My Christian Testimony

Recently, I found an old document that I had written 4 years ago which contained parts of my original testimony from when I must have been around 16. As my blog has many posts talking about Christianity, I wanted to release it here so you could understand my faith at that time.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find the original, so what I have here is an attempted reconstruction, trying to remove what I added later, and keeping everything else that I feel likely to be genuine. As I did this, I wondered how similar this process was to using old manuscripts to reconstruct the original version of the bible. Thankfully, as I’m the original author of both texts, my job was considerably easier.

As this is my own memory, there will inevitably be things that weren’t there originally, and the dates may be a little inconsistent, but I hope the overall message comes across. Besides this, the only changes I have made are to fix mistakes in grammar, and to add extra detail which may have caused confusion if not there.

I have also continued the testimony myself, adding extra events that have happened, marking clearly where the split between the two documents occurs. I am sorry about how long this is, I am wanting to use this document as a resource showing someone’s life experience of religion in extreme detail in words that they would have used at the time. I’ve tried my best. I hope you enjoy.

Ross’s Testimony – Age 16

I was born and grew up in Christianity, every week I would go to Church and learn, but there was a part of me that either didn’t truly believe, or didn’t truly acknowledge what Christianity fully meant.

Later I came to seriously believe that God had sent his son Jesus in human form, so that we might be saved. As well as this, he was truly always there, had a plan over my life, and had been helping me all along.

But what triggered this?

The trigger was real and tangible moments and events that took place in my life.

The bible was not the deciding factor, in fact before all these things happened, I was confused by the bible, so much of it didn’t make sense. I would read and feel bored. I couldn’t apply it to the things that happened to my life.

I was what you might call a casual, not that anyone would ever say that to me, but that’s what I identified as before all this started. God talked and had an active relationship with everyone else, but not me.

But that was soon to change. After a series of events happened, some were very, very minor however some were more major than you could possibly imagine, I started to become a different kind of Christian.

To start chronologically I had always tried prayer, but it just felt like there was a brick wall blocking communication between me and God. I often tried to use God as a sort of miracle vending machine. I was never sure how well payer worked, and felt it mostly depended on what you prayed for.

The most influential prayer to me was something that was very basic and ridiculous. I was playing a game of Pokémon and was trying to catch a rare legendary called Kyurem… and it was not going well. I had used the pokéballs with the highest catch rate, but they failed. All I had left was one single measly pokéball, or I would never be able to catch the rare Pokémon ever… unless I reset the game and tried again, or bought another version of the game.

So what happened? I prayed, and despite what felt like almost impossibly low odds, I threw the pokéball and it caught it.

I was amazed, later I calculated the odds to be less than 0.1%! (Edit from the future – I went back to calculate the cate rate. It was 4.814% chance of success per pokeball, but at the time I had gone through about 30 8.096% chances to catch and had failed all of them)

This could simply have been a coincidence, however looking back, it was a message. God was telling me to keep on trying to find him, because he wants a relationship with me. It wasn’t God saying he will help you catch all the Pokémon you ask him to – trust me I’ve tried!

Between this event and the next, there were successes and failures in prayer, yet I still didn’t feel like my relationship had moved far. God and I weren’t in conversation, and reading the bible just felt like reading any other book. It was boring, and often created more problems in my mind than it answered. I would do that thing where you open the bible to a random page, point at it, and find a message that God was trying to send to you. Every time it would be something that didn’t make sense like Exodus 29:16 “Slaughter it and take the blood and splash it against the sides of the altar.”

So the next thing big event that happened was that I was out on a walk with my parents in essentially the middle of nowhere. We had travelled there via train, and was unfamiliar with the area so we got lost, and reached a point where we would have a choice between going in two directions.

We choose one direction, however I prayed that if it was the incorrect direction, that God should send me a text message, and what happened? I turned my phone on and got a text message. So we decided to follow that route instead, and well, quite quickly we found ourselves in a place that we could recognise and return home easily.

We rushed back to the train station quickly and made it onto the train station with five minutes to spare. What we found was not only that God had got us there at the correct time, but that the actual train itself was the last one, and all the others after it had been cancelled. If God had not helped and intervened then we may have been stranded for the day!

I went to a festival called “Spring Harvest” which was my first real experience of God. They asked for people to stand up if they had never felt the holy spirit before. I hadn’t, so I did, then people prayed, and I prayed to experience the holy spirit.

The reaction that I felt was very minor, my legs got weak and started shaking slightly, and I just felt a reassuring and calm presence. It wasn’t strong, but it was there, and it loved me. I would end up feeling this a lot most times I asked for the holy spirit to enter me.

I then went to ‘Soul Survivor’, which was a Christian festival kind of thing where we all camp out in tents altogether and then go to worship, listen to talks, and have seminars. They taught us how to pray for healing, using a person with a broken arm as an example, and by the time they had finished, he was essentially cured. I couldn’t explain it. At the start they asked him to lift his arm up, and he couldn’t without it hurting. Yet as they prayed his arm started to be able to rise even higher without pain, to the point where he could lift it as high as his head!

We ourselves as a youth group prayed with each other, and yet nothing happened (it would later though) I began to realise that God was real in the world, could change things and had an impact on people in their real life, far more than just an imaginary voice or a book.

Later, with a youth group at a different church we had a trip away. While we were there, someone asked for prayer, and what she prayed for was healing. After praying her leg was healed to a point where she could do a performance/dance routine that she had previously cancelled! It was amazing! Unfortunately I wasn’t in the room at the time, but this was from someone who I trusted completely, this was not an actor.

During an exam I prayed that if I got a question wrong, that God would open the fire door on the page of the incorrect question. What happened? Someone opened the fire door, and I found mistakes on the question that I solved, later I found that this was the best I had ever scored on a test so far! (Edit from the future – this was a lie. I didn’t find a mistake on the page where the fire door had opened, it was on a different page. I wrote this thinking I would use it to try and convert people, so that’s possibly why I said this. It could just be that I remembered it wrong now)

Throughout this time at youth group we had something called “God Moments” or “God Stories” where we would share things that had happened to us throughout the week relating to God. There were too many to remember to recount here, but most weeks someone had something to say much like the exam thing I mentioned previously. They weren’t on nearly the same levels as previous miracles at events like soul survivor, yet they were examples of how God was helping them throughout their week.

The next time I went to soul survivor, I saw something that could only be described as incredible. There was a person in our group who had a knee problem for the entire week, which meant that he had to hold crutches everywhere he went. But when we prayed for him on the last day, he was healed, he was able to bend it completely and run and jump around, he was cured!

This isn’t the only case either, slowly I learned how God was impacting and helping the lives of the people around me, the youth worker at the church wouldn’t have even been there to help me learn these things if God hadn’t cured him of a terminal disease that would have ended his life at a young age. A person I had prayed for at the first soul survivor came back to find me later, saying that he was cured as well years after I had prayed for him.

But what it took was experiencing God more and more in my daily life. When worshipping I felt something, when praying, I felt something, and slowly as I progressed in my normal everyday life, I began to realise that this must be what having a relationship with God was like. Slowly, I began to rectify all my concerns and doubts to a point where I didn’t need to worry about them anymore.

This is my testimony. I came to faith not through reading the bible, or through simply being told about Jesus, but by seriously encountering himself in my own daily life. It’s a fact that is inescapable to someone who has truly experienced Jesus.

Thoughts from the Future

It certainly seems like miracles were my main reason for belief. This was written after I took part in a 6 week “Becoming a Contagious Christian” course. This really appealed to me and was something I wanted to become. I’d never converted anyone before, and unfortunately didn’t convert anyone since either. It was very good at making me examine why I believed what I believed, and it caused me to write this testimony.

As this testimony was supposed to be given to other people, it’s not exactly a snapshot of my faith at the time. I feel like at that age, and having discussed many issues at youth groups with that youth worker, I would have had a better understanding of the bible than what came across. I remember the biggest revelation being that the things I found confusing in the old testament were much better understood as God paving the way for Jesus to arrive. I still didn’t often read the bible though.

The next part is written as a follow up to what you have just read. Without telling you what happens, it’s not exactly the happily ever after I hoped for when I wrote my original testimony at the age of 16. This next section can’t really be called a testimony. There is nothing vulgar or explicit, and there are no traumatic events so please don’t be worried. You’ll understand at the end.

Ross’s Story – Age 23

It would have been nice to end the story there. Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Life as a Christian is a challenge, and with it comes trials.

It’s easy to believe when everything is going well for you and everything is great, but it’s difficult to believe during the times when everything is hard, and god seems silent. I’m sure a lot of you can relate to this feeling, and it’s belief through this struggle as a Christian that is what I want to talk about.

It was in this struggle that more serious doubts started to occupy my mind. In the past when I might have tried to push them aside and ignore them, I had to take them head on. God is all-powerful and God is real. If that’s true, there isn’t a possibility that any doubt cannot be solved. When you doubt, and fully explore that doubt, when it’s finally reconciled, your faith is made much much stronger.

What kind of religion would Christianity be if we told people to suppress their doubts and hide them? It would be a cult. No, on the contrary, we should be proud and strong in our belief, and if we think that there exists any information out there that could prove God false, why be a Christian? Because that would mean that the belief wouldn’t be true, and the truth is all that matters.

God can withstand any doubt, meaning any research and investigation would only make my faith stronger, and how could that be a bad thing?

Though the case for the resurrection was very strong, my belief still hinged on personal experience of miracles. So when I found my past experiences of miracles challenged, I began to doubt immensely.

I watched several documentaries “Miracles for sale” was about faith healers and exposing them as scams and fakes. I knew that fake faith healers existed, and after research I found that there were some definite scams out there. But that didn’t challenge my faith, it just made me question. How could I be sure that these experiences were real? I didn’t disbelieve them, but just wanted to make sure. All of the miracles that I’d experienced had natural explanations, and all of them could be explained as things that could possibly have happened anyway, so I was uncertain. Essentially I was doubting the miracles, and without the miracles, I didn’t feel like there was much evidence for God left, just the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.

So it seemed sensible to investigate these miracles. I had to go back to Soul Survivor to try and find out whether or not these experiences could be verified. It was the last year before the festival as a whole would be cancelled, so it was my last chance. In preparation, I did a lot of research about these kinds of miracles, watched documentaries, and learned about faith healing tricks. I came to the festival equipped with my newfound knowledge, and was so glad I did.

What I found when I got there was not what I expected to find. The festival had huge red flags that were commonly used by tricksters and fake faith healers.

First of all, at the start of each meeting, they induced trance states through very lengthy and extended worship. After, when people had been brought into this very emotional state (due to the nature of the songs) there would be an equally emotionally strong talk which seemed mathematically designed to trigger extreme emotional and vulnerable responses, causing people to be in a very different state to how they usually are. For kids already coming from extremely challenging and difficult backgrounds with problems similar to the ones talked about, you can only imagine how much stronger the feeling would be.

Once the talk finished, prayers would start. The speaker would ask people who wanted to be prayed for to stand up. The nature of the prayer would always be relevant to the emotionally charged talk. These people would be standing up in crowds of thousands, all of whom would be sitting on the floor watching them. You felt vulnerable and exposed. I knew this because I had stood up several times before myself. You would be standing up like this for at least ten minutes, all the time wondering who would come and pray for you. The rush and feeling of everyone suddenly jumping up to pray for you felt extreme. It was a love bomb, an emotional technique used by cults to elicit extreme emotional response. In this frenzied state of extreme emotion, adrenaline, and belief, miracles could happen. It was mass hysteria. It felt like everyone had been hypnotised, and I was the only one who had managed to wake up.

People were screaming, shaking, shouting, feinting, and crying, and I seemed to be the only one worried about their safety. At times it was seriously scary, and I felt there was nothing I could do to explain this to the people I was with. In the times where they had failed to engage people in the same way (this was a few times in the morning sessions only) I gained a massive insight into what they were doing, as I saw them continuously try and force that experience.

The complete kill shot to my belief in miracles at soul survivor was given when I heard just one sentence.

We will now pray for physical healing.

This was something that had been talked about heavily in the research I had done, and it was what I was most sceptical towards, yet what I hoped most to be true. I hadn’t found any examples of definite real healings. I had encountered many times when people were caught in the heat of the moment, and due the frenzy and adrenaline, falsely believing that they were cured, only to die when they started to throw away their medicine or go back to how they were.

The reason why this was a kill shot was that this was said on the last day of Soul Survivor, and not the first. If it was the last day, everyone would go home that same night, or early the next morning. It would mean that people wouldn’t see those who threw away their crutches only to pick them up again the next morning. They would go home falsely believing that a miracle had occurred.

Why would you ever do it in this way? Would you ever choose this order if you genuinely believed people would be healed? Wouldn’t it be an incredible miracle to ask for healing on the first or second day, and then spend the entire rest of the festival with the friends you knew had suffered with all these problems before? How amazing would it be to spend the entire festival with your friend, who for the first time was not in a wheelchair? Why would you ever choose this way of doing it… unless you knew about what would happen to these people the next day.

At the moment I heard the sentence, I thought back to that person with the knee problem who was on crutches for the entire week. This event was years ago at the time, but I thought the exact same thing on that same day. If only we had payed for this on the first night. When we returned to the campsite after his knee was healed, I saw him walking on crutches again before we would go to sleep. I was very confused as I thought he was healed, so I asked him why he wasn’t using crutches? He just smiled sadly, looking at the ground. “I guess I wasn’t healed fully” – I didn’t understand this at the time as in 2013 I was only 13, but I look back and can only feel sad about how difficult that experience must have been for him.

I don’t want to cast soul survivor in completely the same light as other fraudulent faith healers. They did not extort money, nor tell people to throw away their medicine. They said not to run home without your crutches and wheelchair and to also see a doctor before making important life decisions. There were also many people around who would have been in able to support, and I am extremely grateful for this. If things were different that could have been me.

This festival had continued for over 20 years at this point, and it was always ran by the same people. It was carefully planned. There was simply no chance that it was an accident. I wasn’t sure how they could do this, and still believe in God. The best idea that I came up with was that they wanted more people to be convinced of religion through these miracles like I was.

Most miracles I had witnessed occurred here, and now their credibility was completely destroyed. I didn’t have a strong enough belief in the miracles I had experienced to justify my faith. As this was the foundation of my belief, my faith was in crisis. The only thing I had was the confidence in the resurrection of Jesus.

When my faith in God faltered, I did not panic. I was on my own investigative journey, and my discoveries were world changing. Yes, I had lost a lot things that I thought I had, but it didn’t matter, because I never had them originally. I wanted to know what was true, and I didn’t care about what type of world I was left in afterwards. I would be in that world whether I liked it or not, the only difference would be my own ignorance.

My research into faith healing and cult manipulation techniques made me aware of the huge danger in punishing doubt, and trusting what you had been taught with 100% certainty. I wanted to figure it out for myself. It was time to investigate the resurrection of Jesus. 

I had bought an extremely vast and huge ESV study bible at Soul Survivor, it had references, history, details and links to all kinds of information that was perfect for helping me find the truth. I then began to read the resurrection accounts very slowly. Every sentence I paused to read the additional information, I cross-referenced it with each of the other resurrection narratives, learned extra information like when the dates of the gospels were written and continued to read.

The results of my investigation were not at all what I suspected, there were facts that were so important and meaningful, that I had no idea how the church had gotten away with not teaching them to me. The earliest full gospels were from hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, they were originally written 40-70 years after Jesus’ death itself, they were written anonymously. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were just guesses at their authorship, they were written in a completely different language to what the disciples would have spoken, and the only people with the ability to read and write were a small group of the rich elite, making the gospels almost certainly not written by eyewitnesses and disciples. The worst thing was that these things weren’t even considered controversial in academia, they were a ground truth.

The final nail in the coffin was learning that the traditional ending of Mark was a later addition; a forgery. The disclaimer is written in the text itself in pretty much every bible. In the past I had treated this text as if it were DLC for a video game, additional bonus scripture which allowed me to have insight into cool other secrets people at the time might not have had access to. The news that it was actually misleading, false testimony hadn’t occurred to me until that moment.

The end of Mark is shocking and beautiful. The women go to the tomb of Jesus, where they find a gardener who says the following.

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

And then.. the book ends. It is abrupt and shocking, a marvellous ending to an incredible story. But it has no testimony of the resurrection of Jesus. Mark was written first, before all of the others, and contained no story of the appearance of Jesus, nor anyone claiming to have seen him. Amidst all of this historical uncertainty, I no longer believed that the resurrection was even likely, rather, I was almost certain of the opposite.

It was at that time that I realised I wasn’t a Christian anymore. I remember looking up at the ceiling with my copy of Mark open at its true ending in front of me, unsure what to do or think.

I thought that a world without God would be scary. But I felt excited. I had found the certainty I had been searching for. I had been living in a Godless world all along, and now that I knew it, I could investigate a new world that had been completely turned upside down.

It was after only a few seconds that I realised another thing: So my relationship with God never existed? My previous questions and doubts now had a better answer. Why had it taken me so long to feel that God was there? Why did it feel like God was so absent? Why did it feel like I was communicating with God through an impenetrable brick wall? Why did the bible not work for me? Why did it so often lead to more confusion, more doubt and contain things that just seemed wrong?

The answer was surprisingly simple. Like reaching the end of a mystery novel only to find out that the truth was right under your nose the entire time.

I have stayed in touch and known many friends for more than 18 years. None of them have been so quite easily forgotten like the friend I had called God. When I look back at our time together, all I see are small fragments of time when I felt he was there, and thousands of hours spent studying him, worshipping him, serving him, but not actually being with him.

At the time I was too scared to tell people that I didn’t believe anymore. In the past I had been very rude to Atheists, and there was a general sense that they weren’t good people. They were proud, arrogant, stupid, and most importantly, wrong. I had one year left before I needed to go to university. So I decided to just wait it out, and pretend for a year so that afterwards I could live more freely, without judgement. 

I didn’t feel like I had suddenly become a bad person. I still wanted to be honest, truthful, compassionate and kind in the same way I always had been. I didn’t want to be seen as any different.

I did approach people about my doubts, although in a way that they wouldn’t realise I wasn’t Christian, and it seemed like they had the same problems as I did, and I couldn’t really get any satisfactory answers.

Why did an all loving God send so many people to eternal torture? Aren’t humans capable of improvement? Why did God contradict himself by murdering so many people in the old testament, just in order to give birth to the line of people that would give birth to Jesus, do the ends really justify the means? Why does this Universe and this planet behave exactly like you would expect it to be if there wasn’t a God? How could an all powerful being come to exist in the first place? How come all religions on the surface act and behave the same? Why wouldn’t God give us definitive proof of his existence in order to save us?

The answers from my new world view felt more compelling, and the more I thought about it, the less I could understand my former self. Atheism does have problems of morality, origin of the universe, and ultimately nihilism. But I would slowly explore and find answers that I was happy with, in an interesting and completely new world I had discovered for myself.

Through all this, there was one fact that constantly reassured me. If Yahweh was actually real, He would know a way to get me back.

Although my testimony ends here, my journey doesn’t. All of this took place 5 years ago, and I have never stopped searching for the truth ever since. That eager passion for discovery has not weakened, and each day, each book, each conversation is a chance to learn something.