Bless you all for allowing me to join.

Bless you all for allowing me to join.

I expect you have a testimony section which I shall find in due course.
But in the meantime the following testimony seems as good a way as any for introducing myself.
You will see that whilst I am a long established believer I have become a bit of a loose canon as a result of having spent many years seeking the hidden treasures of the Kingdom of Heaven without denominational allegience to prejudice my search.
Nevertheless I hope you will learn to accommodate my quirks.
I have been a regular contributor to my UK forum for five years and my post count on the True2Ourselves American forum is well over 1000, and I hope to replicate that in this forum.
Both my other forums have members who openly appreciate my contributions and I intend to continue to post there.
However those who are not prepared to give time to mulling over some of the things that I have to say quickly jump to hasty wrong conclusions as new member 'OneLight' will testify.
I look to spread my wings as a means of "saying what I think I know in order to know what I ought to think"..... meaning that I am as much a 'listener' as I am a 'speaker'.
Here then is my Testimony:

I came to faith as a child over 60 years ago in a little chapel opposite my parent’s home.
(They packed me off to the chapel’s Sunday school in order to get themselves a peaceful Sunday afternoon.)
By the time I was 16, and in my first job, my faith and the chapel totally absorbed my life.
We believed (at least I thought that we did) in total independence without denominational affiliation, and in God’s development of each member to serve his purpose from cleaner and coffee maker, right up to and including the Pastorate.
Based on Christ’s Sermon on the mount we also majored on practicing complete deference to each other and to all Christians (turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, if asked for our coat then give our cloak, honour the lesser vessels amongst us, total love and forbearance to one another, etc.)
However after National service, change of jobs and house moves, career obsessions etc., my faith was eventually shattered when I later thought to return to the place of my spiritual birth only to find that the Elderly Pastor and his two assistants had abandoned all that they had taught me and had led the chapel into bitter warfare over the question of Pastoral succession.
What they had been preaching, and I had been believing, should have precluded such a complete reversal but far from it with the entire membership taking sides with one or another of the three leaders.
The bitterness became so great that the leadership split up, defected to other Churches and took their supporters with them.
The assembly had in fact become so unrecognisable that, after trying another church for a while only to find the same dissention, I took my shattered illusions off into the ‘wilderness’ to pray and seek resolution.
Thus began, for me, many years of complete prayerful re-appraisal, including extensive research into the History of Christianity from the first teachings of Christ, through all the deliberations and declarations of the numerous Ecumenical Councils, and all the claims and counter claims of the subsequent ‘Reformation’ with all their various creeds and Articles of Faith.
Consequently I have had no denominational influence for over 40 years now and have made it my practice to attend whichever is the nearest church to wherever God places me from time to time (provided of course that they will accept me into full fellowship without demanding formal acquiescence into any man made criteria beyond that which makes me a member of the Body of Christ)
I guess re-appraisal remains an ongoing process, and out of the chequered 2000 year history of Christianity, who would expect the emergence of yet another denominational ‘Parrot’.
[FONT=&quot]Sorry folks but I am now ‘what I am’ and I can only trust and pray that I have kept myself sufficiently free from prejudice, and continually seeking the hidden treasure of Heaven’s Kingdom with sufficient diligence to at least be somewhere close to where God wants me to be.[/FONT]
 
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Glad you found us!
 
hi and welcome.:)

I had no idea we had smelly cats in the UK. Reminds me of our Retrievers who rolled in Foxes' poo, dead seagulls and Pigs' mire.
We tried so hard to get them born again and leaving their sinful nature behind.
I quess you have an equally resistent feline pet.
I'm from North Norfolk. Where are you from?
 
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