Posted by:
exrldsgirl
(
)
Date: July 14, 2015 11:41PM
I grew up RLDS in Michigan in the 70s and 80s. I remember that a big part of our identity was, "No, we're not Mormons!" A lot of explaining how we were different from "the Utah church."
I have really fond memories of Reunion. Every year, my dad would take his one week of vacation time and we would go to the church campground and stay there for the week. I just loved that place. I felt so relaxed and happy there. It was so much fun to spend a week with people from all over the district, not just our own little branch. Singing "The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning" with such a large group of people was amazing. I also loved the campfire songs and skits in the evenings. Our Reunion grounds was on the shore of one of the Great Lakes, and I was baptized in the lake when I was 8.
My grandma was from a family of about 7 or 8 siblings, and they were all members of our branch, along with most of their kids and grandkids. So the church really was my extended family.
My dad was ordained sometime when I was very young and was very active in the church throughout my childhood. (Note to LDS folks - not all RLDS men are ordained into the priesthood. They are "called by God" and it's not necessarily something that happens for everyone. The youngest I've ever seen someone ordained was about 17 or 18.) We were usually the first ones at church on Sunday mornings and also the last ones to leave. He was branch president for a really long time. He was also very active in our town's association of churches. He went up to the jail and nursing home to minister to people.
I hated Wednesday night prayer and testimony services. There would be these horrible, awkward, painful silences when no one wanted to say anything. It was just the same handful of people every time.
There were a few times, especially at Reunion, when I was there to hear "the Spirit" speaking through someone. I wasn't really sure how I felt about it, since the Spirit always said exactly what I had been thinking. For example, one year at Reunion there was some sort of heritage theme. People were going on and on with their testimonies about how long their families/ancestors had been in The Church. At first it was a little interesting to hear some stories, but after a while, it became quite tedious. And people were bragging on and on about their ancestors and the awesome stuff they did, way back before the person talking had ever been born. And I was thinking, "Who cares what your great-great-grandpa did? What have YOU done?" And next thing I knew, the Seventy who was there stood up and spoke in a powerful and trembling voice and said more or less the same thing - that what matters is what you are doing now, not what your family has done in the past.
When the church started ordaining women in the 80s, my mom was one of the first ones in our area to be ordained. I was so happy and proud of her. But there were some people in our branch who wouldn't take communion from her and who would skip church when she was scheduled to preach. But I think the overall quality of the sermons increased greatly when they added some women to the priesthood. We finally had some smart and educated people up there talking, people who knew how to organize their thoughts and present a coherent message. Some of the men in the priesthood were barely literate (the guys who had dropped out of school after 8th grade to work on the farm full time, etc.)
Sometime - I think it was the early to mid 80s - some of the more conservative people left the RLDS church and formed the "Restoration" church. They felt that the church was headed in the wrong direction and they wanted to get back to the "original" church. At the time I had understood it to be about the new hymnals, because they were definitely upset about some changes, but I'm sure that wasn't the whole story.
I pretty much stopped believing sometime in my teens, but continued to attend church at least occasionally, when I was home from college or something. Mostly because I wanted to see the people there.
I'll never forget the day when I was in about 3rd grade and I cried after church because my Sunday School teacher had told us that we should marry someone from the church. For some reason, I was thinking only of our little branch, even though we went to Reunion every year and I knew there were other church members. But since most of the kids in Sunday School were my cousins, there was only one boy around my age who would be a potential husband. And I didn't like him. At all. I was so upset. When I told my parents what I was crying about, the reassured me that I didn't have to marry that boy or any other church boy.
My parents are still in the church, but they have slowed down as they've gotten older. They are upset by how liberal the church has become. And they had a hard time when the church came out and said, "oh by the way, all those things that people said about Joseph Smith Junior, that we denied for years, were actually true."