Will’s mentioned his friend’s earlier encounter with the “Church of Christ” folks, but I’ve had a friend… well, I guess ex-friend now.
Elizabeth Michelle, when I came to college, was a very nice, friendly girl. Some people would have described her as “willowy.” They would have been charitable; Elizabeth had been anorexic for years, required enzyme pills to aid digestion (one of the worst things about eating disorders or unbalanced diets is the loss of the ability to produce certain digestive enzymes, which can lead to food poisoning as undigested food just rots inside you). She was about 5′7 or 5′8 and oscillated between 80 and 85 pounds.
For the first couple years, this was where things continued. She took vitamin pills, ate mostly sugary things (what she could still digest), and her weight stayed relatively constant, if a bit scary. When she’d go home, she got into fights with her parents… with her mother over religion (her mother was a heavy Baptist, her dad was Catholic, she was Catholic) and with her dad because he insisted on trying to force-feed her “normal” food (heavily greasy stuff) that inevitably made her sick.
Enter the end of her sophomore year; around February-ish, she became involved with “Campus Crusade for Christ”, a rather cultish group. Sometimes they went by the name “International Church of Christ” instead, but the groups were one and the same. They seemed to be an “outreach” program of the local “Church of Christ” group, who didn’t have a building of their own but instead rented a large ballroom for their weird sunday services each week.
The good thing about her CCC/CoC involvement was, she got serious about becoming a healthy weight. She reached a more mature 130 pounds (which believe me was an incredible relief: she looked GOOD with curves) over the course of that summer.
Twice after that summer, she tried to drag me to their meetings; once to an on-campus CCC meeting, and once later to the sunday service at CoC (by this point, she was one of their “Sunday School” teachers). The CCC meeting was almost a brainwashing session. The CoC bit had me constantly looking around to figure out where the camera was hidden; they had the smarmy greasy-haired televangelist, his backup dancers (I kid you not), a few people waving fans in the air, and they announced new baptisms like they were doing a TV quiz show, “Just Look What You’ve Won!”
Shortly after the second try to get me involved with this group, Elizabeth started becoming less of a friend… though I was never sure if it was simply her being more involved with them, or otherwise. Eventually, she moved out of the dorms and became a “living assistant” for an elderly member of the CoC. I saw her a few times after that. Eventually, from talking to other mutual friends, it seemed she’d cut off everyone from college who wasn’t a CCC/CoC member.
Last we heard, she’d gotten pregnant and gone through a rather rushed wedding at CoC. Nobody ever heard from her after that. We hope she’s happy, but we somehow doubt it.
It’s not unheard-of for fundamentalist churches to prey on the vulnerable. There was a minor local scandal some years back when I lived in Connecticut involving a hospital admissions clerk who was a member of a hardcore Bible thumping church. It turns out that she’d alert the pastor whenever there was a psychiatric emergency admission to the hospital, and church “counselling” people would pay a visit to the patient.
Comment by Peter — April 24, 2007 @ 6:25 pm
The CoC bit had me constantly looking around to figure out where the camera was hidden; they had the smarmy greasy-haired televangelist, his backup dancers (I kid you not), a few people waving fans in the air, and they announced new baptisms like they were doing a TV quiz show, “Just Look What You’ve Won!”
Interesting. That’s unusual for a CoC operation, from most of what I’ve heard. Their services, from what I understand, are generally somber (in contrast to, say, Pentacostals). In fact, one of the first things I was told about them was that they don’t allow instrument music (ie organs) in their services because it wasn’t okayed by the Bible. They are also generally pretty understated in appearance, more midwestern than southern when it comes to make-up and so on.
Comment by trumwill — April 24, 2007 @ 6:55 pm
Here’s the thing about the televangelist service:
- there was no music. His backup dancers were vocal accompaniment, but other than that, there were no instruments or anything.
- The crowd was predominantly black, I’d say 60% so, and so was the preacher; my experience is that black churches tend to be a lot more into the whole “exuberance” thing and less into the “somber” thing.
- While they called themselves Church of Christ, I couldn’t necessarily definitively say they were the exact same as Walt’s crew or any other Church of Christ; the “Church of Christ” movement tends to follow the “loosely connected” mode of operation, so I’d imagine each church could be very different from the next. CCC, by contrast, is a whole lot more organized, mostly because they try to tie their various campus chapters together.
Comment by Webmaster — April 24, 2007 @ 10:06 pm