Quietism Is Not More Light

Initiative, Presumption, and the Standing Order of the Great Commission

Christos Fellowship — Renaissance Ministries

Fellowship Essay · 3 August 2026

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! — Isaiah 5:20

I. The Question and Its Provenance

As a result of the discussion on the Great Commission last week, we uncovered another doctrinal conflict with Historic/Biblical Christianity and Leonard’s defense of the Denver Snuffer version of Joseph Smith’s teachings (The group calls itself Covenant Christians). During the process of discussing how to witness, and noting that the JW and LDS para-Christian sects were zealous in their proselytization, I was advocating that we in the body of Historic Christianity emulate them and follow the Great Commission, Matthew 28:18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. 19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: 20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

It was obvious to me that Jesus was talking not just to the 11 apostles, but to all who accepted Him as Lord, and who believed His death and resurrection restored their relationship with the Father.

But as the discussion progressed, it became clear that Denver Snuffer does not teach Biblical Christianity on this point. So, we shall analyze what the Bible does teach, and point out the places where Denver Snuffer is teaching a different Gospel than the Gospel of the Bible. Denver teaches that the Great Commission was addressed to the eleven apostles and to them only; that the believer’s part in evangelism is availability rather than campaign. He teaches that the Lord arranges the encounters in our lives. He uses the story of Uzzah being struck down for steadying the ark, and uses this verse as justification for non-intervention in life to spread the Gospel. To use his terminology, we should not “steady the ark.” Leonard said he followed and was attracted to Denver’s teaching because he felt that there was “more light, more knowledge, more understanding” than Historic Christianity possesses.

This is the actual issue, more than any particular point of doctrine. The real question is whether Leonard is following the true light. Is he following the undistorted teaching of Christ that came directly from a man who spoke directly with Jesus? Is the Bible false and the revelation of Denver Snuffer correct/right/true?

The bottom line is, we know that Denver Snuffer is not teaching the Bible. I cannot say who the spirit is that Denver is speaking to, but I know it is not the same message as was delivered in the Bible. I think we are obligated to say to all our friends following para-Christian revelations that it is a different Bible, it is a different teaching. I know Leondard loves Jesus as much as any one of us. But is it the same Jesus that we worship? I don’t know. I know that he follows a teacher who teaches a slightly different Jesus. Does this mean that he is following another spirit, even though he is trying to follow the Jesus of the Bible, or at least the Jesus that Joseph Smith talked about?

I don’t want to trivialize this issue. The problem is that every denomination has a little different version of what the Bible says, (do we sprinkle or immerse, do we allow women to be preachers or only men, do we require men to have short hair and women have long hair, do women have to wear their hair in buns, do we have church on Saturday or Sunday, do we pray to saints and Mary, does the Holy Spirit still manifest by speaking in tongues, do miracles still occur, is the bread and wine actually turned to the body and blood of Christ?)

Just so we know the stakes, here are the Biblical standards for prophecy and teachers:

John 10:5 (KJV) “And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.”
John 10:8 (KJV) “All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers…”
Galatians 1:8 (KJV) “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.”
Galatians 1:9 (KJV) “…if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.”
Matthew 24:23 (KJV) “If any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.”

I think it comes down to what you choose to believe. Do you believe a man today who says, “I speak with Jesus face to face, and here is what he told me”? And we can say, do you believe the Bible is true? The answer is either yes or no. If it is “I believe the Bible as far as it is translated correctly,” then that person has left open the door to ignore any doctrine that they disagree with and insert a new doctrine of their own invention, or one given to them by a man claiming to speak the true and uncorrupted revelation directly from an angel or the Lord Himself.

The fact is that the Bible does not leave room for new prophets coming from God and saying something else. It is either the words of Jesus, the prophecy of God, or it is not, and we either believe it, or we don’t.

Perhaps the method of determining which scripture is true is by looking at the fruits of the followers of each. Is the fruit of Denver Snuffer’s movement better than the fruit of those who follow Historic Christianity? Is either one following the pure teaching? Are we just comparing the behavior of imperfect men with imperfect men, making such an examination moot?

How do we know the truth? In this essay, we see clear evidence that Denver Snuffer’s revelations subtract from the revelation of the New Testament. Let us examine that evidence and see whether there is sufficient claim to say that Denver’s teaching/revelation claims to speak with Jesus personally on a regular basis is evidence of Denver being a false prophet.

Denver is claiming direct knowledge, direct teaching. He is claiming to have bypassed the intermediary filter of Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and that he has received direct revelation from Jesus Himself. I think Leonard is saying that he is disagreeing with what Joseph Smith said on evangelism. I say this from the evidence of the LDS emphasis on evangelism, not from knowledge of their specific teachings. I find this interesting, since Denver Snuffer’s message is essentially the same as Joseph Smith’s on all other matters.

It appears that Leonard is saying that the Bible has been misinterpreted by Historic Christianity for the 2000 years with regard to evangelism and the Great Commission. I think it is clear that Leonard is saying that Denver has a new revelation from Jesus Himself, that Christians should not be campaigning (evangelizing). We should not be making any special effort to witness. We should instead wait for God to organize events in our lives and simply let those little events of our presence and small acts be our outreach. Leonard told the story of wearing a hat with the Christian Covenant symbol on it, and a cashier asked about it. He is stating that such tangential, indirect witness is the way, and that we should let the Lord work through those little things and spread the gospel as Jesus revealed it to Denver Snuffer in his personal visitations.

This teaching counteracts that large view of what is said in the Bible with regard to evangelism. In this essay, I argue that Acts and Epistles support the proposition that the Great Commission applies to everyone who follows Jesus Christ. Leonard argues that the providential-encounter model is the only active requirement of the disciple. If “the Lord does the work” means the believer must not organize, campaign, go on mission, preach on the corner, plant small groups, or purposefully harvest. If that is the actual command of Scripture, then the Great Commission was a private conversation that was recorded, and we are under obligation to share the gospel with no one out of our own initiative and are simply waiting for God to act.

I state my conclusion at the outset, and spend the essay defending it. The teaching that believers must wait for divine initiation before evangelizing is not Biblical. It is quietism. This philosophy/theory/nterpretatation of Scripture is not unique to Denver Snuffer. It is a recurring error with a documented history in Christian and para-Christian movements. This doctrine fails every biblical test that can be applied to it: the test of the command, the test of apostolic practice, the test of the harvest sayings, and the test of fruit. What is true and real must be kept. Of course, we must not presume that every act we do is sanctioned. We should not manipulate those to whom we are witnessing in covert ways or for personal benefit. And certainly the change of any man’s heart is a work that cannot be done by human hands. God alone can give the new birth, give the new name, change the heart of stone to a heart of flesh. But to apply such boundaries to prohibit men from taking the initiative to campaign broadly for men’s salvation and sanctification is to reduce men to the status of victims of the age. The only real remedy for the world in which we live is the sanctification of the culture. To relegate men to the status of watchful waiters is to take from men the action that is the free will that God created men to exercise in their expression of love for Him. What could be a more loving thing, a more willful expression of love, as expressed in character and commitment to His Way, His Lordship, His being, than to bring as many people/hearts/souls/companions to satisfy His heart to that Way as possible.

II. Definitions: Initiative, Presumption, Quietism

The dispute against Leonard/Denver’s postulate that we are to only wait on the Lord for Him to open opportunities turns on three terms that the quietist teaching conflates:

Initiative is action taken within the sphere of God’s revealed will, wisdom, and delegated stewardship, without requiring a fresh, particular command for each act. The servant in the parable who does commerce with his talents receives no instructions; the master gives resources to workers and leaves on a long journey; faithfulness consists precisely in acting without being told each step.

Presumption is action taken against God’s explicit, revealed prohibition. This is the sin of Uzzah. It is upon this verse that the quietist teaching rests almost its entire weight. The text: “And when they came to Nachon’s threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God” (2 Samuel 6:6-7).

Uzzah was not punished for taking initiative. He was punished for violating a standing statute that had been on the books for centuries: the ark was to be carried by Levites on staves, and “they shall not touch any holy thing, lest they die” (Numbers 4:15).
His intention was good; his action was explicitly forbidden; the category is presumption, not initiative.
Initiative is acting within God’s will, wisdom, and freedom; presumption is acting against God’s revealed commands. God forbids presumption. God blesses initiative.
To cite Uzzah against evangelistic campaigns is therefore a category error. The campaign is not forbidden by any statute; it is commanded by the highest one.

Quietism is the doctrine that human initiative is itself spiritually suspect. It is essentially a claim that the soul’s proper posture is passive receptivity, and that action not specifically initiated by God is self-will.

Quietism: a history: it names the seventeenth-century movement associated with Miguel de Molinos, condemned by the church of his own communion, and it names the recurring stream in certain mystical traditions.
We see it in “let go and let God” pietism.
We see it in some charismatic circles that wait for promptings before obeying standing commands.
The teaching under examination is a member of this family. It is not new, it is not restored, and it has been weighed before.

III. The Standing Order

The first test is the command itself, quoted whole: “And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen” (Matthew 28:18-20).

Three observations.

First, the command contains its own scope clause: teaching the nations to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you transmits the commission itself to every disciple made, for the commission is among the things commanded; a commission that expired with the eleven could not be taught to the nations as a thing to observe, and the promise “unto the end of the world” would be attached to a task designed to end within one generation.
Second, the command is unconditional in form. It does not say go when prompted, go when the Spirit initiates, or go when the timing is confirmed. You do not need a special revelation to obey a general revelation. A standing order requires no fresh authorization; it requires execution.
Third, the command to harvest independently commands us to take the initiative and explicitly denies the premise that now is not yet the timing. “Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:37-38).
“Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest” (John 4:35).
The Lord’s stated diagnosis of the harvest problem is not that the field is unready or that the Lord has not yet initiated; it is that the workers are few.
A doctrine that further reduces the workers — that converts willing laborers into waiting ones is not a solution, but expands the Lord’s stated problem.

IV. The Apostolic Practice

The second test is what the commissioned generation actually did, for they are the controlling interpretation of what the commission meant:

“And daily in the temple, and in every house, they ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ” (Acts 5:42).
“Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). These were expressly not the apostles.
“Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him” (Acts 17:17).
“And how I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you, but have shewed you, and have taught you publickly, and from house to house” (Acts 20:20).
Daily, everywhere, publicly, house to house, in the market, ceasing not: this is campaign. It is organized, purposeful, sustained, initiated activity, and it is the uniform record.

The quietist may answer that the apostles were Spirit-led, and so they were — but examine the one recorded instance of the Spirit’s intervention in their evangelistic planning:

“Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia, After they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into Bithynia: but the Spirit suffered them not” (Acts 16:6-7).
The structure of the episode is decisive. Paul was already going. He had initiated the journey, chosen the route, assayed Bithynia on his own planning — and the Spirit’s role was to redirect a man in motion, not to ignite a man at rest.
The Spirit governed where; the standing order had already settled whether. This is the distinction and the exegetical center of the whole question: the biblical pattern is act, and be redirected; act again, and be redirected again. It is never wait, and be initiated.
Paul’s charge to Timothy generalizes it into a permanent pastoral rule, and the phrase “in season, out of season” is a direct repudiation of timing-quietism: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine” (2 Timothy 4:2).
And Peter binds a version of the duty on every believer without exception: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15).

V. The Wider Biblical Pattern: Commanded Initiative

The third test broadens the base beyond evangelism, because the quietist teaching implies a general theology of divine-human relation, and that general theology is testable across the whole canon establishes the pattern: God initiates the promise, man acts in faith, God supplies the power — and Scripture condemns the man who will not move.

At the Red Sea, with the army behind and the water ahead — the one moment in all of Scripture where “stand still and wait for the Lord to act” would seem most warranted — the recorded word is the opposite: “And the LORD said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward” (Exodus 14:15).

The sea parted for a people in motion. Cain is not delivered from his temptation but commanded to master it: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over it” (Genesis 4:7).
Wisdom literature makes foresight and self-started action a moral quality: “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished” (Proverbs 22:3).
Noah builds, Nehemiah organizes, David plans and establishes — initiatives blessed, not rebuked. And the parable of the talents supplies the negative case in the servant’s own words, which are, in substance, a quietist confession: “Lord, I knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed: And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant…” (Matthew 25:24-26).
The servant did nothing presumptuous. He did nothing at all — and for that he is condemned. Passivity is not piety in this parable; it is the indicted sin.

Paul then gives the doctrine its systematic form, and the two texts must be held together because each corrects a misreading of the other:

“For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building” (1 Corinthians 3:9).
In the same chapter, the verses that preserve everything true in Leonard’s caution: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6-7).
This text does not say, “Do not plant.” Paul planted — deliberately, strategically, city by city, on his own itinerary, redirected but never ignited by the Spirit. What the text reserves to God is the increase, and this is the correct boundary of the providential constraint.
Man initiates the planting and the watering because he is commanded to; God alone produces the growth; and the man who claims credit for the growth, or manufactures a counterfeit of it through pressure and manipulation, has crossed into the territory Uzzah marks.
“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12-13) — the divine working is inside the human working, not a substitute for it.

VI. The Mechanism: How Anti-Evangelism Evangelizes

The teaching under review contains a structural paradox that deserves attention. Note that Denver’s audience is LDS; people who have been, by Charlie’s account, kept busy with evangelism and every other form of church service to the point that they have little time for a life other than their church work. Denver is appealing to people under a heavy yoke created by a church that is shaped by the policies and leadership of men, not by the commands and dictates of Scripture. Thus, Denver offers those who are under this heavy yoke the offering of a movement that does not require recruitment. The movement teaches its adherents not to campaign — and grows. Thus, the doctrine of non-recruitment recruits.

The mechanism is identifiable, and it operates on a specific population. The Snuffer movement’s natural mission field is the institutional Latter-day Saint, a person formed by a demanding hierarchy: assignments, callings, tithes, a president as designated prophet whose word functions as the word of God. To this person, Denver Snuffer’s movement presents a portrait built of inversions — no institutional burden, no hierarchy of that kind, and a founding teacher whose central claims are the highest conceivable. (Denver claims in private, and reluctantly, and confidentially, and without pride, that he has seen and conversed with the risen Christ.) He delivers the messages of his encounters with self-effacement, accompanied by the instruction not to promote him. Each inversion is a selling proposition precisely because of the bondage the institutional LDS member is escaping. The humility is not incidental to the persuasion; it is the persuasion, for it is the exact credential the hearer has found wanting in the office of the LDS prophet. And the instruction “do not campaign” completes the structure. It is the same unbidden personal testimony that gives it credibility as certifiably genuine because it is uncoerced. The hearer reasons that no one is selling the program; therefore, it must be real. The anti-evangelism is the evangelism.

I do not claim to read Denver’s heart. I cannot judge any man’s inward state. The standard we are given in Scripture is the judgment of our fruits, not their hearts: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20). The structure of the claim is an outward examination. It can be analyzed regardless of the intent behind it. The structure is a persuasion with its own costume. In this case, the absence of all that is undesirable in the institutional/LDS version of Joseph Smith’s revelation is stripped, and the absence of that heavy burden appears to be “More light.”

The comparison that clarifies the structure is the one long leveled at the prosperity teachers. They offer proof of a doctrine by producing a phenomenon the doctrine itself manufactures. The prosperity teacher points to his own wealth as evidence that giving releases blessing, while the wealth pointed at is composed of the gifts the teaching solicited. Certainly there are verses that promise an increase in following the way of the lord, and giving. But the closed loop in which the demonstration is the donation that produces the evidence is not what scripture is referring to.

The parallel loop here: Denver Snuffer’s movement’s growth-without-campaigning is offered, implicitly or explicitly, as evidence of divine rather than human agency, in quotes such as, “we did not build this; the Lord gathered them,” is reminiscent of scripture:

“…And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.” Acts 2:47 – God adds
“Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it…” Psalms 127:1 – God builds
“…that he should gather together in one the children of God…” John 11:52 – Got gathers
“…I will both search my sheep, and seek them out… and will gather them…” Ezekiel 34:11-12 – God seeks and gathers
“…how often would I have gathered thy children together…” Matthew 23:37 – Jesus gathers
“…I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west…” Isaiah 43:5 – God gathers His people from all directions.
1 Corinthians 3:6–7 — God gives the increase

The analysis above shows that the non-campaigning posture is itself the gathering mechanism, optimally tuned for its target population. Both Denver Snuffer’s non-campaign and the prosperity gospel’s prosperity of the preacher are presented as independent validation of truth.

This is not fruit in the Matthew 7 sense; it is recursion. Actual fruit — the repentance, holiness, and Christ-dependence of the gathered — must be assessed on separate evidence. This essay does not comment on the validity of either ministry along that axis. What the essay establishes is narrower and firmer: growth under an anti-campaign doctrine is not evidence that campaigns are wrong, because the anti-campaign doctrine is functioning as the campaign.

We shall now revisit the mediator test we discussed last week: does a teaching send people to Scripture, or substitute for it? A movement whose distinguishing possession is its founder’s ongoing conversations with the Lord has installed, whatever the intentions, himself as an intermediary between God and man. We illustrated this with a story last week: the Father whose daughter consulted her stepfather for permission before acting. The child need not be forbidden to hear the Father for the mediation to take effect. The mediator need only be consulted first.

A doctrine that quiets the believer’s outward obedience while directing his attention to a living teacher’s revelations has accomplished both halves of the substitution at once: less Bible-commanded action, more teacher-supplied content. This is the shape that Revelation warns against, and 1 Timothy 2:5 forecloses: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

VII. The Test of Light

Leonard’s word for what he found with Denver Snuffer’s teachings was “more light.” We should examine this in light of the Scripture criteria for what constitutes light. “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:22-23).
Light that is actually light produces sight. In Scripture, sight produces obedience to what is seen. A revelation whose net effect is the suspension of a standing dominical command has failed the test by its own output: it has made the commission harder to obey than before the light arrived. Isaiah names the transaction: darkness put for light.
The observation Leonard himself made in the meeting — that his covenant movement is, comparatively, a lighter load than the institution he left — is true and is not the same thing as more light. A lighter load is a real relief, and relief is a real good; but the Great Commission is not a load imposed by an institution, to be shed with the rest of the institutional baggage. It is the marching order of the risen Christ, holding all power in heaven and on earth, and no subsequent revelation outranks the Revelator.

Let the retained truth be stated with equal precision, so that this essay cannot be read as a license for the opposite error. Leonard’s caution guards three things that are genuinely guarded in Scripture:

“I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.” (1 Corinthians 3:6-7);
Manipulation, pressure, and manufactured decisions are counterfeits of conversion and are forbidden to us absolutely; and the servant who begins to steady the ark — who concludes that God’s purposes will fail without his managing hand, and who therefore crosses from commanded work into forbidden control — is in Uzzah’s peril.
Leonard’s practice is initiative: wearing a hat that declares his allegiance, the answered question at the buffet, the monthly potluck, the homeless man fed and received. These are works of initiative, whatever the theory over them says.
The correction this essay makes is to the theory, and the corrected theory is simple:
plant and water on the standing order, without waiting for ignition;
expect redirection, not initiation, from the Spirit;
and leave the increase, all of it, to God.

VIII. Conclusion and the Way Forward

I do not believe the text of Scripture forbids human initiative in evangelism, and no text conditions the Great Commission on particular promptings; the commission is a standing order whose apostolic execution was daily, public, organized, and self-started, with the Spirit exercising route control over workers already in motion.

Second, the Uzzah narrative, correctly read against Numbers 4:15, condemns presumption — action against explicit prohibition — and cannot be extended to condemn commanded action without category error.

Third, the wait-for-initiation teaching belongs to the historically recurring family of quietism and is answerable as such; its growth under an anti-campaign doctrine is not self-validating, because the anti-campaign posture is itself the recruitment mechanism, structurally parallel to the self-certifying proof loop long criticized in prosperity teaching.

Fourth, the claim of “more light” fails the Matthew 6 test, since the teaching’s net output is diminished obedience to a dominical command;

The true elements it contains — God’s sole ownership of the increase, the prohibition of manipulation, the Uzzah boundary — are already fully present in Historic Christianity and require no supplementary revelation to secure.

Therefore, to the question as I posed it — should we go on mission, preach, stand on the corner, organize small groups and Bible studies, and purposefully lead souls toward justification and sanctification — the answer of this essay is yes, on the authority of the standing order, without waiting for what has already been given. We act, and God directs. We plant, and God gives the increase. The fields are white; the workers are few; and the fellowship’s own program — the essays, the meetings, the multiplication of small groups proposed in the 28 July essay — is initiative of exactly the commanded kind, to be pursued with the constraint intact: no pressure, no counterfeit fruit, no hand on the ark.

And lastly, a note to Leonard. Leonard is not an opponent, a fellow seeker of truth, a brother seeking to live in the way of the Lord. I believe the doctrine that Leonard promoted in last week’s fellowship, which is taught/promoted/revealed by Denver Snuffer, is anti-Biblical. I do not support it, and I do not believe it serves Leonard or the body of Christ/the church to follow it as argued above in the precedent of Scripture.

I believe I am required by Scripture to offer this counsel for consideration to a brother in the Lord, “But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). It is my opinion, my interpretation of Scripture, based upon my belief that there is no higher authority than Scripture, that the doctrine he has received on this point is wrong. It is an old error under a new name. It is a teaching that leads those who accept it away from a command of Christ. Love requires that this be said to him plainly. I offer this on no more authority than my interpretation of Scripture. We are laborers together with God, and with each other; and the correction of a brother’s doctrine is an expression of love, and one we must be comfortable and fluent in delivering. This is part of the work of the harvest.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. — Galatians 6:9

Addendum: Three Anticipations

1. The participle objection. A reader familiar with the Greek may object that Matthew 28:19 does not begin with an imperative at all. The word rendered “Go ye” is poreuthentes, a participle — “having gone,” or as some render it, “as you go” — and from this it is sometimes argued that the Commission contains no command to go, only an instruction for conduct along whatever way one happens to travel. The objection fails twice.

First, Greek grammar recognizes the attendant-circumstance participle, which takes the mood of its main verb; the main verb here is matheteusate — “make disciples” — an imperative, and the participle shares its force. Matthew uses the identical construction in 2:8, where Herod says “go and search diligently,” and no one supposes Herod meant the wise men should search only if they happened to be going.
Second, and decisively: even granting the softer reading, “as you go” assumes the going. A rendering that presupposes motion cannot be conscripted to justify rest. The participle is not an escape from the command; it is the command’s assumption that the disciple is already in motion — which is precisely the pattern of Acts 16.

2. The vocabulary of waiting. The quietist position is seemingly defensible from Scripture. We see it being supported in verses such as:

“Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart” (Psalm 27:14).
“They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength” (Isaiah 40:31).
“Stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD” (Exodus 14:13).

These Biblical verses refer to being in a posture of dependence within obedience, never a suspension of obedience. The men who waited on the Lord in Scripture were not idle men; they were men at their posts. Isaiah’s waiters mount up, run, and walk — three verbs of motion — as the fruit of their waiting. And the Exodus text is self-interpreting, for the very next breath is verse 15: “Wherefore criest thou unto me? speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.” Standing still lasted one verse; the standing order resumed immediately. Waiting on the Lord is how the worker is strengthened for the work. It is not an alternative to the work. A doctrine that converts the strengthening posture into a permanent substitute for the commanded task has missed the point — action is always the purpose of posture and preparation.

3. The manner of the correction. This essay has argued doctrine; a word is owed on delivery. Ephesians 4:15 has commanded us to speak the truth in love. When we take this up on Sunday, the aim is not a verdict pronounced over Leonard, but a question set before him: by what standard do you judge the doctrine of waiting on the Lord to bring situations into your orbit, rather than initiating action in spreading the Word? If the standard is Scripture, the case above stands or falls on exegesis. We welcome an argument based on Scripture. If the standard is Denver’s revelations, his words have taken the place of Scripture, and he has become the authority. If this is the case, then we must recognize that the conversation has changed in kind — it is no longer two men reasoning from a shared final authority, but a conversation across differing ultimate standards, and it must proceed on the grounds of rationality and pragmatism, for Scripture has been reduced to one datapoint among many possible voices. This is the same ground we would stand on with any honest seeker who does not yet hold Scripture as final. If Denver’s words are regarded as having authority over Scripture, the deeper issue is how we choose who, what, and how we establish our ultimate authority, allegiance, and standard of truth. This is the same issue that is ultimately behind every conversation about doctrine, religion, and belief.

This essay is not a judgment of Leonard’s salvation, his sincerity, or his love for the Lord. Rather, it is the counsel of brothers who believe a teaching he has received will lead him away from the liberty that is promised in Christ. This is the same argument with the revelation of Joseph Smith, who placed himself, or was placed by men, into the role of mediator between God and man. The issue of the mediator is even more prominent when the man is alive, as in the case of Denver Snuffer. When any man is put between Christ and us — by accepting the man as having the credibility, and hence the authority, of direct words from Christ — we will inevitably be subject to the man-mediator, who will either, by his error of omission, leave us with less blessing than is offered, or more burden than is required. I hold this counsel in the posture of correction, as my duty to warn a brother whom I believe is following another Gospel, another Christ, a mediator when none is needed. It is sincere correction, one man to another, offering my best understanding of Scripture—not infallible, not a word from the Lord, just one man’s opinion—offered once, plainly, in love, and then left with him. It is the Lord that changes hearts. I believe such correction is owed as the obligation of fellowship. Such counsel is not the interruption of fellowship; it is one of fellowship’s duties, and among its highest expressions.

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

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