organized religion

I’ve written in journals for the past ten years of my life, recordings, remembering, and thinking out loud about the people I have encountered, things I have seen, and the things I have experienced. One thing that takes up many pages in my journal is my experience with organized religion, specifically the nondenominational Christian, Bible teaching church. While I believe every word in the Bible, the people that the words are coming from are who take up these pages in my journals. Specifically, one family. I grew up in church. Unaware of the toxic nature of this church, I thought the things that were happening, things I was hearing, and things I was experiencing were normal. My view of church was broken from the beginning, and I am only beginning to understand the damage that it did to me. There was an evil spirit that ran the church I grew up in. I am still unable to pinpoint it to this day, but the churches message was surrounded by fear. Fear was instilled in me from a very young age. There were tracts that i would read that were meant to be used for outreach, talking about heaven and hell, the right path and the wrong path, and how taking the “wrong” path could leave you to eternal pain and suffering, inescapable fire, and pain like you could never imagine. I read the first tract when I was around 6 years old. My whole relationship with god was shaped around fear. Fear controlled me. Fear still controls me. There was always a weird aura about the church that I grew up in. There was a lot of secrets, a lot of people leaving the church with no explanation, and a lot of mystery in the leadership of the church. As a child I knew no different, but I sensed something. The energy was off in this church. It was the leadership and the way it was ran. It was fueled by anger and disapproval and fear tactics. I look back on it now and realize that I did sense that something was off, but I didn’t know what could’ve been wrong. My mom and dad were a part of this church; how could it be evil? How could god let it be evil? It took a lot of time to unpack this, and I still am trying to comprehend what went wrong here. I could tell so many stories about how I felt quieted, scared, uncomfortable, the list goes on. There is no coincidence that families that stuck with this church have lasting issues. I see broken marriages, adultery, complete abandonment of the faith, really dark energies and sense of hopelessness in every single one of them. I don’t know what went wrong in this church. All I know is how I see it; and I see it that an evil spirit is in this church. Something is not right. This church does not represent the Jesus I know. I was damaged by this church and the way they taught me as a young child about how Jesus is and who he is. I still am working through what this church taught me and unlearning what I was taught knowing now what I know.

Right when I started picking up on the missing pieces and energy shifts, we moved churches, which helped me greatly. I think I placed too much hope and pretty much my whole identity in this new church that I started going to in junior high. It was a good church for me at that point in my life. I had life changing leaders there, and I think I truly learned a lot about myself and God and community and christianity as a whole during my time there. But like I stated before, I think I placed too much hope and into that church. I think I made a God out of it, knowing good and well imperfect humans were behind the scenes. And that set me up for heartbreak. And heartbreak came. Senior year, there was a mission trip the everyone had been looking forward to. We got to go to Ecuador! I got to spend two weeks in the jungle spreading the love of God with my best friends. What could be better than that? There was a few adults that went on this trip with us. There was a couple that was part of the leadership team on this trip that I had a rocky relationship with, but at the time of the trip, I felt that I was on good terms with them. I felt like I had put my feelings about them in the past and now that I had graduated high school, maybe we’d have an adult relationship and I wouldn’t feel so shamed and unloved by them. Damn was I wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I had fun on this mission trip and I think it taught me some things about God. But I think it did more damage than good for my relationship with God and especially with my relationship with the church that I went with. The boys that I went on this trip with were my best friends since literally elementary school. I knew them to their cores. I loved them so platonically. However the leader on this trip saw my relationship with them differently, specifically one boy that his daughter was dating at the time. I don’t know if this man was insecure about my relationship with this boy or if his daughter was insecure about me and voiced it to him or if he is just an insecure man and thats why he lashed out on me like he did, but one thing I do know is that what happened was very inappropriate. I am still angry about what happened. I am angry as I write this. The man that was in charge of us on this trip, an elder of the church, and a supposed man of God told the boys on the trip that until we landed on United States soil, they were not allowed to talk to me. Me- a 17 year old girl, who had two months left of living in her hometown with the boys she grew up her whole life with. I had one summer left with these boys. One summer of childhood left, and a trip of a lifetime with them; but I wasn’t allowed to speak to them for the last three days of our trip. The kicker is though, that I didn’t know that this rule had been placed on me or the boys until I pried it out of the boy who was dating his daughter. And he eventually told me after days of being ignored for no reason, that the father figure of our youth group had done this to me and threatened that if we did talk that they would have to break up. First of all this man is an embarrassing excuse of a Christian man if he is that insecure about a literal child on a youth group trip. Imagine the shame that came from this experience. Why was it me out of the whole group of girls that was banned from talking to the boys? Was my personality too much? My body too tempting? My clothes not modest enough? Was I too loud? Or was I just a 17 year old girl soaking up the last memories with my friends? This man ruined my view of the church and the shame that harvested from this experience is sometimes too much to bear. I am working hard and have been working hard for months to forgive this man. But my god it is so hard. Placing expectations on humans to not make mistakes and create a perfect church atmosphere is an impossible standard that I think I made a mistake of at a young age- but to just ask grown men not to shame teenage girls and make them feel like whores while alone in a foreign country? I don’t think thats too much to ask. And I don’t know how to heal fully from what he did to me. I feel wrong for writing this and exposing this man for what he did to me but I feel like I deserve to be heard? I didn’t say any names in this story. But if the damn shoe fits, walk in it. This man ruined my sense of self and shame has swallowed me whole since this trip. I want an apology and I know I’ll never get one. And I think that’s the hardest part of it all- knowing that he won’t see that he was in the wrong.