My Journey from Church to Salvation

I grew up in church from a fairly young age, though attendance was sporadic depending on which parent had me that weekend. At the age of 10, I was presented with the idea that we are all sinners needing salvation. By this point, I had already suffered enough physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that I felt a lot of shame and unworthiness. I felt like I was only lovable when I was doing what everyone else wanted, so when I heard that I could ask forgiveness for my sins and ask Jesus into my heart I really latched onto the concept. I thought, “at least I can do what Jesus wants and be loved by Him and what I’ve done won’t matter anymore.” So I asked Jesus into my heart at the age of 10, and because I was in the Baptist church at the time I got baptized.

I went to many different denominations of churches from that time and I actually enjoyed all of them because, while I was there, I felt like I was doing the right thing. The problem was that I never felt better. It was a constant struggle of trying, working to do the right things and be good enough to keep making Jesus happy. My response to those feelings was to become more involved. I helped in any way I could from watching children to singing on the praise teams to leading prayer groups. I watched the church desk in high school, prayed at the flag pole before school, led a Bible club, and acted in the drama team. As much as I was doing, inside I still felt I was falling short so I was at almost all of the altar calls rededicating my life to the Lord and asking for forgiveness. If I was at a church that told us to accept or invite Jesus into our hearts I was accepting and inviting Jesus into my heart. If I was at a church that told me to confess Jesus as Lord and Savior I was confessing Him as Lord and Savior. Whatever I had to do I wanted to do it because I needed God desperately.

Because I’d been to so many different denominations I was familiar with the idea of the Holy Spirit. In every church I’d been to there was this teaching that when you ask Jesus into your heart or confess Him as Lord and Savior you automatically have the Holy Spirit. Some people were given more gifts or more obvious expressions but supposedly we all had the Holy Spirit. And while we weren’t told that the people who could speak in tongues or tell the future were more spiritual, everyone knew that those people were special. I wanted to be special like those people. In my late teens I started really praying to be able to speak in tongues and reading books by famous preachers about the power of the Holy Spirit, but no one could tell me how to have what those special people had.

I spent the majority of my religious life in churches that were classified as nondenominational, charismatic, or Pentecostal, and while I could fit in at any church, these were my favorites. I craved the emotional aspect as if feeling more made me closer to God. In those churches, we attributed everything to either the Holy Spirit or demons. If someone had a problem telling the truth they had a demon of lying. If someone sang so well that it touched people we would say the Holy Spirit anointed them to sing. For some reason that didn’t apply to great singers in pop culture that could bring you to tears though. Alcoholism was a demon and falling on the floor was the Holy Spirit. Dancing in a club was a demon and dancing in church was the Spirit. Hopefully, you get the picture. 

We spent a lot of time trying to “get in the Spirit”, which, looking back, meant we were trying to get to an emotional place where we felt something wonderful and FELT close to God. But when we left, that atmosphere didn’t go with us and at home we were all struggling with our own sins. For me those sins were lust and pornography. 

I did decide to get baptized again while in high school. I decided that when I was 10 I wasn’t really old enough to understand baptism or salvation so I needed to do that part again.

In college, while I was studying to be a preacher I had a lot of experiences that at the time I attributed to be tangible encounters with God. It’s funny how clearly I can remember those things even though they didn’t line up with the Bible at all. The real irony though is that somewhere during my freshman year of college I did receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit and yet I don’t remember it happening but I know it did because I was able to speak in tongues like I had prayed for for years prior. I remember on spring break one night I was trying to get to sleep. My friend Beth had come home with me and I told her I couldn’t sleep. She told me to pray in tongues and the realization hit me “oh yeah! I can do that now”.

Even at a Pentecostal college people didn’t really preach about receiving the Holy Spirit and what to do with it when you have it. In all those church before we were told that you get the Holy Spirit when you believe in Jesus and there’s a separate baptism of the Holy Spirit that some people get and that sometimes it comes with tongues and that teaching seemed to continue in this Bible school. We’d speak in tongues if the atmosphere was right, never for very long, and usually interrupted by lots of rambling in English. I didn’t use what I’d been given very often.

After college my life started to spiral downward. I realized the guy I’d dated for 6.5 years was never going to want to marry me, my grandmother was being verbally and emotionally abusive because of my weight, and my home life was just toxic. On top of that, that atmosphere from college worship services was gone. That emotion we had worked up to every Sunday and Wednesday trying to “get in the Spirit” was completely absent while I was on my own. I decided that if no one was going to love me when I tried to do everything right then I wasn’t going to try anymore.

I ended up running away from home, marrying a man I hardly knew, and going back to an old church of mine where eventually I learned that I wasn’t the only one struggling to live a godly life outside of church. Within weeks of the pastor trying to manipulate me to stay at the church with guilt I found out he was having an affair on his wife with the worship leader. Shortly after that my husband started seeing someone on the side too and my marriage ended. 

When my husband and I separated I started getting drunk when I could. I was still stuck in lust and pornography and started being promiscuous. I’d probably always struggled with depression and anxiety but it really got bad at this point. I was sleeping most of the day and just in a really dark place in my head. I started going to church with my mom and never really felt like I fit in with the cliques they already had established. When I reached out to them about the fact that I was struggling with violent thoughts and actions towards a couple of boys that I was nannying they had no answers except to remove me from helping in the nursery. 

When that church disbanded and we moved to another church it was the same thing, no real answers for how to be different. When I turned myself in for child abuse their answer was the same as the last church, except this time I was removed from the praise team. Mind you, during all this I really did want to be a good Christian. I really wanted to please the Lord and be close to Him, I just didn’t have the power to do it, and no one had any answers. I’d already said the sinner’s prayer and asked Jesus into my heart. I’d rededicated my life hundreds of times. I’d had these tangible experiences and could speak in tongues though I rarely did. I’d been baptized twice. What was there left?

Fast forward a couple years and I left organized church. I decided it was nothing like what was in the Bible and wasn’t changing me. I was fed up with the cliques and the division. I was fed up with the hypocrisy. I was fed up with no one having answers or real solutions. I was angry at the perfectly polished praise teams auditioning people to sing to God and the smoke machines and light shows that made you feel better in the moment but when you left you were the same.  I believed in God still, I’d seen too much not to, but I couldn’t see how the churches of today were anything like what was in the Bible.

In 2014 I hit my lowest. I was having nightmares about demons and the abuse that I had caused. I was plagued with guilt and by this time I was married again with my first kid so my anxiety was pretty high. I didn’t want to go back to those churches I’d been to but had nowhere else to go. I began praying things like “God have you hardened my heart like Pharoah?”, “God, I want to give you everything but I’m afraid if I do I’ll have to be one of those crazy people shouting at people on the street corner.", "I don’t want to lose everyone.”, and “God, have you created me to be a vessel of dishonor?” I really thought that I had been created to live a screwup life so that one day God could pour out His wrath on me and use me as an example. 

In December of that year I decided to reach out on Facebook for the closest things I could find to the church in the Bible. I didn’t fully know what that looked like but I knew they were different. I knew they were unified and there was accountability there.

I asked in a parenting group if there were any house churches in the area and this lady Nikki sent me a personal message inviting me to a Revival Fellowship meeting. She explained that they do have a building but that they are small. I told her I was looking for a church like the 1st century church and she said that was exactly what they were like. In that message she asked if I could speak in tongues and I told her that I could but that I rarely did. She encouraged me to start praying in tongues daily and to start reading Acts. She said that was where the church started and if I wanted a church like the one in the Bible I needed to read what that looked like. She messaged me every day for a few days reminding me to pray and offered to pick me up for the next meeting. I did start praying in tongues daily for anywhere from 10 to 45 minutes. It was awkward at first, it felt forced to pray for so long but I was desperate, and also I was fighting with my husband so staying out walking the street praying in tongues felt preferable to going home. The fact that she got me to that first meeting is pretty remarkable because at that point in my life my social anxiety was so bad that I would normally agree to go somewhere then cancel last minute.

I went to my first Revival Fellowship meeting and don’t remember anything about the meeting except that someone got up and gave testimony about how they received the Holy Spirit and came to the Lord. After the meeting, Nikki and the pastor sat down with me and went over some scriptures about salvation. They showed me in the King James Bible that it said that we must have the Holy Spirit to be saved and that the evidence of having the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues. They showed me so many scriptures all to prove what they were saying and yet I didn’t believe any of it. I argued with them. After all, I went to Bible college. I’d been in tons of churches my whole life that didn’t say you have to speak in tongues to be saved and how could all of those be wrong and this one church be right? I’d learned the “Romans Road to Salvation” in youth programs for years and what about John 3:16 and “by grace through faith”. Still for every rebuttal I had they were able to show me in the Bible how what I was taught was taken out of context or how my interpretation of the scripture didn’t line up with other scriptures.

I left that day still not believing them. I didn’t want to consider that what I’d learned since 10 years old was a lie or that I had been gullible enough to believe those lies. Still I really wanted to know the truth so for a couple services I went and argued with them then went home and continued to pray in tongues daily and read Acts. About two weeks after that first private message with Nikki, I was sitting in my living room on a yoga ball, reading Acts 10 and 11. In the story it talked about these great attributes that Cornelius had and how he saw an angel who told him to send for Peter who would come tell him words by which he would be saved. Peter came and preached to him and he and his family all received the Holy Spirit. Peter and his men knew because they heard them speak in tongues just like the disciples had on the day of Pentecost. This was the evidence to Peter that salvation had been extended to the gentiles. I was in the middle of the story when it was like a light was turned on in a pitch-black room. I went instantly from not believing what I’d been hearing the last two weeks to knowing it was all true. Suddenly I knew what was missing, this truth that had so much power in it. I was filled with hope at that moment. I knew why I had no power in my life, it was because I hadn’t been using the Spirit that I received in college and because I hadn’t heard and believed the truth. That’s why Jesus said we must worship in Spirit AND truth (John 4:23-24), that the Spirit will guide you into all truth (John 16:13), and that the truth will set you free (John 8:32).

Nikki encouraged me to pray about getting baptized. I wasn’t going to because I’d already done that twice but I continued praying in the Spirit daily and reading Acts. When I got to Acts 19 and saw that the 12 men of Ephesus had been baptized again, after Paul preached the truth to them when he found out they didn’t have the Holy Spirit, I decided to get baptized a final time. I figured if these 12 men got baptized a second time after they heard the truth then that must mean the first time didn’t count so I figured since I didn’t know the truth the first two times then those times didn’t count for me either. I was born again on December 31, 2014 when I finally had repented (turned from my way to God’s), received the Holy Spirit with the evidence of tongues, and been baptized by someone who preached the truth.

It took a while for some of those churchy things to fall away, like that need for emotionalism, but the alcohol was gone instantly without me trying. Cursing was gone instantly. Guilt was gone along with the nightmares of demons and my past abusive acts. Hopelessness was gone, as was the pornography. I was new. I’ve seen many miracles since, miracles of provision and healing and safety. I’ve been able to pray with others as they received the Holy Spirit. I have answers for those hard questions nonbelievers used to ask (even though they usually aren’t looking for answers as much as they’re looking for someone to argue with). One of the biggest things for me though is that before I was relying on doing everything to stay in God’s good graces and be a good Christian and I judged my relationship with Him by how I felt at the time whereas now I line it up with the word of God and I’m able to see what it says about the Spirit and have it actually mean something real in my life. The Bible has come alive. It’s no longer airy fairy hypotheticals, it’s working and transforming and empowering.