Nobody specifically set out to create the "Guilt Complex" - it just happened. Some friends were in the habit of exchanging letters and articles, occasionally including original writing and sometimes consisting of press cuttings or correspondence. The following pages began as a series of letters and articles that passed between them during 1997. It started with a single letter raising questions about guilt - often a problem among people who come from a religious background or who were raised strictly. One by one, they each pitched in with ideas, further questions, brief comments and a few running jokes, until they realised they had created something special. Several suggested that it should be published, but how can you convey this kind of lively informality in cold print? It needed a free format that can jump from thought to thought. It needed the Internet.

When you read these pages you move into a unique society. These people had come to know one another well enough to banter like close friends… but they rarely met each other. Spread widely around the country, a few of them might possibly come face-to-face once or twice in a year. But they carried on this postal fellowship over a period of about fifteen years during which they touched many other lives in the United Kingdom, the USA and elsewhere in the world. Following a joking comment in one of their early letters they came to be known as "Adullam's Cave Writers' Guild", sometimes shortened to "The Cave", "The Guild", "The Trogs" or just "ACWG". The reference to Adullam recalled an Old Testament story (see Note below) about the outcasts and rebels who gathered around David, the future king of Israel, after he had been banished by King Saul. Most of the ACWG members had been banished from fellowships in the movement that later became known as the "New Churches". It was a time of great change in the British churches, a time that produced much that is good, but which also produced some sad mistakes.

The group that became known as "ACWG" had no official status, did not have a membership and never sought to establish its authority or to make itself permanent. It did, however, earn a certain respect and spun off several publications (e.g. "Insights", which is referred to within "The Guilt Complex"). The group's most important achievement was to reassure people who had been spiritually or psychologically damaged by religious people or institutions. God is love, but the people who claim to follow him do not always behave in loving ways. The Trogs reached out to encourage and support confused believers and to help them rediscover their foundations in a faith that is based on grace.

Grace is the message behind "The Guilt Complex". Read on to find how a bunch of ordinary people reaffirmed their own confidence in a God who is not 'out to get us', who does not lay heavy burdens of guilt on our shoulders, but who - well, read it and see for yourself…

1. Introduction (above)
2. Wresting from religion
3. Virtual Reality
4. False standards (The case of the garden broom!)
5. The psychological function of guilt
6. Learning to experience grace
7. The emotion of guilt
8. Being care-free
9. Trying too hard
10. Acknowledgments and copyright