[Stardust]

Amen! Stardust, I have been to so many different churches that it is scary, lol. It was tought to explain to a lot of my friends that I am preaching at two United Methodist churches, when the county I am from had ZERO of those churches, lol. Without confusing them and taking a very non-theological approach to explaining it, I told them it was like a calmer holiness church.

As i said before, that was the only was I could explain it to them because there is no church like it in my county. No more Nazarene churches, no methodist churches, and 4 or 5 different type of Holiness/Pentecostal/Church of God/Assembly of God, etc...

My 2nd sermon at the UMC churches that I preach at, I told them that I am a potpourii (spelling?) Christian and that as long as we all agree that Jesus is the only way to Heaven and that a personal relationship with him is essential, we can have a happy fellowship together.

I am gonna ask you a personal question, that you can feel free not to answer, answer here, or answer in PM if you choose. I have just always heard about protestant-catholic couples that allow their children to choose where to go to church, but they had to go to some type of Catholic schooling. Did you children go to Catholic school? Confirmation? Anything like that? I have always wondered how that works.

Also, praise the Lord that you two figured something out because I was raised in a Southern Baptist church with a mother that was raised Holiness, and I married a United Methodist preachers daughter. That was a struggle enough, I am glad that you two worked out something, so nicely.

You heard right LWC about protesant-catholic couples. The practice of faith was the biggest obstacle that we have faced in our 25 years of marriage. It was a fight in many ways, and I was very adamant in my "fight". To the point where early in our marriage, we just didn't go to church. After our second child was born, we both realized that we were not fulfilling our obligation in raising our children with a Christian upbringing. Thus, we had to come to some compromise. There was a lot of fighting over it before I finally turned it over to God. When that happened, I made concessions, or at least I thought "I" was the one making them. My daughter was baptized in the catholic church and then went through religion classes (our children did not attend catholic school). She completed everything through First-Communion. At around this same time our son was baptized in the Catholic church as well, but he did not begin classes.

During this time, we were still going from church to church, both catholic and protestant. It was more to appease each other, but we no longer argued about the churches that we attended. After attending the church we are going to today, we were in the car headed home. My wife, without discussion with me she was going to do this, asked our two children, where they would rather go to church. Since both had attended both catholic and protestant, they had a very fair gauge and had participated in both forms of practice. Both kids said they wanted to attend Plum Creek Christian church. And that has been our home ever since. Over the years, they have attended midnight mass a few times with Rhonda's family, but as for our home, it has been Plum Creek.

I want to be very careful for anyone else reading this, this is only my story. Not a story that is right or wrong, and trust me, after many years of being judgmental, I now am not. Like I said in an earlier post, I learned that if my way is the only way, then I will be very lonely when I get to heaven. So, my way is what I feel in my heart.

LWC, I have many stories about faith that I could spend hours talking about, but anytime I speak of them, I now know they are not "MY" stories, but they are God's stories. And when I speak, I am only using my mouth to utter the words that God is speaking through me. Thus, trust me, I understand what ministering is.