"OldEnt"--- Thanks for sharing more of your story.

[Theodora]

I've just read your thoughtful/thought-provoking post re the abuse in your "reformed" church. I'm sorry for this painful part of your past. Have you been able to find a new church home? How does this kind of suffering at the hands of the "body of Christ" affect your faith? --- If you care to share more about your story.

Just wanted you to know that I'm thinking about you and will be keeping you and yours in prayer and that your reflections/observations are entering into my own reflections about my experience in liturgical churches.

Grace and peace to you and yours this day--

Theodora

:)

[OldEnt]

I've just read your thoughtful/thought-provoking post re the abuse in your "reformed" church. I'm sorry for this painful part of your past. Have you been able to find a new church home? How does this kind of suffering at the hands of the "body of Christ" affect your faith? --- If you care to share more about your story.


Theo,

It was my faith that brought out of that abusive church. As I searched the Scriptures and cried out to God in prayer, I came to conclusions that were contrary to the emphasis and cultic like teaching of that church and the movement it is a part of.

I sensed there was something wrong but was not able to put my finger on it... I prayed specifcally that if what I was sensing about the one pastor and his wife had any substance to it that God would expose it. Several years latter He did just that. The man was exposed as one who had been consorting with prostitutes for a number of years and had lied to cover it up.

It was in afffirming and laying hold of my faith that I was brought out of that place. My faith was and is in God and His promises, not in men or a specific church. They wanted me to look at the Bible through the lens of their teaching and I refused. I refused to give up the Protestant principle of private interpretation which when correctly understood means we are to "search the Scriptures to see if these things be so..." as the Bereans in the book of Acts did. No cult or cultic like church can long stand to have people in the pews doing that. It undermines all the Protestant self-appointed "Popes" who seek to lord it over the conscience of the congregation. I told one pastor I was not going to leave my brains at the church door.

For the past two plus years we have been going to a Baptist church that is more in the mainstream of Evangelicalism. Our new church is in many ways the kind of church we had thought the old one should be but was not. The new church recognizes they are not the only church in Evangelical Christendom. The leaders are effectively accountable to the congrergation and I do not sense the pride and arrogance I sensed in the old church. As a family we are much happier then we've been in a very long time.

Sunday Oct 17 in our PM service, my younger 18 year old daughter will be baptized. She has bloomed spiritually since we left the old church. She says that while there she was drawing in on herself, closing up and building walls to protect herself because she could "never measure up"... She now has a solid grasp of God's grace and her acceptence in Christ.

I still can get VERY angry when I think think of all the garbage that went on in that church. I often have to think of Jesus words in the Sermon on the Mount regarding anger and ask His forgiveness. Yet I sense in that mix of anger a rightous indignation at the mis-representing of the nature of God and the work of Christ in that church's inadequate and faulty teaching on the fullness of God's grace in Jesus Christ and its menaing in the day to day life of the believer. They are short changing the people of God and cheating them of a more Biblical view of His grace. They think of Him as one like themselves, stern, distant, usually angry at something or another in your life, words, or actions. :eek:

I can pray for them, but not that He will bless them as they now are. I pray they will be conformed to the image of Christ by whatever means God has to use to bring them to that image. What makes me most angry is they will not admit they did anything wrong. No confession of their damnable arrogance and pride or acknowledgment they are not qualified to be leading God's people... They blame the decline of the church on the fallen pastor. They do not see that they to are "the problem"... and the problem is not the "troublemakers" that left but that they are the troublemakers. May God have mercy on them before it is to late....

I do not expect to ever fully heal in this life. I will be fully healed when I see Him face to face and He wipes away my tears... Come quickly Lord Jesus!

Thank you for your kind thoughts and prayers.

In His love, joy, and grace,

Old Ent

[Doug64]

Hi old ENT:


Congrats to your daughter.

So many kids who grew up in abusive churches don't have any religious anchor at all.
None of our three attend church anywhere - and while I don't think that is necessarily a problem of and by itself, not having a relationship with God is.

Doug