 Posted Monday, April 14, 2003 7:11 PM
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Posted Monday, March 15, 2004 9:26 PM
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Can I bump this thread up? I am curious, too. I'll answer for me...
I started having doubts and may have been ready to make a change in the early 1990's, following some paired health crises & deaths among the family & friends... but stayed on for the sake of my parents and then my spouse until Easter, 2002. A symbolic time of renewal, no?
- Jean W.
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Posted Monday, March 15, 2004 9:31 PM
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| I stopped attending in 1986, but kept practicing CS. I hated the services. They were so boring. I really left when I gave my life to Christ in 1997.
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Posted Monday, March 15, 2004 10:07 PM
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JeanW,
I joined in 1966 and resigned my TMC membership about 1992 (could have been into 1993 before I actually got through the process). I took Class in 1974. I stopped regularly attending services in 1980 though did sporadically attend until I attended my last in the Fall of 1992. During that time I also visited the United Church of Christ and Unity. After resigning my TMC membership, I didn't immediately seek out another church. I began regularly attending and joined my first mainstream church in late 1993. Unlike Renee, I enjoyed CS services and it took me some time to get comfortable with Christian services.
Do Go Be Man
<><
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Posted Tuesday, March 16, 2004 12:02 AM
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I don't think the issue is which year we left CS, but rather, when in our lives we left, fell away, started questioning, etc. How old? under what circumstances? what prompted it? etc. etc.
I had my first questions in late grade school and junior high. They were rather abstract, some practical. For one thing, I became aware somewhere/somehow that whereas CS denied "materiality" and physical existence, I lived in a fairly affluenct community, and every CS family I had ever known enjoyed comfortable material existence. I thought if we were serious about CS, we would leave suburbia and retreat to remote areas, live a subsistence lifestyle, and devote ourselves to spiritual readings and things.
I never seriously suggested it!
Later in junior high, I pondered (unsuccessfully) the origin of "mortal mind," coming, somehow, from within/without the realm of Divine Mind. There is no explanation, of course. We've mined this issue on other threads, never with anything approaching a reasonable answer. Other things that bothered me was the concept of "absent treatment," and also I became aware of people with healing failures.
Getting wounded in combat was the thing that did it. I became personally acquainted with the benefits of surgery, antiobiotics, and --especially--painkillers. Wow! Nothing like the rush of morphine to flush metaphysics out of your system! After I recovered, I lost a little over a decade of my life to alcohol (especially), drugs (to a lesser extent), tobacco, left-wing belief systems/activism, and stuff like that. It took A.A. to get some sanity back, along with a different, non-metaphysical understanding of God.
So God did use personal tragedy in my life to work His will. I was in my mid-30's (1982) when I was born again, thanks to a Billy Graham crusade.
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Posted Tuesday, March 16, 2004 6:28 AM
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Thank you, renee, DGBM, and fHim for your responses. In some sense I'm looking to get to know folks here a little better in small chunks, cross-sections, of specific things, as well as trying to play "catch-up" with older threads to see other people's experiences.
followingHim, you put a good angle on things when you slightly altered the original question: where were you, what were your life circumstances when the straw broke the camel's back, when you "woke up", when... whatever, spurred you out of the CS movement. Were you always skeptical, from sunday school up? Was there a significant mentor who passed away? A loved one? A personal illness requiring medical intervention?
I guess I was stubborn, hanging on through thick and thin until it was my child at risk. But there was another element for me, and that has been the recent attempts by TMC to "mainstream" itself with other churches and medical / alternative health care systems. It seems to me as though they are close to admitting that they are not healing. When you take the healing out of CS, what is left? It was founded to "reinstate primitive Christianity, including its lost element of healing". If you take healing away, what's left is Christian Fellowship, and excuse me, but CS churches as a rule are pretty rotten at that.
If CS was truly healing, the way Jesus did, nothing anybody else could say or do would keep the crowds away. One old thread here talked about MBE's ability to control / influence her followers. Well, it was that promise of healing that influenced people. And, I have to say, it was the actuality of healing that kept many for so long.
How many of you know the story of how your families "came into" CS? Was there, or was there not, a dramatic healing involved?
How many of you, when leaving, as I did, did so because of the failure of CS to deliver a needed healing? Inside CS, as many of you know, there is a lot of blame the victim kind of thinking... if you're not healed, it's your lack of understanding that caused the failure, not a flaw in the belief system. Apologies for warping the thread here, but I truly believe that the promise of miraculous healing, combined with all of our lacks as human beings, and willingness to accept that the flaw is in ourselves, not the system, has kept many of us tied to something that we had perhaps years previously ceased to believe, and continued with hope against hope, waiting for that next healing.
- Jean W.
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Posted Tuesday, July 12, 2005 10:48 PM
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I was raised in the CS church. My brothers and I were third generation CS on my mom's side of the family. My dad was not a member of the CS church. He would drop the family off for the service, and head over to the Drug store and hang out with his pals until time to pick us up. Mom always seemed to be in excellent health. Dad was the polar opposite. I can't count how many times he'd been hospitalized with some serious ailment or injury.
I found the Sunday School classes extremely boring and didn't really pay much attention (in retrospect, this may have been beneficial ). As I entered my teens, I became somewhat rebellious. However, I had always considered myself a Christian Scientist.
I suppose, the first time I started to question CS, Dad had been having a very difficult time with physical therapy. His excersises were intensly painful. As he struggled, his pain became too much to handle and he cried out for help. Mom did what she knew. She opened up her trusty "Science & Health" (ironic title, as it contains no science and, if used, is detrimental to one's health) and began to read aloud with me sitting with her on the couch. In tears, Dad asked what she was doing. She said, "It's all I know". I'm sure everyone reading this knows what it's like to be promised healing and not get it.
Another time, Mom had been called away from work to pick me up from school. I had had a little accident which resulted in a broken collar bone. She took me home, and lovingly pulled out her S&H and read to me for literally hours. When dad came home from work, he took me to the emergency room. Another failed attempt at healing.
As I reflected on this and other events, I had to marvel at the fact that I had never ever experienced a healing through CS. I have never even heard of someone being healed from anything at our church. Not even my very devout mom, with the help of a practitioner (who got much of my mom's money) ever received a healing. She became ill when I was in my early 20's. We don't know what it was as she refused to see a doctor. As her body began to deteriorate, we were still expecting a full recovery. Of course, it didn't happen. She was 66 years young.
I received Jesus as my Savior about two years after the death of my mom. I only wish I'd known the real TRUTH sooner.
Sorry to ramble on. This is theraputic.
Bill Webb
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Posted Saturday, July 16, 2005 2:18 PM
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I left a few years ago, but just recently found a real church. It took a long time for me to have the courage to really change my life and learn the truth about Jesus and what God really tells us in the Bible, but I'm SO happy that I did! I've been reading the NIV translation of the Bible straight through, looking at all footnotes, timelines, character analyses, etc., and have learned so much in just the first few chapters of Genesis.
Anyway, I grew up in CS - I was a 4th generation on my Mom's side. I went to a CS camp for years as both a camper and counselor, worked at TMC in Boston in the Board of Lectureship as an intern one summer, and attended Principia College for 4 years. After college I left CS because I did not think very highly of the church, MBE's writings, or really anything relating to the "church" or "religion" in any way. Most of the writings you read/learn in CS sound good, but I didn't feel it was 1)true or 2)applicable. I sure did defend it though when people would slam it on radio shows. But now that I'm in a true, loving, prayerful church and am learning a lot in Sunday school and in fellowship with other Christians, I have a much different perspective.
I am grateful for this forum - it's nice to find others with a similar experience.
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Posted Tuesday, July 19, 2005 3:01 PM
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Hi, everyone:
Steph, what years did you attend Principia? I'm curious if we overlapped. I attended from 1984-88. I worked for WTPC and The Pilot and played on the club hockey team.
I got into CS when I was 23 (1983) and drifted away from it after graduating from Prin, finally quitting TMC in the late 1990s. I was baptized a few years ago.
As much as I detest CS, Principia was an excellent institution, with a few exceptions. Mostly they were because all teachers had to be CS to be at Prin, so some probably wouldn't be the educational field if it weren't for Prin.
My saddest memory is of the three people who died of the measles in winter quarter 1985 -- two students and a child of a staff member. The media coverage was something the college never was prepared for.
Take care!
RisRap 
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Posted Wednesday, July 20, 2005 12:00 PM
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| Can I ask who the staff member was? I read about it in Caroline Fraser's book, but she didn't mention any specifics.
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