[RambleOn]

I, for one, appreciate that you didn't have to have experienced horrible trauma or abuse in order to still be dissatisfied and leave. Much more relatable. It sounds like some people have gone through some terrible ordeals in various LCs, but that wasn't what caused me to leave, nor was it the ugly scandals and skeletons in closets from decades ago. Those are important historical episodes to be sure, but they weren't directly relevant to my experience as an LCer, and I didn't know about most of them until I was already emotionally disconnected enough to begin researching on my own anyway.

I think it's refreshing for church kids like me to hear about people who simply came to the realization that they'd outgrown this particular movement, and just left. It's not a given that you'd need to be damaged in order to find leaving attractive. Because in speaking with some people who still do meet, that seems to be their appraisal of anyone who stops meeting, and especially of those who have been publicly speaking out. The default is to jump into ad hominem attacks in order to explain the negative experience. "I've always thought he seemed a little off," or "yes she's always struck me as a wounded soul..." And while, yes, many of us have gone through some tough experiences in life (find a group for whom that wouldn't be true), the presumption that the healthy default is to stay is itself an insidious form of social pressure, because who wants to admit to being all the nasty things they've always heard about others who have left before?

I remember a few years ago, EM was speaking at an international conference, and he told this anecdote of a young couple who had decided to stop meeting with the LCs, and EM had asked them why, and they had told him, "because we aren't happy here." EM said his response was, "well how about what makes God happy?" Talk about presumptuous, first of all, but secondly, I found that to be very telling, that people are to be expected to disregard their personal happiness and peace of mind for the benefit of the collective, on the basis of a strained interpretation of the proper ground of meeting. Then the more you learn about the divisiveness, lawsuits, attacks, quarantines, excommunications etc, the more you shake your head at the self-serving hypocrisy. God is made happy when his saints meet on the local ground, because that way there is nothing to divide them, and what that looks like is they are going to sue each other for assets, close down churches, and send in their own people to those cities, because that's "oneness." Double-plus-good.

Anyway, that's a tangent, but the point is, I think it's okay to simply say, You know I grew up meeting with the LCs, and I love many of the people there, but bottom line is I just wasn't happy, so I won't be going anymore.