Posted by:
justarelative
(
)
Date: February 14, 2016 02:53PM
Jay,
So that you know I take your request seriously, I took the time to review your posting history, reading maybe a half dozen or so of your longer messages from each of the last five years. You stopped posting regularly at just about the same time I joined the RFM community as a lurker so we've never interacted on this board before.
XXX
When you post you don't say very much most of the time, and you rarely talk about yourself, so those of us who are eager to be of whatever assistance we can don't have much to go on. But then maybe you just mainly want to listen.
The primary reason I am responding to you is to answer your question "What has your experience been like becoming Christian?" Unfortunately, I may not be the person you're looking for, but I'll let you be the judge of that.
I am in the later part of life; I have never been Mormon. However, I was born multiple generations deep into a works-based religious tradition that originated in America in the early part of the 19th century on the premise that all the many Christian factions could be united by the principle of the Restoration of New Testament Christianity.
By the time I came along in the middle of the 20th century, this tradition had itself devolved into many factions, and mine was an insular group proclaiming themselves to be the One True Church. I can relate to many RFMers who chafed under a religious system of conscript philosophy mixed with phobia indoctrination.
When I had finally had enough and bailed, I did so with the expectation that I would lose my wife, my friends, and my family of origin. There were no kids then. Along the way, I felt my livelihood threatened as from time to time I found myself in a back room with local church leaders reminding me of my obligation to express specific beliefs. Or when they crashed an unauthorized meeting I was attending.
Like Mormonism, we treated orthodoxy as truth, and questioning as dangerous.
Unlike Mormonism, we treated emotions as suspect, and intellect as supreme. That is, as long as that intellectualism came up with the right answers, so, similar to an entire church made up of Mormon apologetics if you can imagine.
It's been a while -- I have adult children who are older now than I was then -- but I do remember quite a lot of detail of my journey from aberrant religion to a listless lostness (which some might call atheism or agnosticism, but I never put a label on it at the time) to Christianity. The Christianity I have embraced is focused far more on individuals than it is on institutions.
I regard the duty of the institution of the Christian church to be to point people to Christ. To know Christ, to love Christ, to follow Christ, to give one's life over to Christ unconditionally. Loyalty to any person or institution is secondary and conditional. To the degree that the institutions of Christianity point people to themselves rather than to Christ, then those institutions have gone astray. My strongly held opinion.
During my period of listlessness I too felt as if my life wasn't working, wasn't progressing. In fact, when I dared to get dangerously honest with myself about myself, I could see a long, slow fade taking place. The ideas my life was built on were not strong enough to hold the weight of my life: the foundation was crumbling, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
One of the most terrifying aspects of this period was the realization that there was no transcendent meaning to my life, indeed no transcendent meaning to all of existence. Some say that we have to create our own meaning. Fair enough. But by the very definition of the word, that self-made meaning can never be transcendent. Ultimately, self-made meaning is simply bluster against the larger context of meaninglessness.
As philosophical desperation set in, I finally relented and decided to show up at a church, even though it was the last place I expected to find answers. Initially, I tried returning to my roots. What a disaster! Nothing had changed there, so I quickly moved on.
In May 1991 I attended a weekend service of what some people regard to be the original mega-church, at least in America. It was almost like going to the theater; it was about 95% presentation and 5% participation. The presentation was creative and compelling, easy to understand, extra-ordinarily straightforward.
Except I now had trust issues, and spent an entire year returning each week for more of the creative/compelling part while at the same time watching intently for the hidden agenda to appear. Right at the one year mark, their relentless integrity finally broke through my hardened defenses. Or more accurately, my defenses softened as I slowly realized that this church was above board: what you see is what you get.
And my heart melted into a puddle -- hard to imagine since I was a seriously jaded businessman in a major rough-and-tumble metro at the time -- when I finally grasped the message of grace, a message I had never been taught in my upbringing.
All this time I had been carrying an intense anger that resided so deep I didn't even know it was there. That is, I should have known, since it would erupt from time to time, but in the most unexpected times and places. No rhyme, no reason. As it turns out, that's the nature of buried problems.
That was nearly 25 years ago. Today, literally THIS DAY, I showed up for the first time at a church that meets at the elementary school across the street from my house. The church my family and I have been attending has served us very well in critical ways for several years, but it's just so darned far across town. It's not our community. So now I'm scouting around for a group meeting nearby.
What am I looking for? Proximity, yes, but what else? A place to know and be known; a place to serve and be served; a place to love and be loved; a place to learn and teach; a place to extend and receive grace. A place to *BE* the church among others who are also being the church.
So much more to say, but I'm out of time. Maybe this bit of personal history will help you, maybe not. Either way, it's yours, for free.
A few extra thoughts:
You use the phrase "thinking about returning to Christianity" which in combination with the fact that you were a convert to Mormonism raises the question of what relationship you had to Christianity before becoming Mormon.
As for your statement "We all know we can't judge all religion from our experience with the Mormons" that has not been my experience of some of the people who post here on RFM. But I'm glad to hear you say it.
For more stories of people who were Mormon and became Christian, I suggest you look up the Ex Mormon Files with 'Bishop' Earl.
Regards,
JAR
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/14/2016 05:10PM by Maude.