I've been working on a "Spiritual Biography" for my Ministerial License in the United Church of Christ. The writing has gone in fits and starts, as I struggled with the right tone for what is essentially a toss-off document.
The following three paragraphs were part of an early attempt that seemed, in retrospect, more like the beginning rough-draft of an autobiographical novel than a five-page biography for the Committee on Church and Ministry. But, I liked them so much, I want to share them anyway:
My earliest recollections of church are of frightening "fire and brimstone" sermons, pounded down by stern ministers wearing shabby suits and sporting greasy, Ritchie Cunningham hairstyles.
I was raised in the Wesleyan Church, a conservative split off the Methodists, by missionary parents. The Wesleyans split with the Methodists over slavery in the nineteenth century (they were abolitionists and the mainline Methodists didn't want to offend the southern base), but they were then swept up in the Holiness Movement of the early twentieth century. By the 1970s, when I was growing up, the church was firmly planted in conservative Christianity, which meant plenty of sermons about the end-times, influenced by Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth.
At the age of five, fearing what might happen if the Rapture occurred and I wasn't saved, I went forward at a camp meeting to ask Jesus to "come into my heart." Too afraid not to walk up the aisle and repent, but too afraid to walk up the aisle alone, I asked my Aunt Becki to go with me. She held my hand the whole way, and I knelt at the rough camp-meeting altar and said the words the lay minister told me to repeat after him. My Aunt and the nice minister beamed at me and told me I was saved, but I was dubious. I think I expected some tingling or tromping in my chest — Jesus was making his home in my heart, after all — but I felt nothing.