Category: United Pentecostal Church | Page 68

Leaving An Unhealthy Church #2: Anything You Say Can, And Will, Be Used Against You

You are planning to leave your church and are contemplating writing something, or talking to, the pastor. In a healthy church, this would be easy…but in an unhealthy one, it is best to be cautious.

We are familiar with people being read their rights upon arrest and part of what is said is that “Anything you say can, and will, be used against you.” Unfortunately, though an unhealthy church doesn’t warn you of this, the same holds true with them.

For years I have cautioned people against giving details in any email or letter they may write to a pastor when they leave. If you include anything perceived to be negative, it will most likely be used against you. That would include sharing any thoughts on doctrine being erroneous, how the church is run, problems, and so on. The letter itself, or portions thereof, may be shared with members and it might be featured in a sermon. In an unhealthy church, your observations and complaints may be shared in an effort to paint you in a negative light and to keep members from having contact with you. This, in turn, causes others pause who are having similar thoughts, by getting a glimpse of how they may be treated.

If you write a letter of resignation, and I would encourage it (more in a future post), keep it brief and simple. Avoid sharing your reasons for leaving. If you can do it sincerely, consider thanking the pastor or church for something that helped you during your time there or share that you leave with some good memories. I would not mention where you will be attending church, if you have decided that. (Some pastors will call the church to warn them about you.) By keeping it short and nice, you will save yourself some heartache and won’t be giving the leadership any ammunition to use against you. Keep a copy for yourself.

The pastor may push to meet with you, but understand that the purpose may be to persuade you to remain and perhaps tell you where you have gone wrong or attempt to scare you. While you may not have shared the reason for your exit, sometimes one can give off unspoken signals in the weeks or days before leaving. These may be interpreted as you being backslid, rebellious, unteachable, and anything else negative.

You have no obligation to speak to the pastor. If you know the pastor to be abusive, I would advise against it. Consider having someone go with you as a witness if you do meet. Be aware that sometimes they will take the opposite approach and perhaps even sympathize and promise things will change. This has worked in causing some to remain, leaving them trying to reach the proverbial carrot on a stick that will never be within reach.

For anyone interested, below is my resignation letter, with the church name removed. Today I would probably write it differently, omitting the part about changing churches. It was also written before I learned about spiritual abuse. Though he called fellow United Pentecostal Church pastors to warn them about me, I never heard of him sharing this letter with members of the church.

Dear Bro. Taylor:

Recently I have made the decision to leave the ___ Church and attend another church. I have not yet made the decision on which church this will be, but I am attending church services.

This has not been an easy decision to make, nor was it done hastily. It is not being done to hurt anyone. I feel that this is a move I need to make regardless of what anyone may think or say, be it good or bad. I myself have always felt that it was wrong to change churches unless you were moving, getting married, etc., but now feel that there are times when one may move on for other reasons than these.

I want to say that I have learned much from the many years I was a member of the church and have grown spiritually. There are things which you have taught that will always stay with me. I will always remember and love you and Sister Taylor.

Though I am still praying about which church to attend, I felt I needed to let you know about my decision to leave. I wish you and Sister Taylor the best. May God lead and bless you.

Again, guard your own heart in how you leave and maintain your integrity. And remember- anything you say can, and will, be used against you…..

Stress. Anxiety. Depression.

Stress, anxiety and depression are caused when we are living to please others. ~ Paulo Coelho.

While I don’t think I ever had anxiety or was depressed while I was in my former United Pentecostal church, I did suffer from some stress. Trying to please other people, mainly those in charge, was stressful. Because you could never do enough to please them. Never.

I was sick one Saturday morning and didn’t even wake up until 10. That was when everyone going on visitation left. No one bothered to call to see where I was and I did not call in either. But the next Saturday, in front of everyone, I sure got the filleted-drawn and quartered treatment about not being there EVERY Saturday (as I had for weeks and weeks and on time while others came if the notion struck them). This was the pastor’s wife who called me out. She, who hardly ever showed up on time for some of these functions. But I seriously think she liked making the belated appearance. If you came after she did you are not dedicated to God or the Church.

I always felt that God was so much easier to please than any human agent. Humans just have their own criteria they go by and you need to measure up OR ELSE!

Read Tired of Trying to Measure Up by Jeff VanVonderen if you have problems with those hard to please people.

Foundations

I was raised Disciples of Christ (Christian). When I was nine, I repented and asked Jesus into my heart, and my life changed radically, especially in one way. I had been an angry child, so I started praying that Jesus would teach me to love. When I prayed this way, God would “hug me big, inside out”- my heart would be filled with love and joy in those moments of prayer. I kept this time very private. To my knowledge no one knew what had prompted the changes in my life. (They were just very thankful something had changed!)

For the next few years there were times I was closer to God and times I wasn’t, but He was always there. At 15, I was baptized. (Mom didn’t believe in child baptism, so my request had been denied for several years.) At 18, I began attending a Pentecostal church. There, they taught that there was more for me. God has more for everyone, so this was an easy concept to grasp. Soon after starting to attend there, I was baptized in Jesus name and filled with the Holy Ghost. The pastor took us to ecumenical meetings, and I attended Baptist Bible studies and Disciples of Christ youth fellowships. We fellowshipped other churches and called their members Christians. I never heard anyone at church downplay their experiences.

A few years later, a new pastor came into my life. He taught that no one who had not repented, been baptized in Jesus’ name, and received the Holy Ghost was saved. Had the teaching been that a person isn’t saved if they were taught Jesus’ name baptism and rejected it, I could have almost accepted it. But this new teaching was difficult to swallow; my earlier experiences were too real and life changing to doubt. Even more difficult for me to grasp was his teaching that other Pentecostals with fewer standards were also hell bound. Was my former pastor unsaved because he wore a watch, didn’t follow some other standard, or fellowshipped Trinitarians? Was I unsaved because I had skirts with slits in them? I couldn’t accept that, but stayed anyway.

One night, an evangelist came. He preached that night that if a hand is cut off from the body, the hand would die, but the body wouldn’t. Maybe the hand was diseased or injured. Sometimes the body needed to cut a part off to survive. If it did, the part that was cut off would die. There was no way for a hand to live apart from the body- it couldn’t be grafted onto another body, and it couldn’t be grafted back into the body it had been cut off from for very long after the blood supply stopped. Therefore, if the pastor cut a person out of the church, that person would be condemned, cut off from the blood of Jesus.

Very shortly after that disturbing message, my pastor got up and preached that a person was going to leave soon, and would almost immediately cut their hair and wear pants. He said everyone would be surprised who it was, but that it would happen. After church that night, he called me at home and told me to never come back, that I was expelled.

These three events combined disturbed and grieved me deeply, especially in light of the first message about the severed hand. I didn’t backslide, but instead started attending a different church. And I continued to wrestle with the two messages and the expulsion. Though I finally explained my expulsion to my new pastor, I never told anyone about the severed hand sermon.

This summer, an evangelist preached the remedy. He preached about the foundation:

2 Timothy 2:19 Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure…

1 Corinthians 3
11 For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
12 Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble;
13 Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.
14 If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.
15 If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.

Hebrews 6:1 Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God…

The evangelist continued by saying that the foundation of our salvation is Jesus. No one can shake our salvation (foundation) because our foundation was completed by Him, the master builder. We build on this foundation, and others build on it, poorly or well, and it is what we build that will be tried. But the foundation will remain sure. We cannot destroy the foundation by building on it. We cannot so easily lose salvation. The foundation is sure.

And the blood is sure. The blood can’t be stopped. At Calvary, the soldiers didn’t break Jesus’ legs like they did the thieves’. The prophecy was that not one bone of him should be broken. Why? Because the marrow in the bones produces the blood. If a bone is broken, the production of blood might be stopped or hindered in that area. But His bones were not broken. There is not one thing the devil or anyone else can do to stop the blood. We are saved by the blood, and it can’t be stopped. It can’t be hindered in our lives. Our foundation is sure in Him.

Romans 8
38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We and others build what they will in our lives by our words and deeds. These things will be tried by fire. But the foundation will not be tried- it was built by the master builder. Our foundation, our salvation, is sure in Jesus. There is nothing anyone can do to cut us off from Him.

Will All of You Please Give It a Rest, Already!

This is exactly how my stepdad has felt about many of the conflicting, unhealthy spiritual influences that have played a role in his life. Having had prior unhealthy Baptist and United Pentecostal Church experiences was bad enough, but to have had people pushing these beliefs on him all at once made things even worse for a time.

My stepdad’s mother was very pushy about her particular beliefs to the extent that she thought she could dictate where he went to church and what he had to do to express his commitment to Christ. Her constant harping on him to start attending an “approved” (IOW, Baptist, or Pentecostal) church every Sunday lead to him being very put off on the idea of attendance that persisted for a long time.

My stepdad refused to attend any church for a long time and was fervently believing that every single one, without exception, was a cult. During this time, his daughter and son-in-law got caught up in the UPC with their family. The combination of his mother’s constant nagging whenever she got him on the phone and his daughter’s new-found enthusiasm for the UPC was like throwing gasoline on a wildfire.

The family members of my stepdad that were in the UPC made life very difficult for him for a while. Get-togethers were often a bit of a trial because they simply couldn’t refrain from interjecting their preaching at every chance. When my stepdad’s younger son got caught up in it for a while, it was a question of whether he or my stepdad’s son-in-law was worse with bashing other groups and trying to usurp Jon’s position as head of the household whenever they were invited over.

Another unhealthy influence was one of my stepdad’s aunts, who is close to him in age and was like a sister to him as a kid. Even though she lives in the Houston area, she would visit Odessa from time to see family or friends still living here, and her visits would always include heavy pressure to attend a UPC service with her. Unfortunately, at this point, he hadn’t gotten to where he would just politely decline.

Things with the UPC members in his family finally came to a head after my stepdad’s mother died. When he was having to deal with arranging the funeral, clearing out her house, and dealing with some other bad things going on at the same time, his aunt did something downright hurtful – she told him that if he didn’t join the UPC, she would have nothing further to do with him.

Ironically, after all the turmoil he went through with his kids over their UPC involvement, they ended up leaving the group of their own choice. He has no contact with them due to some non-related issues that arose afterward. My stepdad would finally start taking some “baby steps” towards recovery from spiritual abuse, but it’s been a long time coming. There will be more on that in the next post.

I think, in retrospect, a lot of my stepdad’s conflicts over religion with family members had to do with a lack of boundaries. His mother never respected anyone’s boundaries and tried to find ways around them when they were set. His kids and son-in-law, likewise, also had no respect for boundaries.

When religious differences are sharp, boundaries that you enforce are essential. If you won’t attend their church under any circumstances, they need to hear a polite but firm “No.” No waffling, no non-committal, vague answers. When discussions of religion become a problem, they must know that that subject is off the table.

While boundaries don’t always fix things, they can help make a world of difference for your own peace of mind.

Informational post on speaking in tongues #9

This is just a little informational post on the subject of speaking in tongues, shared as some food for thought. This addresses the doctrine of ‘initial evidence’ as taught by the United Pentecostal Church.

If speaking in tongues is the initial evidence of receiving the Spirit (I am speaking of Oneness Pentecostal teachings here), then why do so many also expect continued evidence after one initially speaks in tongues? (Note: I know that all Apostolics do not practice or believe the above in regard to the necessity of ongoing tongues.)

As mentioned in a prior post, we never see again that those who spoke in tongues in Acts 2, 10 & 19 ever did it a second time. And yet many proponents of this teaching not only expect to see this happen initially, but also expect to see its regular continued use.

How many have been told to ‘pray through’ after doing something wrong or seemingly wrong or if you left their church for awhile? To these people, ‘pray through’ means to pray until tongues come again. They want proof that God’s Spirit is yet inside you. Maybe you need it yourself, too. There is no faith at all in this, proof is demanded. It is as if some believe God’s Spirit regularly hops in and out of believers.

Not only is there the thought to ‘pray through’ to tongues, there can also be things said from the pulpit like, “If you haven’t spoken in tongues in the past week (month, etc.), you had better check yourself!” Why? Where is faith? Do believers lose God so easily? Is God’s Spirit so fickle that at the slightest wrong, He up and leaves?

Things like these and more mean that the teaching is not simply initial evidence. It is really initial AND ongoing evidence to them. They have a need for a sign that they, and others, are still okay with God. This is not walking by faith or standing on God’s promise to never leave, nor forsake, believers.

Think about it. If tongues are indeed ‘initial evidence,’ why then is there such a push for the necessity of continuing to speak in tongues, especially when it is never found in scripture? When did you ever read Paul pressing believers to ‘pray through’ again till they spoke in tongues? When did Peter ever teach that if you haven’t spoken in tongues in a month that you’d better find out what is wrong? These doctrines are not taught, or seen as examples, in the Bible.

So, I say tell it like it really is. They don’t mean just initial evidence—they really mean initial AND ongoing evidence throughout your entire walk with God.