Growing Up UU: Testify!

As I may have mentioned in this blog before, my father is Jewish and my mother was raised in various Protestant denominations and is somewhat of an anti-Semite (she also hates Catholics, to be fair).  As a compromise (or something), they sent my older brother, my younger sister and I to a Unitarian church.  When I was really little, I had no idea what that meant.  I regularly confused my church with the Mormons who advertised on TV.  Now I understand that being a Unitarian in Cleveland in the 1980s and '90s meant that you were the product of an interfaith marriage.  I was one of the only kids in my Sunday School class whose parents had the same unhyphenated last name.  As a result, I have some humorous anecdotes.  Here is one:

As part of the sixth grade RE (religious education) curriculum, we went to a bunch of different religious centers, including a Buddhist temple, a mosque, a synagogue, and what the teachers told us was a "Born-Again" church.  To highlight how much we were told about this church, I didn't realize until about age 14 or so that it was "Born-Again" and not "Bornagin", like some kind of Irish surname a la "Finnegan".  Anyway, I remember gathering in the parking lot and one of our teachers saying the following (artist's depiction of UU Sunday School teacher follows):

There will be a part of the service where they ask you to come up and get saved.  If any of you go up there, we will all be going home and explaining to your parents what you did.

Now, for the uninitiated, this may, at first glance, seem like our heathen instructor was trying to prevent us from accepting the love of Jesus.  However, in reality, our teachers knew that we would all go up and get saved just for the lulz.  This was years before there was a name for lulz, but I am pretty sure UU Sunday School kids invented lulz.  More stories of lulz to come later.