My name is Martin Malone. I was brought up in the Roman Catholic teaching and tradition. Going to church on Sunday was very important to me and I felt I was letting God and my parents down if I missed going, even through illness.

Confession was always a bone of contention for me and I could not understand how, on one hand, you could kneel down and pray to God but, on the other hand, you had to go into a dark confessional and confess your sins to a man (not God!). After all, God is the one we sin against. When I was 18 years old I stopped going to confession. I continued to be a regular Sunday churchgoer but never really knew if I would go to Heaven and lived more in hope than in certainty. I continued like this for almost 20 years, until 1990.

Around this time my brother-in-law came home from America. He was saved and he started telling me about the Bible and how he had got saved. It took a while convincing me but eventually, through his persistence, I started to read from the New Testament. I read a lot, on and off, but two verses from Romans chapter 10 would always stand out. Verse 9 told me that; if you confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. Verse 13 said:
everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. I knew when I read these verses that there was a Saviour who did die n the cross to save me from me sins and that Saviour was Jesus. I knew that if I believed on His word that He would save me and that, instead of hoping for Heaven, I would now be certain of Heaven.

I was attending Dundalk Baptist Church during this period and through the help of our pastor, Stephen Murphy, and a lot of the brothers and sisters in the Chruch who answered questions about God’s Word that I did not understand and showing me how all the answers that I needed could be found in the Bible, I was saved in February 1997. By the grace of God I was baptised in 20th of July 1997, which is the outward sign of the inner belief and a new life, a new beginning in the Lord.