My journey to the truth has been a long one. In my futile search for the truth, I have been a member of Lutheran, Church of God of Prophecy, Mormon, Baptist, and independent Christian churches. For the sake of brevity, I will condense my testimony considerably.

My mother is a hard line Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod member. I was baptised when I was two months old, and my mother took me and my siblings to church every week. At a young age, I questioned church teachings about infants who die before being baptised going to hell. This issue would come back to haunt me later as a parent in a very painful way.

Much to my mother's chagrin, I stopped going to the Lutheran church after moving away from my hometown at age 26. When I talked to her, she would usually lecture me about the importance of keeping my faith and attending church regularly. It was important to her, but not to me. Once, when she visited me and my wife in another state, she left my childhood copy of Luther's Small Catechism on my bed when she left. She often reminded me of the bible verse the pastor read at my confirmation at age 14, "be thou faithful unto death and I will give thee the crown of life." (Revelation 2:10). When my wife had our first child, the pressure from my mother to comply with the teachings of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod intensified considerably. She often pressured me to have my infant daughter baptised in the Lutheran Church. She told me how important it was to her for her granddaughter to be baptised. I resisted, because I believed that each individual must make the decision to be baptised on their own. I didn't believe in infant baptism. This caused great conflict in my relationship with my mother.

At eight months old, my daughter became very ill. The doctors in the small town we lived in could not determine what was wrong with her, and she was rapidly losing weight. Out of fear for her life, we went back to our hometown to get her treatment from a respected pediatric specialist. My mother asked me if her pastor could come by my daughter's hospital room and pray for her. I reluctantly agreed, and would live to regret it. Though she denies it to this day, I still believe that she was hoping that the pastor would say something to convince me to have my daughter baptised. The pastor talked to me for about 20 minutes about the church's teachings, and then asked me if my daughter was baptised. I simply said, "No." He told us that our daughter was going to hell if she died, and that we had alot of nerve asking him to pray for her when we weren't fulfulling a role as parents by having her baptised. I promptly asked him to leave the room. I sent a letter to the church and the denomination's district office a few weeks later withdrawing my membership. Without the prayers of the Lutheran church, my daughter recovered, and today is a healthy 13 year old.

My wife and I briefly attended a Church of God of Prophecy at the invitation of a friend. We were scared off by the speaking in tongues thing. It amazed me that the preacher, who had some training in Biblical languages, sounded so much more authentic when "speaking in tongues" than the babbling old lady in the front row who had no training in Biblical languages. If God really inspired each of them to speak in tongues, why would the pastor sound more authentic than the uneducated old lady?

After we had been married about 3 years, I met a new co-worker who also lived right next door to us. They were a Mormon couple with two young children. We became instant friends with them. We were impressed with how they always had alot of church friends around and they how supportive they all were of each other. We frequently saw Mormon TV commercials promoting the church's family friendly virtues. We called the 800 number and requested a copy of the Book of Mormon. The next day, two missionaries showed up at our door. They were very friendly, and the first visit was brief. They began to come regularly to lead us through discussions on the Book of Mormon. Finally, one night, they came with the hard sell. One of them kept saying that he felt the spirit working that night. Suddenly, the friendliness was gone, and the missionaries moved in to "close the sale" with tactics that would make any used car salesman blush. A week or two later, we were baptised into the Mormon church by my friend and co-worker. When the missionaries and my friend began talking about the temple ordinances, I became leary. When they gave me a copy of the other Mormon scriptures, the Doctrine of Covenents and the Pearl of Great price, I became totally conviced that the Mormon church is not only baloney, but is a cult. We left the church after only a few months.

We then began attending a Baptist church, which seemed so mainstream to us after having attended the Church of God of Prophecy and the Mormon church. Southern Baptist churches, I learned, are much more concerned with the politics of the state and national conventions than they are with worshiping God. Ministers in southern Baptist churches, despite claiming to be called by God, are simply career opportunists like people in any other profession. They typically change jobs every 4 or 5 years. Amazingly, they always seem to be "called" to bigger churches and higher paying jobs. One young pastor, who is now a rising star in state convention politics, decided that the church needed to build a gym (churches always call them a "Family Life Center" or "Activities Center," but they are gyms) in order to "reach out to the unchurched in our community." He preached often from the pulpit that we needed to give above and beyond our tithes to make this happen. He often lied about the church's growth, stating that the church's membership had tripled in 4 years (coincidently, the lenght of time he had been there), when in fact it had increased from 400 to 700 members, which is not even double. He convinced the church to go $2 million in debt to build a gym it can't afford. Only a couple months after the building was finished, the pastor was "called" to a larger, more prestigious church elsewhere in the state, leaving his former congregation to pay for many, many years on a building that he believed was in "God's will" to be built.

Most recently, our family joined a large mega-church, an independent Christian church. Some of the most un-Christian people I know go to this church. Many people seem to go to this church to see and be seen, or because it is good for their business to belong to this church.

I am tired of Christianity. I have spent most of my life trying to find some evidence of truth in it, mainly because I wanted to fit in in the Bible Belt south where Christianity is the norm, but also because I wanted to believe in heaven. I have finally accepted what I realized 23 years ago when I took Western Civilization to 1648 in my freshman year of college-that Christianity is a big lie. Civilization was around for thousands of years before the advent of Christianity. Also, no person who takes any college science class-whether it be Biology, Chemistry, Astronomy, or Physics-can seriously believe that the Biblical account of creation is true. Now, instead of running from the truth and trying to find some evidence of the truth of the Bible in different sects of Christianity, I have accepted the truth, and it has set me free.

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