Category: United Pentecostal Church | Page 60

Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion

Original post here. Continued from Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery. This took place between the late 1960s – early 1970s.

Give me that old time religion,

It’s good enough for me.

The church that I was brought up in no longer exists. The buildings still stand, I could lead you inside and give you detailed tours. They still have the same name, and are still used by an entity that calls itself Southern Baptist. But how they define themselves is completely different. The Southern Baptist Church I grew up in was proudly liberal. At that time God was thought to be too big for the human mind to define, and any attempt to limit God’s nature beyond the broad outlines set out by Jesus was thought to be dubious. The important part of the Bible was the Gospel, everything else was just there to provide context. Homosexuality was not an issue. Abortion was a medical procedure that was best avoided, but sometimes necessary. My husband remembers a local Southern Baptist church holding a divorce ceremony for a couple who had married there. I remember my church kindergarten teachers using a crystal ball in class. And a book written at the time by a woman Southern Baptist theologian celebrated the ordination of women, which was just around the corner.

We never turned that corner. We turned back instead. But how did we reach that enlightened position in the first place?

I was taught in church that the bedrock foundation of our Southern Baptist faith was “soul competency.” God created everything, including each and every one of us, and gave each and every one of us the ability, the permission, and the responsibility to develop a personal and unique relationship with God based on both our personal experience and our own reading and interpretation of the Bible. God would hold each of us personally accountable for our actions when we met Him before the Throne, and we better be ready. There would be no one else to hide behind, and we couldn’t use anyone else’s interpretation as a shield to cover our theological nakedness. However, the same God that made us also made us competent to do the job. We were God’s children, and we were up to this task.

Soul competency was popularized in the Southern Baptist faith by E.Y. Mullins in 1908. Here is the Reverend John Dee explaining it:

To me it means that the individual Christian is unassailable in her interpretation of Scripture and in her own understanding of God’s will for her life. It means that when someone says, “This is what the Bible means to me,” I cannot tell her she is wrong. I can merely say that her understanding is meaningless for me. Only the preacher’s understanding of Scripture is expected to be generally meaningful for the whole community, and it is up to each individual to decide whether the preachers’ words are useful or not. Soul competency means to me that anything I understand to bring me closer to God is true and cannot be taken away from me, because my life is unique and there is a way of understanding Scripture which is unique to me. Soul competency means to me that I find truth when I am furthest removed from distractions and contingencies of people and things and authorities- again, when truth takes forms which are unique to me and my understanding of the Bible.

In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom argues that this belief in soul competency aligns the Old School Southern Baptists with the earliest Christians, the Gnostics, in their belief that the close, personal relationship with God is inviolable. As a young mystic who already had a close, personal relationship with God, I had no problems with that at the time or since then.

Soul competency led directly to another core Southern Baptist belief, the priesthood of the believer. All who believed in God stood equally before God. Some might be more learned or more gifted, but no one stood higher than any other. In practice this meant that as long as you founded your beliefs on your understanding of the Bible, no other Christian could tell you that you were wrong.

As competent priests who took charge of our own souls, there was one doctrine we were strongly against — predestination. Our fate, like our relationship with God, was subject to change at our own hands depending on what we did. If we didn’t like our fate, we could walk with God and talk with God and take it up with God directly. And then we could go out in the world and do something about it. Calvinist predestination was roundly mocked as foolishness.

The great virtue of soul competency is that it inoculates against atheism. If you are taught that the Bible is the only place where one looks for God, then when you realize the Bible is a collection of old books of questionable value in today’s world you have no fallback position and become a skeptic by default. If there is another place where you are taught to look for God the break is not as traumatic.

But how did this play out in my head? Well, here’s an example. The year must have been about 1972. I was around six or seven, and my family was attending Sunday Service at Bowmar Baptist Church in Vicksburg, MS. The preacher was telling the story of Moses, and how as a youth Moses had killed another man in a fit of rage. The preacher said that the young man thought he was alone, but God was there. It got me to thinking: was God also young at that time? It would fit, the God of the Old Testament was certainly more hot-tempered and less mature than the God of the New Testament. Perhaps the entire Bible could be read as God’s coming-of-age story, as He grew into a more responsible deity. I hadn’t heard anyone mention that idea before, and I knew some would object to it. But I was just as competent to interpret the Bible as they were. I would hold on to that thought until I was old enough to discuss it with other believers in a thoughtful, non-judgmental place.

I never found that place in the Southern Baptist church. By the time I was old enough to discuss theology they had changed beyond recognition. I was able to eventually find a thoughtful non-judgmental place to discuss theology with other worshipers, but that would have to wait many decades until I found the Unitarian Universalist Church.

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There was one other thing we learned in church. This being the ’60s and early ’70s we all got a good dose of anti-communism. It was considered your patriotic duty to preach anti-communism everywhere, including the pulpit. We were taught that communism was evil for three reasons:

1) Communists told people what they had to believe, instead of letting people make up their own minds,

2) Communists punished people who questioned them and did not believe what they were told to believe, and

3) Communists rewrote their own history to erase any evidence that disagreed with them. That one seriously freaked me out as an adopted child, probably because it had been done to me personally. (Although why it was acceptable when done to me and not acceptable when done by communists was a question I never found the nerve to ask.)

Keep those three things in the back of your mind; we’ll return to them later.

Three Steps Out the Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction

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Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

These events takes place in the late 1960s – 1970. Original post here. It has been edited slightly to reflect updated information. Continued from Three Steps Out The Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction.

Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red, brown, yellow, black and white
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

In trying to write down my memories, I find that the earliest part of the story has changed the most. There is what I recalled, what I remembered, and what I later found out about.

I recall only scattered memories of the late 1960s from around 2 1/2 years (when my adoptive sister was brought home) to 3 1/2 years, leading up to a moment a few months before my fourth birthday when I realized I was recalling more details, and would in general recall things from then on.

I later found out I had a rotten start. I was adopted at birth by an unrelated couple looking for a baby to save their second failed marriage (each) and give them social credits. My adoptive mother had been rejected as an adoptive parent in her first marriage, and it took three years for my adoptive parents to pass a home study before adopting me (average time is three – six months).

Apparently she couldn’t handle a baby. I found out later she’d bitten and pinched me when I cried, and her own mother had moved in and actually taken care me until her death when I was around three. I don’t recall any of that, but found out about it later. The only thing I recall of Granny is going to see her as she lay dying in the hospital, and looking at a figure under an oxygen tent.

After that Mom took a low-level clerical job, even though we were debt free and fairly well off, so she would require a maid to look after my adoptive baby sister and me during the day. Dorothy was efficient, but neither she nor Mom was into cuddling or other shows of affection.

What do I remember? I remember being very unhappy and not knowing why. I remember being alone almost all the time. My working class parents bought me the toys they thought were appropriate, but made no attempt to learn anything about early childhood development except through hearsay. This made their purchases somewhat scattershot and focused on what was cheap and trendy. It also meant no puzzles until much later, few manipulatives, and never, ever any of those nasty building blocks. There were dolls, but dolls always upset me. I didn’t know how to play with them except to treat them the way I was treated, and I didn’t want to do that to anything. I didn’t tell anyone, but I never saw a doll without wanting to cry my eyes out until I was over 30.

(When I was older my adoptive mother complained that I had loved her completely and we had been perfectly happy until I turned two when I suddenly hated her, and she still had no idea why. You see what I mean about her knowledge of childhood development.)

(And that didn’t gel with the later information I found out about her abusing me as an infant.)

Dad had a traveling job, and was only home on weekends. Mom worked during the day, and Dorothy was busy with my baby sister and cleaning the house. We weren’t allowed outside to play much. As for entertainment, video games didn’t exist yet, and only my parents were allowed to touch the TV.

Of course there was another player in this drama — me. Although I am a Myers-Briggs INFJ with the ability to read emotions, from an early age I repressed my empathy because the emotions I was picking up were too awful. I still to this day have trouble picking them up. From early on I tried to function as an INTP. I got pretty good at it, and had everyone convinced I was an INTP for decades. I got very good at looking at the world as if I were an INTP, which meant I devoted my time to trying to 1) concentrate, 2) sift through large amounts of data, 3) notice discrepancies, and 4) solve puzzles.

I spent most of my preschool years alone in my room with nothing that really engaged my mind. I had a lot of mind to engage and not much inside it at the time. But being highly intelligent and not yet literate, I found it easy to concentrate on a single thought until I fell into a trance and entered an altered state of consciousness. Through trance I met other beings and saw things that did not exist in the here-and-now. It’s incredibly hard to do that now because there are so many thoughts in my head that I have to shut down, but back then it was relatively easy.

I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t have the vocabulary and nobody cared enough to ask me what I had done that day. Nothing was broken, so nothing got their attention. I recall one time when I tried to make them realize how unhappy I was. We were going somewhere, and I slipped unto the floor of the back seat of the car (seat-belts were optional and infant car seats were nonexistent) and began pulling the hair out of my head in huge chunks, hoping they would ask me why. They didn’t. They just yelled at me for making a mess. The hair never grew back, and I have an elongated forehead to this day. But it convinced me of the futility of self-mutilation as an attention-getting ploy, which kept me out of a world of trouble in my teenage years, so it was a win in the long run.

Anyhow, thanks to my mystical experiences I was not as lonely as I could have been, and I became a lifelong theist. Those experiences would become a great source of comfort to me growing up and provide a solid foundation for my religious education.

Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion

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Three Steps Out the Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction

This was originally posted on my abuse issues blog. You’re welcome to read it, but it can get a bit intense. I won’t post more than one a day as I catch up. These stories take place between around 1970 – 1984. This post was originally put up here.

Give me three steps, give me three steps Mister

Give me three steps to the door

Give me three steps, give me three steps Mister

and you won’t see me no more.

There are people who will tell you that the Christian Church(es) never change. If I’m in a good mood I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and try to figure out if they’re naive, moronic, or lying. I lived through the 180-degree transformation of one of America’s largest and oldest Protestant denominations from their days in the early 1970s as the second most liberal church in America into a leading player in the reactionary American Fundamentalist Movement in the 1980s. As a devout, Jesus-loving child, I sat on my pew and watched the faith tradition I loved utterly demolished from the inside, to be replaced by an evil twin who championed the opposite of everything I had taught while all around me people laughed, cheered, and patted themselves on the back for the “good” job that they had done.

To say it left me a bit sanguine is like saying a tidal wave is a bit wet.

Most people today are astonished to hear that the Southern Baptist Convention was ever liberal; the Fundamentalists have done a very good job of burying the body and getting rid of the evidence. But a few people have told their stories of the Takeover; this is mine. It’s about the church that used to be, the church that it became, and the three steps (not to mention a lot of pokes, shoves and outright trips) that led me to leave.

It’s also my attempt to detoxify myself from the whole poisonous experience. I have every right to be hurt, angry, and bitter over what happened to my generation. But I choose to lay my burden down here and not carry it any longer. To allow it to continue to hurt me would be to let the bad guys win, and I don’t believe in that.

While I know many of my peers became atheists as a result, I would ask commentators to refrain from wholesale theist-bashing in the comments. I’m all too aware of how hard it has become to find a church where one can have a positive religious experience in the wake of the Fundamentalist Movement, but I’m not yet ready to completely give up on the concept.

Shall we get started?

Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion

Examining Teachings #4: What Must I Do To Be Saved?

Some people have heard for years in their churches that Acts 2:38 says something like, “with the evidence of speaking in tongues” at the end. It is ingrained in them that the Scripture actually states this and it does not. When it is pointed out and they look it up in their Bible, they are shocked. Yes, they have previously read it on their own, but it was repeated in sermons so much that the faulty version stuck in their mind.

Similarly, many have heard that the preceding verse has the people asking, “What shall we do to be saved?” But the ‘to be saved’ is nowhere to be found. What happened is that Peter preached to them that they had crucified their awaited Messiah. Their response to this was “what shall we do?” What were they supposed to do, now that they realized what actually happened?

Yet there IS a place in the New Testament where that question is indeed asked in the book of Acts. Chapter 16 sees Paul and Silas thrown into prison. As they sung hymns of praise to God late at night while their fellow prisoners listened, there was an earthquake and everyone in the prison was freed. The jailer awoke, and seeing the doors ajar, he thought to kill himself as the authorities would take his life when they discovered the prisoners had escaped. But Paul called out to him and said to do himself no harm, that everyone was still there. Fearful, the jailer fell at their feet. Verse 30 says he asked them, “What must I do to be saved?”

What did Paul and Silas say in response? They told the jailer to believe in Jesus and he and his household would be saved.

They then spoke the word of the Lord to the jailer and those at his home. He washed the wounds of Silas and Paul. Then he and all his household were water baptized. He then fed them and all rejoiced in their newfound faith.

Did Paul and Silas say there were three steps to salvation and if one was not met, they would be lost? Did they show a list of rules that had to be kept afterward, in order to keep their salvation? There was not even a mention of speaking in tongues, either. It has been, and always will be, to believe in Jesus and you will be saved. This isn’t easy believism, as true belief brings about actions and a changed life through the working of God’s Spirit.

Examining Teachings #1: Drunk In The Spirit?
Examining Teachings #2: Jezebel and Shamefaced
Examining Teachings #3: Peculiar And Separate
Examining Teachings #4: What Must I Do To Be Saved?
Examining Teachings #5: Faith Without Works Is Dead

Examining Teachings #3: Peculiar And Separate

Peculiar and separate. How many times did some of us hear that we were ‘peculiar people’ and were to be ‘separate’ from others? Are you aware that the meanings given these words often did not reflect their biblical meanings?

Meme from https://twitter.com/naycrumors/status/678038931158540288

Some are proud of it. They consider it to be an honor to be called peculiar and even weird. Some boast about it. It’s a part of a so-called apostolic identity to some. They think their works make them peculiar and separate.

I recall my former pastor giving a wrong definition of the word peculiar, one which meant that we were different, on the line of odd-like. Many times it is linked to appearance, specifically outward standards. But is this what it really means?

I encourage you to look for yourself and see the true meaning. Look up the word that was translated peculiar, periousion, in Titus 2:14. You won’t find what many of us were taught. Just a quick glance at how various Bibles translate the word (EX: ‘a people for his own possession’ or ‘a people that are his very own’) will show the glaring misrepresentation of the meaning by some churches.

As to being separate, I would also encourage you to read passages in the Bible where it speaks about believers being separate from those who are not following Christ. Look at what things are shared. They are actions and things of the heart and not a dress code.

Think about it. In what way did Jesus look different than those living in Israel? How did the apostles stand out in their attire when they were spreading the Gospel? Did people in Ephesus or Corinth exclaim, “Look! I know they must be Christians. Just look at how they are dressed?”

Many trust that doing these things somehow makes them holy or brings holiness to them. This mindset can bring about great division. For instance, if I believe that a wedding ring is wrong to wear and I see you wear one, then I can easily start judging you and your walk with God, even considering you unsaved because I believe not wearing one helps keep me holy. Therefore your wearing one makes you unholy.

These wrong teachings lead many to then go in pursuit of what else they can ‘give up’ for the Lord, what else they can do to appear more holy and righteous. It can be never ending.

Didn’t the Pharisees do the exact same thing? They followed the letter of the law, even added their own long list of rules to help them and others keep God’s law. Yet Jesus said they were a people who served God with their lips, while their hearts were far from him. They were whited sepulchers, looking great on the outside, but inside there were dead bones.

We are not peculiar or separate as some suppose. Our holiness is obtained directly from God and has nothing to do with us. He alone makes us righteous and holy through our faith in Jesus. Trying to live by a set of rules can never, ever make us achieve this holiness. Trying to do so is an exercise in futility. If the law, which was given by God, could not change people and make them holy and righteous, what makes us think we can achieve this though our rules?

Being separate from the world does not mean looking different on the outside or to abstain from things like going to a ball game or movie. It goes to the heart—what makes us who we are—and THIS is what separates believers from those who do not know Christ.