S
SSTeacher
Guest
I have a good friend whose name is Chester. He’s originally from Noo Joisey
and was a cradle Catholic. He attended Catholic school and from the third grade on wrestled with ideas and asked lots of questions. However, he got very few satisfactory answers. So as soon as he got into high school he dropped out of church. When he left school in 1960 he pursued his interest in music and became heavily involved in the music scene of the American 1960s. He got married in 1974 (to a Catholic) and the following year he and his wife ventured south for a vacation in North Carolina. While they were on vacation they found an old vacant farmhouse and fell in love with it. The thought came to both of them that they might move south permanently. And that’s what they did.
On the material front, they grew their own food and took great care with their diet, replacing sugar with honey, cutting back on salt, and keeping a very low profile where junk foods were concerned (Chester’s always been a bit of a health nut). On the spiritual front, they encountered Southern friendliness and that led them to accept an invitation from some neighbors to attend a Protestant evangelical church.
“I caught the ambience of the place,” is how Chester describes that church.
Every Sunday Chester and his wife went to church following which they were invited to somebody’s house and fed. A very pleasant state of affairs, you might say. And when they were invited to the Wednesday evening Bible study they went to that, too. Chester was quite overwhelmed by the pleasantness of the Southerners he met. He told me the church was “just a nice place to be.” One day, at this friendly church, Chester responded to what is commonly known as an “altar call.” And this, it seems, constituted Chester’s conversion experience. Chester then became a member of the friendly church and he contributed to church life by singing in the choir. The friendly church soon experienced a crisis of some sort, which resulted in the disappearance of friendliness and a subsequent church split. Approximately half the congregation stayed with the church while the other half left to find another church home. Chester was amongst those who left. Eventually the group he was with bought some land and set about building a new church facility. Chester enthusiastically helped with the building (he makes his living as handyman). But he eventually tired of that fellowship and soon found himself drifting from church to church.
I first met Chester about nine years ago in his most recent church setting when I converted to Biblical Christianity. I was on my way in but Chester was on his way out. As far as spiritual matters were concerned he had simply been left to himself and he was fed up. Nobody had taken an interest in his spiritual development. He’d apparently been asking questions about spiritual matters since the mid–1970s but he’d never been able to get satisfactory answers. Indeed, Chester asserts that most of the Christians with whom he’s come into contact considered his questions intrusive and unwelcome. So after years of unsuccessfully searching for somebody who could talk competently about Christianity and who might have been able to help him into the kingdom intellectually and spiritually, as well as musically, Chester became cynical and decided that Protestant Christian churches in the United States are little more than social clubs that offer entertainment on Sunday mornings and mimic a megachurch of their choice during the week. Chester has heard Christians declaring that God always sends somebody to sincere inquirers to let them know about the truth of the Gospel but, ironically, the people he’s heard it from are the same people who make nonsense of the very idea they’re advocating by the ineptness and disinterest they’ve displayed toward Chester and the struggles he’s been going through.
At one stage in his life Chester supposed that he was a Christian. Now he declares that he isn’t. He sometimes asks me: How can you know if a person is a Christian?
So that’s the question.
Grace and peace,
Mick
and was a cradle Catholic. He attended Catholic school and from the third grade on wrestled with ideas and asked lots of questions. However, he got very few satisfactory answers. So as soon as he got into high school he dropped out of church. When he left school in 1960 he pursued his interest in music and became heavily involved in the music scene of the American 1960s. He got married in 1974 (to a Catholic) and the following year he and his wife ventured south for a vacation in North Carolina. While they were on vacation they found an old vacant farmhouse and fell in love with it. The thought came to both of them that they might move south permanently. And that’s what they did.On the material front, they grew their own food and took great care with their diet, replacing sugar with honey, cutting back on salt, and keeping a very low profile where junk foods were concerned (Chester’s always been a bit of a health nut). On the spiritual front, they encountered Southern friendliness and that led them to accept an invitation from some neighbors to attend a Protestant evangelical church.
“I caught the ambience of the place,” is how Chester describes that church.
Every Sunday Chester and his wife went to church following which they were invited to somebody’s house and fed. A very pleasant state of affairs, you might say. And when they were invited to the Wednesday evening Bible study they went to that, too. Chester was quite overwhelmed by the pleasantness of the Southerners he met. He told me the church was “just a nice place to be.” One day, at this friendly church, Chester responded to what is commonly known as an “altar call.” And this, it seems, constituted Chester’s conversion experience. Chester then became a member of the friendly church and he contributed to church life by singing in the choir. The friendly church soon experienced a crisis of some sort, which resulted in the disappearance of friendliness and a subsequent church split. Approximately half the congregation stayed with the church while the other half left to find another church home. Chester was amongst those who left. Eventually the group he was with bought some land and set about building a new church facility. Chester enthusiastically helped with the building (he makes his living as handyman). But he eventually tired of that fellowship and soon found himself drifting from church to church.
I first met Chester about nine years ago in his most recent church setting when I converted to Biblical Christianity. I was on my way in but Chester was on his way out. As far as spiritual matters were concerned he had simply been left to himself and he was fed up. Nobody had taken an interest in his spiritual development. He’d apparently been asking questions about spiritual matters since the mid–1970s but he’d never been able to get satisfactory answers. Indeed, Chester asserts that most of the Christians with whom he’s come into contact considered his questions intrusive and unwelcome. So after years of unsuccessfully searching for somebody who could talk competently about Christianity and who might have been able to help him into the kingdom intellectually and spiritually, as well as musically, Chester became cynical and decided that Protestant Christian churches in the United States are little more than social clubs that offer entertainment on Sunday mornings and mimic a megachurch of their choice during the week. Chester has heard Christians declaring that God always sends somebody to sincere inquirers to let them know about the truth of the Gospel but, ironically, the people he’s heard it from are the same people who make nonsense of the very idea they’re advocating by the ineptness and disinterest they’ve displayed toward Chester and the struggles he’s been going through.
At one stage in his life Chester supposed that he was a Christian. Now he declares that he isn’t. He sometimes asks me: How can you know if a person is a Christian?
So that’s the question.
Grace and peace,
Mick