Since the Methodist Church of my fathers became a modernist abortion, I have been searching for a church, a real church.

I went to the Baptists for a while until they became The Church for the Worship of Israel. I went to fundamental churches until they took the same route. That is why I dislike Jehovism so much. I wanted a church, and Jehovism spoils the ones that modernism doesn’t.

The people I worked with in politics who were Calvinists were hard-core Calvinists. The Catholics I worked with made the Pope look like wimpish. This is the kind of people I naturally work with, and each group was firmly convinced that the others were headed straight for Hell and said so.

I disagreed with all of them, but they were people I could work with. I can work with sincere people I do not agree with. Insincere people are the ones I do not ALLY with. I manage them.

My Catholic friends in Washington did not like the modernist trend in the Catholic Church, so they joined an Eastern Rite church which is allied with Rome, the Melkites. It has the same rites it has had since the fourth century. Many years ago, they prevailed upon me to join them.

Apparently some sixteen centuries ago in Lebanon, the Melkites were in a battle with the other Orthodox Church in Lebanon and they allied themselves with Rome. I don’t remember the details as I was very young at the time.

The Melkites consider themselves entirely Orthodox.

None of this made the slightest difference to me. Sincere Christians invited me into a church that was actually a church.

I spent my time in the catechumate studying their faith and was baptized. I made it very clear that I had no theology except that I wanted to believe in a personal relationship with Jeux Christ. They accepted me.

I went to the Melkite Church while I was in Washington and I still love it. They took me in when I needed them, and I will never forget it. It is the only church I send money to from time to time, and the Melkites have never spent a dime on anything but religion.

Recently the Melkites asked the Pope to back up his preachments abut ecumenicism. They asked that, where there is no Melkite Church, they be allowed to attend either a Catholic Church or an Orthodox Church. The Pope had been talking a lot about “healing the breach” between the Eastern and Western Churches, so they asked him to make this official.

They got an OK from at least one Orthodox patriarch, but the Pope refused. If you don’t have a Melkite Church handy, and very few places do, you have to go to a Catholic Church. I am baptized Catholic through the Melkite Church, but I am not a Catholic.

Maybe I should attend a Catholic Church. Maybe I should attend a Methodist Church. But I don’t. There is too much baggage there that to me is anti-Christian and anti-white. They are not worshiping Christ, they are USING Christ.

To me, that is what my circuit-riding grandfather, in his out-of-date language, would have called pure evil.

That is what MY conscience says. What YOUR conscience says is your problem. I have to answer to mine.

I have enough trouble just believing in Christ. I am 99% atheist. That doesn’t bother me. If that were not the case, Jesus would not have talked so much about the need for faith.

All I want is a CHURCH. Jesus said that when two or more gather in His Name, there He is also. Like Saint Paul, I couldn’t care less about the theology or how may times you bob your head up and down or whether you genuflect or how you recite the filioque or if you just sit there and shout “AMEN!

But when you try to find a church, the theologians are standing in the door blocking you out.

I cannot find one single case in the Acts of the Apostles where an Apostle demanded that you take a detailed theological examination before you were baptized. But Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, Orthodox or Lutheran, the theologian stands in the door and examines you before you are allowed to become one of the two or more gathered in His Name.

I guess I am still an old Methodist. John Wesley preached tens of thousands of sermons over tens of thousands of miles of traveling. He demanded that the ignorant coal miners and the early settlers of Georgia come forward and be baptized. But while he had rigid theological ideas, he never examined anybody’s detailed theology before he baptized them.

If he ever did, then I reject John Wesley, too.

Wesley went out and preached to the ignorant, people like me. We are children theologically: “Suffer the little children to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Jesus added that if someone rejected the children, which to me means the theologian who stands in the church door, it would be better for him had he never been born.

So if you ask me WHICH church I belong to, I feel very, very sorry for you.