I am Christian, but I can’t remain a Protestant. HERE’S WHY!

But yeah, let me explain this.

I grew up in a non-denominational home.

Loved it.

Went to Christian school, learned all kinds of scripture, did, like, Awanas, and was in FCA, and all the Christian clubs at school, and part of the youth group.

I mean, I really adore the foundation that I was given with my Christian faith, with what my parents taught me, with what my teachers taught me.

I don't have any regrets with how I grew up, and in the, uh, Protestant circles that I did grow up in.

If anything, it gave me a love for Jesus and a love for scripture that is so deeply rooted within me that it's brought me to this place in my life where I had such a desire to want to know how the earliest Christians did things.

I went on this journey starting nine months ago, where I started asking questions that I didn't think that I would ever ask, questions like, uh, when was the Bible assembled by the Holy Spirit, and who assembled all of the books of the Bible? How did the earliest Christians worship? What did they believe? What was the doctrine like? What about the American Church is different than maybe the early church? And so it did take me down this road of studying history and studying scripture in a way that I had never understood.

And what I realized is there was something lacking in the foundation of Christianity that I had already established.

There was one thing that I was missing, and that was mainly the fact that I didn't know my own church history.

I didn't know anything about what the earliest Christians did, outside of just what scripture said.

So in order to really find the roots of that, I had to study history.

I had to read the early church fathers, which absolutely blew my mind and also freaked me out because I realized [gasps] the early church doesn't really look like the American Church.

And it doesn't look like the non-denominational services that I've been to.

In fact, all of the early church, and what they're talking about, and how they worshiped, and how they did things, it actually looks kind of Catholic, Orthodox, whatever.

And it, it started to really freak me out because I was like, "That can't be right.

It just can't be right." So it has been months and months of wrestling with this, waking up at 5:00 in the morning and reading through early church history, reading through documents that I have never been exposed to before as a southern Texas little, you know, non-denominational girl.

[laughs] And with everything that I've discovered and everything I've learned, I've come to a place where I'm like, "I know too much now." I know too much, that now because of what I know, I cannot go back to what I didn't know.