Greetings from Cleveland

Hey everybody.

I just found out about this forum from a friend of mine who, like myself, was involved with the "Solid Rock Foundation" in Columbus during the 70's. I was part of the original group that came from Madison, Wisconsin in 1973. I stayed in Columbus until 1980, when I moved to another state and began attending a Great Commission "church" there. About 1984 I finally mustered the courage to leave the Great Commission movement altogether.

What memories! After the 1973 summer "blitz", those who remained (about 14?) rented a house on E. 13th St. The girls lived on the third floor and the guys lived on the second floor. The sense of belonging I found certainly met a need at the time, but what a price! The "elders" (the oldest was 30) told us what to think, what to read, what activities were acceptable and what were not. It came down to this: McCotter had been given a "Heavenly Vision"- a specific strategy to reach the world with the gospel- that had been outlined in the the Book of Acts. We were the only ones who had it, and were, implicity, God's elite! It was incumbent upon US to reach the world, and woe to any brother or sister who couldn't or wouldn't grasp this and commit one hundred per cent to the effort. You might not lose your salvation, but the shame your mother made you feel when you were a child was peanuts compared to the god-awful terror you would experience at the Judgment Seat of Christ if you left the group. That kept me in line, lemme tell ya.

A whole nutty set of rules and behaviors governed our daily routines. Serious members dropped out of school (this was in the very early days before the elders figured out that they couldn't expect to get many new followers using that approach), and most of the brothers and sisters found part-time jobs, as attending the noon Bible Study was imperative. Anything "worldly" was strongly discouraged, and this included things like going to the movies, driving a decent car, and wearing clothes that weren't gotten at a thrift store. (Well, JC Penny or Sears was acceptable.) I remember one of the elders I was especially close to would look only at the ground when he had to walk down the street so as not to be tempted by anything. The lust of the eyes was everywhere. We also had daily prayer meetings which featured loud beseechings and lamentings which, if they didn't get God's attention, certainly got the neighbors'. Brothers would get up and start pounding one fist into the palm of the other yelling "YES LORD!!!" while the sisters, seated on the floor, would make these soft, cooing sounds sort of like the kind little girls make when the see a puppy. (The brothers were expected to display some spiritual bravado, while the sisters were expected to display the opposite.)

Anyway, I have hundreds of memories and stories about those days which used to make me angry when I was younger (I'm 58 now), but now in many ways I'm thankful for (and can laugh about) as I've come to understand all of this as just a unique part of my unique story. It took many years to see how much sense it makes that I would have jumped out of one weird, dysfunctional situation (my home life) into another. The dynamics turned out to be absolutely identical. In my early twenties I was completely unprepared to function in society-at-large, and even though the ways that the Solid Rock brothers and sisters related to each other and to outsiders was about as wack as it gets, who knows what kind of trouble I would have created for myself had I been doing something else.

I would be interested in sharing memories with other ex "Solid Rock" people who were in Columbus from '73-'80.

Peace.

MLM