Site Contents
Why this Website is here.
A relatively short account of the rise and fall of the Chapel and its peculiar teaching.
One of the most distinctive things about Community Chapel was its rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity. In contrast to Trinitarians, who teach that Jesus has existed eternally in inseparable union with the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Chapel taught that Jesus' existence began only at his human conception. The Chapel claimed this was the apostolic teaching of Christ's nature, a teaching driven out by those who taught the doctrine of the Trinity. But the only way they could get history to support that claim was to falsify the historical record, as this article shows.
The Chapel was fond of fond of saying the Trinity can't be defined using only Biblical terms. I now think it's obvious that that charge is false. This article briefly explains why.
This is a review of a book that has become popular among former members of the Chapel who still hold to its "Unitarian" teaching (most of them having come to believe, significantly enough, that Jesus is not in fact God).
Another reflection on anti-Trinitarian beliefs like the Chapel's, and the confusion that is, in my opinion, always the eventual result of rejecting Trinitarian doctrine. Without the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, a consistent, coherent answer cannot be given to who or what the Bible means when it speaks of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In this article I take a look at one of the places where the Bible explicitly calls Jesus God, and the conflicting ways the various opponents of Trinitarian teaching try to explain that identification.
After the Chapel ran itself into the ground I spent another ten years in Pentecostalism before I fully admitted to myself that things were seriously wrong with it and I needed to find out what was true instead. I had become deathly tired of the confusion, strangeness, instability, and just plain wackiness of what was supposed to be a deeper and more powerful spiritual life than what "non-Spirit-filled" churches offered. This is an article I wrote when after maybe five more years I had figured out the reasons for that frustration.
Though it's now been more than fifteen years since I wrote this article, it remains pretty much my final word on the Chapel.
