I was brought up on Methodism myself.My upbringing was a bit straight-laced, but pretty wholesome overall.
In our house we looked down on all the strange stuff in the CofE (Church of England) regarding Holy Communion, and being confirmed as adolescents into the Church and so on.
No, we thought that belief in God was a very personal thing that no one at all could ever teach you. That the whole point was about loving your brother/sister as yourself. That Jesus was a good guy, who tried to teach about love, but who fell foul of the establishment.
It came as a great surprise to me in later life to realise that for many other people, Christianity was not technically about that, but all about believing whatever Paul and others said, and being received into the Church, and accepting all the dogma.
I guess there must be many thousands of people around who have never subscribed to all the traditional dogmas, but regard themselves as basically Christian nevertheless, because they regard the notion of loving one another as the quintessential aspect of the whole thing, regardless of how inadequately we sometimes achieve this in practise.
