“When you say you’re having a hard time finding a church your comfortable with, I absolutely know what you mean. I’ve been to many churches all over the country, and the differences between the denominations of Christianity are often as simple as the color of the pews! All this banter between Catholics and Protestants and Lutherans, etc, like they’re backing their favorite football team is ridiculous, and finding a church that doesn’t participate in such petty arguments can be difficult. I, however, have been blessed to be a part of the congregation at my church for about 15 years now. It’s a “community” church that calls itself “non-denominational” and focuses on studying the bible, worshiping God, and representing Him in all that you do. The pastor teaches us about what the bible says rather than preaching the doctrines of a specific denomination. I couldn’t be more pleased with my church because no matter how you choose to go about worshiping God, it’s all about what your doing, not how your doing it.”
–Josh Peterson–
Comments (2)
It’s great you have somewhere like that to go to church, because a lot of people can never seem to find the “right” church for them because of all those reasons. I go to a Southern Baptist church, but when all is said and done, we will follow the Bible’s guidance over any denominational doctrine, should the conflict arise. I think should I choose to leave my church of 19 years for any reason, I would probably choose either a non-denominational or another Southern Baptist church. I would look at another Southern Baptist church mainly because I believe in the foundational principals that they hold dear, and because of the fact that a lot of them practice only what the Bible teaches, and do not dilute it with any secular teachings. (They aren’t perfect of course, so there are some churches you need to watch out for.) I would also look at a non-denominational church because many of them choose to teach only the Bible, and do not water anything down. (As with Southern Baptist, some non-denominational are not perfect either, so some care should be taken when choosing.)
Doctrinal issues, however, are unavoidable, in my opinion. How your church interprets and views the Scriptures will always lead to some sort of doctrine and point of view. It is just sad that so much bickering and fighting has arisen in the church because of it. Christ unites us all, and His desire for us is to show His love to the lost, not fight over the petty differences we have.
Glad to see you’ve been at a church so long. I’ve been at mine for 19 years, so I’m one of the established members who has pretty much grown up there since I was 3. If you’ve been at a place so long, it allows you to better help the needs of the people in the church because you are respected and people look to you as a great part of the church.
It’s been a while man, hope you’re doing well.
@respawn87 - Hey man, thanks for the input. I really love my church. The staff is great, the pastors are amazing speakers, and the people behind the scenes are genius business professionals. Being at church feels like being a major player in the business of God. It’s a fantastic feeling, and it’s been an honor to watch it grow from 300 curious church-goers into a church of over a thousand members.
As for me, I’m alright, just really, really, really busy. I went back over my blogs from today all the way back to about a year ago, and I was blown away by how much time I had to blog back then as compared to now. Like many in my family, I’m really good at writing, if I do say so myself, and I really enjoy doing it. But good writing takes serious time which I absolutely do not have these days.
I called Rachel today to ask if she would put the exact amount of my paycheck into my financial-outlook spreadsheet, and she said that wasn’t possible because my computer was emitting a vicious odor much like the one hers was pumping out (without the smoke, thank God) when her power supply died. I ordered a new case/PSU combo (using a portion of the little amount left of my insanely high-interest Newegg credit line) and hopefully I’ll be back up and running in time for the Windows 7 final release next week. I’m on my Vista machine now, and I hate it! Windows 7 is a million times better than Vista, that’s for sure. If I can pick it up OEM for a price that fits into my budget, I’ll be one happy camper.
A guy at work dusted out his computer (which was custom built by the guy he bought it from) and in order to get the cords out of the way he unplugged everything. He came to me and said that when he pressed the power button, nothing was happening. I immediately knew that he had either forgotten to plug the power button into the board, or just didn’t know he had to and overlooked it completely. I was right, but when I brought it home (to check the specs for W7 compatibility) I couldn’t for the life of me get the thing to fire. I had to plug the RAM in with a molex (4 sticks of 512, I’m assuming) and the hard drive had a 4 pin molex power, and a 4 pin floppy power plugged into it! I’ve seen many old computers in my years of tinkering, but I’ve never seen that one before. I tried using just one power plug (once with each one), switched out the IDE belt with a new one (rubber banded in a sealed bag new), but no matter what I did, the computer refused to detect the hard drive, and failed the POST every time. Nine out of ten times the power button wouldn’t even work, but the wires looked virtually unscathed despite how old the box was. I think he might have used a statically charged feather duster to clean out the case and shocked the bottom corner where the HDD and case cables are at, shorting out the drive and the wires. Any thoughts? I’m at a total loss here.