Skip to main content

Just to get it off my chest

By an Ex-missionary ~

I'd like to tell my story here. I just need to tell it. To get it off my chest. I am from Brazil and English is not my first language, so I ask who may read it not to judge my grammar.

I lost my faith. I really don't know if I would define myself as an atheist or agnostic. Right now, it just doesn't seem important. Here goes my story...

I became a Christian when I was fifteen (I am 26 now) and at the age of nineteen I was totally committed to the Christian faith, so I decided to become a missionary.

My parents were also Christians (they still are) and they supported me. I was studying math at College, but I quit to go to Missions.

I went to a State 600 Km far from mine to take a missionary school named (Discipleship Training School) DTS from a Mission named YWAM (JOCUM in Brazil).

After the training, which was very superficial and fast, only five months, I started as a missionary at YWAM, kind of a rookie missionary though, so my work was basically to keep close to the more experienced missionaries and do stuff like help to clean the Mission, teach math in a social program, tell my testimony at churches and talk about Jesus in order to convert people (share the gospel like door to door or with terrible street plays)

I have always liked reading and learning, and YWAM usually encourages its missionaries to take more courses after the basic DTS, so I ended up taken a biblical course to learn more about the bible and I also had the opportunity to study English in Canada, at YWAM too, that's why I can make this account.

I spent six years in YWAM, from 19 to 25. In those six years I lived in poor conditions sharing rooms with many people, sometimes with very annoying people by the way. But I didn't care at first, because I was so enthusiastic about being a missionary.

Naturally as the time passed, the enthusiasm faded, and I began to question my life, my mission, and even my faith.

Many people who get out of the missionary field manage to keep their faith. Many become pastors or leaders in their churches, but I couldn't do any of it, for two basic reasons.

1 - I was totally tired of Church stuff. Gospel music, speeches, books, everything. I couldn't stand to stay in a Church for minutes, let alone hours. (I still can't)

2 - I started to question Christianity and the Bible. I studied a lot. I did not get a theology degree, but I read a lot. I read the bible 5 times in those 6 years and many books. Luther, Calvin, Karl Barh, C.S. Lewis, Stott, Piper, Norman Geisler, all these people, I read all these authors, and the more I read the more my doubts grew. the question is: None of them really give good answers to the contradictions of the bible and, even worse in my opinion, the contradictions of life. Suffering, misery, corruption, injustice, and all the filth of the world that we all know very well. I live in Brazil and I see these things everyday, I also have been to Africa , once, as a missionary, I went to Guinea Bissau, things there are really horrifying, like, people eating cookies made of clay because of the hunger.

I started to question Christianity and the Bible. I studied a lot.The point is, I lost my faith in a God who cares, who acts, I lost my faith in the bible, I lost my faith in the Church and in all religions there are.

When I realized that I had no way to keep at the church I saw myself in a very difficult situation. I was 25. Only high school educated and had never worked in a "real job", so, you can imagine my curriculum. How could I get a job? What would I do with my life? It was the end of 2012 and it was a time of deep conflict in my mind.

I told my family that I would focus on studying and making a different life. They are religious, but not fanatical, so I had no problems with them, although, I didn't tell them I was no longer a believer, I just said that I didn't want to be a missionary anymore. My problem was really what I said in the last paragraph. Being 25, poorly educated, unemployed, from a middle class family and with a work history of a missionary, which is only useful if you want to work for a church, what was not an option for me.

I quit YWAM in January 2013 and had nowhere to go. Luckily I learned English, so I could find a job as an English teacher, which is what I do now, I teach English to kids and teenagers. I also managed to get back to College, In Brazil the best universities are public and therefore free, however, it is not easy to get in, you have to pass an exam with many competitors. I am studying languages and English literature, so, I am studying and teaching now. I didn't return to my parents house, Thanks "god", I made some new friends and I share an apartment with them now. I don't even live in my parent's city, I am at the city 600 km far from them where I took that first missionary school.

Now I see my life going somewhere and I am positive about my future. I am struggling hard to make it up for the wasted years when I was living alienated from the real world, but it is not easy. Some people who started math with me are getting their PhDs now and I am still a graduating student. Not all of them kept studying for an academic career of course, but most of them are more financial stable than I am right now and I feel frustrated because I could be in a better situation.

My life today is not easy, and I blame no one because I know that it is the result of my past decisions. I am not here to complain, or judge anyone or anything, I wrote all this because I wanted to share this experience.

I am 26 years old now, and I will graduate probably at the age of 29. I intend to pursue an academic career, so I will have to study and work for a bit longer yet, but I am happy that I found myself doing something that I like and that can give me more stability in the future.

My family knows that I don't go to any church, but they think I am still a believer. I don't intend to tell them theses things now, but I know that the day will come. However, it's a problem "for future Pedro" (to cite How I met your mother, one of my favorite series)

I am happy that I wrote it here. I don't know if it will help anyone, but the fact that I wrote already helped myself.

One last thing. I don't miss the church. I don't miss missions or the bible. I don't feel guilty, I feel free. And it is what matters to me now.

But, sometimes I miss the feeling of having a relationship with God. I hope he exists and that he will clean all the mess there is in this world, but I don't think about it everyday, and it is only a hope, not a certainty anymore.

That's it! Sorry for any grammar mistake. I know that I should know this stuff since I work with it, but I speak better than I write, so, it's something :D

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two