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I have been all over, born and raised lutheran, attended catholic services rarely with friends, attended a baptist church in college and now in grad school i'm attending multiple non-denominational (fundimental) churches.
Are catholics christains? I'd say some are. All it takes to be a christian is a belief that you are saved by God's grace through Jesus Christ. If you believe this then you are saved.
The other day I invited a catholic who said they wern't attending church here at grad school to one of my churches and they said they couldn't, that the catholics aren't allowed. That proceeded me to ask why? Wouldn't god be happy if you were worshiping him and it doesn't matter where the service is?
My problem with big churches is they get to big, they think they have all the answers, and have figured it all out. The church as a whole gets proud and tells their memebers not to seek god without their guidence. My friend also said they are not supposed to read the bible. This completly blew my mind. How is it that we are not supposed to read gods word? These churches that focus purely on tradition and dogma need to reevaluate what God is about. God is not about how many hail marries you say, how many people you helped to day, how many times you prayed, or how many people you dicipled. None of that matters. All that matters is God's love for us is greater than all of our love for him combined. And because of this we are saved despite our sin and flaws. There is no scorecard for heaven (just one true or false question, is jesus your lord and personal savior). We should not legalize religion (see galations), it only leads to problems and halftruths.
Living in Utah now I get exposed to the LDS (Mormans) all the time. They have great zeal but yet many of their beliefs are contradictory to the bible (see galations again). The bible is all we have, we need to go to that first when we want to know what God want's from us.
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