EFCA GATEWAY Exposed My Pride (and Softened My Heart)

I remember my first EFCA GATEWAY cohort meeting. For those who don’t know, GATEWAY is a theology and ministry training program using guided independent study and cohort meetings facilitated by an EFCA-credentialed ministry leader. It’s an accessible training ground that helps pass the baton of ministry leadership from one generation to the next. 

According to the syllabus, I’d done everything required to prepare for the program. I’d read the assigned pages in Grudem’s Bible Doctrine and the EFCA-published Evangelical Convictions. I’d written my rough draft paper on Article 1 (God) of the EFCA Statement of Faith. I’d read my cohort-mates’ rough draft papers ahead of time, noting what I liked as well as what I thought needed some tweaking. That’s the GATEWAY learning cycle: study, distill, discuss, apply—I wanted to give my all to the process. 

I remember being surprised by everyone’s unique viewpoints about God in Article 1. Though I’d written plenty of papers in my lifetime, my educational methodologies hadn’t emphasized reading the papers of my peers and having group discussions about each other's work.  

In that first meeting, I vocalized a few places where I thought my cohort-mates' papers could be improved—how they should say something differently or use “stronger” verse references to support their statements—but, to my surprise, our cohort facilitators didn’t agree with me, saying the other person’s perspective, and supporting Scripture, were perfectly acceptable. In our next cohort meeting, I again critiqued my peers' way of expressing truth and its implications. While some critiques were truly appreciated, others were found to be unpersuasive.  

I’d always been a great student––I'd received excellent grades on my writing throughout my schooling––so, why were more than a few of my suggestions being flat-out rejected? Was my way of thinking about things wrong? What was I missing?

Sensing a call 

In 2015, I sensed a specific call to ministry at a fall retreat. The preacher shared a moment of his own journey, saying, “It was at that moment that I knew I’d work in full-time ministry for the rest of my life.” I’ll always remember those words. I can picture right where I was standing in the retreat center gymnasium. I felt a tangible jolt of the Spirit. 

Despite my conviction, a job in ministry didn’t present itself. I worked as a “sandwich artist” after undergrad while interviewing for youth pastor positions. I didn’t think I’d even make a good youth pastor, but where else could I start? In God’s graciousness to those students (and myself), each church politely turned me down. God instead handed me a contract job in college admissions, and almost a year later, I married my wonderful bride and took a six-month contract at a Fortune 500 company’s call center. My college-friend-turned-recruiter found it for me while my wife and I were on our honeymoon, and while it wasn’t a job in ministry, it was a job. 

I hadn’t lost that conviction, though. My wife and I explored seminary, but feeling uncomfortable with taking on more debt, I took a job at a Christian university so that I could pursue a master's degree alongside full-time work. It again felt like the path God’s hand had guided. The degree took a couple of years, then we had our first son. A few more years passed, and I still wasn’t using the degree.  

With each passing year, I increasingly wondered whether I’d heard God wrong in that retreat center gymnasium. If God had called me, wouldn’t I be there by now? 

A right heart 

In July 2023, I accepted a role at the EFCA national office coordinating EFCA GATEWAY. This position seemed to bring together all my educational and vocational experience up to that point. The winding path now made more sense; a dream finally realized. 

Not quite a year later, I joined a GATEWAY Phase I cohort myself. GATEWAY’s Phase I program guides participants through articulating their defense of the EFCA Statement of Faith. While I thought my prior schooling would make much of the content redundant, the cohort offered other benefits: I could learn about the GATEWAY student experience first-hand, it’d help me understand how the EFCA frames theology in its Statement of Faith and it was an ordered way to complete the thesis paper required for the EFCA’s Christian Ministry License credential (three-year renewable). 

I finished the cohort a year later, having accomplished exactly what I intended. Yet none of those initial motivations are what I will remember most about participating. Instead, I will look back and remember how God used that time to irrevocably transform my understanding of what it means to have a right heart, through Christ.  

In Evangelical Convictions, EFCA President Emeritus Kevin Kompelien states: 

“I am grateful the EFCA remains committed to the inerrancy and authority of the Scriptures (2 Tim 3:16-17) and grounded in the gospel of Jesus Christ (Mk 1:14-15). We affirm the centrality of the gospel in doctrine and life (cf. 1 Tim 4:16), orthodoxy and orthopraxy. In this day, it is important to add a third, orthocardia, a right heart. This is created by the power of the gospel (Rom 1:16) to transform lives (2 Cor 3:18), which is manifested in love for God and love for others (Matt 22:37-39).”  

A “right heart” suggests that we must be rightly oriented toward God and others within our inner state of being to know the gospel. It's less about having the right position, and more about having the right disposition. Consider Paul’s opening to Romans 8:  

“Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that ‘We all possess knowledge.’ But knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God.” 

A true knowledge of the gospel knits Christ’s heart to one’s own; its fruit isn’t that of conceit or self-justification, but that of a humble love for God and others. Transformation to holiness comes through our inward yielding to Christ in us (2 Cor 3:16-18; Phil 2:12-13), not our outward displays of “rightness.”   

Truth diamonds 

For my GATEWAY cohort’s meeting on Article 5: The Work of Christ, I wrote the following in my rough draft paper:  

“Jesus’ act of sacrificial atonement on the cross was an act of penal substitution…other theories of atonement have been offered but should be rejected.”  

I then listed numerous other theories of atonement, explaining what each was lacking. Two of my peers wrote this section exactly like I did. The fourth participant in our cohort wrote:  

“Over the centuries, the Church has articulated several orthodox theories of the atonement to explain what Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection have accomplished for us. Each expression, like the facet of a diamond, shines with its own unique light (Matt 13:52; 2 Cor 4:6).”  

During our group discussion they further described penal substitution—their “most essential” theory—as the “largest face on the diamond.” They successfully highlighted one theory without minimizing the value within the others. 

Our facilitators liked that version, and so did the rest of us. We all revised our papers to include a “diamond” approach to atonement. We had found that the truth of Christ’s atoning work has a kaleidoscopic beauty to it, but it was only by looking at how all of its faces contributed to understanding that we could admire it completely.  

The ancient theory of Christus Victor highlighted Jesus’ victory over Satan, spiritual evil and death (Col 2:15; 1 John 3:8). The moral influence theory highlighted how God showed His perfect love for us in the sacrifice of His Son, and how that love should persuade His followers to moral change (Eph 5:1–2; Titus 2:11–12). The example theory highlighted how Jesus’ submission to undeserved death serves as an example for how His followers should act self-sacrificially (2 Cor 5:14–15; John 15:13). While these theories may not sufficiently describe atonement on their own, each brings a uniquely beautiful insight to gaze upon.  

Writing this article, I again contemplated why a number of my suggestions were dismissed in our cohort meetings. Looking back, the answer feels much less elusive: The truths of God are often multi-faced diamonds that are uniquely beautiful from varied perspectives. Where I first sought to have a definitive—and ultimately self-justifying—grasp on truth, my cohort experience taught me to see, love and value the reflection of Christ in the face of each person that sat around the table. There can be multiple ways to say the same thing; not every question has only one right answer; not every situation demands the same action. I think of my very differently tempered boys: each seems to need a different mixture of truth and grace to receive my fatherly instruction in love. 

Black-and-white answers do exist, and it’s essential to affirm them as such. In the non-essentials, we sometimes need to live in gray. Yet still, I think it’s when we can see God’s loving instruction through the eyes of others that we get to see the world in color. 

The heart of the gospel (and the EFCA) 

In my GATEWAY cohort, I learned the heart of the gospel isn't about knowing or doing what’s right as much as it’s about perpetually relying on Jesus to know and do rightly. We are all in that same boat, rowing forward the best we can from our own unique vantage point.

It’s easy enough to measure the surface of our orthodoxy and orthopraxy. As more positional things, it's natural and reasonable to quantify the “rightness” of our test answers and actions. Orthocardia, however, is much harder to measure. “They show a lot of heart” is something that we say (and value), even though it doesn’t show up on a resume. As a more dispositional thing, right-heartedness requires us to know something. To sit and seek by reflectively gazing upon our Lord—by perceiving, beholding and delighting in the perfections of God. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 3:18, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 

When we look in the mirror, inevitably evaluating our worth, do we focus on ourselves or do we focus on the reflection of Christ in us? Who do we focus on when we look at whoever is across the table from us? 

God, through an EFCA GATEWAY cohort, changed my understanding of being united to Christ and united in Christ. The people I wrestled through the Scriptures with had a significant impact. People like Ryan and his beautifully nuanced way of articulating truth with clarity. Or Jessica and her philosophically rich approach to understanding God and His relationship to mankind. And Luke with his straightforward way of stating the truth of the Scriptures we’d all come to know and love, despite our different paths to vocational ministry. One of us a pastor, two of us missionaries, and myself, a coordinator at the EFCA national office.  

I am grateful to my facilitators and for the EFCA’s ethos of leadership, an ethos that highlights the Church’s need for confidently humble hearts. Hearts more concerned with uniting rightly around the gospel essentials than with having their views on non-essential issues affirmed as exclusive. Hearts that proclaim dependency on Christ in all things, continually longing to know what it means to reflect Christ in their doctrine and life. Hearts that continually and humbly seek to learn from people different them themselves, believing that the Spirit of Christ is working through them, too.

Since assuming my position with EFCA GATEWAY, I’ve learned that heart work is slow work. You can have conviction in what God is calling you to and still need transformation to accomplish the call. Our hearts are desperate for a tighter knitting to Christ’s. In addition, Christ uses the image-bearers around us to inform our understanding of His kaleidoscopic love for all people, including ourselves.  

Heart work is slow, but it’s also right.