I'll be slowly developing my personal history. I'm managing some identity issues. In the interest of full disclosure, Lee Denzler is a pen name. There are people from my previous life who know my real name. I have nothing to hide, I just have not decided how all the details might negatively affect already difficult relationships between close family members and myself.
I'm a developing self-autonomous human . . . I'm part of humanity . . . well now I am . . . I hold loosely to few designations. I'm nonreligious. Non-theist (a person of non-faith) seems to be an accurate descriptor.
Less is more, I guess for those of you who care to know . . . .
By the mid-seventies (when I was born) the holiness movement could possibly boast of less than 40,000 members. I'm not sure it's possible to know exactly how many adherents there actually are. I estimate there are several thousands of churches with most congregations of less than 50 persons as of the extensive travel I did for Thompson Bible Institute in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Family pride runs very deep on my father's side of the family. Church, the Methodist Church, was a big part of my great-grandparents lives. My grandfather and grandmother maintained the faith into the next generation. My grandparents raised my father in a traditional american family traditionalism of the 60's. My grandmother was perhaps a bit forward thinking and applied "Dr. Spok's" wisdom in the rearing of my father.
Religion was important to my father's family, but in knowing my grandparents, their beliefs were personal, and they seemed to be tolerant of other community members who viewed things differently. Somehow, my father fell in love with a "holiness" girl that went to his local high school. There was a very small "holiness" church in the same community.
Well my saga starts about here, because the start of my father's involvement with the holiness movement began with this "holiness" girl. He was only allowed to be with her at her church, under her pastor-father's supervision. My father liked this girl enough that he went to the church with her, and got suckered into the movement.
He believed the message of salvation which was preached. He was a "horrid" sinner before God, needed to repent, and be saved through the merits of Jesus's blood. He swallowed the gore hook line and sinker one Sunday night service, gave into the peer pressure, and end up giving up his previous identity in exchange for this little known "holiness movement". My father never married that girl that got him involved, but he never left the holiness movement either.
The difference between my father and mother were minor by the time they met, but a peek under the outward happy family that they were able to construct in the church and subsequent ministry reveals something other.
My mother is at least a 2nd generation Fundamentalist Christian if not a 3rd generation Fundamentalist evangelical Christian depending how you count Fundamentalist Christian influence. Mother's parents met not over hormones and natural attraction (these were likely there, a large family resulted from their union), but so the story goes, Grandmother heard my Grandfather's prayers has he paced the floor above her room. There were two warring factions of a similar fundamentalist holiness denomination in the same town. Each had it's own Bible School apparently on opposing sides of the street in a fledgling Colorado town. My imagination wonders over what the differences actually were. From what I've gleaned over the years, and read, it was a war of words and hair-splitting definitions of various doctrines surrounding the idea of Christian perfection.
What were the roaring 20's how did these influences impact the local lore? My maternal grandparents would have been very young children during the late 20's. The depression really affected my maternal grandfather and his family more than my maternal grand-mother's family. Grandpa was poor from birth. Grandma was well-off. Grandma rejected her more liberal Christian upbringing and made some very big changes to be part of the Holiness movement of the 40's and the revivalism period of the People's Bible College of the 1940's. My maternal grandparents married, in Bible School, took a pastorate.
Eventually a large family would be initiated into the rights, privileges, and controversy of cult-like sub-culture known as the conservative holiness movement that promoted an unrealistic approach to life. On my mother's side of the family, I'm one of slightly over 80 immediate family members--counting children, grandchildren, and into the high teens of great-grand children--accumulated before the passing of my maternal grandmother. She died at 87. She may well be the most difficult individual I've personally known to date. She "held fast the faith".
Of my maternal side of the family there is enough material to keep several psychologist busy for a life-time examining, studying, and writing on all the family dynamics issuing from the union of these two people. Poverty is a constant of that side of the family with few exceptions--unfortunately substance abuse, risky life-styles to the opposite extreme of one sibling turning out to be a doctor. In between are several ministers, and a couple missionaries. Depression, PTSD, and psychological issues have and will continue to companion many of my extended family members. Most simply cannot extricate themselves from false beliefs regarding their place in this world. The doctrine of original sin, salvation, and sanctification in the context of many strange family dynamics seems absolutely senseless, but non the less so real, that no other reality exists.
A great aside: [The ideas of cognitive scientist and their work with "frames" would be absolutely fascinating to apply to the general social milieu of the maternal side of my family: as of December 2014 I've just discovered George Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant" which outlines in short summary the family "morals"]
Marriage, Bible School graduation, my birth, ordination, and start of ministry followed closely one after another. Many factors, ones that I will explore, are reasons that I remain overtly and covertly isolated from my parents. We talk, but agree on little. The deep sleep that over-came my father early in his college days continues to keep him very much asleep to how the outer, feared, world really works.
Over many years my father has progressively given up more and more self-autonomy. I'm not sure he still can remember a reference point before his involvement. He's invested more than 35 years into the system. Along the way he took his family on an exotic and chaotic journey. Eventually my journey would branch off the course of family legacy, and I would make a journey that alternates even to this day between the extremes of heaven and hell. I hope my journey will create for myself less chaos for myself and for my wife and son. I hope others will make their own journey into the present, this moment, the only guarantee any of us have.
One of the leading features of modern Christian Fundamentalism is Cosmic Specialness. One firmly held belief is that one is able to follow a god-designed blue print for one's life. I personally, in 2014, am making a bit of sense of the implications of my leaving of the fold. In "Leaving the fold" by Marlene Winell Ph. D. (2006), Dr Winell deals with many topics that I find very helpful in understanding what being born and raised in a fundamentalist Christian family means. I'm starting to relate my sub-culture, third-culture experiences to what has been happening coincidentally on the out side of the subculture. Running parallel to my reality was a modern world that I was in, but not a part of. I'm starting to come home.
On page 50 I'll quote something very important concepts from Dr. Winell:
Along the way a few people were transformed by conversion to our format of Christianity. I will always smile when thinking of Dan Barker's quip: "I was converting Christians to Christianity" in reference to his missionary zeal in Mexico converting Catholics to Evangelicals! We even had a martyr story about how the Catholics had murdered one of our national pastors in cold-blood! It had happened in the early 70's as I recall.
Our escape from freedom and responsible cross-cultural interactions were stark. On the inside, a person who must win another person to the Lord must be utterly insecure and need re-enforcement of his own "joy" over another convert. I see selfishness, pride, and xenophobia at every turn. Was good done, depends on a cursory or in depth look. So goes the tale . . .
For seven years we labored. Literally dad scarified our wants and desires on many occasions for the sake of the gospel. It's a common complaint of the children of clergy, but one in which those of us who have been on the receiving end know as real. One of the side effects is that I'm bi-lingual. In fact a Christian Mexican friend years latter when I was carrying on the tradition of missionary work in another Central American country gave me a beautiful Castillano translation from Latin of Lucero's Letters. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to reading such an ancient work in it's original language. That friend little knows the mental door which swung open to me in attempting to read that philosophical work.
Busy. Yep distracting work will keep one very busy. Nationals were trained, and sent out to re-indoctrinate an indoctrinated world. Charitable functions like increasing literacy were happening on a small scale, but by-in-large with such a huge emphasis on evangelizing not much important work was ever accomplished. Until tragedy struck. It was a series of incidents that culminated in what was labeled a "physical break", "nervous break-down", physical collapse. My energetic father became too ill to work. It was the end.
I can recall several key events leading up to dad's collapse. 1) There was an on-going misalignment of the ruling authority's prerogatives at mission head quarters and what my father saw as appropriate. The top person said that money was most important, and my disheartened father felt that souls were most important. The mission director must have been a business man. My father was the priest on a mission to enlighten the Christians of his version of the Gospel message. 2) There were stress factors resulting from over-work and over-care. Relations between missionaries in other fields in surrounding countries pressed in on father. He was getting a really good hard look at the inner workings of fundamentalist evangelicalism, and was sickened by the politics, greed, and general humanness of what were thought to be godly people. 3) Family issues were pressing in and there was trouble brewing internally between my parents...over-work, stress, resentments were gradually building. 4) a very unfortunate vehicular accident occurred no fault of my father. He could not deal with the reality of that incident. A life was lost. There were some legal difficulties in getting the situation settled with the other party. As a whole family, we experienced a lot of isolation and fear at that time. 5) a brush with existential angst occurred in public in a small mountain church a few months after the accident. While interpreting from English into Spanish a sermon being preached by the very "business-man" mission director, something snapped in dad's psyche. I think the house of cards caved in all at once. Some gruesome horror story was being artfully outlined of a train wreck where many people died, and dad simply lost it. He could not conclude the message and had to be driven home by the visiting mission director. I remember the mission director's wife, snidely remarking at the breakfast table the next morning that dad was just "faking it". Dad was not faking it.
I can only ponder . . . was it the accident or the realization that possibly there was a mean streak to god, and he felt like an expendable commodity. Hopes and dreams were snuffed out after his collapse. Dad knew he must return to the home-base and regroup, and maybe heal. Mom and my siblings somehow packed up all our belongings over the next month and arrangements were made for a friend to drive us all the way back to the USA. We left.
---------I'll keep filling in this gap-----
In 2006 my wife and I attended a weekend retreat hosted by International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) http://www.icsahome.com/events/workshopsgas We there were able to start making some sense of what it means to be the "products of parents that took short-cuts". I don't remember being introduced to Winell at the conference. (I don't know if there are peer concerns where Dr. Winell's opinions are concerned. It took me nine years to find this resource.)
I assume knowing the massive amount of information and studies that have been done and are being done, that it's all part of one's journey. I hope that voicing my frustration with not being able to find the information I was looking for is not taken as a criticism of all the hard work and life investments of those that have helped along the way. These are just facts. Our limitations as humans is that we don't know all things.
So for what ever reasons, Winell's work "Leaving the Fold" was lost on me for several years. I do think that in hindsight since here work takes a stronger humanistic approach, that I'd probably have been very dismissive of her work. Strange, that so few understand the difficulty of finding sound wisdom when there is no reference point of wisdom beyond the Bible.
Winell's description of the abdication of personal responsibility for the trade-out of "following the plan" is startling. I know personally that the comfort of following the "Divine Blue-print" is extremely limiting, and creates undo stress and chaos. I too "found" god's will for my life, for a short period of time. I followed the foot step of a legacy of "forsaking all to follow Christ" to the full conclusion of ultimately coming to the realization that there was no Christ.
So I write of my personal history in hopes that clarity will emerge out of the chaos that I experienced personally. To grow into a better adjusted human being that is able to do some good in this life that "I know" I possess at this moment. Maybe somebody will read and find this to be of help.
Culture Shock: the start of some of my history at TBI:
An influence of my thinking is a Christian author, Ruth Van Reken and Pollock: Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds. I've mentioned the exotic and chaotic elements of growing up in as a third culture kid. The culture shock of re-entry is a little known phenomenon. Quite unhelpfully movement was made between the extremes by "trusting Jesus" when all else failed. This mind-set was so real to me that it was not until I was no longer a missionary and heard through a friend of Van Reken's contribution to this topic that I took an interest and read this book. I was very sad to learn of things that would have helped me and my family so much as we moved between cultures and first hand experienced the stark realities arising out of moving between cultures.
In this foment of emotion: the nervous break, NC, and what not can be further explored.
Belize: Dependable, Unquestioning religious automatons
Ejection: Catastrophe or redemption!
Searching: the slow death of a god
Now: this moment
I'm a developing self-autonomous human . . . I'm part of humanity . . . well now I am . . . I hold loosely to few designations. I'm nonreligious. Non-theist (a person of non-faith) seems to be an accurate descriptor.
Less is more, I guess for those of you who care to know . . . .
A broad snap-shot
I was born into and raised in a fundamentalist Christian family . . . roots in Methodism, and aberrant versions of early Methodism. In the late 1800's the Camp meeting "revivalist" grew into some of the better known tongues movement churches. (My history is a little mixed up maybe) some anti-tongues people formed a purified version of the old Methodist Church their roots were in the Wesleyan-Methodist churches of the late 1800's. Out of this movement grew the Nazarene Church in the 1930's, and at this time other "really small groups" that separated from the Wesleyan and the Nazarene Churches. These small factions became known now as the Holiness Movement, (kind of like the Nazarene Church, or Wesleyan Church; really quite different though, in the lingo of the Holiness Movement of the 1970's these mother movements had "apostatized".)By the mid-seventies (when I was born) the holiness movement could possibly boast of less than 40,000 members. I'm not sure it's possible to know exactly how many adherents there actually are. I estimate there are several thousands of churches with most congregations of less than 50 persons as of the extensive travel I did for Thompson Bible Institute in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Dad
My father came from a decent, ranching family, from South Dakota. My great-grandfather homestead the family ranch in 1911. He had a college degree from Purdue. He worked hard, and was able to hold out through the Great Depression. As other homesteaders left the area, he was able to buy up the surrounding land grants for 50 cents an acre . . . so the story goes.Family pride runs very deep on my father's side of the family. Church, the Methodist Church, was a big part of my great-grandparents lives. My grandfather and grandmother maintained the faith into the next generation. My grandparents raised my father in a traditional american family traditionalism of the 60's. My grandmother was perhaps a bit forward thinking and applied "Dr. Spok's" wisdom in the rearing of my father.
Religion was important to my father's family, but in knowing my grandparents, their beliefs were personal, and they seemed to be tolerant of other community members who viewed things differently. Somehow, my father fell in love with a "holiness" girl that went to his local high school. There was a very small "holiness" church in the same community.
Well my saga starts about here, because the start of my father's involvement with the holiness movement began with this "holiness" girl. He was only allowed to be with her at her church, under her pastor-father's supervision. My father liked this girl enough that he went to the church with her, and got suckered into the movement.
He believed the message of salvation which was preached. He was a "horrid" sinner before God, needed to repent, and be saved through the merits of Jesus's blood. He swallowed the gore hook line and sinker one Sunday night service, gave into the peer pressure, and end up giving up his previous identity in exchange for this little known "holiness movement". My father never married that girl that got him involved, but he never left the holiness movement either.
Mother
Some believe it does not matter what one believes, I think it does. There are consequences to certain forms of belief. The ones that interest me are the memes of "self-effacing" beliefs. These beliefs take away a persons self-confidence, and replace the most basic self-preservation instincts of the person with a codependency upon a system of belief. Normally a person is eventually controlling the strings of the puppet.The difference between my father and mother were minor by the time they met, but a peek under the outward happy family that they were able to construct in the church and subsequent ministry reveals something other.
My mother is at least a 2nd generation Fundamentalist Christian if not a 3rd generation Fundamentalist evangelical Christian depending how you count Fundamentalist Christian influence. Mother's parents met not over hormones and natural attraction (these were likely there, a large family resulted from their union), but so the story goes, Grandmother heard my Grandfather's prayers has he paced the floor above her room. There were two warring factions of a similar fundamentalist holiness denomination in the same town. Each had it's own Bible School apparently on opposing sides of the street in a fledgling Colorado town. My imagination wonders over what the differences actually were. From what I've gleaned over the years, and read, it was a war of words and hair-splitting definitions of various doctrines surrounding the idea of Christian perfection.
What were the roaring 20's how did these influences impact the local lore? My maternal grandparents would have been very young children during the late 20's. The depression really affected my maternal grandfather and his family more than my maternal grand-mother's family. Grandpa was poor from birth. Grandma was well-off. Grandma rejected her more liberal Christian upbringing and made some very big changes to be part of the Holiness movement of the 40's and the revivalism period of the People's Bible College of the 1940's. My maternal grandparents married, in Bible School, took a pastorate.
Eventually a large family would be initiated into the rights, privileges, and controversy of cult-like sub-culture known as the conservative holiness movement that promoted an unrealistic approach to life. On my mother's side of the family, I'm one of slightly over 80 immediate family members--counting children, grandchildren, and into the high teens of great-grand children--accumulated before the passing of my maternal grandmother. She died at 87. She may well be the most difficult individual I've personally known to date. She "held fast the faith".
Of my maternal side of the family there is enough material to keep several psychologist busy for a life-time examining, studying, and writing on all the family dynamics issuing from the union of these two people. Poverty is a constant of that side of the family with few exceptions--unfortunately substance abuse, risky life-styles to the opposite extreme of one sibling turning out to be a doctor. In between are several ministers, and a couple missionaries. Depression, PTSD, and psychological issues have and will continue to companion many of my extended family members. Most simply cannot extricate themselves from false beliefs regarding their place in this world. The doctrine of original sin, salvation, and sanctification in the context of many strange family dynamics seems absolutely senseless, but non the less so real, that no other reality exists.
A great aside: [The ideas of cognitive scientist and their work with "frames" would be absolutely fascinating to apply to the general social milieu of the maternal side of my family: as of December 2014 I've just discovered George Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant" which outlines in short summary the family "morals"]
The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winner and losers. There is an absolute right and and absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good.
What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can:
- Protect the family in the dangerous world,
- Support the family in the difficult world, and
- Teach his children right from wrong.
A repeat of history
My parents formed a similar relationship as my maternal grandparents with a couple of exceptions. 1. Birth control was finally ok. My parents decided to limit their progeny. 2. There was the slightest breaking with the traditional observances of the conservative holiness movement, that an exit fault began to open up for me personally to get enough exposure to someday leave.Marriage, Bible School graduation, my birth, ordination, and start of ministry followed closely one after another. Many factors, ones that I will explore, are reasons that I remain overtly and covertly isolated from my parents. We talk, but agree on little. The deep sleep that over-came my father early in his college days continues to keep him very much asleep to how the outer, feared, world really works.
Over many years my father has progressively given up more and more self-autonomy. I'm not sure he still can remember a reference point before his involvement. He's invested more than 35 years into the system. Along the way he took his family on an exotic and chaotic journey. Eventually my journey would branch off the course of family legacy, and I would make a journey that alternates even to this day between the extremes of heaven and hell. I hope my journey will create for myself less chaos for myself and for my wife and son. I hope others will make their own journey into the present, this moment, the only guarantee any of us have.
Blind leading the blind: Missionaries
The next section of my personal history involves Lee Denzler growing up in a fundamentalist Christian missionary family. Where as my maternal grandparents were content with preying on domestics, their own flesh and blood and moving between several states in the mid-west preying on unsuspecting victims, my parents hit on a grander scheme. "Evangelize the world".One of the leading features of modern Christian Fundamentalism is Cosmic Specialness. One firmly held belief is that one is able to follow a god-designed blue print for one's life. I personally, in 2014, am making a bit of sense of the implications of my leaving of the fold. In "Leaving the fold" by Marlene Winell Ph. D. (2006), Dr Winell deals with many topics that I find very helpful in understanding what being born and raised in a fundamentalist Christian family means. I'm starting to relate my sub-culture, third-culture experiences to what has been happening coincidentally on the out side of the subculture. Running parallel to my reality was a modern world that I was in, but not a part of. I'm starting to come home.
On page 50 I'll quote something very important concepts from Dr. Winell:
Escape from Freedom and Responsibility. In the fundamentalist framework, decision-making is a matter of discerning God's will, to the point of looking for God's blueprint for your life. The only clear desire that you are really permitted to have is to love God and do His bidding, as in "Not my will, but thine be done" (Mark 14:36). This can be quite a relief. As great philosophers attest, human freedom is indeed a deeply troubling dilemma. We must make choices. We are responsible for our lives. At the most profound level, our perceptions create our experience. As Yalom (1980) describes it, confronting responsibility can be enormously unsettling. Humans are strangely "doomed to freedom." Thus, he says, we seek structure, authority, grand designs, magic, something that is bigger than ourselves. Fundamentalist Christianity relieves the burden of responsibility very thoroughly. When one is "born again" and finds a place in the "family of God" one's freedom and responsibility are traded for the comfort of following the plan.As with many a celebrity story, the public story and private story line of pseudo celebrities is one of conflict and contradictions. We were a well managed outwardly functioning missionary family. We had status in our community of influence. Reverence and awe were par for the course. We were extremely wealthy in comparison to our neighbors. Back in the USA people were praying for us, supporting us with encouraging words, sometimes. Criticism came too. Money was flowing to the accounts of the mission headquarters and designated for "god's work" in Central America. Yep important stuff was happening.
Along the way a few people were transformed by conversion to our format of Christianity. I will always smile when thinking of Dan Barker's quip: "I was converting Christians to Christianity" in reference to his missionary zeal in Mexico converting Catholics to Evangelicals! We even had a martyr story about how the Catholics had murdered one of our national pastors in cold-blood! It had happened in the early 70's as I recall.
Our escape from freedom and responsible cross-cultural interactions were stark. On the inside, a person who must win another person to the Lord must be utterly insecure and need re-enforcement of his own "joy" over another convert. I see selfishness, pride, and xenophobia at every turn. Was good done, depends on a cursory or in depth look. So goes the tale . . .
Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me?" -- Annie Dillard, 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'Here we have a simple truth. Jesus accused some of making their converts twice the children of hell! Wow, wonder how he knew? We had a home-base loving and supporting our public display of "called of god". The distraction from personal freedom and responsibility was stark. We were commissioned, our whole family, to go into the whole world and preach the gospel. We never paused to consider that in smiting and inflicting deep wounds on our fellow man was perhaps a shade on the side of immoral! We smote with the sword of the Word, and by golly pulled the remedy out of our back pockets in declaring the "Good News" in the next breath! This now revolts me. It's nearly unspeakable.
For seven years we labored. Literally dad scarified our wants and desires on many occasions for the sake of the gospel. It's a common complaint of the children of clergy, but one in which those of us who have been on the receiving end know as real. One of the side effects is that I'm bi-lingual. In fact a Christian Mexican friend years latter when I was carrying on the tradition of missionary work in another Central American country gave me a beautiful Castillano translation from Latin of Lucero's Letters. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to reading such an ancient work in it's original language. That friend little knows the mental door which swung open to me in attempting to read that philosophical work.
Busy. Yep distracting work will keep one very busy. Nationals were trained, and sent out to re-indoctrinate an indoctrinated world. Charitable functions like increasing literacy were happening on a small scale, but by-in-large with such a huge emphasis on evangelizing not much important work was ever accomplished. Until tragedy struck. It was a series of incidents that culminated in what was labeled a "physical break", "nervous break-down", physical collapse. My energetic father became too ill to work. It was the end.
I can recall several key events leading up to dad's collapse. 1) There was an on-going misalignment of the ruling authority's prerogatives at mission head quarters and what my father saw as appropriate. The top person said that money was most important, and my disheartened father felt that souls were most important. The mission director must have been a business man. My father was the priest on a mission to enlighten the Christians of his version of the Gospel message. 2) There were stress factors resulting from over-work and over-care. Relations between missionaries in other fields in surrounding countries pressed in on father. He was getting a really good hard look at the inner workings of fundamentalist evangelicalism, and was sickened by the politics, greed, and general humanness of what were thought to be godly people. 3) Family issues were pressing in and there was trouble brewing internally between my parents...over-work, stress, resentments were gradually building. 4) a very unfortunate vehicular accident occurred no fault of my father. He could not deal with the reality of that incident. A life was lost. There were some legal difficulties in getting the situation settled with the other party. As a whole family, we experienced a lot of isolation and fear at that time. 5) a brush with existential angst occurred in public in a small mountain church a few months after the accident. While interpreting from English into Spanish a sermon being preached by the very "business-man" mission director, something snapped in dad's psyche. I think the house of cards caved in all at once. Some gruesome horror story was being artfully outlined of a train wreck where many people died, and dad simply lost it. He could not conclude the message and had to be driven home by the visiting mission director. I remember the mission director's wife, snidely remarking at the breakfast table the next morning that dad was just "faking it". Dad was not faking it.
I can only ponder . . . was it the accident or the realization that possibly there was a mean streak to god, and he felt like an expendable commodity. Hopes and dreams were snuffed out after his collapse. Dad knew he must return to the home-base and regroup, and maybe heal. Mom and my siblings somehow packed up all our belongings over the next month and arrangements were made for a friend to drive us all the way back to the USA. We left.
---------I'll keep filling in this gap-----
The adventure continues
In 2006 my wife and I attended a weekend retreat hosted by International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) http://www.icsahome.com/events/workshopsgas We there were able to start making some sense of what it means to be the "products of parents that took short-cuts". I don't remember being introduced to Winell at the conference. (I don't know if there are peer concerns where Dr. Winell's opinions are concerned. It took me nine years to find this resource.)
I assume knowing the massive amount of information and studies that have been done and are being done, that it's all part of one's journey. I hope that voicing my frustration with not being able to find the information I was looking for is not taken as a criticism of all the hard work and life investments of those that have helped along the way. These are just facts. Our limitations as humans is that we don't know all things.
So for what ever reasons, Winell's work "Leaving the Fold" was lost on me for several years. I do think that in hindsight since here work takes a stronger humanistic approach, that I'd probably have been very dismissive of her work. Strange, that so few understand the difficulty of finding sound wisdom when there is no reference point of wisdom beyond the Bible.
Winell's description of the abdication of personal responsibility for the trade-out of "following the plan" is startling. I know personally that the comfort of following the "Divine Blue-print" is extremely limiting, and creates undo stress and chaos. I too "found" god's will for my life, for a short period of time. I followed the foot step of a legacy of "forsaking all to follow Christ" to the full conclusion of ultimately coming to the realization that there was no Christ.
So I write of my personal history in hopes that clarity will emerge out of the chaos that I experienced personally. To grow into a better adjusted human being that is able to do some good in this life that "I know" I possess at this moment. Maybe somebody will read and find this to be of help.
Culture Shock: the start of some of my history at TBI:
An influence of my thinking is a Christian author, Ruth Van Reken and Pollock: Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds. I've mentioned the exotic and chaotic elements of growing up in as a third culture kid. The culture shock of re-entry is a little known phenomenon. Quite unhelpfully movement was made between the extremes by "trusting Jesus" when all else failed. This mind-set was so real to me that it was not until I was no longer a missionary and heard through a friend of Van Reken's contribution to this topic that I took an interest and read this book. I was very sad to learn of things that would have helped me and my family so much as we moved between cultures and first hand experienced the stark realities arising out of moving between cultures.
In this foment of emotion: the nervous break, NC, and what not can be further explored.
Belize: Dependable, Unquestioning religious automatons
Ejection: Catastrophe or redemption!
Searching: the slow death of a god
Now: this moment
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