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A Child Following Hard After Father
By Boudicca | April 23, 2007
My Journey Away from Organized Religion Into the Arms of Christ: A Testimony, Part the First
Introduction: A couple of months ago I began a series on my personal blog titled “My Journey Away From Organized Religion.” I have written a few posts but upon further reflection feel the need to delve much more deeply and personally into my story and my reasoning. I have realized recently how much my decision to leave organized religion has affected and continues to affect family members and close friends, and I truly desire to share my heart and my journey in a more complete and in-depth way. There were a couple of other factors playing into my decision to rewrite: when I read my dear husband’s series “My Journey Out of Church and Into the Body of Christ” (currently being posted in parts on this blog), I was challenged to be more thorough and vulnerable with my own story. Secondly, when I previously began this series I was writing from a defensive posture because of an ongoing conversation with a dear friend. I’m hoping now to write from my heart, not in an effort to defend my decisions, but rather in an effort to let those close to me really know me. So I’m starting over. By necessity I will reiterate some of what was contained in my previous postings (and sometimes directly plagiarize myself), but I hope to encompass more details of my story, let you know me in a deeper way, and write in a way that will hopefully better communicate my heart for God and my love for his Body.
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After twenty-two years of being raised in solid, Bible-believing, born again, sanctified-by-the-Holy Spirit churches, I quit organized religion.
My mom says I asked Jesus into my heart when I was just two years old. For obvious reasons I don’t remember this event, but from my earliest memories and awareness of the world, I knew I belonged to Christ. I loved him and wanted to be his.
My spiritual heritage is one that has taught me the value of being a pioneer and thinking outside the box. My mom, who grew up nominally Methodist, became a Christian in college and was part of a close-knit community of believers at her college. They often had prayer-meetings in the hallways of her dorm, sharing communion, praying, and singing. Many of them also attended an organized church (in the charismatic tradition), but this was just a small part of their community life. It was through a Gospel singing group that many of her friends were a part of that my mom met my dad, who had grown up Lutheran and came to know Jesus personally during his high school years. Their relationships with God were personal and in many ways much of their growth in those early years happened outside of organized “church”.
Soon after my older brother reached school-age, my parents decided to homeschool us. Homeschooling back then was revolutionary and (in our state) illegal at the time. They were true pioneers – crusading to make homeschooling legal, standing against societal norms, standing up to their parents, and oftentimes standing up to their church friends who asked them why they weren’t letting their kids “be a witness” in the public schools. The public schools needed families like us, we were told. Yes, the public schools had problems – but those problems would only get worse if all the good families left and decided to homeschool!
From the beginning my parents were separatists, not Puritans. They left the system rather than reforming it. They decided to be innovators rather than imitators. It was into this heritage that I was born and in which my personality and perspectives were forged. (Thank you, mom and dad, for being so brave and for teaching me the value of independence and freedom!)
My spiritual journey is different than many because I belonged to the Lord so early. I have no memories of living apart from him or outside of him…“living in sin” as many call it. My desire from the beginning was to love him and serve him. Even as a child, this desire was passionate. This desire was also largely informed by the Christian contexts in which I grew up: churches and Sunday school.
Sunday school was the first place I learned about how to relate to God. By winning prizes for memory verses, I learned that Christians related to God on the basis of our achievements, at how well we did at keeping his commands and knowing his word. I learned songs like this one:
“Oh be careful little eyes what you see.
Oh be careful little eyes what you see.
For the Father up above is looking down in love,
So be careful little eyes what you see.”
These songs taught me that God was essentially a divine policeman, looking down from heaven and waiting to “catch me in the act” of committing a sin that was displeasing to him. I began to relate to him in fear – the way that we relate to the cops we see on the side of the road pointing their radar guns at the road, trying to “catch us in the act” of driving faster than the speed limit. Every time I sang songs like that one, I thought of things I’d seen and things I’d heard that would be displeasing to Father. I felt bad, and indeed often woke up my parents in the middle of the night in order to confess “things I’d seen and heard.” Though the words spoke of God’s love, on a subtle level I was being distanced from him. Who wants to draw near a cop who is trying to catch them in the act of speeding? So too, who wants to draw near to a God who is trying to catch me at my worst moments and punishing my failure to live up to his expectations? Guilt was used in those early Sunday school days to try to get us kids to reform our behavior, but what our well-intentioned teachers never realized was that very same guilt kept us from running hard and fast into Father’s arms. Instead I lived with a quiet, low-grade guilt that often turned my stomach. Though my parents would have described me as a generally good kid, I spent a lot of time feeling dirty and guilty and sick to my stomach over my wretchedness. It started, I think, with those early Sunday school lessons that not-so-explicitly taught me to relate to God on the basis on my works, rather than His work. This despite the fact that the churches we attended were not what you would consider legalistic. They were generally free-form, charismatic, easy-going congregations with an emphasis on personal relationship with Christ and knowing his Word.
Yet, my obsession with my work rather than Christ’s continued well into high school. I developed an overachiever mindset, thinking that if perhaps I could follow the Puritan formula of confessing every single sin, every single day, even journaling about my sins – perhaps if I could read something from the 17th century like “Mortification of Sin” by John Owen, perhaps then I’d learn to “put my flesh to death” and stop struggling so much with the wretchedness and wickedness of my heart. I picked up “Knowing God” by J.I. Packer in a bookstore when I was about 13, and though it took me about a year to work through the theological language that was quite heavy for a thirteen year old, I loved it. I read Jerry Bridges’ “Trusting God” about the same time and began studying Reformed theology. My bookshelves began filling up with the works of theologians like John Piper. I kept trying to earn God’s favor, kept trying to know Him better from my end, thinking that it was all up to me.
Boy, was I wrong.
To be continued….
Note: This is cross-posted at Live With Desire.