Category: rapture | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Harmed In The United Pentecostal Church

When one has been exposed to spiritual abuse, great harm can be done. While some escape with minimal or no injury, most do not leave unscathed. Those of us who have been exposed to it grow weary of people trying to minimize or poke fun at what we experienced. If a person has only been in a healthy church or group, they cannot relate. They will wonder why people remained or went along with some things. They simply do not understand the atmosphere in unhealthy churches, nor the harm they cause. Some others who are still part of an unhealthy church love to label everyone as bitter, rebellious, and/or unforgiving and some laugh and say we just didn’t get to sing in the choir or didn’t like the color the pastor painted the church.

In two groups, I asked people to share how they were harmed during their time in the United Pentecostal Church. People were also able to respond who exited a different group. I received enough responses to make at least three blogs. These are used by permission and are anonymous. Some responses have been edited for spelling and punctuation and smilies have been removed. All the ones included in this part were from the UPCI or other Oneness Pentecostal group. Each person is separated between using and not using quotation marks. After reading this series of posts, perhaps many will better understand some of what can happen to people in abusive churches.

I feel like I lost time with my immediate family that could have been shared, as Jesus did – with compassion and mercy. My interactions with them (while in the organization) were more about my false appearance of moral superiority, judgement and condemnation. I’ve lost moments with them that I’ll never get back. I only have hope that our eternities will be spent together at this point.

I was taught a dysfunctional and deformed view of God, as a vengeful, rejecting, elitist, which justified me and everyone else to behave in like manner. I became that guy that cut off family, friends, and anyone who rejected our way. I taught and believed anyone who wasn’t Apostolic was a fake wanna-be Christian and wasn’t going to heaven.

Wearing Make Up? Going to hell. Wearing pants? Going to hell. Wearing shorts? Going to hell. Seeing a shrink? Going to hell. etc, etc, etc. Thus, I spent 15 years judging people instead of loving people. Sure, I’d wave, but I’d turn around and snicker – yea there’s a harlot…

I was taught to mock people who left or were different instead of following Scriptures example. Years ago a local businessman came to me and said, “I know you are a Christian, and I highly respect you, and I want to confide in you.”

This man confided his addiction to pornography to me, explained how he tried and tried to quit, the hurt it caused his family, his failings, etc. In the end, he asked me to mentor him, to be an accountability partner, to support and pray with. I told this man that if he had the real Jesus, not his fake Jesus, he wouldn’t have these problems and that he needed to come to church, get baptized in Jesus name, get the Holy Ghost and speak in tongues or he was lost to hell, and until he did those things I wouldn’t be able to be that connected and close to him.

This man was seeking Jesus, and I could have been part of that, and helped a MAN with a problem most men face. Instead? I judged, condemned and rejected like a good Pentecostal should.

It took me three months after leaving the cult to circle around to as many people as I could remember that I rejected and personally and face to face ask for forgiveness for the things I had done, said and exemplified.

I grew up with a very unrealistic view of the world around me. I was a good student in public school and a PK at home. I felt schizophrenic because the two worlds were always in competition. I attended the cult college instead of real college but thankfully met and married a wonderful man. He was clueless to all the hurt and abuse women suffer in the UPC. I was robbed of the fun and joy of being a young wife. I felt like an old lady at 30 and looked like one. So many things were not ‘allowed’. We were allowed to eat so I got fat. No makeup, jewelry, feminine things that make a young wife smile. I never fit in, my kids never fit in; not because we broke the rules but rather because we followed them too closely. I was miserably judgmental of myself and everyone around me. The peace that can be found when you leave this legalistic, self righteous group is unbelievably amazing!

…I did not even touch on the financial in my last post. From our pastor insisting we buy a van as a young married couple so we could haul people to church (and his assurance in 1973 that we would never have to make all the payments because the rapture was imminent). Then my making all our clothes, even suits and jeans because there was a cheap mill fabric store and a huge portion of our money went into the church. We shared drinks at Burger King while the pastor ate at Bennigans with our tithe. We had major life events including my husband being injured and spending almost two years in the hospital and a year of waiting for military pay to kick in while living on $40 a week from Red Cross and painting a house myself in lieu of rent. No church offered any help whatsoever. That year I had $19 for Christmas for three small children. Although we were assured we would have huge money issues and go broke if we left and did not pay tithe, we have flourished in the seven years since leaving, even though we still give to the poor and needy and those who struggle and to our own families (even those still in UPC who still struggle) but not to the fat cat preachers.

I lost my youth. I lost out on relationships with extended family before I left and now with my immediate family and most childhood friends since I left. I was uneducated, depressed and married at 20. I hated my life and didn’t even recognize it until I left.

Being a former 4th generation UPC kid and growing up under the church pews, I learned to hide who I was quickly. I learned my body should be hidden. I wore clothes several sizes too big for 27 years. If I wore something that fit me (even as a kid), it was too sexy and I would be causing some old penis to sin. I was taught I shouldn’t find interest in sports or things because the dress code for those things were “inappropriate”. I really hate that word! It was used for anything that didn’t fit the UPC mold: friendships, clothing, jewelry, heels off in church, sexuality, creativity that didn’t serve the church in some way… I was taught to not speak up, to hold my peace. I wasn’t to listen to my instincts because they were inherently evil. (I still struggle with this! It’s gotten me in some pretty awful situations over the years.) I felt I often needed to apologize to people I cared about in the church for my family’s treatment of them in the name of God. The church taught exclusivity from “the world”. I could have had some pretty amazing life-long school friends had it not been for the church! I missed out on joy, being more athletic, being a dancer, feeling beautiful, being playful, having relationships with my non-UPC family, getting help with my developmental disabilities outside a school setting, and not making plans for my future past 18. (It was a rule in our house we had to graduate high school, but I didn’t plan for marriage, college, career, kids, or anything. The rapture was going to happen! Hallelujah. Amen. Why try to dream about things that’ll never happen?!? It really made the first few years of my marriage super tough. I didn’t know how to live in the real world. I was so flipping naive! I didn’t know what I wanted to do for work, so I got fired a lot a lot! I didn’t know how to pay bills. I’d always lived with my parents. I could spend money like there was no tomorrow at the grocery store. My poor husband was/is still super patient with me when it my lack of street smarts/worldliness pops up.) There is sooo much more.

The constant call for money and giving more than you could afford caused much heart ache in our family. Even to giving our whole month paycheck to the church. Not even a thank you and it going into the big black hole that was existing at that time. My husband and BIL were asked to sign on a huge loan and they wouldn’t. That next Sunday was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The church was asked who would support the pastor in anything they did or say by raising their hands. We did not of course. That’s when we were snubbed leaving that day. We had had enough. 1/3 of the church split. We were with the split. That pastor left us to go evangelize and we felt betrayed. The new pastor sent in by the UPC also betrayed us by leaving in a month. That’s when both of us gave up on the UPC. My husband went back to it after awhile but I never did.

Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

What keeps them enslaved?

What keeps them enslaved? In one word I would say “fear.” Fear of rejection. Fear of breaking the rules. Fear of damnation. Fear of freedom. Fear of shunning. Fear of the unknown. Fear of hell. Fear of God. Fear of what other people think. Fear of man. Fear of vulnerability. Fear of being truly and fully human. Fear of being seen. Fear of the “world”. Fear of evil. Fear of committing the unforgivable sin. Fear of being the same as other Christians and not special end-times elitists. Fear of their worldview collapsing. Fear of doubts. Fear of intrusive thoughts. Fear of emotions (“good” and “bad” emotions – both).

Fear of reality. Fear of being “found out” (shame). Fear of social interactions beyond their managed and controlled interactions. Fear of other churches. Fear of Christendom. Fear of the end of the world. Fear of the “rapture.” Fear of being the only one with scrupulosity. Fear of “worldlies” infecting them. Fear of being excluded from within. Fear of constant judgement and gossip. Fear of everything they believe not being certain. Fear of mystery. Fear of unanswerable and difficult questions. Fear of the size of the universe (if God really is that big, then maybe our church doesn’t have a total monopoly on him after all).

Fear of the final judgement. Fear of demons. Fear of the supernatural. Fear of meeting Jesus face to face. Fear of people who have visions or dreams from God. Fear of speaking in tongues. Fear of science. Fear of eternity (will I be lonely and isolated for the whole of eternity, like I am here on earth). Fear of the book of Revelation. Fear of saying “no.” Fear of speaking up. Fear of questioning. Fear of one’s own mind. Fear that one’s heart is wicked and evil beyond help. Fear of Jesus saying “I do not know you.”

Fear of not doing enough for the Lord. Fear of being on the lowest rung in heaven because they weren’t good enough or diligent enough here on earth. Fear of other’s Christians’ displays of worship in spirit and truth. Fear of being shamed. Fear of other Christians’ faith. Fear of thinking for oneself. Fear that they’ve wasted years believing a lie. Fear of apostates. Fear of talking about God in any way outside of the church building…

I think they are enslaved by a spirit of fear. It keeps them compliant, obedient, unquestioning, and in a permanent fog and state of cognitive dissonance. Fear is from the dark side. It is from hell. There is no fear in heaven. Where Jesus is there is liberty and freedom and joy and love. So why are they entrenched in fear and anxiety? Because that’s the fuel that powers their religious and God-less system. 🙁

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The Rapture Doctrine – Fear mongering at its highest

The rapture doctrine was used to instill terror in me as a child and a teen. I’ve researched where this late doctrine came from and I don’t believe in this doctrine any more. For 1800 years Christians had never heard of the rapture theory. It is a fairly new “revelation.”

I used to get up in the middle of the night and tip toe down to my parents’ room to see if they were still asleep or if they had been raptured. I was terrified of being “left behind” even though I’d said the sinners’ prayer at least 200 times by then. God is a God of love and comfort and closeness. Not a God of fear. Hell and the rapture were preached to me as an infant. Not a good way to end up with a healthy psyche. I focused on the lake of fire and on the rapture, not on God’s love – because the whole environment was one of fear, control, shame, guilt.

It’s such a relief to know that there is no special rapture for believers. I know Christians are “divided” on this theological issue, but all I can say is, do your research about the person who invented this theory! It caused me years of anguish and terror and anxiety. When I met my husband, he told me about his similar fear of the rapture as a child. And my sister-in-law confided in me about it too. They were forced to watch the A Thief In the Night (a kind of 70’s “Left Behind”) video series as children. No child is emotionally ready for that level of fear. It is downright damaging.

I don’t freak out in sheer terror any more when I get home and the house is unexpectedly empty. I used to freak and think I was left behind. I know people who would make a phone call to a really “good” and “holy” Christian friend who most definitely had made the rapture cut and hang up when they answered, just to make sure that the rapture hadn’t happened. I have friends who are still afraid, and still do this.

It must grieve God’s heart that some of His children live in fear because someone made up a doctrine to control people and instill fear in their hearts. “ARE YOU READY FOR THE LORD’S COMING?” was a constant question in my childhood and teens and twenties. It used to baffle me. What did “ready” mean? How could I possibly be perfectly “ready” to meet The Almighty? I guess it was a fear-based question. I am now excited to meet Jesus because I know Him as a God of love. What a difference. Night and day. Because now I KNOW Him, not just know ABOUT Him. There is a big difference.

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The hardest thing about spiritual abuse

In early 2000 I was thrown out of a church. The process lasted several agonizing weeks, but things had been very bad for months. There was the man who kept telling me he was praying I’d lose my job because I was a woman and should work close to the church. There were the high standards that made no sense to me, the preaching about begging God for a special revelation of oneness because if you didn’t have that you would surely go to hell… after all, if you didn’t have that, you surely didn’t know God. The pastor bragged about his long fasts and groaned about people not wanting to ‘hear the truth.’ He didn’t share information with everyone, just with the men. The men were to tell their wives at home, which excluded me as a single woman. He told me that I needed a man over me, that I should either get married or move home to my dad’s house. Neither of those was an option. And there was the sermon about how if we leave our local church we have cut ourselves off from God, from life, from forgiveness, as though we have amputated ourselves from the body of Christ.

I remembered last night how, on December 31, 1999, I was terrified that God was going to come back and thought I’d surely be lost. I spent that night on the living room floor, sobbing and begging God to forgive me for who knows what, and never feeling any peace or forgiveness. I realize in my mind now that what I was dealing with was not conviction but condemnation, and fear, not godly sorrow or repentance. There was no peace or forgiveness because I wasn’t repenting of anything. I’d done nothing wrong except attend where I did and believe what I did, and those weren’t things I would recognize should be repented of for many years.

God didn’t come back on December 31, 1999. The pastor told me about a month later that he discerned I had bad thoughts and if I didn’t change, he would throw me out. He then left town for several weeks. How does a person change thoughts someone thinks they have, but they don’t? I ‘repented.’ I spent hours more on the floor, sobbing and asking God to change me. I stopped eating, thinking I would fast until they returned. But I thought they would be gone for a week at most, not several. I finally had to eat, and felt I was condemning myself by doing so. I tried to reach them by phone so that I could talk to them before breaking my fast, but they wouldn’t answer at first and then answered only to tell me to stop calling them. I called everyone at the church asking them to forgive any offense real or imagined, and was later accused of calling them threatening to kill myself instead.

These things had a psychological impact, but the spiritual impact was greater. I’d started attending there with a fairly healthy view of God and faith. By the time I left, my self confidence had been torn out from under me (I felt guilty just for being invited out to eat, because ‘saints’ shouldn’t eat with the ungodly-1 Cor 5:11), but more than that, my faith in God had been shredded as well. I repented, but I hadn’t felt forgiveness, and certainly hadn’t seen any forgiveness from others at the church, not even the ‘man of God,’ the pastor. I begged God for the special revelation we supposedly must have, but never really understood or experienced anything about this ‘revelation’ as the pastor described it. I fasted for days but was still thrown out. My pastor had discerned something evil in me, some thought I didn’t know I had, and though I’d prayed and fasted and repented, things only got worse.

Above all of this, these things had happened during a time when I’d thought I was closest to God. I was praying in tongues often, studying the bible, feeling the emotionalism in church, living by the high standards set, close to the pastor and his family (at least in my mind), repeatedly playing the sermons and music I was told to, and was very involved in bus ministry, Sunday School, and music at church.

All of these ended the night the pastor called me and told me never to come back. No one but me ever realized they ended, because that night I lost every person who might have known. I went to another similar church, but was told there to pretend nothing had happened and just ‘move on’. I couldn’t move on, though, and I couldn’t talk about the reasons I couldn’t, since I was to pretend nothing was wrong… and since admitting these things would have been good reason for the new pastor to label me ‘backslid.’ The only thing to do at that point would be to ‘pray through’. More fear, more nights on the floor sobbing, begging God for something that at that point I knew wouldn’t happen. To make matters worse, just as I would start to heal somewhat and begin to feel that there might be hope, something else would happen and the doubts would come back, as well as all of the memories.

Of everything that happened in my 19 years in Pentecost, that’s what had the most lasting damage. That combination–the fear, the condemnation, the false teachings that backed them, but most of all the doubt that they instilled. Not just self doubt, but faith shattering doubt of the Bible and of God.

Things are better now. I am healing, slowly. There have been times I wanted to just walk away from all of it. It would be easier not to believe than to fight through the mess that was left after everything happened. But there have also been times of learning and growth, and for me, these have been the most healing, times when I saw the scriptures that were used against me in a different light and I realized how wrongly they’d be used, times when I recognized some of what caused the damage and was able to rebuild, to heal, and to finally move forward, not as though nothing had happened, but in spite of what has.

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Irrational Fear of Loved Ones “Left Behind”

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned a little about some of the toxic beliefs my stepdad’s deceased adoptive mother espoused. Seeing how the beliefs that she had impacted how she dealt with people has helped make me understand some of his antagonism towards that brand of religion.

His adoptive mother went from Methodist to Baptist, and her second husband had been raised United Pentecostal, but didn’t follow their beliefs or lifestyle. They both attended a Baptist congregation that was hardline in some respects, and this was the group that influenced my stepdad’s beliefs the most as a kid.

After her second husband eventually died, she started attending a Pentecostal congregation that was Trinitarian and standards-free, but still had the emphasis on a pre-millennial “rapture.” She had a major sense of fear that this event was going to happen at any moment and that my stepdad would be “left behind” because he wasn’t living a Christian life according to her standards.

Having only attended a service at her congregation once and heard a homily preached by her pastor at a funeral once, I don’t know if the church was actually teaching that much fear or if the fear was my stepdad’s mom’s take on things. I recall my stepdad’s mom having major fear issues that even her pastor remarked about when she was meeting with my stepdad and mom to plan her funeral.

One thing that is obvious, though, is that fear-based teachings don’t create effective disciples. If anything, they help create dysfunctional followers who are more absorbed in their particular group’s teachings than the Gospel.

We know that perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18), so fear-based teachings don’t have their origins in God, but rather human brokenness. Another thing to consider: not all Christians believe that the catching up of the Church happens prior to the Second Coming. This event, regardless of when you place its timing, shouldn’t be used as a prop to try to scare people into repentance with.

Remember, the words of 1 Thessalonians 4:14-18 are designed to comfort, not scare. Using these words to push an agenda of fear is something that we should all rightfully reject.