For most people, I think the topic of Hell is an uncomfortable one. I know it was for me for the longest time. Being exposed to a lot of different Protestant sects growing up, I was exposed to a lot of different views when it came to Hell. At the United Methodist Church in our town that I attended as a child, Hell wasn't really mentioned that much, or at least it wasn't mentioned when I was younger. As I got older, the church became less traditional. It started heading down the contemporary/charismatic road. Then, Hell was mentioned more. Yet even then, there was an easy way out. All one had to do was go to the altar and "get saved." That seemed comforting. I had already "gotten saved" when I was seven years old, so I figured it was nothing to worry about. I think at that point in my life, Hell was just pushed to the back of my mind, if it was even in my mind at all. To me it was a non-issue. I was "saved" and I had nothing to worry about, or at least that is what I thought for the longest time.

Yet when I got older, we started going to a Wesleyan Church that my dad had attended when he was younger. The whole reason for going to this church was that it was about to close, and everyone who used to go to that church rushed back to try and revive it to keep it from closing. I heard a lot more about Hell at that church. Yet this still didn't scare me. Even though the Wesleyan Church was from a branch of Protestantism known as the Holiness Movement, it had become quite a bit more liberal in recent years. It no longer taught that after one "gets saved" they must become sanctified and essentially be perfect and sinless before God in order to attain Heaven. Virtually all churches within the Holiness Movement tend to teach this, at least to some degree. Where they vary is at what point does one backslide, or at what point is one no longer in a state of grace. The Wesleyan Church does not teach "once saved always saved" as the Baptists and some other Protestant denominations, but they don't quite teach that every single sin will send you to Hell either. So even there, I had a sense that backsliding was possible, but I figured it would take a pretty heinous sin for that to actually happen. I was still pretty comfortable with my spiritual state and didn't worry at all........yet.

What really started my fear of Hell that took me years to shake was when I started becoming involved with these people in high school who went to a church known as the Church of God. Now, there are probably hundreds of different churches that go by this name, I've even heard the Catholic Church referred to as the Church of God, but these people and their beliefs were far from what I would later find Catholicism to be. You could say they were the strictest form of "holiness" church. They fully believed that one must "get saved," not through the Sacrament of Baptism, which they, like so many other Protestant denominations, believe is just symbolic, but from going up to the "altar" and "accepting Jesus as your savior." This part was not the part that struck me as odd. Most of the Protestant churches I had been exposed to believed in "getting saved" in that sense, but they had a belief that really set them apart from other denominations. Once you were saved, they believe that if it really took, if you were truly saved and truly accepted Christ with all of your being, that you would cease to sin....period. If you ever did sin again, then they believed that you were never really saved in the first place. You were on your way to Hell until you reached a point where you were completely without sin one-hundred percent.

Naturally, they did sin just like everyone else, but it turned into a denial game pretty much. However, talking to these kids that went to this church did start to have an impact on me after awhile. I attribute my deeply ingrained fear of Hell on them, since they did teach that if one ever sins, they are not really a Christian. True repentance to them meant quite literally sinning no more. There was no Sacrament of Reconciliation, there was no praying for forgiveness...none of that. Once you were in you were in, and you were expected to be perfect. What concerned me as a kid, though, was that I wondered if maybe they were right. What if their church was the true church. That was another interesting thing, is they claimed that they were not Protestant. They claimed their church was a continuation of the church of the Apostles. Yet, oddly enough, their church sprang up in the 1800s when a lot of other Protestant denominations were forming. So where was their church all of these years before that? They way that they answered this question was by misinterpreting Revelation 12.

They claimed that Revelation 12 was actually referring to the Church, which they claimed was their Church. Now, as I refer to Douay-Rheims Bible Online, the footnote does mention that the lady in Revelation 12 can refer to the Church of God, which would be the Catholic Church, but I disagree with this footnote. It is not infallible and frankly, it doesn't make sense. It says in Revelation 12 that the lady was with child, and the Church did not give birth to Christ, Our Lady did, so frankly this is just completely wrong. Anyway, back to their misinterpretation....

Since it says that the lady was in the wilderness for a thousand, two hundred, sixty days (Revelation 12:6), they claim that the church was essentially gone, or underground, up until the time that their sect sprang up in the 1800s. This is completely false since we know, from Christ, that He would always be with His Church and that the Gates of Hell would never prevail against the Church. Had the Church ever dissolved for a time and then reformed later, that would have made Christ's words false, which we know would not happen.

One thing that this church did for me that was actually good was it inspired me to search for the truth. The fact that they taught that their church was the church for the Apostles made me wonder what church actually IS the church of the Apostles. No longer did I just accept the fact that no denomination had it one-hundred percent correct as I always used to. I now believed absolute truth was out there, and that I just had to find it. So, they at least prodded me in right direction, since I ended up coming home to the Catholic Church. Now that I am Catholic, my fear of Hell has faded. I still think and worry about Hell occasionally, and maybe it will take me awhile to heal from their false doctrine I was exposed to back in high school. I now know that true repentance and Christian holiness isn't about pretending to be sinless. It's about having a close relationship with Jesus Christ. It's about being a part of His True Church. It's about humbly taking yourself to the Sacrament of Reconciliation when you do fail, which inevitably we all will time and again. Now that I've realized all of these things, I am much more at peace. Thank God!