About Ignaria

My experience of Christianity has probably been a bit more varied than many of yours. I grew up in a Mennonite church with parents who were missionaries. On a northern Canadian First Nations reservation, we were surrounded by Catholics and Pentecostals. We were a small, strange minority.

Whenever tragedy struck, as it often seemed to on the reservation, the local radio station switched from secular to Christian music and people talked about repentance. After a few days, things went back to normal.

So my evaluation of my religion was that it was fractured, and usually a thin veneer that didn't seem to change the lives of those who believed it, at least not at a deep level. My family loved me, but our religion didn't blunt the force of generational patterns that were sometimes abusive and hurtful. Some of the worst hurts came in the name of “discipline,” and God's love seemed very far removed from that day-to-day reality.

The juxtaposition of growing up in a Christian family surrounded by other Christians who did not agree with me, and a stated belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ who makes all things new, but didn't make much new in my home created an insatiable hunger to find out if there was something real beneath the facade.

Over the years, I have read widely, but again have seen that fractured version of Christianity repeat itself in isolated thinkers with widely divergent views. The question crystallized for me: Is modern Christianity, split into Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox, actually historic Christianity? Where is the religion preached by Jesus Christ on Sunday morning?

I do believe the seeds of that original message are present today, but they are often oversimplified and partial. What I want is a full understanding of the theology of the Bible as understood by the first few generations of Christians. And it is to that end I built Ignaria.

I came to theology largely on my own — self-taught across most of what I know, though I spent a year and a half in graduate theological studies at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tennessee. That formal study sharpened my instincts but didn't produce them. I had been reading theology and philosophy for years before I set foot in a classroom.

The practical problem I kept running into was access. Primary sources are scattered across volumes, archives, and library shelves. Finding what Tertullian actually said about a specific doctrine, or tracing how the early Church understood baptism, requires hours of searching through indexes and anthologies — time most pastors, writers, and theology students simply don't have.

Ignaria gives you direct access to that corpus — blockquoted, cited, and searchable — so that reading the Church Fathers doesn't require a seminary library or days of research time. The goal is not to resolve every theological debate, but to let you read the sources yourself and see what Christians across centuries actually wrestled with — including the shared patristic foundation that predates many of our later divisions.