Testimony

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

I was baptized at the Middleport Church of Christ in 1979 and worshiped in several churches of Christ throughout my childhood and college years. Those years instilled in me a serious regard for Scripture and a lasting conviction that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are essential components of Christian faith and practice.

After marrying in 1992 and during my twenty-four-year career as a Marine Corps officer, I worshiped in Methodist, traditional Baptist, and Reformed Baptist churches. This exposure broadened my understanding of denominational Christianity while deepening an abiding concern: I could not reconcile the biblical witness with theological systems that minimized the purpose and role of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Over time, this concern matured into a settled conviction that many modern doctrinal frameworks fail to reflect the full apostolic pattern.

Military service trained me to think in terms of authority, responsibility, accountability, order, and obedience—principles that became foundational to both my leadership and my approach to divine revelation. My work in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Microsoft and Worldscape Technologies sharpened complementary skills: analytical reasoning, pattern recognition, signal discrimination, evidence testing, and the structured assessment of complex systems. I have brought both disciplines to biblical study in pursuit of rigorous, methodical, and self-critical exegesis.

Yet I do not regard 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 distinguish the Spirit of truth from the spirit of error—has become central to my understanding of theological labor. My return to apostolic truth has therefore been pursued through study, prayer, spiritual testing, repentance, and conscious dependence on the Spirit of truth.

For seventeen years, I belonged to a church that identified broadly as a “Bible church.” Over time, I came to understand that it was deeply aligned with Reformed Baptist theology and was moving toward progressive covenantalism. During my final five years there, I increasingly struggled with a method of interpretation that seemed to subordinate the force of the biblical text to the demands of a preexisting theological system.

In response, I undertook intensive self-study and met regularly with the church’s leaders to discuss theology. Since February 2026, I have also completed four courses at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, studying Reformed Baptist hermeneutics, systematic theology, early church history, and the English texts of Ephesians and Colossians with particular attention to spiritual warfare.

I entered this work not to find reasons for criticism but to test my own conclusions and determine whether Reformed Baptist theology faithfully represents the apostolic witness. My study sharpened rather than resolved my concerns. I found that the system often established the boundaries of acceptable interpretation: Scripture was read through inherited categories, while limited space was given to asking whether those categories themselves could withstand the full textual, canonical, and practical force of the apostolic deposit.

The deeper I engaged these methods and conclusions, the more convinced I became that several doctrinal commitments did not arise organically from the apostolic witness. Instead, theological constructs appeared to govern how Scripture could be read before the text was permitted to speak with its native force. In my judgment, the apostolic deposit was not consistently allowed to stand over the system as its judge. It was too often narrowed or selectively emphasized to preserve confessional coherence.

For this reason, the apostolic deposit has become the center of my ministry burden. 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 must be guarded, preserved, proclaimed, practiced, and obeyed. One of the defining failures of modern denominational Christianity is its willingness to permit confessional systems, inherited traditions, and institutional loyalties to modify or mute that deposit rather than submit fully to it.

A major part of my work has involved applying disciplined analytical methods to Scripture, doctrine, and church history. I trace themes across large bodies of text, test doctrinal claims against the biblical evidence, compare recurring interpretive patterns, and assess whether conclusions are exegetically derived or systemically imposed.

This work led me to develop the Edenic Deception Template, an analytical framework for assessing Satan’s historical and contemporary campaigns of deception. The framework is rooted in the pattern of Genesis 3: the reframing of God’s word, the weakening of divine warning, the reinterpretation of obedience, and the separation of life and covenant blessing from the faithful response God ordained.

My exegetical method draws especially upon Gordon D. Fee’s New Testament Exegesis, Thomas R. Schreiner’s Interpreting the Pauline Epistles, and Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum’s Kingdom through Covenant. Fee supplies a disciplined exegetical process, Schreiner emphasizes tracing an author’s argument, and Gentry and Wellum provide a covenantal and biblical-theological framework. I am deeply grateful for their contributions and have integrated elements of their methods into my own research.

The Edenic Deception Template has profoundly shaped my assessment of modern departures from the apostolic deposit. In particular, I have become convinced that reducing baptism to a sign or symbol is among Satan’s most consequential deceptions in the contemporary church. I do not regard this as a marginal dispute or claim. It detaches baptism from the realities with which Scripture associates it: forgiveness, union with Christ, covenant entry, priestly consecration, and the obedient response of faith. This reduction follows the logic of Eden. Divine instruction is not rejected outright; it is redefined, softened, and stripped of its covenantal force.

I understand my present calling to include the following commitments:

To contend for the apostolic gospel and deposit, regardless of personal cost.
To expose doctrinal deception wherever Scripture has been subordinated to a theological system.
To challenge teachings that redefine or minimize baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
To conduct rigorous, text-driven exegetical research while continually testing my own theological assumptions.
To place analytical rigor, pattern recognition, and historical inquiry in the service of biblical truth.
To test the spirits through prayerful discernment under the authority of Scripture.
To call churches, elders, teachers, and believers to repent of departures from apostolic doctrine.
To bear witness that doctrine must be governed by Scripture, never Scripture by doctrine.
To urge a return to the faith, practice, and pattern delivered by Christ through His apostles.

In time, I may also teach biblical studies at the undergraduate and graduate levels, equipping students to interpret Scripture faithfully, recognize theological distortion, engage in spiritual warfare, and think with disciplined submission to the apostolic witness.

I believe God has used every part of my formation—my early years in the churches of Christ, my experience in multiple denominational settings, my military career, my 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—to prepare me for a particular work of witness: calling preachers, pastors, elders, and theologians within denominational Christianity to repentance and urging a return to the apostolic gospel, response, pattern, and deposit.