Celebrating (Cautiously) Our New Creed!
INTRODUCTION
My name is Luke Copeland, and I am a creedalist.
I am also an Advent Christian, the son of two ordained Advent Christians, a pastor of two (so far) Advent Christian churches, and the father of six children who will be raised in the traditional Advent Christian doctrines of soul sleep, annihilationism, and the imminence of Christ’s soon return. Furthermore, I am a teacher of the Bible as the sole infallible rule of Christian faith and practice.
Moreover, I am a rescued and redeemed child of God, saved by grace through faith from my sins, and from the everlasting punishment that I deserve because of them. Let me begin by saying that I, as a Christian, an Advent Christian, a pastor, and a father, am overjoyed by the stand that our denomination took last week!
DISCLAIMER
Lest any opponents of the changes should read this far, please allow me to sincerely express my condolences. Though I disagree with you on a fundamental level, I believe in the genuineness of your hearts, and I empathize with the sense of loss and disappointment that you are feeling right now. Furthermore, for what it’s worth, I will not spend this whole article gloating or singing the praises of these changes. In fact, despite my support for them, I actually share some of your concerns about the dangers which lie ahead of us. In other words, the goal of this article is not to rub your noses in it.
However, I must begin with some words of joy and gratitude, for to do otherwise would be to violate my own conscience. I am grateful to the delegate body for courageously “contending for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). I am grateful to the men who sacrificed a great deal of time and energy to the drafting and subsequent defense of these changes, and to their churches and families for empowering them to do so. Most of all, I am grateful to the Lord Jesus Christ for his grace to our humble, small, quirky denomination, and for his long-suffering patience with us, as we took the long way around to this point over the last century.
So, yes, before I am done, I will express some words of caution. But first, let us begin with some words of affirmation and encouragement, for I am convinced that we have good reason to rejoice!
A CREED AT LAST!
Though I was born an Advent Christian, from 2008 to 2018 I spent a decade wandering as a prodigal son. I bounced from Presbyterian to Baptist to non-denominational churches, learning much about God and his beautifully diverse people along the way.
But in 2017, the Advent Christian people did something that caught my attention. At their Triennial meeting, they affirmed the Biblical doctrines of Jesus’ divinity and God’s triune nature! Though I had been raised in those crucial doctrines, they had never been formally recognized on a denominational level. Within a year of that decision, I was pastoring an Advent Christian church. One more prodigal had returned!*
(*To be clear, I am speaking metaphorically. I am absolutely NOT suggesting that salvation can only be found in Advent Christianity, or that the gospel is not believed and preached by the other churches and denominations that I have served, for it certainly is.)
However, as I came to know the Advent Christian pastors and churches around me, I was forced to come to an unsettling conclusion: we had taken only half a stand. No doubt, we had overwhelmingly (80+%) affirmed the essential truths of the Christian faith. But we had not yet taken the more painful and equally important step. We still needed to draw hard theological lines by establishing a mechanism of enforcement.
CHRISTIAN CHARACTER AND TESTS OF FELLOWSHIP
Here, I must pause to defend the very idea of theological enforcement, which is anathema to many of our forefathers, and even a few of our contemporary Advent Christian brethren. First, let me loudly and clearly pronounce what I do NOT mean: inquisition. I have no interest in theological witch hunts, nor would I find it the least bit appropriate for any ecclesiastical body (conference, region, etc.) to bind the conscience of any believer or dictate the beliefs of any local church.
However, I am very interested in knowing who we are. And it is impossible to establish any clear definition without some measure of exclusion. We must have a way to discern who is in and who is out, not of the Kingdom (which is left to God’s perfectly righteous judgment), but of the Advent Christian Church as a national body. Think of it this way: imagine that you join a Tuesday night bowling club, and that on your first night, you bring your bow and arrow and taxidermied deer for target practice. Your fellow bowling club members have no right to tell you not to practice your archery. But they have EVERY right to tell you not to practice your archery in the bowling alley! If you’re going to be part of the bowling club, you will be expected to bowl. If you choose not to bowl, that’s your prerogative, but you will, by definition, be excluded from the club. On August 20th, 2026, our archery club changed to a bowling club. That means no more bows and arrows.
More importantly, the reason that I believe in doctrinal standards is because I am convinced that the Bible demands them! Although Christian character is indeed an essential test of fellowship (1 John 4:20, 1 Corinthians 5:11, etc.), it is not by any means the only one. In Galatians 1:8-9 and 2 John 7, the Apostles Paul and John both excommunicate false teachers for their doctrine. In other words, the catchphrase “Christian character is the only test of fellowship” is antithetical to the Biblical testimony! Furthermore, “no creed but the Bible” also falls far short of the Bible’s own prescribed tests of fellowship. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, the Holy Spirit of God, through the pen of the Apostle Paul, identifies and exalts particular doctrines as “of first importance.” Please don’t misunderstand me, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful” (2 Timothy 3:16). But this does not mean that all Biblical doctrine takes equal priority. In Romans 14, Paul makes it very clear that it is not wrong to eat meat. Yet in the very same chapter he exhorts the believers in Rome not to eat meat in the presence of “weaker” brothers who choose to abstain. “Hold the phone, Paul,” you may think to yourself, “which one is it?” BOTH doctrines (the “carnivore” doctrine and the “love your brothers” doctrine) are Biblical, yet one takes priority over the other. Some theologians call this “theological triage.” And clearly, this is not merely some clever theological device concocted centuries after the death of the Apostles, for the Apostles themselves make use of it in the uniquely inspired Word of God!
THE VALUE OF RELATIONSHIP
Of course, now that we have established this theological standard of fellowship and the means to enforce it, I imagine that some of you are fearful of what it will mean for your relationships with churches and pastors who disagree with it. I encourage you that just because they leave (or are asked to leave) the denomination, that does NOT mean that you can no longer talk to them!
Steve, my associate pastor, sets an excellent example in this regard. Though he himself is trinitarian, he speaks kindly, openly, and honestly with non-trinitarians whenever he has the opportunity. He speaks the truth, and shares the gospel with them. He has never given them the cold shoulder, shouted them down, or committed assault and battery upon them with his enormous John MacArthur study Bible.
You can still talk to people who end up outside of the denomination. But I urge you to consider whether you love them enough to disagree with them. I am not willing to say that every non-Trinitarian is lost in their sins, because I am in no place to make that judgment. But the Bible makes it very clear that you can know, study, and trust the Scriptures and yet miss out on the saving gospel of the Messiah (John 5:39-40)! Relationships with other pastors and churches are precious gifts from God, but none of them are more precious than our relationship with the Savior Himself, the God-man Jesus Christ.
HIS PLANS ARE HIGHER
Having spoken my heartfelt affirmation of the denominational changes, I will now shift toward my cautions and concerns. I shall begin them with a statement that may surprise some of you: I am glad that the 2026 Declaration of Principles failed.
To be clear, I voted in favor of it. The reason I did so is because politics (yes, even church politics) is the art of making the best bad choice. Once more, let me clarify: I am not saying that the 2026 DOP is a bad document (it is among the finest theological statements ever produced among our ranks), nor am I saying that its authors are bad men (I personally know them to be godly men of outstanding moral character). What I mean by “bad” is simply that it went too far. It defined as essential some very fine and technical theological points that I do not think belong in that category.
However, as I confessed earlier, I am a creedalist. So, given the choice between an overly rigorous theological standard and none whatsoever, I must choose the former. However, once the 2026 DOP failed, God opened the door for another standard of fellowship, one that was admittedly less academically rigorous, but also one that was shorter, simpler, and much clearer to the average delegate (including me). This is not to say I feel the work is done. With its statements on sabbatarianism and pacifism, the old Declaration of Principles clearly no longer represents the beliefs of most Advent Christians. It still needs to be replaced, and the sooner the better. However, I hope that the definitive failure of the 2026 DOP will teach us some valuable lessons, and it is to those that I now turn to in this article’s penultimate section.
THREE CAUTIONS
I plead especially with our Northeastern brothers to honor our differences on non-essential theological matters. Not everything that you can pass on a conference or Regional level is going to pass denominationally. We are an extremely diverse body in almost every way, and we should “outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10). If I had it my way, I would establish a 1:1 sugar:tea ratio for all Advent Christian sweet tea. But most of y’all don’t know a daggum thing about sweet tea ratios, so until you Yankees someday taste the heavenly sweet tea and see the light, we’re just going to have to let you be wrong, and agree to disagree. I acknowledge and appreciate the compromises you have already made, but I hope you will become willing to make more, not out of weakness or convenience, but out of a genuine desire to unite our dying denomination, a desire that I am certain burns in your hearts already.
I plead with the leaders who will populate the newly formed General Conference Standards Committee to practice special care and patience as you seek to diligently perform the duties which our delegate body has assigned to you. The task you are undertaking is unprecedented in a century and a half of Advent Christian governance. This should both thrill and humble you. Fear and trembling are highly recommended, if not required. I pray that God may grant you both grace and truth, both tenderness and conviction, as you faithfully labor to purify the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 5:13).
Lastly, I plead with the Advent Christian people to take responsibility for the articulation and defense of your own beliefs, both individually and in your local churches. Even if every measure had failed, I still would have been encouraged by this Triennial, simply because we are finally having the hard conversations! But we do not have time to pause those conversations, only resuming them every three years for a few short days. Much concern has been expressed about top-down transformation; I share that concern, mostly because I am confident that it will not work. Unless we are praying, listening, teaching, serving, evangelizing, discipling, and working out these disagreements on a local level, no amount of denominational business can reverse our current death spiral.
TWO WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL
In the interest of hearing the bad news before the good, let’s start with the funeral. An era of Advent Christianity has come to an end. Though I am glad to be rid of our noncreedalism, I openly and unashamedly acknowledge that this is a sea change for us as a people. Furthermore, this course correction comes fraught with danger. Ecclesiastical authority is risky, for we are all sinners, desperately wicked, and none of us is immune to the twin seductions of pride and self-interest. But take heart! Because while the road ahead may be perilous, the road behind was no less so. God has graciously killed our longstanding relativism, and although there is a pit on the right side of the road, when I look back, it seems to me that we have been careening for generations into the pit on the left side whilst imagining our course as “balanced.”
The first wedding I should mention is between the mind and the heart. Advent Christians have a rich and beautiful history of rigorous Biblical study. Names like Dean, Collins, and Hewitt come to mind, just to name a few. We also have a wonderful legacy of deep and lasting relationships. “They’ll know we are Christians by our love,” and praise be to God, we really love each other. Yet somehow, despite their mutual presence, these disciplines seem to have become bifurcated, perhaps even divorced. The God Who thinks and loves, however, wants to make us whole. He exhorts us to love him with all of our hearts AND minds! Theology and brotherhood must intertwine, lest we become cold and calloused theological nitpickers on the one hand, or “peace at all costs” compromisers on the other. Grace and truth embrace in the person of Christ, and His Spirit beckons us to reconcile these seemingly competing (but in reality, complementary) halves of the Christian life. Put simply, theological standards and lovingkindness do not have to be enemies. Instead, they can be the two legs upon which we walk; we no longer need to hop, or even hobble!
The second wedding is between the word and the Spirit. Though I am a far cry from anything even resembling a respectable academic, I do consider myself a thinker. I love to consider, contemplate, discuss, and debate the things of God. But Paul exhorts us to pray in both mind and Spirit (1 Corinthians 14:15). Therefore, let us not neglect soul-wrenching petition for the sake of mind-melting pontification; we cannot think our way out of this. Instead, may we all lift up desperate prayers for Spirit-empowered revival to God, not forgetting the greatest and most important wedding of all, the one soon to be celebrated between Jesus Christ and His bride, the Church. “Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready” (Revelation 19:7). The bridegroom will be here before we know it, so let’s get ready!
Your native son,
-Luke
P.S. Although you are more than welcome to exchange ideas in the comments below, I confess that my online presence is hit-or-miss depending on my fluctuating responsibilities to my family and my church. So, whether you are a non-Trinitarian, a non-creedalist, or the sort of Trinitarian who knows what “monothelitism” is and sees it as essential, please feel free to email me at lukecopeland21@gmail.com, and I will carefully read and respond to your critiques and questions, as time and energy allow, should He tarry. Maranatha!