The church we are praying about joining requires a written testimony. I thought I would post it here as well.

I was raised in a Christian home as a Fundamental Baptist. I prayed the so-called “Sinner’s Prayer” when I was of age six at an evangelistic meeting. However, not until I was sixteen years of age was I truly brought under a conviction of my sin and my standing before God. In a Thanksgiving Eve service, I came under a desperate fear for my life. Hearing the testimonies of those surrounding me, I found that there was something lacking in my own witness. That evening, I called out to God, asking Him to have mercy upon me and save me.

The next two years or so was marked by a period of rapid growth within my life. I developed a great hunger for the Word of God, and felt a call to preach. I made the decision to attend a church-based Bible college in Louisiana.

In college, my spiritual growth became stunted in a hyper-fundamentalist church. The Lord was gracious even through this time in two main areas. He brought me out of a situation that had become unstable and increasingly authoritarian, and He joined me with my lovely bride.

After college, there was a period of about three years that I would term “recovery.” This period was marked by a time of shying away from the fundamentalist movement and a progressive removal of various doctrines. During this time I began to do things that I once would have termed sinful. Some examples; I began to allow my wife to wear pants. I began to question the validity of the King James only position. Although these type of things were necessary to work through, I unfortunately became increasingly antinomian, even dropping out of church entirely for about a year.

About three years ago, I reached a low point spiritually. My wife and I committed  ourselves to find and regularly attend a church. We became members of a Southern Baptist Church in Portage, IN. It was here that the Lord began to graciously remove many of my antinomian tendencies, and show forth once more spiritual fruits in my life.

Two years ago, while reading Ephesians, the Lord brought me to a “four point” Calvinistic position. Although I  initially rejected the limited atonement, I gradually came to understand that this was a necessary component to the Doctrines of Grace. Since coming to that fifth point, about eighteen months ago, I have been insatiable for more. I have never seen God working in my life so much. I have never wanted to know Him more than I do now. I have never wanted to share with others so much.