For those who aren’t familiar with my background, I grew up in a Christ following household. It was good in many ways. I was taught that Jesus was the one who came to save us, to read the Bible (most of it anyway, Protestant Bibles don’t include the deuterocanonical books) and to pray daily. At the age of 12 my parents took myself and my younger brother and sister to Ghana. We were helping start a church in a remote village in the nominally Muslim area of the country.

We returned to the USA after 2.5 years. I graduated high school after homeschooling my whole life, went to Liberty University, and got a B.S. in government. I ended up in Northeast Virgina right on the border of D.C. After failing to start a career in politics and governance I moved to Oklahoma to be closer to my family who was in the Midwest, and met my wife.

It was right before this move from Virgina that God got me to the bottom of myself, and there, out of the darkness, revealed His love for me. In Oklahoma I was moving quickly in my spiritual journey, pushing the boundaries of what was possible in a non denominational charismatic church.

My wife and I continued to develop ourselves. We were honestly at a point where we wondered what church we could ever find that would be able to teach us much of anything.  I came from a Baptist-ish background and my wife from a Nazarene-ish background but had moved well beyond those places or any other mainstream Protestant understanding of our relationship to God and each other. It was during this that God shook up everything and injected an entirely new concept into the mix.