Orthopraxy: From Right Belief to Right Practice

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The most incredible privilege of my life is serving as the Apostolic Overseer of Sozo Ministries International, in which I get to lead, equip, and encourage a number of the most anointed men and women of God I have ever met. 

I come from an American background. I was raised outside of church until I was 16, then was saved through a fundamentalist Baptist church at a youth camp. Then, after attending a fundamentalist Baptist college, I spent time working with various churches and ministries of different flavors. I served as an intern with a Baptist missionary organization for a time. I was an associate pastor at an Acts29 Network (neo-reformed) church for a few years. After that, I served an interdenominational missionary organization as an evangelist, where I traveled extensively and even lived in Haiti for almost a year. And, along the way, I grew more and more charismatic in my theological opinions before launching Sozo Ministries in 2015.

I have served in Christian ministry since 2003. In that time, I have had the privilege of working in the U.S., Mexico, Panama, Ukraine, Haiti, Israel, India, Kenya, South Sudan, and in Uganda, where I have lived full-time since 2018. 

Though I have served as a youth pastor, associate pastor, cell group leader, evangelist, missionary, and probably a few other titles, my calling from the Lord is apostolic. (This is not a self-appointed role. It has been recognized by various other Christian leaders who know me well and is proven by the fruit of my labors.) My passion and anointing from the Lord are to lay the theological foundation and practical framework for building the church, especially in less-reached and unreached areas, which is where I now spend all of my time.

It is within this apostolic role that I am now setting my mind on this new blog series, which will take my writing well into next year. I am calling it “Orthopraxy,” which means taking our correct belief (orthodoxy) and letting it lead us into right action as the body of Christ.

The Basis For This Series

As God continues to open new doors for ministry and even opportunities into new nations and regions, all while the world is still in crisis with this current pandemic, it is no longer viable for me to limit my church development teachings and training to in-person settings.

As I have lived and served the body of Christ in various cultures, I have seen that there are many different ways of doing things as “the church.” This is great. There is great beauty in the diversity of God’s creation.

At the core of my belief system is that true ecclesiology is that those called by God to lead His body are not required to follow any model or method created by man. Rather, they must lead and minister out of intimacy with the Holy Spirit and only do what He leads them to do. That is how the original 12 Apostles set up the church, and it has been the way the church has taken root and grown in some of the most antithetical cultures in the world.

As I travel, I have seen this beautiful diversity in the culture of the global church, and I have observed believers everywhere doing their best to follow the Holy Spirit’s leading. Nevertheless, the fact remains that ALL Christian belief and practice must have their firm foundation on the Word of God, despite our personal cultural backgrounds or subjective experiences with the Lord.

It is here, sadly, that I have too often seen the gaps between what we claim to believe from scripture and those things we simply do out of habit or traditions of men. These are the areas I hope to shine a light on in this series.

Like What?

One example where our practices don’t always line up with scriptural teachings is the area of praise and worship. Of course, every culture has its musical styles, instruments, and methods of emotional and verbal expression, which should all be utilized to worship the Lord. However, the truth is that sometimes things get called praise or worship, which are pretty far from the biblical understanding of what those things should be. 

For instance, I have heard it said that praise is when you sing upbeat songs during which people clap and dance for God, while worship is when you sing slow songs where people focus quietly on Him. That isn’t true! Also, singing songs that instruct the worshipper to dance, shout, jump, or clap, just for the sake of getting people moving, instead of pointing to the glory of God for which we ought to do those things, is too shallow to be considered praise. So we will be covering biblical praise and worship in this series.

Another example is in times of sharing testimonies. While I love hearing testimonies of God’s hand in and through His people’s lives, I can truthfully say that some things offered as testimonies are not actually shared to glorify and point people to Jesus. Some are benign, just missing the point of the opportunity. Others are outright sinful, shared with personal recognition at the heart of the story they tell. 

Biblically testimonies have a prophetic power to them, which ought to lead people into more profound experience and awareness of the Lord in their lives. This will be another area we will cover in this series.

What to Expect

While I don’t want to lay out every single topic that I plan to share in this series (nor do I know them all at this point), here are some of the things to come to give you a taste of what to expect.

I hope you will join me as we begin to dig into the practical outworkings of our shared beliefs. I plan to write in such a way that the theological foundation is laid out clearly, without giving too many specific instructions. That way, no matter your background or the culture you minister in, you will be able to take the truth of scripture and then look to the Holy Spirit yourself to discover how to put it into practice.

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© Anthony Scott Ingram 2021. All Rights Reserved.

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Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.”

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