I Didn t Join a Cult I Joined a Church

Welcome to Unhurched, where truth breaks tradition, faith finds freedom, and your story matters. My name is Edna White, and this is part of Keeping It Real On Purpose. Today is probably one of the hardest conversations I've ever decided to have. Yes, I've told parts of the story. I've told, you know, excerpts of it with other guests, but I've never started my own story to tell you about my time in a religious cult. And at the time, I didn't know it was, but if you ever decided to have this conversation and more, this is the place for you. I started this episode in my head hundreds of times. Should I tell it? Should I stay quiet? Will people understand? Will people think I'm attacking Christianity or any other religion? Will people think I'm bitter? The answer is, I don't know. And personally, I don't care. What I do know is that this is my story. I'm not telling anyone what to believe. I'm not asking anyone to leave their church. I'm simply sharing what happened to me. For over 20 years, I gave my life, maybe even more, 28 I think it was, I gave my life to one church. I wasn't just a member. I helped build it. I defended it. I recruited people into it. I believed in it. I love the people there. And I honestly believed I would spend the rest of my life there. So if you're expecting a story from someone who hated church, that's not me. I loved church. I loved it. I just slowly stopped recognizing myself inside it. You see, my life before church was full of childhood trauma. I was sexually abused from the age of six or seven to the age of 14. I had one major perpetrator who was supposed to be the one that was supposed to look after me, my stepdad. But he didn't. He perpetrated me. He molested me every possible chance he could. And then there was what we now know as his godson was his son. We now know it's his son. And then his nephew. And my aunt's first, or one of her boyfriends, and I don't want to say first, but one of her boyfriends, fondled me. So I was coming out of this. And the time that I first entered into church is when one of my friends, when I was 13, invited me. And after a while, about 13, 14, well, after 14 or 15, my mom kind of took me out of it. And it was the same type of organization. And so she took me out of it. And, you know, I was going on to, like, finish high school, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff I was doing. But I ended up getting back into it. And I don't even remember how. I think it was through my best friend, Helen Williams. That's how I got involved with it. And I met this wonderful woman. And she had a beautiful church, a beautiful spirit. And she has had the come as you are, where you are, when you are. She had that type of openness and love about her for the people. And when I talked to her about how I was feeling, and this was just at the same time that I had tried to commit suicide. It was the same time. And I was explaining to my friend, I am just struggling so hard, you know, with all of this, and I don't know what to do. She said, Well, just come to church and meet, you know, Fannie. And I said, Okay, well, you know, and so I went to meet her and she was just the most amazing pastor there was. And then I, there was something that was going on within internally within the church. The church kind of split. And I ended up going with the elder of the church to right around the corner where he had his church. And so I ended up going there. And that's where I spent from the age of 22 all the way up to 40 something. That's why I ended up spending most of my time. And so you can just see and know that's what I was dealing with a lot of what was going on. And I was just entered into therapy. So I was just learning how to accept these these new tools and try to navigate myself through this and still with more trauma and more trauma packed on top of it. So you could just imagine what I was feeling, who I was before church was on top of that I was modeling. I was a receptionist at Walker radio station of East Patchogue. I was a force to be reckoned with. I loved fashion. I loved beauty. I love the beauty of all people. I love to look good. And then growing up, and now entering this, this era, or space where I had to change, I had to be something different. Because women could not look beautiful. They had to look chaste and downtrodden. So I, you couldn't look beautiful, you couldn't wear makeup, you couldn't wear earrings, you couldn't wear nice clothes. You can wear nice clothes, but they had to be certain clothes. So you had to look chaste and not noticeable. You know, you had to, you know, be embarrassed of your body. If you had, you know, large breasts, if you had, you know, a big butt, you had to downplay that. You had to wear clothes, a lot of it, you had to do a lot of taping up of things, you know, getting where two or three bras to kind of cover yourself up. And my personality, you know, was not that everything was like, yeah, you know, I was the one that always loved to laugh, love to be involved in high energy. But I couldn't be that way anymore. When I entered in the space of church, my mother always followed me to churches, she wasn't a church person. And I later found out that she followed me to churches, so I wouldn't tell the story. I wouldn't stick around. So that's why she didn't stick it stick around the first church that I went to, because I had already told the story. And that, you know, pastor told me to go to therapy, you need to go to therapy, church can't solve it for you, you need to go to therapy. It was the first pastor that I ever heard say that. And still to this day, I don't hear pastors saying that. And so along with her came my stepfather, who was the abuser, and it was like this family secret. Now, when I shared the story with my teacher, Pat Murray, that was her name. And she called the police. And that back in the days in the 70s, that's all they they knew is to call the police. So the police took me home was a discussion with the cops. And then my mother looking at me like I did something totally wrong. And it was the worst thing I could have done. And I was told to go to my room, and she would talk to him. And I heard a lot of screaming and hollering and door slamming. And the next thing I knew, you stay over here, he stays over here. I don't know how that's possible if we're supposed to be a family. So this kid here is 12 years old saying, well, how is that even going to happen? I don't even think I was 12. I think I was maybe 9 or 10. And how could I even figure that out? You know, I wasn't even 12. No, I wasn't even 12 because I was 13 in Belfort. So at any rate, my mother's response set in my soul. And it made me angry. And I was this angry kid. Throughout teenage years, my stepfather and her followed me to church. And needless to say, if you know this, the apostolic or Pentecostal religion, women are, they're put down low on the totem pole. You know, they're only useful as they can be useful. But after that, they're sat on the side, and the men take the stage. So I was 19 when I entered into this church, into the arena of church. Right after, right before I went to the church, I had attempted suicide and sat and laid on the railroad track with my young son, which was about a year and something. And I was laying on the track and waiting for the train. The train never came. All day. I waited all day. I waited all day and the train never came. And I remember saying to myself, man, I can't even kill myself right. So I, you know, I kind of knew then that, you know, there was something, a force that wanted me here for some reason, you know, for not some reason, but an exact reason. So I was trying to make sense of my life and I wasn't happy. And I went to my friend, Helen was telling this, and she said, come with me to church. And that's how I got involved. So, but as I move forward, my stepdad came with me and that was so debilitating in itself. It was debilitating because I see him rise to power as a worker. He was a man and I put in time and work and effort and programs and all of this, and he gets away with everything, you know? So I walked in and I stayed because I wanted to be part of something. I needed what I didn't get, safety. I needed a father, safety. I needed parents, safety. I need siblings and friendships that wouldn't walk out on me, safety. I needed that. And that's why I stayed all those years. I know what you're going to probably ask me is why didn't you just leave? And that's really a fair question. And I just told you is that I needed people to welcome me. You know, that love bombing that they do in the beginning, love bombing you, they welcome you. They hugged me. They called me daughter. They remembered my name. Okay. They remembered my name. They invited me to their homes. After everything I had been through, that mattered. Looking back now, I understand why I stayed. At the time, I just thought I had found my family. I never questioned when the church split. I never questioned why it split. I just followed like a lamb to the slaughter. Nobody sat me down and said, we are going to control your life. It wasn't like that. It happened slowly. One teaching, one correction, one compromise, one act of obedience at a time. The church just didn't shape my faith. It slowly took ownership of my decisions. It influenced what I wore. I had come from modeling. I just told you this. I loved expressing myself. I loved writing. And I'm going to tell you, I didn't write a single thing except for their programs, except for their, you know, services that they wanted. I didn't do anything more than that outside myself. That had become my hobby, church. I loved expressing myself. Now, at that time, long dresses, covered arms, head coverings, which made no sense. You had to cover your head in the presence of God. Well, if God's just in the churches and not all everywhere else, shouldn't the world be dark? Shouldn't it be the world not bloom, not flourish? It didn't make any sense then, but I went along with it. And it certainly doesn't make any sense now. Even at the beach, the women wore dresses over their bathing suits, which didn't make any sense. But the men didn't have to do those things. They didn't have those expectations. They didn't have those rules. The women were taught to be embarrassed of themselves, to degrade themselves, to put themselves in the back burner, to not love themselves. The women's identity was washed out of them. Mine was. I accepted it because I believed suffering made you holy. That's what they told us. Suffering makes you holy. Being embarrassed, you know, makes you holy. It makes you holy. Looking crazy in society makes you holy. And then something else started changing. After a while, my friendships, they influenced my friendships. I remember being friends with another, my friend Cindy, and she was from a sister church that we attended. And we'd go on vacation together. We were thick as thieves. And they always questioned me, what's the hoopla about Cindy? What's the big deal about her? You have your friends right here. But none of them wanted to do what I wanted to do. None of them wanted to travel. None of them wanted to just be out on the boat. None of them wanted to do things I wanted to do. They started influencing my friendships, who I spent time with, who I trusted, who I kept my distance from. If someone left the church, I learned to pull away. If leadership questions someone, I question them too. It also influenced my romantic relationships. And I had, at the time when I entered, I had already left and left my children's father. And they influenced me to get back with him. And the whole cycle started again. So I ended up divorcing him anyway. But in the meantime, you know, I and another gentleman that wasn't in our church, we were friends outside of church. And then we started what we wanted to date. And I remember him coming in and saying to me, Hey, you know, I'm gonna go ask your pastor because you don't seem to have a dad because I let him know we're dating. I said, Okay, you know, I didn't think that was a thing, you know, like, you don't have to ask. We're like, I think we're in a time where he's in our 30s. So we didn't have to ask, you know. However, he did. And they bashed that. They said no way no how. And because he was a traveling preacher, I would be gone. I didn't know that at the time. That was the reason I found out later. They didn't they didn't want me to go anyway. So they choose who's acceptable who wasn't. And without realizing it, I slowly stopped asking myself, what do I think? Instead, I started asking and looking to the leadership to give me their feedback. What do you think? What should I do? Even in my own career, I was asking them questions, instead of Looking back, that really break is breaking my heart right now. To think that I handed over my life to people who didn't even know what a career like mine looked like. Because I already spent my childhood with someone taking away my choices. Without realizing, I gave those choices away. Again, I gave those choices to someone who didn't even know me. And didn't plan on knowing me. They planned on owning me. We even had our own languages guys. Praise God. God is good all the time. All this other nonsense. We had all that. We had all that. We had those special phrases and the way we speak and they would drill it into us that that's the language that we're supposed to have. The more I learned that language, the more and the further I moved away from my own voice. I want you to think about that. Because that is what happens to you when you lend yourself or give yourself to a system that's created on falsities. Created to control. The churches were created to control. From a book that was created to control. That was created, that was made up as plays. Made up as stories. There's not a bit of truth in it when you really do the research. And one thing that one scripture that comes to mind is study to show thyself approved. A workman that rightly divided the word of truth. That was one of the major things that we overlooked every day. And if we just sat down and studied like I did after I got out of church. I sat down and studied and worked on everything and figured it out. Did I know that hey, this is not even a real book. It's not real. It was created by someone who was definitely had no qualifications to put it together. And you know how many hands touch that. But that's a different story for a different day. So let's get to where I was serving in the church. You see I wasn't just attending. I was working. Constantly. Chairperson. Secretary. Organizer. Teacher. Assistant. Planning retreats. Planning dinners. Planning vacation. Bible school. Planning groups. Planning programs. Recruiting people. Building programs. If something needed to be done, I was probably doing it. People came because I invited them. Some say because of me. I never saw it as recruiting. But they saw in me the ability to draw people. Which I had no idea I had. They saw my gift before I saw it. I thought I was helping people find what I found. And looking back, it's hard to admit. It wasn't the right place to bring them. This understanding. This awakening. Is where you should be. There's cracks that I need you to understand. There were moments I couldn't explain. Like seeing my stepfather, the man who abused me, become a deacon. I was told that because I had been divorced, certain doors were closed for me. That was hard. Really hard. Then there was a message. Forgive. Forget. Move on. As someone recovering from childhood sexual abuse, those words nearly destroyed me. Nobody asked what healing looked like. Nobody asked what recovery looked like. It was simple. Forgive. Another moment came when I trusted my discernment. I whispered something privately to someone. When I was learning how to lean into my discernment, my clear sentience that we all have. That innate creature that can sense things through the energy of others. We all have it. Some of us use it more than others. And that's more of our dominant energy read or our sensory. Some of us use that. I was trusting it one time at this service. They came up. They asked me to pray over everybody, which I didn't like touching people. Now I know why. I saw this one man. I read his energy. I leaned over and whispered to him. The words were, what you see, what you're looking at, is not edifying your soul. I just stood back. He didn't move. He just started crying. Moments later, maybe 10 minutes later, he stood up before he ended the service. He said, I want to thank God for that little sister there, which I'm five, five guys. And he says, I want to admit something. I've been watching pornography and I can't go on doing this and meeting people. Everybody gasped. And he said, I want to leave my parishioners with the church that he was visiting. I am, I have to get some help. And so they gathered around him. And he, of course, as the proverbial church scene prayed over him, little did they know, realize that that same energy could go to them. They were laying hands on him and he wasn't really recovering or really allowing that from out of them. So, um, he then talked afterwards. I said, you need therapy. This does not therapy. And he said, he agreed. So I haven't seen him after a while. I haven't seen him since, but, um, one of the missionaries didn't like that. I said what I said and went to tell my leader, my pastor about it, that I was reprimanding another leader. And this other leader was forced to confess because I must've got the truth out of it or something. I don't know. So instead of, you know, she went to tell the leader, my leader, and instead of asking how it happened, I was reprimanded. You can't do those types of things. You're not a leader. You don't have that power. That was one of the first moments I realized truth isn't always welcome. Questions aren't always welcome. Discernment wasn't always welcome unless it came from leadership. Now the questions are here. So I started asking myself now, why are vacations questioned? Why are friendships questioned? Why are relationships questioned? Why are reading certain books questioned? Why is thinking differently questioned? Why are fasting all day without food and water because someone told us? Why are we doing it? Why do we believe we're the only ones who have the truth? In my, in going to college, I visited almost every religion in Suffolk County. So why is that the truth? Because all of them say they are the way. So who decides? The more questions I asked, the more uncomfortable leadership became. I remember asking or saying, I know the difference between as I was studying. Now, as I'm getting the red flags, I'm actually collecting the red flags, believe it or not. And I'm learning. I'm now starting to process them. I'm starting to figure out what's the soul, what's the spirit, what's the innate creature, all of these things. And I start to, and I remember reading the books, the book, The Pigs in the Parlor. And then we have a friend, Cindy, we went upstate and we found this book called Jesus the Rebel. And we read that book with such fervency that started, those two books started me to dismantle, dismantle Christianity, religion, church, the cult, the system. It started me to dismantle it. And so I said to my pastor, I said, I know the difference between the soul and the spirit and the way we serve him. Only way we say we're supposed to be worshiping is not proper. And he looked at me, people have been doing this hundreds of years. I said, yeah, doesn't mean it's right. So he says, well, what do you, how do you know that? And I said, well, I can, I can tell you, I broke it down and I broke it down to him. He's like, can you teach that? I said, sure. So it came in with charts, graphs, you know, pictures and it broke it down and their mouths were wide open. And so my pastor stands up. How do you know this? I said, cause I listened to my innate preacher, discernment. And I said, that's different than the spirit you talk about. It's different because this spirit doesn't speak over you. It whispers, it's gentle and it doesn't disrupt you. So he was so annoyed with me. And I knew at that point, this was the surgence of me leaving. This was the door that was opening. The door now was unlocked. Another area that I've been, had been challenged with, and that was one of my red flags picking up was my children were there. They served most of their lives. My youngest son, they all served until about the age of 16. Served in choir, vacation by the school programs, going to church, all of that. And I, um, you know, started to give them a little bit more liberty as I started to awaken my youngest son, my daughter got most of it. But, um, the biggest turning point wasn't about me. It was about my children. That's when things changed for me. When I saw my son struggle and I was supposed to distance myself from him because he was struggling. But when it happened to the leader and his grandson got in trouble, he mortgaged his house. But I couldn't do that. I had to leave my son to waste. But I couldn't. I tried, I tried, I couldn't. I had to go see him and make sure he was all right. When my daughter came out that she was gay, they expected me to reject her. Not love her. Don't talk to her again. I couldn't do that either. Yes, I was struggling with it. What I do with it because I was believing the invisible contract that they were filthy people, garbage. I was dealing with that, grappling with that. But when I realized it was going to separate us, I woke up quick. I woke up quick in a matter of two weeks. My love for my children became stronger than my fear of disappointing the church. Looking back, I think that was the beginning of my freedom. Again, that key that unlocked that door so it could swing open. There's so much more to my story. And the stories within the story are what's so poignant. And I wanted to start off unchurched with this story to let you know where I come from. I'm just not no Joe Schmo getting other people to talk about their stories. I am that story. If you've listened this far, thank you. Thank you for being here for me because I know your listening supports me and helps me to be stronger, to tell the story, to more, to help deliver other people. And in unchurched is those stories. Those stories that it's okay that you went through it. Now do something with it. Be responsible. Where are you going to take it? Yes, there are a lot of apologies, a lot of awakenings, a lot of shifting, changing that has to be done, you know, to your friends, to your spouse, because every relationship is affected when you come into this cult. Every relationship. This wasn't easy to tell. It wasn't, honestly. I've only scratched the surface. This isn't a story about losing my faith. It's a story about finding my voice, finding the God within me, like the God that they service in the church, but there's gods sitting in the church that don't realize they're gods, that they have the power over their own life, that it doesn't have to pray like they pray, doesn't have to move like they move. It's about discovering the faith and the control are not the same thing. Faith and control are not the same thing. Let me say it one more time. Faith and control are not the same thing. You cannot control me that faith is at the end of the rainbow when you die. When we're living in hell, in our emotions, in our physical body, in our mind, in our hearts, in our social lives, in our finance, financial lives, we are living in hell now. The responsibility is what do we do with that now? How do we change that now? Not when we die, because the only thing that's going to be different is going to be energy does not die. Your body does, and that's what we're not getting. That's not what we're not being taught. It's about learning that loving the divine doesn't require abandoning yourself. So next week, I want to talk about something I didn't even know had a name until years after I left. Spiritual bypass. How just pray about it became the answers to everything, and how that kept me from facing years of pain that needed compassion, not silence. If my story resonated with yours, I hope you'll join me next week. I was going to say season, but it's next week. Not because our stories are identical, but because no one should have to choose between their spirituality and their humanity. This is unchurched, and this is just the beginning. Thank you, and I'll see you next time around. Bye for now.