Author Archive
Michal Pleban
Why did I stop believing in God? The shortest answer would be that I ran out of excuses for him. Pentecostal Christianity stresses that God is actively involved in the believers’ lives, answering their prayers, communicating with them, and changing events around them. As a teenager, I loved this idea. I was raised in traditional Catholicism, where God, while powerful, was very distant. I always thought that if there is a God, I wanted to have close contact with him – I couldn’t imagine any other way of living a meaningful life.But the dull Catholic liturgy, repeated week after week, did not provide me that. So when I found myself at a charismatic, joyous Pentecostal meeting, I knew immediately that what I had discovered was a religion for me.
Carolyn Shadle
I am a senior (age 74 at this writing) and only recently admitted to myself that I am an atheist. I was brought up in a conservative (aka fundamentalist) Presbyterian church but went to a “liberal” Presbyterian college (The College of Wooster) where I was introduced to a more scholarly approach to scriptures. From there I earned a Masters in Religious Education at Union Theological Seminary. While I understood that the stories in the Bible (particularly the “Old Testament”) were just that – stories, it never occurred to me to actually reject the entire thesis of the Christian faith.
Ranier
The son of recent German immigrants, I was born in Western Canada in 1956. My mother grew up in a fundamentalist Christian home where guilt and shame were generously dispensed by her mother and later also by her grandfather. My father was a skeptic and nominal Lutheran who found it hard to stomach Christian hypocrisy and thus only attended church on occasion. Sadly though he grew up in a home with little emotional support and little love. My parents fought constantly about pretty much everything but especially about religion. My younger brother, now an ordained minister with The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, and I grew up in a home with fighting, yelling, physical abuse and parents who had poor parenting skills.
Calvin King
I’m a former Mennonite minister who served in two congregations in Kansas for a total of 30 years before resigning and entering the business world as a human resource manager. I distinctly remember reading through the Bible in 6 months when I was eight years old. I was surprised by God’s anger and destructiveness. Still I believed.
Robert Crompton
It was November 1965 when, while still in my twenties, I walked out of the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses as a disfellowshipped person.Because I had come to disagree – quite strongly, in fact – with many of the teachings of the Watch Tower Society, I was summoned before a judicial committee to give an explanation for myself. They probed and questioned, and questioned me again. Surely this was all just to cover up some other wrong-doing, some immorality? No, it was not. It was simply what I said it was– my disagreement with Watch Tower teaching.
Mark
My life was the church. I grew up in the church. I went on numerous mission trips. I got a college degree designed to prepare me for church ministry. I worked as a youth pastor for several years. I got my masters degree in seminary. Finally, I found a great job as the senior pastor in a fantastic, growing evangelical church. It was a wonderful place to work and I loved my job for over half a decade.
Ches Smith
In Southern Baptist circles, they say “once saved, always saved” as if there’s no going back. They say something similar about alcoholics so I can’t help but picture myself seated in a circle in the middle of a gymnasium, waiting for my turn to stand up and say, “Hi. My name is Ches and I’m a Jesuholic.” Anyway, I’m from Houston, married with three children, and I work as a computer tech at a middle school. I have a background in art and I’m also an author. My first novel, Under the Suns, was published in August 2014.
John Laughlin
John serves on TCP’s Screening Committee. Where to start??? I grew up in the home of a Southern Baptist minister in North Carolina. I started Wake Forest College (WF) in 1960 and graduated in 1967. I would say that is because I am a slow learner but the truth is I dropped out of college in the fall of my sophomore year and spent the next 3 years in the US Army (doesn’t mean that I’m NOT a slow learner!). I Was sent to Taiwan after specialized training in the ASA (Army Security Agency). The best part about that tour of duty was learning to love freshly brewed hot tea! I drink a lot of it every day. (I think that is what gives me my youthful appearance so clearly seen in my picture above!).
Vic Milne
My single-parent mother was not excessively religious, but she sometimes told me Bible stories with the assumption that they were true. She also sent me to a fundamentalist Sunday School because it was the nearest church. She attended church for a while but then stopped going. I didn’t know it at the time, but she was turned off because the congregation leaders canned the pastor in a very dirty way—gave him a pair of airline tickets to visit his home in Scotland, but when he came back to Canada, his job was gone. Mom kept sending me to Sunday School, until at the age of 11, I announced that I didn’t want to go anymore, and she didn’t put up a fight about it. I remember that when a census was taken in my teens, I insisted on being designated an agnostic. However, that didn’t last.