• An Unbiblical Middle Ground: Wellspring Church claims a believer can be “saved” yet remain in the “kingdom of sin,” while Christianity teaches no middle ground between Satan’s kingdom and God’s reign.

• God's Sovereignty Denied: By placing the decisive work of the Holy Spirit into human hands, Wellspring Church doctrine contradicts both Scripture and their own professed Calvinist theology.

• Why God's sovereignty never made sense: While claiming to be Protestant and Trinitarian, Wellspring Church taught us a hidden Oneness Pentecostal view of how to be born again.

 

What is Salvation?

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To most Christians, when you are saved, you are born again as a child of God. You can walk out your salvation and over time allow the Holy Spirit to transform you into the image of Christ, in a process called sanctification. But at Wellspring Church, being “saved” or more precisely being “justified” is merely the first step, a step that can be lost through sinning.

 

The particulars of how many sins, or how frequent the sin is, is never discussed, only a knowledge that those who are “only justified” are not “fully born again”. According to Wellspring Church, these souls remain in a precarious state of grace that can be lost through sin, which would result in going to hell. Justification at Wellspring Church is simply a legal declaration made by the Father. In their view, nothing happens to the believer on the inside - no heart change, no indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
 

Wellspring Church makes a separate call to the few who are fortunate enough to hear their special information for “the rest of the truth”. This separate call is to follow the “gospel of the kingdom”, where a Oneness Pentecostal understanding of being born again is offered. ​In separating salvation from being born again, Wellspring Church claims that one can be "saved" - "forgiven and reconciled with their Creator" and "receive eternal life" while still remaining a part of the "kingdom of sin". 

 

Wellspring Church’s claim that someone can be “saved” while remaining in the “kingdom of sin” fabricates a spiritual existence that Scripture does not recognize - an imagined space between allegiance to God and allegiance to Satan. Scripture and Christian theology reject this entirely. In Christian theology, there are only two spiritual realities: those who belong to God’s kingdom and those who remain outside of His kingdom, who knowingly or unknowingly stand in opposition to His rule. As C. S. Lewis vividly describes in Mere Christianity, “There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”

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The New Testament presents no neutral or temporary category in which a person is forgiven yet still outside God’s kingdom. There is no biblical “middle ground” between two kingdoms. Scripture consistently portrays salvation as a decisive transfer: those who believe are delivered from the domain of darkness and brought into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Col. 1:13). The biblical picture is binary - darkness or light, death or life, Adam or Christ - not a sliding scale of partial belonging or incremental spiritual status.​

 

Scripture gives no support to the idea that anyone can pass from Satan’s kingdom into God’s kingdom apart from spiritual rebirth. This movement from one realm to the other is always tied to the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit, what Jesus calls being “born again” or “born of the Spirit” (John 3:3–6). Salvation is not merely a legal adjustment or a partial step toward a future experience; it is the moment when God rescues, renews, and adopts the believer, bringing them fully into His kingdom and family.

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Oneness groups such as Wellspring Church often describe salvation as “conception” and being born again as “childbirth.” This analogy is not a Christian teaching but a uniquely Oneness Pentecostal construct developed to defend their three-step understanding of spiritual regeneration. This “conception vs. birth” interpretation was not part of the original 1913–1916 Oneness debate. This framework developed later, primarily within the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW) in the 1920s–1940s, as Oneness teachers tried to systematize their multi-step new-birth doctrine.

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Scripture presents regeneration, justification, and entrance into God’s kingdom as one unified work of God’s grace, not a sequence of human-mediated steps. The “conception vs. birth” analogy exists only to create an artificial gap between being saved and being born again, a gap the Bible never makes. It is a framework designed to support a doctrine, not a doctrine derived from Scripture. No historic Christian tradition separates salvation from regeneration or divides being born again into sequential biological stages, and nothing in Scripture presents this analogy.​ The Bible consistently presents being born again as the single, decisive moment when God brings a sinner from death to life (John 3:3–8; Eph. 2:4–5; James 1:18).

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Salvation, justification, and being born again cannot exist apart from one another; they are inseparably united as the sovereign work of God, received through faith. This truth is affirmed across all major Christian traditions including Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Reformed/Evangelical Protestant, and Wesleyan/Arminian. John Wesley expressed this beautifully when he wrote, “Justification implies what God does for us through His Son; the new birth implies what God does in us by His Spirit.”

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What is God's Sovereignty?

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God’s sovereignty is affirmed across all of Christianity, even though different traditions describe the relationship between His sovereignty and human freedom in various ways. Though Christian traditions articulate the mystery of grace and human response differently, they share the conviction that being born again is ultimately the gracious initiative of God. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions all affirm both God’s sovereignty and that being born again is a unified work of divine grace, not a segmented, formula-driven process dependent on completing specific human steps, as defined in Oneness Pentecostal doctrine.

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Wellspring Church seeks to align itself with Protestant thought and the legacy of the Reformers by professing adherence to four of the five points of Calvinism. Its leaders confidently assert the Calvinist declaration that “God is sovereign”. Yet their foundational doctrines stand in direct contradiction to Reformed theology - the very heart of which is known as the Gospel of Grace. In Reformed thought, God’s sovereignty means that salvation and spiritual regeneration (being born again) is entirely the work of His grace, not human striving. By contrast, Wellspring Church (and Oneness Pentecostalism) makes this spiritual regeneration contingent upon completing a three-step process mediated by human action.

 

In practice, this human action replaces divine initiative with human performance, turning the miracle of being born again into a human-managed process. It places human action at the center of being born again, effectively limiting God’s sovereignty and undermining the very grace they claim to uphold. It replaces divine initiative with human performance - a theology of effort rather than a gospel of grace. In Calvinist thought, you are not justified before being born again, because true faith requires a regenerated heart. To restate, you cannot be justified without being born again, because being born again is what enables you to truly believe. 

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The Reformers fought and suffered to recover the truth that justification, salvation, and being born again are received by faith alone, through grace alone, in Christ alone - and that at the moment a person truly believes, God sovereignly imparts new life through the indwelling Holy Spirit. Though they expressed different perspectives on how God’s sovereignty and human will relate, the Reformers stood united in rejecting any view that postponed being born again to a later stage or made it dependent on human-administered steps.

 

For the Reformers, the regeneration of being born again was not a gradual process but God’s immediate and sovereign work - inseparably joined to justification and salvation at the moment of genuine faith. Wellspring Church’s Oneness Pentecostal doctrine, which postpones this spiritual regeneration (being born again) until additional actions are completed, replaces this grace-centered reality with a human-mediated sequence. What the Reformers boldly proclaimed as “It is finished,” Wellspring effectively turns into a system of “It is not finished yet.” The Reformers would instantly recognize how far such teachings depart from the very gospel they devoted their lives to defend. They would protest the doctrines of Wellspring Church without hesitation. ​

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Protestant Reformed teaching on God's Sovereignty

 

Within Protestantism, Calvinist and Arminian traditions differ in how they understand the relationship between divine sovereignty and human will in being born again; however, both unequivocally affirm that being born again is the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit and is essential to genuine salvation and justification.

 

Calvinists maintain that being born again precedes faith, while Arminians hold that being born again occurs at the moment of faith - yet both agree that becoming born again is God’s gracious and decisive work, not a human achievement, and that salvation is received by faith alone and is inseparably united with spiritual regeneration (being born again) in the experience of every true believer.

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Protestant Reformers overwhelmingly used the word regeneration (Latin: regeneratio) to describe what many modern Christians call the “new birth" or "being born again" or "born of the Spirit". From the perspective of Protestant Reformed theology, we provide below the​ four points of Calvinism to which Wellspring Church professes adherence.

Calvinism teaches that man exists in Total Depravity and therefore cannot initiate faith or repentance without divine intervention. How then does the Father draw without the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit in the person's heart and mind? Calvinism teaches that the Holy Spirit must first regenerate the heart (being born again), and that this regenerated heart enables saving faith, through which God justifies and saves the believer. According to Calvinist thought, this inward regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (often called effectual calling or regeneration), what the Bible calls being born again, occurs prior to a person expressing saving faith.

 

In Reformed theology, prior to a person even having saving faith, the Holy Spirit must work internally to:

• Enlighten the mind to understand spiritual truth.

• Renew the will to desire what is good.

• Implant new affections so that the person freely believes and repents.
   

This is what Calvinists call 'monergism',  the idea that inward regeneration is the work of God alone, not a cooperative act between God and man. Reformed theology rejects any human-mediated process for being born again, including water baptism or demonstration of spiritual gifts. Wellspring’s doctrine inserts human steps (repentance + water baptism in Jesus’ name + speaking in tongues) as necessary conditions for being born again and entering God’s kingdom. Therefore, the Wellspring Church (and Oneness Pentecostal) model is synergistic, not monergistic - and thus cannot harmonize with Calvinist or Reformed soteriology.

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Calvinism teaches Unconditional Election, that God sovereignly regenerates (grants new birth  to) those He has chosen, and that this regenerating work does not depend on any human action or merit. Wellspring Church, however, presents a system in which being born again is not a sovereign act of God, but rather a multi-step process completed by the believer under the direction and influence of other humans in positions of authority. This portrays God as electing people without actually granting them new birth until they fulfill human initiated actions under human direction. Such a view directly contradicts Reformed theology, for it implies that divine election initiates but does not accomplish regeneration unless human effort completes it.
 

Calvinism teaches Irresistible Grace, that the inward call of the Holy Spirit unfailingly brings about regeneration and being born again for those whom God elects. Wellspring Church, however, teaches that many who repent and place faith in Christ have not been born again because they have not completed additional human actions (water baptism in their formula and Spirit baptism verified by tongues). This suggests that God’s saving call can be resisted or rendered incomplete until human effort finishes what grace supposedly began. Such a view denies the efficacy of the Spirit’s regenerating work and stands in sharp opposition to historic Reformed teaching, which holds that the Spirit’s inward call accomplishes regeneration fully and definitively.

Calvinism teaches the Perseverance of the Saints, that those whom God regenerates by the Spirit will be preserved by that same Spirit to the end. Wellspring Church, however, asserts that many professing believers, even those they consider “justified”, have not been born again or received the indwelling Spirit until they complete a series of additional steps. This framework raises an unavoidable theological problem: How can God preserve believers who, according to Wellspring, lack regeneration and the Spirit’s indwelling power? In Wellspring’s model, God elects people but leaves them spiritually unequipped to persevere, a view incompatible with Reformed theology, which regards regeneration and indwelling as essential to God’s preserving work.

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Taken together, Wellspring Church’s three-step doctrine of being born again stands in direct contradiction to every major pillar of Reformed theology. In historic Calvinist and broader Reformed teaching, being born again is God’s sovereign, completed act - not a human-dependent process. Wellspring’s system therefore replaces the gospel of grace with a conditional, human-mediated path to regeneration that the Reformers would have unmistakably rejected. ​​

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Roman Catholic teaching on God's Sovereignty

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Wellspring Church’s three-step, human-mediated definition of being born again bears a superficial resemblance to certain sacramental patterns found in Roman Catholicism. Like Catholic teaching, Wellspring locates the decisive moment of being born again in a ritual act rather than at the moment of genuine faith. Yet Wellspring goes much further, adding additional requirements - such as a precise baptismal formula and the verification of tongues - that extend human mediation far beyond Catholic practice. While the two systems differ profoundly in theology, the structural similarity reflects, in small part, the influence of the founder’s early formation within the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, it was not Catholic doctrine that led him into Oneness theology or authoritarian control; those developments arose from interpretations and decisions uniquely his own.​

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Even with these surface similarities, Roman Catholicism, with its strong sacramental emphasis, does not divide being born again into the separate, time-stamped stages required in Oneness Pentecostal doctrine. In Catholic teaching, water baptism is the moment of regeneration, justification, and entrance into the life of grace, and the gift of the Holy Spirit is understood as inseparably bound to that same sacramental act. Catholicism sees being born again as a single, unified work of God’s grace, not a multi-step progression dependent on a particular sequence of rituals or an outward sign a believer must demonstrate such as speaking in tongues.

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While both Roman Catholicism and Oneness Pentecostalism connect being born again to baptism, they do so in fundamentally different ways. Catholic theology teaches grace-mediated regeneration - that God, in His sovereignty, is the one who causes spiritual regeneration and freely chooses to convey this grace through the sacrament of baptism. In this view, the priest does not produce regeneration; rather, God is the active and sovereign agent, and the sacrament is simply the means He has appointed.

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Oneness Pentecostalism, by contrast, teaches a human-mediated process of being born again - one that depends on the baptizer speaking the correct verbal formula and on the believer demonstrating tongues. In this system, the effectiveness of water baptism, and therefore being born again, rests not on God’s sovereign initiative but on human accuracy and compliance with a prescribed sequence of actions. The unique baptismal wording that Norman James required - “in Jesus’ name for the circumcision of heart and the remission of sin” - is treated with strict verbal precision, such that the validity of the baptism hinges on using the exact wording.

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Roman Catholic theology differs sharply here: while it sees baptism as a sacramental means through which God sovereignly imparts grace, the Catholic Church does not treat the formula as the decisive element in the way Oneness Pentecostalism does. For Catholics, it is the sacramental act of water baptism itself - not the precision of the spoken formula - that conveys grace.​

 

Wellspring Church's Oneness Pentecostal teaching of being born again is thus fundamentally different than the teaching of the Roman Catholic church. Oneness theology places the decisive moment of being born again on human performance, while Catholic teaching attributes it to God’s sovereign action, even though it is mediated through a sacrament.​
 

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Why God's Sovereignty Never Made Sense​

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In the restorationist theology of Wellspring Church, they claim to descend from the Protestant branch of the Christian church. Yet this claim collapses under examination. Although Wellspring leadership uses the Calvinist language of “God’s sovereignty” with confidence and gravity, their underlying meaning is rooted in a Oneness theology that contradicts the Reformers themselves. Rather than standing within the Protestant stream they appeal to, their Oneness belief steps outside of the historic Christian church altogether - much like other restorationist movements such as Mormonism or 7th Day Adventism.

 

Looking back, one of the reasons discussions about God’s sovereignty always felt strained, confusing, or internally conflicted is because we were not working from a Protestant Christian framework at all. We were unknowingly being taught a Oneness Pentecostal understanding of being born again while simultaneously being told that we were aligned with Protestant and Trinitarian faith. This created an unavoidable internal conflict that was a collision of two systems and views of God that cannot be reconciled at any fundamental level.​

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In Protestant Trinitarian Christianity, God’s sovereignty is rooted in the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - the eternal relationship of mutual delight, self-giving, and shared purpose. Sovereignty in this framework is never solitary or authoritarian; it flows from the relational heart of the Triune God who acts in wisdom, love, and unity. Because God alone is sovereign, human beings contribute nothing to being born again beyond receiving it by faith - and even this faith is itself a gracious gift from God.

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In a Oneness system, however, sovereignty takes on a markedly different tone. Because God is understood as a single Person who simply manifests Himself in different roles, His sovereignty becomes more solitary, unilateral, and often more demanding. Instead of flowing from an eternal communion of divine love, sovereignty becomes closely tied to human compliance with a prescribed formula for becoming born again and to the authority of leaders who claim the right to administer that formula correctly.

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This is why discussions of “God’s sovereignty” at Wellspring felt weighty, solemn, and binding - not because God Himself is harsh, but because the meaning of sovereignty had been reshaped by a Oneness framework rather than grounded in the relational fullness of the Trinity.​

 

Newcomers, especially those with a Protestant background, may hear familiar Christian language like “God’s sovereignty,” yet do not realize that these words have been redefined at a fundamental level. The vocabulary sounds familiar with assumed meaning, but it serves as a facade through which a very different spirit and meaning are introduced.

 

In this way, Wellspring Church, following the pattern established by their founder, redefines Christian language and teaching in ways that re-center spiritual authority on human action and human leadership, rather than on God’s sovereign grace. In their Oneness framework, the progression to becoming born again is something humans must correctly perform and leaders must correctly administer - shifting the weight of God’s sovereignty into human hands.
 

Summary

 

In historic Christianity, across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions, God’s sovereignty in salvation and being born again is central, even when Christians differ on its precise expression. Entrance into the kingdom of God is the gift of God’s grace - freely given, never earned, and never achieved by any act, effort, or spiritual gift. But in the system we were taught at Wellspring Church, the decisive work of being born again was not God’s sovereign act but a three-step, human-mediated and human-verified progression: repentance, water baptism “in Jesus’ name,” and speaking in tongues.

 

What felt like internal conflict and theological tension in the teaching we received was, in reality, a collision between two fundamentally incompatible understandings of God and His redemptive plan: the biblical “gospel of grace” and a hidden Oneness doctrine of human progression - what Wellspring Church calls the “gospel of the kingdom.” The true gospel of grace flows from the relational, loving heart of the Triune God, whose work is rooted not in human steps or spiritual achievements but in the mercy, initiative, and self-giving love shared eternally among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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In historic Christianity, God’s sovereignty is never a tool for human domination but the gracious and freeing rule of the Triune God, who draws people to Himself by love, truth, and the work of the Holy Spirit. When a church’s structure or doctrine places decisive spiritual power in the hands of a leader or institution - determining who may enter God’s kingdom, who may belong, or who is spiritually acceptable - it subtly replaces God’s sovereignty with human sovereignty.

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This is not a matter of intent but of effect. Wherever human authority becomes the functional center of spiritual life, the freedom of the gospel is eclipsed, and the community becomes shaped by control rather than grace. A true return to God’s sovereignty would mean recovering the biblical truth that salvation and being born again belongs to the Lord alone, and that no human being may stand between a person and the God who calls, forgives, restores, and loves with perfect freedom.

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Yet even when a system misrepresents God’s sovereignty, God Himself is not hindered. His grace reaches individuals in quiet ways - in their questions, their longings, their conscience, their hunger for truth, and their desire for freedom. The Triune God does not depend on any single church or leader to draw people to Himself; He works directly in the hearts of His children, guiding them with patience and compassion.

 

For those who feel confined, confused, or burdened, this is good news: God is not limited by Wellspring Church's structures. Your life - created, known, and sustained by Him - is not bound to the authority of any human system. The God who formed you and calls you His own meets His people personally, faithfully, and lovingly. He continues His work even where institutions fall short.

 

The same God who sees every wound and hears every cry is able to lead you into clarity, healing, and a deeper experience of His grace.

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