I started coming out in 1993. They had just started breaking bread. Delano was still around. We met in the house Erik and Angel were renting. One amusing aspect of the house was that the meeting room had a stained glass window. This was ironic because the preachers would sometimes declare how we didn't need stained glass windows.
I started coming around the same time, shortly after Dave. It was a few times during the spring of 1993 and I met Allison Sills (then Ahrens) and Damon Bornigno at Mesa College when they did the booktable before Bible Study. It was during the summer of that year I really started to get involved. Somewhere, a casual coming out to the Tuesday night Bible Study in June lead to going around with two visiting campus workers (Brett [surname?] and Susan Holland) to UCSD, Mesa College, and SDSU. Shane Sills was present at many of the summer campus labors as well. I was also going to a Japanese Christian Church at that time and by the end of the summer, I made the decision to commit to the San Diego assembly.
I remember the room David mentions. It had stained glass windows like he said and mirrors on the wall.
I remember a wave of people leaving as Dave and I came in during 1993: Damon, Delano, and sometime later, Brian Mallone. Dave Posada started coming to the fellowship in 1993.
Bob and Sherrie Starr were sent here a few years later (I don't remember the exact year). Bob's sanity (compared to most workers/LB's) is much of what kept me around for so long. I would occasionally say to myself "Am I in a cult?" but would think how ordinary and un-cult-like Bob was/is.
I believe it was around early 1995. My memory is fuzzy but it sounds right.
The assembly changed quite a bit after this. We had various waves of people leave, and new ones gradually come out. There were a few times that I preached 3rd. We eventually began having an "outreach" to another part of town.
I was one of the people to leave a year and a half later. The Starrs had nothing to do with it. I've always remembered them fondly.
When did Bryant come into the picture? I met him a couple of years later and we were in a class together at SDSU when I was trying to tie the ends on my BA.
No matter what we tried to "change" it was always just superficial things (like the particular outreach venues we tried). The meetings were always at exactly the same times and done the same way.
I do "confess" that I stopped wearing a tie on Sunday for about the last year. My excuse was that I was interpreting for the Deaf, and that the tie was distracting to look at. I even removed it at the seminar.
It was one of my little bits of rebellion that made it out. The other bit one was when I never did any of my consequences I earned while on an MTT (mission training team).
High-five on not doing the consequences.
