This is the first in a short series of posts exploring the Apostles’ Creed — one of Christianity’s oldest shared statements of faith. Whether you’ve been reciting these words your whole life or have never heard them before, I think there’s something here worth sitting with.
Rev. Joyce Rodgers
April 19, 2026
Ancient Words, Today’s Faith – Week 1| Genesis 1:1–10
Most of us have said something we didn’t fully mean.
Not because we were lying. But because there’s a difference between saying words and living them. A difference between knowing something in your head and knowing it in the place where your decisions actually get made.
That gap — between what we say we believe and what we actually live — is one of the most honest things about being human. And it turns out, theologians have been thinking about it for a very long time.
Three Kinds of Belief
Theologians from the ancient fathers of the faith through the Protestant Reformation developed a three-part understanding of belief. Thomas Aquinas, one of those ancient fathers, laid important groundwork for this conversation, and by the time of the Reformation these three dimensions had become central to how theologians described saving faith.
The first is notitia — knowledge. This is simply being aware of what a belief claims. You don’t have to agree with it. You just know what it says. Someone who has never set foot in a church can have notitia about Christian beliefs just from reading or listening.
The second is assensus — assent. This is when you move from knowing about a belief to agreeing that it’s true. You’re not just aware of the claim; you’re willing to say yes to it.
The third is fiducia — trust. This is the belief that has gotten down into your bones. It shapes how you act, what you choose, how you see the world. It is, in the oldest sense of the word, faith.
Think of it this way. Assensus is studying a map. Fiducia is actually making the trip. You can know everything about a place — the roads, the languages, the food — and still have never been there. The person who has made the journey knows something the map-studier doesn’t. Not because they’re smarter, but because they went. That’s something like the difference between a head knowledge and a heart knowledge.
Almost and Altogether
John Wesley — the eighteenth-century Anglican priest whose work gave rise to the Methodist movement — preached a famous sermon on exactly this distinction. He called it “The Almost Christian.”
Wesley described the Almost Christian as someone who is sincere. Genuinely so. He was careful to say this person is not a hypocrite — they are earnest and aspiring. But they have not yet received the full assurance that comes from the Spirit’s witness. The Altogether Christian, by contrast, is someone who has crossed that threshold into transforming, Spirit-confirmed faith — and Wesley believed they were able to receive a degree of peace and contentment that came from having a full assurance in the core of their being.
I find this framework strangely comforting. Because it means the journey from Almost to Altogether isn’t about trying harder or believing more intensely. It’s about allowing what you say you believe to actually form you — to get down into the decisions, the fears, the way you treat people, the way you face hard things.
What the Creed Is — and Why It Still Matters
The Apostles’ Creed is one of the oldest summaries of Christian belief in existence. It grew out of the earliest centuries of the church, when Christians were urgently trying to answer a question that had genuine stakes: what, exactly, do we believe?
The early church was navigating serious theological conflict. Some were teaching that the God of the Old Testament was an entirely different deity from the God revealed in Jesus. That question alone — is the God who called Abraham the same God revealed in Jesus Christ? — was enough to threaten the coherence of the entire faith. There were others, but that one gives you a sense of what was at stake.
The creeds were the church’s attempt to draw a boundary — a fence that said: here is the core. Here is the territory. If you’re inside this, we’re talking about the same faith. From the foundation of the American Methodist Church, these creeds have been central to our doctrine. You can find the Apostles’ Creed in our baptismal vows, in our hymnal, and in the Book of Discipline under the section outlining our theological task. Its role has remained unchanged since Wesley published the founding documents of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
Not every church recites the Creed in worship every week — style and length are real factors. But I think reminding ourselves routinely of our core beliefs matters. These words, printed and spoken each week, give anyone who walks in the door for the first time a clear picture of what the people in this building believe.
I think of it like an electric fence. When we lived in Richmond, our community didn’t allow a traditional fence, so we used an electric one. The key was placing flags along the perimeter — visible markers of where the boundary was, even though you couldn’t see the fence itself. When we recite the Apostles’ Creed each week, we are looking at those flags. You can remove them, but eventually something drifts. Gradually, without anyone noticing, the boundaries blur. So we keep the flags up. We say the words each week.
And as we grow in our faith, those words take root. They evolve from statements we assert to beliefs that shape and form us into the image of God. They become part of the very essence of who we are.
So let us begin where the Creed begins — not just to understand what these words mean, but to ask what kind of people we become when we truly live inside them.
“I Believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth”
Notice what the Creed does not say. It does not say, “I believe in God.” That would be easy — and vague. When surveyors in Britain asked people whether they believed in God, many said yes. When one respondent was asked to describe the God he believed in, he said his God was “just an ordinary God.”
The Creed is not interested in an ordinary God. It begins with specificity: God the Father. Almighty. Maker of heaven and earth. Three claims, each one doing real work.
God the Father — not a distant architect who wound up the universe and walked away, but a parental God. Intimately involved. Concerned not with humanity in general but with each particular person. If the image of a father carries painful associations for you — and for many people it does, because human parents are human — then reach for the image of the best parenting you’ve ever witnessed, real or imagined. Psalm 91 compares God to a mother bird, covering her young with her wings, offering refuge: “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.” That kind of parent.
Almighty — not merely very powerful, but the kind of powerful that has no ceiling. Isaiah 54 reminds us that because our God is not “just an ordinary God,” no weapon forged against us will prevail. The prophet Ezekiel once stood in a valley full of dry bones — the image of absolute, irreversible loss — and heard God ask: Can these bones live? God told him to speak to those bones: “I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.” And then they did. When we say God is almighty, we are saying there is no situation so broken, so far gone, that God is not able. That changes how you face things.
Maker of heaven and earth — everything that exists has its origin in God. I am, as I often say, a science-oriented person. I do not read Genesis as a rival to astrophysics. I read it as a different kind of answer to a different kind of question. When I look at images sent back from the Artemis II mission, I don’t see a cosmic accident. I see intention.
There is a sequence of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence — a pattern that shows up throughout creation with striking consistency. It appears in the arrangement of seeds on a sunflower, the spiral of a snail shell, the structure of the Milky Way, and at an atomic level in quantum simulations and electron clouds. And if you look at the swirl of your own fingerprint, you’ll find it there too. If you’ve ever done a painting project with a child, you know they get their fingerprints on everything they touch while they’re creating. The Golden Ratio — that recurring spiral — is something like God’s fingerprints on everything God made. Including you.
What Happens When You Actually Believe This
Knowing these things is one thing. Trusting them changes you.
If you believe in God the Father — really trust it, not just agree with it — you find you can let go of the exhausting work of figuring everything out yourself. You can trust that when things don’t make sense, they are not therefore without purpose. When Jesus called Peter to step out onto the stormy sea, it didn’t make sense. But Peter took that first step because he trusted in Jesus’ love. We can do the same. Even in moments of suffering, even when things are hard, we are not alone.
If you believe God is almighty, you find you can face impossible situations without being destroyed by them. Not because you are optimistic by nature, but because you know that dry bones have come back to life before. Hope stops being a feeling and starts being a posture. We can embrace that timeless expression: God can make a way where there is no way.
If you believe God made everything — every creature, every person, every landscape — you start treating the world differently. Creation care becomes a form of worship. Conservation becomes a spiritual practice. The face of someone you find difficult becomes something you look at with a kind of wonder, knowing that God’s fingerprints are on them too. You look in the mirror the same way. We care for the stray kitten as an act of love toward God. We carry the heart of each person the way we would carry the cross. We tend the environment around us with the same care we give our sanctuary.
An Invitation This Week
Wherever you are with belief right now — whether you’ve been saying the Creed for decades, or you’re somewhere between knowing and agreeing, or you’re not sure what you think — here is a simple invitation.
Sit with this sentence: I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
What does it mean? Can you say it in your own words? Do you find yourself agreeing — or somewhere between knowing and agreeing — or somewhere else entirely? And if you do believe it, even partially, even tentatively: how might that belief change something about how you move through your week?
That’s the real question. Not just what the map says. But whether we’re willing to make the trip.
This post is part of a series on the Apostles’ Creed. Each week we’ll take one clause and ask both what it means and what it looks like to actually live inside it. I’d love to hear what’s resonating — or what questions are coming up for you — in the comments below.
