Be In My Book

My book (working title Wrestling With God I Was A Teenage Pharisee) is almost done.  It’s about trying to move beyond a culture of legalism without losing relationship with God.  It assumes that a culture of legalism is bad, and that you have had negative experience of one, which experience you are trying to sort out.  

Please answer whichever of the following you wish, in as much detail as you wish, using an assumed name if desired. I'm looking for personal experiences to cite in my book, using only your first name (real or assumed) to label them.  It's fun writing about myself and all, but having the collected observations and experiences of others of similar background adds a great deal of colour, breadth, depth and weight to something like this.

Please email your responses to wikkidperson AT hotmail.com.  I would love to fill out my book with some of the thoughts, feelings and experiences of other people.

1. When you read the bible now, does it tend mostly to support, or challenge the legalism you grew up under?
2. Describe difficulties you have had in dealing socially with legalistic people in your own setting. Specific incidents are better than general statements.
3. Some of our friends threw their legalistic church culture right overboard when they hit adulthood, and hit it hard.  What are some of the horror stories you have, as to friends making a mess of their lives in fleeing legalism in this way?  Did they “come back” afterward, repentant prodigals?
4. Some of our friends “stayed with” church culture and never really broke rules or went against it, and are now raising obedient, old-school (often homeschooled) church kids.  Are you aware of any downside or sacrifice or struggle involved in them having done this? What has been hard about it for them?
5. What was it like for you to first attend the worship services of another church?  To what degree did your Brethren upbringing make you feel you were being unfaithful, or indulging in something fleshly, or the like? Did your upbringing "ruin" you for enjoying the worship activities of other Christians?
6. Did your culture make it hard for you to connect to others, in terms of romantic relationships? How?
7. When you think of an activity (non-sexual) which utterly pulls you out of yourself, your week and your problems, making you lose all track of it and just getting engaged in what's going on, what is that activity?  Makes you feel alive and yourself and good? Did you discover it while still living under your birth culture, or as a result of connection with people and things outside of it?  Was it/would it be encouraged and nurtured, were you still living very much under your culture's limits?
8. How much do you "trust" God with your dreams, hopes and aspirations? Do you fear you need to hide from Him to get the desires of your heart, and if you listen to Him enough, He'll send you to Africa?  Has there been a change in this, since your teens?
9. What do you feel would be the consequences, were you to “get legalistic” and live the next ten years with an excessive degree of unchecked legalism running through every aspect of your life?  What would happen?
10. In your teens and early adulthood, how much of a “thing” were fairly inexplicable and disproportionate feelings of crippling shame? And how about nowadays?
11. How important is feeling in control to you?  Do you tend to view a loss of control as sin?  Has a need for control ever limited your options?
12. Growing up, how aware were you that other people were watching to see how "godly" or "worldly" you were being?
13. To what degree do you feel like pleasing (not shaming) your parents as to life choices continued to be a (disproportionately, unhealthy) central concern well into your adult life? If so, how does one grow beyond that a bit?
14. What is the best concrete difference your church culture made in the secular community in which it was located?
15.  To what degree are your standards for your life entirely higher and different, in many ways, than your standards for the proper behaviour of other, "regular" folks?  Are you less forgiving of yourself, because you need to be better?
16. Growing up, how aware were you that there were a lot of (unwritten) rules in your church culture?
17. Exactly how were you made aware of these unwritten rules, if you didn’t somehow “just know” them?  Was there some common thread which connected all of these rules together?
18. How were the rules enforced, generally?  Have you ever exerted pressure on someone else when he or she wasn’t really keeping the rules?
19. What happened when you first decided to bend or break some of the rules? Which rules did you choose? (What happened inside you, and then when you did it, and what was the aftermath?)
20. Do you feel you grew up to be someone who “self-generated” Brethren rules? (If no rule existed for a given situation, you kind of "just made a rule up" all by yourself?)
21. Talk about your own growing relationship with enjoyment/pleasure as you left home. Have you made progress?  Did you need to?
22. To what degree did/do you struggle with a view of a God who was waiting to pounce on you and punish you for enjoying things?
23. My cousin said that growing up under our Brethren rules resulted in us becoming either rebels or liars.  I would add that some of us became zealots, who felt “better than” rebels or liars, and tried to actually keep all the rules.  We judged them in my hearts.  Comments about your own rebelling or lying (or zealotry)?
24. I found my conscience had to change/develop. It began to focus less on movie theatres and concerts, and more on how to treat people properly. It was like regular folks had more tender consciences about how to treat other people properly than we did.  Comments?
25. Did you feel like your culture simply wasn’t enough for you in terms of your finding a true relationship with God, or did you feel like it actively seemed to “block” your efforts to find Him more genuinely?
26. What have you discovered about the bible that you don’t feel was the main thrust of Brethren teaching?  How did you discover it, if you weren't taught it in your own birth culture?
27. What important things have you learned from dealing with people (including writers and musicians) outside of your birth culture?
28. Twenty-seven would be an awfully awkward number of questions to have, wouldn't it?