by Joel V Webb | Mar 19, 2026 | Theology & Practice
What we believe about the Church impacts a lot about how we go about being a part of the Body of Christ.
In a recent conversation I had with a church leader I greatly respect, we were talking about the role of leadership training in the Church for pastors and so on. He pointed out how leadership is important, how God is very organized (you can see that from the creation account in Genesis), and that we need to develop those with strong leadership qualities because we are an organization.
Yes, there are some good things we must have in developing leaders, but I came away from that conversation thinking there was more. Later, a friend made a statement that brought it all into focus: “The church is an organism, not an organization.”
That difference matters. Organizations are built by people, structured around efficiency, and maintained through systems. They live or die by planning, leadership, and metrics. But organisms—living realities—are something else entirely. They are born, not built. They flourish through life and nourishment, not through management. Their health depends on vitality, not structure.
That is precisely what the Church is called to be: a living body, the Body of Christ, animated by the Spirit of God rather than by human ingenuity. When we forget that truth, when we begin to operate as if the Kingdom grows by skillful management rather than faithful abiding, we start to treat the Bride of Christ as though she were a business.
There’s a lot of well-meaning leadership language floating around today—vision casting, strategic planning, branding, metrics for success. These things have their place, but when they become central, something subtle yet serious happens. Ministry becomes more about achievement than attentiveness, more about image than incarnation. We start to assume that the same models that work in the corporate world can also guide the Church. But the Church is not a company, because her life is not sustained by human ambition—it is sustained by the Holy Spirit.
What we really need are not more executives but more priests.
And by “priests,” I don’t just mean those who wear robes or serve at the altar. I mean men and women who embody the mediating life of Christ, bridging heaven and earth, bearing the presence of God into the ordinary. Every follower of Jesus is called into that priestly vocation. As Peter wrote, we are “a royal priesthood,” a people set apart to show forth the praise of the One who called us from darkness into light.
A priestly leader measures faithfulness differently. They do not count success by attendance numbers or program launches but by the measure of obedience, by how faithfully the presence of Christ is carried into the lives of others. They are not managers of outcomes, they are stewards of presence. A priest’s focus is not on controlling life but tending it, nurturing growth where grace is already at work.
That is the kind of leadership Jesus modeled. The Son of God didn’t come to optimize efficiency in Galilee. He came to serve, to wash feet, to suffer, and to give His life for the world. He came as a priest, standing between heaven and earth, reconciling humanity to God through His own self-giving love. When He said, “Follow Me,” He wasn’t inviting us into a system but into a life.
Throughout Scripture, the imagery of God’s people is always living, not mechanical. Paul speaks of the Church as a body with many members, joined and held together by what every part supplies. Peter calls us living stones being built into a spiritual house. Jesus compares His disciples to branches connected to a vine, dependent on His life for their fruit. Even the last vision of Scripture in Revelation is that of a living city—a place where God dwells among His people, where rivers flow and trees bear fruit for the healing of nations.
Every one of these images points to the Church as an organism filled with breath, rooted in relationship, and sustained by grace. And this means our structures and plans should always serve life, not replace it. Organization is not wrong; in fact, organization is part of God’s nature. Genesis reveals a Creator who brings order out of chaos. But in God’s world, order always serves love. It exists to make room for life to flourish, not to control it.
The danger comes when we invert that relationship, when order becomes the goal instead of the servant. Then we begin to trust our systems more than the Spirit. We begin to rely on programs instead of prayer. We forget that what brings health to the Body is not a well-laid plan but the living presence of Christ in our midst.
Recovering that organic imagination would change a lot about how we lead and live together as the Church. It would slow us down. We’d talk less about performance and more about formation. We’d spend more time listening, less time strategizing. We’d learn to see failure not as evidence of poor leadership but as part of the slow rhythm of growth. Living things go through seasons, sometimes fruitful, sometimes barren, sometimes pruned. A business might panic in decline, but an organism learns patience. In the Church, life often moves by resurrection, not acceleration.
Priestly leadership, then, is fundamentally intercessory. A priest listens for God on behalf of the people and listens to the people on behalf of God. They stand in the tension of both heaven’s holiness and earth’s need. That kind of leadership is marked by prayer more than planning, by presence more than productivity. It values formation over function and relationship over reach. It sees every encounter as sacred and every moment as potentially sacramental.
That’s not to say we should abandon organization entirely, just that it must bow to life. The Church’s systems exist to serve her people, not define them. Committees, councils, and boards can do holy work when they remember they are tending the living, beating heart of Christ’s Body, not managing a brand.
Jesus established order among His disciples, but He started with communion. He appointed leaders, but He first washed their feet. Even His parting command was not “Run the organization well,” but “Abide in Me.” His way of growing the Church was not through efficiency but through intimacy.
If we truly saw the Church as a living organism, Christ’s own body on earth, our leadership would take a cross-shaped form. We would spend less time guarding turf and more time sharing grace. We would view authority not as control but as service. We would measure success by fruitfulness of the Spirit rather than the size of the crowd.
At the center of all this stands Christ—the Great High Priest, the One who mediates life to the world. His life flows through His body by the Spirit, connecting and nourishing every member. Where He is truly present, the Church comes alive. Her worship becomes the pulse of a new creation. Her service becomes the fragrance of love. Her structure becomes the trellis upon which living vines can grow, not the cage that holds them in.
Maybe what we need in the Church today is less confidence in our ability to manage and more confidence in Christ’s ability to dwell. Maybe revival will not come from better leadership models but from a rediscovery of our calling as a priestly people, those who carry the presence of Christ into every home, workplace, and community with humility and joy.
Because in the end, organizations impress, but organisms live. The Church does not exist to impress the world with polish and productivity. She exists to be alive with the very life of Christ, His hands, His heart, His voice, His presence—moving in the world until all creation is renewed.
That life is what the world truly needs. That life is what we have been given. And that life, shared together in priestly love, is what makes the Church the living Body of Christ on earth.
by Joel V Webb | Mar 10, 2026 | Orthodoxy Matters, Theology & Practice
One of the prayers I think every Christian prays for that echoes the words of Christ from St. John’s Gospel, chapter 17: “I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me.” (v.21). Where things get sticky is what we all mean by “one.” If you are a Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or Anglican, your ecclesiology (theology of the Church) differs from that of your run-of-the-mill Evangelical or Baptist. For the traditional Christian, the Church is often visualized as an ark (like Noah’s ark) that is sailing through history, with people getting on and off as time passed. Whereas, in a low-church understanding, “the Church” is not a single entity, but a blueprint found in the Bible that is made to be reproduced. Because of these different understandings, the answer to the prayer to “be one” looks different.
In the New Testament, the Church is described as a body—many members, but one life. The image St. Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 12 goes far beyond metaphor: it is the reality of what the Holy Spirit does with the people of God. There aren’t multiple bodies of Christ, only one. When we are baptized, we are joined not merely to Christ but to one another, across all ages, cultures, and nations. Congregations are expressions of that one Body, not separate bodies with their own identity. To be a Christian, then, is never an individual or local affair—it is to belong to something both visible and historical.
But the Church through time has not always lived that reality well. It has divided again and again—sometimes for tragic reasons, sometimes for necessary ones. In truth, some divisions have been like emergency surgeries: painful, but at times necessary to save life. Others, however, have been the result of human ego, political pressure, or differing cultural forms. Once the crisis passes, though, the call remains the same—to heal what has been torn.
Take, for example, our own Methodist heritage. John Wesley never intended to start a new church. A lifelong Anglican priest, he described the Methodist movement as an effort “to reform the nation, particularly the Church, and to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.” Methodism in its origin was not a schism—it was a renewal movement within the Church of England. Lay preachers, class meetings, and field preaching were ways to reawaken the life of grace in ordinary believers. It was only after the American Revolution, when Anglican clergy were scarce and Wesley reluctantly sent Thomas Coke to ordain new ministers for the colonies, that Methodism took on a distinct ecclesial form—the Methodist Episcopal Church. Even then, Wesley saw Methodism as a continuation of the one Church, not a replacement for it. The split was pastoral and practical, not theological.
A century later, the Free Methodist Church emerged from the Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1860s. The reasons were morally serious and historically necessary: a stand against slavery sympathizers, a desire for “free seats” when pew rentals had become a social barrier for the poor, and a concern to preserve holiness preaching when the larger body was becoming formal and complacent. B. T. Roberts and others didn’t separate to rebel, but to stay faithful to the Spirit’s movement within Methodism itself. The goal was not to leave the people called Methodists—it was to keep their original fire alive.
This is where we must recover a patristic vision of the Church: not as disconnected islands of believers floating independently through time, but as one unified body moving inexorably through history under Christ’s headship. The early fathers—like Ignatius, Irenaeus, and Cyprian—taught that the Church is a single, organic reality, handed down from the apostles, growing and correcting itself across generations. Splits may scar the body, but they do not create new bodies; the one Church persists, calling her wounded members back into communion. For low-church Protestants, this doesn’t mean hierarchy or ritualism—it means seeing our local assembly as a vital part of that ancient, living organism, linked by baptism, creed, and Scripture to every faithful Christian from Pentecost to today.
But the question we must ask today, with gratitude for those who came before us, is whether the reasons that once made divisions necessary still remain. The Church of England that Wesley knew is not the same as the Anglicanism that exists today. Interestingly, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) has been deeply shaped by the kind of Spirit-led, Scripture-centered renewal that Methodism championed in the eighteenth century. Anyone looking at ACNA congregations can see strong echoes of early Methodism’s heartbeat—biblical preaching, small-group discipleship, evangelistic zeal, and a hunger for holiness. In a sense, Wesley’s children have helped their Anglican mother recover her vitality. Perhaps that mutual influence is a sign that old wounds might be ready for healing.
Likewise, within Methodism itself, we find new alignments forming. The rise of the Global Methodist Church (GMC) represents a desire to reclaim both scriptural faithfulness and Wesleyan integrity. The brokenness that once split Methodism in the nineteenth century over moral and doctrinal drift may be resolving in our own time through renewed clarity, holiness, and mission. If the theological and moral crises that once necessitated fracture have given way to faithful reform, then perhaps it is time to ask not how to multiply more branches, but how those branches might graft once more into one living tree.
Christian unity doesn’t mean uniformity. It doesn’t mean abandoning our distinctives. It means recognizing that the Body of Christ is one—not only across geography, but across history. It means realizing that our hope lies not in our denominational franchises but in our shared participation in the life of Christ. If the Free Methodist, the Global Methodist, and the Anglican find themselves proclaiming the same gospel and pursuing the same holiness, perhaps it is time to start praying and working toward a visible unity that testifies to the world: Jesus truly is Lord.
Our divisions may have had their reasons, but when those reasons die, so should our excuses for staying apart. The Church is one Body, sailing through time like an ark on God’s mission of redemption. It’s time for those who have stepped off along the way to start rowing toward one another again—until the ship of the Church, battered but unsinkable, carries us all home together.
by Joel V Webb | Mar 3, 2026 | History, Theology & Practice
“War…war never changes.”
This haunting quote from a video game franchise I’ve played captures the harsh reality of human conflict. No matter the epoch of history, or the technology available, war is a horrible and terrible thing. I truly believe that violence grieves the heart of God because it is a destruction and violation of his image bearers. One of the promises given to humanity in the New Heavens and Earth is a place where, “They will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nations will not take up the sword against other nations, and they will no longer train for war” (Isaiah 2:4 NET). Oh what a place that will be! To not have to deal with the threat of violence and death. And for us as Christians now, we have a role to play in working as the Church in being the people of God to the world as His hands and feet in seeing that come about at his return.
But what does this mean for us in the here and now?
It means acknowledging the tension of living in a fallen world where sin’s curse lingers, and evil doesn’t lay down its arms just because we pray for peace. The Bible doesn’t present violence as neutral, it’s a tragic consequence of our rebellion against God—but neither does it demand pacifism in the face of slaughter. There are times when force, even lethal force, becomes a moral imperative to protect the innocent, restrain wickedness, and restore justice. As a pastor wrestling with Scripture, I’ve come to see this through the lens of biblical texts that frame violence not as vengeance (which God reserves for Himself, Romans 12:19), but as protective duty and restorative order.
The Biblical Case for Protective Violence
Scripture repeatedly calls God’s people to defend the vulnerable, using strength when words fail and threats loom. Consider Exodus 22:2-3, where a homeowner who kills a nighttime thief bears no guilt, self-preservation is presumed righteous amid darkness and danger, though daytime restraint honors life. Nehemiah 4:14 captures this urgency as the wall-builders arm themselves: “Fight for your brothers and your sons and your daughters and your wives and for your homes.” Here, violence isn’t aggression; it’s the shield for family and faith against marauders. Proverbs 24:11-12 drives it home: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?” God holds us accountable for inaction—turning a blind eye to genocide or tyranny makes us complicit.
Psalm 82:3-4 echoes this divine mandate to rulers: “Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.” These aren’t abstract ideals; they’re commands to wield authority forcefully when oppressors strike.
Restorative Force and the Sword of Justice
The Bible also entrusts restorative violence to governing powers as agents of God. Romans 13:4 is unflinching: the state “does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.” This isn’t a call to personal vendettas but to ordered justice, echoed in Genesis 9:6 (“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed”) and the Mosaic laws balancing retribution with mercy. Ecclesiastes 3:8 speaks plainly: there’s “a time for war, and a time for peace,” timed by divine wisdom in a broken creation.
Unchecked violence thrives when red lines are drawn, crossed, and met with nothing, emboldening aggressors, as history shows from appeasement before WWII to modern escalations where impunity begets atrocity. Scripture warns against this passivity.
Jesus Himself models measured force, driving out moneychangers with a whip (John 2:15) and telling disciples, “Let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one” (Luke 22:36), preparing for peril, even as He rebukes Peter’s impulsive strike (John 18:11). These aren’t endorsements of endless conflict but of principled resistance.
Toward a Just War Framework
This scriptural thread weaves into just war theory, a tradition rooted in Augustine and Aquinas but grounded in the Bible’s own principles. War is justifiable (jus ad bellum) only with legitimate authority (Romans 13), just cause like defending innocents (Proverbs 24:11; Nehemiah 4:14), and right intention aimed at peace (Isaiah 1:17). In conduct (jus in bello), it demands proportionality (Deuteronomy 20:10-19, offering terms first) and discrimination (sparing non-combatants). This doesn’t mean every action in a just war is perfect—soldiers sin, leaders err, atrocities occur—but a righteous cause remains righteous, calling for repentance where wrong amid the fight for good.
Unchecked evil, like Pharaoh’s armies drowning innocents or Amalek’s raids, forces a choice: stand idle or intervene. When bullies test boundaries and face no consequence, violence metastasizes; Proverbs 24:12 indicts the silent witness. Loving your neighbor (Mark 12:31) sometimes means rolling in the tanks, not out of hatred, but to halt the butcher’s blade. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39), “give to the one who sues you and give your cloak as well” (5:40), “go the extra mile” (5:41), “do not resist the evil person” (5:39), is contextual genius: in Roman-occupied Judea, these subvert oppressors non-violently. Turning the cheek defies dehumanizing slaps (right-hand backhand), offering the left challenges norms; surrendering cloak strips the suing exploiter; walking the extra mile mocks forced labor. It’s bold resistance through grace, not surrender to tyrants or passivity before slaughter.
History’s Echo: The Crusades as Just Response
This framework isn’t theoretical, history tests it. Consider the Crusades, often maligned as mindless aggression. In reality, they were a delayed Christian counteroffensive after four centuries of Islamic conquests that devoured two-thirds of the Christian world: from Muhammad’s 630 Tabuk raid on Byzantines, to Jerusalem’s fall (638), North Africa’s seizure, Spain’s invasion (711), and Tours halted only by Charles Martel (732). By 1071, Seljuk Turks crushed Byzantium at Manzikert, threatening Constantinople and pilgrims; Emperor Alexius begged Pope Urban II for aid—red lines crossed repeatedly with no response until then.
The First Crusade (1095-1099) liberated Jerusalem not as imperialism, but reclamation of stolen lands, much like Nehemiah’s wall or Abraham’s rescue (Genesis 14). Papal calls framed it defensively: aid Eastern Christians under “brutal Muslim rule,” halt jihad’s tide. Yes, abuses happened, the responses and actions of those involved weren’t always perfect or right, with cruelties and excesses that demand our sorrow and repentance—but this doesn’t remove the just cause of the entire movement: legitimate authority (Pope/emperor), just defense against expansion (post-Manzikert Seljuk surge), intent to restore pilgrimage access and borders. Without Crusades, Europe might have fallen as Spain nearly did; they bought centuries for Christendom to regroup, proving consequences deter unchecked violence.
Implications for Today: Peace Through Principled Strength
What does this mean practically for Christians in 2026? It calls us to a relentless pursuit of peace; diplomacy, de-escalation, mercy wherever possible, while recognizing that true peacemaking (Matthew 5:9) often demands the courage to confront evil head-on. We’re always working for peace, praying for reconciliation, supporting negotiations, and building bridges across divides. But when aggressors reject peace, slaughter image-bearers, and threaten annihilation, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (ignoring red lines from Crimea to full assault), Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, or rising authoritarian threats, the just extension of protection is violence. Not gleefully, but grievously; not endlessly, but proportionately; not vengefully, but restoratively. Even here, individual sins or tactical wrongs don’t negate a war’s moral foundation, we grieve them, seek accountability, but stand firm on rescue. When nothing happens after violations, violence thrives; deterrence saves lives.
This isn’t license for hawkishness or endless wars, Scripture tempers us with “Blessed are the merciful” (Matthew 5:7) and warnings against trusting in chariots (Psalm 20:7). Churches should advocate ceasefires where viable, aid refugees, and disciple nations toward justice. Yet inaction before tyrants echoes the wicked silence of Proverbs 24:12, forfeiting our mandate to rescue the stumbling. In self-defense laws, military service, or policy debates, we uphold the state’s sword (Romans 13) as God’s reluctant gift in a Genesis 3 world. Vote for leaders who prioritize peace through strength; support alliances that deter aggression; pray for enemies even amid the tanks’ rumble.
Peacemaking in the Mud
Being a peacemaker isn’t passive, it’s active pursuit of shalom, which crushes chaos. In our era of rogue regimes, terror networks, and genocides, Christians must champion this dual path: diplomacy first, resolve when atrocities demand response. War never changes, but our calling does, to grieve its necessity while embracing the fight when Scripture bids us stand.
The eschatological hope of Isaiah 2:4 fuels our labor now, but until Christ returns, sometimes the plowshare must wait while we shoulder the sword.
by Joel V Webb | Dec 10, 2025 | Orthodoxy Matters, Theology & Practice, Uncategorized
Modern Christians love to sing about “tradition” when Tevye belts it out in Fiddler on the Roof, but many of us grow uneasy when the same word comes up in church. We instinctively feel the pull of Tevye’s point: tradition gives shape, identity, and continuity to a people; take it away, and everything wobbles. Yet when it comes to the Christian faith, we often imagine we can live on “Bible alone” in a way that somehow bypasses tradition altogether. The irony is that, just like the villagers of Anatevka, we already live by powerful inherited patterns—ways of worshipping, reading Scripture, praying, and organizing church life—that were handed down to us, even if no one ever called them “tradition.”
One of the cornerstones of the Protestant Reformation was the reclamation of Scripture as the central infallible rule of faith. Meaning that no matter what, Scripture is the ultimate authority in all things of faith and practice. As someone in a tradition downstream from Anglicanism, we see this in Article 6 of the 39 Articles (which are the confessional and theological foundation of Anglicanism, and were as well for early Methodism), “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”
And I agree with this. Scripture is essential and of all importance because it is to us a direct revelation of God. Yet, from this also stems a primary frustration. For some Protestants there is always that ‘dirty word’ hiding in the corner…tradition. Like many, I grew up believing that tradition is bad, if not evil, and that tradition is what keeps people away from God. Whenever tradition came up, it always had something to do with those Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans, or other Christians who dressed funny, and certainly didn’t worship “in the Spirit”, because they were all bound up by their traditions.
Well, for anyone who has known me the last several years, you know I now have a very different answer. Tradition is not bad. Ironically, WE ALL HAVE TRADITION! The question we often fail to ask is, “do I acknowledge my own traditions”. Because, if we don’t, we are actually more controlled by those traditions than we realize, because they are hidden. And this is the fatal deceit we Protestants often fall prey to. We think tradition is bad, and that tradition is not an authority.
But again, we can’t get away from the truth that tradition is always going to be there. And here’s the other thing we must realize. Interpretation of Scripture outside of tradition is just as likely to lead us into heretical teachings that it is into orthodox ones. Just ask Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Ellen G. White, and the list goes on. As Protestants we must have tradition, otherwise we will continue into an endlessly featuring web of church splits and every more specified denominations over small matters of interpretation.
Now, this is not to say there are no reasons for separation. There certainly are. But when we fail to understand that tradition is authoritative, sometimes we look to as a rule of interpretation, it can help us in maintaining true Christian unity.
Over the last few years, I’ve come to see that tradition, properly understood, is not a rival to Scripture but a servant of it. The great creeds and confessions of the Church were not written to replace the Bible, they were written to safeguard its message, to offer faithful summaries of what the Church across time and place has understood Scripture to teach. When we recite the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed, we are not adding to the Bible; we are joining our voices to a two‑thousand‑year chorus of believers who have wrestled with the same questions, doubts, and heresies we face today.
At its simplest, tradition functions like a set of guardrails on a mountain road. It does not confine us; it keeps us from tumbling into error while still allowing for movement, discovery, and growth. It gives us perspective—reminding us that the Church did not begin with our generation, nor with the Reformers, nor even with the apostles, but with the eternal purpose of God carried out through time. When we cut ourselves off from that inheritance, we risk spiritual amnesia.
The irony, of course, is that the Reformers themselves were deeply traditional. Luther and Calvin constantly appealed to the early Fathers—Augustine, Chrysostom, Athanasius—not because they thought those writers were infallible, but because they knew that faithful interpretation does not happen in a vacuum. “Sola Scriptura” never meant “Solo Scriptura.” The former places Scripture at the center of authority; the latter isolates it from the Church that bears witness to it.
Many modern Christians assume they have escaped “tradition” simply because they don’t follow a written liturgy or historic creed, but that does not mean they are tradition‑free; it just means their traditions are invisible to them. The way a church structures its services, chooses its music, teaches about salvation, organizes leadership, and even dresses on Sunday are all patterns that have been received, repeated, and defended over time, that is, they are traditions. When these homegrown traditions go unacknowledged, they are rarely tested against Scripture or the wider wisdom of the Church, and so they can quietly harden into non‑negotiable identity markers. The more Protestants distance themselves from historic Christian tradition; creeds, catechisms, classical liturgy, and a common sacramental life, the more each community is forced to invent itself from scratch, which only accelerates fragmentation, doctrinal confusion, and church splits. If this trajectory continues, the body of Christ will become increasingly divided into isolated tribes, each mistaking its own unexamined habits for pure, tradition‑less Christianity, rather than humbly receiving and discerning the tested traditions that once held believers together.
Healthy Christian tradition is not just anything that has been done for a long time; it is the Church’s tested, communal wisdom about how to believe and live the gospel under Scripture. Good tradition gathers up biblical teaching in stable forms—creeds, catechisms, liturgies, patterns of discipleship—that help ordinary believers confess the faith clearly and avoid well‑worn errors. At the same time, because Scripture remains the final norm, even long‑standing practices and assumptions must stay open to correction and reform. Naming this explicitly helps people see that the choice is not between “Bible or tradition,” but between unexamined, private traditions and accountable, Scripture‑shaped ones.
If tradition is to be received and discerned wisely, it has to be held by more than isolated individuals; it belongs to the Church as a concrete, visible community across time and space. Councils, confessions, agreed forms of worship, and recognized teachers are ways the Church has historically said, “This is what we together hear in Scripture,” rather than leaving every question to personal improvisation. When the gathered Church, under the Word and in dependence on the Spirit, tests and hands on tradition, it offers a shared framework that can restrain fragmentation and correct local excesses. Recovering this sense of the Church as a real, tradition‑bearing body helps modern Protestants move from “me and my Bible” toward “we, the Church, listening together to the Scriptures,” which is where genuine unity and faithful reform become possible.
Ultimately, the goal is not to exalt tradition for its own sake, but to love and know Christ more faithfully. Scripture is God’s Word written; tradition is the Church’s memory of how that Word has been lived and confessed. We need both if we are to remain rooted and flourishing in a fragmented world. Perhaps the way forward for Protestantism is not to abandon its Reformation principles, but to deepen them—to see in the Reformers not just critics of the past, but faithful heirs of a much older and larger communion of saints.
by Joel V Webb | Nov 26, 2025 | Resources, Theology & Practice
A while ago I wrote about utilizing the Lectionary for preaching. This ancient tool provides Scriptures for every Sunday of the Church year, each passage carefully selected to guide the Church through the rhythms of Christ’s life and the great mysteries of the gospel. At its best, the lectionary is not just a schedule—it’s a theological lens. It draws us into a way of reading Scripture that aligns our hearts with the seasons of the Church, shaping how we pray, how we worship, and even how we understand the story of redemption as it unfolds across the pages of Scripture.
During Lent, for instance, we hear readings that focus on Christ’s ministry as He moves steadily toward His Passion. The texts remind us of His temptation, His preaching on repentance, and His resolute journey to the Cross. These aren’t random selections—they’re intentionally chosen to form us in penitence, humility, and renewed devotion. And now, in Advent, the readings point us toward watchfulness and hope. They remind us of God’s promises, the prophets’ longing, and the call to prepare our lives for Christ’s coming—both His first coming in Bethlehem and His return in glory. When used well, the lectionary doesn’t just tell the story of salvation history; it invites us into it.
Most churches today that follow a lectionary use a three-year cycle—Years A, B, and C. This pattern is a relatively modern innovation, developed after Vatican II and adopted by many Protestant denominations as well. The idea was simple: expand the range of Scripture heard on Sundays so that congregations would receive a broader diet of biblical passages. With concerns about growing secularism, biblical illiteracy, and the increasingly thin scriptural foundation in Western culture, this seemed like a noble and necessary move.
Historically, however, the Church used a one-year cycle that repeated annually. Each new Church year started with Advent, and the readings cycled through the same appointed lessons every year. The repetition was intentional. The Church believed that spiritual formation happens through immersion, not novelty—through hearing the same words again and again, in the same seasons, until they become part of the Christian imagination.
So why did many churches move to a three-year cycle? Part of the answer has to do with changes in everyday life. For centuries, the primary place believers heard large amounts of Scripture wasn’t Sunday morning—it was the daily prayer offices, especially Morning and Evening Prayer. Through these, the entire Bible was read in the course of a year. But as the pace of life accelerated and the daily offices fell out of regular use for many, Sunday morning became the main (and for some, the only) time people regularly encountered Scripture. The three-year lectionary was an attempt to compensate for that loss.
But good intentions do not always yield the outcomes we expect. While the breadth of Scripture increased, something subtle but significant was lost: depth.
Three years is simply too long for the average congregation to hold a unified scriptural rhythm in memory. The seasonal themes become stretched thin. The passages don’t repeat often enough to become familiar, let alone formational. A reading heard only once every three years might be interesting or enlightening in the moment, but it rarely has the opportunity to sink in, to reappear in prayer, or to become a recurring voice shaping our lives.
The older one-year lectionary, by contrast, offered a formative repetition that acted like liturgical catechesis. Every Advent, you encountered Isaiah’s promises. Every Lent, you heard the same calls to repentance and the same foreshadowing of the Passion. Every Easter, the same readings shouted the resurrection hope of the gospel. Over years of worship, these passages became companions—scriptures that lived in the heart, surfaced in difficulty, and formed the backbone of a believer’s biblical memory.
This is why many people who grew up with the one-year cycle can recall certain readings with remarkable clarity. They don’t remember them because they studied them in a classroom; they remember them because they prayed them, sang them, and heard them proclaimed every year. The repetition shaped not only what they believed, but how they believed it.
In the end, this is what the lectionary is meant to do. It is not merely a reading plan. It is a tool for communal formation. It shapes the imagination of the Church, builds a shared scriptural vocabulary, and roots our worship in the story of Christ from Advent through Pentecost and beyond. And perhaps the most important thing we can rediscover—whether using a one-year or three-year cycle—is that Scripture forms us most powerfully when it returns to us again and again.
The goal of the lectionary is not simply that we “get through” more of the Bible, but that the Bible gets deeper into us. And in a restless, distracted age, that depth may be more valuable than ever.
So starting this Sunday (November 30, 2025), the church I pastor is switching to the traditional 1-year lectionary that is found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. This is for the most part the same lectionary that John Wesley himself used his entire life. The only major change is the addition of an Old Testament and Psalm reading that has been added by the Canadian Prayer Book Society, as the original 1662 Lectionary only contained an Epistle and Gospel reading.
My hope and prayer is not that this will reap an immediate reward or change, but that in 3 or 4 years, parishioners and myself alike will see how God has been working in us His likeness and character as we encounter the same Scriptures a different way. Our human nature needs repetition for something to sink in. and while the Scriptures might be the same every year, the Holy Spirit has been working each of us into the image of Christ just a bit more, and so we are by His grace that much more like Him.
by Joel V Webb | Nov 21, 2025 | Orthodoxy Matters, Theology & Practice
One of the perennial issues of discussion, disagreement, and consternation in modern Christianity is how to solve a “problem” like the book of Revelation (cue The Sound of Music). It is one of the most talked-about and also one of the most misunderstood books of the Bible, precisely because of what makes it so beautiful. It is mysterious, symbolic, imaginative, and at first glance feels opaque enough that Christians often fall back on whatever interpretive framework they inherited. And for many in the Western church, that inherited lens is some version of the dispensational, end-times schema popularized by the Left Behind series.
Recently, a parishioner asked me how to understand Revelation, and I realized quickly that a simple five-minute conversation wouldn’t be enough. The questions behind Revelation are not only about interpretation but about imagination. We need to untangle what the text actually says from the assumptions we bring to it. And this is difficult, because for many Christians even those who do not personally identify as dispensational, our cultural imagination has been shaped by that system. The idea of a seven-year tribulation, an individual Antichrist, a secret rapture, and a sequence of future political events culminating in Armageddon often feels like it “must” be biblical because we’ve heard the system so often and so confidently.
But when we slow down, open the Scriptures, read Revelation in its own historical and literary context, and listen to the witness of the early Church, we discover something surprisingly simple: Revelation is not about decoding a timeline. It is about unveiling the triumph of Jesus Christ and the call for His people to remain faithful in a world that often opposes the Lamb.
It is striking that the book opens not with a puzzle but with a blessing: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy” (Revelation 1:3). The early Church never treated Revelation as a secret codebook but as a proclamation, prophetic imagery meant to comfort persecuted Christians, strengthen their worship, and remind them that the Lamb reigns even when Rome seems unshakable.
This is precisely how the earliest Christian writers approached the book. Irenaeus, writing in the second century, did take Revelation seriously as prophecy, but he always tied its hope to the victory already won by Christ. He wrote, “The name of our Lord… is the faith which brings salvation” (Against Heresies 3.18.7). The point is not prediction. The point is fidelity. Origen, commenting on Revelation’s imagery, said that the visions “are to be understood spiritually” and that the book “reveals what Christ has done and is doing” (Commentary on John 2.2). Even Augustine, often accused unfairly of over-allegorizing, was simply following the pastoral instinct of the Church before him when he said that Revelation displays the reality that “the Church is always under trial… yet is always victorious through Christ” (City of God 20.9).
For the early Church, the primary message of Revelation was not fear of what might come, but confidence in what has already come: the Lamb who was slain now stands (Revelation 5:6). Christ’s victory is not future, it is the very lens through which the future must be seen.
This is also why the historic Church never taught a seven-year tribulation. That idea simply does not appear anywhere in Revelation. It emerged from a very particular reading of Daniel 9, developed in the 1800s, in which dispensational writers “paused” Daniel’s 70th week and moved it thousands of years into the future. No Christian writer, east or west, taught this before the modern period. For the early Christians, the “tribulation” was the reality of discipleship in a world that crucified Jesus and still resists His reign (cf. John 16:33). As Tertullian wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”—not because the Church awaits a future seven years of horror, but because tribulation is the normal environment of faithful witness.
Likewise, the idea of a single end-times Antichrist figure does not come from Revelation either. The only place in Scripture that uses the word “antichrist” is the Johannine epistles, and there John says plainly: “Many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18). It is a category, people and powers opposed to Christ—not a cinematic villain. Revelation’s beast imagery is not about a future political leader waiting in the wings; it is prophetic imagery about oppressive empire, idolatrous power, and systems that stand against the Lamb. Early Christians knew this. Victorinus, the earliest commentator on Revelation (3rd century), wrote, “The beast signifies worldly kingdoms… opposed to the Church” (Commentary on Revelation 13). Not an individual. Not a future dictator. A system. A pattern. A recurring reality in history.
In other words, Revelation is not predicting a future empire in exact detail, it is revealing the spiritual nature of all empires that wage war against the Lamb (Revelation 17:14). And the Lamb wins.
Even the Reformers and later theologians continued this historic reading. Luther was initially suspicious of Revelation, but even he insisted its purpose was to “reveal Christ and testify to Him.” Calvin did not write a commentary on Revelation, but he preached from it confidently, saying, “The sum of all prophecy is that God in Christ reconciles the world to Himself.” John Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, reads Revelation as a symbolic depiction of Christ’s ongoing victory and the Church’s call to endurance. Wesley wrote, “The sum of this book is that God governs all things by His providence, for the good of His people.” He never once suggested an end-times timeline, a seven-year tribulation, or a single Antichrist figure.
It is important to say this gently and pastorally: the dispensational approach is very new. It arose in the 1830s through John Nelson Darby, was popularized through the Scofield Reference Bible, and became mainstream in America only in the 20th century. That does not make dispensationalists bad Christians, many of them love Jesus deeply. But it does mean their interpretive framework is not the standard Christian reading and should not be assumed as normative.
This brings us back to Revelation itself, the text, the imagery, the hope. When we set aside the pressure to decode it, Revelation becomes astonishingly clear: the crucified and risen Jesus is the center of all history. The visions unveil not chaos but order; not fear but faithfulness; not despair but triumph. Revelation tells us that the powers of this world may roar, but they are doomed to collapse. The martyrs may seem forgotten, but they stand before the throne in glory (Revelation 7:9–14). The Church may feel besieged, but she is protected by the Lamb who walks among the lampstands (Revelation 1:12–13). The dragon may rage, but it has already been cast down (Revelation 12:7–10). Babylon may boast, but she is fallen before the word is even spoken (Revelation 18:2). Heaven’s cry is not “fear what is coming,” but “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain” (Revelation 5:12).
Revelation is not announcing that Christ will win someday. It is announcing that Christ has won already.
And because He has won, the Church can be faithful even when the world looks like Rome, even when suffering feels heavy, even when the powers rage. Faithfulness is the call; worship is the weapon; perseverance is the witness. As the author of Hebrews reminds us, “we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Hebrews 12:28).
When we read Revelation in continuity with the early Church, with the Reformers, with Wesley, and with the whole sweep of Christian interpretation before the 19th century, we discover that its message is not a coded warning but a cosmic proclamation: Jesus reigns. The Lamb has conquered. The nations will be healed. And God will dwell with His people.
Revelation is not a puzzle to solve but a vision to behold. And when we behold it, without the unnecessary weight of modern timelines—we find precisely what John intended his hearers to find: courage, clarity, and the unshakeable hope that “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ” (Revelation 11:15).
If you wish to further explore this topic, here are some amazing resources to take a look at:
