This meeting was going to be different, I was sure of it. This meeting would solve things. This meeting would restore my trust in Rick Sinclair and CFC leadership. I imagined myself laughing at the fact that I ever thought he’d lied to me. He would make sense of it all and I would apologize for ever THINKING such a thing and we could move forward with this, right?

As I reflected more, I concluded that while I was certainly responsible for the legalism and dysfunction in my life during those years, I realized that to some extent, so was my church leadership. CFC sermons started to feel more and more like conservative practical life advice and culture war tactics with a moralistic Deism twist.