My Testimony (short version)

By: Loretta

I was in organized religion for 43 years. After being a religiously devoted but lost practicing Roman Catholic for the first 17 years of my life, Jesus Christ revealed Himself to me in 1985 when He called me by His Spirit to follow Him as I read His words in the Gospel of John. (I received the Bible in the mail by an anonymous sender after praying to God that He would reveal Himself to me.) Everything changed in my life. The Lord called me to be His, and now I had a relationship with Him.

I left the RCC and entered the world of Neo-Evangelicalism where I attended a Willowcreek style Modern megachurch for 20 years. After experiencing great distress and confusion at the apostacy of Humanism, Pragmatism, Corporate Business model (top-down) organization, false gospels and false teachers that had come in, I fled the megachurch thinking there must be a spiritually safe place somewhere in Christendom.

Looking for this last bastion of true Christianity that was not affected by the apostacy, I ended up in a small, traditional, old-fashioned, “Bible teaching” independent Baptist type Church where I stayed for 5 years. The issues here were many and complex, perhaps I will share in a blog post sometime. Basically what happened was I realized that I was striving to please people (at the Church) not living to please Christ. I was trying to submit myself to, and be obedient to “Church” instead of submitting to and being obedient to Christ. I was becoming (once again) very religious and I was substituting “Church” for Christ Himself. I was serving “Church” and not our Lord Jesus. I was being conformed to the image of “Church” and not to Christ. Combine that with the fact that they taught many Church doctrines and traditions that I did not even believe in at all!

The great spiritual distress of realizing that I was faced with the choice of either living for Institutional Church or living for Christ, became unbearable. I was under pressure to conform to “IT”. I was trapped in bondage and lies. I got the call to come out in January 2010 when my husband said to me, “I think we are done with —–(this Church)”. At that moment, God released me from the organized Church System. He called me out and I ran for the door– exiting Churchianity. God has freed me to follow Jesus Christ unhindered. Now I follow the Lamb wherever He goes.