Let's Say What We Believe: Why I’m Voting Yes on the 2026 Declaration of Principles

Why I’m Writing This

I want to tell you up front why I’m putting this out there. I’m not writing this to win an argument. I’m not writing it to make anybody feel small. I’m writing it because I love this denomination, and I want to see it thrive long after I’m gone.

I pastor a small congregation of about 25 people on average, mostly mature believers who have loved this faith longer than I’ve been alive. I’ve had the chance to serve in leadership at the district and conference level, and every time I sit in those rooms, I walk away more convinced that we are a people worth fighting for.

I love our heritage. I love that we take death seriously, and we take Scripture seriously enough to say the dead are asleep, not floating around somewhere, because that’s what the Book actually teaches. I love that we still watch the sky for Jesus. I love that we’ve never needed a bishop to tell a local church what to do.

So, understand something before you read another word. I’m not writing this because I’ve lost my love for this church. I’m writing this because I have it.

And I want to say clearly, before I say anything else, that I care deeply about the men and women who see this differently than I do. Some of the godliest people I know are voting no on this DOP. They are not my enemies. They’re my brothers and sisters. I want the best for this denomination, and honestly, so do they. We just disagree about what gets us there.

So, I’m not writing this to flatten anybody. I’m writing it because I think this document is one of the best things to happen to us in a long time, and I want to tell you why, as plainly and as honestly as I know how.

We’ve Been Quiet Long Enough

We’ve said it for 166 years. “No creed but the Bible.” I love that line. I really do. It came out of a people who’d been burned by big institutions telling them what to believe, and I understand why our founders held it so tightly.

But I love the truth more than I love a slogan, and here’s the truth. We already test men before we hand them a pulpit. Every ordination council in this denomination asks a candidate what he believes about God, about Jesus, about salvation, about the church. We already decide, quietly, in a room, behind closed doors, that some answers are acceptable and some are not. We just never wrote any of it down where the whole denomination could see it and agree to it together.

That’s not humility. If we’re honest with each other, that’s just us being scared to say in public what we already say in private. A denomination that won’t say what it believes out loud isn’t being gentle with each other. It’s avoiding the conversation, and avoiding a conversation this important isn’t kindness, it’s cowardice dressed up as manners.

Think about what that silence has actually cost us. It’s cost us pastors ordained under our name who quietly reject the Trinity, while the man preaching next Sunday in the next town over would call that heresy from his own pulpit. It’s cost us seminary students who can’t get a straight answer about what our denomination actually holds on the nature of God, because the paperwork says one thing and the pulpits say twenty different things. It’s cost us clarity on the mission field, where our own pastors need something firmer to hand a new believer than “well, it depends who you ask.”

166 years is long enough to avoid this conversation. I think it’s time we finally had it, together, out loud, on the record.

Good Men Disagree With Me. Let’s Talk About Why.

Now, plenty of men I respect are against this DOP. I’m not going to stand up here and call them the enemy, and I’m not going to pretend their concerns are silly. Some of them have given their whole lives to this church, longer than I’ve been in ministry. Their worry comes from love, not from spite, and it deserves an answer, instead of an eye roll. So let’s walk through it, one at a time.

You might be thinking, this turns our Declaration from something that just described us into something that binds us. You’re right. That’s exactly what it does, and honestly, that’s the whole point. For a hundred years our Declaration just described what most of our pastors happened to believe at the time. Nobody was actually bound to any of it. It was more like a description than a covenant. Sounds nice on paper. But that’s how we ended up with pastors wearing our name who deny the Trinity, standing next to pastors who deny the sleep of the dead, standing next to pastors who deny that the Word is infallible, while all three claim the same denominational badge. Same name on the door. Different doctrine on the inside. A denomination that describes everything and requires nothing isn’t really a denomination. It’s just people who happen to share a mailing list and a building fund. I don’t want us to be a mailing list. I want us to be a denomination that can finish each other’s sentences on the gospel.

Maybe you’re also thinking, this is going to crush our congregational government. It won’t, and I want to walk through why. Your church still calls your own pastor. Your church still runs your own business meetings, sets your own budget, and disciplines your own members. Your church still answers to Christ and nobody else, and no bylaw on this earth changes that. What this actually asks is simpler than people think. If your church wants to carry the Advent Christian name, share in Advent Christian fellowship, and send and receive Advent Christian pastors, then your church agrees, on paper, with what we say we already believe. That’s not somebody in Charlotte taking away your freedom. That’s a covenant between churches who trust each other enough to say what they hold in common. Every healthy church body has some agreement about who’s actually in, and who’s just visiting.

And maybe some of the wording throws you, words like “eternally begotten.” I get it. It sounds unfamiliar, maybe even a little heavy for a plain-spoken people like us. But we already use plenty of words the Bible itself never uses, to explain plainly what the Bible clearly teaches. We say Trinity. We say conditional immortality. Open your concordance and try to find either phrase printed in your Bible. You won’t find them, not once. We use those words because they say clearly and carefully what Scripture teaches all through its pages, from Genesis to Revelation. “Eternally begotten” is doing that same job for who Jesus is, guarding against the ancient error that Jesus was created at some point instead of eternally being God’s own Son. The church has used language like this since the days of Nicaea, not because Scripture is unclear about Jesus, but because Christians keep finding new ways to muddy what Scripture says plainly. Careful words aren’t compromise. Careful words are just how you keep from going fuzzy on Jesus when somebody starts twisting the plain reading of John chapter one.

There’s a Fear Going Around, and I Want to Meet It Head On

I’ve heard the newest worry making its way through our churches, and I want to take it seriously instead of brushing past it like it doesn’t matter. Here’s the claim, as best I understand it. The proposed bylaws would make the Statement of Faith and the 2026 DOP the standard for membership. Not someday, down the road, after a long transition. Right away, the moment the gavel comes down at Ridgecrest. And that means, some are saying, we’d be torching 166 years of non-creedalism in a single afternoon, and walking out the door holding two brand new creeds in our hands.

Let me be straight with you, because you deserve straight talk and no fluff. The part about the bylaws is true. Article I, Section 2 of the proposed bylaws does tie membership, for regions, conferences, churches, and associate ministries, to affirming both the Statement of Faith and the Declaration of Principles. Article VIII does the same thing for our ministers. And yes, if the delegates approve it, it takes effect that day.

But here’s where I don’t follow that fear all the way to a “no” vote, and I want to lay out why in full.

First, that membership standard is not a test of your personal salvation. It’s not a hoop for the widow in your third pew, or the teenager who just got baptized last spring. It’s a standard for churches, conferences, and ministers who choose to be formally, officially, on paper, part of this denomination’s cooperative fellowship. Nobody’s showing up at your potluck to check your paperwork or quiz your grandmother on the eternal generation of the Son.

Second, “immediate” doesn’t have to mean “overnight and without mercy.” The standard would take legal effect right away, and I’ve already told you that’s real. But how existing pastors and churches walk that road, what grace looks like, what a fair review process looks like for a man ordained thirty years ago under the old standard, that is exactly the kind of thing our delegates can ask about, and should ask about, from the floor at Ridgecrest. That’s a good reason to show up, stand at the microphone, and press the question until you get a clear answer. It is not a good reason to kill the whole document before anybody even gets a hearing.

There’s a separate resolution on the table too, written just for this exact worry, called the Enduring Resolution for the 2026 Advent Christian Ministers. It says plainly that some of our already-credentialed ministers may not be able to affirm this new DOP in good conscience, and it says the General Conference is grateful for their faithful service anyway. So here’s what it actually does. If you’re already a credentialed minister right now, before this DOP ever passes, and you can affirm the Statement of Faith and every Enduring Resolution that came before this one, your good standing stays exactly where it is, even if you can’t affirm everything in the new DOP. Nobody’s coming for your credentials the day after Ridgecrest. All it asks is that you report your points of difference to your ministerial committee by the end of 2027, that you’re upfront with your people when you preach or teach on those specific points where you differ from the denomination, and that everybody on every side of this treats each other with the same charity they’d want shown to them.

Third, let’s call this what it actually is, and not what fear makes it feel like. The Statement of Faith isn’t new. We’ve lived under it, taught it, and organized around it since 2017. The Declaration of Principles isn’t new either. We’ve had one since 1900, and we rewrote the whole thing whole cloth once before, back then too, without the sky falling. So we’re not conjuring two creeds out of thin air in one afternoon at Ridgecrest. We’re finally asking our own denomination to formally stand behind two documents most of us already say, on any given Sunday, that we believe.

Fourth, there’s a real difference between a creed and a confession, and I think that difference gets lost in the heat of the moment. Our people ran from bodies that put a man’s document above God’s own Word, and they were right to run. That’s not what’s sitting on the table in front of us. Both of these documents say plainly, in their own words, that the Bible, and the Bible alone, is our final and only infallible rule of faith and practice. A confession that bows to Scripture is not the same animal as a creed that rules over it. One is a fence that protects the flock. The other is a cage that traps it.

So if that fear has got a hold of you, I understand it, and I don’t think less of you for feeling it. That’s the same instinct that’s kept us from real creedalism this long, and it’s worth listening to. I just don’t think it should end with you staying home in August. I think it should end with you at Ridgecrest, in person, asking every hard question you’ve got, with your eyes wide open and your Bible in your hand.

What We Owe the Next Man God Calls

Here’s what concerns me more than almost anything else in ministry right now, and it should concern you too. Nearly six out of every ten of our pastors are past 60 years old. Only about three out of a hundred are under 35. I feel that math every time I stand in front of my own congregation, most of them faithful folks who’ve walked with the Lord longer than I’ve been alive, and I wonder who’s going to shepherd churches like mine in twenty years. Our own pipeline is running dry, and every pastor I talk to knows it.

That means the next wave of Advent Christian pastors might not come from our own homes, and our own youth groups. Some of them will come from outside our tradition entirely, men who never sat through a covered-dish supper where somebody explained the sleep of the dead over potato salad. They’ll show up hungry for truth, never having heard the words “conditional immortality” until the day a stranger finally hands them a document that says it plainly.

So what are we going to hand that man? A hundred-year-old paper nobody’s actually required to believe, with a wink that says “we don’t really enforce this part, don’t worry about it”? That’s not a foundation to build a life of ministry on. That’s fog, and fog doesn’t hold anybody up when the storms come, and they will come.

Right now, today, our Advent Christian pastors across the waters are carrying this gospel to the Hadzabe and the Datoga tribes in Tanzania. They need a clear message in their hands and in their mouths, not a mumbled one, not a “well, some of us believe this and some of us believe that.” The nations don’t need our confusion. They need our conviction.

If we want conditional immortality, the sleep of the dead, and the hope of Christ’s soon return to outlast every one of us sitting in these pews right now, we have to say plainly what we believe, write it down, and ask our pastors to actually stand on it, generation after generation, long after our names are forgotten.

Paul Already Settled This for Us

I am currently preaching through Ephesians, and Paul won’t let me duck this question, no matter how many times I try. Right now, I’m sitting in Ephesians chapter 3, preaching on the mystery of the gospel and the calling of the minister, and it keeps circling back to the same thing. Paul says God’s plan, hidden for ages, is now being made known through the church, so that even the powers in heavenly places would see the wisdom of God on display in us. That’s a high calling for a body of believers. It’s hard to display much wisdom to watching angels when we can’t agree, in writing, on who Jesus actually is.

Then in chapter 4, Paul tells us Christ gave the church pastors and teachers “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God.” That’s not “let’s just get along and avoid hard topics at Thanksgiving.” That’s unity built on what we actually know and believe about Jesus, together, in agreement. Paul wanted a church that could say its convictions out loud and stand shoulder to shoulder because of them, not in spite of them.

That’s exactly what this DOP is reaching for. It doesn’t try to say everything that could possibly be said about God. It says what has to be said, the load-bearing walls of the faith, and leaves room to breathe on everything else. It stays open-handed on final punishment, so both annihilationists and traditionalists can still preach from the same pulpit, side by side, in good conscience. But it draws a clear, firm line on the deity of Christ, the authority of Scripture, and salvation by grace through faith alone, because those are not the walls you leave open.

That’s not us drifting from our heritage. That’s us finally being able to explain our heritage, out loud and without faltering, to a watching world, and to whoever God calls next.

Where I Stand

This document isn’t perfect. Nobody on the task force would tell you it is, and I wouldn’t ask you to pretend otherwise. But I refuse to let the search for a perfect document cost us a faithful one.

Good men and women disagree with me on this, people I love and respect. I’ve tried in this whole article to take their concerns seriously instead of waving them off or making them sound foolish. They’re not foolish. They love this denomination as much as I do, and I believe that with my whole heart.

I still believe, After all of it, this is the clearest, most honest statement of who we are that Advent Christians have ever put on paper in 166 years. When the vote comes at Ridgecrest, I’m voting yes.

I ask that you study it for yourself and don’t just take my word or anybody else’s. Wrestle with the real objections, not just the loudest ones online. Show up in Black Mountain, and ask your questions on that floor, face to face, the way this deserves.

And however the vote goes, let’s remember to continue to love each other when it’s over.

Let’s PRESS ON together, with a name we can finally say out loud without flinching. 166 years of silence is enough. Let’s say what we believe.