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serving as pilgrim Life History Rev. Eric Posa | |||||
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Track 2: Song: "Wings of a Dove" Artist: Ferlin Husky There was much about my family that helped us to fit in well with our neighbors in Kennedale. Religiously, though, my family had little in common with others in my community. Kennedale was permeated with the sort of evangelical Protestantism common to working-class white southerners. I was raised unchurched, however. My father would call himself Baptist if you asked him directly about religion, but I never knew him to attend church, read the bible, pray, or do any of the things I associated with religious people at the time. My mother was raised in the Pentecostal church, in which her own mother was very active, but left the church after her teen years. The only times I remember religion and church-goers discussed during my childhood, mom was decrying "hypocrites" who go out partying every Saturday night, then put on a fake show of piety in church the next day while disdaining those not in attendance. I visited worship services or Bible classes only about a dozen times before graduating high school. Every time, this was because I was invited by classmates, who were convinced they needed to prostelytize me. All of these were Southern Baptist and Church of Christ congregations. I never encountered mainline Protestantism, Catholicism, or any non-Christian religion (and certainly did not know about Unitarian Universalism) until I started college. Nor was I ever comfortable at any of these churches I did visit, or with the friends who would discuss their religious lives with me. Those incidents colored my perceptions of church and religion, and led me to reject the evangelical Christianity I knew at the time, along with any organized religious life, by the end of my high school years. backward to "Walking After Midnight" forward to "Imagine" | |||||
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