When I look back at the church I grew up in, I realise that nothing about its behaviour was very Christian. It was just a social club on Sundays where people would meet up with their mates.
I was not in the church, but we claim, like so many people, 'Yeah, I grew up in the church.' Well yeah, I grew up in the church and went to church, but I knew nothing about the Lord. I had no idea what it meant about walking in faith.
When I grew up, in the time of 'Look Back in Anger,' the theatre was very exciting, a place where you felt that social comment could lead to social change.
I grew up on the south side of Chicago in a working class community. There were no miracles in my life, there's nothing miraculous about how I grew up, and I want people to know when they look at me, to be clear that they see what an investment in public education can look like.
When I was growing up, I grew up in church--my father was a pastor--so when I was growing up in Trinidad, I'd close all the windows in the church and go in the church every day after school and get a little microphone and pretend all these people were in the pews, and I would sing to them.
I saw him at the club and one of his friends was like, 'You're gonna meet Justin' and I just remember - everyone knows Justin Bieber, right? Everyone grew up, at least I grew up, listening to his music. I know all about him, I was so nervous.
I grew up very heavily involved in a United Methodist Youth organization. I grew up going to church camp for years. I ministered, and country music stole me away. It was just where my heart wound up. It's what I wanted to do.
I grew up on my dad's sets, but I was never star-struck or desperate to be famous. I grew up being a worker. It took me a long time to realise that my work ended up being seen by people. As far as I was concerned, I was just in the family business.
I grew up in a very Christian household. We went to church every Sunday whether I wanted to or not.
I grew up in a little Methodist church that was very rural, very community support-oriented, made up of great people who talked about love and grace and the spiritual experience, but only in rhetorical terms.
My grandmother made sure that I went to church every Sunday. And shed come over and pick us boys up, and we would go to the Nazarene church. And back then, that was about as close to heaven as I ever got, because just the time to be able to spend with her, and she was very, very religious.
I grew up in a church-going family, a very sort of ordinary, middle-of-the-road Anglican family where nobody really talked about personal Christian experience. It was just sort of assumed like an awful lot of things in the 1950's were just sort of taken for granted.
I taught Sunday school when I was younger, and ended up an elder in the church, and it just seemed to me that a lot of people who went to church certainly weren't - the rest of the week - living what I would call an Christian life.
I grew up in the church and loved contemporary Christian music. I go back to the early days of when it first started with the likes of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Those people that really pioneered are heroes of mine.
My grandmother made sure that I went to church every Sunday. And she'd come over and pick us boys up, and we would go to the Nazarene church. And back then, that was about as close to heaven as I ever got, because just the time to be able to spend with her, and she was very, very religious.
When I grew up, and I think about City Council, I look at the men and women then - these were people who just wanted to be a part of the community and give something back. They weren't necessarily trying to use it as a steppingstone to something else. I looked up to those people.
I consider myself a non-denominational Christian. I grew up in a Bible church and still hold those beliefs very close to me.