Where Is God in This?
A Fellowship Meeting Analysis: The Question of God’s Voice in the Christos Civitas Vision
Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 19, 2026
Source: Sunday Zoom fellowship, April 19, 2026. Participants: Thomas Abshier, Charlie Gutierrez, Susan Gutierrez, Leonard Hofheins, Isak Gutierrez, Armond Boulware. Discussion arose from Leonard’s written comment posted to the Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men essay (April 18, 2026), which asked: Where is God in all this? Does he have a voice? What would be his part, if any? Does he speak today, and if so, to whom? Or do we need him to speak — a Bible, a Bible — we have a Bible. There can’t be another Bible.
To the Fellowship —
The meeting on April 19 took shape around a single question, and the question was Leonard’s. He had read the Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men essay the night before and had left a comment on the website asking, with characteristic directness, where is God in all this? It was a fair question, and it set the agenda for the entire two and a half hours that followed.
I want to capture what the conversation surfaced, because the question is one we will keep encountering — with Mike, with Leonard, with every new conversation partner — and the way the fellowship handled it on April 19 deserves to be preserved. There were three substantive movements in the meeting, and a brief opening exchange about what to name the broader project, and a closing testimony from Charlie that I want to honor. Let me walk through each in turn.
I. Naming the Project — Christos Civitas
Before the substance began, I shared with the group a list of name options I had been working through for the broader civic-and-theological project I have been calling, for years, “the Christian nation.” Michael had pressed the question at the time of his last visit: what should this thing be called, given that “Christian nation” carries baggage and “kingdom” risks confusion? I had asked the AI for candidates. The list was: Kingdom Nation, Righteous Society, Christos Nation, Kingdom Culture, Kingdom Way, Covenant Nation, One Nation Under God, Christos Vision, Kingdom Commonwealth, Renewed Republic, Christos Civitas, Sanctified Society.
The candidate that landed for me was Christos Civitas — the city or citizenship of Christ. Latin rather than English on purpose: it carries the gravity of the long Christian tradition without conscripting any modern American political frame, and it names what the project actually is — a city in the Augustinian sense, a citizenship in the Pauline sense (Philippians 3:20: “For our conversation is in heaven” — politeuma, citizenship). It is not a nation-state. It is not a denomination. It is a body of citizens whose first allegiance is to a King whose Kingdom is not from this world, but whose Kingdom is being made manifest within this world through people who have submitted to His way.
Charlie, true to form, suggested “Jesus is an American” and “Jesus is a redneck” as alternatives. We will not be using those. But the Christos Civitas name will appear in the corpus going forward, and members of the fellowship are welcome to push back if a different name fits better.
II. Leonard’s Question — Where Is God in This?
Then Leonard surfaced his question, and the rest of the meeting was the working-through of it.
His written comment, read aloud at the start of the meeting, was substantively this: Where is God in all this? Does he have a voice? What would be his part? Does he speak today, and if so, to whom? Is there anyone who speaks for God today? Or do we need him to speak — a Bible, a Bible, we have a Bible, there can’t be another Bible.
The phrase “a Bible, a Bible” is from the Book of Mormon (2 Nephi 29:3-6) — a passage Mormons commonly invoke to argue that revelation is ongoing rather than closed. Leonard was placing that passage alongside the Kingdom of God essay and asking whether the essay had implicitly closed off divine speech.
His worry, as it unfolded, was not that the essay denied God’s existence. His worry was that the essay’s vision of a Christos Civitas was being constructed as if God had nothing to say about it — that we were “steadying the ark” (a phrase from 2 Samuel 6, where Uzzah died for steadying the ark of God with his hand when the oxen stumbled, presuming to do God’s work in his own strength). Leonard was asking whether the project was vain — whether we were laying out a vision in human terms when we should be on our knees asking what God’s vision is.
This was a serious question, and it deserved serious engagement. Three things came out in the working-through.
A. The Mormon-shaped expectation of a prophet
Leonard’s question carried with it, as he later acknowledged, a particular cultural expectation. The Mormon tradition assumes that God speaks to His people through a designated prophet — Joseph Smith originally, then his successors in unbroken succession. If God is speaking today, the LDS framework expects that He is speaking through someone in particular whose words are then to be heeded. Leonard has explicitly distanced himself from the Salt Lake institutional version of this, but the underlying expectation — that God works through chosen messengers — is so deeply embedded in his theological formation that it shaped the way he framed the question.
I tried to name this gently in the meeting. I observed that I had grown up Bible-based rather than Mormon-based, and that the expectation of a single chosen prophet was simply not part of my theological formation. I had heard, growing up, of the still small voice (1 Kings 19:12) — God speaking quietly and individually to those who would listen. I had not heard people around me saying “the Lord told me, therefore everyone should follow me.” The cultural-theological air I breathed was different.
I offered a counter-example as well: the Netflix documentary The False Prophet, about Sam Bateman, the FLDS leader who claimed to hear God and used that claim to take dozens of wives, including underage girls. The pattern is recognizable. Whenever a community is primed to expect a prophet — primed to expect that God will speak through one designated man — the door is open for any sufficiently audacious figure to walk through it. Bateman walked through it. Joseph Smith’s spiritual heirs walked through variant doors. Sun Myung Moon walked through one. Jim Jones walked through one. Sam Bateman walked through one. The pattern repeats because the expectation is itself the vulnerability.
This is the practical-theological reason Bible-based Christianity has historically resisted the sole-prophet model. It is not that God cannot speak through individuals — He can and does. It is that making the prophetic office central to the community’s life creates a permanent vulnerability to the next charismatic claimant. The Reformation closed the canon, partly to close that vulnerability.
B. Charlie’s recurring question — How do you know what’s true?
Through the meeting, Charlie kept returning to the question that has been his persistent contribution to the fellowship: how do you know what’s true? He named it in conversation with Leonard’s question, drew a line back to Acts 17:11 where the Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so,” and observed that this is what we are condemned to do — think and pray and weigh and compare — at every point.
Charlie’s hang-gliding analogy was the most memorable image of the meeting. His first hang-gliding teacher told him: If you could see what a wild, crazy ocean of currents the air actually is, you would never fly. But if you are going to fly, you have no choice. You go up with it, go down with it, and deal with it. Charlie applied the image to the spiritual life. The currents of conflicting voices in our world — religious traditions, charismatic teachers, political prophets, internet gurus, our own internal chatter — are a wild ocean. We cannot pretend the ocean is not there. We have to fly through it anyway, alert and discerning, comparing every voice to the standard of “my sheep know my voice” (John 10:27).
This is, I think, exactly right. The Christian life is not the avoidance of the ocean. It is the disciplined flight through it.
C. Isak’s insight — the veil was always our idea
Isak made the most theologically generative move of the meeting, and I want to capture it carefully because it integrates the apparently competing positions.
Isak observed that the desire for a human mediator between the people and God is not God’s idea. It is Israel’s idea, repeatedly. At Sinai, when the people heard God’s voice as thunder and lightning, they begged Moses: “Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die” (Exodus 20:19). Centuries later, when the prophet Samuel was old and Israel was in transition, the people demanded a king “like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5) — a human mediator they could see and follow. The pattern repeats: given the option of an unmediated relationship with the living God, the human heart consistently chooses a human substitute.
The work of Christ, Isak argued, is the removal of the need for that substitute. The veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom at the moment of His death (Matthew 27:51) — a deliberate sign that the separation requiring a priestly mediator was over. “Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil” (Hebrews 10:19-20). The new covenant is not “find a better mediator.” The new covenant is “the mediator has done His work, and you are now invited into direct fellowship with the Father through the indwelling Spirit.”
This means that any movement that re-installs a human mediator at the center of its religious life is, in some structural sense, going backward — back to the pre-Christ pattern of priestly mediation, even when the language of “Christ” is preserved. The Mormon prophet, the Catholic priest’s role in confession, the Pentecostal apostle, the cult guru — these all share the same structural feature: a human stands between the believer and God. The biblical pattern, post-resurrection, is the opposite. Every believer is a priest (1 Peter 2:9, “Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood”). Every believer is indwelled by the Spirit (Romans 8:9). Every believer has direct access to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16).
Isak’s framing did the work of turning the conversation. The question “Where is God in this?” has two possible answers. The Mormon-shaped answer is “find the man God is speaking through and follow him.” The Christ-shaped answer is “every member of the body has direct access to God through the Spirit, and the body together discerns His voice through the Word, in fellowship, and in the conviction of conscience the Spirit applies.”
The Christos Civitas vision is the second answer. It is not a vision in which God is absent. It is a vision in which God is distributed — speaking to every faithful citizen through the Spirit He sent, and the body of citizens together discerning what He is saying, comparing it to the apostolic deposit, and acting on the consensus of Spirit-led discernment.
D. Susan’s procedural counsel — James 1:5
Susan, characteristically, brought the conversation to ground with scripture. She read James 1:5: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” And then verses 6-8: “But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.”
Her gloss was important. “Asking in faith” does not mean “asking, with confidence that you will get an answer.” It means asking, having already decided that you will obey whatever answer comes. The wavering James warns against is not intellectual uncertainty about whether God exists or speaks. It is moral wavering — the posture of the seeker who reserves the right to evaluate God’s answer before deciding whether to obey it.
This is the precondition for hearing God’s voice. The believer who comes to God with conditions — I will obey if the answer suits me — has already foreclosed the conversation. The believer who comes saying whatever you say, that is what I will do has opened the door God has been waiting to walk through.
That is, I think, the correct response to Leonard’s original question. Where is God in this? God is everywhere His people are seeking Him with that posture — and silent everywhere His people are seeking Him with reservations.
III. The Resolution — “Everybody Is a Prophet”
Late in the meeting, after some heat had built up between Leonard’s framing and mine, Susan brokered a clarification. She suspected — correctly — that Leonard and I were not actually disagreeing about substance. We were talking past each other on framing.
Leonard, when pressed, was not actually arguing that the Christos Civitas project requires one designated prophet through whom God speaks. He acknowledged this directly: God does not choose just one, he said — God chooses many, those who are willing to do the work and to be called. What he was arguing, in his original comment, was that the Christos Civitas vision document needed to explicitly verbalize that the project is being undertaken in submission to God’s will rather than as a human construction. He wanted the language to make plain: we are doing this because we are seeking what the Lord wants, and we believe He is leading. Without that language being overt, the document risked appearing to be vain in the biblical sense — a human project undertaken in human strength.
Once Susan named this clearly, the apparent disagreement dissolved. I responded that this is exactly what I believe and intend. The Christos Civitas vision is not a vision in which we are filling a hole left by a silent God. It is a vision in which every faithful citizen is hearing the Spirit and contributing what they hear to the discernment of the body. Everyone is a prophet, in the small sense — everyone who is in Christ has the Spirit, and everyone with the Spirit has access to God’s voice in the matters before them.
I will adopt Leonard’s recommendation. The vision documents will more explicitly verbalize that the project is being undertaken under the leading of the Spirit, not in our own strength, and that we expect God to direct it through the Spirit-led discernment of every faithful participant. This was a genuine contribution from Leonard, and I am grateful for it.
The agreement we reached was, in summary:
- No one human prophet is required for God’s voice to be present in the project.
- Every faithful citizen is a prophet in the sense of being in continuous communion with the Holy Spirit and able to discern God’s leading on the matters before them.
- The body of citizens together — through prayer, scripture, fellowship, and the discernment of the Spirit applied to each — discerns God’s will for the larger project.
- The vision documents should make this explicit, so that no one reading them assumes God has been left out.
- Charismatic claims to special prophetic authority require, at minimum, the same kind of testing the Bereans applied — comparison to the apostolic deposit and the witness of the Spirit in the body.
This resolution will hold for the foreseeable future. It is consistent with the Theological Grammar’s posture on revelation, and it is consistent with what I have argued in the substitutionary atonement and phenomenology essays about union with Christ. The Christ who paid the debt at Calvary now indwells His people by His Spirit, and the Spirit speaks within every believer who will listen. That is where God is in this.
IV. Charlie’s Question — What Kind of Life Do You Want?
About halfway through the meeting, Charlie pivoted with a question that pulled the conversation out of theological abstraction into personal testimony. What kind of life do you want?
The answers were revealing.
Leonard: peace and quiet. He wanted to be left alone, to get on with his life, to not encounter constant struggle with everybody and everything. The answer of a man who has fought a long battle to leave the institutional Mormon church and is now seeking refuge in a quieter form of faithfulness.
Isak: the same — peace.
Armond: a life of service, with impact. He told the story of his older brother talking him off the ledge of his Y2K-era anxiety about death — the realization that took root in him then was I am going to die at some point. I am going to take advantage of being here while I am here. He spoke about being blessed with influence and physical presence, and choosing not to use those gifts to bully but to be a positive presence to his peers. He spoke about wanting, when he meets God, for God to recognize that he had been responsible with the duties and the gifts he was given.
Susan: the testimony she gave was the most pastorally important moment of the meeting. She spoke about what it actually feels like to be in continuous relationship with the Lord — the way prayer turns from petition into companionship, the way obedience starts to feel less like burden and more like coming home, the way the unconditional love of the Father, once felt, produces in the believer the desire to love Him back. She quoted Psalm 37:5 — “Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.” And she said, plainly, that connection with God is joyful even when it passes through hard things — that there is a difference between obedience-as-drudgery (which is how it can look from outside) and obedience-as-gratitude (which is how it feels from inside).
This is the testimony that should anchor the Christos Civitas vision. It is not a project of theoretical theology. It is a project of people who are actually in this relationship, and who are bearing witness to what the relationship is like, and who are inviting others into the same relationship. Without testimony like Susan’s, the project becomes intellectual machinery. With it, the project is the natural overflow of a community that has met the living Christ and cannot help but speak about Him.
Charlie’s own answer — given partly through testimony rather than direct statement — was that he has lived this question expensively. He has spent time in jails for following the Spirit’s leading in ways the government did not approve. He does not drink alcohol because he does not want a single moment of his life to be blurry — “too dangerous.” The kind of life he wants is the kind of life in which he is awake, sober, alert, and free to obey when the Spirit speaks, regardless of the cost. This is a serious answer from a serious man, and the fellowship should honor it.
V. The Doctrine of Christ — A Brief Exchange
Near the end of the meeting, Leonard and Susan circled around the question of what the doctrine of Christ actually consists of. Leonard gave a fivefold list drawn from his Restoration framework: faith, repentance, baptism, the Holy Ghost, and the doctrine of Christ as believing Him. Susan added what she felt the list left out — love. The mark by which the world is meant to recognize Christ’s disciples is that they have love one to another (John 13:35). A list of doctrinal-procedural items without love named explicitly leaves out the central commandment, the central demonstration, and the central recognizable feature of authentic Christian life.
The exchange was a small one but worth noting. Leonard accepted the addition. The fivefold-plus-love framing is not the worst summary of the gospel I have heard, and it is consistent with what historic Christianity has always taught: faith working through love (Galatians 5:6). Faith is the mode of receiving Christ; repentance is the turn from sin; baptism is the public declaration of union with His death and resurrection; the Holy Ghost is the indwelling presence applying Christ’s finished work to the believer’s life; and love is the fruit by which the Spirit’s indwelling becomes visible in the world.
That is, I think, what we will land on as the core summary in the Christos Civitas vision documents. Faith. Repentance. Baptism. The indwelling Spirit. Love made manifest. These are the family resemblance markers of the citizens of the Christos Civitas. Anything that fails to include all five is not a complete description of Christian life. Anything that adds requirements beyond these — temple ordinances, priesthood ratifications, prophetic submission — is adding to what Christ established.
VI. What the Meeting Taught
Three things I leave the meeting holding more firmly than I held them before:
1. Leonard’s question deserved better than I initially gave it. My first response treated it as a Mormon-shaped expectation of a single prophet. It was that, partly. But it was also a legitimate concern that the Christos Civitas vision was not adequately verbalizing its dependence on God’s leading. Susan saw what I missed. The vision documents will be revised to make the dependence explicit.
2. Isak’s “the veil was always our idea” insight is doctrinally generative and deserves its own treatment. The recurring human pattern — Sinai, Samuel, the Mormon prophet, the Pentecostal apostle, the cult guru — is the demand for a human mediator. The work of Christ is the dissolution of the need for that mediation. Every member of the body has direct access through the Spirit. This is the structural feature that distinguishes apostolic Christianity from every restorationist movement that has installed a new mediator in the gap Christ closed. Worth a founders_vision seed entry, and possibly a standalone essay.
3. Susan’s testimony is what the Christos Civitas project actually rests on. The intellectual scaffolding — the Theological Grammar, the substitutionary atonement essays, the political vision — all of it is downstream of the experience of actually being in relationship with the living Christ. Without that experience present in the fellowship, the project is dead letter. With it, the project is the natural overflow of a community that has met Him and cannot stop speaking. The fellowship should make space, regularly, for the kind of testimony Susan gave on April 19. That is the soil from which everything else grows.
VII. Closing
Leonard, the question you raised on April 19 was the right question, and I am glad you raised it. The vision documents will be revised to make explicit what was implicit — that the Christos Civitas is not a human project in human strength, but a project undertaken by people who believe they are being led by the Spirit of the living Christ, and who are seeking, every day, to discern His voice in fellowship, in scripture, and in the conviction of conscience.
To the fellowship: this is what we do for each other. Iron sharpens iron. The conversations that look like disagreements are often, on closer examination, the body discerning together what no member could discern alone. April 19 was a working-out. April 26 was the next working-out. Every Sunday is a working-out. “Forsaking not the assembling of ourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25) is not optional, because the assembling is itself part of how the Spirit speaks.
We close, as Susan closed the meeting, in the hope that next week’s gathering will be edifying, that we will challenge each other in love, that we will continue arriving at truth together, and that the Lord will bless each of us with His Holy Spirit.
Thomas
“Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.” — John 16:13
Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.