Replies

>>I could name a few beliefs and practices of pentacostals and Baptists I don’t agree with. <<

Tell me about it! :)

I cannot imagine finding a church with which I agree on every little thing, so I make sure we agree on the “bullet doctrines” and mostly agree on the other stuff. Otherwise I’d never find a church.

>>...the reason we have denominations is because not everyone agrees with each one.<<

I’m in the process to moving to rural Kentucky. The sheer quantity of “Babdis” churches there is staggering. And they have prefixes like “first separate”, “second revived separate” before the words “Baptist Church”. Freedom has its price.

>>I for one am not into speaking in tongues<<

That is why I had to finally leave Assembly of God after attending there for 18 years. It was the church I began attending when I first gave my life to Him. But no matter how I read it, that tongues thing just did not match what the bible says about it. The primary example in Acts is clearly talking about people speaking in other earthly languages. But I digress.

Regarding the Rapture, I had a REAL hard time with that. However, here is was a timing thing. They strongly preach “Pre-Trib” and I was in agreement when I was ignorant. After all, they knew more than I did, right? I mean, I could just appeal to their authority. Except the proofs they used were almost (but not quite) as silly as the proofs used to claim Mary died a virgin.

I did become a “mid-Tribulationist” (actually it is “post-trib, pre-wrath”) but this was after studying it myself. Twenty five years later I came across a guy that actually describes my position much better than I can, so I offer it here. And he and I are pretty much in total agreement on this particular issue:
http://watchmanbiblestudy.com/BibleStudies/Definitions/Def_Pretrib.htm

For me, the “rapture” (or whatever you want to call it) is most simply called out in Revelation 7, after the sealing of the 144,000. I find it interesting that the Bible prophesy talks of such a precise number out of israel, talks of armies of 300,000,000 and yet in that verse the number of people is too high to count.

That is actually pretty good news. :)