Category: United Pentecostal Church | Page 39

Pants or not pants?

Pants for women has become a laughable argument in Pentecost.

The argument at my former church was that tights were fine because they had feet, so they resembled hose. Hose were not pants, and hose were for women, so tights were OK (at least in modest colors).

However, then came leggings and capri tights. Leggings and capri tights were NOT OK, even when worn under skirts, even when made out of the same material – or even a bit thicker material – than tights. Leggings and capri tights didn’t have feet in them, therefore they were not like hose, they were pants. Pants were for men, so leggings and capri tights were not OK.

BUT… Long johns were a type of underwear and didn’t show, so even though they didn’t have feet, they were OK, even though they were made just like leggings.

Leggings looked just like tights when worn with boots, but leggings were still wrong, even under a long skirt. (But tights were OK.)

Pajamas were not OK, with or without feet, because pajamas were pants and pants were for men.

Source: https://www.dhgate.com/product/feminine-chiffon-wide-leg-skirt-pants-long/184384882.html

Judge, ye. Pants or not pants?

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Afraid to leave… afraid to stay

I’ve been reorganizing. As I did, I came across a good-bye letter from me to the pastor from March 2008. I didn’t actually leave until December 2009. I don’t remember what prompted me to write the letter; I’m fairly certain it had to do with two younger women falsely accusing me of some really weird things–so weird that when he started rebuking me I had no idea who even could have come up with such ludicrous statements. I’m pretty sure from the way the letter is worded that I figured I’d be kicked out, not that I was planning to just walk out. I also know that I should have left even before that.

Reading the note – a note that was mainly thanks and praise of them for all the “good things” like outreach and being used so much and being “allowed” to help – brought back a lot of memories. Memories of such fear and anxiety that I would physically start shaking so hard I could barely stand if I so much as got a text from the pastor or his wife. Memories of my stomach in knots and me afraid to run to the bathroom because he’d be angrier if he’d called me to stand in his two hour after service line of people he wanted to talk to or who wanted to talk to him and stuck his head out and saw that I wasn’t there, or saw me leave service for any reason, or… Afraid to go to the church for anything, never knowing when I’d get ‘called in’ or what I’d be in trouble for next, and afraid not to go because missing anything meant a step toward hell, no matter what the reason for missing.

People who left had things said. They were garbage, trash. They weren’t worth talking to and couldn’t be trusted. Listening to them or spending any time with them was risking your own soul, because as the pastor said, “be careful who you fellowship!” If you associated with them, you were probably one of them. And if you were one of them, you were backslid, too, and had left God and fallen away ‘like a dog returned to his vomit.’

And so I was afraid to leave, but I was afraid to stay. I realize now that the pastor was exerting a tremendous amount of control with his after service lines that you had to stay in until 1:00 am if he told you to be there, even on a work night, and his rebukes based on false accusations — rebukes without giving the accused an opportunity to explain, harsh rebukes that didn’t even have to do with the original accusations in many cases, rebukes in which the condemned weren’t to say anything or they’d be talking back to the man of God, which was simply not done. I realized even then that the amount of terror that I was feeling and the physical toll it was taking were harmful. I’d been warned by doctors that stress was elevating bad things and manifesting physically. I didn’t know at the time how close I may have been to an emotional breakdown.

Leaving was costly. Staying was costlier. I stayed because I believed in God. I stayed until I barely had any faith left. They taught that those who left also left God, but I would have struggled less with faith in God if I’d abandoned faith in them a little sooner, before they’d entwined ideas of God with their sickness quite so much. I was afraid to leave, and after I wrote the letter I found tonight, it would still be another 21 months before I left. People there at the time may have wondered why I left. I look back, eight years later, and wonder why I ever stayed as long as I did. If I’d know then what I know now, I’m not sure if I’d have been more or less afraid of leaving. But looking back now, my regret is that I ever went there to start with… and that I didn’t leave sooner.

*Fear and anxiety like I describe here, and the kind of control I experienced should never be a part of any ‘church’. If you are in an organization and you are afraid to leave but afraid to stay, seek outside help. And somehow, leave. God will be on the other side of that door, no matter what they say.

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Bible Reading and Prayer

I’ve asked and been asking myself for years why I struggle so much with Bible reading and prayer. I’ve finally gotten to a point where I can talk to God a little bit, but I wouldn’t say we were on close speaking terms. Bible reading is very difficult, and I rarely pick up a Bible or want anything to do with things that remind me of it.

This didn’t happen because I left the church. It happened because I was in it. It happened because the words that were supposed to comfort me were very often used against me instead. People who professed to be Christians did what they could to undermine my faith and that of others, in order to lift themselves or hide their own failures, and not just a few times, but repeatedly, until what I hear when I read, no matter what it is, brings a flood of bad memories rather than anything good.

I wasn’t raised in what most people who read this might consider a Christian home. We went to Sunday School, we read Jesus storybooks sometimes, but Bible reading was in preparation to teach, and prayer was mainly before extended family meals, not part of daily life. I struggled with some things in my own life, and at nine I went to a camp where we were ‘encouraged’ to have daily devotionals and to memorize scripture. I was a strict rule-follower and very much took these new rules to heart.

When I got home, though, I quickly learned that it was not to my advantage to follow them… I hid to memorize verses or to read my Bible, and most of my prayer time was done after lights out or high up in the top of a maple tree where no one would know. (When my sister found out I was reading my Bible, the next time we were in trouble for something she chimed in to Dad that I should know better because I was reading my Bible… and she got off the hook while I was punished, because he agreed with her.) Still, even touching the Bible brought me a kind of peace and calmed me in a way that nothing else had been able.

Throughout my childhood there was a feeling that I should be following the rule, the discipline, of quiet time. I wasn’t very faithful with it always, but the thought was there that I should be. Going to a Pentecostal church backed that thought. I jumped into that rule and others very eagerly–the concept of rules associated with church was familiar to me, and I liked having rules… they brought order to areas of my life that were very chaotic otherwise. One problem with this was that it led to legalism… the other was that not everyone followed the same rules.

Bible reading, particularly, went from being something positive to a chore within just a few years. I craved the recognition of getting my Bible reading certificate (for reading the Bible through in a year), but it was easy to fall behind and it was hard to catch up. There were other obligations, there was life… and more and more a piece of paper and a few minutes of applause for the hours and hours of ‘faithfulness’ in a year wasn’t enough. I started to recognize that the recognition was unfair when the youth were challenged with a point system — a point for every minute prayed or chapter read. Well, goodness, I could pray and drive but I sure couldn’t read and drive, and I could speed read but I wouldn’t get much from what I’d ‘read,’ but this was how to rack up points. And a chapter often took a whole lot longer than a minute of prayer. There would be no recognition for ‘slow and steady’ in the point system. I think that is the first year after joining that I didn’t get my certificate. It didn’t matter any more.

Within three years of that, I was thrown out of a church. I fasted for a week before I was thrown out, having been warned to somehow change whatever the pastor disliked, even though I wasn’t sure what that was. Fasting didn’t ‘fix’ me, and it didn’t prevent me being thrown out. I’d been the only one going to the church to pray, the only one going to the prayer room before church at least sometimes, definitely the only one ‘interceding’ in tongues for the services, but I was the one thrown out. I didn’t understand how this could happen. Being thrown out made me doubt myself and my routines of prayer and fasting. What difference had they made? Not only was I told not to go back there, but I’d actually had the pastor tell me he didn’t know if I COULD BE saved.

I experimented a little while with other options, but in the end I moved… to a place that ended up just as bad or worse. Within months I was no longer reading, praying other than before church as required, or fasting if I could avoid it without getting called out. I’d try. I was guilt ridden when I didn’t, and fearful that I’d be ‘caught,’ but even the fear and the guilt weren’t adequate motivators. Not that they should have been; by that point I had THAT unhealthy a perception of “Christian disciplines,” though.

It’s not easy to get out of that level of legalism or that degree of unhealthiness.

Tonight I found an article about the type of church I grew up in. It reminded me of that group’s “five steps to salvation” and the emphasis to a nine year old camper of the importance of daily Bible reading, memorization, and prayer. It reminded me of the beginnings of a legalism that would take me, finally, to a place where I wondered if there was a god, to a place where I’d sit stunned as someone told me they were a Christian but didn’t have devotionals and didn’t think they were even necessary… to a place where I would wish I could believe the same, to find again a place with God where the rules didn’t matter, but just the relationship.

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The sacred cows of Pentecost

According to Wiktionary, a sacred cow is something that can’t “be tampered with, or criticized, for fear of public outcry. A person, institution, belief system, etc. which, for no reason other than the demands of established social etiquette or popular opinion, should be accorded respect or reverence, and not touched, handled or examined too closely.”

There were herds of sacred cows in my former church, things that I think most people knew made no sense, but that no one would question, things like:

Praying an hour, because there was a song that said “Sweet hour of prayer.” Nothing in the Bible, and most of the congregation had never even heard the whole song. They certainly never sang it at my former church. It was too slow.
Women not wearing pants because of a verse in Deuteronomy that talks about women not wearing “that which pertaineth to a man.” Why this means pants specifically and not t-shirts, denim, suit jackets, etc, which all began as things men wore is never discussed, or if it is, it is shrugged away by saying that those don’t change the profile. The same people argue that a woman can’t wear a fly in her skirt because if she’s walking behind something and people can only see from hip and up it might look like she’s wearing pants. But that fly doesn’t change the profile.
Going to church multiple times a week because “the Bible says forsake not the assembling of yourselves together.” The Bible never says that people should assemble repeatedly during the week until they are exhausted or even though they are sick.
People should not wear jewelry, because the Bible says not to wear gold or jewels or costly array. In what universe does this mean your daughter can’t wear toy plastic beads around her neck but you can wear a $300 outfit?
Women shouldn’t wear makeup because Jezebel did. Not everything wicked people do is wicked. In the same verse she arranged her hair and looked out a window. Of the three, only makeup is preached against. (And for that matter, she only put on eye makeup… not lip gloss or blush, much less concealer or nail polish.)

There were many more. Herds of sacred cows. Cows so sacred that people did all sorts of strange things to avoid not only touching them but even looking at them. There were people who wouldn’t buy watches because they were sold in the jewelry section. Most women would flinch if they accidentally touched a pair of pants on a sales rack. People would go to church sick, and others would report each other for wearing chapstick. (“It looked PINK!”) Those sacred cows… there were way too many. Dare to ask the simple question “Why?” and you could be labeled or ostracized. It wasn’t even popular opinion that made them untouchable. Sometimes it was pastor’s opinion, and sometimes it was group think.

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Raising Two PKs in the UPCI

I was not raised a PK but as a pastor’s wife I had trouble fitting in with other pastor’s wives because I thought I wasn’t good enough to be around them. I wasn’t raised by Christian parents and especially not in a pastor’s home.

I did raise two children as PKs but tried to make their lives as normal as possible. I also know my kids were treated differently and were often excluded from activities and parties because they were the pastor’s kids.

It did save the life of my daughter one night when her two friends decided to live on the wild side and went to a party where they consumed alcohol and were involved in a terrible accident and both girls were killed. If my daughter would have been with them, well let’s just say she could have been killed too. This caused my daughter to suffer guilt because she hadn’t said anything to us about the party. She knew why she’d been excluded but didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to be a snitch. The years passed, my son went away to college and my daughter married and my husband left me for another woman and I was left to clean up his mess.

My life changed immediately and the saints took their hurt out on me. It wasn’t a good time in my life. I moved to a bigger city 2 hours away where my son lived and my daughter and her family followed suit. Her marriage was crumbling and soon she was divorced with three young daughters. We couldn’t find another United Pentecostal Church where we felt welcomed because we were no longer in the ministry but were still isolated from the saints. I had women coming to me in the church warning me away from their husbands and my daughter couldn’t attend because of her ex.

So we finally found a non-denominational church to attend. Here we found hope, love and a new beginning. But most of all we found acceptance without the stigma of our past.

I had close friends at my job but it was hard to make friends at church because of our past, but we did and most of all we feel at home.

My kids and I definitely suffered by the elitism of the UPC ministry but from the lack of it in our new church we’ve been able to achieve some normalcy. My daughter married a good man a few years ago who had 2 daughters and they have a wonderful blended family and I was blessed with 2 more granddaughters. I have also been blessed with a very nice man and we’ve been dating for three years and he is not a minister at all!

Through this we’ve learned to be kind and friendly to everyone and we welcome all to our homes for dinner, not just ministry. I belong to a sweet group of people who call me by my first name with the usual “sister” in front of it. I’ve got an identity that is all my own.

So what started out as the worst time of my life has changed to the best time.

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