I was raised in the Methodist church. If the doors of the church were open my family was there. As a young girl I went to various Bible study classes at my church but always came away confused. There were classes on interpreting the Bible and biblical theology that also left me questioning. When I would read the Bible, it just didn't seem to compare with what I was being fed at my church, so I never really dug deeply into the Word. I always felt that I was never going to be good enough to be saved and that my sins were too many for God to forgive.

LOOKING FOR A BIBLE-BASED CHURCH

I married young to a man who had not been raised in a church. He professed to believe in God but had no Christian background. I dutifully dragged my husband off to the Methodist church every Sunday just as I had been raised, but he was literally leaving black heel tracks every time we went. He finally said he didn't like the Methodist church, so eventually we both just stopped going at all.

When our first child was on the way, I began to think about Baptism and asked my husband what he thought about it. Unfortunately we had never discussed our beliefs before this, and I didn't even know if he believed in infant Baptism. He agreed, however, that we should have our child baptized. I remember telling him at the time that I refused to have my child baptized in a church where no one knew us and that we needed to find a church right away. He told me the only church he had ever been to before we were married was the Episcopal church. Since there was a small Episcopal church around the corner from where we lived, I agreed to go there.

We started going regularly, and when our son was born, we had him baptized. The fact that we had a child kept us going to church, and eventually we raised all four of our sons in the Episcopal church.

We moved to Hawaii in 1980 and found a house in a predominately Mormon community. My sons were socializing with all the Mormon children at school, and they kept coming home and telling me what wonderful things the Mormons had at their church.

It was a real wake-up call for me. I knew I didn't want my children to become Mormons, but I did not know enough about the Bible to defend my Christian position. I began to read the Bible and share what I was reading with my children. The more I studied the Word, the more I became convinced that I was not being taught the same thing from the pulpit. I could not understand why the Bible needed to be interpreted or why I was told some things did not apply to today's world. It seemed clear to me that the Bible was the Word of God, but some in my denomination were saying that not everything contained in the Bible was true.