Normal Is Not An Option

That's not true, but I've always loved the scene in the original version of the movie "Hairspray" when Divine complains that her daughter is, "All ratted up like a teenage Jezebel!" By the standards of our society at large, I was a very good kid who got good grades and never got into trouble, but by the ridiculously perfectionist standards of the church of Christ congregation we attended, I was a source of major turmoil. When I was 15, I decided that I didn't want to attend the teenagers' Bible class any more. I was the only girl, and the boys teased me viciously. The male teachers (because of course, women weren't allowed to teach boys older than 12, lest they usurp authority over a man) just sat there and did nothing, no matter how much I complained. This had been going on for years, and I finally reached my limit and announced to my parents that I wasn't going to that class any more and that I would be more than happy to sit with the adu...

For about a year I've been attending an Episcopal church, and I've been part of the choir for almost 6 months. It has been an amazing experience, filled with joy and wonder. The first Sunday I sang in the choir, I called a friend, who knows all about my experiences in the COC, to tell her about it. She said, "Were you wearing a fancy robe?" I said, "Yes, of course." "And was there a stained-glass window behind you?" "Yup." "Well, weren't you afraid that lightning was going to come through that window and strike you down?" I laughed and said, "You joke, but the thought did cross my mind!" I sometimes chuckle to myself during church services when I think how people who knew me in the COC would react if they saw me there in my robe, singing up front instead of in the pews, and singing with an organ or piano, instead of a capella, as the COC demands. I imagine their stricken faces, followed by their stern lect...

Yesterday I had a long, lovely conversation with an old friend who also grew up in a fundamentalist denomination (not the church of Christ) but is now a Catholic priest. He asked me if I ever go back to the CoC and what that's like, after being away for so long, and he asked me to blog about my experiences. So here goes. I do go back to the CoC on rare occasions when I visit elderly relatives who are still involved in it (and who don't know that I've left). As for what it's like, I guess it depends on the day. Sometimes it makes me sad, because my relatives are so unsure of their own salvation, because they believe in an unloving, unforgiving god who is just waiting to strike them down. I really wish they could know the joy and comfort of God's grace. Sometimes it makes me angry, especially when the preacher goes on and on about how all those other churches are wrong about, well, everything, and the CoC is the only church that preaches The Truth. TM Sometimes, t...

Imagine that you're a small child, and someone forces you to put on a suit that doesn't fit. The jacket is so tight that you can't lift your arms. You feel strangled because the neck is too tight. The pants don't allow you to move freely. You have no freedom to move and run and jump and play like all the other kids. And it itches. Now imagine being told that you have to wear that suit for the rest of your life, because God ordained it. God chose that suit for you, and God knows best. God has a plan for your life, and it means wearing that suit every day until the day you die. In fact, if you ever take off that suit, God will cast you into hell for all eternity. Even questioning the suit (why do we have to wear it, why doesn't it fit better, how do we know for sure that God wants us to wear it) is a sin. Imagine how you would feel--bewildered, frustrated, perhaps even angry--over not being able to choose your own suit or at least alter this one so it fits better. ...

A few months back, I read " Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl " by Susan Campbell. It's about her experiences growing up in the church of Christ. She went to a much more liberal church than I did, but I still could relate to her story, for the most part. No matter what branch of the CoC we're talking about, the women will be repressed, to one degree or another. And for some of us, no matter how hard we try to conform, we can't accept second-class status and have to leave. I especially liked her metaphor at the end of the book (I think it actually was her brother who said this) that fundamentalism is like a sword that broke off in her. No matter where she goes in life, that piece is still stuck inside and she can't get rid of it. I completely understand what she means. I suppose it's that way with any damaging childhood experience--you can never undo what was done. In any case, it's a very good book (there is a lot...

Sometimes when I'm trying to explain the church of Christ and its negative effect on my life to my friends who didn't grow up in it, I feel as if I'm no longer speaking English. The words I'm saying simply don't compute with them. For example, they can't even imagine a church that rejects instrumental music, or refuses to celebrate Easter, or doesn't have a food pantry or give money to a homeless shelter. That's what a church IS to them. It's the very definition of a Christian religious body. Sometimes they don't even believe me and think that I'm pulling their leg. And who could blame them? The COC is so bizarre and insular and out of touch with reality that it seems like a bad joke. This is one of the reasons I'm so grateful for the ex-Church of Christ support board (the link is to the right of this post). There are people on that board who actually speak my language, who grew up in the COC and know what a bizarre little world it is. I...

Today is Pentecost Sunday--not that you'd know it in a church of Christ. I don't know about the mainline or liberal congregations, but the conservative non-institutional branch of the COC emphatically does not observe the church calendar in any fashion. A Sunday is a Sunday is a Sunday, all the same, forever and ever, world without end, amen. Thus, it's always fun for me to observe the changes that occur at my new congregation as the liturgical year progresses. In honor of Pentecost, the decorations, candles, and vestments are red, symbolizing the tongues of fire that hovered over the disciples on the very first Pentecost. The readings, songs, and sermon are all about the Spirit and how it inspires us to love our fellow humans and gives us power to do good in the world. Such talk of the Spirit would be shockingly out of place in the COC where I grew up. I remember that sermons on the Holy Spirit were few and far between, and they tended to be more about what the Spirit does...

Just wanted to wish everyone a healthy and prosperous new year. Hope you had a lovely holiday season, however you chose to celebrate.

Hope y'all are enjoying the holiday. I'm getting ready to go to a friend's house for dinner, so this post will be brief. What am I most thankful for this year? Well, among (many) other things, I'm thankful I have friends who want to see me and spend time with me because they actually like me, not because we get together and play church 3x weekly. I'm thankful to have a job, especially after being laid off for most of last year. I'm thankful for my family's good health. And I'm especially thankful for the freedom I have in Christ--the freedom from the destructive legalism of the COC. It's been almost a decade since I decided I had to leave, although it took me a few years to actually escape. I'm so much happier and life has been a lot easier since I stopped judging and started loving. The freedom to love others without constraint--that's one of the greatest blessings of all. Happy Thanksgiving!

Once in a blue moon I attend a COC, usually when I visit elderly relatives who are deeply involved in it. Now that I've been away from it for so long and have had a taste of the calm beauty and reverence of a liturgical service, the COC services just seem weirdly absurd to me. It's as if they're playing at church, checking off a list as they make their way through the Five Acts of Worship (sing, pray, give, communion, and sermon) to punch their heavenly time cards. It's rushed, chaotic (I addressed the underlying chaos of the COC in an earlier post ), arid, and Spirit-less. And in the end, it's all futile, because they really don't believe that anyone will get into heaven, because getting into heaven requires perfection, which is impossible. So why even bother? Why go through those motions thrice weekly just on a 1-to-million shot that god will be in a good mood when you die and NOT condemn you to the eternal flames? Why not just enjoy your life and be happy? It...

The title of this post pretty much sums up my policy with regard to my family and the COC. I've never told them that I left the COC, and they've never asked me about it. I think they just assume that I'm still going, possibly because I've never criticized the church in front of them or expressed my doubts about it. For a long time I felt weird about this, as if I'm deceiving them. But where is it written that full disclosure is obligatory with your family? If I'm an adult living on my own and paying my own way, then aren't I entitled to a certain amount of privacy? Also, am I not allowed to make my own decisions regarding church and faith without explanation or apology? My conscience is clear in that I know what I believe and why I believe it. Furthermore, what purpose would it serve to tell my family, especially the elderly ones who are deeply entrenched in the COC? It would just upset them, and it's not as if there's even a remote possibility of ha...

I used to do daily Bible reading when I was in the COC, but after I had read the whole book cover-to-cover about a dozen times, I was more than a little burnt out. Now I pretty much limit my Bible reading to the lectionary readings each Sunday. So this year, instead of giving up something for Lent, I decided to add daily Bible reading to my routine for the 40 days leading up to Easter. I found an online lectionary and downloaded daily readings specifically for Lent, and I've really enjoyed it so far. Yesterday's epistle reading included the first 3 verses of I Corinthians chapter 13: "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gai...

In recent, separate discussions with both of my siblings, they have mentioned the fact that it makes them sad that our surviving parent's love for us isn't unconditional, which is the ideal for parental love. As is often the case, unfortunately, the "good parent" (i.e., the one who DID love us unconditionally) died far too young and left us to deal with a parent whose judging of us usually gets in the way of loving us. Ideally, your parents will love and accept you no matter who you are or what you do. But in our family's case, love and acceptance are predicated on adherence to the COC's rigid rules. If we were to let our true thoughts and beliefs (and the fact that we've all left the church) be known, we would be cast out and disowned. In fact, that has already happened with one of my siblings, so the rest of us hide our true selves. Our parent will never know who we really are, because our true selves would be abhorrent. I won't blame the entire situ...

The COC is obsessed with heterosexual marriage. In all my years in the COC, I lost count of all the sermons and classes we had on "the family." Typically, such classes and sermons were just a rehashing and reinforcement of the strict gender roles described by Paul's letters: the husband is the head of the wife, and she's supposed to be obedient to him, and the kids in turn are supposed to obey the parents. If it was a ladies only class, you can bet we studied the "godly woman" described in Proverbs chapter 31 , ad nauseum. The COC's doctrine about the family isn't complicated, but we had to go over it again and again and again. I wondered why at the time, but now I realize that the church and its patriarchal structure were threatened by the rise of feminism in the 1970s. Thus, they felt compelled to harp on this one subject endlessly, to prop up their gender hierarchy. This emphasis on strict gender roles means that the ideal in the COC is that e...

Someone posted this on the ex-Church of Christ board: http://www.christistheway.com/2006/20060701c.html . I don't have much to add except to comment that it's absolutely the truth. This is exactly how every COC I ever attended approached the scriptures. None of those congregations ever wrote it down, however. I'm amazed that this group would put this out here on the Internet for anyone to read, since these rules are usually part of the unspoken creed of the COC and are used to fluster and bamboozle anyone who dares to argue with the COC's interpretation of the Bible. OK, I do have two comments. Rule #4, "Do Not Do "Proof Text" Study. Study to find what to believe; do not study to prove what you already believe," makes me laugh, because proof-texting is all the COC does! And rule #22, "Be willing to learn from others, but do not accept their explanations uncritically," sounds great in theory, but in practice, you'd better accept what...

I feel badly that I've neglected this poor little blog for so long. Life threw me some curve balls recently, and I've had to deal with a lot of unexpected crises. But things are a bit calmer now, so I thought I'd pop in for an update. I have to confess, however, that I don't feel the need to blog as often as I used to. This has been good therapy for me, to help me work out some of the residual emotional issues of growing up in a controlling, cultish environment. But I feel that I've moved past some of those issues and no longer need to vent my spleen about them. I'm sure that other issues will come up in the future, but for the moment, I'm content with my life and my choice to leave the COC.

A fellow ex-COC-er and I have had this same conversation over and over again: we don't know what to believe any more, all we know is that we don't believe in the COC. We don't believe that the COC is the one true church. We don't believe that the COC has all the answers. And most important, we don't believe that the COC has any authority over our lives and has no authority to condemn us for our lack of belief. The problem is that, after ridding ourselves of the negativity of the COC, it's hard to find something to replace it with. After all those years of fear- and guilt-based indoctrination in a literalist interpretation of the Bible, it's hard to think rationally about doctrine, to decide what you truly can and can't accept, because you're afraid that, if you make the wrong decision, you're condemning yourself. One big question we both wrestle with is whether there's an afterlife and if so, is there a good place and a bad place and who is g...

A point of pride for the church of Christ is that, unlike people in the denominations, its members "know" their Bibles. Reading the Bible, both as a group during worship service and individually at home, is stressed a great deal. Since the Bible is the key to salvation, it behooves us to know it inside and out, forward and backward. And we're always supposed to be able to give "a ready answer" (i.e., quote Scripture) to anyone who questions our faith. So most COCers will read their Bibles diligently, if for no other reason than to fill in the blanks in the Bible class workbooks and not get blindsided when the teacher calls on them to answer a question during class. Unfortunately, it has been my observation that the average person in the COC doesn't really know the Bible that well in the first place. Most people only read what the preacher tells them to read and have never read the entire book. They ignore the difficult or uncomfortable passages and stick to ...

Recently on the ex-Church of Christ support group forum, one of the members commented that the culture of the COC is one of fear, not love. For example, the COC uses fear to keep people in line. The fear of being disfellowshipped hangs over everyone who fails to adhere strictly to the party line, and if your whole family and social life are associated with the church, that can be a powerful inducement to keeping your mouth shut, because you know that you'll lose everyone you love if you're disfellowshipped and shunned by the church. Fear is also the primary emotion expressed by members of the church. Everyone I knew in the COC is constantly living in fear--fear of accidentally sinning and going to hell, fear of causing someone else to sin and going to hell, fear of not raising their kids right and going to hell, ad nauseum. In fact, I would say that most COC-ers are afraid of life itself. They're afraid of anything that's messy, that's not black-and-white, that...

One thing I noticed while growing up in the COC is that the church does not allow people to be themselves, to live an authentic life and express the best of themselves. Instead, everyone must conform to the church's idea of proper behavior, ideas, and emotions or risk being labeled as "wayward" or even sinful. As a result, people in the COC are forced to wear a false front and not express their most authentic selves. You can't express your true feelings or thoughts because they might contradict church doctrine or undermine the authority of the elders and deacons (or "the men of the church" if there are no elders or deacons). One way that the church suppresses personal authenticity is by strictly enforcing very rigid gender roles. Women with leadership skills are pushed down and relegated to a subordinate role, while men without those skills are forced to play public leadership roles to which they're ill suited. It's just assumed that a man will alw...