Faith on the inside and works on the outside

Season three of The Armchair Anabaptist podcast explores the roles of belief and good works in the life of the Mennonite believer

Dennis Rader said, “I was a good man, who just did bad things.” Who is Dennis Rader? True crime fans will recognize his name, because Dennis Rader is a serial killer better known as BTK—an acronym for his modus operandi. He bound, tortured and killed his ten victims.

Before his arrest in February 2005, we probably would have thought Rader was one of us. Just shy of his sixtieth birthday at the time, Rader had two grown kids, had been a scout leader, and had served as president of the council of Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, according to an October 2005 article from The Christian Century.

“Dad wasn’t the black hat. He’d been the white hat—the good guy,” wrote Rader’s daughter Kerri Rawson in her 2019 memoir A Serial Killer’s Daughter. “The guy who saved the day. The hero—my hero.”

Was Rader a good guy who did bad things? Did he believe what he heard in church? Even if one doesn’t know the details of his crimes, most would probably say no—he couldn’t possibly have believed it. Why? Because of his deeds.

But wait. I believe what I hear in church and I also do bad things. I don’t “bind, torture and kill,” but I can be self-indulgent, self-centred, and unkind with the best of them. What do my deeds say about me?

Faith or works: what’s more important?

I joined Jesse Penner and Andrew Dyck as hosts of The Armchair Anabaptist in 2025. The Armchair Anabaptist, an EMC podcast, seeks to take Anabaptist theology out of our armchairs and into our world.

As a journalist with an agricultural news company, I am the only non-pastor in the group.

As we began planning the third season of The Armchair Anabaptist podcast, I and my fellow hosts Jesse Penner and Andrew Dyck anchored ourselves in James 2:14–26. James writes, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?” (James 2:14).

The centre of James’s argument is the story of Abraham who, at God’s bidding, took his son Isaac up a mountain and prepared to sacrifice him. At the last moment, God stays Abraham’s hand and provides a ram instead. “You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did,” James says (2:22). He concludes, “faith without deeds is dead” (2:26). Faith and works can be a real tightrope.

Andy Woodworth calls it the “battle of the orthos.” Orthodoxy (right beliefs) versus orthopraxy (right practice). Woodworth is the EMC’s conference pastor. He spoke with Jesse Penner for episodes nine and ten.

Martin Luther, a contemporary of the earliest Anabaptists, didn’t like the book of James, Darryl Klassen told me in an interview for two episodes of The Armchair Anabaptist. Klassen is an adjunct professor at Steinbach Bible College, where he teaches Anabaptist History. Luther, a tortured soul who felt he could never please God, found his life transformed by Romans 1:17, “the righteous will live by faith.” He swung hard toward justification by faith and stuck by it even when he found in his own congregation people were living as they pleased.

Layton Friesen

The early Anabaptists weren’t satisfied with this. “They widened or thickened the definition of faith,” said Layton Friesen, academic dean and professor of Bible and theology at Steinbach Bible College. “When they said that we were saved by faith alone … what the Anabaptists meant was that we are saved by an obedient, loving faith that’s willing to suffer with Christ.” When they said they are saved by grace, Friesen explained, they meant not only God’s undeserved favour but also the offer of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, “just like the sunshine on the soil just awakens the soil and causes it to grow plants … that’s how salvation happens … it’s this faith empowered by the Holy Spirit to do good works,” Friesen said. “That’s the whole package in terms of justification.”

Yet, while this definition balanced the role of works as an outworking of faith, in practice Anabaptists tended to fall off on one side of the tightrope. “We tend to feel the most comfortable in the orthopraxy,” Woodworth said, “I don’t think there’s a lot of cases … where we’re dividing over certain creeds, but we certainly divide over certain behaviours and practices.”

While this tendency to emphasize works stemmed from a desire to take the Bible seriously, historically it presented challenges. In their desire to maintain the right lifestyle, they frequently tipped over into a tradition of do’s and don’ts, Klassen said.

The Kleine Gemeinde (now the EMC) emerged from a church community that they saw as slipping into spiritual stagnation. Kleine Gemeinde leader Klaus Reimer was sickened when a community member bragged in church about beating his servant. The man had even brought the stick to church, Klassen said. “Klaus Reimer was just sickened by that and said, like ‘what have we become?’” It seems that works without faith are also dead.

Works at the speed of the Spirit

“We actually are created for good works,” said, James Driedger, senior pastor of Blumenort Community Church (EMC) and podcast guest. Those things don’t save us, but out of the life-giving grace we receive and out of our identity as creations of God we do those works. The Anabaptists believed that the Holy Spirit gave power to change and to actually live like Jesus. However, change takes time.

Of the interviews I did, a story about a South German Anabaptist named Pilgram Marpeck (a baby name that should make a comeback) stuck with me. Marpeck criticized the Swiss Anabaptists for what he saw as an overly harsh attitude toward sin, Layton Friesen told me. This attitude led the Swiss brethren to frequently excommunicate people who were struggling with sin. “[Marpeck] just found this alarming,” Friesen said. “He wrote some really harsh letters … saying, ‘if you guys actually believe in the Holy Spirit, if you really believe that the works of righteousness, sanctification is produced by the Holy Spirit … then you’re going to have to just be patient.’” “You have to actually kind of work at the pace of the Holy Spirit.”

I find this concept to be encouraging. As I said, I’m no BTK killer, but despite my sincere desire to do good, I struggle with sins I can’t seem to shake. I sometimes quote Romans 7 to myself. In verse 19, Paul laments that he doesn’t do the good he wants to do and he does the things he hates.

Paul says in Romans 7:24–25, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” We see a fascinating dance on the tightrope of faith and works. Bible school professors would call it the already and not yet. We are empowered by the Holy Spirit to do good works, and yet, we won’t be perfected until our final deliverance in Christ Jesus.

Confession and the true community

In this season of The Armchair Anabaptist we noted that when there’s a strong emphasis on works, sin is often driven underground—still there, but secret lest anyone find out who we really are.

Arlene Friesen

John writes in 1 John 1:6–7 that if we claim to have fellowship with God and yet walk in darkness, we don’t live out the truth. If we walk in the light as God is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and Jesus’s blood cleanses us from sin. “I used to hear that verse … and would hear ‘I have to walk in the light, like I have to do right in order to have fellowship with others and to be cleansed from sin,’” said Arlene Friesen, a former professor at Steinbach Bible College. “It became like a weight, instead of hearing it as … when we bring our sin into the light and stop trying to hide it, then we can actually have true fellowship.” “The true self who acknowledges the sin and confesses it is facing another true self who is also doing the same thing,” Friesen said. “Then also the blood of Jesus can cleanse us from that sin … we receive that cleansing.”

We took a podcast episode to look at the role of confession in the health of the Christian and the church. I championed this topic because for me, confession has been transformative. About a year ago, I confessed a bad habit to my family. I felt pathetic and exposed as I recorded a voice message for the family group chat, but I asked for help. Within minutes, messages of support came back and I had recruited allies in my fight. I’ve started to see confession of sin as just that—recruitment of allies in the battle against sin. For that matter, one can ask for help pre-emptively by saying to a trusted believer, “I’m tempted to sin. Please pray for me.”

This is a vulnerable position. You are, in effect, handing the other the rope that’s around your neck. They can help you remove the noose, but they can also use it to hang you.

However, when a culture of transparency is fostered, it makes space for true community, said counsellor and spiritual director Peter Ascough. People crave to be “safe and seen and soothed and secure, and here we are modelling it,” Ascough told me. “Even in our imperfections we can all be saying ‘come join us as we are moving together towards this … towards true community.’”

True community will walk through the challenges and discomforts and give grace to one another, as God grants grace to us. Confession and repentance serve to bring faith and works together. Our belief in and love for Christ drives us to be the same on the inside as on the outside. Join Andrew, Jesse and me as we explore this further in the upcoming season of The Armchair Anabaptist.

Photo credits: 1. Illustration by Rebecca Roman, 2. Steinbach Bible College, 3. Steinbach Bible College