About 2,000 years ago, the Christian church had no official buildings, no denominations and no recorded membership. John Slye, senior pastor at Arlington’s Grace Community Church, believes those early Christians were on to something. Ten years ago, the 45-year-old helped found Grace as “a church for people who don’t go to church.” Since then, it has grown from a handful of families to about 600 seekers who meet Sunday mornings at Thomas Jefferson Middle School. Slye shared with The Washington Examiner thoughts on his own faith, and how it has led him to a new kind of church. Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I am a Christian. As a kid, I began a relationship with God, and accepted Jesus Christ as my savior. As I got older and in my time at seminary, I began to investigate why I believed as I did. My faith, and my belief in the Bible began to make a lot of sense to me in a very logical way. I began to see that the principles of the Bible are true and solid. I’ve made turning to the Bible a practice. I turn to God and his word for help, and for those building blocks of an effective life.
Many people don’t link religious pursuit with logical pursuit. How do they sync with regard to your faith?
My faith is driven by logic and by reason, and when I read the great theologians of 300 and 400 years ago, they were driven by reason, too. They didn’t blindly accept their beliefs, or the world around them. Today, I don’t think God’s word calls us to blindly accept anything, either.
Even right at the beginning of the Bible, you’re faced with questions of science and logic — right there in Genesis, chapter one. As a church, and as Christian people, we need to throw ourselves into a pursuit of science. We need to get up on that horse and ride as fast as we can, because the more we know, the more I believe it will take us back to the brilliance of the Bible. We’ll find that there’s more and more truth there.
You advertise as a church for people who don’t go to church. What does that reveal about traditional churches?
In our early years as a church, as we prayed about who God wanted us to be, I kept hearing from people who said they hated church — which is pretty strong language. They’d been burned by church, or just bored. They felt that churches were judgmental, or full of condemnation, or that they were controlling organizations.
We’re not trying to indict traditional churches. All we’re trying to do is create a place where people can hear God’s word without feeling pressured to believe in a certain way, and without being pressured to give — we don’t have a formal offering, and we never have. I’m not saying that anything goes, but that it’s possible to believe in something, and not make anyone feel like an idiot if they don’t believe exactly the same thing.
Can a church without a denominational affiliation survive? Is that the point?
I don’t think that matters at all. If all we’re trying to think about is how we survive, then we need to close things up right now. Most people will tell you that the glory days of the Christian church were in the first 300 years. What do we know about the church then? It didn’t have buildings. It didn’t have denominations. The more you worry about survival, the more you risk becoming very rigid, very institutional, and those are things that people aren’t interested in. When you worry about how to keep something going, you start to put pressure on people, and all of a sudden you’ve taken a movement that Jesus Christ created and degraded it into an institution.
At your core, what is one of your defining beliefs?
I believe that the grace of God is the most powerful force in the universe. I believe that Jesus Christ is the way, and I believe God’s word. I do my best to stay open to the prompting and the directing of the Holy Spirit’s work in my life, and in the world around me.
– Leah Fabel
