I'm probably going to be a minority here, but I liked church. Sorry to learn that it is false. I liked that social interaction. I liked the idea that I had life's answers. I liked having a calling and contributing to my ward.

I would almost find it tempting continue attending for the social aspect if it weren't for the fact that I could not live a lie and would not pay tithing.

Sorry but I don't follow your thinking.

We can all like things that are made up. I think about being with my family in the next life and love that idea, but I don't know that that's what is going to happen, but it still gives me a good feeling.

You can find a social club to go to if that's what you need or want. I'm sure they are always looking for people to offer their assistance.

Apology if this sounds rude.

Yes. But then with correlation, three hour meetings, doctrinal problems, and the final discovery that it was a bogus religion, I stopped liking it.

I thought church got boring because it was so repititious. It would be like repeating 8th Grade every year for the rest of your life. No depth, lots of repetition. I thought older people fell asleep because they were tired; no, they were just tired of repeating 8th grade for the 50th year.

As for the social club, it was nice to move to an area and be able to quickly make friends with other Mormons. However, those relationships were pie crust friendships: easily made, easily broken. I realized how flaky they were when I quit the church and lost all my "friends" almost instantly. It wasn't even they were mad at me; we simply had nothing left in common.

Sure, I'd like to be able to make friends like that quickly, but I want true friends, not ones that you make and lose in a day.

... but Church is getting old. Only so much overt white wash one can take. It might be easier to take if it was like any other church (and like the Lutherans, we had coffee and cake after church), but the incessant, "we have the truth" "we are christians" "I know..." .... AGHHHH. I can't take it anymore!

boring:
Fast asleep and testimony
some talks... especially those involving primary
any primary themed meeting
Most of sunday priesthood meetings
any High Priest led meetings (it was always about missionary efforts)
most of sunday school.... depending on the teacher


NOT boring:
some sacrament meeting talks
some priesthood meetings... especially those that descended into an off-topic discussion
some sunday school meetings - ditto -
all social events (apart from the aforementioned missionary themed ones)
institute

There were times I liked church, but I always had a number of issues with it as well. I still like to attend church at times, but just not the Morg.The morg is noisy, lacking in spirituality, services are too long, there is too much emphasis on JS and other petty stuff and it is generally boring.If you want a church, there are better ones out there IMO

As a kid, it was just something that we did. Ididn't really hate it as much as I found other things I'd rather do, like skip church with my friends.

As an adult, going to church was cool for a while. It gave me safe friends, it gave me opportunities to do something worthwhile, and it gave me opportunities to lead. Not so much to be in charge, but to lead in worship and to teach the gospel.

But as the years went on, it became more of a chore and a burden to which I was fully yet sometimes painfully committed.

It wasn't until I was in the Bishopric that the full toll came into being. I had a Bishop who was out of town a lot and the other counselor would place family above church which often left me holding the bag. But the real problem was that it became a 6 hour workday and no time but Saturday off.

Not only that, but I never got back what I put into it. People don't think that the Bishopric exist except to serve, and don't need support or serving for themselves. They let the Bishopric members fenbd for themselves when the chips are down and yet still demand favors and help. When our familys life was at our most desperate, nobody even cared or HomeTaught us and yet they felt confident in taking all my time away from the home.

When I got out of that calling, I found myself only going out of habit and duty. The classes were boring because they taught such skeletal material, and the talks were all the same, which you don't really get to hear when you're on the stand cuz you're thinking of churchwork the whole time.

I was really psyched to get to finally go to class after all that time, and really bummed that there was nothing to learn.

In all, I should have been relieved to find out it was false instead of torturing myself for two+ years.

I liked the activities that were fun! I liked the social interaction. I liked participating. I loved being involved in theater/drama/speaking/music, etc. I liked the general religious guidelines --- until they became too invasive and I realized that Joseph Smith Jr told a "whopper" and got away with it.
Religious notions of some sort were always part of my life growing up also.
There were always some facet of school, work, church that didn't appeal to me.

A group like the UU's are not going to tell you what to believe, and you would still have the social aspects.

I would also say that it's more normal than not for mainstream Christians to take a cafeteria approach to their particular denomination's beliefs.

But if organized religion is no longer your thing, there are always community civic and fraternal groups.

I do enjoy church. I enjoy it a LOT more now that the worship music includes a full band, and is free of hundred year-old hymns.

Especially since I can wear whatever I wish without worry of judgement.

Even more so since instead of giving my tithe to a religious machine, my charitable donations will actually go to *ahem* a charity. Of my choosing.

Also, it's nice to have sermons that don't revolve around making you feel like crap. I leave each Sunday feeling uplifted and happy, not guilt-ridden and overwhelmed.

I legitimately get excited to go to church every week. This was not the case when I was LDS.

Quite frankly, I'm glad I have found the truth. If not, I would indeed be condemned to life of weak, filmsy friendships and middle school-approved social gatherings. All while raising 6+ kids with a meek and mild-mannered wife whose idea of kinky sex is not putting on the garments after the climax. Oh boy!

That's not to say that don't have a few good friendships with Mormons right now though. But I'm afraid if those will last the moment I leave their holy church. Blehhh...

As I recall, there were two years in my life where I preferred going to church over the alternative. Even then, I can't say I liked it.

Before the consolidated schedule, it was certainly more tolerable, with the occasional enjoyment.

Like the two months my YW/YM class didn't have a teacher. We just rented out chalk, played games, and chatted. We got caught when we ran through the sacrament meeting time when one of us had a talk. Oops!

Or there was the time that four of us thought we were just Xmas caroling at one house so we spent an hour chatting in the car. We got in trouble for that too.

Other than that, I hated church.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/06/2010 08:15PM by Tiff.

But I didn't like Sacrament meetings, Sunday school classes......

I liked to have fun.........

AnonyMs

Nope. I hated just about every aspect of it. I hated my Sundays being cluttered with ridiculously boring meeting. I hated answering to my neighbors in their guise as some sort of arbitrarily designated authority. I hated pretending to enjoy spending copious amounts of time with people with whom I had nothing in common. I hated paying tithing. I hated it so much that I probably would have quit it even were I convinced it was "true."

I mostly found it boring, but it was something you were supposed to do like eating your veggies. I liked teaching lessons, so that I could talk about stuff that was kinda interesting to me. I guess it started becoming like AxelDC said about 8th grade over and over again. I seemed to be learning more about other things, but my knowledge of the church seemed static unless I ventured into the black and gray literature. Eventually my zealous study of the "gospel" led me to discover the truth about LDS, Inc.

After that it just became increasingly infurating to listen to the lies. I got headaches after church, so I stopped going to the last 2 hours. The headaches persisted, so I quit altogether. I physically could not take it anymore, because the mental and emotional strain was to great just to attend.

Eating veggies good for the body. LDS, Inc. not so much.

After my mission, I just wasn't meeting guys in CA so I took a job in Salt Lake City. It worked, I was married a year later and we continued to live in Salt Lake for some years, while the kids were young. That pretty much did me in.

Before that, I really did like being a member. I liked having all the answers too. I liked getting dressed up and having somewhere to daydream on Sundays. I liked the satisfaction of accomplishing little Mormon goals. I liked being part of a cause, part of something important, a lot. I always felt like I had a lot of friends and that being Mormon was something special.

But living in Utah was just frustrating. People worried about such dumb things and gave themselves airs about even dumber things. It was a whole different church than the one I'd been part of in California. That feeling that something was just wrong/just crazy kept building until I finally figured it out.

Now I don't particularly like not having any answers but I do feel closer to other humans who are equally unsure. I prefer accomplishing my own goals and I can find more worthy causes. My Mormon friends melted away like ice cream on a hot stove and I found out about real friends and how worthless so many of my Mormon friends really were. And it turns out being Mormon was pretty silly - not special at all.

But when things were good, I liked them. Not realizing I could do better.

I liked growing up in our well-to-do So. California stake. But it was a different church from what it is now.

There was less harping on Obedience and more emphasis on the church being there for you, to develop yourself to your highest level.

We had some great bishops who were really sincere in wanting to help, maybe having money made them more relaxed about life in general.

We did have a Boyd K. Packer type SP, he was a dentist and quite anal-retentive but he was rendered harmless by the relaxed types around him.
The other bishops sort of made fun of this SP for grinding away at work and at life in general, while they bought boats and took exotic trips each year.

The bishop we had took regular trips to Vegas with his wife, they loved the shows there. No one batted an eye.

I don't know how anyone can stand being in the morg now. Effing Nazis, strutting around demanding money and Obedience over a fake book that is based on false premises and disproven by DNA>

I did not like it at all. I took it way too seriously, I think, and that was a significant part of the problem. I can remember even as a child coming home after church and locking myself in my room and pulling my hair as hard as I could or administering other little "punishments" to myself because I had found out that I still was not good enough and that God was mad at me (for stupid stuff like I had an impure thought or a swear word popped into my head or I did not pay tithing without resentment, that kind of stuff). This only intensified as I got older.....the coming home hating myself more and more every week because I was not making any progress on my quest for the necessary perfection.

I also did not like the dress code. It seemed "off" to me that God would care whether his children wore certain underwear, certain color shirts, tie versus no tie, nylons with their dresses versus bare legs. I know it's a little thing, but the idea that God's acceptance of his children was conditional upon so many ticky-tack things really bugged me.

I am not super social, either. I like people, but in small doses at a time. For me to value a relationship, I have to know that it's based on sincere affection between people. I always felt that the relationships were forced in the mormon church. They assigned "friends" to drop by every month, people would invite me to social functions that I had no interest in and when I knew the invitation was more out of "fellowshipping" than friendship. I am not uncomfortable being on my own and the taboo against being an introvert in the mormon culture got on my nerves. Introverts can be interesting people, too....they just need more time to warm up.

After leaving mormonism, I found a mainstream church (very nondogmatic/nonjudgmental) and I do actually enjoy going there on occasion. People are free to disagree and they do so respectfully. There are interesting, fresh ideas brought up on a regular basis in various discussions. The God taught there doesn't care what you wear or whether you go to church or not or whether you're the quiet type....he values each individual person equally. It's a much healthier place, not to mention more interesting.

Hell no!

It was after the morning session of church, I was in the gym playing with my friends and having a good time. By the time I was 6 I really didn't care for church. Being from pioneer stock, not attending church was never an option, and in fact I could not even concieve that the church was not true until I was about 30.

Maybe a handful of times in a period of 40 years I liked church.

Probably the last 15 years I attended I never once liked it or got anything out of the boring, repetitious, mind-numbing, sleep-inducing, uncomfortable meetings.

I'm kind of glad that I always hated church now. It bordered on torture at times growing up and hating it so bad, but when it came time to leave it was not painful in the same way that it must have been painful for someone who enjoyed what the church offered with the exception of all the lies it was offering along with the other stuff. It did hurt to leave the church in certain ways (seeing my parents' very real emotional devastation due to my choice, for example) though I always hated it, but I did not mourn the "loss" of anything other than all the years I spent hating myself when I didn't have to. For me, when I found out it wasn't true, I felt like a caged animal suddenly set free. I was elated to shed the dark cloud I'd been carrying around my whole life.

Not to mention the quality of people worth interacting with has improved significantly since ditching that cult of ignorance.

I hated church. Bored.

I enjoyed church (and General Conference) during my mission, because it was the only time I could relax without feeling guilty.

I also genuinely enjoyed church for about 2 years after my mission.

The rest of the time, my interest in church mainly coincided with my interest in girls. I looked around the room and enjoyed the view far more than I paid attention to the talks. By the time I got married, I was taking a PDA to church so I could play games and zone out if things got boring.

Like Snowball said, it's like repeating the 8th grade over and over. It's new and challenging while you're in the 8th grade, but after that it gets more and more boring and pointless every year.

I never liked it, ever!

From a VERY young age I knew it was all a bunch of lies and I could never understand why my family fell for the charade.

I thought church was boring and SUPER monotonous – even the buildings were drab. And with the members giving talks well, it was amateur hour every week. And, fast and testimony meetings were just awful. Everyone said the same old few lines and the crying, gag! Sheer torture!

When I was an adult I went to a Catholic Church once and then a Jewish Synagogue with a friend to attend a Bar Mitzvah and although I don’t follow ANY dogmatic religions whatsoever, I did at least enjoy that the Catholics and Jews at least had knowledgeable theologians speaking to the masses.

As a kid I hated it but I liked the people and the fun activities. As an adult, I liked some of it, disliked other parts.

If you really want to go - for whatever reason, then don't let people tell you not to go. But, please, please take it on your terms and just participate as you are comfortable. Don't let anyone bully you into callings you don't want or paying tithing, etc.

I still go - for my own reasons. Mormonism fascinates me and where better to observe it in all its glory than actually going to some meetings when you want to.

To me, these are two different churches.

Yes, I have changed, but so has the Mormon church. It changed from liberal (outside of Utah), informativeand relevant--to conservative, repetitious, boring, and nonsensical. The meetings became 3 hours long. They lowered, simplified, and even eliminated some of the hymns. They discouraged Great Music altogether. They started teaching the words of the old polygamous prophets. Christ and Love were lost in the shuffle, a long time ago, as Joseph Smith became more and more deified. Heck, the male priesthood members diefied themselves--claiming that they would become Gods one day.

I liked Primary because my mother was chorister then president, and we sang songs like "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" from Oaklahoma. I liked the youth activities at first, but a lot of these were done away with, such as the road shows, plays, fund-raiser bake sales and bizaars, youth conferences, beach parties, etc. I even liked working in the welfare cannery, but we were told it was our duty to clean the buildings and weed the grounds instead.

I won't even get into the pre-temple Mormonism vs the post-temple cultic Mormonism. I did not like the temple!

Being raised outside of Utah, most of my friends were not Mormons, and I had the opportunity of going to several other churches. I liked those! Yeah, the coffee-time between meetings in the Lutheran church was great! My children atteneded the neighborhood Lutheran school, and I was actively involved in the Lutheran school system. That was a happy time in our life!

UPLIFTING is the operant word, here. The local congregational and Bible churches, the Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Jewish, Seventh-day Adventist, UU, left me with a feeling of love, and hope. The Mormon church stripped away love and hope. It was depressing! I did not like it, for very good reasons.

I hated the Mormon church even more, when I was single, divorced, and a working mother. When the priesthood leaders started physically bullying my children, we left. Our over-all view of the Mormon church is that we hated it.