You see, AAG? You left the church because you saw the church as the problem. No, its the ATTITUDE thats the problem. And you still HAVE the attitude, but now you've turned it around on the ones who stayed in that church.
If a pastor had walked up to me and said what you just described I would have taken it as friendly ribbing....joking around. But you CHOSE to assume he was serious and you got offended. Even if he WAS serious, the gracious thing to do would be to treat him as if he was joking.
I see this constantly with Ex-IFBers. There is a whole group that goes around badmouthing us, as if they KNOW our hearts. They talk about how they USED to be IFB, but now they "found grace." When you came in with that as part of your first post in this thread, I got a clue as to what was going on in your head. These people still see US as being as judgemental and legalistic as THEY "used" to be. I say they are STILL legalistic and judgemental, just from the opposite viewpoint.
Yesterday I was reading another board and saw a lady like this posting. She had the gall to say that a young man she didn't even know probably had a spiritual life that was "a mile wide and an inch deep." She said this based SOLELY on a description of him that said he had grown up going to an IFB church on a bus route, had gone on to attend the church's high school, and then Bible college, and was now serving Jesus Christ faithfully.
Now, she would "probably" be appalled at anyone calling her judgemental or legalistic. But she was being both to the extreme. She was saying, according to HER standards, anyone going faithfully to an IFB church would have NO spiritual life worth mentioning.
This is the sort of thing we get all the time.
And my contention is that those who leave IFB WITH THIS BITTER attitude, have the SAME attitude they accuse us of having.....but they project it onto EVERYONE IFB.
