May 7, 2026 Show with Lee Anne Ferguson on “Christ Rescued Me! ….from the Church of Christ”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this seventh day of May, 2026.

Before I introduce to you my guest for the day and our theme, I want to remind everybody to mark down on their calendars a special interview that I am having next Thursday, May 14th, here on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, with the lead actor in the new movie A Great Awakening, which is the story of the life and legacy of 18th century revival preacher George Whitefield, as seen through the eyes of founding father Benjamin Franklin.

And Jonathan Blair, who portrays George Whitefield in this film, is my guest Thursday of next week. So I hope that you mark that down on your calendar. I hope that you listen and send in questions, and I'm looking forward to it.

Many of you may know, and many of you may not know, that I was raised Roman Catholic, and the first group of professing Christians to instill within me an interest, a fascination, and even a love for reading the Scriptures and learning about it, was the Church of Christ, a specific Church of Christ congregation initially, in Nassau County, Long Island, New York, where my brother Bob was a member at that time, with his wife at that time.

And they became a group of people that I grew to love and respect and enjoy their company. But I soon, or perhaps not very soon, but after years of visiting them, I became uneasy with the extreme exclusivism that they had of being the only Christians on the planet earth.

And I don't mean that they believe that that congregation featured the only Christians, but their group, their movement, which is also known as the 19th century Stone Campbell Restoration Movement. But I was later, by God's providence, led to a Reformed Baptist church, where I was eventually baptized and have been a believer in the doctrines of sovereign grace for decades now.

But I do want to make it clear that I do have a special place in my heart for the Church of Christ, and I do owe them a debt of gratitude for being the place where I first fell in love with the Scriptures.

But having said that, wherever error is found, especially when it's very serious, it needs to be pointed out, and that is actually an act of love, to point out the errors in someone's beliefs and practices, especially in the sphere of religion, where most of society thinks that is the one place where we should not be critical of one another.

But that is the most important place to be critical, and of course, we must always do so with humility and grace and love. And we are going to be doing that today. Our guest today is Lee Ann Ferguson, a former member of the aforementioned 19th-century Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, who discovered and embraced the doctrines of sovereign grace, who will address the theme of her book, Christ Rescued Me from the Church of Christ.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Lee Ann Ferguson.

Thank you so much, Chris, for having me on. It's an honor. I'm not much of a talker. I grew up very quiet, but the Lord compels me by His love, and the love He's given me for His people, wherever they are, and I know they're scattered, and some of them, I truly believe, are still in the Church of Christ of the Stone-Campbell Movement.

And just to let our listeners know, you can look up more about Lee Ann Ferguson and her ministry at christrescuedme .com, christrescuedme .com, and we'll be repeating that later on in the program. Well, it would probably be helpful for our listeners to have a definition of who the Church of Christ is, and then we'll get into your specific details of your own testimony of how you became involved with them and so on.

One of the things that I've learned over the years—and by the way, I still do have friends in the Church of Christ in a number of different places in the United States, and I've come to recognize that they are not monolithic.

In fact, the more I research their history, I've discovered they were never monolithic. It's interesting that, from what I understand about the creation of the movement, it started primarily with Thomas and Alexander Campbell, immigrants from Ireland to the United States in the 19th century.

They had a vision and a mission to bring about unity amongst different Christians from different backgrounds and denominations and so on, and they wound up really creating a movement of division. And the division even began amongst themselves, and they would have infighting and have been having infighting for decades, for over a century, in regard to things that many Christians would find not only to be nonessential issues, secondary and tertiary issues, but even nonsensical issues.

One thing that comes to mind immediately—I've told this story on the program before—but I was visiting my late brother in the nursing home, and I happened to hear some beautiful acapella hymn singing going on, and I excused myself from my brother's room and went to look for this music, this singing, and found a group of folks in the cafeteria singing acapella.

And I asked the man, after he was finished, the man who was leading the singing, what church he was connected with. And he said, the Shippensburg Church of Christ, and he said it rather rudely, which surprised me.

And I said to him, oh, it just so happens I'm going to a Bible conference at the Carlisle Church of Christ on Six-Day Creationism, and do you plan to be there? He says, I don't know anything about it.

So when I asked the minister of the Carlisle Church of Christ, how come the guy leading a singing ministry over there at the nursing home where my brother is, how come he doesn't know anything about your conference on creationism?

And he says, oh, they don't want anything to do with us. And I said, why is that? Because we have a kitchen in our building. And so you realize that when you are believing that your being right with God has so much to do with your own performance and things that you do and do not do, it can reach levels of insanity just like that.

But if you could give us your own description and definition of the Church of Christ.

Yes. By usurp of that title, it disguises itself under the title of Church of Christ, but the Stone Campbell Restoration Movement that started in the early 1800s also sprouted other heretical cults, the American cults, the LDS, JWS, SDAs, etc., which speaks volumes.

History reveals that this counter-reformation, the root of it was Armenian, anti-Trinitarian, sacramental salvation, and it was popularized and disseminated by the Restorationists. And of course, it's Romanism-like.

And it also sparked, of course, the one that Pentecostals came along later, but it paved the way, I think, even for that. And all of these false doctrines, these unique doctrines that they came up with, kind of the original false doctrine, though, was this, they called it the ancient gospel.

Now, all that that is, is it's just work salvation. The main problem they had was with unconditional election. And so, when you want to have conditional election, you want God to judge you based on your own works, then you're going to have to come up with another gospel besides the gospel of grace.

This whole movement was the result of a devastating deviation from the doctrines of grace. And when cults center their theology on the false notion that God has done everything he can, now the rest is up to you, then their application of salvation will vary.

And this is why the ZOC came up with its new laws of salvation. And it's a type of hyper-distanciational two-gospel heresy. And, but if you word it that way, they will deny it because they don't get behind the pulpit and say, we preach hyper-distanciational two-gospel heresy.

They're not going to say that. And they're not even going to say that they teach new terms of salvation unless you bring up the thief on the cross. They only bring up their different terms, language, when you bring up the thief on the cross, which is very interesting because I didn't realize it all those years when I was in the church of Christ that this was what was being taught.

And it kind of reminds me of the conversations I've been having lately with the JWs, you know, because they asked me, they came back around after 20 some years and they said, why did you put studying with this?

I said, well, we came to a torque in the road because you all believe in a second chance after you die. And they're like, oh, no, we don't believe in a second chance. And sure enough, even on their website, it says this is not a second chance.

It's just another opportunity. OK, so you see how they worded that differently? OK, so that's what the church of Christ does. They word things differently. And I told the JWs, I can tell that when I say the word second chance, you're triggered.

But if I say another opportunity, you're OK with it. But it means basically the same thing. So there's this language barrier that has to be scaled when you're dealing with these of these false religions.

And I know it's triggering if they hear the words false religion, false gospel, cult. And when I'm on a personal level with them one by one, one on one, I don't hope that way. OK, but when I have to come out against this religion, I have to come out strong.

And it's not my natural disposition to do so. I'm just going to tell you that right now. I'm a very quiet person. I'm a very private person. And for me to have to come out with this, you know, it has to be pretty major because I realize I am sitting on information that people do not know and they need to know.

Like Jeremiah Nortier said, there's not enough resources out there. And I feel like, you know, the one thing that encouraged me is that God uses the weak. And that describes me. But out of weakness, we are made strong because he can strengthen us to do his will and to come out.

There was a fire in my bones when I stayed silent and I just couldn't do it anymore because there's people still suffering in this group. And they truly don't understand the implications of what they're being taught.

And many of them don't even really understand what they're being taught to believe. Yeah, most of them have been raised in it. I was raised in it. I was in it for over 30 plus years. But they still tell me, you don't know what we really believe.

Yeah, I do, because I stood strong for their doctrines. I was highly into advancing the church of Christ. I truly believe that we were the one true church. Now, the non-instrumental churches are more likely to outright teach that.

That we're the one true church. Of course, there's one true church, but it doesn't have to be. It's not this cult. I'm just gonna come right out and say it. The one true church is God's people and it's universal.

It's mystical. It's invisible. It's not a visible institution, but they have institutionalized God's grace into a system that must be worked for that grace to be operative in their life. But God's grace is different.

Saving grace is all about God. The gospel of grace is all about what God has done in Christ. The faith centers, it's not about what we do, but they have these isolated pretexts that they go by. And it all centers on water baptism, because like I said, if you have conditional election, you have to have some way.

You have to have something you do, whether it's walking a mile, saying the sinner's prayer, which is decisional regeneration, or you've got to have baptismal regeneration. They don't call it that. We did not call it that.

We didn't dare call it that, because that is a Romanist doctrine, but it's disguised.

They call that baptism for the remission of sins, right?

Yes, and like Jeremiah said, he's done more videos on it. It's actually baptismal justification, because if you get right down to it, they don't believe they have to be regenerated, because they're born with a spark of goodness.

They don't believe in originals. And that's the problem when you get down to the foundation, you know. So yeah, the isolated pretext, there's actually more than seven. There's Matthew 28, 19, Mark 16, 16, John 3, 5, Acts 2, 38.

They don't believe that there was a church. They don't believe there was a gospel. They don't really believe there was salvation that we have today until after Acts 2, 38. That's their different gospel.

They say that there's different terms that came into play after Pentecost. So they created a probationary period between the cross and Pentecost. They even call it a probationary period, and it's nowhere in the inscription.

So we've also got Acts 22, 16, Romans 6, 3, 3, 4, Galatians 3, 27, Colossians 2, 12, Titus 3, 5, 1 Peter 3, 21. That's a biggie. So what you've got here is they're taking these verses that have to do with a New Testament ordinance, and they're turning it into a new gospel, and it's a new law gospel.

And they'll say, no, it's not what we're doing, but I've got proof. You have to go to their liturgy, okay?

But of course, one of the things that we have to make it clear, though, they are not monolithic, even though there are commonalities that are very often manifest amongst the different congregations. Even in the 21st century, you have Church of Christ congregations that have actually become liberal.

I know the Church of Christ in West Islip, Long Island, has a woman minister.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah, yeah, you're right.

And the Manhattan Church of Christ in New York City, they celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by having a conference on the prophetic voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. And Martin Luther King, Jr. denied the essentials of the faith.

He denied the deity of Christ, the Trinity, the substitutionary death of Christ, the bodily resurrection of Christ. And that's the kind of thing you would not hear in a typical Church of Christ. And they did start off from the same a cappella Restorationist movement.

And even amongst those that are very conservative, you have differences among them. Even recently, when Jeremiah Nortier was debating Jack Wilkie, Jeremiah was going on the impression or the presumption that his Church of Christ opponent did not believe in baptismal regeneration because of the issue of most, or many at least, Church of Christ folks not believing that a new nature is given to someone when they're saved.

And Jack Wilkie apparently disagreed with that, and he admitted that there was debate in the Church of Christ over that. And apparently, I believe, he was in some way, some level, reprimanded by fellow Church of Christ folks after, because he was really affirming baptismal regeneration.

So you do have, and you also have all levels of ecumenism. I know Church of Christ people who believe I am their brother. I know Church of Christ people who have actually developed an Orthodox—when I say Orthodox, I don't mean Eastern Orthodox—a biblical understanding of baptism and have in their bulletins that baptism is conducted by immersion of a repentant believer, and those that are saved should obey this ordinance.

So that is a different level of ecumenism. It's a different way of wording it than most Church of Christ folks would like to put in their own bulletins. So there are differences that do exist.

Hopefully, they're not all consistent, either. I have family members, see, one of my grandmothers was a Calvinist, and—.

And in the Church of Christ.

Yeah. Well, her children became Church of Christ, and they would joke around with her that she wasn't going to make it to heaven. She said, oh, I didn't know that. But after she died, they were saying, if anybody's in heaven, she is, and I'm thinking, okay, you're not being consistent with your doctrine, you know, because their husbands are preachers and teachers in the Church of Christ, and they preach just like most Southern Churches of Christ here do.

Yeah, here in the South. Now, the ones I know of here in the South, they are very strict in their old school, and one of their publishing arms is the Gospel Advocate, and it has been promoting their creeds that they claim not to have.

It's been promoting them for over 160 years. Now, we always had Gospel Advocate curriculum in the Church for Sunday school. I know that some COCs don't have Sunday school, so I guess we were kind of liberal that way, but other ways, we were very strict.

You know, some have kitchens, some don't have kitchens, even some that don't have a kitchen, they've got a water fountain, so they're still not being completely consistent. And, you know, they would allow me to bring snacks for my children, but we weren't allowed to have a kitchen in the church.

You know, it just wasn't consistent faithfully, but that's where you can hopefully get in there and have some good discussions with them. And like I said, when I'm on a personal level with them, I don't say, you're a cult member, or you have a cult leader.

No, I try to follow Jesus when He was on a rescue mission, okay? And when He was on a rescue mission, He had to come up against the wolves, and I do. I did have to come up against them a lot. I had to come out strong, and since I did, they come after me.

I've been severely scoured in their churches. I've been slandered. A lot of those things are to be expected, and I've never thought that I was a strong person to handle that. It's only by the grace of God, because it has been heartbreaking, because I have lost family members over this, and you know, I've been disowned, disinherited, discarded, dismissed, disrespected, you know, all of this stuff.

But you have to have compassion on these people, because they truly don't understand, because it is hammered home to them constantly, and there's so many twists and turns when you try to question these things.

They will come off with some of the most mind-twisting gymnastics that you've ever encountered.

Yeah, and it's interesting that you and Jeremiah, in your interview with him, it was brought up that they are Roman Catholic light, and I can remember when I first heard that comparison was from one of my oldest brothers, Andy, who had become a Baptist.

We had all been raised Catholic, and he knew that my brother Bob, who is closer in age to me, had become a member of the Church of Christ. And when I told my brother Andy that I was visiting my brother Bob's church, he said, the Catholics.

I said, what? He said, Bob's church, the Catholics. I said, how on earth could you say that? They don't have statues, they don't have even pictures or paintings of Jesus in the sanctuary, the minister isn't wearing a robe of any kind, there's no candles burning.

You know, what are you talking about? But then, when I later became saved and embraced the doctrines of sovereign grace, I realized how valid the comparison was. They are, in many ways, low-church Catholics without statues.

You know, they don't have a high liturgy, and unlike Catholics, they do solely use the Scriptures to determine what they believe and teach and do, but they just interpret it and exegete it incorrectly.

So, am I making sense of that?

Well, yes, yes, because that's exactly what makes the Church of Christ cult that much more dangerous, because they do use the Bible. There have actually been those who have left the Church of Christ to become Catholic priests.

Let's see, on page 127 of my book, I go over that. Now, I go over how the Church of Christ has always been a temporary bridge back to Rome, and there is a mass exodus going on, and a lot of people are leaving the Church of Christ because of so many inconsistencies, and they are ending up in the arms of Rome.

Now, of course, there are even people that leave Reformed Baptists and other solid churches. In fact, I'm moderating a debate between a former Coptic Orthodox brother who is now a Reformed Baptist who's debating a former Reformed Baptist who is now Eastern Orthodox.

Oh, wow. Now, this particular, this one guy that left, they got this Roman Catholic YouTube channel called Returns Home. He said there's bridges back to Rome and the Church of Christ, and they're having a hard time getting the Church of Christ to worship Mary.

You know, they definitely don't want to do that. They're not into the mass. We're not saying that. It's just that they have the same adulterated soteriology, you know, works of man added into the equation of salvation.

It originated with Rome, and if you go on my website, I've got an article called Arminianism of Papist Plot, because Augustus Toplady, he wrote Rock of Ages, and he wrote about this years ago, that the Jesuits, they had a plan, and they called it the drug, D-R-E-U-G-G, that's how they spelled it then, the drug of Arminianism that they planted within the Reformed Protestant camp in order to try to destroy it.

It's very interesting if you read the history on that, and it is rampant now, and like you said, there is a lot of medical things going on now, and so we have to be on the lookout to any bridges back to Rome, and one of the main bridges back to Rome in the Church of Christ is the baptismal bridge.

What I found to be the root, sorry, what I found to be the root of all false religions is the false free will doctrine of man. Of course, we still have a will, but it's not completely free until Jesus sets us free.

Jesus said, whoever the Son sets free is free indeed. Then we have the free will to follow Him.

And we have to go to our first commercial break. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. You may remain anonymous if your question is a personal and private one.

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Wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back, and if you just tuned us in, our guest today is Leanne Ferguson, and we have been discussing, just beginning to discuss, her life in the Church of Christ, and we've been seeking to define the Church of Christ.

Leanne, are you there? Yes. Okay, could you turn your camera back on? No, I'm sorry. That's okay. We're video recording this for Jeremiah Nortier later on. Yeah, sorry about that. That's all right. And I do want to let our listeners know that they may find three of my previous interviews interesting.

I don't know if you know, Leanne, who David Lawrence is. Dr. David Lawrence was a professor of history at Lipscomb University, which is one of the premier Church of Christ institutes of higher learning, and he became convinced of the doctrines of sovereign grace while still teaching at Lipscomb University, and they did not dismiss him amazingly.

And he has entirely broken away from the restoration movement and is now on the leadership team of a Reformed church in Nashville. But if anybody wants to listen to a three-part interview with David Lawrence on that, we titled that, Discovering Sovereign Grace While in the Church of Christ Holes of Academia.

Just type in the search engine David Lawrence, and that's spelled L-A-W-R-E-N-C-E, and those interviews took place on July 18th and 19th of 2022, and also on August 19th of 2022. So, we hope that you enjoy those.

But picking up where we left off, I do want to get into your own story about having been raised in there shortly, but is there anything that you wanted to say before we move into that phase?

No, go ahead. That's fine.

Well, you already mentioned that you were raised in that church, and can you tell us which branch, if you will, of the Church of Christ you were in? Were you in a non-institutional church, or did you have Sunday schools and all that kind of thing?

Yeah, it was non-instrumental. Like I said, we went by the Gospel Advocate curriculum for the most part. We also had house-to-house, heart-to-heart, Christian Courier, the Sword and Trail. There was different ones, but the main publishing art was the Gospel Advocate.

And like I said, those were our creeds that we claimed not to have. And they've remained very consistent.

With those creeds. Yes, I can remember a friend in the Church of Christ who invited me to a conference at his church. And during one of the sessions, the speaker was telling everybody something that they likely heard thousands of times already—that the Church of Christ has no creed but Christ, no confession but the Scriptures, etc.

And during a Q &A, I raised my hand and I said, I have your church bulletin here, and it says we in the Church of Christ are not Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. We are the Church that Christ established.

We do not use musical instruments in worship. Our ministers do not wear clerical robes but typically would wear business suits and ties. And we only have male ministers in our church, and we believe in a plurality of elders.

And it was going on and on with all the details of what this church believed and practiced. I said, this is your creed. I said, you'd say you don't have a creed, this is it.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the inconsistency and the hypocrisy is one reason so many people are leaving. It's because you develop cognitive dissonance if you don't. Like you said, it can lead to insanity. Well, you know, I felt like I was losing my mind.

I mean, I got to where I just couldn't do it anymore. It was so legalistic. You know, we always had an invitation at the end of each service, and the focus was always on our response. That was the deciding factor.

So I lived in fear that if I didn't do everything just right, I was going to be lost or I couldn't keep my salvation. You know, we believed you could lose your salvation. Now, what really helped me was just reading one of the Bible verses that really stuck out to me was Romans chapter 10.

Romans chapter 10, verse 9. Believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, and thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness. And I knew I just didn't have that kind of heart faith.

It was all intellectual. I didn't know the true Christ. I didn't know what he accomplished at the cross. I didn't understand what happened at the cross at all because all the focus was mostly on us, what we do.

And still today when I communicate with the churches of Christ, it's all about what they do, and they call it their education. You know, they say you need that education. You need to know what to do to be saved.

Well, Jesus already did it. He did all the work. We did all the spending. That's what we did. That was our part. Only Christ can save us. It's not what we do. And you know, what really helped me was the book of Romans.

And then I kept reading that I needed to believe. And I knew that Jesus was my only hope. Despite all the false teachings, I still knew Jesus was my only hope. And even my grandmother, when I was little, I remember one time she told me, she said, well, you have to believe in Jesus.

Okay. But in practice, it never seemed like that was the emphasis. And our curriculum, that was not the emphasis. But I do hope that deep down, Grandma knew that because she told me, well, you have to believe in Jesus, of course, right?

I mean, you have to have faith, plus works is what they teach. But just faith in Jesus, period. I mean, he is our eternal security. He told Peter, he said, I pray for you that your faith fail not. And I didn't understand the intercession of Christ.

I never heard of the intercession of Christ until I read Bunyan by accident. My husband's friend loved the intercession of Christ, Christ the complete Savior by John Bunyan. I thought it was Paul Bunyan.

I don't know who John Bunyan was. We never heard of John Bunyan. I'm sure.

They didn't want me to know. How did you get a hold of that book?

Well, we're still in contact with the homeschooling family, but they had a house full of them. And so they loaned them to my husband and I got a hold of it and started reading it because I wanted to disprove the Baptist doctrine because, you know, my husband grew up Baptist and I wanted to disprove them.