Posted by CB on January 27, 2011 at 16:38:18
In Reply to: Re: Long road since leaving in 1972 posted by Alias Hannah on January 26, 2011 at 16:19:58:
I was in art school in New Haven, Connecticut, when I joined, I believe, in January 1972. I was 20 years old at the time. Before going to art school in New Haven, I had attended a Baptist missionary high school in Honolulu, Hawaii. (My father was military, so I moved around a lot.) While at the Baptist high school (1968-69), I was evangelized. I didn't make an act of repentence or commitment to follow Jesus until I was 19 (December 1971).
I first ran into COG in the fall of 1970 in Austin, Texas. I was a freshman at UT at the time. I had some serious sinning to do for the better part of 1971, but had hit bottom and gave up trying to do things my way in the fall of 1971. I was looking around for a church when I ran into the COG again in early 1972.
A few years after leaving COG (early 1975), I joined the Roman Catholic Church (around 1979). I was turned off by evangelical Christianity by that point. My exhusband, who I met in COG, came from a Catholic family and they wanted us to get married in that church. So we did. A few years later I converted. Then I became more Catholic than the pope and professed as a franciscan lay sister in 1982.
Left the RC church in 1993 due to a clergy sex abuse scandal. I had been studying to become a youth minister, and the parish priest who was sponsoring me was molesting teenage boys. It was a heartbreaking experience. Burnout doesn't capture the devastation I experienced--more like getting torched by a flamethrower. I can relate to people who were in COG/TFI for a long time. Very similar issues to what I experienced in the RC church.
I started attending Alanon meetings in 1996, and started doing AA in 2000.
After 16 years of being disaffiliated from a church, I joined a Vineyard fellowship in 2009. Vineyard is an evangelical, charismatic church.