A Word to the Reader from the Faith Homes

You may have arrived at this page carefully. Perhaps you cleared your browser history to get here, or you are reading late at night, or you have told no one. If so, I want you to know that this was anticipated, and that you are welcome, and that nothing on this site will ask you for your name.

I also want to name something you may be feeling right now, because naming it is half of understanding it. It is fear. Not the reverent fear of God, which Scripture calls the beginning of wisdom, but a different fear: the fear that by reading, by questioning, by merely entertaining a doubt, you are stepping off the path to Zion. That somewhere a ledger has noted this moment. That the consecration you have labored toward, or the standing of your family, or your place among the saints, is now at risk because of what your eyes are doing on this page.

I grew up around that fear. I have sat with people who carried it for decades. And I want to tell you the single most important thing this site's historical section establishes about it: that fear has an author, and the author was not God.

The fear was installed

If you read the historical documentation on this site, you will find, graded source by source, the record of where the doctrines that govern your fear actually came from. You will find that the founder of your mission, Pastor Paul, was a married man who ordained married men, and never made celibacy a wall around Zion. You will find that the tiered Zion, the mandatory consecration, the binding exclusive teachings, and the machinery of standing and certification were formulated afterward, by his co-founder, in the years after 1945. And you will find what the mission itself concluded about that man in 1962, and how it chose silence afterward, keeping his doctrines while erasing his name.

I do not tell you this to make you angry, and I ask you not to stop at anger if it comes. I tell you this for one reason only: a fear that was installed by men, at a known time, for reasons you can now read, is not the voice of God in your conscience. It only learned to imitate that voice. You have perhaps spent years unable to tell the two apart. The history exists on this site so that you can begin to tell them apart.

What the history does not prove

I want to be honest with you about the limits of that history, more honest than a critic would need to be, because you deserve the whole truth and not a persuasion.

The failures of men do not decide doctrine. David sinned grievously, and the Psalms remain the word of God. If the only thing this site showed you was that certain founders fell, you would be right to answer, as many do, that God's work continues despite fallen men. That answer is not foolish. History can tell you that a doctrine had a human author with human motives. It cannot tell you whether the doctrine is true. Only Scripture can do that.

So the history section of this site is not the argument. It is only the key that unlocks the room where the argument can be heard. Its whole purpose is to lower the cost of reading, to show you that the penalty you were taught to fear was written by a man in Colombo and not by God in heaven, so that you can open the Scriptures with steady hands.

The question underneath the question

For years, the question you were given was this: What will I lose if I fall short? Zion for the fully consecrated, lesser glories for the rest, and outer darkness for the one who leaves. Every sermon, every convention, every white garment arranged itself around that question.

The manuscript on this site asks you to consider that Scripture asks a different question entirely: What has God already secured, and for whom, and can it fail?

Notice the tense of Hebrews 12:22: "But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem." Not "ye may attain," not "the worthiest among you shall be admitted." Are come. Already. The apostle writes to ordinary believers, married and unmarried, slave and free, and tells them Zion is their present standing, not their distant wage. Either he was wrong, or the ladder you have been climbing was built in front of a door that was already open.

That is the claim the manuscript examines: that salvation rests on the sovereign grace and election of God, purposed before the foundation of the world, accomplished at the cross, and kept by His power and not yours. "My sheep hear my voice... and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand" (John 10:27-28). If that is true, then no man can certify your standing, and no man can revoke it, and the fear you have carried was never holding up your salvation. It was only holding up an institution.

How to read what follows

Do not take my word for any of it. The Bereans "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11), and they were called noble for it. Read the manuscript with your Bible open. Every claim in it is cross-referenced to the Scriptures so you can check each one. Bring your hardest objections; a section of this site exists precisely to hear them. If the doctrine of sovereign grace cannot survive your questions, it does not deserve your trust.

Take your time. There is no altar call on this website, no register, no worker who will visit your home. If what the manuscript says is true, then the God who chose His people before the foundation of the world is not wringing His hands over how long you take to read. His elect cannot be lost by reading slowly, and they cannot be kept by fear.

You were told that questioning was the first step away from Zion. Consider, as you begin, the possibility that it is the first step toward the Zion you were already given.

"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." (2 Timothy 1:7)

Begin with the manuscript here, or read the historical documentation first. Both doors are open. Neither one is watching.