sending them there or for not you know, they don t want their parents to know what they went through because it s too heartwrenching. you know, i think that s why i write the blog, too, because there are a lot of stephanies out there and a lot of hollies and a lot of micahs. and none of us deserved to be treated that way. i understand some people have felt really hurt. their negative experience may be because they so desperately don t want a in your face challenge that they are going to say, well, that s negative. why would you ask me to do that kind of thing? that s why i say honor academy is not for everybody. beating your body, according to teen mania, would be to ignore any discomfort from, like, exercise. basically, if you re not beating your body and making it your slave, you re not a good christian. all of that stops you from
how old were you when you first heard about teen mania? first i was 18 and i actually got saved. that s pretty much the classic age for recruitment into groups like this because, you know, it s right at that on the cusp of about to go out on my own. how did you become involved in it? how did you hear about it? acquire the fire. i went with my youth group from the time i was a sophomore through senior year. so i was used to it, and i looked forward to it every year, and i would wear my wristband for months afterward. i was with atf since i was 13 and i didn t think of it until i went to an atf until my senior year and that s when i heard about the honor academy in a more personal life and it was
after esoal. in terms of the process of thought reform, it looks like lifton s criteria were active and are active at teen mania. great. it pisses me off that it happened. yeah. is that your fault? no. no, it s not. i really think that the only thing we re all guilty of is wanting to be good people, wanting to be good christians and wanting to help other people. yeah. that s what we re guilty of. they took that and they used it against us and there s no reason for us to feel bad about that. exactly. we were just kids. it s just hard to, like. this is a lot to swallow,
interest, always on guard always. yeah. absolutely. i just had a lot of avoiding symptoms, really. i can t stomach a worship service anymore just because of the dha. it s not necessarily that anything bad happened in worship, and it just reminds me of that and i can t stomach it. i m looking at the checklist and thinking i do have some of these symptoms which i just never thought about. i think it s the whole avoiding the thoughts, like even the thought of teen mania. yeah. i think i m just now realizing that that that s what it was. the purpose of esoal is to train in an environment that s safe and pushes people beyond where they ve gone before and we re not doing things that will cause people to have problems
quitting. when they get a commitment one of the churches say they re coming and they get to ring the gong and everybody cheers for them, you know? so that might mean 15 or 20 kids are coming from that youth group and they ll have a chance to have their life changed and they see this picture of 36,000 people. about 15 of these guys put all of those guys in the seats. so if you re an 18-year-old and you walk in and you go god just used me to get these 60,000 people here or whatever, wow! all of the ministry that happens. so it is teen mania. it s teenagers being used to whether it s change the world on mission trips or change their generation here in america. there s a shift any b shift for the ministry placements and a shift is 9:00 in the morning