The truth: I was raised in the Church of Christ, and I’m not sorry about that. I grew up around a lot of wonderful people, and I learned a lot about the Bible. Besides, we were what you’d call liberal — but only, it turns out, by comparison.
Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about being a fundamentalist: that you are one. It was only when I got out into the world that I realized what that label meant and that it applied to me. Except it never did, quite. I talked the talk and walked the walk, but even as a kid, I didn’t think the thoughts. Partly, that’s their fault, asking me to look at the Bible for what it was, not for the ideas imposed on it by the world. What I saw was a God that was not all about making tally marks of bad stuff; rather, he wanted to see you do the good stuff.
I never want to throw my former denomination under the bus here. This is in part because I haven’t wandered too far. I have for the last dozen or so years been in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a group that, as our own statement of faith says, is “a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.” It’s that simple, except in all the ways it’s clearly not. What it looks like is ecumenism and service. I would say that puts it light years from the church I grew up, but I can’t, because it’s not, actually. Both the independent Churches of Christ and the denomination we call the Disciples of Christ stemmed from the Restoration Movement in early 19th century America. It’s also called the Stone-Campbell Movement, hence the name of this site.
To read more about the Stone-Campbell Movement, or at least my understanding of it, see the page Stone & Campbell…once I write it, that is.
Stone-Campbell Girl 