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giftofsong
Hello I am new to this forum and I would like to share my experiences while attended Turning Point. I will tell it in different parts though because I have a lot to say and to remember as well. I attended TPCC and TPCWOC starting in about the spring time of 2004. I was invited to Turning Point by two good friends of mine that I knew from high school. We ran into each other at a local Starbucks and they invited me to go to 180 which was the youth group that met on Wednesday nights. I had a great experience and the worship was good and I felt the word was presented in an appropriate way for our age group. I was glad to have found something that was so fun, with people who really seemed to be involved, and who loved God. I later started to go to the Sunday service and that was when we were meeting in the 8th street "old" building. I had another positive experience there with the people and the leaders. I felt welcome and I was on fire for God, it felt good to be part of a church family again. I then started attending all the events that I could, making many friends and doing the Friday night service Fan the Flame as well. It was nice to be able to have something more than just a Sunday service that I could attend and I loved the worship and the prayer time we spent on those Fridays.

To back up just a little and share about my life as a Christian a little bit I was raised in a Christian home with loving, caring parents and did not want for anything growing up. I was not spoiled just blessed with a loving family who was very supportive of me and who took great care of me. We went to a wonderful church when I was young and I have so many great memories of Sunday school and great programs that I was involved in as a child. We ended up leaving that church when our long time pastor was called to another church and we then attended other churches that I enjoyed too. I also attended Christian School and was taught much about God and the Bible there as well. Eventually we hooked into Smokey Point Community Church, which I enjoyed, led by Pastor John Stumbo who is a wonderful man and was a great preacher and pastor to us. I was involved in their youth group a bit there but it wasn't the greatest. I was going through those weird years as a teenager as well at the time but I have always loved music so I was heavily involved in that at my school. I actually started to attend the public middle school (7th and 8th grade) and high school (9th-12th grade) to get involved in the music programs they offered that my private school didn't offer so I decided to start attending for that reason alone. I am so grateful that my parents were so strongly involved in a church all my life, they taught me well and brought me face to face with God and I learned so much about my faith. Overall I grew up knowing the Lord and very familiar with the Bible and the Christian faith.

Anyway back to Turning Point, I then was very heavily involved in many, many things at TPCC which I probably won't even remember them all but here are the majority of them. I went to the Winter Camps, helped with many of the 180 events in the youth group, I helped with Summer Jubilee, I joined the worship team, and I also did discipleship, and took the classes that introduced me to the church and educated me on how things were done at TPCC. I became a member of the church and later was part of the Twenty Something's small group when that started and also became part of leadership with that group. I even joined SOMA and moved to a house with three other girls from the church who attended SOMA as well. I did not ever live in the SOMA dorms though. I was so involved that I had literally no other time to do anything else except work at my job which was all scheduled around these many events at TPCC. The more I got involved the more I strayed from my family members which for me always being so close to them, was a very weird thing that I didn't notice at the time. I felt the church pulling me in heavily and even experienced guilt when I couldn't attend events. It all was starting to change me and I didn't even realize it. I soon got my family to attend Turning Point with me and they enjoyed it but were not as into it as I was but were never negative about it- until later on when they felt it wasn't the right place for them. So, they still continued to attend Smokey Point Comm Church eventually.

But in that time of attending TPCC my parents experienced some pretty hard times in their marriage and let me tell you they received absolutely no support or help from the leaders or elders of the church. It was heartbreaking for my mom who so desperately needed some spiritual guidance and some hope from someone in the church to have received nothing - no returned phone calls from pastors to meet, and some very harsh words from Jeff Barnes about "not submitting to her husband" and that is how he explained their problems, in a nutshell. That was one of the most devastating moments of her life she told me and I was so shocked that he told her that I was speechless. From that moment on I started to feel differently about TPCC as a whole. That is just the short version of the depressing and whacked out conversations my mom experienced while being hopeless and separated from my father and I will never forget how disgusting I felt to be part of a church that acted that way and I was saddened that my mom had that happen to her.

I can tell you the exact moment that everything changed at Turning Point and it scares me to have been so sure at the time and I am ashamed to say I did nothing but suppress my feelings and feel guilty. Those feelings actually weren't feelings they were promptings from the Holy Spirit. Saying to me to be careful and to stay aware of what was really going on in the church.

More to come . . .