Category: Churches | Page 96 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

Don’t brag about your good deeds

Matthew 6:2-4 New Living Translation (NLT)

²When you give to someone in need, don’t do as the hypocrites do—blowing trumpets in the synagogues and streets to call attention to their acts of charity! I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get. ³But when you give to someone in need, don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. ⁴Give your gifts in private, and your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.

Today it is so easy to let a lot of people know what you are doing or not doing. Just go to your Facebook account and start typing (or what ever social media site you use). Then the ones who receive your message may decide to share your good deed and everything else with all their friends. Pretty soon it has gone around the world in about 15 minutes.

I have seen posts like this: “I am going out to buy Christmas gifts for a family whose kids would not have any Christmas otherwise. Pray that I find lots of sales!!” Then almost immediately there are the responses: “Oh what a wonderful person you are!” “How nice of you to do that for that family!” “God bless you as you go out to find the right gifts!” and etcetera.

According to scripture (above) that is all the blessings and praise that person will receive. They won’t get a special jewel in their crown for telling everyone they know what they are doing. (“I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get.”)

I don’t know why people are this way except they need to have praise from men (people in general). I think it is they don’t know what Jesus has to say about it (Matthew 6:2-4). I saw and heard of this happening, maybe not a lot, but enough times in my own former church that it just made me cringe. Even before I left. I don’t mind someone showing a gift they are buying for a special person in their life but to brag and call attention to buying for a family who cannot afford to buy for their kids is just against Bible Scripture. (“Give your gifts in private, and your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.”) It does not or should not matter if anyone else knows you did this kind deed.

The Pharisees drew attention to themselves and would stop in the middle of the street and suddenly start to pray so they would get attention of those around them. In Pentecostalism this would be akin to suddenly bursting out in tongues in the middle of a busy mall or store. Just to get attention. Or jumping up in the middle of your place of work doing the same. Jesus did not have kind words to those he called hypocrites. Would you not rather please Jesus than man?

By the way Jesus is very much easier to please than any man or woman on earth. And that is the Truth!

#WhyILeft Fundamentalism, Part 2

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on January 10, 2015.

Continued from Part 1

They make me feel so empty
Their words, they cut like knives
You tell me to forgive them,
But I’m not sure I’ll survive… – TFK, In My Room

“The way you talk about English, you really don’t seem like a dentist to me. You talk about it like you really love it,” Cynthia B. said, shifting in her electric wheelchair.

Cynthia B. was my first friend outside the box. We met in a British literature survey class fall semester 2010.

“I get that the practice is your dad’s gift to you, but maybe there is another way to honor him. Maybe you could take the practice, keep it for a few years, then pass it on to safe hands. And do something with English.”

But I didn’t see how I could be my real self and not disappoint my parents. Since I couldn’t have both, I was sacrificing myself in an attempt to please my parents and protect my siblings.

But my creative soul was reawakening.

My dad said leisure activities were a waste of time since it wasn’t school or work for his office. He said rest was for the dead.

I taught myself to sightread music using a hymnal when a family friend gave us her old piano right after moving to Colorado Springs. Mom had wanted a piano ever since she first married. Dad said I didn’t have time for lessons, but later allowed my sister to learn from our pastor’s wife.

But if Mom or I sat down to play, my dad would call us away within minutes and give us a more useful task.

I hid in my room when I read or wrote poetry or waited until I was alone in the house to play a musical instrument.

Senior year of high school, I took A Beka Academy’s Jaffe Strings orchestra program for the performing arts requirement, using a family heirloom violin from the 1890s.

But Dad didn’t let me play in the orchestra group at church or take private lessons after graduation. He drove me to rehearsals, but had Mom call my mentor and say I couldn’t attend the actual performance. After two times, I gave up.

Later, I drove myself to college, so I paid for violin lessons every other week second semester of freshman year. But June 2010, a week before our group performance in church, Dad told me I couldn’t participate because it was on his birthday.

I called my teacher to back out. She was furious. I hung up, called my mom crying. Mom said I had to obey my dad.

I asked Jesus if I could die now. Breathing hurt.

Trapped at home alone, I dialed Focus on the Family’s number in a panic around 9 a.m., thinking they wouldn’t involve the outside government agencies I feared. I told the elderly lady who answered that I was suicidal and needed to speak to a counselor.

While I waited, I read forum threads online to distract myself and watched the Lifehouse Everything skit on YouTube and sobbed.

A counselor called back around 2 p.m. I told him my dad controlled me and didn’t let me have friends and I was miserable. He said I should join a college Bible study on campus or at church.

I told him Dad didn’t allow that and asked him how I could move out and honor my parents. He said I needed to keep living at home and seek out friends and a mate in Bible study groups. Then he prayed with me and hung up.

Dad relented, I was in the performance. But he said he didn’t see any value in doing special music at church.

I despaired. The one hotline I trusted to keep my anonymity didn’t understand. Maybe I was the problem, maybe I should accept my loneliness and deaden my desires.

This is how I stopped feeling, how I got emotional hypothermia.

But I didn’t stay alone.

In October 2009, first semester of college, another homeschooled friend I met in driving school invited me to CleanPlace, an online Christian writer’s forum for teens run by a handful of women writers in their 30s. They encouraged my poetry and feedbacked my stories. They didn’t dismiss creativity as a waste of time.

Most of the members were homeschooled, and several of them had been crushed and isolated like me. I found community. I wasn’t the only one stuck in the box.

I started making friends at college, too.

First I befriended my professors, since I was a straight A student and I was used to talking to adults, not my peers.

Then I tutored chemistry in the Science Center on campus, my first real job outside my family or my church.

I’d avoided the punk girl with long pink hair and industrial piercings who yelled F*** at her Analytical Chemistry textbook, but then she befriended me. We debated Christianity and philosophy and traded graphic novels.

After sophomore year, I let myself read for fun again.

That summer and fall, after a discussion with one of my writing mentors, I read the Harry Potter books and later wrote a defense of them as being almost Christian fantasy.

I was happier than I’d been in years.

But my parents saw me changing. And they were afraid.

Read Parts Three and Four.

Leaving an Unhealthy Church #7: It Happens To Ministers, Too

Another aspect of unhealthy churches is that the talk, lies and abuse happens to ministers, too. Sometimes we do not think about or discuss this.

When I was involved in the United Pentecostal Church in New Jersey, there was a neighboring pastor from the same organization that my pastor would talk about negatively. He would accuse him of being lax on standards, proclaim that rebels went there (our church had years before split and some who left attended there), and he even put him down for attending a tent revival run by someone outside our group. These weren’t private one on one comments, which would be bad enough, but were remarks openly made to the entire congregation. While sharing about the other pastor receiving his ordination at a district conference, my pastor complained in a sermon that the District Superintendent, Wayne Trout, called him up front to pray for the man.

I knew a minister who was pastor at another church in the organization, about two hours north of us. When that church went through the established process of leaving the organization, various things were said of him. One was that he ‘stole’ the church from James Lumpkin, the previous pastor. He personally shared with me that when he resigned his license, Nathaniel Urshan, the UPCI General Superintendent at the time, wrote cautioning him against leaving & I believe basically saying that those who exit do not end up well. That church is still in existence in 2023 and Terry Smith is still the pastor.

Then there is a former UPCI minister in Michigan, Joel Chipman, who since leaving has been bad-mouthed by his former pastor, Robert Henson, in Flint. I have no doubt that similar has happened to other former UPCI ministers, as well as ones from other church groups.

Anyone involved in an unhealthy church can be hurt, even those in the ministry. When you leave, your name sometimes becomes mud, even though you may have previously given your life to the group.

Arrogance in the church? Nah.

“One thing is for certain about the Amish. They are a modest bunch of people. They will never condemn you for having another religion as they believe that arrogance is a sin.” (From 26 Amish Facts You Need to Know – Sportingz.com/news/26-amish-facts-need-know/26/)

I never thought I was an arrogant person but after being in my former church for 18 years, I think I had become that way. No one had any truth unless they went to our church. No one knew how to pray, how to worship unless it was our way (noisy and active). We had ALL the TRUTH. It was our duty to try to get people to come visit our church (and of course stay) and become one of us. Surely we were not arrogant. We just wanted people to know the truth.

We did the Saturday morning visitation thing of course. I remember going out with some of the other girls and women. A couple of the teen girls had knocked on a door and the person told them to go away. They went away and “shook off the dust from their of their feet against them….” (It is in the Bible – Acts 13:51). I remember thinking “I hope the people in that house did not see them do that.” It did not seem very Christ-like to me even then.

Small children raised in that church could point out all the women they saw that were not dressed right (skirts/dresses only and down to the ankles, no slacks, long sleeves not above the elbow, and no short hair except for men). People of other denominations sometimes were ridiculed from the pulpit and of course we all “amened” that.

If people didn’t look like our church members, then they did not have the Truth (as we saw it, as it was taught and preached to us which was not necessarily what was in the Bible). It made us feel special, called by God, God’s Chosen People. We had Church, with running, dancing, singing, loud music and the louder the better. All other churches were considered “dead” because they did not “worship” the way we did.

Does God always want all that noise? There is a time and place for everything. Maybe sometimes we want to leap for joy before God. David did. Sometimes we want to play the music loud. That is in Psalms. But sometimes we should just be quiet so we can hear that still, small voice talking to us. Prayer was never quiet. How could any of us hear God? How could we feel God move on us? We only had good church if we went late, with an hour altar call with screaming, dancing, louder and faster music. Being slain in the spirit, chattering in tongues, kicking off shoes.

Judging people for how they dressed or worshiped; people who were different in their churchiness. Arrogantly feeling sorry for those who did not have the Truth. But it was all outward appearance and what we did in church and how many times – oh, those other people who went to those other churches only went one hour Sunday morning. Just think how much they are missing by not going several times a week.

People are different. God made us that way. We like to gather with others who think the same way and that is OK, but don’t begrudge anyone else from thinking and doing differently. Don’t isolate yourself from so many others who may just have a good way to worship God even if it is different.

The fragility of truth

Someone told me today that he had come to the conclusion that “Orthodoxy is a fragile thing, which can be good. If it’s false, it can be easily dropped, and broken. But if it’s true, it must be constantly maintained.” I wonder if I misheard him. Because if what we believe is false, it can be easily dropped and broken, yes. But that is when it must be constantly maintained. Only the false is fragile. The truth, like fire, should not be so easily snuffed out.

It was an interesting comment and an interesting line of thought. Should the truth need to be constantly maintained? I don’t believe so. Truth will flourish on it’s own. The false, the insufficient will be easily broken or snuffed out, yes. Something closely related to that has been bothering me lately. After nineteen years of believing a certain way and giving my life to it, I find myself wondering what I believe.

I’m not sorry for the positive things that came of my life in Pentecost, but I don’t believe what I did just two months ago. I told someone not long ago that I haven’t left Pentecostalism, I’ve just grown beyond it. That is very true. It was good in it’s place and time, but there are deeper, richer places in God, and I’m ready to explore those.

So was what I believed false, that it could be easily broken? I can’t answer that yet. Is my faith broken or bigger now? I’d have to say bigger. Maybe in answering the second question, I’ve answered the first. So again I come to the thought that I haven’t left Pentecostalism, but I have grown beyond it.

Only what is false must be constantly maintained, in my opinion. Truth will stand on it’s own, and falsehoods won’t tarnish or change it. Truth is strong, but falsehood is weak and easily broken. Systems that encourage people not to look beyond their group’s way of thinking are maintaining something. But truth promotes growth, not maintenance.

The difference between falsehood and truth, to me, are like the difference between a spark and a bonfire. One can be easily snuffed; the other can burn for days without any human effort. So when I’m told if I miss a service that I’m “leaving truth,” when I realize that after 19 years that two months has totally changed my opinion on certain passages in the Bible… I have to wonder what I was maintaining all these years.

God made the mountains. He put the stars into space. He is truth. Truth doesn’t need to be maintained by humanity. Truth extends way beyond humanity. Who ever heard of maintaining a mountain? Or maintaining a star? So why, then, do we think truth must be fought over and maintained through such careful monitoring of every bit of information that passes our eyes? Truth will stand on it’s own. It isn’t fragile, and there is no need to maintain it.

There is no reason to fear that truth will break so easily. It should be treated respectfully, but even when left alone it will persevere. If a person is afraid that “truth” can be easily broken or lost, that is a very good sign that they are only maintaining an ideology, a mindset, or a thought pattern, rather than real truth and faith.