October 3, 2025 Show with Matt Plett on “Why We Became a Confessional Church”

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.

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, 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 Friday on this third day of October 2025.

Trinity Fellowship and the Call to Confessionalism

I'm thrilled to have a first-time guest today, and that guest happens to be Matt Platt, pastor of Trinity Fellowship, a confessional Reformed Baptist congregation in Niverville, Manitoba, Canada, or Niverville.

He'll correct me in a minute. And today, we are going to address why Pastor Matt Platt and Trinity Fellowship became a confessional church, having adopted the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, also known as the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Matt Platt.

Hi, Chris. Great to be with you.

Well, tell our listeners something about the Trinity Fellowship. Is it Niverville or Niverville?

It's Niverville. Niverville, Manitoba. That's right.

Well, tell us something about that congregation.

Sure. We are a young congregation, I guess in several ways. We started Trinity in spring of 2022 with small beginnings. It actually started as an evening Bible study and kind of testing the water to see how much of an appetite there was for something like this in our area.

And that picked up and kept gaining steam week after week until we felt that it was probably advisable to move to Sunday mornings and start Sunday morning worship services, thinking that our numbers would dwindle because we had to have competition on Sunday mornings.

But things just really kept going. And so we've been going for three and a half years. And by the Lord's grace, he is greatly blessed with our efforts. And yeah, it's been a very exciting time planting this church.

It's well exceeded the aspirations or the expectations of us elders who planted it.

Well, tell us something also about Manitoba, Canada. What other major cities might be near Niverville and that kind of thing?

Okay, so Niverville is a town of about 5 ,000, I believe. It's growing rapidly, so it could be well beyond 5 ,000 at this point. The major city in Manitoba is Winnipeg. That's also our capital city. It's kind of in the southeast corner of the province.

For Americans, I tend to just say we're about three and a half hours straight north of Fargo, North Dakota. So if you keep going north on I -29, you'll get the Canadian border, and that turns into the 75 highway here.

And you'll get right to us. You almost have to drive right past our church to get to Winnipeg.

And it's interesting that the reason why Pastor Matt Platt is on my program today came about through an act of God's providence where he had contacted my pastor, Simon O'Maney, of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, because a former member of our church who moved away had been traveling, and Pastor Platt contacted my pastor and had told my pastor that he was a very big fan of Iron Trip and Zion Radio, and I was very honored to hear that.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, when I was emailing with your pastor exactly then, the name sounded so familiar, and one of my email correspondents just said, Is that not where Chris Arnzen is a member? He confirmed that, yes, Chris Arnzen is a member of his church.

So, yes, small world.

My pastors throughout the years, having moved a couple of times, I'm sure they're absolutely thrilled at the first thing that comes to mind when people hear the name of the church. Is that where Chris Arnzen goes?

And I'm sure that for a moment their heart stops, and they're wondering why that person said that. Yeah. Well, if anybody wants more details about Trinity Fellowship in Niverville, Manitoba, Canada, go to trinityfellowship .ca, trinityfellowship .ca.

And by the way, if I ever say anything that's incorrect, please let me know. I just discovered that one of my recent guests I announced as a first-time guest, and it was not his first appearance on my show.

It was his second, and for some reason he never corrected me.

As far as I remember, this is my first time on your show.

Well, we do something here as a tradition. Whenever we have a first-time guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, we have that guest give a summary of their salvation testimony, which would include any kind of religious atmosphere in which they were raised, and what kind of providential circumstances our Sovereign Lord raised up in their lives that drew them to himself and saved them.

And also, when I have a Reformed Baptist guest such as yourself, I also love to hear about how you came to discover the doctrines of grace and embrace them. But let's start with your salvation testimony.

Sure. Southeastern Manitoba is very heavily populated by Mennonites. So I come from Low German Mennonites that moved to Canada from Russia in the late 1800s. And so I grew up in that environment. Believing family, both sides of my family, many believers.

And in a fairly kind of, in some ways, you know, insulated community. This whole region where I was born was set apart as a reserve for the Mennonites that came from Russia. So lots of, at least when I was a kid, lots of similar background people in my school and my sports teams and so forth.

So I was raised in an evangelical Mennonite church. But maybe not quite the conventional way. My own parents struggled quite deeply with their marriage. And there was a number of very difficult years as a kid.

And at that time, this was in the late 80s, I would say. Divorce was more or less completely unheard of in our corner of the world. And my parents ended up divorcing. It was quite a difficult time. My dad had a dairy farm right next door to my grandparents, who also had a dairy farm.

And so we spent a lot of time at my grandparents'. I rode my bike often over to their house. And to some, to a large degree, I would say I was raised by my grandparents. They were wonderful, believing people.

And they were very much a calm in the storm in those years. And yeah, it just almost felt like heaven on earth when I was at their house. Just given the kind of the turbulence that was sometimes happening at home.

My parents did bring us to church. They brought us to Sunday school. We did do family devotions and stuff. So it's not like this wasn't happening in our home. But I'd say a really deep impression of a vibrant Christian faith came largely from my grandparents.

I'd say I don't have a drastic conversion story. My testimony is maybe a little bit like John Piper's, where God saved me from a life of sex, drugs, and rock and roll at age four. I'm thankful to the Lord that I've been spared many things.

He did get a hold of me. As far as I know, as a young child, I do recall repenting for my sins and wanting to be forgiven. Wanting to know the Lord in a personal way. And I remember that quite vividly at age four.

I did that at the top of my stairs as a little kid. And yeah, I mean, church life ended up being a little bit more complicated just because of the family situation. We ended up going to a church of the Nazarene in Winnipeg later on.

So that's, I'm not sure, I'm guessing you're familiar with the church of the Nazarene? Yes.

In fact, I just had a debate on my program not long ago between a Reformed Baptist and a Nazarene pastor, Jared K. Henry. Very nice guy.

Yes. Actually, I haven't listened to that episode yet, but I did see that one.

Yes.

And the things that we vehemently opposed about Jared's beliefs is he very strongly and passionately affirms the ordination of women to pastoral positions with authority above men in the church. And he also believes in the possibility of Christians to achieve, he doesn't call it sinless perfectionism, but he referred to it as freedom from known sin.

Because he acknowledges that since we're not omniscient, that human beings could have sinned without necessarily knowing it or forgetting about it and so on. And therefore, he toned down the language that is more commonly used of sinless perfectionism.

But anyway, those are two different debates, by the way.

Yes.

And in my time in the Nazarene church, so I would have been probably early teenager when we went to the Nazarene church. And there, if I recall correctly, I don't think they used the word sinless perfectionism either, but it was certainly part of the Wesleyan holiness tradition.

And I believe they talked of total sanctification. And again, it was freedom from all known sin. There could have been unintentional sin, but all known sin that was being preached. After the divorce, my dad sold the dairy farm.

We actually moved to Oregon and spent a few more years at a different church, the Nazarene, in Oregon. Once I graduated high school, I moved back to Manitoba, became a member of my grandparents' church, the Evangelical Mennonite Church.

And so I was there for many years. Loved it there, actually served in leadership in various capacities. Started off as an adult Sunday school teacher. And then I was a deacon for, I'm going to say maybe about eight years or so.

And then I was actually a lay minister for a number of years as well. And so fond memories there. Thankful for my upbringing, despite some of the turbulence, but very thankful to have had Christians around me and share the faith with me my whole life.

From Mennonite and Nazarene Backgrounds to the Doctrines of Grace

Now, you also wanted me to share about coming reformed. Is that correct?

Yes, how you came to discover the doctrines of grace and embrace them.

Sure. So in my Evangelical Mennonite Church that I was a member of here, I'd say in the early 2000s, maybe let's say 2005, somewhere in there, we were working through a deacon election. And at that point, there was a contingent in the church membership that was interested in pursuing adding a female deacon.

And that created quite a stir. The leaders of the church at that time did a study paper and concluded that we should remain with male-only deacons. But this caused quite a rift and kind of caught my attention as a young man.

So I would have been in my early 20s at that point. And I wanted to be on the right side of that issue. I had conservative instincts. So my instincts were to favor not female ordination just because of historical purposes.

But I bought some books by Grudem and Piper on that issue, recovering biblical manhood and womanhood. And it really kind of gripped my attention that you can't just isolate one doctrine from the next.

And I started on a deep dive of starting to listen to John Piper sermons because of that book. And I loved and appreciated his passion very deeply. And I just couldn't listen to enough. And about the same time, you'll recall the emerging church movement that was happening at around that time as well.

And so in my little town that I thought was very conservative, full of conservative Mennonites, I found out it's not so conservative after all. There was also quite a push in the emerging direction. And I found that a lot of the men that I was reading and listening to that were really good on gender issues also happened to be quite good on biblical authority and on some of this emerging church stuff.

But I noticed one strange thing about all of them is that they had this very bizarre view about Calvinism, which, of course, growing up Mennonite and then moving into Nazarene circles, Calvinism was not a feature of any of that whatsoever.

So I knew by default that Calvinism was wrong, which surprised me that before I studied it, I knew it was wrong. But then it kind of surprised me that all these really good men that were writing about biblical inerrancy and this kind of thing, J .I. Packer and John Piper and R .C. Stroll and John MacArthur, they were all Calvinists.

And that really made me very uncomfortable because, again, I knew that Calvinism was clearly wrong. I've been told that enough times that I didn't have to look into it. But it surprised me that the men who were strongest on inerrancy also happened to be Calvinists.

And so I started to study that, emailing with a relative of mine who had become Reformed, is living in the state of Colorado, emailed with him back and forth a bit and slowly but surely, I just kind of moved.

And soteriology was the first thing that happened. My understanding of God's grace and salvation, his sovereignty and salvation was the first thing. And it just kind of kept going from there. You start looking into covenants, you start looking into historical theology, and the dominoes kind of just kept falling.

So I'd say probably by about age 26, I would have said I was a Calvinist. And probably by about age 30, I would have said I would recognize myself or I would identify with the Reformed tradition.

Leadership, Church Life, and the Move Toward a New Church Plant

So were you therefore fully convinced of Calvinism or the doctrines of grace or Reformed theology before you were called into the pastoral ministry?

Yeah, so it's a bit of an interesting turn. So I guess I was old enough, when I became a Calvinist, I avoided the worst of the cage stage, I think. And I was already deeply involved in leadership in our church, the Evangelical Mennonite Church.

And I loved the history, I loved the roots, I loved the people so deeply that it never crossed my mind that if I would switch my view on salvation or so forth, that I would ever move on to a different church.

And again, in the Mennonite tradition, there's a strong emphasis on holy living and on discipleship and not such a strong emphasis on doctrine. And so statements of faith tend to be fairly minimalistic.

And so, you know, I'd say historically, Mennonites, of course, are Arminian and not Calvinistic. But there was nothing in the statement of faith of that church that I would need to take exception to or object to.

And so I felt I was able to labor there for a number of years that way without it becoming a real issue. And I'd say that that worked fairly well until it didn't. A few other things came into play that it just seemed like the peaceful thing and the most gracious thing to do would probably to recognize that the best thing was to move on.

Some of it kind of sort of related to Calvinism, but mostly other things at that time that made it just appear that some of us in leadership would be best to peacefully resign and move on and discover what the Lord had next.

By the way, I want to strongly plug a wonderful book. I don't know if you're familiar with it. But since you had mentioned that God had used in his sovereign providence the means of discovering great and gifted men like R .C. Sproul and John MacArthur and others who believed in the doctrines of grace to lead you into those beliefs, we know that the greatest men on earth don't have the final say about anything.

It's the inerrant word of God. But at the same time, we all know that he uses the means of men, of flawed men with sin in their lives. And he even commands such men, including ourselves, to spread the gospel.

But a book that I highly recommend, especially to people who have heroes of history that many Christians who are not Calvinists claim as their heroes, for instance, Charles Spurgeon, there are many.

It's always interesting. Everybody loves Charles Spurgeon, and many people should not.

Yes.

Well, there's a book by Dr. Thomas J. Nettles, a dear friend of mine for many years, called By His Grace and For His Glory, a historical, theological and practical study of the doctrines of grace in Baptist life.

And it lists and details a whole host of great names within Baptist history that many Arminians in and out of the Baptist heritage claim to love and support as heroes, uphold as heroes. And for those of you listening who want to get a hold of this excellent book, you can get that from Founders Press, which is the publishing house of Founders Ministries run by my friend, Dr. Tom Askell.

And that website is Press .Founders .org. Press .Founders .org, and you can look in the search engine for By His Grace and For His Glory by Dr. Thomas J. Nettles. But now it's time for us to enter into our main theme today, which is why your congregation, where you pastor, had come to the conclusion that to preserve biblical purity—now, when I say that, I don't mean perfection, because everyone on this planet, until we're in glory with Christ for eternity, are never going to do anything perfectly.

After all, we're not Nazarenes. But what I mean by that is to have guardrails to not only preserve your congregation from going off the rails into heresy in your present day, but also hopefully for generations in the future to do the same.

Churches have developed and adopted confessions of faith. And in fact, since we're coming too close to our first commercial break, I'd like you to start that story when we return. And if anybody listening would like to ask a question of Matt Plett, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

As always, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Matt Plett.

I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in His sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession. We embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost, and the glory of our triune God.

We are also devoted to living out the one another commands of scripture, loving, encouraging, and serving each other as the body of Christ. In our worship, we sing psalms and the great hymns of the faith, and we gather around the Lord's table every Sunday.

We would love for you to visit and worship with us. You can find our details at trbccarlisle .org. That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, we'll see you soon.

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And this is Matt Plett, pastor of Trinity Fellowship, a confessional Reformed Baptist conversation in Niverville, Manitoba, Canada. We're discussing why we became a confessional church. And I am so delighted that in spite of your background being a dairy farmer, you're not just serving the milk of the Word.

And I was just curious, are you influenced at all by the Calvinist theologian Douglas Moo? Sorry about those bad jokes. But I was wondering, as I stated before the break, how your congregation came to, even to begin with, start to have discussions on confessionalism.

And what led you ultimately to make that decision to become a confessional Reformed Baptist church?

Why Trinity Fellowship Became a Confessional Church

Okay, so when I kind of resigned and moved on from a previous setting, that was in conjunction with a few of the other leaders that made a similar decision. And so there was a group of us, I guess, that was not sure what was next.

And we knew there were a handful of Reformed Baptist churches in the area that we went to go visit over the course of that winter. And trying to determine what was best, do we plug in one of these churches in terms of our leanings and our desire for what we would be looking for was quite similar.

And so we started to visit churches, and I talked with a number of pastors to see, you know, what would they advise? What do they think is best? Do we plug in somewhere? Do we start something? What do we think about?

And after a period of time visiting and plugging in with different churches, we started our evening study, actually, in the Heidelberg Catechism, is what we did to start with in the evening Bible study kind of thing.

And kind of clearly set out—so I'd say, actually, the theological vision was actually set before the church really started. So we knew if we set out this way, we knew what we wanted to do, how to form it.

So the vision was actually set before there was really people there. But the appetite clearly was there, and people started to come. So in some ways, it's harder because we started from nothing. But in other ways, it was simpler because we're not trying to steer an existing church to confessionalism.

We did it just right off the dock. And that came about because the four of us men who became founding elders, I suppose, we did share a common vision of what we wanted. We did want a conservative and orthodox expression of Christianity if this plant were to get off the ground.

And so we identified with the London Baptist Confession right from day one. And again, I think, you know, there's no one cookie cutter way to make a church plant, you know, how to start from scratch. There's many different ways, but we started with the leadership structure.

We started with the confession, and then the people started to come from there. So it wasn't a contentious thing. It wasn't difficult to, you know, it's not like we had to teach through it for five years and then really work hard at getting it through.

The vision was there. You know, we weren't, you know, I don't think schismatic or obnoxious about it at all, but we didn't hide it either where we were going. Once we started meeting on Sunday mornings, we started an expository series in the Sunday morning worship service on First Timothy, which makes sense for a new church, kind of, you know, what's the biblical structure for a church?

But then for our adult Sunday school time, we started immediately working through the London Baptist Confession, just to familiarize people with the structure and the contours of confessional Christianity, because I'd say the vast majority of our members do not come from a confessional background.

They come from a, you know, sincere, relatively conservative Bible-believing background, but confessionalism was something new to the vast majority of our people, I would say.

So when this was presented to the congregation, it was universally agreed upon with the elders to adopt the confession?

Yeah, so as elders, we set that direction, and it was early on that we constituted, and as we constituted, it was put in there that we were accepting the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession as our statement of faith, as an accurate summary of biblical doctrine of what the Bible is teaching.

And so that happened off the get-go, and we've been teaching it in our adult Sunday school time for, well, over three years now. I think we're into chapter 21 or 22 right now on Christian Liberty. I think that's chapter 21, actually.

So we're slowly and methodically working through it. Sunday school time is interactive, so we're not going fast. It's conversational. It's good. People can marinate on it, because we have people from all different backgrounds.

So I'd say there's a receptive spirit. Certainly there's a united spirit. There's a healthy spirit. But it is just a matter of slowly but surely marinating in this and helping our people to be familiar with this historic expression of faith.

Why Confessionalism Matters for Historic Christianity and Sola Scriptura

Well, why don't you provide our listeners, especially for the sake of listeners who either are anti-confessional or they are indifferent about it or just totally unknowledgeable about it, what it even means.

Some people may be so unfamiliar with the concept that they may hear the word confessional and think, these people have—you go into a booth somewhere and confess your sins in the church to a priest? Why do they call themselves confessional?

But tell us about why this is so important that your church has adopted a confessional position.

Okay, so for us in particular, part of the reason that we felt it was important is because, again, coming from the context that we do, there is a strong history of sincere, genuine Bible-believing Christianity in this part of the world, in Mennonite culture, most certainly.

But it's not—and it's by design, if you understand Anabaptist history—it's intentionally not very theological. Nor historical, right? The Anabaptists were biblicists and, to a large degree, radicals. And so they were not so interested in identifying with the history of the church, right?

They were going in a new direction completely. And some of that, even though I wouldn't say my own background was particularly radical, many things were just left undefined. There was not a great emphasis on the unity of the church through history and so forth.

And when contentious issues come up, as they did, if you kind of cut yourself off from the wider history of God's church and the way he's built it and the way he's done things through the centuries and even through the millennia, you're really stunting yourself.

And so we felt to—intentionally, this was a self-conscious decision—is that we are going to identify our church with historic Christianity. That we're not starting something from scratch, we're not doing something new or novel, this isn't faddish, this isn't trendy.

We are self-consciously identifying with historical Christianity, and particularly one of the confessions that came out of the Reformational era. And so that brings up your next question, what is confessionalism?

Confessionalism is simply stating in an objective manner how we understand the Bible to teach the Christian faith and the Christian life. It's not me and my Bible, just me, you know, subjective, kind of individualistic.

You know, where instead of having one Catholic pope, every Christian is their own pope. Confessionalism is a great balm for that, because it says, here's how the church has, as a collective, you know, sat down, understood the faith, understood the Christian life, committed it to Prince, so you can find the content of the Christian faith somewhere.

It's committed to a confession, and of course there's a number of different streams of church history that have produced their own confessions. But typically when we talk about it, we're talking about in the Reformational era, you know, the 16th and 17th century was kind of a highlight of that time.

Committing these things to print in all the churn and all the debate that was happening in the Reformation, it was put into print to preserve and to undergird the system of doctrine and the system of living that is presented in the Scriptures.

And so again, for us, it was a self-conscious decision to identify with not just other Christians. You know, the unity that Christians enjoy isn't just across geography, it's also across history. And so we wanted to identify that we are united to the church from the 17th century and from the 4th century and from the 2nd century.

And those early creeds that also were hammered out under, you know, sometimes intense persecution and difficulty. So that was the mindset behind becoming confessional. We were not interested in creating something new.

We were rather interested in identifying with the history of God's people.

And from what I understand from church history, that that is a primary reason—not the only reason, but a primary reason—Calvinistic or particular Baptists of the 17th century, who already had the 1644 Baptist Confession of Faith, also known as the first London Baptist Confession of Faith, they sought to adopt the second London Baptist Confession of Faith partly to demonstrate an affinity with Presbyterians.