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By the time I reached adulthood I believed I was blessed to have grown up in about the most perfect family on the face of the earth.  I was the oldest of five siblings in a Christian home.   Not only were my parents believers, they were involved in full-time ministry most of my life.  My grandparents were believers, as were all my aunts and uncles, even all the cousins as far as I knew.  I accepted Christ as my Savior when I was five.  When I was nine I reached a new level of understanding and committed my life entirely to following God.

During a lot of my growing up years, our family was on deputation in preparation for going to the mission field.  As a result, we spent a lot of time with other ministers' families -- and when pastors get together, they just can't resist talking doctrine.  I loved to listen in while the women swapped birthing stories and the men discussed doctrine!  There was a lot of focus on the children memorizing Scripture, which resulted in me tucking away large amounts of the Word over the course of about ten years.  I went to Christian schools during most of my school years and then attended and graduated from Bible college.

All in all, I was very proud of my family and spiritual heritage.   By the time I graduated from Bible college and got married, I believed my husband and I were ready to be launched on the world for the cause of Christ.

But the princess was living in a glass house, and it had some serious cracks.  Within a short time after my turning-point with God when I was nine, I began to notice that the Christians around me at church said one thing with their mouths but their lives told another story entirely.  I watched and wondered and started to question what I was seeing.

Then when I was fourteen, we met some other Christian teens who went to Fundamentalist churches in our state.  I was amazed and excited to see teens who took their relationship with God seriously and who were "radical" in their pursuit of following God.  Here I saw people who believed that there was a way to tangibly live a holy life before God, something profoundly at odds with what I was observing in church.  My family and I embraced this "new," "more committed" mode of Christianity.

However, I gradually began to see tarnish on the halos.  During the course of a couple of moves we changed churches, always finding another church within the denomination.   But from one church to another, and sometimes from one leader to another within the same church, there were variances in "standards" and "convictions."  There was no way to ever be good enough.  There was always somebody with a list with something on it I didn't know about and didn't measure up to. 

But I forged onward, striving for holiness in my desire to please and serve God.  As the time came to head for college, my parents and I looked for a Bible college that held both the highest academic standards AND the highest standards of personal holiness.  The college we chose was part of a well-known, worldwide Christian ministry.  The president of the company and college was also the pastor of the church on campus.  While being an extremely small private Bible college, the president of the college was well connected with the leaders of Fundamentalist churches throughout the country.  As a result, we had a lot of close, behind-the-scenes exposure to Fundamentalist leadership around the States.

During my second year of college, I began to realize there were some serious problems behind the shiny façade. While we were told we were the "cream of the crop" among Christian young people, we were constantly criticized.  We were told we were ungodly, unjustly accused of wrongdoing, told we were too immature to hear from God for ourselves and therefore we must bow to the will of our leadership in all things.  There was also a good deal of immorality going on behind the scenes among the leadership and being covered up "for the sake of the ministry."   At the same time, to give credit where credit is due, there were and are a lot of people working there who are truly attempting to serve God with a pure heart.  Most have no idea the extent of the corruption in the leadership.

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