Archive: How God Found Me in a Methodist* Church

A personal testimony by Marion S. Byers, Lexington, Kentucky

In the fall of my seventeenth year I really didn’t think I was looking for God. And I knew the Methodist Church I sat in every Sunday morning was not the place to find Him. But God surprised me: He found me there anyway!

Our church had a liberal bent. It emphasized Jesus the good example, and lived out this philosophy with pep talk sermons, church bazaars, social dinners, and drives. I never heard the phrase “born again” or the words “accept the Lord Jesus Christ in your heart.”

God could have let me hear Billy Graham on television, find a tract, or meet a real Christian. But He didn’t choose any of these ways to channel His love and life to me. Instead, during an ordinary Sunday morning worship service in a liberal church, God reached me through the Scripture reading. Later that day, I had an insatiable desire to read my untouched Bible. It had been given to me five years ago by the church at my confirmation.

From my earliest memory, church and Methodist were synonymous. Every Sunday morning my mother would dress us in our Sunday clothes and take my brothers and me to Sunday school and church. Sunday after Sunday, year after year, a fuzzy image of God emerged.

He was up there and out there; and church people spent a lot of time smiling and trying to be good. Church filled time with colorful, noisy bazaars, dinners, and clothing and missionary drives. Jesus was someone good, who lived a long time ago. He was kind to everyone, especially little children. I remember singing the hymn, “Tell Me the Story of Jesus” in Sunday school. That is what Jesus was to me. A story and an ideal I was supposed to act like. Gradually, I discovered that to be like Jesus was an impossible, heartbreaking goal when one tried to accomplish it by human effort alone.

As I grew older, sappy Sunday school quarterlies replaced coloring pages. I attended dull M.Y.F. meetings where we sang a few hymns and listened to a devotional someone read to us. The rest of what went on was so boring, I can’t remember any of it. The redeeming part of each meeting was the refreshments. Cookies didn’t lift our spirits much, but the night we had strawberry shortcake was one of our best M.Y.F. meetings.

At one point Sunday school became so irrelevant that our class decided to vote on whether to use the Bible or something more racy like human interest stories. Even our teacher voted down the Bible, and the Bible lost.

In this desert of irrelevance, my teenage life was in desperate turmoil. Nagging questions rolled around in the back of my brain. What is life? Why are we here? Is there any purpose in living?

I remember asking our minister if anyone really was a Christian and he said, “We are all trying.” Trying? I was so tired of trying! Trying to be good. Trying to do right. Trying to climb out of bed in the morning. Trying to make any sense at all out of a world and life that seemed absurd.

My reasoning traveled this logic: If everyone, including me, dies eventually, then why struggle to learn, go to school, and work—if it all ended buried in the ground? I flirted with the idea: Why drop dead later, why not drop dead now? I could find no purpose in my life that could stand against the finality of my death. In despair, I realized that life, after the struggle of days upon days falling into years, was terminal.

In an effort to find a rock in the midst of all this sand, I read and read and read: Ernest Hemmingway, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Albert Camus. Surely there were answers to the puzzle of existence somewhere! Unfortunately, all this reading packed my mind full of facts and emptied my heart of all hope, leaving mountains of despair.

I continued going to church and I heard the sermons say, “Let’s try to be good people, kind people, loving people.” Church was a performance that was always the same. I read it in the bulletin: the invocation, the number by the choir (maybe a solo today?), the children’s sermon, the hymn singing by the congregation, the offering, the Bible reading, the sermon, the closing prayer, and the final hymn. Most of us left church the same way we came in, untouched by the reality of the presence of Jesus Christ.

But God had a surprise for me. His ways are not our ways and He is not limited by His creation, man. One Sunday I dutifully went to church, settled in my pew and looked around. I saw people all around me. I saw stained glass windows, the great center altar, the lighted candles, flowers, the choir. I heard organ music and people talking. And I vowed somewhere deep in my heart that this was the last Sunday I would ever come to church. I thought church was phony, unreal, and such a dull show. Life here? No way.

But something happened in the middle of the script, between the offering and the sermon. The minister stood up and read from

Hosea 11: 1-4, 8:

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more I called Israel, the further they went from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them …. How can I give you up, Ephraim?

Something began to stir in me. The words were weighted, heavy with life and absolutely directed to me, as if God was alive now, talking to me now, with the voice of love! God was not talking about a long-ago-Israel. He was talking to me! This particular Scripture had my name on it at this particular point in time. I was held in His arms and I was held by bands of His love. The reading ended with the words, “How can I give you up, Ephraim?” but in my soul it was the question, “How can I give you up, Marion?”

I don’t remember the sermon. I don’t remember what we ate for Sunday dinner. But I do remember that as the Bible was being read aloud, there was birthed in me a desire to know God, whoever He was.

I needed a Bible. Did I have a Bible? Yes, in the foreknowledge of God, the United Methodist Church gave Bibles to each person at confirmation. My confirmation had been five years ago. Where was that Bible? I spent hours that Sunday afternoon looking for it. I searched my room, all the bookcases in our home and through boxes and boxes in our basement.

Finally, I found it—on my brother’s closet shelf. I carried my Bible back to my room, shut the door, and began to read the four Gospels. I underlined as I read. I wrote in the margins all the questions that spilled from my mind. Why did Jesus heal the blind, the crippled? What did He mean He was the life and the truth? What was living water? What did it mean to know Him or to hear His voice? What did it mean to follow Him? Was He really God, and was He alive right now?

I grew weary with all the questions. But a rising certainty grew in me: this was a different Book. It was miles away from Hemmingway, Camus, Wolfe, and all the others. This was not a story; there was some kind of reality here I didn’t understand with my mind. I began to see Jesus, as He said He was—not someone to be like, but Someone who said He was God and could live in me. He was Someone who is alive forever.

Was He my answer to my desperate questions about the meaning and purpose of my life? At that point my mind began mental doubletalk. God could not be real and I really couldn‘t know Him. The book is only a story after all. So grit your teeth, Marion, and keep going as usual. But one verse kept pulling at my heart: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” I realized my physical ears were not the ears referred to here.

What was I hearing from this different book, this Bible? I kept hoping the Bible was true, that Jesus was alive, that He could save me from all my meaninglessness and death, and that He could live in me. In desperation and abandonment, with all the truth and honesty I knew, I remember audibly talking to the air in my bedroom, “Jesus, if You really are alive, and I can really know You in reality, then I commit my life to You right now. Do with me as You want.”

At the end of that only real prayer I had ever prayed, I was not talking to the air anymore, but to a real Person. I knew with a certainty, which can’t be physically demonstrated, that Jesus was real—and that He was alive in me. I knew that I knew, and I was conscious of the presence of Jesus in me and in my room.

I continued to read my Bible and found answers to many of my questions. The biggest question of my life had been answered forever. I do have a place in the universe! I am in relationship with the Creator of everything! With eternal life, knowing Jesus, there IS meaning and purpose in life, in my struggles, in my trying, in my growing, and someday in my dying.

Perhaps, because I couldn’t go back to my church and say, “I have accepted Christ as Lord of my life,” God led me in another direction. Previously, I told half a dozen people that I didn’t believe in God. I sensed the need to return to each of these people and tell them I now believed in God and that His name was Jesus. Two of these people had moved away, so I wrote them letters. That was easy. The other four were close by and this meant face-to-face confrontation.

This was hard, but I did it. Their reactions ranged from hostile to happy. For example, a teacher doubted my sanity and hoped I would give up this fairy tale. A casual friend was overjoyed when I told her, because she had been praying for a Christian friend. We became close friends and remain so today. I told our minister one Sunday after church, while he was standing at the door shaking everyone’s hand as they filed by. When my turn came, I blurted out, “I have accepted Christ into my life.” His reaction surprised me: He grabbed both my hands, and I noticed there were tears in his eyes.

I wish I could tell you my United Methodist church became evangelical or that I never had any more struggles. But I can’t. I know there is life and purpose for me with the living Christ, who began a mutual journey with me when I was 17 years old. Now, many years later, I am still struggling and learning and failing and succeeding with Jesus. I know that God is truly sovereign and that He can move in any situation. There is power in His Word, as written, and it does not return to Him void. It will accomplish His purposes.

*METHODIST: This term is used to refer to the name of a church as it existed before the United Methodist Church was created by merger in 1968.