A man asked me this in a hardware store parking lot, and he wasn't being ugly about it. He said, "There's a church on about every other corner in this town. What are you doing that they aren't?"
Good question. It deserves a real answer and not a brochure.
So start with the honest part. Mecosta County is not short on churches. Count it up and you land somewhere north of forty congregations, depending on how you handle the ones that have quietly closed and the ones nobody's sure about. There's a Catholic parish with two worship sites. All three of the major American Lutheran synods are here. There's a big cluster of holiness churches — Free Methodist, Wesleyan, Nazarene, Church of God, the Salvation Army — which together make up the largest single family in the county. There are Restoration Movement congregations, Pentecostal churches, one Reformed church, one Episcopal parish, a Seventh-day Adventist congregation, a scattering of Baptist churches, and a long list of independent community churches, several of which started life as a rural Sunday school in somebody's township hall.
That's a lot of pulpits for a county this size. So no, we're not planting TheWay because the shelves were empty.
Not better. Different.
I've said this publicly before and I'll keep saying it: there are good churches in Big Rapids. If you are sitting under preaching that opens the Bible and exalts Jesus, and you're in a room where people actually love each other and know your kids' names, then stay. Be faithful there. Serve. I mean that with my whole chest.
I would rather drive you to a good church than have you sitting home on the couch on Sunday morning telling yourself you're spiritual. That's not a nice thing to say to sound humble. It's the actual position. A soul in a solid church that isn't mine is a win. A soul in no church at all is not.
So we're not starting because everybody else got it wrong. We're starting because a church ought to be able to tell you plainly what it believes and why, in words you can check. Because there are thousands of people in this county who aren't in any church at all. And because a lot of the folks who quit going to church never quit on Jesus — they just ran out of road somewhere and nobody came looking.
Why these differences aren't trivia
Somebody's going to read this series and say the differences don't matter, just love Jesus and stop splitting hairs. I understand the impulse. I've felt it. But look at what the differences actually are before you file them under hairs.
Who gets the final word — the Bible, or the Bible as a council or a confession or a bishop or a denomination hands it to you? That's not trivia. That's the question underneath every other question.
What baptism is and who it's for — does the water do something to you, or does it say something about what already happened? That's not trivia either. It changes what you tell a scared parent and what you tell a nineteen-year-old who just got saved.
And how a person is saved. Whether righteousness is poured into you a little at a time and can drain back out, or handed to you all at once because Christ earned it and God credits it. Whether you can know tonight, sitting in your truck, that you'd be with him if the heart stopped. That is not a preference. That is the thing itself.
An orange and an apple are both fruit. They are not the same fruit. Pretending otherwise doesn't make anybody healthier.
Now, some of these differences are family arguments among people who will be standing in the same room in heaven, and I'll say so every time we get to one. Others are not family arguments at all — a handful of groups in this county deny the Trinity, or the deity of Christ, or that a sinner is saved by grace through faith. When we get to those, I'll be just as kind and a good deal less flexible, because there the issue is the gospel itself and there's no gracious way to fudge it.
What TheWay is, in one paragraph
TheWay is a non-denominational church with Baptist practice. Scripture is our final authority — not a denomination, not a convention, not a confession, not a tradition, and not me. We hold the foundational faith the apostles laid down: the inspiration of Scripture, creation by God, the virgin birth, the blood atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the physical return of Jesus. We baptize believers, after they've trusted Christ, by immersion, as obedience and testimony and not as the thing that saves. The Lord's Supper is a memorial. Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ alone, free and permanent; discipleship costs everything, and holiness is what salvation produces, never what qualifies you for it. Salvation is offered to all men, whosoever will. We govern ourselves — one congregation, led by a plurality of biblically qualified elders, owning its own building and calling its own pastor, with nobody over it but Christ. We believe the gifts of the Spirit continue and that walking in the Spirit is the whole key to the Christian life, without turning a worship service into a show. Everybody sings, there's no stage act, and the old and the young are in the same room on purpose.
What we're going to do in these posts
Over the next stretch of weeks we're going to go tradition by tradition. Catholic. Lutheran. The whole Wesleyan-holiness family. Reformed and Presbyterian. Restoration Movement. Pentecostal. Episcopal. Adventist. The independents. The groups that stand outside historic Christianity. One at a time, and here's how we'll handle each one.
- We will never name a single church in this town. Not to criticize one, and not to praise one either. Traditions only. If you read one of these and start guessing which building I mean, you're guessing.
- We'll state the other position the way its best teachers state it. Not the version you heard secondhand. Not the version that's easy to knock over. If you're a lifelong Lutheran and you read our Lutheran post and think "well, that's not quite it" — then I failed, and I'd want you to tell me.
- We'll lead with what we share, because with most of these traditions the shared ground is bigger than the disputed ground, and burying that would be dishonest.
- Where a tradition has a conservative wing and a liberal wing, or three synods that don't agree with each other, we'll say so instead of flattening it.
- When we differ, we'll name the passage. Not a vibe, not a preference, not "that's just how we've always done it." Chapter and verse, and you can go check me.
I'm not writing these to win arguments at the Meijer checkout. I'm writing them because people move to this county and stand in their kitchen with a phone and a list of churches and no idea what any of the words mean. Right? Somebody ought to just explain it.
Before You Read the Rest
One more thing and then I'll let you go. You could read every post in this series, learn the difference between a synod and a diocese and a district, be able to explain transubstantiation and prevenient grace at a dinner party, and still walk out of here lost. The line that matters most doesn't run between the churches on those corners. It runs right through you.
God says every one of us has sinned and the wages of that is death. Not a fine. Death. And Jesus — God's own Son, born of a virgin, who never sinned once — took that death in your place, and three days later walked out of the grave with his body. Anybody who calls on him gets saved. Not the ones who clean up first. Anybody. You can settle it where you're sitting, right now, without a building or a ceremony or a single thing to bring him but yourself.
And for those of you who've already trusted him: don't leave a good church over a blog series. That's not what this is for. Do this instead, this week, before the next post goes up — pick the one thing about your own church's beliefs you've always nodded along to without understanding, and go ask your pastor about it. Face to face. Make him show you where it is in the Bible. A believer who can't say why he believes what he believes is one bad week away from believing anything.