Category: United Pentecostal Church | Page 65

#WhyILeft Fundamentalism, Part 3

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on January 11, 2015.

Continued from Part 2

That’s why I hide here in the dark
So no one has to see my pain…
But can You bring the keys to my heart
And help me find the way? – TFK, In My Room

My growing independence unsettled my parents.

The fear crept in subtly.

I buried myself in 15 credits fall 2011. Several nights of the week, I stayed in the Math Center on campus doing calculus homework with tutors.

But Dad freaked if I didn’t respond to his texts or calls right away, threatening to call campus police to check on me. I explained I got absorbed in study and didn’t check my phone often.

He taped an index card that said “Campus Police: 719-255-3111” to the kitchen microwave.

The landslide started. I was 22 years old.

December 2011: I started seeing a Christian counselor because Mom took my sister.

I told him how controlling my parents were, and he encouraged me to set boundaries. I wrote in my journal that he told me to stop thinking in terms of “shoulds” and “musts” and more in terms of “wants” and “your reasonable heart’s desires,” because the former is living under the law, and the latter is “where freedom is and where Christ wants you to be.”

We met regularly until his retirement in April.

After finals, my parents raided my room, confiscating all Harry Potter books I owned and other fantasy they found objectionable. And two Harry Potter DVDs I’d checked out of the library.

Mom opened my bank statements. Said I spent too much money at Christmas. Opening any mail or packages addressed to me became a requirement for living in their house. I objected. They grounded me from attending a white elephant gift exchange party with my online writers’ group. Dad drove my sister instead.

January 2012: Dad said my hair had to be cut off because women with longer hair are more likely to get raped according to a book Mom read on self defense. I fought him for three weeks, gave in and donated 14 inches to Locks of Love.

My parents took away internet and cellphone access and driving privileges the last two weeks of winter break. I chatted with my friend Anna G. in Dallas on my mom’s iPad in the morning and on the landline with Cynthia B. so I didn’t hurt myself. I felt so trapped.

They threatened to prevent me from driving to campus for classes and work unless I signed a written contract. I didn’t like being manipulated, so I agreed to the chore list and asked them not to pay me.

My curfew was 7:30 p.m.

February 2012: I discovered my study buddy Racquel and Cynthia B.’s numbers were blocked on my cellphone. My mom said Dad told her to block them on our family plan since they’d encouraged me to move out. So I called them using campus phones.

March 2012: Dad and I fought at midterms because he wouldn’t let me study. I was enrolled in 17 credits (Organic Chemistry 2, Chaucer, Bacteriology, an English senior seminar, and a Merck honors research lab class) and tutoring on campus part-time.

I told him I wanted to move out after finals. He cried and told me he wanted to be a hedge of protection around me as long as possible.

April 2012: I bought tickets to go to New Life Church’s Easter production, the Thorn, for the first time. My dad said he didn’t approve, I went anyway.

May 2012: After finals, we took our last family vacation together to Camden, Maine. Mom and Dad said they had an idea. They would send me to Bob Jones University.

I didn’t want to leave UCCS after three years and attend an unaccredited school. I read the 2012 BJU student handbook and told my parents I wasn’t comfortable with rules like “on and off campus, physical contact between unmarried men and women is not allowed” and “Headphones may be used for educational purposes only and may not be used to listen to music” because it sounded Orwellian.

I didn’t want to leave one box for another.

They allowed me one phone call to Nia, a writing mentor. She said prepare to move out ASAP.

June 2012: Mom and Dad laid hands and prayed over me, saying I had been given to them as a loan when I was born and they were giving me back to God. They said determining God’s will for my life was up to me now.

I went with my writer’s group buddies to a 10:30 pm showing of Snow White and the Huntsman. I texted my parents before going. I came home, everyone was asleep. I woke up and the car keys were gone for a week as punishment.

July 4, 2012: I visited the Bob Jones campus with my family. I wasn’t allowed my laptop or cellphone so friends couldn’t sway me. I still didn’t want to transfer, even though Dad said I didn’t have to be a dentist if I went.

July 22, 2012: Met with my parents and my pastor after church. My pastor asked if I was being physically or sexually abused. I said no, my dad was just controlling and I wanted freedom to follow God on my own. He said the only way to honor my parents was to transfer to BJU.

July 23, 2012: I told an English professor and my chemistry research professor, Dr. Owens, what was happening. They listened to me, helped me sort my thoughts. Told me independence was part of growing up, that virtue in a closet is not virtue. Said to listen to my heart.

I told my parents to give me another week to decide. The next day, I got an email from BJU saying my registration fee had been paid. I called my mother and asked her to explain. She said they figured I’d go.

My parents tracked my location using the GPS on T-Mobile’s Family Anywhere feature. They checked multiple times a day and knew from the satellite map of the building if I was working in the research lab or standing in my professor’s office. So I was scolded for driving to a mentor’s house for advice.

July 27, 2012: I walked to investigate apartments near campus since my parents took the car. My mom told me they’d emptied my savings account of nearly $10,000. The funding I was using to leave. Money I earned working for Dad and money they gave me as my college savings.

July 29, 2012: Another meeting with the pastor. I said God’s will seemed muddled. He said I was letting Satan confuse me. He said BJU was the only Scriptural way to honor my parents. I twisted my hands in my lap, said I couldn’t do it. He said, “Then I’ve got nothing more to say to you,” and walked out.

I sat in the pew sobbing. My mom came in.

I said, “Do you realize I can never come back here for church now?”

July 30, 2012: Dr. Owens picked me up and took me to the bank so I could remove my parents from my checking account, which only had $200. I drove her car from campus to a downtown branch, but the bank couldn’t transfer the money back to my account.

I signed up for my own cellphone plan. And my friend Mary W. and her mom gave me one of their bikes, a helmet, and gloves for transportation.

August 1, 2012: I signed a lease for an apartment with my roommate. Dr. Owens gave me $500 towards the deposit.

Mom and Dad said my possessions must be out of the house by 5 p.m. Around 3 p.m., I texted friends for help. I dragged furniture and boxes out onto the front porch in pouring rain.

Five carloads of friends came, carrying my punk pink-haired friend Kat, Ivy, Adaeze, Elsie, the Peveto twins, and Kristi and John.

Mom took my house key, but she couldn’t kick me out in front of all my friends. We pulled up at the apartment complex around 7 p.m.

And I was out.

Or so I thought.

Read Parts One and Four.

#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 Few, The Proud, The…

One sign of an unhealthy church is when they teach that almost everyone else is wrong and lost except them. It isn’t speaking of those outside Christianity, but those within. This may also be said of some of the churches within their own organization, if they belong to one.

I remember when my former United Pentecostal Church pastor would say we were the only church in the area with ‘the truth.’ Yet in the nearby town, just minutes away, was another church in our same organization. He felt that pastor was lax on standards as all those attending didn’t fall in line (as if all those attending our church did). He also sometimes spoke against our long-time District Superintendent, Wayne Trout, claiming he ‘stole’ people from our church. I was personally warned about this by him. Through the years I have heard far worse stories than the things my former pastor would do.

Besides believing that outside their doors there are few that are saved, some particularly unhealthy churches also tell their members to not go to any functions at certain churches within the same organization. The reason behind their detest for these churches may be they feel the pastor is lax on the standards, or perhaps not in line with the ‘higher’ standards he holds. It might be that they allow the use of some form of media that is taught against, like filming services. Perhaps he doesn’t like the other pastor for some personal reason. The jealousy between some ministers is a shame.

Some of these elite may even go on to a ‘preferred‘ way, a ‘better’ way, that puts distance between them and those they feel are abandoning ‘truth.’ They will uphold ‘the old paths,’ even though those alleged ‘old paths’ are not found in scripture. You can almost hear them sing, “Tradition, tradition! Tradition!”

An unhealthy church has no problem disregarding Galatians 5:13-15 as they bite and devour one another. What was it that the early Christians were known by?

¹³For you have been called to live in freedom, my brothers and sisters. But don’t use your freedom to satisfy your sinful nature. Instead, use your freedom to serve one another in love. ¹⁴For the whole law can be summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” ¹⁵But if you are always biting and devouring one another, watch out! Beware of destroying one another. (NLT)