From the desk of
®
JOHN BRADSHAW
April 2024
Dear Partner in ministry, From a religious perspective, my childhood was very confusing. At the very time I should have been learning that God was good and that God loved me, I was being told something very different. That’s why I am so excited about what It Is Written is doing right now. I was blessed to have a wonderful mother, who was kind and loving, and a hardworking father who was a man of deep integrity. My siblings and I were taught the values common to my parents’ generation, and my father had each of the seven Bradshaw children with him in church every Sunday. But the older I got, the more confused I became by what I was learning in church and at my church school.
I desperately wanted to go to heaven, but I was confused and felt hopeless.
As a young Catholic, I was taught exactly what you would expect: The pope was infallible; we should pray not only to God, but also to Mary and a multitude of saints; those who died went to heaven, purgatory, or an eternally-burning hell; we should confess our sins to a priest; that to miss mass on Sunday was a mortal sin… and so on. Even as a child, the teachings of my church were confusing and contradictory and, I believe, responsible for almost all of my classmates turning their back on God. I desperately wanted to go to heaven, but I was confused and felt hopeless. I wanted to honor God and live a good life, but I had no idea at all as to how that was possible. Between then and now I was blessed to encounter the God of the Bible, and I am now determined to see as many children as possible receive clear, biblical, and accurate teaching about Jesus. I don’t want another child to live in the kind of confusion I did, unable to reconcile the love of God with eternal torment, penance, and praying to saints.