Last post we left off talking about the early experience with Christianity in my childhood. It was the turn of the decade, and many things in the world came to an end, and other things just started. Society itself was undergoing changes in the state of Oregon itself and we found ourselves as people not truly certain as to who we are. The results could be from being unaware of proper anthropology, we knew we were human, but what did that mean? There appeared to be many changes coming from behavior physiologists to child therapists all explaining what a child should be doing or not doing. I grew up under various rules and social norms, once that could have been the fault of the sixties, others in the seventies. All these developments would not simply play into how an individual grew up, but how they would learn about the world.

This is the background of my generation, my grandparents survived the great depression, and my parents were born in the sixties, and gained their developmental years in the seventies, and had me in the early eighties. This means I ended up being raised by two completely different generations holding to two separate value systems. One was part of always going to church on a Sunday, and the other had no issues sending my siblings and myself to learn religious things as it was childcare help. This means that the rest of the week, religion did not matter it was something to do on the days I went to my grandparents’ house. This meant regular public schooling.

The intention of this series is not simply to delineate how a Bible-believing Christian who gave his heart to Jesus at nine years of age, would then leave that for the supposed man-made traditions of the Latin Rite Catholicism. However, this is a more wholesome approach that is aimed at showing that our entire personhood is developed by the society in which we live. That when we understand who we are, and study where something comes from, we can learn the cause of our current situation and then rectify any kind of disease we find within it. In short, the human person can become whole once they understand the reason why something is the way it is, and respond to it. We do not need to live in where we are, why were are there, how we got there, who put us there, what it is all about, and when did it all happen. Instead, as an individual sits down with their mind, and is exposed to their own thoughts they can grow and develop their conscience in a manner that is in line with natural and correct humanness. That is what we are going to observe in this series, and this is exactly the manner in which I gained conversion.

During the formative years between 10 and 15 years of age, being from about 1992-1997 I attended several more church groups. The grandparents had left the big one from my second post, left the “Foursquare Church” system, and joined a fledgling evangelical community that met in a house. This was a small startup involving a couple of pastors who themselves had left a larger community. The group began by the name of Maranatha Community Church. After about a year or so they managed to gain themselves an actual building to be used for church instead of the living room of one of the pastors. This was your typical guitar, drums, dancing praise, and worship community with Holy Ghost inspired sermons designed to lift you up and make you feel good.

We had also shifted back to living in Salem at this time. I was in the sixth grade while we lived in Albany, Oregon, which was considered at that time a middle-school age, and so I attended the proper school. I was out of elementary school and going to be with the older children, who had classes in different rooms, and a locker and all those cool older kid things. However, moving back to Salem meant going back to elementary school, which at this time was K-6th, not K-5th as I had experienced. As in Albany, I had a one on one education tutor as I was not the most focused of children, common educational formatting had seemed boring to me at that time, and being honest I consider traditional classroom format for boys and girls a bit too stifling for real imaginative and therefore intellectual growth. Homelife of Monday through Friday consisted of the usual, school work, riding the bike around town, and playing with children near my age. Video games had also been a large part of my life at that time. Being able to save a couple of dollars and rent a video game at the local video rental store was a treat. Especially when those older video games could be beaten in two hours. The video store had a return and exchange policy for movies or games that were unsatisfying. I probably played all the video games they had made up to that point within a matter of weeks because of that exchange system. I would tell the grown-up that the game was too hard for me, or too boring or whatever excuse I wanted to spin just so I could play all the other games I wanted and only for one simple rental fee a week.

These years, during the weekends, were backed up by the constant Trinity Broadcasting Network playing at the Grandparent’s home. People like Paul and Jan Crouch, Jimmy Saggart, Benny Hinn, John Hagee, T.D Jakes, Jesse Duplantis, and many more, had their faces and voices on the television preaching, praying and praising God. They received a lot of money from my grandmother over the years, as faithful as she always made sure to tithe the local church she attended and her favorite Christian broadcaster network. I heard a lot of deriding remarks about the televangelists growing up, and even now many years later I still hear of how these people believe that God wants them to have multi-million dollar airplanes and bodyguards, and mansions. I don’t fully understand their game or desire to have so much material wealth being preachers unless they are entertainers? However, I digress.

I was about eleven when I received my first Bible, and I read that book cover to cover. I highlighted passages that spoke to me or things that caught my eye. Many of the highlighted verses was a result of being paid to memorize passages. John 3:16 was memorized for fifty cents. Over the next few years, I would continue to learn and memorize parts of the New Testament that were designed to land home what would later become traditions and doctrines from the sixteenth century. I began then to learn to read into scripture specific ideas and philosophies that came from a Western Philosophy that was completely divested of historical teachings. This means that I began to learn that I was Protestant and that I was learning what the scriptures really taught and that everything I would learn would be free from all those man-made traditions that another body of so-called Christians believed.