rriggs

Thanks. I am thankful for my time in the church, plenty of happy memories there. I think that seeing it from the perspective of an insider was very valuable to my spiritual development.

Mine was a long path that began when I was ten years old. By the time I was sixteen, I had read the Bible cover to cover five times and had become a fixture in local libraries and book stores, studying (largely) Buddhism as well as Hindu texts, and a number of philosophers. Immediately upon graduating high school, I entered a local non-denominational ministry and remained there for six months until the program was shut down due to financial problems. I was recommended to and accepted by another program and studied there for a year until I graduated (nine month program). Upon completing the program, I was accepted by a local church and ordained shortly thereafter, I was nineteen-years-old. I served as Youth Pastor for four months, when scandal involving the Senior Pastor erupted. I had known the pastor for about a year at that point and adored the man, but in the face of the scandal, he refused to allow the church to censure him and to be "rehabilitated" by the governing body as was required by the church. Ultimately, he was defrocked and broke away from the governing body. While I was clearly entitled to keep my ordination from the governing body (as I had followed protocol during the situation) and/or ordination from the Senior Pastor, I chose to resign and surrender my credentials because the politics of the church left a horrible taste in my mouth. In the two years that followed, I moved to two different churches, the first I could not escape the stigma of being involved with the aforementioned Senior Pastor and the second, I watched a very righteous man pushed out of the church he had built by a pair of newcomers. While I continued to study, I walked away from organized religion altogether. Ultimately, marriage, children, and work (i.e., "real life") took over and before I knew it, almost twenty years had passed. Finally, in late 2005, I decided to recommit myself to study, meditation and spirituality, with the hope of eventually putting together a humanist spiritual collective that accepted the best ideas of all faiths. While I am still in the midst of gathering myself together to be in a place to do this, I reclaimed my ordination through the ULC because I had already done the work and wanted to move forward. That's my story and I'm sticking to it...