Category: United Pentecostal Church | Page 72

More Visions

*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*

I want to share another random memory about visions.

My family on my Mom’s side is 90% Pentecostal/Apostolic. They are big believers in visions and prophetic dreams. I shared in an earlier post about my Mom and her best friend informing me of a vision that I was going to be raped as a consequence of my rebellion of wanting to wear pants. Another time when I was 17, my great-grandmother told me she’d had a vision about me.

She almost cried as she told me, she was so disturbed by the content of her vision. She said that she saw me at a river, and I got pushed underwater by a tall man with blond hair. I thought she was about to relate a vision about baptism, but I was wrong.

She said that he never let me back up, he held me under the water for a long time and eventually let go and walked away. She didn’t see me surface. She said that the scene then changed and she saw people that looked like police officers carrying a stretcher out into the water. They reached into the water and put something on the stretcher. When the carried the stretcher out of the water, she saw that it was me, dead, on the stretcher. She described in detail how my clothes and hair were covered with river mud, moss, and “seaweed” type plants. She said my skin looked greenish gray. The vision ended there.

There were several members of my family around and they were immediately distressed after she shared this and started praying for my safety. By this point in my life, I was 17 and had left home in order to leave the Pentecostal religion (my parents told me that as long as I was under their roof I would be Pentecostal) and I knew that the rest of my family was thinking that this was a warning from God that I was going to die if I didn’t come back to the “church”.

My Great-Grandmother was not like my Mom. She didn’t focus on demons and punishment, and she is not normally a ‘sensationalist’ Christian. This caused me to take her ‘vision’ a little more seriously than I now viewed my Mom’s claims of divine revelation. I didn’t agree with my family that it was a message from God that I needed to be Pentecostal again, but I didn’t have an explanation for it of my own either.

17 years later I still don’t really know what to make of this memory. I can’t write it off as easily as other claims of visions because of the deep respect I have for my Great-Grandma. So far though, I’m still alive.

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Bragging Rights

How true this passage rings out when thinking of how new converts are boasted of in the United Pentecostal Church.

Message Bible, Galatians 6:11-13

The people who are attempting to force the way of circumcision (ie: legalistic rules) on you have only one motive, they want an easy way to look good before others, lacking the courage to live by a faith that shares Christ’s suffering and death. All their talk about the law is gas. They themselves don’t keep the law! And they are highly selective in the laws they do observe. They only want you to be circumcised (ie: keep the legalistic rules) so they can boast of their success in recruiting you to their side. That is contemptible! (Words in parenthesis are mine.)

How true this passage rings out when thinking of how new converts are boasted of in the United Pentecostal Church. Whether at home or abroad, we hear this NUMBER saved or this NUMBER baptized. We have the great somebodies of Pentecost. I agree with Paul, this is contemptible.

[The picture is from the UPC website in 2007, of what turned out to be a false report of a Jewish revival given by the then Nebraska District Superintendent.]

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Perfection

There is a concept in the church I’m from that we can live above sin. If we sin after we come to God, we are told we are, at best, living beneath our privileges. Sin doesn’t have control of our lives now, therefore we shouldn’t sin.

I have several issues with these thoughts, but there is one that really gets me. Perfection. The five fold ministry is for “the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry.” So we are to be brought to perfection or maturity. But what is perfect? What is mature? Simple (they say). Don’t cut your hair, don’t put on makeup, don’t wear pants, always wear long sleeves, don’t wear jewelry (including wedding bands or bracelet watches). Don’t go on a date without a chaperone, or hold hands or kiss until you’re married. Don’t lie. Respect the ministry, never talk bad about the man of God or his family, and never question what a leader says. Don’t wear hair bows, don’t wear anything in your hair that doesn’t match your hair color. Don’t wear red, don’t wear certain shoes, don’t wear denim to church, don’t wear denim jackets or caps ever. Sit like a lady. Stay submissive. Learn when to clap and shout and run, and always do these at the right times. Don’t be out after midnight, don’t fellowship non-Apostolics, don’t drink or chew or cuss or swear….

The list goes on and on. Is that perfection? Following a list of proscribed do’s and don’ts? Is that maturity? Or is perfection- is maturity- accepting ourselves and others as we are, while still becoming more like Jesus? What happened to love? Was it perfected right out of the church? Am I immature because I doubt these types of restraints in my 30s? Are others more mature because they watch to see when I make a mistake and immediately report it to the pastor (and gossip about it in the meantime)? Is the pastor in a place of spiritual perfection and maturity when he yells that I have a women’s lib spirit, because I supposedly broke one of these rules?

Perfection, maturity, is so far beyond any list of do’s and don’ts. I fear we’ve missed it. When I start to do something and stop to think, “if someone saw…”, rather than considering how Jesus would think or just being able to relax and enjoy myself in some small way, that is anything but maturity, spiritual or otherwise.

If lists of rules were perfection, the Pharisees and Jesus would have been great friends, I suppose. But they weren’t. It was Jesus who said “ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and forget the weightier matters of the law… these ought ye have done, and not to leave the other undone”. It was Jesus who said “he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” Jesus stepped beyond the rules and touched the heart.

God calls us, as Christians, beyond a list of rules. We are called by Him into a place of trust and faith and love. We desire to do our best for Him, but our best isn’t any more dependent upon the man made rules than Jesus’ was. How often did Jesus heal on the Sabbath? Touch a leper?

Jesus stepped beyond rules, and he calls us to do the same. It is a step of faith. Rules are simple to follow, but real love isn’t always. After all, love healed, but it also allowed crucifixion. Can we reconcile that love in our hearts?

Ez 26:36 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

Rules can be followed by a heart of stone. Love can only be followed by a heart made soft by the touch of Jesus. By his love. And it’s in His love that we can be, and are, made “perfect.”

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Broken Bones & Whiplash In Church

This is another ‘random memory’ that something made me think about today.

It’s often preached in UPC (United Pentecostal Church) churches that when it comes to “shouting” or “dancing in the spirit”, no one will ever EVER get hurt unless the person doing the shouting is faking. From what I’ve seen, this is just not the case.

The main incident happened when I was around 10 or 11. My great Aunt was the one doing the ‘shouting’. She was being prayed for up front, speaking in tongues, and started shouting. She bumped into the altar and it turned over and landed on the foot of an elderly lady who was standing up front praying and it broke her foot.

The reaction of the entire church was pretty ugly. They told my Aunt that she was faking, and she was shunned and verbally abused for several months after that. My reaction was “WHAT JUST HAPPENED????” I was soooo confused. The thing is, I KNOW my Aunt, and I KNOW that she would never fake anything.

I don’t really know what my beliefs are on shouting and dancing, I don’t know if its of God, or if its a product of emotional frenzy, but either way, I know that my Aunt was not doing something fake just to appear ‘spiritual’. Whether what she was doing was of God or a product of something else, she truly believed it was of God and felt ‘something’ or she wouldn’t have been doing it.

Almost 20 years later, I still have no idea what to think about this particular instance. The lady with the broken foot never blamed my Aunt, said that she believed my Aunt was “in the spirit” and that its possible for something like this to happen due to ‘human imperfections’. I don’t know…

My other two memories involve (surprise surprise) my Mom. One thing that happened was in the same church. My Mom was “running the aisles” and she started grabbing people’s hands and pulling them out to run the aisles with her. One lady whose hand she grabbed got halfway around the church and then fell in the floor. People ignored her for quite awhile thinking she was “slain in the spirit”, and then someone noticed she was calling for help. I can’t remember exactly which bone it was, but a bone in her lower body had broke and she couldn’t stand up. Paramedics were called and she was taken to the hospital. The church was VERY angry with my Mom for pulling her out to run the aisles with her, even though this was a common practice.

It turned out that this lady had bone cancer, and she didn’t know it yet. After they patched this bone up, other bones kept breaking every time she walked and she died around a year later.

Another thing was several years later, at a different church, my Mom was again running the aisles and “dancing in the spirit”. She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me out to run and dance with her. I had no interest in this, but she had hold of my hand so tight I couldn’t easily let go. I tried to just move unobtrusively with her, but her dancing was so exuberant she was jerking me around all over the place. For about two weeks I had whiplash symptoms.

Most Pentecostal churches would censure anyone who tried to ‘force’ someone else to “dance in the spirit” or run the aisles, because they teach that this is a spontaneous reaction induced by the Holy Ghost alone. Being ‘forced’ to do it by someone else would basically be considered faking. But there are also some who not only condone this, but encourage it. I’ve seen this more among ultra-conservative Apostolics rather than UPC.

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Broken Dreams

For years I wanted to be a missionary. I was raised in the ’80s. We are the World was one of my favorite songs. Missions work seemed like the ultimate adventure, and still allowed me the opportunity to help others.

When I was first shamed, my pastor knew my desire. He told me several times that he didn’t want me at his church, so maybe I should just go be a missionary. Not knowing what was happening, I decided that missions work was out of the question for me, because I was so messed up I couldn’t even be a good saint, much less someone who could reach out and touch others.

For years after that, I hid the pieces of my dream. I built some other dreams, and tried to follow them instead. And I did. But I wasn’t satisfied.

Dreams mean a lot to people. If someone shares their dream with you, treasure it, protect it, and encourage it. Don’t kill it, crush it, or break it. Dreams are precious things, but they are fragile, after all.

No, I don’t see myself biking across China passing out bibles. But God has a purpose and it isn’t too late to find it. My childhood dream was glorious, but in reality it wasn’t so much about traveling the world as it was about helping others and doing something for God. Maybe its time to brush the dust off of my dreams, to polish them a bit and examine them in the light of experience. Maybe they weren’t so broken, after all. Even if they were, I think I know now Who can fix them.