Category: United Pentecostal Church | Page 60

Leaving An Unhealthy Church #10: Sorting Through The Teachings

For those still trying to sort through the doctrines you were taught in an unhealthy church, here are some things to consider that should be helpful.

1) Keep the passage in its context. One can make it appear to seem like a passage is teaching something different when it is taken out of context or partially quoted. You need to read the surrounding verses, and sometimes chapters, and not just the proof-text given.

2) Beware of assigning a word an incorrect definition. Many in unhealthy churches assign words meanings which do not reflect their biblical meaning. If one doesn’t look further into this, they can be led to believe the Bible teaches something totally different than it does. Some words that readily come to mind from my old church organization are long, peculiar, shamefacedness and hallelujah (the latter probably only pertains to my former church). Nowadays it is very easy to look up the basics of the original Greek or Hebrew words used in the Bible. Your modern day dictionary is not what you should use.

3) Look at the overall picture. Discover what the ‘whole,’ or all, of the Bible teaches on a subject and not just a few passages. Unhealthy churches piece together passages to support some teachings. Yet if you study what the entire Bible says on the subject, you will find what they say really isn’t taught in scripture. You won’t find the doctrine being stated by the apostles or Jesus and you won’t find any examples of them doing (whatever) it is. Complete concordances are found in abundance to help you find every instance of a word in the Bible.

4) Interpret a difficult passage in light of those that are clearly understood. When one passage seems to not fit in with the rest of scripture on a subject, we need to interpret that passage in light of what is clear. The teachings aren’t going to contradict themselves. For instance, if there is one verse that on the surface could appear to say something is a matter of salvation, and yet that is never explicitly stated anywhere in the Bible, then you are probably understanding it incorrectly. It needs to be interpreted by the passages that are clearly understood.

5) Set aside preconceived ideas and take care to not read things into a text which are not stated. When we read the Bible, we should approach it in a way that God can speak to us through it. That’s hard to do if we are dead set in our minds that we know it all and that our interpretation must be 100% accurate. This is what causes many in Pentecostal churches, when they read in the Bible about the Holy Spirit, to automatically think ‘speaking in tongues‘ even if it is not in the text. Thus we read into scripture our thoughts or what we have heard taught in church and we aren’t going to learn that way. Don’t set about to prove what you believe is correct or to prove a doctrine to be false. Instead, approach your studies with wanting to know what the Bible teaches, regardless of what you think it does or doesn’t teach.

The Trial

It’s the Bible, right? It’s a church, how wrong can it be?

I think the most insidious thing about beginning my Christian life in a United Pentecostal Church is all the things I missed out on – the pure joy of knowing Jesus Christ as my Savior and the goal of the Christian life, which is to grow up in Christ, go on to maturity. I missed out on knowing all the treasures that I have in my new identity in Christ – I am deeply loved (John 3:16), completely forgiven (Ephesians 1:7), totally accepted (Ephesians 1:6), and complete in Him (II Peter 1:3, Colossians 2:10).

So when the trial came fourteen years later, I wasn’t equipped. I was still an infant. I remember saying to members of my family, “I thought trials were supposed to make you better.” I felt I was growing worse by the day. I was crying out for help but there wasn’t any. All those black dots on the map, I was one of them.

All I knew was, I must have done something wrong, I was bad. God was getting back at me; I had been weighed in the balance and found wanting (one of the pastor’s favorite sermons). This was the kind of God I learned. Why had God zeroed in on me like one of those dots to be pinpointed like a destination on a map? I had no truth to cough up, no words of wisdom to hang on to; it was just me, singled out for the trial of my life. And I failed. I didn’t draw closer to my faith.

Wait, Faith? Faith, they didn’t even call it faith; faith was just a word to describe what you needed more of to see miracles, it was one church service to the next, one emotional high to the next. It was faith in – faith, an outer garb, and in a man and his church. Faith was not the very word used to describe this marvelous salvation in which we stand. There was no substance, no solid ground to stand on. Instead of standing, persevering, I just wanted to run, to do whatever it took to get out of the trial.

It would be two more years before I would leave the UPC and twenty more before I would leave the last vestiges of the scars that its false doctrine would leave on my heart and mind.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. James 1:3-4

Three Steps Part 4: Feminism and Fellowship

Original post here. This is continued from Three Steps Part 3: The First Step. This was about 1975.

So what do you do when it seems like your birth parents, your adoptive family and your church tell you that you, the individual person, are worthless? You start looking for other ways to make progress. In the 1970s there was another way that had made astounding progress in recent years, and that was through collective action and identification with a movement. Perhaps that could work for me. If I was not allowed to help myself as an individual, perhaps I could work for the advancement of a group that would benefit me in the long run, such as feminism.

By the mid-1970s my family was settling in to a new life in Birmingham and it seemed like my country was settling in to a new life as well, one that seemed sincerely interested in using reason and compassion to fix the errors of the past. Progress had been made on ending racial and gender discrimination, and more progress was coming. These developments were hailed as Good Things by our leaders and in the press. There were a few people grumbling about the changes in private conversations and letters to the editor, but never in public. It didn’t seem important.

School started to become interesting when they decided to start one of those newfangled “gifted” programs. I was ostracized by my peers for reasons I did not understand (high IQ and trauma), classes were deadly dull, and I had stopped paying attention and just sat there reading whatever I had checked out of the library. My reading teacher fought to get me tested for the program even though my grades were poor because I was reading a different book every day. The tests revealed that I was gifted, and I was put into the new class on probation over the strenuous objections of the principal, who apparently thought being bored in his classrooms was somehow inherently immoral.

I learned the two most important things I would learn in elementary school about that time, and oddly enough both of them were taught to me by male military veterans. The first lesson was taught to me by my new gifted-ed teacher, a 50s-era Army veteran who had used his benefits to earn a Master’s in Psychology. He taught me that the things which made me look at the world so differently than everyone else and isolated me from my classmates were matters of psychology, not moral failings on my part. They were in the process of being named, studied, and understood. I took a great deal of comfort from this fact. In the lifetimes of my adoptive parents and grandparents these same types of researchers had worked diligently to eradicate so many of the great plagues that had swept over mankind, like smallpox and polio. Surely they would be no less diligent in finding productive ways to deal with depression and anxiety.

The second lesson came from my new P.E. coach, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran who had been stationed in San Francisco and learned about yoga and meditation while he was there. I don’t think the school approved of such things, but he would mix in as much yoga and meditation as he could with the soccer and gym hockey. He taught us meditative breathing, and practicing that form of stress relief helped keep me from cracking under the stress.

Meanwhile I was noticing some discrepancies at church. People talked about gender equality in church, but like the Queen’s jam in Alice in Wonderland, it was always equality tomorrow, never equality today. Women would be allowed to preach any day now, but somehow never today or any other day on the schedule calendar.

By now I had noticed that most people didn’t come to hear the preacher speak in the first place, they came to take part in the activities going on in the Fellowship Hall. These activities were organized by the church ladies. Therefore the big draw at the church was the work of the women, not the work of the all-male clergy. Yet, when the preacher called out the names of the notable members who had helped the church at the beginning of the service and asked them to stand and be recognized he only called on men. After they were honored there would be a general platitude about the “wonderful work done by the ladies of the church”, but no women would be named and recognized, and no individual woman’s work would be held up for commendation.

There were also definite differences between “women’s work” and “men’s work”. Women in the church cooked, cleaned, decorated, organized events, and took care of children. Men in the church wrote and administrated. Even at that age I knew that my God-given gift was writing. There was no place for a women writer at my church, even with a gift coming from God. God had not seen fit to gift me with any talent at all for cleaning, decorating, organizing or anything else which women were allowed to do. In fifty years I have picked up some very slight skills along those lines, but nothing that will ever approach my ability to string words together. So if God truly meant for men and women to occupy different spheres, why had He given me a gift that did not fit in with my gender? It didn’t make any sense. Either God had made a mistake, or the church had. The latter seemed far more likely.

Meanwhile our preacher was getting ready to retire. A new minister had been found by the steering committee, and exciting new things were being planned by the church organizers. Maybe it would finally be the day for that equality jam.

I had a lot to learn.

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

Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion

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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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