@Hope in God
Thank you for your kind and complete reply. You and I are apart on some things, but perhaps not as much as some might think on many of the more important things. I suspect your experience is in mainstream church, but that I don't hold that against you. Please don't hold my experience against me. I have never belonged to such a church and have only rarely ever visited them.
Most of my personal experience in churches is in the Pentecostal area, non trinitarian types, which automatically make me a cultist to some. The largest group of which I was ever a part was Catholicism and that was over 50 years ago. A lot of water under the bridge since then. God has not moved, but I have! For a little over a year now, for the first time in a great many years, I have belonged to no local church group. I was a minister of sorts at the last one, but when they put out my old pastor, I went too. I've visited places since then but it seems unlikely that I will stick anywhere any more at my age. I know in that year I have not let up with God in spite of my disconnection.
We may be more alike than you think, dear brother. I know well the UPC doctrines as I was a member of one of their churches while in my beginnings. I turned to Jesus soon after an electrician shared with me the Cross as we stood in a Navy chow line one day. That night, I prayed as I was lying in my rack. This was during a deployment in the Caribbean aboard a destroyer where we were sent to play war games (target practicing) three months prior to my discharge from the Navy. Soon after our return to the States, I was Spirit filled at a beachfront home filled with tens of recently converted Jesus People. I spoke in tongues almost the moment hands were laid on me.
Following Great Lakes naval training, both my identical twin brother and I, having enlisted together, were stationed aboard the same ship, the Noa (DD-841). He was discharged earlier than me due to a disciplinary matter that allowed him to keep the classification "under honorable conditions" and left FL for TX. Eight months later, I too was discharged, after which I purchased a van I outfitted for camping.
My zeal for the Lord, by then, had eaten me up, and I wanted to share face-to-face the Cross with my brother, so I drove to TX. To my disappointment, he was not in Dallas when I reached his address, and, as I found out, he chose to backpack/hitchhike to CA, then up to the NW, and back to Dallas. After about two or three weeks living with my brother's friend who permitted me to use their apartment in anticipation of Dennis' return, in walked my filthy, road encrusted twin who initially wanted nothing to do with Jesus.
But the Lord had other plans, and within a couple of weeks, after noticing the change in me and what the Holy Spirit had done for my character and mood, Dennis became convicted and prayed the sinner's prayer. We then looked around for a church to attend while we worked for a day labor force moving furniture (how I hated that work). One night, being hungry, we stopped at a pizza parlor where we discovered a table full of Spirit filled believers from a UPC assembly. I did not know the differences in their doctrine and was very happy to have found a church home.
The UPC does not believe in the Trinity, being Jesus only adherents, and told me, since I was not sure I was baptized in water in the name of Jesus, that I was not saved, so I obliged and did that again. My hair being long and sporting a beard, was cut short as recommended. Their insistence upon tarrying at the altar for the Holy Spirit to overtake a prayerful seeker and cause him to speak in tongues baffled me. It seemed so unnecessarily super spiritual to me. For recreation, we once went to a lake where the men and women were not permitted to intermingle. The women swam on one side of the lake, and the men, the other. Still, we held on, and within a week my brother was baptized in the Holy Spirit. By then, I had begun to suspect their doctrinal leanings to not be where Jesus wanted us. During the few months we were with that group, we gained some good friends, but I felt the Lord wanted us to return to Florida where a movement of God was strong and because it was home to me.
Little did I know that the Lord's initial presence (or was it excitement) would lift in north FL after the first year or so, leaving each believer a bit bewildered and starving as they continued to hold onto the only teachings to penetrate the area: the prosperity gospel and the sheep/shepherding error. What a mess those extremes caused throughout the body in those days.
While in FL, I forced myself for years to adopt the Charismatic methodologies for wealth and happiness, and submitted myself to a young pastor who told me how to order my life. I desperately desired balance, and chose to join a Charismatic church, a several hundred member congregation whose favorite teachers included Arthur Burt, Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth Hagin, and men from Ft. Lauderdale who preached submission: Derek Prince, Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson, and others. It was there I helped lead worship with an occasional sit-in, Phil Driscoll, during his earliest days as a rededicated Christian.
Then, out of the blue, brothers from Beaumont, TX came to town, and set up Bible training classes on the first principles of Heb. 6, which, for me, was my deliverance. The one brother who remained while the others set up their own classroom studies in other parts of the US, taught me how to rightly divide the Word, to study, and approach my growth with a vision for knowing the Word. They were all about more Word and less sign following, which was good for me. Those brothers knew the Scriptures, and were marvelous examples in that regard. I left them after 1.5 years of twice daily sessions while I completed the earning of a BA in literature at the university. After earning my degree, I packed my things, and headed back to my roots.
Fed up with it all the usual debates and nitpicking among the believing community, I left for my boyhood home in SW PA where I wrote for the county paper in the evenings, played secular music gigs at fraternal organizations, and owned and operated a bookstore. I haven't been back to "church" with any consistency since the early '80s, and I can truly say I don't miss any of it..
