A Church That Isn’t

What we can say about Radix Fidem depends on the question and how you ask it. We are a community of shared faith, but not a church, nor a denomination. It’s really about faith itself. This is not an organization, but a way of doing religion and deciding on organization.

You can belong to any church you like, or start a new one. The latter is probably less hassle in one sense because there’s less baggage, but the former is certainly a lot simpler in execution. The real issue is to work out how a genuine heart-led faith affects what you do in religion. It’s deeply individual in the sense that the whole foundation is you directly connecting to Jesus in your heart.

Granted, we do have that covenant thing and it does propose certain ideas that will make it really difficult to fit into most existing religious organizations. So it boils down to whether the organization will tolerate those ideas. More to the point, it’s whether the organization tolerates your efforts to incorporate those ideas. It’s a matter of your personal sense of calling, and your style of social interaction. What role do you play in the society in which you live? It would also depend on what role your church plays in your social context.

If you’ve read much of my stuff, you already know I fully intend to lead a church based on Radix Fidem and my own sense of calling. But my sense of calling includes a lot of stuff that I don’t think belongs in Radix Fidem itself. Rather, I’m quite conscious that what I must do won’t work for everyone. But I honestly believe that Radix Fidem is certainly the One True Path, insofar as such a thing can be declared. I’m trying my best to keep separate those alleged universals of Radix Fidem from the particulars of what God requires of me in my own little world.

I suppose some of my readers will always wonder where to draw the line between those two parts of what I write. I assure you I’m not always certain myself. I don’t think it’s possible to be that precise over every question that might arise.

If you were to get involved in Church History and the study of what men have thought, said and done in pursuit of Christian religion, it would be a very heavy burden. I’ve invested a lot of time and energy in that pursuit, and I’m glad I know what I know, but sometimes that tends to get in the way of my sense of calling. It’s a matter of juggling my detailed familiarity with the mistakes people have made already, and are still making, and why proposing a Radix Fidem covenant seemed necessary.

For example, Radix Fidem does not lend itself to revivalist religion. I like the music, I confess, but that kind of thinking about how God works in our world is far amiss, if you ask me. Radix Fidem is all about building a parallel society, something that functions as a competing civilization in itself. My sense of mission is wedding you to an empire and culture that is distinctly different from what is available on this earth. It’s a very long term project that would rightly outlive us. So the idea that we can sweep the country with an energizing and entertaining revival is flatly contrary to the very concept of what we are doing.

I’m not interested in whipping up a transient atmosphere of emotion to bring about a change in one’s orientation. That strikes me as a sales pitch, a mere psychological conversion. It’s something that can be undone by the next revival meeting offering a competing brand. I’d much rather push away people looking for that kind of experience. We aren’t selling a brand within a competitive market. We are asking people to consider leaving the market entirely.

Radix Fidem is more about challenging the very ideas of what religion is all about. This is why I call it a meta-religion: It’s a doctrinal study of how to do religion. The result should be you and I each pursuing our own individual religion — “religion” defined as a human response to spiritual apprehensions. Religion is the manifestation of faith. And it’s a path, not a conclusion at which you arrive and stay. What holds us together as a community is the way we go about manifesting our faith, not the manifestation itself. I fully expect the religion part itself to be rather variable and at least some of it to remain in flux. It will always need refinement.

And all of this includes the ways and means for fellowship. Radix Fidem assumes a certain amount of spin-off. Once you start asking the right questions, the answers you get from God may require you to leave the fellowship. Thus, I invest a bit of time explaining what I believe Scripture requires of us in the eventual necessity of separation. There’s a right way to do that so that the Father’s glory rises. A basic assumption in Radix Fidem is that God runs the show and nobody should feel the least bit guilty about having to leave the community, or simply take up some distance. We proclaim there is a blessing for us in you finding out what God wants for you, even if it takes you away. We still love you just the same, but God won’t bless us working together. There has to be room for a gracious distancing, however far that distance must be.

And it also means you can come and go as you feel led. We’ll always welcome you back, and hug you when you leave again. We don’t have to be organized in human terms to do religion right. We believe this echoes what we see in the Bible. It is also very contradictory to what our Western society expects, so we have that thing about being anti-Western in our covenant.

But at some point a few of you feel like I should be some kind of pastor for you. We never meet in the flesh, but you still have that divine pull, that sense that God wants you to hang out with me, if only virtually. There is no clear boundary between being in a church and just being friends. I’m okay with that; it seems to work. I don’t believe God requires us to draw that boundary. Instead, we recognize spiritual and moral dominion that defies human boundaries, because it’s a kind of feudalism that is wired into Creation itself, resting on God’s own divine moral character.

That’s a part of what defines the term “elder” in the biblical sense of moral authority with contextual limitations. In human terms, I’m a freaking nobody. I’m not your superior as the world sees it, but I have a very real authority and confidence from God, and it’s up to you to embrace it or deny it. I didn’t declare myself elder; you folks made me one. You chose to believe that God speaks through me on certain matters pertaining to your life, and you decided that tolerating my limited leadership was obedience to the Lord we both serve. My eldership rests entirely on those who decide that God says that’s what I am.

It’s time for a bike ride. I need to process some things.