You were doing great until the end, but we all can learn much from you. One can play church for many many years and still not understand the fullness of the gospel. Intellectual knowledge is no substitute for heart knowledge.
Why were you “kicked out of the church”? How do you reconcile salvation by works or legalism? Immaculate conception? Peterine Primacy/succession, papal office, magisterium, a levitial style priesthood et al? None is contained in Gods word.
You are definitely very interesting for sure. God bless you,
JB
Your questions are each a thread in themselves.
Basically, we were kicked out of the Evangelical Free Church that we had been faithfully involved with for seven years after a woman pastor (children’s pastor) became jealous of me and concocted a set of heinous accusations against me (e.g., she claimed that I was scaring the children–I guess that’s why my children’s choir grew from 24 to over 60 kids in three years, and why I and my two daughters were invited to work with Vacation Bible school every summer and why parents enthusiastically got involved with many of the ministries that I was involved with in that church).
My husband and I were asked to attend a tribunal, where a group of men that we had never met and who had never met us before tried us, condemned us, and asked us to leave the church. Then we were shunned by the Church.
A year later, that woman pastor was fired because she was caught in a lie.
Obviously this woman pastor had some problems, perhaps emotional or psychological, and she had learned to tell lies to protect herself or build herself up.
I found out a year later that the parents of the children went to the pastors to find out why I was no longer involved with the various ministries, and they were told that I had chosen to leave the church. In other words, they were lied to by the pastors.
The night the tribunal condemned us is the night that I finally admitted the utter fallacy, the outright evil, the Satanic masterpiece, of the doctrine of
sola Scriptura. Forgive my language about this doctrine–I simply cannot find words that are expressive of the utter depravity of this twisted and horrible doctrine that has led so many people down the path to confusion and doubt.
The pastors and the men in the tribunal used the BIBLE to justify their cruel and capricious treatment of us and of our two daughters. After the trial, both of my daughters stopped attending church, claiming that if the church could kick US out (after all our years of active and loving service in many ministries), then the church would certainly kick out my daughters.
My older daughter, a graduate of Calvin College, became Catholic two year ago, after a prolonged period of study.
My younger daughter and her husband still do not attend church. She has major trust issues–the pastors and the men who sat on that tribunal at the Free church have a LOT to answer for at their judgement. I believe that the Blessed Mother pleads with her Son to have mercy on my daughter, for she was treated shamefully by men who claimed to be shepherds of Jesus.
That night, after the trial, I actually saw a vision, as real as anything, of the “doctrine” of sola Scriptura crumbling apart, shearing away like pieces of mica.
I didn’t read the Bible for almost a year after that night. I was afraid of it because I had experienced personally the evil that men can do by using the Bible alone as their authority. I didn’t want to become like them.
I’ll answer your questions in another post, due to word limits.
It is the work of the Holy Spirit to conform us into the image of Christ.