by Robert Hitchcock I am and have always been an ecclesiastical mutt. My parents were middle of the road Southern and American{Yankee Baptist} when they married in 1960 and I was "Dedicated to the Lord",{a "dry" infant Baptism} in a General Baptist Church when I was born in 1961. My father was in the Air Force {Yeah, OURS!!} at the time of my birth and I cost him a whole whopping $9.60 cents in delivery costs at the Base Hospital. As I grew, Dad would pull out the bill for my birth and bemoan the "fact" I had initially been such a "low" cost investment, but with the broken arms, glasses, ear surgeries for swimmer's ear, I ended up being a high maintenance item. I know the old boy meant it mostly in jest, but then again this was a guy whose idea of a family dinner out was the Golden Arches. In the end his "cheapness was exposes for all to see when my three siblings and I were forced to share one small fry and a medium coke between the

by Tim Simmons One Tuesday night in May of 1988, I heard a knock on my apartment door. I was married at the time and my wife was at work. I opened the door. Two men from the local Baptist church were out witnessing door to door and asked if they could come in for a few minutes. I said sure. I didn’t know at the time, but they were following a gospel presentation outline that they had learned from Evangelism Explosion, a sales tactic devised by James Kennedy, then pastor of the Coral Ridge Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I invited them in and we all sat down in the living room. After a few minutes of leisurely conversation, they eased their way into the gospel presentation and slowly tried to ascertain my eternal disposition by asking me the two diagnostic questions. “Tim, have you come to the place in your spiritual life where you know for certain that if you were to die today you would go to heaven?” one of them asked. I wasn’t sure. He then proceeded

My Christian saga began at birth with a blessing from my father that I would never leave the church. My family spent many hours every week in an old time Holiness congregation. The women wore no make-up, pants, shorts, bathing suits, did not cut their hair even for a trim, and were required to have on a out of style dress, girdle, slip, pantyhose, bra even on the hottest day. The men always looked GQ. There were many other such restrictions about sex and the body. My mother finally quit the church and my Dad did as well. At about 10 I started attending the Baptist church across the street from our home because all my friends went there and we had a great time at GA's and Sunday School. At 13 all my friends and I went to a revival where I got saved because the visiting preacher scared the holy shit out of me with his hell fire and brimstone message, and I did not want to burn in eternal damnation for all eternity for my sins. What my sins were, exactly, I could not have told you,

by Anthony Westchester, Illinois USA I couldn't take all the greed and general unholiness that I saw in Christian churches! How did my encounter with Christianity begin? Well, "against my will" might be a good way of phrasing it. I was baptized in Mexico when I was born. A couple years after that, I attended school at various Christian or variant of Christian schools (Pre-school was Lutheran, 3 years of Catholic grade school, etc). However, the event that made me turn away from Christianity completely occurred when I was attending a public school, oddly enough. One of my friends was a member of the congregation at a church in the town called the Westchester Bible Church, and he was as religious as could be. I should have known there were problems when I was over at his house one day and I said "Oh god" while we were doing something and he told me that I shouldn't do that because it's taking the name of the lord in vain. "What?" I th

Dave - You had asked about my conversion/deconversion experience. I replied with a very long email and for some reason it had no text once it made it to the group. Perhaps it was over the limit or something. I'll split this one into two parts. FYI - Feel free to copy and post this anywhere, under the condition that you don't use my name - since many people close to me only know the first part of this story. My parents divorced when I was 4. I was the oldest of 3 kids. My mother had custody and basically took us to church whenever she dated a guy who went. My dad's dad died when I was 10. It shook him up and so he and my stepmother started taking us to a boring old Presbyterian church in Kentucky. I got pretty involved, but it never "clicked" like it would later. We went regularly, but we missed several times a year, if we had something else to do on a Sunday morning. Once I got to be 15, they said it was up to me whether or not I went. I did go