In my earliest posts, I spoke openly about my involuntary interaction with the Evangelical Christian movement. I spoke about moving from church group to church group in an effort to remain within the Christian environment going from Foursquare to Non-Denominational to Assemblies of God meant that with my life in the quest I would need to search out what is Truth. This meant in those agnostic years the channels were wide open to be atheist, agnostic, Christian, Muslim, or as an adherent to Vedanta. I could choose anything therefore I would need to sit down and go to war with these issues, after all, I had been reading and studying quite a bit of information. Now I felt a pull that I should investigate the situation and give it a whole lot of prayer.

I will begin these next posts in the order in which I had patterned my investigation. This is a search that took my free time up during the years of 22 through 29. These seven years would be fraught with confrontation, disappointment, and despair. There had been hardships in talking to people, for when putting in the hot seat about beliefs teachers and pastors do not tend towards honest discussion, instead, they tend toward insult or other forms of abuse. It is a rare person who can sit down and help an individual hash out why something is the way it is, and have answers to any kind of protest to it.

I needed to start with my first experience and that was within the halls of a foursquare Church, and their history points to Aimee Semple McPherson who founded the movement in the early 1900s. McPherson’s own conversion points at the Pentecostal movement. This movement began from a split within the Methodist Church founded by John Wesley called the Holiness Movement. I was able to learn a lot from the views from the Foursquare Church and come to a simple conclusion that it was an early group of Christians who indeed found them basically like any other Pentecostal group. It becomes a huge mess of a tree when I had begun to map all these groups and trace their origins. This particular battle left me looking to Wesley, a reformer of the Church of England.

It did not take long for England to suffer its own Protestation against its reformation king. This lead to the Methodist movement that made it quite clear that their doctrines clearly followed Biblical teachings based on the interpretation through Wesley and other enlightened theologians. This is in fact the same sort of agenda I read about consistently throughout my historical pursuits. If I could say one thing now about this shifting sands of theology called the Reformation is there was no end to people thinking they understood the Scriptures better than those they left.

Therefore, what could my problem be with those enlightened reformers who broke from the Methodists and became Evangelical Pentecostalism? Quite simple was my realization that the motives behind their advancement might have appeared to be to help souls into a simpler belief in Jesus, the reality remained, and they were founded simply by a man. As I declared earlier my youth taught me a deep love of the Holy Bible, and I did my best to read it daily and devour its words. My search demanded that I would find the Church founded by Jesus Christ, as he declared he would build his church. That Christ would establish his community, and it was my goal and aim to look for it. Well, it was not founded on McPherson, or Wesley, for they admitted that they came from a completely different background. As was the case for McPherson she received insight directly from the Holy Spirit, and Wesley disagreed with the King.

At the end of my research I found that it was not doctrinal issues, but historical error within this branch of belief. They had no line to prove they came authorized by Christ to be a church if I were to contend with the Bible itself as I was taught there was no Church of the Methodists mentioned, no book of Paul written to the Church of the Foursquare. While one can call this tongue in cheek humor, we must understand the scriptures and the logic behind Paul’s own words as he wrote that all should be of one mind. Between McPherson and Wesley, there was clearly a missing apparatus that could guide me to understanding that these faith groups even with their own declarations of belief found within Methodist Theology or the statement of belief of the Foursquare Church. If I could hold to simply agreeing with their tenants why would they be at odds with each other, what reason is there that McPherson did not simply open a Methodist Church of her own? All these questions became easier to answer when I realized that it was the striving issue of ego and the goal of being the religion that rightly interpreted the scriptures.