I'm coming to grips with a concept. It touches integrity, inspiration, conscience, contentment, ethics, eternity, morality, mission, head, heart, self, service, sacrifice, submission, peace, purpose, and my place. The concept? Truth.

Not just any truth. The truth I'm interested in is the kind of truth that's supposed to set you free. The sort of wisdom-infused truth that guides your whole life. The type of courage-building truth that calls for service and sacrifice.

Truth with those characteristics calls for nothing less than complete submission. This True-Truth is so profound, broad, deep, challenging, obvious, and pervasive that it changes a person, changes people and communities, and can change the world. But such truth needs to be discovered, nurtured, and acted on. A hidden truth or a truth only passively accepted is not going to change the world.

As I re-examine what I have been taught by my church over the last 45 years, I'm growing more uncomfortable with what I find. As I sit in church on a Sunday, I think, "...perhaps I need to dig deeper, open a few windows, take a fresh look..."

Our fellowship is small on a global scale. We keep to ourselves ("insular" is a good description), and we claim, rather boldly (and incorrectly, in my opinion), to have a superior (or more complete) gospel that can make "true Christians". Others, those from whom we are keeping our distance, are in our eyes pretenders and ignorant of the "true truth" we have. I think our "Doctrine of Separation" does more harm than good.

I'm taking a hard look at all I've absorbed in the last 45 years. There are some highlights, but there's a lot of dross in the crucible.

One doctrine, one of the bedrock tenets of the Revival Fellowship's version of the Gospel, is validating a Christian's salvation by speaking in tongues. The Revival Fellowship teach, concerning salvation, that a person's Godly and Christ-like life counts for little without tongues. In the Revival Fellowship's view, if you are a Christian who is endeavouring day by day to live out your faith and your salvation has not been confirmed by your own experience of speaking in tongues, then your Christian characteristics are pointless. To the Revival Fellowship, your faith and trust in your Redeemer and the fruit of the Spirit abundantly manifest in your life miss the mark if you do not speak in tongues. Similarly, any life-changing encounters with God you've experienced, and your daily surrender to your Saviour, all mean little if you do not speak in tongues. They remain implacable on this point: without tongues, all of this confirmative evidence of your Christianity is not even relevant.

Surely such a radical doctrine stands in serious need of a Reformation.

That is not to say that the Revival Fellowship do not expect Christians to live godly, Christ-like lives. They do. They also hope that Christians build a deep faith and trust in their Redeemer. (However, see Relationship and Gospel. Me and Jesus for comments about that.) The Revival Fellowship support the notion that Christians, day by day, are to more deeply surrender to The Lord (a slightly nebulous euphemism in Revival Fellowship circles) and that Christians will manifest the Fruit of the Spirit. Ultimately, however, for the Revival Fellowship, these Christian markers validate nothing if you lack what is for them the foundational experience of speaking in tongues. Now that is a radical position for the Revival Fellowship (or any fellowship) to take.

It seems incredible that men and women of good faith can believe and defend such a doctrine. That's why I maintain this website - to keep the spotlight shining in two places simultaneously.  I'm illuminating God's Word and, on the one hand, and our Revival Fellowship doctrines on the other, and I'm making the statement, "One of these things is not like the other!"

Truthiness was the word of the year in 2006. It was a nod to the fact that truth is up for grabs in our postmodern (or post-truth) world. The man who coined the word, Stephen Colbert, said it meant "truth that comes from the gut, not books." The American Dialect Society further clarified with this: "Truthiness is the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true". 

In the discussions you find here, I'm trying to expose and avoid Truthiness. As we together pursue clarity and completeness in the truth, let me say this – the enemy of the truth is not the person who investigates, examines and openly debates the information before them and comes to believe something that may be found later to be untrue. Instead, the enemy of the truth is the one who would smother the debate.