Category: Churches | Page 112 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Life after 60 outside the cult

Some won’t like that I said cult but I could have said asylum 🙂 ok, my apologies to the more serious among us.

Anyway, I am finding life to be very peaceful, rewarding, joyful, and surprisingly kind to me. No lightning strikes, fear, intimidation, etc. God is still good, kind, awesome, a source of strength and rest. His Word is still true and still hidden in my heart and slowly untwisting from years of cult manipulation. I find it easier to pray and sense a caring God listening with love instead of the harsh, threatening, far away God from the legalistic church.

I find it increasingly easier to trust God and to trust others; having faith in His love allows me to believe others truly love me and infuses me with love for others, friend and foe.

The spirit of judging, both myself and others, comparing, ranking spiritually on a ridiculous legalistic scale is a thing of the past.

An old children’s song says it all “Have faith, hope, and charity, that’s the way to live successfully, how do I know the Bible tells me so”.

So 60 is good. Out of the cult is good. God is good. My heart is full and I am in love with God, family, friends, life in general and even see the possibility of loving those that despitefully used me. God bless us one and all.

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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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Becoming

Is it ever too late to become? We chuckle and see TV commercials now of older people talking about what they want to be when they grow up but really once one loses hope of growth, the only thing that remains is death. Is that also true in the spiritual realm? I think Paul voiced that thought many times in many ways.

I feel that many times in my UPC walk, we were encouraged to see the 3 step doctrine as the be all and end all to our salvation. Sure we were told to then keep the ‘standards’ and behave ourselves but the only potential for growth was in service or giving.

In life though, growth or ‘becoming’ only truly stops at death, whether a physical death or a spiritual one. While serving others and giving to the cause is many times noble, it is only a small part of growth. To grow, one needs to stretch, to attain, to reach, and to experience anew. Paul called it reaching for the ‘high calling’ that is in Christ Jesus.

There is so much to reach for in understanding God, Christ, even ourselves and our becoming. God is limited when our only plan has three finite steps and discourages or minimally encourages further growth.

To grow in our relationship to God, one needs the freedom to think, to study, to listen, to realize one’s insignificance but also to realize the potential in living and growing in relationship to an almighty God.

“Study to show thyself approved, a workman that need not be ashamed” – paraphrase from Paul’s writings.

God is not limited to any belief system, any edition of His word, any group of believers, any man-made doctrine, any interpretation proclaimed by fallible humanity.

God is beyond our human understanding. It is a big mistake to ‘make God in our own image’. Like Paul, our goal should be to be ever coming to a knowledge of the the truth.

Jesus loves me THIS I KNOW, the rest is to be discovered as I become and grow until like Paul I can say I have fought the fight and run the race and look for that reward.

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Where Are The Dead?

This was a lesson title taught by SG Norris at ABI. I loved (and feared) SG and appreciated him immensely, but as the years have gone by and my losses have been many, I am realizing the arrogance of any of us to proclaim to know with any certainty ‘where are the dead’. Just as life is in God’s control –we can’t create it or even change it much– so death and the dead are also in God’s control.

I choose to believe a loving, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God whose mercy endureth forever, will not leave ANY of us nor forsake us even through our final journey. God is LOVE. I am forever thankful that we are in His hands and not in the hands of those on earth who would decide our destiny based on their limited, finite, self righteous understanding. There is shelter in His arms.

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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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