I was born and raised in the Dallas Branch (a very conservative branch) and towed the line till I went to Graceland for a year. I found out that the world church was not the church I was raised in. I also found that the trust I had put into the church and its leaders was ill-founded. My calling was put into question by my lack of faith that I felt. Living a lie was a hard truth to realize but the real kicker was the amount of information/truth found on the internet. Old Joe was a polygamist after all, etc, etc. Then the church, who has never changed and never will change starts accepting women in the priesthood and the the name changes. I wish my eyes were opened years ago but I will say that the church made me a better person and I hold no grudges. But ultimate truth is my focus and I will always search for it.

We haven't heard from uncle Dale Broadhurst lately, who is ex-rlds. Hope he's okay

I went to RLDS for several years, and that's where I had my children baptized. We were there just as the name was changing over to CoC. It was a friendlier more down to earth congregation than the Mormon church is. My parents both died the last year I was there, and I went through some introspection that took me back to LDS Inc for a short time until I left permanently.

I preferred RLDS because many of its beliefs are more in alignment with mainstream Christian beliefs. Not enough to go back there. There were some things I had some difficulty with, and left due to what I considered a lack of moral compass at the time that I didn't wish to subject my children to.

It wasn't women in the priesthood I had a problem with.. Just some other things that didn't align with the values I hold dear and was trying to instill in my family. Going there for a while was a learning experience for our family. And there are some really fine people there I consider to be spiritual giants. And some who are not, like anywhere else.

I remember the first Sunday after we moved up to Buffalo, and didn't have anywhere to go to church yet. My children were 8 and 10 at the time. I called ahead to the RLDS to find out their meeting times. The kind woman I spoke to said she was looking forward to meeting all of us.

On that Sunday morning I was lying in bed when I felt something tickling my feet. I don't know what it was, but it felt so funny and ticklish that I jumped out of bed. Since I was up early because of that and wide awake, I went ahead and got my children and me off to our first meeting there. The woman pastor's mother told me in Sunday School she had prayed for us all that past week that a guardian angel would bless us to get out the door that Sunday. I laughed with her as I shared my experience about having my feet tickled.

It was a Kodak moment.

I grew up RLDS in Michigan in the 70s and 80s. I remember that a big part of our identity was, "No, we're not Mormons!" A lot of explaining how we were different from "the Utah church."

I have really fond memories of Reunion. Every year, my dad would take his one week of vacation time and we would go to the church campground and stay there for the week. I just loved that place. I felt so relaxed and happy there. It was so much fun to spend a week with people from all over the district, not just our own little branch. Singing "The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning" with such a large group of people was amazing. I also loved the campfire songs and skits in the evenings. Our Reunion grounds was on the shore of one of the Great Lakes, and I was baptized in the lake when I was 8.


My grandma was from a family of about 7 or 8 siblings, and they were all members of our branch, along with most of their kids and grandkids. So the church really was my extended family.

My dad was ordained sometime when I was very young and was very active in the church throughout my childhood. (Note to LDS folks - not all RLDS men are ordained into the priesthood. They are "called by God" and it's not necessarily something that happens for everyone. The youngest I've ever seen someone ordained was about 17 or 18.) We were usually the first ones at church on Sunday mornings and also the last ones to leave. He was branch president for a really long time. He was also very active in our town's association of churches. He went up to the jail and nursing home to minister to people.

I hated Wednesday night prayer and testimony services. There would be these horrible, awkward, painful silences when no one wanted to say anything. It was just the same handful of people every time.

There were a few times, especially at Reunion, when I was there to hear "the Spirit" speaking through someone. I wasn't really sure how I felt about it, since the Spirit always said exactly what I had been thinking. For example, one year at Reunion there was some sort of heritage theme. People were going on and on with their testimonies about how long their families/ancestors had been in The Church. At first it was a little interesting to hear some stories, but after a while, it became quite tedious. And people were bragging on and on about their ancestors and the awesome stuff they did, way back before the person talking had ever been born. And I was thinking, "Who cares what your great-great-grandpa did? What have YOU done?" And next thing I knew, the Seventy who was there stood up and spoke in a powerful and trembling voice and said more or less the same thing - that what matters is what you are doing now, not what your family has done in the past.

When the church started ordaining women in the 80s, my mom was one of the first ones in our area to be ordained. I was so happy and proud of her. But there were some people in our branch who wouldn't take communion from her and who would skip church when she was scheduled to preach. But I think the overall quality of the sermons increased greatly when they added some women to the priesthood. We finally had some smart and educated people up there talking, people who knew how to organize their thoughts and present a coherent message. Some of the men in the priesthood were barely literate (the guys who had dropped out of school after 8th grade to work on the farm full time, etc.)

Sometime - I think it was the early to mid 80s - some of the more conservative people left the RLDS church and formed the "Restoration" church. They felt that the church was headed in the wrong direction and they wanted to get back to the "original" church. At the time I had understood it to be about the new hymnals, because they were definitely upset about some changes, but I'm sure that wasn't the whole story.

I pretty much stopped believing sometime in my teens, but continued to attend church at least occasionally, when I was home from college or something. Mostly because I wanted to see the people there.

I'll never forget the day when I was in about 3rd grade and I cried after church because my Sunday School teacher had told us that we should marry someone from the church. For some reason, I was thinking only of our little branch, even though we went to Reunion every year and I knew there were other church members. But since most of the kids in Sunday School were my cousins, there was only one boy around my age who would be a potential husband. And I didn't like him. At all. I was so upset. When I told my parents what I was crying about, the reassured me that I didn't have to marry that boy or any other church boy.

My parents are still in the church, but they have slowed down as they've gotten older. They are upset by how liberal the church has become. And they had a hard time when the church came out and said, "oh by the way, all those things that people said about Joseph Smith Junior, that we denied for years, were actually true."

I'm curious about your issues with the world church. We were always getting a lot of direction from them.

Been wanting to share some insights I've has since leaving the church.If this post is still open someone email me. I grew up in the church, Been teacher,elder and pastor. Been thinking about writeing and article or book on my journey but many of you have had my experience. The church that I grew up in was not "Christ Centered " but "Church Centered." Any Church that has had as much conflict as Mormonism has can not be Christ Centered, I was even worse than COC I was a fundamental restorationist and was caught up in the leagalism of the church. I have come to the openion that when the Leadership of the church found out that they had been wrong about things all these years that they had to try to change the church but instead of admitting that they were wrong the only choice they had was to change the doctrine and see what happend and to do it slow enough that they would not lose their church. I figure that until the leadership attended siminary outside the church they came to the conclusion that they didnt have the answers to the hard questions. I could not see inside the church until I was on the outside of it. The people on the outside wern't as ignorant as we thought they were. The whole thing in a nutshell is it is not about the church and what it can do, it is about Jesus Christ and what He did and God's saving grace.

Postpharisee Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> The whole thing in a nutshell is it is not
> about the church and what it can do, it is about
> Jesus Christ and what He did and God's saving
> grace.

Absolutely it's all about grace! I was just looking around today to see if Ex-RLDS sites/conversations still were out there. My spiritual journey was as a Baptist as a child (my parents didn't attend) then going to the RLDS church as a teen and eventually joining. I had an amazing experience as a teen and am a Graceland grad. I wouldn't trade the Graceland years for anything. However as a young adult, I started to see the non-truths (such as Joseph Smith was never a polygamist). In spite of all that I was ordained one of the first female elders in the D/FW area. Lots of conflict and the church here had a lot of people split off over ordaining women. A few years after our first child was born my ex and I left for a non-denominational church and never looked back. Been thinking about visiting some of my long-ago friends at the local RLDS (now Community of Christ) Church. Don't know if I can go visit once without having them "bugging" me about going back though.

One woman used to post several times a day for years. Her parents were fanatical and she had to limit contact because of their toxic attitude toward her leaving their church.

I'm sorry she left as you would have had some good discussions.

I have two friends who were born and raised RLDS. Both originally from Missouri. One is in her 80s and dying of cancer now. One has moved away, but I'm connected to him on Facebook. The funny thing is that although both of them are ex-RLDS now and I only found out about that when they found out I was exmo, neither one seemed to have any major issues with leaving or having been RLDS. So even though they had some historical issues with JS, I don't think many of them were indoctrinated with bullshit the way we were.