Are you in the TRUE church? Sam Shamoun answers

Are you in the TRUE church? Sam Shamoun answers

The cedar planks of the workshop floor were cold beneath Thomas’s socks, a sharp contrast to the humid, early-summer heat settling over the Ohio River valley. Outside the high, uninsulated windows of the old textile mill turned furniture studio, the afternoon was turning an aggressive, heavy gray. A storm was rolling in from the west, the kind that smelled of damp limestone and ozone, threatening to knock out the unstable grid of the industrial park before the shift ended.

Thomas didn’t mind the dark. At thirty-one, he had developed a deep comfort with silence and shadow, a professional necessity for a man who spent ten hours a day restoration-carving white oak beams for local heritage projects. His hands, thick-fingered and permanently stained at the knuckles with dark walnut walnut stain, moved with a slow, deliberate rhythm over a seventeenth-century lintel piece. He was a man who understood structure. He knew exactly how much weight a mortise-and-tenon joint could bear before the timber began to shear along the grain.

But his internal engineering was far less stable.

“Hey, Tom,” a voice drifted from the doorway, competing with the low hum of a dust collector in the corner. “You got a minute, or are you locked into that chisel?”

Thomas pulled his safety glasses down around his neck and wiped his brow with the back of a flannel sleeve. Standing at the threshold was Marcus, an elder from the Grace Covenant fellowship—the sleek, multi-campus non-denominational church that occupied a converted warehouse three miles down the bypass. Marcus was forty-two, wore crisp utility shirts that had never seen a saw-pit, and possessed the smooth, unflappable energy of a former mid-level project manager who had transitioned into full-time ministry logistics.

“Just cleaning up the bevel,” Thomas said, setting the wood-handled chisel into its leather sheath on the workbench. “What’s up, Marcus?”

Marcus walked in, his leather boots clicking sharply on the loose floorboards. He held a cardboard tray containing two large iced coffees, sliding one across the oil-stained workbench toward Thomas. “Saw your truck was still out there. Missed you at the Tuesday evening small group. Rachel said you’ve been pulling double shifts, but I wanted to check in. When a guy gets back into the Word after ten years out in the cold, the enemy loves to use busyness as a wedge.”

Thomas took the plastic cup, the condensation cold against his calloused palm. He looked at the old lintel piece, its hand-hewn surface bearing the distinct, irregular marks of an adze tool used three hundred years ago by a craftsman whose name had been completely scrubbed from history.

“I’ve been reading, Marcus,” Thomas said, his voice dropping into a quiet, hesitant register. “A lot, actually. Since I came back to the faith last winter… it’s like my brain won’t shut off. When I was twenty, leaving the church felt easy because I just wanted to run. Now that I’m thirty-one, I’m looking at the landscape, and I’m realizing I don’t even know what territory I’m standing on.”

Marcus leaned his hip against an unplaned slab of walnut, a reassuring smile on his face. “That’s normal, brother. Deconstruction is easy; rebuilding takes sweat. But you’re doing it the right way. Just you, Jesus, and the text. No religious baggage. No ancient political traditions getting between you and the Savior.”

Thomas took a slow breath, his thumb tracing the plastic rim of his cup. “That’s the thing, though. I was talking to this guy online—an old street preacher who does live-stream Q&As out of an old library in Detroit. I asked him straight up: Is it enough for me to just love Christ, read my Bible, and keep going to Grace Covenant? Is that kosher? And he looked right through the camera and told me I was contradicting myself.”

Marcus’s smile didn’t fade, but his posture went slightly rigid. “People online love to build fences around the gospel, Tom. What did he say?”

“He told me that the same Bible I’m trying to follow says I can’t just be a lone sheep with a personal handbook,” Thomas murmured, his eyes locking onto Marcus’s. “He said the Word itself demands an anchor. He asked me where my authority was. He asked me who watches over my soul.”

The Weight of the Word

The wind outside hit the side of the mill, making the old window panes rattle within their leaded frames. The light in the room dropped significantly, the gray sky turning a bruised shade of purple.

“Let’s look at what the text actually says,” Thomas continued, reaching into his canvas tool bag and pulling out a worn, black leather Bible—a standard translation he’d bought at a thrift store after his grandmother’s funeral. The pages were heavily annotated with pencil marks, the margins filled with his small, tight handwriting. “The guy gave me three passages, Marcus. And I’ve been sitting here with them for four hours, trying to find a way around them.”

He flipped the pages, the paper dry and rustling under his thumb. “First one was Hebrews 13:17. ‘Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will give an account.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Thomas, that isn’t talking about the governor or your city council. That’s a spiritual commander.’ He asked me who at Grace Covenant is going to stand before the judgment seat of God and give an account for my specific soul. Is it the lead pastor on the video screen? Is it the campus coordinator who checks the parking passes?”

Marcus sighed softly, crossing his arms. “Tom, we have small group leaders. We have pastoral care teams. We have accountability partners. The local church isn’t a building; it’s a network of believers.”

“But a network isn’t a government,” Thomas said, his voice firming up with the precision of a man arguing a structural blueprint. “He took me to Matthew 18 next. The conflict resolution passage. Jesus says if a brother sins against you, and won’t listen to two or three witnesses, you take him to the Church. And if he refuses to listen even to the Church, you treat him like an unbeliever—a tax collector. You cast him out.”

Thomas laid the open Bible flat on the oak timber between them. “I looked at that, and I thought about what happened with Brian last year at Grace Covenant. He was caught embezzling from his business partners and sleeping with an intern. What did the church do? They couldn’t discipline him. They didn’t have the authority to cast him out of anything. He just stopped showing up at our campus, drove five miles north, and started attending the big non-denominational church in the next county. He was in their worship band three weeks later.”

Marcus’s face darkened slightly, the corporate warmth dropping away to reveal a sharper, defensive edge. “We live in a modern society, Thomas. We don’t live in a first-century village. People have mobility. You can’t force someone to submit to church discipline if they choose to walk across the county line.”

“Then the highest authority on earth for a Christian doesn’t exist anymore,” Thomas said flatly. “Because Jesus says in that exact same chapter, ‘Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loomed in heaven.’ He was talking to the leaders he was appointing. He was giving them legislative power to set the boundaries of the community. If ‘the Church’ is just an aggregate of forty thousand independent franchises that don’t talk to each other, then that verse is completely dead. It has no teeth. It’s just poetry.”

The Twenty-First Century Stream

Marcus walked over to the window, watching the first heavy drops of rain strike the gravel parking lot below. The storm had finally broken, filling the valley with a dull, rhythmic roar.

“You’re falling into a legalistic trap, Tom,” Marcus said without turning around. “Jesus didn’t come to establish an international bureaucracy. He came to set us free from the Pharisees. When He said to Peter in Matthew 16, ‘On this rock I will build my church,’ He was talking about the confession of faith. He was talking about the global, invisible body of every true believer on the planet. That body doesn’t need an earthly headquarters. It doesn’t need an episcopal hierarchy.”

“Is that what the early believers thought?” Thomas asked quietly.

Marcus turned back around, his eyebrows raised. “What do you mean?”

“The preacher asked me a question that really messed me up,” Thomas said, his fingers tracing a knot in the white oak lintel. “He asked me: At the time of Christ, when He stood there and told Peter He was building a church, was that church non-denominational?“

Silence hung in the workshop, heavy and thick with the smell of wet sawdust.

“Obviously not in the modern sense,” Marcus said, his voice tightening. “The word didn’t exist then. The divisions happened later because of human corruption.”

“Right,” Thomas said. “He agreed with that. He said it wasn’t non-denominational because there were no options. There was just the Church. One family, one faith, one physical body connected by the actual hands of the men who had seen the empty tomb. Then he told me that the non-denominational movement as we know it didn’t start until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. He asked me how a movement that started nineteen hundred years after the resurrection can claim to be the thing Jesus built.”

“It’s a restoration of the original model, Tom!” Marcus said, his voice rising slightly over the sound of the rain. “We stripped away the medieval clutter. The incense, the popes, the councils, the institutional decay. We went back to the New Testament format—simple fellowships, focused on the Bible, led by local elders.”

“But the New Testament format included Timothy and Titus,” Thomas countered, his pencil point striking the margin of his Bible for emphasis. “He took me to 1 Timothy 3:15. Paul writes to Timothy about how people ought to behave in the household of God, which is ‘the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.’ A bulwark is a defensive wall, Marcus. It’s a retaining structure that stops the soil from sliding into the river. If the church is invisible, and if every pastor can interpret the Bible according to his own preference, then where is the wall? Who keeps the truth from dissolving into forty thousand different variations?”

Thomas stood up, his height giving him an imposing presence in the small frame of the workshop. “There are over forty thousand independent, non-denominational or separate Christian groups in America alone today, Marcus. If I don’t like what you preach about marriage or baptism at Grace Covenant, I can cross the street, rent a storefront, put up a sign that says The Real Truth Fellowship, and call myself an independent elder. Who has the authority to tell me I’m wrong? The Bible? I’m using the same Bible you are. I’m just using my own dictionary.”

The Lineage of the Timber

Marcus walked back to the workbench, looking down at the ancient oak lintel Thomas had been repairing. The wood was dark, dense, and heavily marked by time, but its structural integrity was absolute.

“You’re looking for a certainty that doesn’t exist in this broken world, Thomas,” Marcus said, his voice dropping back into its calm, pastoral register. “You want an institution that can’t fail you. But history shows that every single visible institution—whether it’s Rome, or Constantinople, or the old European state churches—eventually becomes corrupt. They turn into political machines. They buy gold and sell indulgences. The only thing that stays pure is the relationship between the individual heart and the Holy Spirit.”

“Then why did Jesus leave an institution?” Thomas asked, his voice cracking slightly with the raw frustration of his search. “If He just wanted a relationship between the heart and the Spirit, He could have written His own book, dropped it from the sky, and skipped the crucifixion entirely. But He didn’t. He left twelve men. He breathed on them. He gave them the power to forgive sins. He told them to go out and lay hands on other men, who laid hands on other men.”

He picked up his wood mallet, the hickory handle smooth from years of sweat. “I work with wood every day, Marcus. If I want to know if a beam is solid, I don’t just look at the surface grain. I track the growth rings all the way back to the heartwood. I look at the root system of the forest it came from. When I look at Grace Covenant… the grain looks nice. The music is great, the sermons are practical, and the coffee is good. But when I try to trace the rings back past 1985, there’s nothing there. The line just stops in mid-air. It’s like a branch that’s been cut off from the trunk and stuck into the mud to look like a tree.”

Marcus looked at the floorboards, his thumb drumming against his side. “So what are you saying, Tom? You’re going to leave? Go join the Catholics? Or the Eastern Orthodox? You want to trade your freedom in Christ for a set of rituals and an old man in a robe?”

“I don’t know yet,” Thomas said, his chest rising and falling as he stared out at the rain-soaked industrial yard. “The street preacher didn’t give me an easy answer. He didn’t tell me which door to walk through. He just told me that if I want to live by the words of the Bible, I have to stop pretending that I’m the first guy in history to read it. He told me I have to find the family that was there before the modern world decided every man should be his own pope.”

Marcus watched him for a long moment, realizing that the usual vocabulary of personal growth, spiritual warfare, and relational community wasn’t going to hold the joists together this time. Thomas wasn’t experiencing a crisis of emotion; he was experiencing a crisis of architecture.

“The small group will miss you, Tom,” Marcus said quietly, reaching out to touch Thomas’s shoulder before picking up his remaining coffee cup. “Just… don’t let the pursuit of an ideal structure turn you into a cynic. The Lord meets people where they are.”

“I know,” Thomas said, his hand dropping back onto the ancient oak lintel. “But when the storm hits, you don’t want to be standing under a roof that’s only held up by the goodwill of the contractor. You want to be inside something that was dug down into the bedrock before the wind ever started to blow.”

Marcus nodded once, a brief, solemn acknowledgment of an impasse, and walked out out into the dark hallway. His boots echoed down the concrete stairs until the heavy steel door at the base of the mill clicked shut, leaving only the sound of the rain against the glass.

Thomas didn’t turn the electric lights back on. He picked up his chisel, his fingers finding the familiar, hand-worn grooves of the wooden handle. He set the steel edge against a rough section of the three-hundred-year-old beam, tapped it gently with his mallet, and watched a single, curled shaving of white oak fall away into the dust, revealing the deep, unchanging grain hidden beneath the weathered surface.