistance and separation from the world, but most of them had lost that teaching over time. Well, meanwhile, our little church had continued on and had been reestablished in Dallas through the work of another brother, and we grew beyond the three families who had survived the Anglican experiment.
However, after a number of years, we eventually felt a real need to be connected with other Christians. So we began exploring every option we could think of, from the Moravians to the Wesleyan holiness churches, from the brethren churches to various Anabaptist groups. One of the brothers in our fellowship suggested that we link up with Charity Christian Fellowship in Pennsylvania. And so we explored that option as a church.
In fact, it was while the congregation was mulling over the possibility of joining with Charity that Deborah and I left for a two-week trip to Europe. Now, this wasn't a pleasure jaunt; the reason for the trip was for a family reunion with my French relatives. I had met some of them when I was a very small boy, and I'd hoped to see them again someday before I died. Well, one of my distant aunts in France decided to host a worldwide reunion.
And so we had people there from Australia, from various Pacific islands, and of course from France and a few from America. And there were, I don't remember, three or four hundred people showed up. It was quite an exciting occasion. But I had also wanted to go to Europe to visit some Christians in Germany who had been in touch with Scroll Publishing for quite a number of years. And I hoped that I could be an encouragement to them and just to get to know them a little bit better.
The other thing that I wanted to do while I was in Europe was to meet the Waldensians. I had been doing quite a bit of research on them, and I knew there was still a number of Waldensian churches in Italy, particularly in the Piedmont Valley area of northwestern Italy, which is not that far from where my ancestors come from in southeastern France. Well, I was able to accomplish all of my goals on the trip, and Deborah and I were even able to squeeze in a quick visit to the catacombs in Rome.
But I was sorely disappointed with what I discovered about the Waldensians. Now, I knew that they had eventually joined the Reformation and had lost most of the kingdom beliefs with which they had started. But I had hoped that there would be at least some conservative ones left, some who had not abandoned everything that they once stood for. But what I found is, no, there are none. What they once had is totally gone, and they have no desire to recapture it.
Deborah and I visited their museum in the Piedmont Valley, where they proudly displayed the guns they used in their wars with the Catholics after they joined the Reformation. Their museum even has displays praising Luther and Calvin. Now, if the Waldensians were nothing more than conservative Calvinists, that would be bad enough. But they're not even that. They're basically today just another liberal European Protestant church.
Well, on the flight home from Europe, I couldn't help reflecting on the Waldensians versus the Anabaptists. While a large segment of the Anabaptists have either melted into the world or have regressed into conventional churches, there is still a significant percentage of them who have maintained authentic Christianity, and what I mean is Sermon on the Mount Christianity, for nearly 500 years.
That's far longer than what the Waldensians had been able to do, and it's far longer than what even the early church had done. That really helped me to put things into perspective. You know, it's really easy for those of us with non-Anabaptist backgrounds to sit back and criticize Anabaptist methods and their congregational standards or rules. And it's easy for us to point out their failings. But have any of us been able to accomplish what they have? The answer is no, we haven't, nor has anyone else.
Well, I reflected on those things all the way home from Europe, as I said, and I came back with a renewed appreciation for the Anabaptists. But when Deborah and I returned to Texas, to our great surprise, we found that the fellowship had peacefully disbanded while we were gone. There had been no acrimony or disputes. The brothers and sisters had decided that they didn't want to join Charity after all. But they had no alternative place to go.
There was no longer any united vision, and therefore no real purpose to continue on the fellowship. Everybody decided that they should individually visit various churches in the Dallas area so that each family could find the church best suited for their family needs. I was grateful that we had disbanded peacefully, but it was still sad to have to disband. In fact, after the congregation disbanded, I was quite despondent for several months.
But eventually, I decided to visit a Mennonite congregation that was about an hour and 15 minutes away from where we lived. I was actually expecting to get a rather cold reception as I thought I was still in the doghouse with all Anabaptists. But to my considerable surprise, the brothers and sisters there received us with a very brotherly, friendly spirit. So we started attending there regularly, although we initially had no plans to join it.
But for me, it was a real joy to be around kingdom Christians again, and fellowshipping there really lifted me out of the spiritual despondency I had slipped into. And after about a year, I was actually ready to tackle another writing project. I wanted to write a book about the American Revolution from a kingdom perspective, that is, from the standpoint of a non-resistant Christian.
But as I started on the project, I realized that I had to first convince my readers about non-resistance, or else the book would be somewhat pointless. So I decided to first write a short book on non-resistance, and then I would offer it along with the book on the American Revolution. But as I got into that project, I realized that unless someone understands the New Testament teaching on the two kingdoms, he's never going to understand non-resistance.
So in the end, I saw that I needed to write a book about the kingdom of God, and that's the book you may be familiar with, The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down. Well, writing that book had quite an impact on me spiritually. I realized that through the years after writing the Heretics book, I had lost my focus on the kingdom.
The focus of our church there in Tyler and in Dallas should have been the kingdom of God and the king of that kingdom, not on recreating the early church, which tended to be our focus, or finding where the real church is today, or getting linked up with a church with apostolic succession. Jesus didn't say, "Seek ye first the church." He said, "Seek ye first the kingdom." I had started my pilgrimage with the kingdom in mind, but I'd certainly lost my focus on it through the years.
Well, by the time I was finished with the book, Jesus Christ and his kingdom had totally absorbed me. I realized that it wasn't enough just to visit a church with kingdom Christians like we were doing. I wanted to enjoy kingdom fellowship on a day-in and day-out basis. As much as I was blessed by the Mennonite congregation we were attending, it would have been difficult to carry on Scroll Publishing within that setting.
So my family and I and Scroll Publishing relocated to Pennsylvania, where we could fellowship with an Anabaptist church without there being any conflicting issues with Scroll Publishing. So in conclusion, where has my spiritual journey taken me over the past 15 years? The truth is that I believe almost exactly the same as I did when I wrote the Heretics book 15 years ago. My theological beliefs have essentially remained unchanged.
I had deviated from a few of them during my two-and-a-half-year Anglican sojourn, but I long ago concluded that I had it right the first time. By becoming Anabaptist, have I abandoned the early church, some people have asked? By no means. I still value the early Christian writings as our best commentary on scripture. But in particular, what I value about them is the method they have taught me about understanding scripture.
Before becoming acquainted with the early Christian writings, all I knew was the proof text approach to New Testament doctrine. You went through the New Testament and you picked out the verses that fit your church's belief system. And then you loudly proclaimed them and pointed them out to everybody, and you shoved aside all the verses that didn't fit your system. But that wasn't the early Christian way.
They looked at the totality of what the New Testament teaches on any subject, and they read the Bible quite literally as would a little child. And that's something that any of us can do. We don't need a seminary degree to understand the scripture. We just need a childlike heart, a blank slate that the Spirit can write on, and some spiritual honesty. If there's one thing I can encourage you to do with this message, it is don't be afraid to read the Bible as a little child.
When you're reading a Bible passage or preparing a devotional message or something, don't go running for a commentary to see what some learned theologian has to say about that passage. Trust in the Spirit and in God's intention that the scriptures would be best understood by those without a great education, by those with a childlike trust, if they haven't already filled their minds and hearts with a lot of preconceptions that are going to block out the Spirit.
Just read the Bible like that and then compare your conclusions with what the early Christians believed. If you take all of the scriptures in the New Testament on any given subject and you take them seriously and literally, I think you'll always come right back to the historic faith that's demonstrated in the early Christian writings. By doing that, one thing God has impressed on my heart is that the essence of Christianity is an obedient love-faith relationship with Him and His Son.
And we live out that relationship within a kingdom setting. Christ is the King and we are His subjects. He has given us wonderful kingdom laws that transcend man's wisdom and enable us to live right now by the values of eternity, even while we are still in the flesh. These laws are a true blessing, but they're also a requirement. That's why I want to be in a church that teaches Christ's laws and where we can all support one another in living the Christ's life.
Because if we love Jesus, we will obey His commandments. And when we love Him, we abide on His vine, as He said there in John. And that is my goal for the rest of my life, for me and my family, to abide on that vine until the end.