A believer who wants to follow Jesus faithfully is often told that their letters stand in the way, and that the only cure is to stand up and renounce the organization by name. The New Testament asks for something older and harder than that ritual. It asks for repentance: a real turn from sin, and from anything that has taken God’s place, toward Jesus Christ. Sometimes that turn means leaving for good. It never means using God’s name to avoid telling the truth to the people you are leaving.
Two claims usually compete here. One says any tie left unbroken is a door left open to the enemy, so a formal renunciation is required. The other says the whole concern is overblown. Testing either claim means looking at how people in Scripture actually broke with their past. Lisa Fields frames the puzzle well. She finds people repenting in the New Testament and apostles casting out demons, but not a believer reciting renunciations of a false idol and then being right with God. She wonders whether “maybe renouncing is repentance. They’ve just swapped out the language.”
Dr. Dan Morrison, an Anglican priest and Navy chaplain who studies the New Testament, answers without hedging: “I’m a tell you, I don’t think you’re gonna see that.” The passages that come closest bear him out, and they also show what Scripture does require.
The bonfire in Ephesus
Morrison points first to a call story. When Elijah throws his mantle over Elisha in 1 Kings 19:19-21, Elisha slaughters his oxen and burns the plow gear before following him. It is a vivid picture of leaving no road back, but it describes one prophet’s call, and the farm he left was not sinful.
The passage that carries real weight is Acts 19, because it involves actual sin and actual spiritual danger. Luke records it this way in Acts 19:18-19: “And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.”
Three details matter. “Curious arts” is the KJV’s term for magic, the use of spells and rituals to gain spiritual power. The people confessed “their deeds,” their own sins. And what they destroyed was their own property, at great cost. Repentance here is concrete and expensive, and it targets a specific practice the text treats as incompatible with faith in Christ.
The verses just before the bonfire sharpen the point. In Acts 19:13-16, seven sons of a priest named Sceva try to drive out a demon by reciting the name of Jesus as a formula, borrowed from Paul’s preaching. The evil spirit answers in Acts 19:15: “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are ye?” Then it overpowers them. Luke sets a failed spoken formula right before a scene of genuine repentance, and the name of Jesus is magnified as people confess and give up their sorcery.
That arrangement is a reading of how the chapter is built, not a direct command. Still, it should give pause to anyone who treats a recited renunciation as the thing that breaks a spiritual hold. The Ephesians were turning away from the belief that the right words, said the right way, could control spiritual power. Their freedom came through faith in Jesus and honest confession.
Repentance lives in the heart, not the script
A renunciation can express repentance. It can also replace it. Acts 8 shows the difference. Simon, a former sorcerer in Samaria, offers the apostles money for the power to give the Spirit. Peter does not hand him a declaration to recite. He says in Acts 8:22: “Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.” The problem is in Simon’s heart, and the remedy is repentance and prayer.
Paul reminds the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 1:9 “how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.” The movement runs in two directions, and the second is the point. John closes his first letter in 1 John 5:21: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” These texts take idolatry seriously. They prescribe no ceremony for leaving it.
Morrison does not dismiss every form of renunciation. Some Christian traditions include in their baptismal rites a renunciation of the devil and all his works. That practice renounces evil itself as part of turning to Christ. What troubles him is the endless multiplication of named renunciations beyond it, and he asks the obvious question: “you got anything left by the time you finish all your renunciations?” When the list keeps growing, the list has become the focus.
Lisa Fields offers a reason the pull toward lists is so strong. People in pain want an explanation, and a renunciation promises one: find the attachment, break it, and the suffering lifts. She grants that people can give anger or sin a foothold, which echoes Ephesians 4:27: “Neither give place to the devil.” But sometimes a person is struggling simply because life is hard, and the cause is not obvious. Fields names the temptation directly: “And we are always looking for a formula.”
The hardest objection: come out and be separate
In 2 Corinthians 6:17, Paul quotes the prophets: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.” Some Christians read this as a direct call to leave any organization whose members, history or ceremonies are not Christian.
The context limits that reading. The verse sits inside an argument about the temple of God and idols (2 Corinthians 6:16). Paul is warning against joining in idol worship and binding the church’s life to unbelief in ways that compromise worship. He does not tell believers to withdraw from every group that includes unbelievers. In 1 Corinthians 5:9-10 he says plainly that cutting off contact with all sinful people in the world would mean leaving the world altogether.
First Corinthians 8-10 shows how Paul handled a closer case. Market meat had often been offered to idols. Eating it, he says, is not itself the problem, since an idol is nothing. Taking part in the idol’s worship is different: in 1 Corinthians 10:21 he says believers cannot share both the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils. The line falls at participation in the worship of another god, and at actions that wound a fellow believer’s conscience.
Oaths raise a related question. In Matthew 5:34 Jesus says, “But I say unto you, Swear not at all,” and in Matthew 5:37, “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.” Some believers read this as ruling out the solemn vows of an initiation, especially vows made by anything other than God. Others note that Jesus is confronting the habit of layering oaths to make some promises binding and others evasive, and that Paul himself calls God as witness in his letters. On that reading, the question is less whether a vow was spoken than what it bound the person to.
So faithful Christians land in different places. Some conclude that particular oaths, ceremonies or devotions in their organization conflicted with their allegiance to Christ, and they leave in good conscience. Others remain members and see no such conflict. Scripture does not name these organizations, but it does give the test: does a specific practice involve worship of something other than God, or has the organization taken the place that belongs to him? That has to be answered honestly about the actual practice, not assumed in either direction.
When God’s name ends the conversation
Morrison’s most searching point concerns the motive behind many renunciations. For some people, he says, “I think it’s more of a psychological approach that is wrapped in religious language.” He is candid about how tight-knit Greek-letter organizations are, especially among Black Americans. Members come through together, and the chapter becomes a brotherhood or a sisterhood. Cutting those ties hurts, and a spiritual reason makes the break easier to announce. As Morrison puts it, “When I put religious language on things, it relieves me of some of my responsibility.”
He saw the pattern early in his ministry. A church member told him God had said to go elsewhere. Morrison prayed with them and blessed them on their way, and they were upset that he did not fight to keep them. His reasoning was simple: “Who am I as a servant of God to try to convince you to disobey God?” He came to believe they might have stayed if he had argued, but having invoked God, they felt bound to leave. Morrison sees the same move in many renunciations: “it’s really a way of being able to say, okay, I owe you no explanation because I’m doing this because of God.”
This is where the biblical texts on repentance speak most directly. When Paul describes putting off the old life, honesty with people is part of it. Ephesians 4:25 says, “Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another.” A repentance that hides behind God’s name to escape a truthful conversation has kept something the passage tells believers to put off. Lisa Fields adds a test of fruit: maturity shows most in how we treat people who are hard to deal with, so a spiritual focus that leaves someone more hostile and critical is growing something other than Christlikeness.
What sets a believer free
Behind many renunciation rituals sits an assumption: past ties keep a spiritual claim on a believer until they are verbally broken. Morrison reads Paul differently. Paul describes evil powers through images of slavery, war and rule, and then announces their defeat in Christ. Colossians 1:13 says God “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son.” Paul speaks of that transfer as already done.
Galatians 4:9 shows how Paul argues from that kind of freedom: “But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?” The context matters. The Galatians were being pressed to take up law observance, and the next verse, Galatians 4:10, faults them because “Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years.” Morrison connects the “elements” to spiritual powers, and interpreters debate exactly what Paul means by the term. What the passage plainly shows is Paul’s method. He does not tell freed people to recite a release. He tells them they have been freed and must not go back. Applied to any old allegiance, that is an analogy rather than the passage’s direct subject, but it is an analogy that fits the logic of Colossians 1:13.
Morrison does not deny real spiritual trouble. He has met situations he believed involved more than human causes. He insists on discernment, and he is just as willing to tell someone, “This ain’t a demon. You did this.” When a situation is unclear, his counsel turns toward the church rather than a solitary declaration: “Let’s pray together. Let’s discern together.” That matches Acts 19, where repentance happened openly among believers.
The real question, then, is not whether you have said the right words over your past. It is whether anything in your life still holds the allegiance that belongs to Christ, and whether you will deal with it honestly before God and before the people involved. If something has become an idol, leave it, whatever it costs, and tell the truth about why. If nothing has, no ritual can add to what Christ has already done.