Testimony – Truthscape

My life and ministry have been shaped by the convergence of several forces: early spiritual formation, professional discipline, theological struggle, sustained biblical research, and deep prayer.

I was baptized at the Middleport Church of Christ in 1979. Throughout my childhood and college years, I worshiped in several churches of Christ in Ohio until I returned to the Marine Corps as an officer in 1990. Those years instilled in me a serious regard for Scripture and a lasting conviction that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are weighty components of Christian faith and practice.

After my marriage in 1992 and throughout my twenty-four-year military career, I worshiped in Methodist, traditional Baptist, and Reformed Baptist churches. That exposure broadened my understanding of denominational Christianity but also deepened an abiding unease: I could not reconcile myself to theological systems that minimized the purpose and role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Over time, that unease matured into a settled conviction that many modern doctrinal frameworks do not adequately reflect the plain apostolic pattern.

My military service trained me to think in terms of authority, responsibility, accountability, order, and obedience — principles that became foundational not only to leadership and service but also to how I approach divine revelation. My professional work in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Microsoft and Worldscape Technologies, Inc. sharpened a different set of skills: analytical reasoning, pattern recognition, signal discrimination, evidence testing, and the structured assessment of complex systems. I have carried both disciplines into biblical and theological study, using them to support deep, methodical, and intentionally unbiased exegesis.

Yet I do not understand this work as merely analytical. I understand it as spiritual discernment in the sense of 1 John 4:1–6. The command to test the spirits — to discern between the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error — has become central to my understanding of theological labor. My return to apostolic truth has therefore been pursued not through study and analysis alone, but through prayer, spiritual testing, and conscious dependence on the Spirit of truth to expose error and confirm what accords with the apostolic witness.

I spent seventeen years in a Reformed Baptist church. Over the past five years, I increasingly struggled with its theology, especially when it seemed to subordinate the force of the biblical text to the demands of a preexisting system. In the course of that struggle, I pursued intensive self-study and gained what I would describe as master’s-level knowledge of Reformed systematic theology. Since February 2026, I have completed four classes at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary to deepen my grasp of Reformed Baptist hermeneutics, systematic theology, and early church history, along with an exegetical study of the English versions of Ephesians and Colossians focused on spiritual warfare.

I did not enter that environment seeking reasons to criticize it. I entered to learn, to test my own conclusions, and to assess as honestly as I could whether Reformed Baptist theology truly aligns with the apostolic witness. What I encountered confirmed and sharpened my concerns rather than relieving them. In my experience, the system itself sets the boundaries of acceptable thought: students are formed less to test the system against Scripture than to read Scripture through the system’s established categories. I found little meaningful space for sustained adjudication of whether the system is itself faithful to the apostolic deposit in its full textual, canonical, and practical force — especially where that deposit presses hardest against confessional coherence. The deeper I engaged its methods, categories, and conclusions, the more persuaded I became that many of its doctrinal commitments do not arise organically from the apostolic witness but from theological constructs that govern how Scripture is read before the text is allowed to speak with its own native force. This has been deeply troubling to me. In my judgment, the apostolic deposit is not being allowed to stand over the system as its judge; it is being managed, narrowed, and selectively emphasized so that the system remains intact — and an institution that conditions students to mistake the preservation of a confessional system for fidelity to the apostolic deposit has, by that very fact, failed at the deepest level.

For this reason, my passion for the apostolic deposit has become the center of my ministry burden. I believe the faith once delivered to the saints is a sacred trust from Christ, conveyed through His apostles to the church. It is not raw material for later doctrinal reconstruction; it is to be guarded, preserved, proclaimed, and obeyed. One of the defining failures of modern denominational Christianity is its willingness to allow confessional systems, inherited traditions, and institutional loyalties to modify or mute that deposit rather than fully submit to it.

A major part of my work has involved applying disciplined analytical methods to Scripture, doctrine, and church history — tracing themes across large bodies of text, testing doctrinal claims against the actual biblical data, comparing recurring interpretive patterns, and assessing whether conclusions are exegetically grounded or systemically imported. From that work, I developed the Edenic Deception Template, an analytical framework for assessing Satan’s historical and contemporary deception campaigns against humanity. It is rooted in the pattern of Genesis 3 — the reframing of God’s word, the reduction of divine warning, the reinterpretation of obedience, and the detachment of life and covenant blessing from the form of faithful response God Himself ordained.

This framework has profoundly shaped my assessment of modern denominational error. I have become convinced that the sign-only, symbolic view of baptism is one of Satan’s greatest deceptions in the contemporary church. I do not regard this as a marginal dispute. I regard it as a direct assault on the apostolic pattern because it detaches baptism from the place where Scripture joins it to forgiveness, union with Christ, covenant entry, priestly consecration, and the obedient response of faith. This reduction follows the very logic of Eden: divine instruction is not denied outright but redefined, softened, and stripped of its covenantal force.

I also carry deep guilt for exposing my wife and children to error through my ignorance, compromise, and desire to avoid conflict. For roughly twenty-five years, I worshiped in churches whose commitments on baptism and the Lord’s Supper made me uncomfortable, and I did so in the name of unity and peacekeeping — in the mistaken conviction that this was what it meant to be a good husband. I now believe I compromised both my convictions and the spiritual headship entrusted to me, allowing the desire for household harmony to override my responsibility before God to lead my family in apostolic truth. Recently, after much difficult conversation, my wife has agreed to attend a church of Christ with me, though she still does not fully understand why I can worship nowhere else in good conscience. I do not take her willingness lightly, and I admire her obedience to the Lord in this. I offer these details only to be honest about the cost of this return. Theological compromise is never merely abstract; it touches households, consciences, and souls. Through it all, I thank God for His patience, mercy, and persistent correction, by which He has been returning me to apostolic truth and freeing my conscience from guilt and sorrow.

These convictions ultimately demanded action. After five years of deep study of Calvinism — including hundreds of sermons and studies by John Piper, John MacArthur, Voddie Baucham, and R.C. Sproul — and three years of sustained interaction in church and in “lunch and theology” one-on-one elder discussions, I met with four of the elders of my Reformed Baptist church to inform them that I was departing. I told them that I prayed daily (and still do) for them, asking the Lord to remove the scales from their eyes and for them to repent of their departures from apostolic truth in doctrine and teaching. I am now seeking a church that more faithfully reflects the doctrine, practice, and pattern I believe Scripture reveals.

Accordingly, I understand my present calling to include these ministry commitments:

To contend for the apostolic gospel and the apostolic deposit, no matter the personal cost.
To expose Satan’s doctrinal deception wherever Scripture has been subordinated to a system.
To challenge denominational teachings that redefine or minimize baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
To conduct in-depth, text-driven exegetical research that resists theological bias.
To apply analytical rigor, pattern recognition, and historical analysis to serve biblical truth.
To test the spirits through prayerful discernment under the authority of Scripture.
To call churches, elders, and believers to repent of departing from apostolic doctrine.
To bear witness that doctrine must be governed by Scripture, not the other way around.
To urge a return to the faith, practice, and pattern delivered by Christ through His apostles.

I also understand this calling as encompassing several concrete aims. I want to complete a Master of Divinity to deepen my preparation for ministry, scholarship, teaching, and public engagement. While pursuing that degree, I plan to build an online forum (Truthscape) devoted to apostolic education and analysis, where denominationally influenced believers and seekers can engage Scripture seriously, examine doctrinal claims, debate contested questions, and openly contend for the apostolic deposit. In time, I may teach biblical studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, equipping students to interpret Scripture faithfully, resist theological distortion, engage in spiritual warfare, and think in disciplined submission to the apostolic witness.

In sum, I believe God has used every part of my formation — my early years in the church of Christ, my time in multiple denominational settings, my twenty-four-year military career, my professional work in artificial intelligence, my seventeen years among Reformed Baptists, my theological conflict and seminary study, my prayer and repentance, and the development of the Edenic Deception Template and spiritual-warfare research — to prepare me for a particular work of witness: to call preachers, pastors/elders, and theologians in denominational Christianity to repentance and to urge a return to the apostolic gospel, response, pattern, and deposit.