Category: United Pentecostal Church | Page 76

The Rapture & Scared Children

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

Rapture drills. Hell House. End-time revivals. The Y2K scare. Have you experienced them? Children have been left traumatized by these, scared to death they may be left behind while their parents and others are taken away to be with God. Even later as adults, some suffer from PTSD due to how these teachings were instilled in them.

For those unfamiliar with rapture drills, these would happen with the young people at a church or camp meeting. Sometimes there would first be a fear based message on the rapture and then the drill would be held. One explanation I heard was that they would hold a Bible or songbook and on the count of three everyone would drop theirs. This was to show how sudden and unexpected the rapture would be. Then it was emphasized the need to do certain things in order to be ready.

Several years back, I found on DVD the old series of movies from Mark IV pictures on the end-times. Remember A Thief in the Night, Distant Thunder, The Image of the Beast and The Prodigal Planet. They were shown at my former United Pentecostal Church. When I watched them once again, years after leaving, they left me feeling much different and with a bad taste in my mouth. I no longer cared for them.

I firmly believe adults and children should not be scared into following God. While there is a time and place to teach about eternity and unbelief, the message to those who do not know Jesus should be the Gospel – the death, burial & resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is about how God so loved the world and what this means to them. The message is about a new life in Christ. It is Good News; anything other than this is NOT good.

It is no wonder many have a distorted view of God when they hear more about hell, torment, and being lost than they do about God’s love and mercy and grace. Scaring people into believing isn’t the way, whether that be through end-time movies, rapture drills, threats concerning standards, tongues, or anything else.

I am going to share some excerpts of a blog that shows how this affected a young girl who was raised in the United Pentecostal Church.

The second coming of Christ was presented as a real and present danger of everyday life. Jesus could return at any moment, with one loud trumpet blast by way of announcement. If you were not saved you would be left on earth, which would become hell, complete with Satan, fire and demons, where you would burn forever and ever. Everyone who had followed directions would be whisked away to heaven and it was all going to happen in the blink of an eye. Let’s just say I had some anxiety as a child.

Anyway, I repented about a million times for my kindergarten sins and got baptized when I was six.

…Up until then, the fear of hell was real. I couldn’t go to sleep at night, especially after church. Preacher after preacher …would tell tall tales of untimely deaths and tragic accidents. …My dad said he didn’t believe we were going to get out without a scratch; meaning some of us would be tortured and killed for our beliefs before the rapture. So he was no help getting to sleep.

There was a traveling evangelist named Brother Richard Heard. He would visit the church, preaching nightly, sometimes for weeks at a time. The Rapture was his thing. He could scare the shit out of you before halftime. I distinctly remember him saying, “I don’t think we are going to see 1977.” It was 1976, I was 10 years old and had to sing myself to sleep with happy little tunes to shut out the voices.

Another former Christian has a very good article about his evangelical experiences.

One stormy night in the summer of 1992, I walked down the basement steps of my parents’ house to await the apocalypse. The Iowa air was thick with humidity, the ominous green sky prophesying a tornado. My 10-year-old hands trembled as I laid out my inventory: animal crackers, juice boxes, a Bible, and every sharp knife in the kitchen.

My parents were home late and my first thought was that they’d been raptured up to heaven. I was a sinner who had been left behind to face the Earth’s destruction.

Unfortunately, countless children have lived in fear that was caused by grown-ups. I think many do not stop and think before speaking to a child about something that even scares adults. How do you expect a young child to process teachings on the rapture, hell or the book of Revelation?

Please allow your children to be children and have a childhood. They already have more than enough to handle with how some things are in this world. Teach about the love of God, his mercy and goodness, and don’t tell stories that scare them half to death, causing them to live in fear. Some children are more sensitive, internalizing and taking these things very seriously and it can have devastating long-term effects.

If you were harmed by these, my heart goes out to you. It should have never happened.

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Maybe it is just me

For years when I didn’t seem to be able to ‘fit in’ in the cultic church that was my heritage, I would ask myself “is it just me?” Is it just me when it seems there is so little real friendship, or even so few real people? Is it just me when things just don’t make sense and I am unable to mindlessly just go along when everyone else seems OK? Is it just me when I feel shunned but don’t really understand why? Or when my beautiful well liked (everywhere but church) children are shunned? Is it just me when I feel I have no true friends in the church?

In viewing my life from this much older person vantage point, I think perhaps some of it was just me. When we first left the cult and found other escapees with similar experiences, there was great relief in thinking “OK, it wasn’t just me!”

However, upon reflection, I am beginning to realize much of my unhappiness in the cult came from my own nature to not be a cliquey, groupy, type person. I remember as a 10 year old getting all the neighborhood girls together to form a club, but though they were all my friends, some didn’t know each other and had formed their own little cliques. My goal was to ‘bring us all together’. Then in high school, after lunch, I would go from clique to clique, being friendly to many different and differing groups. One friend asked me why I didn’t just pick one group to belong; I really didn’t know, it just didn’t fit ‘me’.

As an adult, my hubby and I would throw parties and I intentionally invited people from my eclectic groups of friends, neighbors, church friends, scouting friends, homeschool friends, etc. I would make up icebreaker questions so they could get to know each other. One of the funniest is when ‘I was a high school quarterback’ was answered by our little petite friend, Marsha 😀 (it was an all girl team, but still . . . .)

In the cult, having outside, different friends was discouraged unless you were attempting to bring them into ‘the truth’. Following the rules explicitly was expected, but most seemed more than a bit hypocritical in this. Another way it probably was just me; I abhorred hypocrisy, so it was either I really followed the belief or I really didn’t. I have always worked diligently at being the same person no matter where I was.

So maybe, at least a part of why I never seemed to really fit into a group and culture that I was literally 3rd generation born in was ‘it was just me’! The best part of me! The me that refused to be part of a clique, the me that loved people from all walks of life, the me that tried to forge friendships in diversity, the me that refused to be hypocritical, the me that God created me to be.

It is OK to be me .

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UPC from a Child’s Perspective

My earliest memories were of my mom, dad, and maternal grandparents, who were apparently helping my father build a church in a town that did not have a United Pentecostal church. I can remember my preacher Grandpa working on the building and my grandmother taking me out to see him on the scaffolding. I recall my mother reading me Bible stories, and some visiting preacher teasing me about my imaginary friends. I often played in my dad’s workplace, as he could not provide for the family without working a secular job.

When I look back at the pictures of that time, I see a happy little girl with curly blond hair and the prettiest dresses. The pictures nor the memories of that time reveal anything to me other than being loved and cared for. I wonder if my parents were perhaps different then. I heard them tell stories of “winning a family to God” only to find out that the man was beating his wife, so my dad addressed that with him and he eventually stopped. These are the stories I was told.

Eventually, we left there and went to another town where my dad took the pastorate of a church. I was preschool age, but I do remember him telling my mother about going to the home of one of the parishioners uninvited, at an unexpected moment because he felt the man was being deceptive about his lifestyle. He “caught” the man watching TV, which was strictly prohibited by the UPC at that time, and he confronted the man about it. The man made up lie after lie as an excuse to hide this “sin”.

There was a woman in that church who suffered from bulimia. I remember the judgement and disgust with which she was discussed, with never any hint that this could be a serious illness. As a mental health provider, I now cringe at what she must have suffered in addition to the bulimia and its root causes. Religion without compassion can be very hard on people with mental health issues.

By that time I had an infant sibling. I remember church people getting mad at my parents for taking my sister out to spank her during church for things like fussing during church or other such age appropriate things. I remember being spanked with a “skinny belt” for asking one parent if I could go home with a friend and when that parent said no, asking the other parent.

My friends in the church had me over to their house one day in December and their mother said, in front of me, that there was no difference in a Christmas tree and the Christmas lights my mother had in our home. I was about five and I can still feel how sad I was when I told mom what these people had said, only to watch in horror as she took down all of the Christmas decorations in order not to “confuse and offend” church people who were being taught it was a “sin” to put up their Christmas trees.

My dad was often joking and fun during that time with us, and with his preacher friends. I often heard them sit around the table and argue about scriptures, and then in the next breath tell racial jokes that are appalling to me now.

During that time, I first became aware that I was “lost” because I didn’t have the Holy Ghost. I went down to the altar and cried, not understanding everything yet. I told my family I was now a Christian and had the Holy Ghost because I went to the altar and prayed. They explained to me that I had to “speak in another language” in order to get the Holy Ghost. My sister by this time was getting old enough to play church with me. We were strictly forbidden to ever play like we were “getting the Holy Ghost” by jabbering nonsense. Instead, we would close our mouths tight and jump around to show that we were “getting the Holy Ghost” in order to not play with sacred things. I have a distinct memory of a teen who was “seeking” the Holy Ghost and fell out on the floor with people all around her. I was fascinated by watching her mouth upside down as she was speaking in tongues.

I was constantly watching my baby sister with a stuffed animal in church and feeling so jealous because I wasn’t allowed to play. I would secretly pretend my Bible was a baby and I was it’s mother, but if I moved it around too much I’d get in trouble so I had to be careful.

Eventually there was some kind of church problems of which I’m still not clear on all the details, but my dad resigned that church and bought a trailer to evangelize. They were already homeschooling me, so they would continue to do so as we traveled around the United States. I’ve heard my parents recount often the story of how they “dusted their shoes off” out the window of the vehicle as they left that town. My dad says God showed him there would never be a thriving church in that town because of the rebellion in the hearts of those people.

I was just a little girl. I don’t know the ins and outs, or if the people were truly rebellious. I can only share what I remember and have heard from that time.

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Earliest Spiritual Abuse

Everything has a beginning. My beginning happened in a small town where my dad was pastoring, (or rather attempting to pastor) a church that had never really existed, but in the mind of those who wished to start it. There were no constituents, and it is my understanding that my parents lived on what my dad could make working in a grocery store. It was there I was born, and where I lived for nine days, before they packed up everything and left to evangelize.

According to my baby book, written in my mother’s handwriting, I received my first spanking at the hands of my father when I was only a little over two months old. She followed this revelation with a little smiley face that she wrote, before explaining that they later found out that I wasn’t getting enough milk and that’s why I was screaming so much. It seemed not to bother her or my father particularly that they had “spanked” a tiny infant for being hungry. They just knew that they did not want to raise a child who would “throw fits”, and they were starting early to make sure I behaved as the child of a minister should.

I was the oldest child, and perhaps these mistakes could be chalked up to inexperienced ignorance, but it nonetheless sheds light on the mindset of two young people starting out a family, when both of them had been raised in Oneness Pentecostalism their entire lives. They both had been raised to expect perfection of themselves and others, because after all, God expected perfection, didn’t he?

My parents still brag about how well they trained me to act in church. I am that shining example that they hold up in front of every other young parent who crosses their paths. They had me trained on how to act in church from the age of nine months old, so they know it can be done!

I have no recollection of that time, of course, but I am told that I would sit on the front seat all alone at nine months old. I am told that I was expected to sit there looking forward, and not get up or turn around. On those occasions where I did get up and turn around, my parents said that one of them would leave the platform and take me out for a spanking. My mother played the piano and sang, while my dad led the services and preached. It was my job to sit down and be quiet. Apparently I learned the lesson they were trying to teach me fairly well, because they used that experience to teach other parents how to train their kids to act in church.

Years later, when I allowed my two year old to bring a quiet toy to church and to play between the pews quietly, I received major lectures and severe criticism, because “We know children can be trained to sit on the pew quietly. We trained you when you were only nine months old.”

Dad never allowed for a church nursery at any church he pastored, because he felt like babies need to be trained from infant-hood how to behave in church. If a parent was struggling to accomplish this, he would go back to that example of me at nine months old.

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Visions And Revelations

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

In the last post on my timeline, I talked at the end about how during one of the tent revival services I was asked to take the children into the house and babysit them.

The weird staring and glaring from my Mom and her best friend got worse and worse. I started to feel paranoid, like they were watching me all the time. Then, one night, I sat down to the dinner table and Mom and Dad told me that they needed to talk to me.

They told me that I was possessed by a demon. They said that during that tent revival service, the preachers (Mom, her best friend, and her friend’s husband) had cast it out of her best friend’s son, and that the demon left the tent looking for another body to enter, and came in the house and found me. They said that it was a rebellious demon that found me inviting because of the way I’d been expressing anger against wearing dresses, going to church all the time, and being taken out of public school. They said that I needed to be aware of this because it would affect my reactions to anything Godly until they could get it cast out.

Then, my Mom proceeded to tell me about all the visions her and her best friend had about me. They had a vision of me being raped due to my rebellion of wanting to wear pants (keep in mind that I was 9 at this time) and they gave me graphic detail of this vision. They told me they could see demons running around in my bedroom that were attracted there because of the demon in me. They said that my wanting to spend so much time at non-apostolic family member’s houses had contributed to my rebellious spirit inviting in the demon. They also told me the demon’s name, what it looked like, and that it was a fallen soul – a rebellious teenage girl that went to hell and became a demon. There were more “revelations”, but you get the general idea.

As you can imagine, by this point I was terrified. I was afraid to talk to my family, I was afraid to be around my little sister. I stopped going anywhere and stayed home all the time (as much as I had the choice to), and alone most of the time, wondering how many of my thoughts were really my own and how many were coming from the demon.

Occasionally Mom would “address the demon” instead of me. I’d be walking along and she’d suddenly jump in front of me and say “(Demon’s name) you want to hit me don’t you! Go ahead and slap me, I dare you!”. I didn’t know what to do when this would happen. I’d try to turn and walk away, but she’d grab me by the shoulders and hold me in front of her. I’d say “Mom I don’t know what you want me to do!”. Eventually when the ‘demon’ didn’t respond she’d give up.

Plans were being made to “cast it out”.

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