About the Author

If you have ever sat under teaching that everyone around you accepted, and quietly wondered whether it actually squared with Scripture, this site is for you.

Trust is our first instinct, and a good one. We trust the speaker, we trust the book everyone is passing around, we trust the movement that seems to be bearing fruit. But testing what we hear is a learned skill, and many sincere believers were never taught it. Without it, a person is left defenseless the moment an idea spreads because it is popular rather than true. I was taught to test early on, which is probably why I have watched it play out without being carried along: a teaching moving from church to church on momentum, repeated so often and so warmly that almost no one stops to ask whether it holds up.

This site exists to change that. I am not here mainly to tell you which teachers to avoid. I am here to put a lasting skill in your hands, the same habit the Bereans practiced when they measured even the apostle Paul against the Scriptures. When you leave this site, I want you able to test teaching for yourself, not just to be warned about it.

Who is behind this

Howdy! My name is Blake Helms, and I live in Birmingham, Alabama. I am not a pastor or a scholar. I am a layperson and a lifelong Christian, and most of what I know about testing teaching came from two places: years spent close to the work of the church, and a career built around one question, whether something can be trusted.

My path ran through more than one tradition. I grew up in a small, traditional Southern Baptist church, Fairfield Highlands Baptist Church in Midfield.Fairfield Highlands Baptist Church voted to dissolve in 2021 and handed its building to a newer congregation, Faith Church. See The Alabama Baptist . When I was thirteen, my family began attending a large Assembly of God church, Garywood Assembly of God in Hueytown (now Kingdom Culture Church ), and I spent my formative years there behind the scenes. I ran audio on Sunday mornings, handled the projected graphics and lyrics, and worked in the print shop that produced our weekly materials. I also did the web and design work, both for our everyday ministries and for the large Easter production we were known for.Garywood’s annual Easter Drama, produced from 1977 into the 2000s, was known across the Birmingham area. See Wikipedia . That role pulled me into other congregations, Church of God churches among them, where I consulted on the same things. For years I saw the charismatic and Pentecostal world from the inside, as a participant, not a critic peering in.

In 2009 I came back to the Baptist tradition I grew up in, at Grace Life Baptist Church in McCalla. I led the overhaul of its media and production, and when the church grew enough to hire a full-time media person, I handed off leadership and stayed on to serve wherever I am needed. I mention all of this for one reason: the movements and teachings I write about are not abstractions to me. In many cases I have stood inside them.

The rest of my life has gone into technology. I work today as a software engineering director at EBSCO Information Services , after years as a hands-on engineer. We build the research databases and library platforms that universities, schools, hospitals, and public libraries depend on to put credible, peer-reviewed sources in front of their researchers and students. So much of what people find online has never been checked, and my part is to help build and safeguard the systems behind that work. My days come down to two questions: does this system hold up, and can the information it carries be relied on? Telling the reliable from the merely convincing is, more or less, what I do for a living.

Let me be clear about one thing, because it matters more than all the rest. None of this sits in judgment on Scripture. My instinct for testing serves the Word of God. It does not stand over it. The question I keep asking on this site is not whether a teaching is impressive or popular. It is whether it is true to Scripture. Everything else I bring here exists to help you ask that.

What this site will and will not do

A few commitments hold this together.

The first work of the site is to teach you to test: how to read a passage in its context, how to weigh a claim against the whole of Scripture, how to notice when a familiar-sounding idea has quietly drifted from it. I would rather make you a careful reader than a loyal one, and over time you should need me less, not more.

But testing that never reaches a verdict is not much use to anyone. So when the evidence is clear, and especially when a teacher’s or a translation’s own words give the problem away, I will name it plainly, so you can steer clear before it costs you something. What I will not do is trade in rumor, or guess at people’s motives, or reach for outrage. A warning here is meant to guard you, not to wound the person I am writing about or to win a point.

And all of it stands on convictions I have tried to state plainly rather than leave you to infer. I write from a Southern Baptist understanding of the faith. You can read exactly what I believe on the beliefs page .

The habit worth keeping

When Paul preached in Berea, Luke singled those listeners out for praise. Not because they swallowed what he said, but because they checked it:

Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

Acts 17:11 (ESV)

That is the whole thing. Receive the word eagerly, then go to Scripture and see whether it holds. If this site does its job, that is the habit you walk away with, long after you have forgotten anything I wrote.

New here? Start Here is the best place to begin.