Leaving the Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement | Theocast

Hi, my name is John Moffitt, and this is my story about leaving the IFB. For those of you who don't know, that's the Independent Fundamental Baptist Movement. This video has been requested by several people.

It's kind of talking about my personal experience of being in the IFB and what it's been like leaving. And for me, it's been almost 20 years since I've been a part of it, but I was born and raised in that world.

And for those of you that know the IFB, it's definitely a world that you're raised in, or even just conservative Christianity. And before I go along, because I know that there are many who are probably watching this, and they're going to shut it off right away.

I am a pastor. I've been pastoring for over 20 years outside of the IFB world. I planted a church seven years ago in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and love God and have four children. I love my wife and have not run off into atheism or hating God or drugs and all that kind of stuff.

So I just want to start there and explain to you what it was like for me to wrestle with some of the theology that I'm sure that you're wrestling with. This is probably why you're watching this video.

Someone sent it to you, or you found it, and some of the theological questions that you have. I'm going to just kind of walk you through some of the same thoughts I was having, and then maybe you can utilize some of the resources that have been available through Theocast and through my church as you continue to think through and grow through this.

Growing Up in the IFB World

It's terrifying when you first realize that the way in which you've been raised, the way in which you've been trained and taught might be wrong. Not all of it, but significant portions of it. Just so you understand where I came from, my dad used to work for Jack Hiles, for those of you that probably know that name, and was a youth pastor there, born and raised in that church.

Then he moved to California right before I was born to work for a pastor there by the name of Ray Betama. And then after that particular pastor had cheated on his wife in love with the secretary, he then planted, or took over a church that was a church plant in high desert California, and was a pastor there for almost 18 years.

And that's where I was born and raised. So I was around the theology, I was around the idea of it, and my dad slowly began to question it as he was kind of drifting away from the IFB world. But I was still raised around King James-Only-ism, and just thinking through.

I wasn't allowed to go to movies until I was 18. My mom, I remember when the conversation started happening whether she was going to wear pants or not. And I ended up going to a school, really I thought to play basketball, but then I was really reintroduced back into, I would say, kind of the full world of the IFB.

It's still a pretty popular college today called Golden State Baptist College. And played basketball there, was there for two years, and then ended up leaving for various reasons, which we'll talk about in a minute.

And ended up graduating from a really small Bible college in Southern California, which then kind of started my journey away from fundamentalism. So a lot of what ended up happening is, believe it or not, reading the Bible.

Reading Ephesians and Discovering God’s Sovereignty

We're really encouraged in the IFB to be in the Word daily and to know the Word and read the Word. And when I would preach, that would be one of my struggles is that as I'm teaching, my first job was a youth pastor, and I would be preaching and teaching.

And one of the struggles I was with is that I felt like all my sermons sounded the same. Don't do this, do that. Don't date, don't kiss, evangelize. It just doesn't matter what I was preaching from. I was going to springboard off to whatever I wanted to preach about and pick whatever topic I wanted to.

And it started to bother me because I could realize it wasn't affecting me, it wasn't affecting them. And I remember sitting down and just reading Ephesians, just the book, thinking, man, I need to be encouraged.

I'm going to just read. And so I started reading the book of Ephesians, and I remember when I got to chapter 2, and it was talking about, you know, elect before the foundations of the world and God's sovereignty.

And I literally picked my Bible up and turned it over. I'm like, what version is this? Am I reading the King James that I accidentally pick up another Bible and I didn't realize it? I just hadn't seen those verses before.

And I just started reading the Bible profusely and then cross-referencing. I had a skull-filled Bible at the time, so I'm just reading all of the cross-references and asking lots of questions and realizing I just didn't know as much as I thought I had known.

And about this, during this time, this is right after that my father had passed away. He passed away right before my 21st birthday, which really kind of shook my world about prayer and just about trusting the Lord.

And so you have the combination of my frustration of my first experience in ministry, the passing of my father, who was my hero, and really who helped me theologically, you know, just kind of think through things, is when I realized, man, I just, I don't know what I don't know.

And I feel like everything I do know, all it feels like Christianity is, is the things I'm not supposed to do. And if I want God to be happy with me and I want to be successful, I want to make it to the end.

And when Christ returns at the second coming and the rapture happens, I need to make sure that my life is in order. And I've done my part and I've witnessed to enough people. And every day I just felt like I was a failure.

I was hiding, right, hiding my own sin, my own temptations, my own struggles. I was putting these burdens upon my wife to perform in a certain way. I just had my first child. And so I was thinking about what does it mean to be a parent?

And yet I would hear about grace, a lot, a lot of grace, right? We would quote Ephesians 2 .8 .9 all of the time, ignoring really the first part of Ephesians, but quoting Ephesians 2 .8 .9, which is amazing.

You know, we are saved by grace, not of works, lest any man should boast. Praise God for that. But it was kind of like we had grace for salvation, but we didn't have grace for anything else. You have to be careful when you're emphasizing grace, because if you do, then, well, then people aren't going to want to show up to church.

They're not going to want to drink, and they're going to do drugs, and you can't emphasize grace. So what do we use? Well, legalism and pietism. Those are two words. One of them you probably know, legalism.

Legalism, Pietism, and the Burden of Self-Righteousness

Pietism, definitely want to encourage you to look more into that. There's a free e-book on our website, theocast .org. You should listen to that or download that, read that. We have an episode that I've done called Leaving Pietism, and you'll understand that here in a minute, why it might be something you want to listen to.

Or what is pietism? I've got a couple of episodes on that. But in my own personal experience, grace was just not a part of my understanding of God. I was angry at Him. I was disappointed. I was disappointed in how my life had begun to turn out.

I just felt like I was an angry pastor. I was angry at my wife. I didn't understand theology. I was wrestling with what I really had been taught my entire life. I just felt like I was a judgmental Christian all the time, judging people for what they wore, what they listened to, what they ate, what they drank.

I was just angry all the time. I got exhausted by it. I didn't ever want to walk away from my faith, but I definitely wanted a break from the IFB world just because I was so exhausted by what I didn't understand.

Every time I would ask a question, I would be rebuked for asking the question. I'm just supposed to blindly believe what you're telling me, and I don't mind believing, but show me in the Bible. Show me in Scripture where I need to not do certain things and be doing other things when I can't seem to find it in the Bible.

Specifically, one of them being, I remember just arguing a lot about the King James Bible. I wrote an article on this back in years ago. It's got to be almost 15 years ago I wrote an article about the history of the King James Bible because that's the world that I came out of.

Well, I got a career with Apple and started working for Apple retail just to kind of give myself a break. I didn't stop going to church. I was still going to church, going to a Baptist church that my wife had grown up in.

It was there that I continued to read. I began to read a lot about just the history of Christianity, and that's what really introduced me to Reformed Theology. Now, I know Reformed Theology is a scary word, especially in the IFB world.

Calvinism is akin to Satan, and it's the doctrine of demons. I'm not really here to talk about Calvinism, but that's kind of what started introducing me to the gospel and introducing me to this other form of really the history of Christianity.

I ended up going to seminary, which in the IFB world is a major no-no. I remember being in seminary. I had some former classmates that I would still keep in contact with from Golden State. Professors there and pastors that I had known well, I was very closely connected to them.

They're asking questions. They heard I was going to seminary, so he's like, oh, is he still using the King James Bible? I was like, which is the most important question to ask about my faith and where I'm at?

That began to just show me maybe just how some of the priorities in the IFB are so off. It's interesting where we put the emphasis about what's important in the Christian life. Now, listen, the Word of God is extremely important, and I'm all for that, but we sometimes get sidetracked, and I think it's a tactic of the evil one to do this.

We get sidetracked from what really matters, which is the gospel and the hope of Christ and spreading the good news of the hope of Christ with petty things. Listen, I'm not saying sin is petty things, but some of the stuff that we all can agree that the IFB teaches, it's just not sinful.

It's not sinful to go to a movie. It's not sinful for women to wear pants. Even the length of hair is arbitrary. We're not allowed to have facial hair in college, drinking alcohol. All of those things just become a way to be self-righteous.

I don't do these things, therefore I'm acceptable in the eyes of God, and we're creating new laws that God never created. I love my brothers because they really are passionate about seeing people come to Christ.

They're passionate about rescuing people from the pits of hell, which is wonderful. But as far as being trained in the Word and knowing how to properly exposit the Word and know what it says, it does become arbitrary to whatever you think the text is going to say.

There's no real science of interpretation behind teaching the Word, and so often sermons just become really repeating everything you've heard at a conference or you've heard on a line or you've heard in seminary or in your college.

It turns into a lot of an echo chamber, and you can feel that. You show up to be encouraged, and instead you're often beat down. I thought a really good sermon, in my opinion, was when I got beat down, when I just would walk out of there and just be really discouraged.

It was refreshing when I started to realize that the law was designed, God's law was designed to expose my sin, but God's gospel is to give me the hope and joy and to be refreshing to the soul, and that it was His gospel that would lead me to obedience, not dread and fear.

Watching the Left Behind series and thinking about, oh, I better obey, otherwise I might be left behind. That constant self-examination is what really caused me to start reading Scripture and ask myself, is this exactly how God wants me to live?

Does He want me to constantly be self-examining and comparing myself? And come to find out that it's not the case. My journey wasn't abrupt of leaving right away. It took a lot of time thinking through from the moment.

I would say by the time I was 24, 25, I had really decided that most of what the IFB had stood for in those unique places, considering a rejection of really historical Christianity, so rejection of Reformed theology, using other Bible translations, movies, drinking, things like that.

I had realized that I needed to do my own research on that and find out, okay, what does the Bible really have to say? And I'm not the first one, thankfully, to wrestle with these realities. What's the most important thing for you on this journey that I have experienced is that you're going to learn a lot of theology that is all over the place, right?

But the one thing you have to center yourself on as you're thinking about moving away is, yes, we might be moving away from bad teaching and bad doctrine and a bad culture and a really abusive culture.

I've experienced that, too, where you're just kind of belittled and put down, and you don't want that. But the person behind all of this, which is Jesus Christ, that person is still the same. Now, how he's presented can often be skewed, but my encouragement to you is if you're thinking about denominations and you're thinking about where you want to go and what you want to abandon, often what ends up happening in the IFB world is that you get so squashed down and you get so exhausted by the movement that people end up just squirting out all over the place, leaving Christianity altogether, leaving Christ altogether.

And we don't want that either, right? So let me talk to you a little bit about the hope of Christ and where I have found myself 20 years later in my journey of serving the Lord. I'm excited about his kingdom.

I'm excited about who he is and sharing the hope of Christ and raising my children in the fear and admission of the Lord. And yet, I'm not a part of the IFB anymore. And so, yeah, you can actually serve the Lord and find hope and grace.

And do so and not be a part of the IFB. And so, for those of you that want to care, I know this has gone on for quite a while already, so there are parts of the gospel that I know that resonate with you because I can remember hearing them.

Hearing about the grace of God in my salvation was paramount for me. I loved it because it just kind of gave me the assurance of like, Okay, I'm not saving myself. This is great, lest anyone should boast.

But what about after, right? And verses like, Those verses are really important because we look to Jesus for our salvation, but it's at that point then we look to ourselves in the IFB, and really in a lot of Christianity, we look to ourselves to then, I don't know if it's earn our rewards for some people, validate ourselves, or get God's blessing upon our life.

We hear this a lot about the United States. The United States is under a curse because they have not been obeying God's law. If they would obey God's law, then God would continue to bless them. And so that just resonates with us, right?

My life has gone the way it has, either because I've obeyed God or because I have disobeyed God. So my life is horrible because of my disobedience, or God is cursing me and he's coming after me, or because I have perfectly obeyed him the ways that I should, then that's why my life turned out the way it is.

And that is what is the epitome of pietism. Legalism is to require someone to obey a certain set of commands in order to receive salvation by law. But pietism, because many, many IFB people will say, I am not a legalist, I am not a legalist.

I don't require people to be saved by the law. I don't require people to be saved by... And I agree with you, you don't. But you do require people to act in a certain way in order for them to be accepted by God, or to say that this is holiness, that this, these particular actions is what God requires of us.

But when he doesn't, he doesn't require... These are arbitrary rules that are placed upon Christians that are not found in Scripture. And at the end of Colossians, Paul says to the church, he says, these have an appearance of wisdom and of spirituality, but they're of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

And I remember, while I was in fundamentalism, and even today hearing about it, that we try and use scare tactics, and we try to use legalistic, pietistic practices, disciplines to suppress the flesh.

And this is not only true in the IFB world, but in the Christian world in general. Man, it seems like we're hiding sexual sins, we're hiding our struggles. We don't really confess our sins to each other.

We're not willing to admit where we're really struggling, because we have to present ourselves as these godly, clean, I don't have a problem, my marriage is perfect, and there's no struggle. And all it does is cause the inside of us to fester.

Like if we've got a wound and it's cut, and instead of exposing it and allowing it to be... Put ointment on it and care for it, we just keep covering it, covering it, covering it with bandages and putting clothes on top of it.

Eventually that infection, it's going to take root, and you're going to end up losing an arm or whatever the problem is. And this is what ends up happening with people, is that they get so built up with this sin inside of them, and their heart becomes hard, they become jaded.

We become really good at lying and being deceitful. I'm speaking from experience here, because I can remember playing the game and pretending. Pretending to be godly, pretending to be happy, pretending everything was great.

I can remember going to chapel in college, and Dr. Tributy would be like, oh, ministry is great, which is true. I love ministry. But almost to the point where there isn't a moment of suffering and understanding the frailty of our flesh, and that we have to rely on God's grace, not our own efforts in order to survive.

Grace, Confession, and the Hope of Christ

So passages for me that started to just change my experience in my world, were like in Hebrews 4 when he says, in a time of need, which is, I can't think of a day when I don't need mercy and grace. He goes, in a time of need, come with boldness before the throne.

And to receive what? Mercy and grace. That became important to me because I'm a wretched sinner, who by my own power and strength, I cannot survive a single day. I would be destroyed. But if I walk by faith, as we were told by Paul, trusting in not the fear of the Lord, but trusting in His grace and His mercy, then we can survive, right?

I hate sin, and I don't know anything to do with it. I love holiness. But 1 John 3 tells us that the way in which we are going to find holiness is by the hope that we have in Christ. Everyone who thus hopes in Jesus purifies himself as he is pure.

Man, I was afraid of, right? It was a fear tactic for me. Instead of love, it was fear. Instead of joy, it was dread, right? And most of you can understand what I'm talking about, right? It's the sermons where they're harsh and exacting, and there's a lot of yelling, a lot of finger and spitting, right?

And they're trying to motivate you like a football coach who's just basically screaming at you and threatening to throw you off the team unless you get on board, versus a loving Savior who says, I know you're a sinner, you're weak, you're going to constantly be failing.

It's my grace. My grace is sufficient for you. For when you are weak, I am strong. Our sin is the evidence of our weakness. Our flesh, we're so weak, right? We need the constant preaching of the gospel.

This is why Paul tells the Corinthian church, which is one of the most sinful, wicked churches in Paul's circuit, and even in the New Testament as we're reading it. Paul, in the beginning of the letter, is like, I want to write to you, and I'm writing to you that I can't wait to come to you, and I want to preach to you the gospel.

Why?

Because it's the gospel that motivates us into life, to life and obedience. Paul calls it the power of God under salvation. We need to hear more of how Christ loves us and cares for us and how he can transform us through his power.

We need to believe that by faith, and every day waking up, trusting and walking by faith in those truths instead of fear and anxiety and suppression and hiding our sins. We need to learn how to confess our sins, right?

How to, as James says, confess your sins to one another. Boy, that was a new one for me, coming into the Reformed faith and understanding that every Sunday we stand up and we read the law and be reminded that, man, I have not loved God as I should.

I've not loved my neighbor as I should. And there being, not that we celebrate our sin, but the refreshing truth of knowing that I confess my sin to God and to my brothers and sisters, and together we receive forgiveness.

And in doing so, we then now have the joy of our salvation restored to us, not because we had lost it, but it's the reminder that sin separates us from God and his joy and his blessings, and that repentance and grace and mercy is what draws us back home and it restores our hope and our joy, right?

And so the preaching every Sunday when I stand up, I want to do nothing more than introduce people to the love and joy of Christ in the midst of their suffering, pain, and sorrow. If you're trapped in sin, the way out is not to try harder.

The way out is you worshiped yourself into that sin, right? You allowed yourself to love that which is the opposite of God. The way out of that sin is to love and worship Christ your King. So if I yell at you and I scream at you and I tell you to repent, is that really going to motivate you to do that?

You're just going to hide it because you're going to be afraid of me, of you finding out that I know. But if I offer you the joy of Christ and his power, we can come out of the hiding, right? We don't have to hide our sin and let it fester anymore.

This is why we want more of Christ and him crucified. So for those of you that are wrestling with this I of B, this is what my life looks like now. I hate my sin. I don't want my church to experience their sin.

It's damaging. It destroys everyone. It robs me of the joy of Christ. And so how is it that I wake up every day and wrestle against my flesh? You know, Paul says, in Romans 7, the things I don't want to do, I keep doing them.

And the things that I should be doing, I'm not doing them. Oh, wretched man that I am. Who will save me from this body of death? You know, harsh preaching. No, he says, thanks be to Christ, right? Jesus becomes our hope.

Jesus becomes the living water that we long for. He becomes our food, right? Our spiritual food. This is where we as pilgrims learn that it's not by sheer grit that we make it through and we serve the King.

But it's by his power and his strength and his joy that we do it week in and week out. So there's a lot here. I didn't want to overwhelm you theologically. So part of the podcast that I do, Theocast Ministry, and the partner I have with, Justin Perdue, we're both pastors.

And we're trying to help people process through pietism, legalism, and really this part of Christianity that just focuses on us, the individual. What am I doing for God and have I done enough? And then what happens is to tell if I've done enough, I have to start looking at others.

So, man, I mean, how many sermons did I hear growing up just comparing ourselves to other churches and the world? And we really find our righteousness by the morality that, at least I'm not sleeping around with other women and I'm not doing drugs and I'm not drinking.

I must be a good Christian. But that's not what the law says. The law says that he demands perfect obedience to the law. And let's just start with the greatest commandment of the law, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

So you're going to compare yourself.

Start there.

Christ, the Law, and the Call to Humility

And that's what leads us to desperation. And we become humble. James says that wisdom are those who are meek and gentle and open to reason. Humility is part of wisdom. So when we're thinking about the future of where we want to find ourselves, we don't want to abandon Christ because he's real and he's true.

And unfortunately, Paul was dealing and Jesus was dealing with people who abused the word and did not teach it right. So you're experiencing the same problems the New Testament experienced where we have people who abuse God's word and they use it and take advantage of people.

Where you want to go is find a church that is going to open up the word of God and say, thus saith the Lord, and show you Christ and preach to you Jesus from all of Scripture. This is exactly, if you remember, on the road to Emmaus and Jesus had raised from the grave and he's talking to the disciples and they don't even know that it's him.

And he showed them from all of Scripture who he was because the Bible is about him. We miss that. We think the Bible is about morality and trying to be like David and be like Elijah and be like Abraham, and all these men were sinners.

They were only pointing us to the Savior. We don't need to go to the Old Testament to find moral examples so we could try harder. We go to the Old Testament to see we as humans failed like they did. Look how God faithfully kept his promise to bring us a Messiah which was promised to us in Genesis 3 .15 and now we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his mission which is now to take the hope of the gospel and to be light and salt to everyone around us that they too might have that light and hope.

That was another thing. Evangelism was just such a dirty word. I always feel guilty and ashamed. I didn't do it enough. I didn't do it right. I felt like people were more angry with me than excited. I would hear about thousands of people coming to Christ but no one coming to church.

I'd go out on bus routes. For those of you who know what a bus route is, I was on a bus route. I would share the gospel and they would say the prayer but they would never want to come to church. If they really met Jesus, wouldn't they want to go be with the people of Jesus?

All these people were getting saved saying the prayer but they didn't want to be around the people of Jesus. I just remember that really bothered me. I would have guys at school that were like, I saw 27 people saved today.

If God really rescued them, where are they? Why aren't they here? I don't want to pick on these. They're my brothers. I love them. Many of them are trying to do what is right. I think there's a big movement.

A lot of people are leaving it for right reasons. A lot of guys are trying to change it from the inside out and I commend them for that. My encouragement to you is there is a better way. We don't need to abandon the faith.

We don't need to be judgmental or harsh. My encouragement to you is allow the Word of God to start reshaping your mind. I'd be more than happy to help you with that. There's some other resources that can help with that.

If you want to move on to a next stage of thinking through these, I would say what is pietism? Pietism is what really destroyed me and my faith. This constant self-absorption. I'm always looking to my own obedience.

How well am I doing in comparison? Really creating a lot of self-righteousness, comparativeness, and really missing the point of the Kingdom. Where the point of the Kingdom is to be the salt and light, to be joy, to share Christ's love in the Gospel, which is going to transform people's hearts.

I would start there. Really, the podcast is designed to just every week point you to Christ, learn how to trust in Him, and leave behind our old ways of legalism. There's a contact form on our website.

If you want to contact me and ask any questions, I'll do my best. There's a whole community called Theocast Community. If you want to join that, that's a great place of learning. There's people in all different areas of theology where they're starting to learn how to rest in Jesus Christ and trusting in the history that we have behind us.

We're not the first ones to read our Bibles. We're not the first ones to get this right. And so I have a lot of thanks for the Reformed faith that I find myself in now. So if you want to find rest in Christ, and you want to start that journey, my encouragement to you is go to our website, scroll down to the middle of the page, you'll see a little book there that says Rest.

Maybe you can start there. But you're not alone. You're not the first who has had these thoughts and these feelings. And I hope this is encouraging for those of you who are thinking about leaving fundamentalism.

For those of you that are in fundamentalism still, I try to say this in such a way that I don't want to demean you,.

Put you down.

I love you guys. I love my brothers and sisters. I pray that you continue to grow in your faith, read your Word, allow all of God's Word to shape what you think about it, and realize that as much as we have a passion for the Gospel and for evangelism and for holiness in the IFB world, I think we have allowed tradition and certain men to influence us instead of God's Word.

And so my encouragement to you is to maybe take that first step and ask yourself, does everything that I believe align with Scripture? And if it doesn't, maybe I need to remove it and replace it with what the Bible does say.

Closing Encouragement and Blessing

All right.

Hopefully this is encouraging to you, and maybe one day I look forward to meeting you, for sure, in our kingdom with our Father when He brings the new heavens and new earth together. I'll see you there.

May God bless you.