Category: my experience | Page 21 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

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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The First Pastor Of The Church I Grew Up In

OK, a little foundation on the things I’ve discussed so far. This post will be about the Pastor of the UPC (United Pentecostal Church) church we started out in.

He was a wonderful, elderly man. Elderly physically, and elderly in the sense of meeting the Biblical qualifications for an elder of the church. A true shepherd, loving and kind. I’ve often wondered how he came to get involved in the UPC.

I was a child when under him, so there may have been doctrinal issues with his preaching that I don’t remember, but children recognize and identify with a kind spirit, and this is what I remember about him. His preaching was always delivered lovingly.

When he baptized me, I remember being very surprised. Everyone who’s been in the UPC knows what a big deal they make about the words that are said when you’re baptized – “it HAS to be in Jesus name, or you’re not saved!”. But, when this Pastor baptized me, he said “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, which is Jesus Christ”.

My Mom complained endlessly about this pastor. He was too old-fashioned, and also not old-fashioned enough (in her opinions). Even though she was a fellow preacher, he wouldn’t talk to her in his office without someone else present and she took this as a slight against her character. (In reality, he was protecting them both against gossip and slander and generally making a good practice of common sense.) He objected to suggestions of hers that would offend many families in the church, and she saw this as “political pandering”. He saw it as loving your brothers and sisters in Christ, to take care to preach ‘the truth’ in a way that would not hurt people.

Mom and the other female preachers in the church would meet at our house and spend hours on end talking about what they didn’t like about this pastor. These sessions are something else that I would get punished for interrupting if me or my sister needed things, like food or maybe a band aid for an injury. How dare we interrupt the workings of God! Because to them, all this gossiping was just “sharing concerns to be prayed about” and this was of God in their way of thinking. It seems that gossip and slander wasn’t possible for them, because everything they said about somebody no matter how bad, damaging, or unfounded it was, was only for the purpose of prayer. The only time the concept of gossip seemed to even exist to them was if something bad was said about them.

Another thing about this pastor – many of the men on the board of the church didn’t believe in female preachers. But he did, and he overrode them to allow Mom and the other women to preach in his church. This seems pretty progressive to me, and also very different from the “political pandering” he was accused of by them. If you have a group of people in a mindset of extremism, often giving them a leader with a good heart still can’t sway them away from their extremes.

At this point in my childhood, I already knew that there were major problems with the UPC beliefs and lifestyle I was being taught. I could see them so clearly with the non-jaded vision of a child. But, because our pastor was such a kind man, I felt that the problem was the people in the church (like my Mom) who refused to be Christlike in their actions. I didn’t see yet that my pastor was actually a major exception to the rule when it came to the personalities of UPC ministers.

Edited to add: I forgot to mention that this pastor was the presbyter of our UPC “section”, so he was big in the organization. I’ve never seen anyone else like him in the UPC.

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A Memory

Just got some news from a friend requesting prayer, her Uncle died this weekend, possibly from suicide. That hasn’t been determined for sure yet.

This brought back a memory that I’d shoved to the back of my mind not wanting to think about the tragedy. I’m going to get out of my timeline a bit in sharing this, but I want to get this written down while I’m thinking of it.

My Uncle committed suicide when I was about 9. He’d never known God, and the only “christians” he knew were my parents. A few weeks before he died, he came to their house asking them to tell him about God. He wanted to know how to be saved! But, instead of telling him about Jesus, they simply told him that he had to go to church. He replied that he couldn’t go on Sunday nights because the races were on Sundays and he was on the pit crew, he had a commitment to be there throughout the season. They replied that if races were more important to him than church, he couldn’t be saved.

He hung himself in my Aunt’s garage a week or two later.

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Things Kept Crumbling

After Mom started preaching, pretty soon she decided that I was too fragile and unstable for public school, and that all the problems I was having were due to the pressures of first and second grade. So, she decided that I would be homeschooled. I didn’t want this, I begged and pleaded with her to let me stay with my friends, but to no avail. School was the only ‘normal’ thing in my life, and I wanted it to continue even though our way of dressing made it difficult. But, second grade was as far as I got to go in public school, I began homeschooling in third grade.

The first few years of homeschooling were pretty uneventful. Then, something strange happened. One Sunday morning, my parents announced that Dad was going to church with us. I was so excited, if Dad would just ‘get in’, I figured we could be happy. ‘Normal’. Dad went to church with us regularly for a few months, even going up and praying a few times. All the church people were very welcoming to him, even ones that he’d met in the past and been rude to. Things were going great.

For some reason I didn’t understand, soon after Dad started going to church him and Mom told us that Dad was going to go live somewhere else for awhile. To me and my sister, this was completely unexpected. What was even more unexpected was the reaction of our church. I was around 7, but adults in the church felt free to ask me questions that they would never have asked my Mom. Every service, people would catch me without Mom around and start asking questions. “Where’s your Dad? Why isn’t he coming to church anymore? Does he still live with you? Do you get to see him? Are your parents divorcing?” These questions were coming from adults, not adolescents. Sunday School teachers, song leaders, youth pastors… no matter what their position in the church, they didn’t seem to care what kind of pain and embarrassment they brought on a little child whose home had been ripped apart, they were only concerned with their blood lust for juicy gossip.

This was my first experience with emotional pain from outside the church being made worse by those in it. It would not be the last.

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