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When I was a child I saw Jesus in my dreams, went to church regularly including Sunday School, and accepted what I was told was the truth. It was when I hit my teens that I began to question how accurate the words of my vicars had been.

I found it difficult to reconcile the way we were told that Simon Peter was the person Jesus Christ had wanted to found his church, when most of the new testament outside of the first four gospels were related to what Paul had said and taught. When I learned that Paul had only seen a vision of Jesus, not actually been a disciple whilst Jesus lived I began to wonder what was going on. Christianity was certainly all about Paul's views, with only a few instances where Jesus's own words were being quoted.

Often the church was accepting ideas that were contrary to what Jesus taught. How could that be? Surely we were all supposed to be following Jesus and his teachings, not Paul's, a person who clearly had not spent much time with Jesus or truly understood his views.

Whilst in my teens I visited a non-conformist church once a week which had a special Young Sowers evening at which children of all ages attended. I loved these sessions. They covered Jesus rather than Paul, and concentrated on the gospels. They also had slide shows with images drawn by one of the church leaders: we sang songs created specially for the children to repeat, and I loved that special event every week. But then I became older, found the ordinary services of this church following the old sort of teachings, and generally found I wasn't comfortable in a church, so I left and decided not to return.

It was not for a further fifteen years that I started thinking about visiting a church again. I lived in a different town, and now had a child after twelve years of childlessness. My husband and I decided to have our son baptised, but the only church which would do this was our local C of E as long as we attended confirmation classes. We agreed for our son's sake, but as we discussed the ways of the church we found we couldn't accept the teaching blindly, and the answers being given were not ones we could feel happy with. Our son also took a dislike to the church organ so we stopped taking him. And when our daughter was born twenty months later the vicar refused to baptise her as we were no longer regular church goers.

For me, the doubt about the church, and the way Christianity is portrayed, remain. Jesus's words are what is important not the narrative of his life, and too

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