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In reply to the discussion: Any Ex-vangelicals? [View all]luvs2sing
(2,220 posts)when I was a teenager. My family was not religious, but I joined the local small-town mega church for two reasons: my two best friends were members, and cute boys from other school districts. Seriously.
I spent about five years in the church, mostly thinking W-the-everloving-F are these people talking about? I watched the teenage Peyton Place that went on, the girls mysteriously going to visit family members out of state for a year followed by young married couples suddenly adopting babies, newborn babies, upon their return. The guys in their 20s dating girls in their teens. I watched the Left Behind movies all the time thinking this is, as Shrub says, some weird shit.
Then I started dating a very nice Methodist boy, the kind of boy every parent wants their daughter to date. We regularly attended each others church services. Everything was cool. I was seventeen on my last Sunday at the Baptist church when a substitute Sunday school teacher, a man who had no business in my business, spent the class berating me for dating someone outside the church. It got personal. I must think Im real cool. Then he told me I had two choices: break up with him or convince him to get saved because if I dont, when the Rapture comes, he will be Left Behind. I told him I actually had a third choice, and that was to get the hell out of this insane place. And I walked out and never went back.
Ive gone to other churches in my adult life, but Im not comfortable in any of them. I believe in a higher power, and that power is more readily available to me on my morning walk than it ever has been in a church.