Oh my God, they excommunicated Kenny...
One of the many contributing factors to my exceptional unpopularity at high school (*) was the fact that I belonged to the Christian Union. The aim of this little club was to take all the freaks and misfits and alienate them further by locking them in a classroom after school on a Friday so they could sing nice songs and talk about ‘love’ and ‘salvation’ and pray to our buddy, Jesus. It was run by my English teacher, who was a jolly nice man and whose role in life to was to make sure that as many of his pupils as possible were saved from eternal damnation and hellfire. There was also a guy who ‘helped out’. Not a demanding job – I think it mainly involved changing acetates on the overhead projector so we could sing the second verse of ‘Shine Jesus, shine’ and generally looking spiritual and holy at all the right points. He was an odd chap, used to go to our school, the kind of guy you’d be pretty sure has never seen a woman naked. Or so we thought…

One afternoon we were hanging round the classroom at afternoon break, reading the bible, as all the cool kids do when our English teacher came in with a solemn look on his face and told us ‘Kenny won’t be coming to help at Christian Union any more. He’s had to go away.’ Being a bunch of naïve morons we took this to mean that Kenny had gone on a nice long holiday. What had actually happened was Kenny had been arrested in Operation ‘Catch the filthy paedophile’ for having a hard drive stuffed with kiddy porn. Yep, the nice guy who spent his spare time helping out at the church youth groups and at our Christian Union was then going home and cracking one off to pictures of naked children.

So being the kind, understanding people that the church are, they rallied round and forgave him. Well, it’s what that nice Mr Jesus would have done. Except, you see, they didn’t. They sent a man round to his house to explain that he wasn’t welcome in the Church ever again. Ever. What the guy did was clearly wrong, but don’t set yourself up as an institution based on love and forgiveness then turf out one of your flock because he did something terrible that you can’t understand. Mind you, when the vicar was arrested for credit card fraud two months later, they weren’t particularly forgiving over that either. Or the organist and that rent boy incident. I had to leave, they were waaaay too exciting for me to associate with. Plus I turned 18 and discovered the secret of popularity that had eluded me for so long. Giving blow jobs…

(*) The others being my excessive pedantry, ineptness at any form of sport and a rather fetching perm.
(Rakky, Tue 31 Jan 2006, 9:52, Reply)