This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed—words spoken by billions of Christians across centuries and continents. In his new book, ““We Believe: How the Nicene Creed can deepen your faith,” the Rev. Michael Carpenter shares how these words written in the 4th century aren’t just ancient history, but also have the power to unite across denominational lines and why they still matter today.
Guest: The Rev. Michael Carpenter
- Discover more about Carpenter's ministry at RevMichaelCarpenter.com.
- Purchase "We Believe" including the leader's guide and DVD at Cokesbury.com.
- Learn about the medical debt forgiveness initiative by Wahoo First UMC under Carpenter's leadership.
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This episode posted on June 20, 2025.
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Transcript
Prologue
This year marks the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed—words spoken by billions of Christians across centuries and continents. In his new book, ““We Believe: How the Nicene Creed can deepen your faith,” the Rev. Michael Carpenter shares how these words written in the 4th century aren’t just ancient history, but also have the power to unite across denominational lines and why they still matter today.
Crystal Caviness, host: Hi, my name's Crystal Caviness and I'm the host of “Get Your Spirit in Shape.” Today, I'm here with the Reverend Michael Carpenter. Michael, welcome to “Get Your Spirit in Shape.”
Rev. Michael Carpenter, guest: Thank you, Crystal. Thank you for having me.
Crystal: We're going to talk about your new book, which is titled, “We Believe: How the Nicene Creed Can Deepen Your Faith,” and I'm really eager to have that conversation with you. But before we do, can you tell our audience just a little bit about yourself?
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. So I am an ordained elder in the Oklahoma Conference and I am currently the senior pastor at Lost Creek United Methodist Church or on the south side of Stillwater, Oklahoma. So right outside the home of Oklahoma State University. I've been serving there for about 10 months now. Had previously served some churches in Oklahoma City and then for the past five years before moving to Stillwater, I served a church up in Nebraska, west of Omaha, Nebraska. So I've kind of been a lot of different church settings and church environments and have seen a lot of things. And then on the personal side, I have a wife, Rachel, who's a physician here in town, and then we have five wonderful and wonderfully active kids.
Crystal: I was going to say, I bet your home is busy.
Michael: It is very busy. Yeah. Our kids' rage. We have a second grader, have twin four year olds, and then twin 18 month olds.
Crystal: My goodness.
Michael: Two sets of twins in the house. So yeah, there is never a dull or quiet moment until it's finally bedtime.
Crystal: Right. And everyone just is exhausted at that point.
Michael: Yes.
Crystal: And you said before we started recording, you said your church is the largest church on a gravel road.
Michael: Yes. That's what we like to say. Yeah. Lost Creek. We are kind of in the no man's land between two towns, and so we pull from both of those equally. And so it has the feel of an old small country church, but then we worship right about 200.
Crystal: Great. Well, I love that we get reminders that The United Methodist Church is just so diverse. It's diversediverse in its sizes, it's diverse in its locations. And I was raised in a small country church, a small United Methodist church in a rural setting and have a real affinity for that and currently attend one as well. So I love that and I love getting to know those people and tell those stories too. And we're going to talk about how diversity plays into your book and the Nicene Creed. Michael, with your permission, I thought it's a creed. It's a creed we speak in church and recite in church and I thought that perhaps we could say it together.
Michael: Absolutely. That would be wonderful.
Crystal: And I just went to page 11 of your book and there it is. And you're the minister, you're the pastor. So I'll let you start and then I'll come in right with you.
Michael: Okay, so this is the Nicene Creed.
I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible.
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets.
I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come.
Amen.
Crystal: Thank you for allowing us to start the podcast that way. I know when I stand up in church and usually it's the Apostles Creed, I'll be honest, usually we're reciting the Apostles Creed. I feel really empowered. I don't know, there's something about speaking these words about what I believe and it just, it's a very, feels very special and very, I don't know. I gather some strength from that.
Michael: Absolutely, and I'm glad Crystal, we did that together here as well. That was the reason why I titled the book, “We believe.” When we get up the words and that translation I have there in the book on page 11 is straight out of our United Methodist hymnal, page 880, that we make a point to say at the three sections we believe that you get up. It's not just a personal, not a private declaration. I believe this. It's not the pastor getting up and pointing at the church saying, y'all believe this. This is us all in the power of the Spirit and the church together saying this is what we believe
Crystal: And I do want to talk about, well, I appreciated that you share in the book that when you were in college you were with, I guess I think you said you were in a fraternity with others who were in the ministry or studying religion or something like that, but that you came from different faith backgrounds and sometimes it was lively in your conversations, but that it was because there were differences of opinion and the things that we all do, and we of course all think that our opinion is the correct one. Can you tell us a little more about that? Because I found that really intriguing and I also found it so relevant.
Michael: Absolutely. Like I said, I joined when I got to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, I joined a fraternity and it was one founded on Christian principles. It's called Alpha Tau Omega. And so Alpha and Omega is Jesus and the Tau, the T in Greek is the cross, so it's a fraternity founded on Christian principles. And when they had recruited my pledge class especially, they had really leaned into those Christian principles. And so there were a lot of us, especially around my year, who were being pulled into ministry of various sorts. I knew coming into college I wanted to be a Methodist pastor one day. I'm a sixth generation Methodist myself, so I was very secure and who I was as a Methodist, but then my roommate is Roman Catholic, some of my best friends, our Southern Baptist one is planting a new church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
And then out from there, my big brother in the fraternity, he's a Southern Baptist missionary in Japan, and then another fraternity brother was really on the fence of if he wanted to be a Catholic priest or not. It was really, he wanted to go into the priesthood, but then there was this girl, as they say, which then obviously would've closed the door for him on being a Catholic priest, and marriage ultimately won out for him. But then he very involved in his Catholic church still where he lives in Missouri. So it was that we would imagine a lot of different fraternity houses are argumentative for a lot of different ways and maybe each one has their different things. They like to argue about our fraternity at the time, we would get sometimes into theological debates and it would be what I believe about communion and why I would let any of my friends, I'd be arguing with come to my communion table at my church, but then I wouldn't be able to go do that at some of the other churches my friends go to.
We would argue about what forms of baptism are valid or not. That was my baptism by being sprinkled as a baby, was that acceptable. And my Southern Baptist friend, he would always invite me to go get real baptized. Sometime he would offer to do that at his church and then the Catholic friend would jump in and say, no, it was fine. It just wasn't in a Catholic church, the way was fine, just not the where. So we'd have all those sorts of discussions and we'd work down to where we'd have real intense disagreements about the how the where, and maybe exactly the what of baptism, but we all agreed that baptism was something central to our faith that we could all get behind this idea of one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. And so we really not really backended into the Nicene Creed there. Obviously we didn't come up with it. It's been around now for 1700 years. This is the 1700th year of the Council of Nicea convening, but we had kind of backed into it and then when we found it was the common ground for all of it.
Crystal: It's hard to imagine for me, I'll just say, for me, that something that was written in the three hundreds, 1700 years ago, which this is the anniversary year, is still relevant, but yet in your book you do two things: you tell its history and why the words were selected, the reason they were in the three hundreds for very specific reasons, and yet today that's still important and significant. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Michael: Absolutely, and that's what I see among, I think my friends and then maybe folks my age and younger in the church too is a longing also for those things that have lasted and have stood the test of time that so many things. I mean, for my generation at least growing up with, I still remember my parents having the bag cell phone, what having the bag with them and then graduated a little bit. My first phone was those old Nokia brick phones, and then I got the flip phone and then now finding the iPhone and every year there's a new one with a new feature and it's just nothing really lasts. It's just all this constant change. And we see that on social media too with the scrolling, the things we're watching are getting shorter and shorter also. And so there's this yearning for those things that have stood the test of time that this isn't new and shiny.
It's old, really, really old, but it's still really shiny too, that it hasn't lost any of its luster over 17, 800 years. And there's a power in that. This was that the Council of Nasia was the first time after all the scriptures were written that church leaders from across the world got together in an ecumenicals, we call it a worldwide churchwide council of all areas of the church represented, and they hammered out this creed to really to solve some of the debates that were happening at the time and what they came up with, which was inspired by the spirits in filling and presence there at the council has withstood the test of time and is still powerful and transformative and life-giving for Christians 17 centuries later.
Crystal: I read a book a few years ago, or actually maybe not even that long ago, Michael, and it talked about people who have, it was written by two, the authors, two women came at, they just had really different viewpoints, perspectives in the world, and the premise of the book was, let's find the place where we have an intersection. Let's find the place where we can have an agreement. There's a lot of noise about what we don't agree with, but let's find that place where we do find connection and in our joint humanity. I mean, that might be it. We're both human, but it really stuck with me because I have strong opinions and I like to think my opinions are right. Of course I do. We all like to think that we're right, but I believe it's in hearing other people and trying to understand and finding those places where we can come together and say, we believe in one God,
We believe in baptism, and your book was, I really appreciated that in the book, is that you were like, okay, at the end of the day, these are the things that we've, there's all this noise out there as sprinkling, dunking, whatever, infant, adult, but at the end of the day, this is where we believe, and we do need those places where we can come together and remember our joint, our connections I think is the word you used, which is absolutely right. One of phrases you've used, you said the Nicene Creed is like a map. I'd love for you to tell more about that.
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say I got this idea from prolific author CS Lewis who wrote about that in his book, “Mere Christianity”, so this is not an original thought too. I'm happily borrowing it from him and I imagine that he would be okay with that too, but that so many of us are searching for a deep encounter and experience with God. That's what so much of this is, so many of our spiritual practices, so many of our religious journeys, that's what we're trying to do is to have some kind of encounter with God, to know that God loves us, to know that God has a plan for us just to have that kind of encounter with the God who made it and who loves us, but sometimes we don't know where to go, and we talked about there's all these different ways, all this noise in the world offering, here's the five steps to do that, or here's a course you can buy for 99 99 and that we'll show you how to do this.
But what the Nicene Creed is then, as Lewis had said, is it's a map. And he had said that this was based on an encounter he had with someone who had been a British Air Force pilot in World War II who had said he had been in the sands of the Sahara and the North Africa campaign in World War II and said, I've seen the divine, I've seen God out in the desert compared to that. Why do I need these rickety old things like the creeds? These are flimsy pieces of paper. I've experienced God for myself. And Lewis said, that's fine, that's great. If you've experienced God, that's wonderful. But for maybe those of us who haven't, the creeds, it's not an encounter with God in and of itself. It's a map that will lead you to it if you're trying to on your own just kind of poke around the edges.
He used the example of the Atlantic Ocean that if you want to get to America from England across the Atlantic Ocean, if you just walk along the beach on the western side of England, that's not a map of the ocean. But there was this group that met 1700 years ago of really faithful people, of really holy people who were then inspired by the Spirit to have this ecumenical council who drafted this, this essentially a map then that will draw you into it like we talked about, say, I believe rather we believe in one God that then helps to focus us on who that God is and that we believe then that he had a son, not only that he had a son, but then that for us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven that it wasn't just because it wasn't just happenstance, it was for us and it was for our salvation, and that we believe in a holy Spirit who is the creed says the life giver, who is the giver of life, who gives that life, that abundant life to us. So every step of the way, it's a map that will take us there.
Crystal:
Let's take a moment out of our conversation to talk about apportionments. Let's be honest. When you hear apportionments, you might think, is that just a church budget thing? We get it. It sounds like accounting, but here's the truth. It's actually a story of ministry, mission and multiplication. Apportioned giving is how your small offering becomes part of something much bigger. That means supporting churches in underserved communities. That means funding seminaries, hospitals, and disaster response teams. That means reaching people you may never meet but who know God's love because of you. It's not about how much it's about all of us showing up together. You're part of a church that is united in impact. That's a story we're sharing and a story worth being part of. It starts with you and your faithful generosity. We are the people of the United Methodist Church and together we are united in impact visit resourceumc.org/unitedinimpact to learn more. Now, back to our conversation.
Crystal: Michael, can you give us just a little, maybe, I don't know if it's a theology lesson, but there are several creeds. There are several creeds in the United Methodist Hymnal, and maybe you know why we say the apostles creed more often? I don't know, but can you just talk about why we have creeds? Because in your book you challenge the churches to say these creeds, to say this creed together every week.
Michael: Absolutely, and we can go into a minute about my experiences maybe in my previous churches bringing the creeds there, but yeah, there are several different creeds. The Nicene Creed is the first of what we call the ecumenical creeds. Those creeds that were hammered out by an ecumenical council, church leaders from across the global Capital C Church who met and who came up with that creed. Like you said, the one that's maybe a little more common is the Apostles Creed, which historically people have attributed. Then the story behind the Apostles Creed is that each of the 12 apostles each offered one of the lines of the Apostles creed and that they wrote that together and certainly that is a wonderful way to think about it, and if that draws you into the Apostles creed, that's wonderful. We don't have any history of that being the case historically.
Crystal: That was my next question, has that been proven at all?
Michael: We don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story sometimes too as a preacher.
Crystal: That's right.
Michael: As I tell my church, all my stories are true and some of them actually happened, but anyway, the historical evidence for the Apostles Creed, we see it didn't start coming up until after the Nicene Creed had been adopted. So the Nicene Creed then is also then the first one, but it was these attempts and then there's a longer one, the Athanasian Creed, and that came about two generations after the Nicene Creed by, there was a very young participant who I talk about in the book at the council of Nicea, his name was Athanasius, so that he wrote this creed that then is much longer. So if we're feeling really we don't have any lunch plans after church, maybe we'll do the Athanasius Creed or at least portions of the Athanasius Creed. That one really gets into the Trinity itself and what we do and do not believe about the Trinity.
And then we have then in the United Methodist Church that we adopted a century ago, a Social Creed, that, as our founder John Wesley said, we know of no religion but social religion and no holiness, but social holiness, that we are a people who our churches aren't just a waiting room of heaven either. We then bring that faith out into the world, and so then we put pen to paper on what we believe, how we should act out in the world. And so the social creed then will maybe not being like a bare bones theological statement like the Nicene Creed or the Apostles Creed would be the social creed is then what also gives us legs to go out in the church. I advocate for an all of the above buffet option for creeds in the church. I know a lot of churches will stick with the Apostles Creed every week because it's shorter, it's more well, well-known, but then regularly using the Nicene Creed and the Social Creed and maybe parts of the Athanasian Creed when they feel like it also, but that we gained something with all of these creeds.
Crystal: Well, tell us about what happened in your church.
Michael: Sure. Yeah. So I served a church in Nebraska and I was the church I served in the midst of the pandemic. I had gotten to that church and had been there nine months when COVID hit and a lot of churches, it really set us back. We had to say goodbye to a lot of great ministries and programs that then were hard to restart when we came back out of COVID. And so it was trying to get the wheels turning, and one of the things that the church had not done previously before I got there was recite a creed regularly. So coming out of COVID, I decided to make that a part of it. And like I said, we had had a lot of wonderful buy-in and support from especially the younger people in the church because it was something ancient that as we remember now from five years ago in the midst of the pandemic, everything was unprecedented, we're unprecedented times had to take unprecedented measures, everything was unprecedented.
The Nicene Creed is very much unprecedented. It has been around and it hasn't changed for 17th centuries. And so then as we started to do it, it was helpful for the church, but where we really saw it blossom was in our youth of the church. We started seeing a lot more young people come into the church, especially through one of our youth who was a member. He won our conferences evangelism award because he just kept bringing friends from school to church. He tripled our confirmation class just by continuing to invite kids. It was wonderful. And so we'd be there on Sunday morning and when we get up to recite the creed, we would have the words on the screen and obviously in the style where you could look at them, and most adults, even if they think they know it, are going to look at the screen just to make sure that it's not changing.
They don't want to say it wrong, but the kids made it a contest who could memorize it first and then to make unbroken eye contact with me at the front of the church while we recite the creed, which was a little off-putting at first, just to have a teenager just hardcore staring at you while they say the creed. And I think that was part of it to see if they could throw me off as they did it, but then also to show me that they knew it and these kids had made a game of it and it was fun for them, and they would say it, not mumbling, not halfheartedly. They were really into it. And to see that in a new generation of people 1700 years after, it was incredible. And I know that life like it does for a lot of us is going to throw curve balls at some of those youth as they get older.
And I'm not naive to think that all of those youth will stay plugged into the church and plugged into their faith for the rest of their lives. Some will go to college, enter young adulthood, and faith might take a backseat. And yet I'm confident that when they do that, if that happens to them because they've memorized these words that are 1700 years old, that they'll remember at some point deep within them, we believe in one God or for us and for our salvation. He came down from heaven or we believe in the Holy Spirit, the giver of life that will resonate with them and be a core part of who they are because it had been something we did week in and week out in church. So it was really powerful.
Crystal: I love that, Michael. I just got chills as you were talking about it, and it's true. I mean, that is embedded in their hearts and in their memory, and those words will be, I believe they'll bubble up when they're needed. Well, I want to also share, I just felt like I'd be remiss to have you as a guest and not ask you to share about something really exciting that happened at one of your churches in 2022 when you had your church’s 150th anniversary, which is kind of, maybe it feels a little bit off topic, but it's really not off topic at all. So with kind of that setup, I'll just let you start sharing that story.
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And so this is actually the church I was just talking about that as we came out of COVID. We are also preparing for our church's hundred 50th anniversary. It was a prairie church planted then in 1872. And so in 2022, it turned 150 years old. And as we're getting ready for that, we did what all good Methodists should do, and we formed a committee to plan for our sesquicentennial is the fancy $10 word for a hundred 50th anniversary. And we're talking about what do we want to do at the anniversary? We're obviously going to have a big worship service and who should come preach? Who should we invite? Let's get all the addresses of our former pastors to come back. We will obviously have a reception. Methodists can't get together without lunch, so we'll have that. We're going to have a history tour, so let's collect all the history we can find. We got from the Great Plains Conferences archives, the saddlebag from our first preacher, whose name is escaping me right now, but he went on to be a district superintendent in Illinois, and he then lost a congressional seat to Young Abraham Lincoln then later on too. So just all this history, quite the story.
Crystal: Quite the history there.
Michael: It was a whole lot of fun. Then we thought then too, that so much of what our church has been, unlike most Methodist churches, is also giving of and beyond themselves, that it's not just about us. We've been here on this corner of Seventh and Beach Street in Wahoo, Nebraska for almost 150 years, and we've done only had wonderful worship and discipleship, but we've also had community transform and service over the years of all the things that we've done. So we want our anniversary to be something special for those beyond us too. And so we had this idea from some things we had seen from some other pastors who some of us knew was to partner with the group that was then called RIP, medical Debt. It's now called Undue Medical Debt. And what they do is they would buy medical debt on the secondary debt markets. So after the hospitals can't collect their bills, they sell it for pennies on the dollar to other debt agencies.
And then RIP medical debt was a nonprofit who would buy it then. And then with their campaigns, they would just forgive it. So you'd get a letter in the mail saying that your medical debt was forgiven. And so we partnered with them and they promised that however much we would raise, they'd be able to forgive a hundred times that. And so we set the goal for our hundred 50th anniversary that we'd raise $15,000. And so we raised, I think just under 16,000 for that anniversary. And they came back to us a couple months later and said, because of some, I think market conditions and some COVID medical debt, because that obviously had ballooned in the pandemic, they were able to go above and beyond what they had promised us. And we wiped out over three and a half million dollars in medical debt in six states around Nebraska.
And it was incredible. And we traced it back then too. There are people who said that this is one of the things we say in the Nice and Creed when we say we believe in the Holy Spirit who gives life and who gives power to us and who spoke through the prophets and who's speaking still to us, that that's the kind of power that we're talking about. It's power to live our lives and to live into our calling, but then also power for a church just coming out of the pandemic in a town of 4,500 people in central Nebraska to be able to forgive three and a half million dollars in medical debt for its neighbors.
Crystal: Wow. That is a powerful story. And I believe, if I'm correct, that UM News did a story on that a few years back when it happened, and we'll definitely will enclose the link. We'll add the link to the episode page so that people can read more about that, just that act of faith and that real miracle. I mean, just think about people receiving that letter in the mail and how powerful that would be. That's awesome. Thank you for goodness. Thank you to your congregation for that inspirational story and for sharing that with us. Well, Michael, I know that there's, I mean, you go into great detail to really, and I'm sorry, we're just not going to do it justice, so everyone is just by your book, but you go into such detail on how the words were chosen, why they were significant, just all the pieces of that, and I love that so much. But is there anything other than that, is there anything that you wanted to make sure we discussed today that we had not gotten around to?
Michael: I think just that impetus behind the book, also realizing that we're coming up on this momentous anniversary of 1700 years from it was also that we've been, and a lot of us, probably a lot of your listeners here, that there has been so much noise out in the world. What do Christians believe that what do United Methodist believe and some things true and untrue have been said, and that then the ING Creed, in addition to being a map, can also be an anchor for us, that we know whatever winds of change, whatever other things are said about us or other things happen in the world, that we have this anchor that we know is tied to scripture, is tied to a living encounter with God that we can then go from. So that was also one of the reasons behind the book to be an anchor for folks who needed that also.
Crystal: I love that. Well, Michael, now I'm going to ask you the question we ask all of our guests on “Get Your Spirit in Shape” and how do you keep your own spirit in shape?
Michael: So I am a big believer in what the founder of our denomination, John Wesley, what he called his class meetings at our church here at Lost Creek. We call them home groups, but it's the same that we get groups of people together who ask, and then that transformation question from the class meetings, how was it with your soul? That's where the rubber or the rubber meets the road in our discipleship. And so I am blessed to be part of a home group. It's actually, it's quite the experience. We have a lot of the younger families, the families who have young kids in our church, and we're in a home group together. And so we all get together and have a huge dinner at five 30, and then at six we split up into our home groups. The moms go over here, dads go over here for the home group, different home groups, and all the kids go outside to play.
And when we have all the kids come, it's 23 kids who are all playing outside, but then the moms and the dads are in a home group. And so it really helps to keep my spirit in shape, to have this group of folks around me who every week are asking me, how is it with your soul that then I can be honest with them and be a little vulnerable, and the next week ask how things went, and just to continue to deepen not only my discipleship, but to help my relationship with God. So that has been a blessing to me that I'd also recommend to folks.
Crystal: Well, and that is another structure, if you will, that has lasted all of these years, hundreds of years, and just stays really relevant. And that question, you said it well is where the rubber hits the road. So yeah, you could go into it with five questions, but I bet you're not going to make it past the first one. Yes. Yeah. Michael, thank you again for being a guest on “Get Your Spirit in Shape.” We'll definitely link to how you can purchase this book at Cokesbury. It's probably out in some other places as well, but we'll add the Cokesbury link to the episode page and share that news story and then some other things. But I just appreciate your ministry and you providing this book and being a guest on “Get Your Spirit in Shape.”
Michael: Alright, thank you so much, Crystal. Thanks for having me.
Epilogue
That was the Reverend Michael Carpenter discussing his book, “We Believe: How the Nicene Creed can deepen your faith.” To learn more, go to umc.org/podcast and look for this episode where you'll find helpful links and a transcript of our conversation. If you have questions or comments, feel free to email me at a special email address just for “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listeners, [email protected]. If you enjoyed today's episode, we invite you to leave a review on the platform where you get your podcast. Thank you for being a “Get Your Spirit in Shape” listener. I'm Crystal Caviness and I look forward to the next time that we're together.
