Just as our spiritual journey is a work in progress, so is this page. Here I summarize the chronology of my spiritual journey with links to separate posts on different aspects of it. I will be expanding it with some of the specific spiritual experiences that I have had and with a bit of my personal persuasions and opinions.
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As spiritual journeys go, mine has been fairly winding. My immediate family background was United Methodist, and so much of my early childhood was spent in Sunday School and worship services there. I went with a friend to a children’s crusade where I first actually understood the Good News that Jesus died for my sins, and I accepted him personally.
Some time later I heard about the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer. I spent lots of time in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches and eventually, as a teenager, decided to formally leave the United Methodist Church. I described myself as non-denominational and began to focus on Christ himself rather than on a particular set of beliefs or practices.
As I studied the Bible and attended seminars on the Jewish roots of Christianity, I got involved in the Messianic Jewish Movement. I learned a lot during that time and met lots of interesting people. I even learned a good bit of Hebrew.
My wife introduced me to the denomination of her childhood, the Christian and Missionary Alliance. I am currently a member of a C&MA church, because I appreciate the Alliance’s emphasis on missions and on Jesus as Sanctifier.
2 responses so far ↓
Pauline // November 20, 2007 at 12:09 am
Well, I don’t see a date for when this was posted, but I’m surprised there haven’t been other comments yet.
If RG’s path has been winding, I hardly know what to call mine.
I went to a Congregationalist church with my father as a child, but I was also influenced by my mother’s beliefs. She went to a Unity Church, which is part of a movement called New Thought, and has a lot in common though is not the same as New Age. Using the metaphor of a spiritual journey, my parents would have both agreed that everyone ends at the same destination no matter what path they take to get there. The Bible would be sort of a travelogue, telling how some people had found God.
By the time I was a teenager, I had decided that if there was a God, he didn’t have much to do with my life. But the idea of faith appealed to me, and when I went with my sister (who had become a Christian at college) to a church that preached the Gospel clearly, I wanted what they had. So I joined an independent fundamentalist Baptist church and received believer’s baptism (I had been baptized as an infant in my father’s church). This church taught that there was only one way to God, with the map clearly marked in the Bible.
I went to a Baptist college, but also visited other churches, including Presbyterian. The PCUSA church was too liberal, like the UCC church I grew up in. The OPC church was good, but too far away to attend regularly. I went to Spain as part of a study abroad program, and attended first an indigenous church (called Evangelical, which simply meant not Catholic), then a CM&A missionary church.
After graduating I found a job as a teacher in an interdenominational Christian school founded by a group who were primarily Pentecostal. I discovered that some of my fellow teachers drank alcohol and went to movies, and the school actually had a dance teacher!
I remained Baptist myself, though I was happy to finally find a Baptist church that was Bible-believing but thought going to movies was OK, women could wear pants, and other versions of the Bible besides KJV were good.
Then a young man from a Presbyterian church started going to our Baptist college&career group, and within a year we were married. The church he had picked (for its good music program) turned out to be poor on teaching the Word and discipleship, so after trying to start a class to explore what it means to be a Christian and finding people saw little need for it, we went to another church.
That church (a PCUSA church also, but with a much better Christian ed program for all ages) clearly preached the Gospel, but did not have a problem with having joint services with the nearby Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, and even Catholic church. (The Quakers also joined us but never hosted the service.)
While we were at that church, my husband found that the call to be a pastor, which he had ignored as a teenager, reasserted itself. So he went to seminary (RCA rather than Presbyterian, for various reasons) and became an ordained pastor.
He pastored one church for almost six years, until dwindling finances (it was a church of almost exclusively senior citizens) brought about his decision to resign (rather than let the church spend all its money on his salary). He pastored another church for six months, but they decided he wasn’t a good fit for them after all. (Both these were very conservative PCUSA churches.)
The PCUSA church where we live now is liberal, and wherever the closest conservative Reformed church is, it’s too far away to be part of. For a while my husband worked at the Salvation Army, which he was required to attend so we went with him. It was OK, but strange to me that they don’t celebrate baptism or the Lord’s Supper.
We currently attend a church that is Baptist but doesn’t advertise the fact, but tries to be a “seeker-sensitive” church.
Kjell Lee // April 6, 2008 at 1:42 pm
The Bible says: “The Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that fills all in all” (Eph. 1:22-23). This is how Christ fills those who are His. He has taken up His abode in the Church. There the Lord’s people are to seek their strength in the communion of saints and in the Lord’s Supper.
It is from the Church, that Jesus will fill the individual. We read that He will fill all. Temperament and natural aptitude are not determining factors. No one is by nature such that he cannot become a Christian, yea, that he cannot be filled by Jesus. Also you can be filled.
This filling is a gradual process. Jesus fills the individual by more and more taking possession of him. He will fill “all in all.” The individual’s whole life, his home and his work, his thoughts and his interests, his words and his feelings, all of his nature and his being shall be filled by Christ.
Lord, fill me! Fill everything in me! Place Thy stamp upon me! Take possession of me! Grant that all that I do, all that I say, all that I think, and all that I am, may testify only of Thee!
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