Author: GladToBeOut | Page 2 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Oneness In The Year 220

Just found this interesting tidbit of information. I always thought the Oneness doctrine was fairly new – late 19th century at least. But then I read about Sabellius.

The New World Encyclopedia says:

Sabellius, a Christian priest, theologian, and teacher, was active during the first decades of the third century, propounding a Christological doctrine that was later deemed heretical. Specifically, he advocated a modalistic view of divinity that described God possessing a single unified substance, albeit one that took particular forms (Father, Son, Spirit) in relation to human beings. As this doctrine denied full, discrete reality of each “Person” of the Trinity, it was anathematized, leading to Sabellius’ excommunication from the church in 220 C.E.

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Visions And Revelations

*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*

In the last post on my timeline, I talked at the end about how during one of the tent revival services I was asked to take the children into the house and babysit them.

The weird staring and glaring from my Mom and her best friend got worse and worse. I started to feel paranoid, like they were watching me all the time. Then, one night, I sat down to the dinner table and Mom and Dad told me that they needed to talk to me.

They told me that I was possessed by a demon. They said that during that tent revival service, the preachers (Mom, her best friend, and her friend’s husband) had cast it out of her best friend’s son, and that the demon left the tent looking for another body to enter, and came in the house and found me. They said that it was a rebellious demon that found me inviting because of the way I’d been expressing anger against wearing dresses, going to church all the time, and being taken out of public school. They said that I needed to be aware of this because it would affect my reactions to anything Godly until they could get it cast out.

Then, my Mom proceeded to tell me about all the visions her and her best friend had about me. They had a vision of me being raped due to my rebellion of wanting to wear pants (keep in mind that I was 9 at this time) and they gave me graphic detail of this vision. They told me they could see demons running around in my bedroom that were attracted there because of the demon in me. They said that my wanting to spend so much time at non-apostolic family member’s houses had contributed to my rebellious spirit inviting in the demon. They also told me the demon’s name, what it looked like, and that it was a fallen soul – a rebellious teenage girl that went to hell and became a demon. There were more “revelations”, but you get the general idea.

As you can imagine, by this point I was terrified. I was afraid to talk to my family, I was afraid to be around my little sister. I stopped going anywhere and stayed home all the time (as much as I had the choice to), and alone most of the time, wondering how many of my thoughts were really my own and how many were coming from the demon.

Occasionally Mom would “address the demon” instead of me. I’d be walking along and she’d suddenly jump in front of me and say “(Demon’s name) you want to hit me don’t you! Go ahead and slap me, I dare you!”. I didn’t know what to do when this would happen. I’d try to turn and walk away, but she’d grab me by the shoulders and hold me in front of her. I’d say “Mom I don’t know what you want me to do!”. Eventually when the ‘demon’ didn’t respond she’d give up.

Plans were being made to “cast it out”.

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Why Am I Writing This?

If you’re reading this, you may have questions like these.

Why is she recounting all these bad memories?
What’s the point of rehashing all this and making it public?
Why doesn’t she attempt to make these descriptions more balanced?
Why is she dishonoring her parents?

The answer to the first and second questions are pretty much the same. The point is – these things happened to me, and I was very hurt and damaged. It was many years and lots of therapy before I was functional after leaving home. Similar things may be happening to other children as we speak. I hope that Mothers and Fathers might read these and rethink their actions with their children, and make it a point to instruct them with love, not criticism and fear. Maybe if some Mother of Father realizes that they’ve been unintentionally treating their child(ren) the same way, they’ll stop.

As for the third question, these are my childhood memories. The memories of a hurting child may not be a balanced view, but they may still be helpful in bringing someone else to a balanced view, if they realize that they’re doing this to their own children.

Regarding the 4th question, the truth is the truth. I have not named my parents or myself, so no one can read this and connect this with my family unless they were there. If I was naming them with the intention of embarrassing and shaming them, then my motive could be considered dishonorable. As it is, I am speaking the truth with as little possibility of causing a backlash to them that I can manage, and I do not see any dishonor in this.

John 8:32 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

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A New School

*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*

After much discussion with her new best friend, Mom decides that the conditions in our church can no longer be tolerated. We still go there ‘officially’, but start visiting other churches who have services on nights that our church doesn’t. One that we visited was an ultra-conservative Apostolic church that’s not affiliated with the UPC (United Pentecostal Church). The rules at this church are much stricter than the UPC rules even though their basic theology is the same. They viewed the UPC as too liberal.

At this point, we’re going to church at our ‘home church’ on Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. We’re going to the Apostolic church on Saturday nights, and a nearby UPC on Thursday nights. (The nearby UPC church is the one that Mom’s best friend went to before they started coming to our church.)

Mom and this family decide that it’s time for them to start taking action against the demons infiltrating their churches. They “cast out a demon” from the preacher’s daughter’s boyfriend at the nearby UPC church when he comes up to pray during an alter call. The teenage guy shakes all over like a leaf and this is touted as evidence of the ‘demon coming out’. About 60% of the church members stand back in disbelief and disapproval of what is happening. Mom and her friend do another “casting out” in our home church to a visitor.

They receive some sort of ministerial censure for this, but I do not know the details. It resulted in the other family breaking away and starting their own Apostolic church. It begins as a tent revival in their back yard. Also during this time, Mom decides to stop homeschooling me, and to send me to the Christian school at the ultra-con Apostolic church that I mentioned previously.

The Apostolic church disapproves of Mom’s best friend and her family (believes they are demon possessed and still Satanists), and also of women preachers in general. Mom goes there and keeps quiet in order to be able to send us to the school, and goes to the other family’s church and preaches as a guest speaker the rest of the time. The result of this is that we go to church six times per week.

At this school, I remember getting in trouble several times. Once, because I went to school in a shirt with sleeves above my elbows. Another time, because I wore a hair barrette (jewelry). Another time, I didn’t want to testify during chapel when called on. When we got in trouble for things like this, we had to be prayed for at the altar until we were ready to confess our sin. If that took all day and no schoolwork got done, so be it. Another thing that we were punished for was “not working at our full potential”. I once got an 80% on a math test that the principal believed I was capable of making 100% on. He informed me that he was giving it to me again and if I didn’t get 100%, was was getting 10 swats. I got 85%. Fortunately, he was called out on an emergency while it was still being graded, and didn’t mention this again the next day.

During my time in this school, the ‘tent revival’ continued. One night, Mom and her best friend came to me and informed me that I needed to take all the children out of the tent and into the house and babysit them. I asked why and was told not to question, just do as I was told. So I did. I didn’t mind getting out of there. I had no idea that the events I was removed from that night would soon affect me in a devastating way.

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A New Family In Our Church

*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*

Eventually, Dad came back home and back to church. The painful questions from members stopped after awhile, and things were pretty good. Then a new family came to church.

It was a husband and wife and two teenage kids. The husband and wife were preachers, and the teenagers (a boy and a girl) both claimed that they’d been ‘called to preach’. About half the church welcomed them with open arms, the other half stayed aloof from them. Friendly, but not friends. I remember my Great-Grandma (who helped build the church building) saying that her spirit just didn’t recognize their spirit.

My mom and the mom of this family became ‘best friends’. We started spending a LOT of time with them. Our whole family would go spend the weekend at their house almost every weekend, and during the week they were at our house all the time. Once again, things started changing.

The woman in this family told Mom how they’d all been Satanists before coming to God, and that she believed occult was infiltrating the church. They started buying tons of occult/witchcraft instruction books and comparing the practices outlined in these books to things happening in the church. Their conclusion was – demons were running rampant in the church and possessing the believers of the Truth in an attempt to thwart God’s Oneness revival.

My family was always the first ones to arrive at the church building, lots of times the doors weren’t even unlocked yet when we got there. This other family started joining us in arriving extra early. Mom and this woman and her daughter would go into a Sunday School room and ‘pray’. Often you could hear them ‘praying’ all over the church, other times there was silence. A few times Dad asked me to go in and get Mom for one reason or another. The times I went in they were sitting at a table talking, and stopped immediately and Mom angrily asked why I interrupted them. After a couple of those instances, they started locking the door.

Some things from this time that I heard them state: They could literally ‘see’ demons running around inside the church building. They could see demons when they looked in the eyes of some of the male preachers in the church. The pastor was ‘obviously’ demon possessed. The people who didn’t come to church as early as them to pray were ‘spiritually bound’ by evil, if not actually possessed.

Gossip started about their ‘prayer sessions’ and the questioning of me started just like it did when my parents had separated. “Why does your Mom go in there to pray with those women? Why can’t she pray out in the open? Why do they spend so much time in there? If they are actually talking to God, there’s no reason they should have to lock the door.” People seemed afraid to say these things to my Mom and the other women, so they said them to me, a child about 8 years old. Several of the men in the church started saying things like “locking the door gave an appearance of homosexuality more than prayer”. At one point the pastor actually asked them to stop going in there. They refused. He didn’t feel that it was right to “force” people into things, and didn’t want to start making rules about use of the church building, so nothing else official was done beyond his personal request to them to stop.

Mom’s behavior at home got more and more strange. She started giving away my things to the teenage girl in this family. I was tall for my age and she was short, so even though we were about 10 years apart we were pretty much the same size. A lot of times when I got new clothes she would ‘suggest’ that I give them to this girl. (Side note – we were poor, and new clothes were a rarity so I not only wanted, but needed to keep them.) Also, mother-daughter time had ceased to exist. This girl was 18 and out of school, so she spent a lot of weekdays at our house. Mom would send me outside to do my homeschooling with instructions to watch over my 4 year old sister at the same time. On days that they didn’t come over, she spent hours on the phone with the girl and her mother.

If my Dad, my sister, or myself complained, we were hindering her ministry. She would state things such as “I have a call from God to ‘clean up the church’ and if you stand in my way you’ll be judged with blasphemy. Do you want to go to hell and burn forever? Is that what you want? You kids don’t go bother your Dad at his job, don’t bother me while I’m doing mine.”

I started to act out against these things. Since I was a child, I acted out in very childish ways. I cried and would run away and hide whenever Mom would announce that we were seeing these people again. I intentionally started messing up my schoolwork hoping to force Mom to spend time with me. I tried to run away from home. I spent as much time at relatives houses as I possibly could. Soon, I noticed Mom and these other women watching me with a look of suspicion and hatred that scared me – badly.

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