What I believe

I believe in the Bible. I read it as the word of God, and I read it through Jesus — because if I am going to call myself a Christian, then the clearest thing God has ever said about himself is a person, not a principle.

Jesus

Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh — fully God and fully human. He lived the life we do not live, died the death we deserved, rose bodily from the grave, and is alive now. He is not one option among several. He is the way, the truth, and the life.

Scripture

The Bible is inspired by God and trustworthy in what it teaches. I read it the way the Anabaptist tradition does — in community, all of it together, with Jesus as the centre that holds the rest in place. Verses pulled out to justify cruelty are being read against the One they point to.

Salvation and discipleship

I am saved by grace through faith in Christ. Nothing I bring earns it. But I do not believe in a faith that leaves a life untouched: the Anabaptists were called the radical Reformation because they insisted that following Jesus is meant to be visible — in how you spend money, how you treat an enemy, whether you tell the truth when it costs you. Faith is a gift. Discipleship is what you do with it.

Baptism

I hold to believer's baptism — a person's own confession of faith, made when they are old enough to make it, rather than something done to a baby on their behalf. It is a burial and a rising: the old life left behind, a new one walked into.

War and peace

I am not a pacifist, and I am not a conscientious objector. I served in the Marines, and I am not going to sand that off my story to fit more neatly inside a tradition I admire.

What I take from the peace churches is not a political platform but a way of reading Jesus: that his teaching is meant to be obeyed and not merely admired, and that the church's first loyalty is to him rather than to any power that would use his name. I have not resolved every question about war, and I am not going to pretend on a website that I have.

The church

The church is a body, not an audience — people bound to each other, accountable to each other, sharing bread and burdens. I have been carried by that kind of community when I could not carry myself: a Mennonite family who took in a seventeen-year-old stranger and made her eat dinner at the table. That is what the church is for.

Faith and freedom

Faith cannot be coerced, and nobody should be argued or legislated into the kingdom. I believe in liberty of conscience — the Anabaptists were drowned and burned for it — and in a church that keeps its own conscience instead of borrowing the state's.

Communion and foot washing

I take communion as a shared meal among people who are actually reconciled to one another, and I honour foot washing as the picture Jesus gave of a life spent serving — the leader kneeling with a towel. Some congregations practise it as an ordinance; I have seen what it does to a room either way.

Simple living

I believe in holding what I have loosely: plain living, generosity, and caring for the poor as a matter of obedience rather than charity. Somebody once gave me two years of their life for nothing. I have been trying to pay it back ever since.

Hope

Christ is coming again to make all things new. The grave is not the end of the story, and the suffering I have lived through is not the last word about me. Until then I keep singing, because the people of God have always sung on the way.