These are essays and letters I wrote while I was a member of the Church of Bible Understanding. Most of them were attempts to clarify my own thinking about what was going on there. There were so many plausible reasons given for everything and so much invective was being hurled at us in meetings, that one spent his time running in fear and desperation to accomplish Stewart Traill’s directives for our lives. If this pressure was not coming directly from him, it was coming from others who were watching you and in group sessions where we met apart from Traill to “check our fellowship” to see who was carrying out these orders, and it was 100% full on, all the time, no breaks. You lived in, worked for, and went to meetings in the Church of Bible Understanding. Drawing off to yourself was considered to be wrong. I needed to draw away and think my own thoughts and write down my own observations in some orderly way.
There is one paper (My Exit Statement) that I wrote to pass out to other church members, which of course, was ignored. I also have included some other essays I wrote about the church after leaving there.
I am also including letters that I wrote while I was still living in. There is a series of letters I wrote to my mother and I wrote several others to authors of books about spiritual abuse. These can also be considered essays, because they were attempts to set down (in this case to other people) what life was like there, hence they are short compositions on life in The Church of Bible Understanding and they also help to explain the group dynamics and the manipulation practiced by Stewart Traill.
