This blog post will have no meaning to you unless just want to get inside my spiritual history. I write sometimes as a outlet. It is in effect therapy for my soul. I consider my religious life stream one that has converged in many different streams of the Christian faith. I have been deeply blessed in my life with the experiences of attending and being part of many different types of churches. My earliest memories in the Church world is that of a simply Christian church. They did not use the term non-denominational. They were simply Christian. They were non-denom decades before it was cool to be in a non-denominational church. They simply desired to teach the Bible as they understood it. When I went with my cousins to church I experienced the big church of a few hundred that was the contemporary by 80s standards, independent, Baptist Church. I can occasionally still remember the people singing in their long white robes with blue edges. My grandparents usually attended the Methodist church that was literally across the street from our house. I still remember running up and down the isles spooked by the “picture of Jesus” that hung above the meager pulpit. The little church could seat no more than fifty but at Christmas time it was full. As a little kid I loved Jesus. I just didn’t know who he was. There was something about him that drew me to him. I believe that I loved him but I couldn’t tell you why.

When I was nine we moved to the northern part of New Hampshire. My family began attending a United Church of Christ congregation (UCC). My aunt attended the Baptist church down the road and occasionally we went with her. Her husband didn’t attend much from what I recall. The different denominational backgrounds confused me and my parents where unable to explain their differences. My first exposure to Catholicism also occurred at this time. One of my best friends Lucas was being raised as a less than devout Roman Catholic (RCC). The UCC church was ecumenical in spirit and Father Bud Belfry from the RCC church in town came to our church on occasion. He was always very kind to me and spoke with me as a person and not as a child. It was always a pleasure speaking with him. I asked my parents one day in the foyer of the UCC why all Christians weren’t Catholic. My parents informed me that we were protestants and didn’t believe the RCC claim to be part of the (only) Church that descended from Jesus. This drew me to them. I really wanted to know Jesus. My parents weren’t all that interested in me attending a RCC church. Yet I fell in love with the professed history of that church and its connection with Jesus.

I started studying the RCC. Before the advent of the internet my limited studies as a 12 year old was the local library. The articles I read in dictionaries, journals, and encyclopedia led me to conclude that the RCC couldn’t back up its claims. I was very disappointed and as much as I wanted them to be the one true Church I simply couldn’t believe that they were right on their position on marriage of clergy, treatment of and superiority over other denominations, and position on Mary. Part of me wanted to belong to the history of the RCC. For a season I wanted to be a priest! I was probably a odd twelve year old in that I really cared so much about the truth. I couldn’t understand how people that claimed to know the truth could live so very far from it. How they could hold to things that just didn’t seem to make sense with my understanding of God bothered me greatly. In everyone’s life things happen that challenge our beliefs. One of the greatest challenges to my childish belief in Christianity was a senseless evil that decimated my childish faith.

I was raised on moralistic Christianity. I once believed that the only really good people were Christians. The church my parents attended basically taught that the purpose of Christianity was to make bad people good and good people better. When I was 12 years old it was discovered that one of my classmates had been raped by her female teacher repeatedly for over two years. The teacher was a professing Catholic. I still remember her speaking about her religion. I once believed that only really good people were Christians. Here was a supposedly good person that had done a deplorably evil thing. That was the first nail in my young faith.

The second came as I discovered Martin Luther King Jr. and through him Gandhi. As I read biographies of Dr. King I learned that the South I once had lived in and idolized was far from perfect. My parents had kept my exposure to racism limited. As a child I assumed all Southerners were Christians. As I discovered that much of the sins committed against blacks in the South were perpetrated by professing Christians I began to despise Christians.I ultimately rejected my parents explanation of the Christian faith to make bad people good and good people better. I began seeing to much evidence to the contrary.

I still liked Jesus. I just didn’t like the Church. I didn’t like the God of the Church either since He seemed to do little to change peoples lives for the better. This combination of things led me to reject Christianity as a whole. I figured the real Jesus was a good man but that was all.

At fourteen I moved back to the South as a spiritual agnostic. I didn’t want to attend the public schools so my parents had me go to a independent Baptist school. For three years I watched people both students and staff talk about their relationships with God in a real way. I knew I had no such thing. I also watched Christian kids doing very unChristian things. I was confused.

I had my experience of conversion in 1997 during one of their mandatory Wednesday chapel services. I learned perhaps the most important doctrine of Christianity from a gym teacher that was roped into doing the service at the last moment. He spoke plainly that Jesus came to die for my sins because he came to make spiritual dead people spiritually alive. This led me in to a decade long journey to discover what I understand as the doctrines of Christianity as taught by Jesus. After my conversion I deeply desired to discover which Church best reflected Jesus and taught what he taught.

I have worshiped in Baptist, Charismatic, Lutheran, Methodist, non-denominational, and pentecostal churches of a variety of different expressions and flavors. I have read deeply about others including Amish, Anabaptist, RCC, Puritans, Quakers, and countless others. The first church I ever joined was a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) affiliated contemporary Baptist church. I attended and even served there as a Sunday School teacher for nearly five years. In 1998 a year after my conversion experience I began to attend was then called Southeastern College of Wake Forest on the campus of Southeastern Seminary.

I was in the SBC for nearly a decade. I can honestly say that I liked a great deal of what is found within the SBC expression of the Christian faith. I once held that it was the purest and closest denomination of all to the early Church. I have been studying Scripture for nearly 13 years now and I no longer hold that one denomination over the other is the sole true Church in this world. I do believe many denominations as a whole are a lot closer than others to being a New Testament Church!

I see denominations as different patterns in a large tapestry of God’s redemptive story of grace. I see God using them all even many of them have erred on certain important doctrines. God is love and that love is illustrated in his grace and mercy on us sinners especially those of us in the Church. He is moving the Church towards himself and the truth of Christ. I am loyal to no one denomination but do love many Christians in some that I consider better than the others. Ultimately it isn’t my decision to make. It is the Lord’s. They are his servants and he will judge them. By Him they will raise up or fall down. I am very glad though that through my spiritual journey in some of the different streams of the Christian faith that Jesus redeemed me for himself.

I am overjoyed he loves me just like that little child that just somehow knew that Jesus loved him so, because the bible told him so.