My parents’ church, growing up, was very small and wouldn’t try anything new. They never encouraged anything for anyone under 50 to my memory. We kids couldn’t sit past the third pew on either side because a deacon’s mom sat in the third row and NO ONE sat in front of her. We had one egg hunt when I was around 8 or 10, and VBS I think about the same time. Once. Dad asked about videos during class due to reading and hearing difficulties of some. It was not considered.
They were told that mowing the church and parsonage lawn, doing a significant amount of the church maintenance, supplying all Sunday School materials from their personal budget and resources (Mom created a lot of the material herself for awhile, because the church wasn’t purchasing anything that worked for a class with an age range like they gave her.) for free was not considered in any way part of a tithe, and were not allowed to participate in decisions within the church because they weren’t giving a full 10% of Dad’s paycheck. If they’d considered how much they were giving of themselves, it would have been much more than 10% I suspect.
These were not healthy things, any more than anything I experienced as an adult. There are many various ways that churches place unhealthy and unreasonable expectations on members.
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Author: Through Grace
I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12).
I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ.
1 John 4:7-8
7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
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