ive often asked myself if things that i have learned over the years growing up were the real truth or not. have you ever done this? in my life growing up in a baptist church i was taught many things - most good. but there are so many things that over the past few years of my life i have come to see as total crap. things that i honestly thought were in the bible, and it was the truth. ways of thinking that are so far from the bible that it makes me cringe. well i guess i thought it was the truth because i learned it in church. i didnt even question it at all. so what does a person feel when they find out on their own that what they grew up knowing to be true - is nowhere near the truth? what action should one take? so you are asking yourself - what in the heck can he possibly be talking about? the message of grace is the first that comes to mind. (actually none of this is just coming to mind - it has been swimming round for a long while now...) how many times have i seen a man of god slip up and sin, only to see the church totally turn its back on this person. now since the church is made up of sinners and the bible clearly states that no sin is greater than another - how can this happen? i honestly do believe that pastors in a church should be held to a high standard. but the fact remains that they too are sinners and are going to mess up. it isnt a matter of if it will happen - it is a matter of when will it happen. so if no sin is greater than another - and pastors are sinners too - how in the world can we actually pass judgement on them and kick them when they are down - to the point of totally kicking them out of our churches? and yes - i have seen this happen on more than one occasion. when jesus was confronted with the situation with the woman who had been caught in the act of adultery - what did he say to her? go and sin no more. (john 8:1-11) did he say - i think you are a terrible person and my church wants nothing to do with you? if he did - i must have missed those verses. the message of jesus is love and in all we do we should try to be like jesus. growing up i saw too many examples of such ignorance that i honestly wanted nothing to do with a baptist church ever again. and this is just one of the things that i was being taught without me knowing it. i am a huge believer that whatever a preacher preaches in the church - the people believe it whether it is the truth or not. most of the time people dont look and see things for themselves. they dont think for themselves or even look it up in the bible for themselves. people even take things to the point of emulating a preacher. i see it all the time in the way people in the church try and pray like the preacher. to a point it is actually funny. my point is this: if the church is going to survive - it has to stop making people feel like they can not come to it with their problems. if a person can not come there - or is made to feel so badly about where they have been, what they have done, or what they are going through - where can they go? no christian is better than any non-christian (ephesians 3:6) and if we are to live as christ lived - we have to walk where he walked (1john 2:6).