In 1992, I concluded a six-year biblical analysis of the basic doctrines of Protestant Christianity--going to church, giving tithes and offerings and keeping the sabbath. The results were absolutely staggering!

Protestant Christianity's going to church, giving tithes and offerings, and keeping the sabbath, I discovered, are not doctrines, much less the basic doctrines, of biblical Christianity.  Nor are they commandments of the Old Testament Law.  Even the traditional biblical proof-texts, which Protestant leaders use to prove these doctrines, don't match the doctrines in words or meanings.

An additional four-year analysis exposed the true origins of these basic doctrines of Protestant Christianity.  I traced going to church, giving tithes and offerings, and keeping the sabbath in every Protestant denomination and found that they were, indeed, the basic doctrines of every one of them, regardless of their own particular doctrines, which separated them from other denominations.  So, I went all the way back to the sixteenth century, to the beginning, to Martin Luther, to when Protestantism was born.  Sure enough, there I found these basic doctrines of Protestant Christianity.  Then I traced them to the religion of Catholic Christianity, Catholicism--a mixture of Phariseeism (Babylonian paganism: today's Judaism), Roman and Greek paganism, and biblical words, terms, and phrases.

Martin Luther, esteemed as the father of Protestantism, was thrown out of the Catholic Church, mainly for his condemnation of the papal authority. But he took these Catholic doctrines and made them the basic doctrines of Protestant Christianity.

In his book, EXIT INTERVIEWS, William D. Hendricks reports the results of a survey done several years ago.  Every week through out Europe and North America, 53,000 people leave the church and never come back.  And contrary to popular belief, the majority of them are saved and haven't left the faith and their relationship with Jesus Christ.  They continue on in their faith reading the Bible and praying, as they did when they were in church.  But now they do it alone or with family members and a few friends apart from the institutionalized church.  They know something is very wrong with the church today, but they can't quite put their finger on exactly what it is that's wrong.

Hendricks also interviewed a number of people, himself, who were still in the church.  And the results were alarming.  He said that four out of five long-time church members were so disgusted in their church but didn't know what to do or where else to go, or either they were strongly thinking about leaving the church, altogether.  Denominational leaders are beside themselves with pastors, suffering from "burn out", leaving the church every year in astronomical numbers.

This is the reason that I'm writing this series. I want to alert all of these people to this never-before-revealed, shocking truth.  Long before God saved me, I was a faithful, and very moral, water-baptized member of a Southern Baptist church.  But I wasn't saved.  It wasn't until I heard the true gospel of Jesus Christ, at twenty-seven years old, that I was truly born again.

After I was saved, I taught Sunday School and Bible Studies in churches of Southern Baptist, Charismatic and Assemblies of God denominations.  But I stopped going to church in 1992 (after 52 years of going) after I concluded the biblical analysis of going to church, giving tithes and offerings, and keeping the sabbath.  And I haven't joined another church or religion.  Nor have I lost my faith or turned away from the Lord Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior.  In fact, I have such a close relationship with Him now, and His Word is so much easier to understand, since His Truth has cleansed me and made me free of these false doctrines of idolatry and witchcraft.  Praise God!  When I began this study in 1986, it wasn't my intentions to prove that anything was wrong with the basic doctrines of Protestant Christianity. I had no idea that going to church, giving tithes and offerings were the basic doctrines of the church today.  But I did believe that they were biblical doctrines because of their traditional biblical proof-texts. The more I studied the Bible, however, the more I saw that there was something definitely wrong in the church today and with my christian life, as well.  I determined in 1986 that I wouldn't rest until God showed me exactly what it was that was wrong, from His Word.

Read the next of this introduction to learn why I began questioning these basic doctrines.