one of the problems each of us has is our personal experience combined with our education on the subject-for this thread the baptist or catholic churchs.
The OP had a terrible personal experience that combined with the dogma of the church cause her to have to wait, remain faithfull remain chaiste remain true when all are caused by things not under her control.
Next, the dogma she is offerred, you can drink our grape juice and eat our crackers, they are after all symbolic allows her to take part in the service and be a part of a community.
She is also being provided the psychological benefit of being recruited and welcomed into the group-another convert from catholiscism-it makes her special and allows them to provide attention and they believe they are successful and doing Gods work.
All of this in the face of the church telling her that through no fault of her own she must delay maritial relations, not take part in the eucharists, not be a full member of the body of christs so to speak.
After having undergone torture at the hands of her exhusband I am predicting that this woman will join the Baptist church for the above reasons.
However, before everyone goes off the handle, I also predict that after several years she will start to find that the church service leaves her with a feeling of emptiness and she will seek out the church go through with the annulment and rejoin the catholic church.
Until each of us is provided the gift of faith we search, our experience leads us various places and sometimes the places are part of our necessary journey because we have not had the education or understanding necessary to provide for accepting where we are at a particlar time.
For me my experience in the Baptist church was one where the preached the literal interpretation of the bible, I had problems with that, the baptist church spent more time on hell and sin, what you could not or should not do and little time on loving others and doing for the least of mine. Oh they glossed over the teachings of love in the new testament but emphasized the teachings on hell. They explain it as their duty to tell everyone what is going to happen if they do not follow the teachings of christ and the baptist church way of obtaining slvation. I have heard the teachings on hell explained in light of our love for horror movies that scare us, the more we are scared the better. the teachings of hell were the horror movies of the last 1000 years and became a n integral part of protestant services largely because of Martin Luthers on doubt about his salvation.
I found faith in the catholic church not when I was searching for it but when God provided it to me. I was attending with my small children and catholic wife but had no preassure put on me at all, yet faith appeared and believe in the teachings of the church grew with the ability to find intellectual answers in the church to questions I had. For example the church has the greatest factual explanation for the truth of the resurrection one can find.
I find the baptist lean on charismatic pastors to fill their churches while the catholic church relies on dogma and the church, they can be more flexable about dogma because they dont have the responsiblility to christ and to preserving the faith and the church we do, a lot of people are attractd to flexability.
I have about ten more pages but this is too cumbersome and will probably not be read so I will close but any one with a question of a former baptist can pm me…
