I began my exit at seventeen by making sure the grocery store I was working at in high school started scheduling me on Wednesday nights and a shift every Sunday that made it impossible to hit either service.
My first two years of college I was still living at home but my parents were retired and travelling a great deal, including 3-4 months at a time in Florida with their motorhome during the winter. Needless to say, I didn't darken the doorway of the church when they were out of town and very, very rarely attended even when they weren't.
When I moved to Columbus at twenty-four (1980) to finish up my degrees was the final break. I was inside the building three more times; once for my father's funeral, once to be an usher in a friend's wedding (both in 1983), and taking my Mom to services the last time in 1998, when her Alzheimer's had gotten bad enough we had to bring her to Florida.
When Mom finally passed away in 2004...with my oldest brother having been effectively shunned in the 1950's for being expelled from Harding, my other brother having been formally disfellowshipped in 1974 for his divorce, and me being completely out of the closet...we didn't even consider holding her services at the church. Let the biddies and "holier-than-thou" elders and deacons come to the funeral home to whisper and point instead of celebrating her life.
An interesting side note with Mom was I discovered she had stopped attending services regularly at 80, almost three years before we moved her in with us. Up until that point, she had rarely missed a service. Since she had been baptized in a creek at age fourteen, spent her entire life living a good Christian life (including a stint as an elder's wife), and fifty years in the same congregation, tells me that was probably the most difficult decision she ever made.
Now whether the fact the old home congregation's minister had gone on a six-month-long, hellfire and brimstone tirade over gay rights (including newspaper ads and radio spots
) at about the same time might have had something to do with her decision, remains unanswered to this day. But the fact she happily moved in with me and my partner and pamphlets and notes found in her Bible said she had settled the issue with God instead of just accepting the hate being preached from the pulpit.