23 April 2023
I've openly confessed that what I teach is part of the Radix Fidem covenant path. It's been called a movement by some, but I don't think it qualifies. The definition of "movement" includes this: "a group of people with a common ideology who try together to achieve certain general goals". Our community has no goals, in the sense that we aren't trying to change anything except ourselves.
We do expect a move of the Holy Spirit to bring people into our community, but that's a matter of divine promise. I'm not trying to draw new members. All I'm doing is explaining some aspects of what we teach so you can decide if it sounds like what God is doing in your soul. But there is no leader of Radix Fidem. It's not a religion or organization; it's an approach to faith. It's what we call "meta-religion" -- it's a religious discussion about what religion should be. And it's only a discussion.
Granted, there is a virtual community organized under the name at the Radix Fidem forum, but that's not Radix Fidem itself. In other words, the community belongs to the label, but the label does not belong to the community. It was just a handy label nobody else was using at the time, so we adopted it. But there's nothing to stop anyone from legally hijacking it and taking it away from us, since it's critical to the whole concept that we don't engage the secular legal system. God is our Protector.
The label is Latin for "root of faith". We were hoping folks would get the idea that we were stepping outside the whole system of organized religion. So far as I know, most of us were at one time evangelical Protestants (lots of Baptists), but we have been striving to restore something that predates all the usual labels. We want to get back to the roots of faith itself. So, we renounce all our previous associations. We deny being Protestant or Catholic or Orthodox or anything else. But we lack the arrogance to imagine that we are God's definition of generic Christians, as if it should be self-evident to everyone else that they are all wrong. So, we picked out a label that would help folks recognize what we are doing isn't part of any established mainline organization.
Given that all of us are geographically scattered, we have only a quasi-community. To the degree we have a community, there is someone who acts rather like an elder just to provide moral covering. The real idea is that at some point in the future, each of the members would find themselves in a local community where they live, and develop their own covenant family structure, in accordance with their spiritual gifts. Right now, my church is my wife and I. We worship every Sunday morning, typically in our front room. We've had others join us in the past, but they have all moved to other places, and a few have died. And if this is all we have when we ourselves die, that's God's concern. We shall be faithful to our calling and mission.
You cannot think of me as your pastor or elder unless you live close enough to attend our worship. Communicating with me online is not a substitute for fellowship. You are the seed of another community wherever you are. Thus, our chatter is collegial; we are friends. I'm not your covering. I am at most just somewhere down the same road in front of you. I can talk about where I am, but you aren't here unless you are here in the other sense. You are still standing before God on your own. I cannot be your covering unless I can put my hands on you.
I can pray for you all day long, but not as your covenant covering. Once we meet and you get to know me in the flesh, that can change. It's a spiritual principle: Without the physical presence, there is no merging of moral dominion. Your heart cannot recognize me as a fellow servant of the Lord unless we have a physical resonance of heartwaves. Yeah, your heart has its own energy field and is a sensing organ. It has its own processing capabilities separate from the brain.
Our interactions online cannot substitute for that. We can pretend to some degree, but it's just not the same.
Radix Fidem is just a batch of ideas, not people. If we were to meet together in the flesh and form a real covenant community, it would have a different name, or maybe none at all. It could be any number of generic labels like "my church" or "our covenant family" or whatever. As I've already said, and will keep reminding you: Until we build real-world iterations of a covenant community, we have no idea what the Covenant looks like on the ground. That requires physical contact, and a common interaction with the local context. A church is a witness to the context in which it exists.
Pray that your covenant family can be born as soon as the Lord pleases.
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