Steven Anderson

Radical Fundamentalist,
Founder of the
New Independent
Fundamental Baptist Movement

---

Pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona; and founder of the New Independent Fundamental Baptist (New IFB) Movement. Anderson began his church, Faithful Word Baptist Church, in 2005 after dropping out of Jack Hyles’ Bible College. When his pastor suggested enrolling in another Bible college and thus completing his Biblical education, Anderson rejected his counsel and moved his family to Tempe, Arizona where he started his church. He has no sending church, and he was never ordained.

Anderson promotes hate and divisiveness, usually branding his critics and those who leave his church as irredeemable reprobates, thus placing himself in a position over God and His Holy Word.
Anderson denies the biblical Trinity, and he always has. From the beginning of his ministry, he taught the heresy of Modalism – that there is one God who consists of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that all three are simply different manifestations of the one true God.
In about 2015, Anderson dropped Modalism, and purged his church and movement of all who still believed and/or taught it. He has now replaces it Modalism with a hybrid form of Tritheism and Partialism. Anderson teaches that God consists of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He goes on to say that these are three separate persons, each with their own body, each with their own spirit (except Jesus whom Anderson claims has seven spirits in Him), their own separate mind, and their own separate seat of consciousness. Anderson goes on to say that all three of these separate individuals physically look exactly the same. He bases this on John 14:9, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” He further teaches that the Father has DNA, an actual physical substance, thus indicating God is at least partially physical.

While he does teach the belief of the eternality of Jesus, Anderson takes it a step in the other direction – away from the Biblical God, and says that Jesus has always been, for all time and eternity, a human man. Anderson also teaches that Jesus’ death did not atone for sin as the Bible clearly and explicitly teaches. Instead, according to Anderson, Jesus had to suffer in hell as a burnt offering in order to atone for our sin. Steven Anderson, as well as his entire movement are part of the wider “King James Only” movement. They believe the King James translation of the Bible, as it was originally written in 1611, is the only preserved, true, inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God; and going so far as to claim that each copy of the 1611 King James Bible actually contains God Himself, not simply His words but His very being. At the very least this is dangerously close to idolatry of the 1611 KJV.