Category: experiences in church | Page 6

Dresses, Dresses, Dresses

Do dresses make you holy??? After I was declared to have the Holy Ghost, I did not receive any inspiration from the Holy Ghost to begin wearing dresses. In fact, being a teenager when I arrived at a United Pentecostal church, my wardrobe consisted mainly of jeans, shorts, and mini dresses. It was the spring time of the year when I began going to this church and the following summer, I went on vacation with my family wearing pants, makeup, and bikinis. Funny thing is I don’t remember having any feelings that this was wrong or that I was betraying the Lord in any way.

My main memory of beginning to wear only dresses came from my concern that I could possibly be seen by someone from my church with the wrong clothes on. I also remember my mom, who was not a fan of my new church experience, questioning me “so you’re not going to wear all those clothes anymore?” This new way of dressing had to become my passion because I needed a whole new wardrobe! And hey, dresses were going to make me holy, right?

At first, I was at the mercy of one of the seamstresses in the church who had a penchant for heavy double knits. I considered myself to be somewhat of a fashionista so before long I purchased a sewing machine so I could make my own dresses. This was the early ‘70’s when the only dresses you could buy were short and unacceptable for making me holy. Thankfully, a few years later hem lines dropped and I could buy some of my clothes. Until then, you found me spending hours and hours making new dresses. Dresses are serious business in my UPC church! You must wear your newest and finest for the big Sunday night competition.

All those hours I spent sewing dresses never ever made me holy as the UPC claimed. They did make me different which in UPC world is considered a good thing. They love nothing better than being noticed for their different way of dressing. Once the pastor called me to come forward before the congregation as an example of what he expected the women to dress like. Even then, I knew, as far as my standing with the Lord, dresses meant nothing.

For about seventeen years, I wore only dresses but when I realized I could tell a lie easier than I could put on a pair of pants, something was wrong. There was no holiness in my clothes or any inside of me. I was an empty shell practicing a religion of works similar to those who are compelled to wear a head scarf or holy underwear. None of these things are what God is looking at. He is looking inside of your heart and your motives for doing what you do. All of these outward things people do to make themselves acceptable to God have no value. Man-made commandments and doctrines are only self-imposed religion and will in no way make you holy. In reality, they only serve to make you proud of yourself, your effort, and your appearance. True holiness described in Ephesians 4:24-32 comes from a heart, mind, and will that is controlled by the Holy Spirit living within.

Therefore, if you died with Christ from the basic principles of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to regulations—“Do not touch, do not taste, and do not handle,” which all concern things which perish with the using— according to the commandments and doctrines of men? These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh. Colossians 2:20-23 NKJV

Experiences Can Be Real, But….

Here is some food for thought to consider. If Paul taught in 1 Corinthians 14 that people would think believers were mad if they heard a bunch of speaking in tongues in a gathering, what would he say about the laughter and being slain that are seen in some churches? Speaking in tongues is biblical. What about these other ‘manifestations?’

When we go to the Bible we do not find these things there. Neither is taught, nor do we see evidence of either in the stories found in the Bible. This should be very telling.

What is accomplished when people laugh out of control, especially during preaching or teaching? It certainly is not edifying. In addition, Paul taught that the spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet. This means that as believers, we are in control of what we do and allow.

The passages used to support laughter and being slain are taken out of context and never show anything remotely similar to what goes on in churches today that teach and support these things. But because they happen in a church setting, many blindly accept it as being from God. In addition, some in ministry threaten people who would speak against such ‘moves.’ (For example, think Hinn and Hanegraaff.)

Experiences can be real, but real experiences don’t necessarily translate to being something God ordained.

Three Steps Part 3: The First Step

Original post here. This is continued from Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion. This happened about 1974.

And he walks with me and he talks with me
And he tells me I am his own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.

1974 – A few months before we had moved from Vicksburg to Birmingham, from a small ranch house to a split-level ranch house, from a traditional elementary school to an “open format” elementary school, from the big Southern Baptist church in a small town to a big Southern Baptist church in the suburbs of a city. The least turbulent transition was the church. There was a distinct change in decor — the Vicksburg church had a huge mural of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden behind the baptismal font, quite unusual for a Protestant church but very welcome for wandering eyes to rest on. The suburban church had varnished pine boards, with nothing for a bored child to do but resist the urge to count them, for once they were counted, what else was there to do? Fortunately there wasn’t much boredom at that time, as the services were very similar. There was an emphasis on free will and God’s love to provide an answer to all our problems, on God’s expectation that we would stand on our own feet, work together, and get things done. The ideal relationship with God was the one described in the song above, although the song itself wouldn’t be composed for almost another decade. With intellect, love, and will-power, any problem could be solved. I had just turned eight; and I believed, I believed, I believed.

But church wasn’t only the calmest place in my life, it was the most intellectually stimulating. School was deadly dull, and there was no other place around me where people were having interesting, open-ended discussions about life’s problems. In the early 70s there were a ton of problems to discuss, and many people were getting all gloomy about them. But not the church, which was a haven of optimism and reason.

When we joined a few months ago, the preacher had welcomed us individually, shook my hand, and told me that if I had any problems I could come see him. When I felt comfortable there, I took him at his word. I must have just turned eight. My sister and I had been dropped off there for some children’s function, and I found the opportunity to speak to the minister alone in the sanctuary. I told him that Mom and Dad were doing things to us that they shouldn’t, and, maybe, he could talk to them and make them stop? The preacher thought for a moment and then asked if my father sang in the choir. Yes, he did. He asked if my mother was the treasurer of the PTA. Yes, she was.

He did not ask why I had requested an intervention.

Then he kindly explained things to me. He explained that since my parents were members of the church in good standing, they couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong, especially not to their own children. If I thought that members of the church in good standing were doing something wrong, there could only be one explanation. Somehow I had become possessed by Satan, and Satan was inside me making me believe lies about my parents that could not possibly be true. Then he prayed to Satan to leave my body and stop plaguing my thoughts with such lies, and sent me on my way.

I was dumbfounded. I may have just turned eight, but even then I knew the only thing I was possessed by was the good sense to realize how ridiculous the preacher sounded. It was without question the single stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life, either in stories or in real life. But if he took it seriously, then that could only mean — dangerous things. I remember staring at the thumbs of his clasped hands in shock, not daring to look him in the face. Then my mind started to work.

This was a modern, liberal church in the early 1970s and he’s threatening me with Satan. I don’t think half the congregation even believes in Satan! It’s not a serious topic of conversation in or out of sermons. Here people talk about using love to solve real problems, they don’t threaten people asking for help with stuff that belongs in old movies. It’s like be threatened with leeches or water torture or — or footbinding or some other bit of antique nonsense.

But if there were even a tiny minority out there who actually believed such things, then I could never, ever tell anyone about my own spiritual experiences. I had never told anyone about talking to God because I had never met anyone who would have a positive reaction to the news. The negative reactions would fall into two camps, the ones who would want me shipped off to a loony bin and the ones who would want me burned at the stake. Of the two I figured I could talk my way out of the loony bin easier than I could talk my way off a burning stake. I seriously thought the latter camp only existed in old books, but apparently I was wrong.

That hurt. I’d been looking forward to talking to someone about it someday.

Obviously I couldn’t talk to any spiritual ministers about anything else going on in my life. And I had made a mistake not waiting until I knew someone long enough for them to trust me before asking them for help. Next time I would wait longer.

That was what went through my conscious mind at the time. For over 40 years whenever I consciously remembered it, that is all I thought about, that and the image of the thumbs of his clasped hands. It was not until I finally committed to writing about it after years of dithering that I realized my subconscious had ruminated on it for a long time, and reached conclusions that I did not fully realize were connected to this memory.

In my subconscious I realized other things as well. I realized that my parents could do anything they wanted to my little sister and I and no one would rescue us. According to the preacher, they weren’t the only ones. Any “member of the church in good standing” could do anything they wanted to us and if my parents didn’t stop them no one would. That meant no one would protect me not only from my father but from any man at church who wanted to abuse me in any way. It meant that the church would attract abusers who wanted to be “members in good standing” for the cover it provided for their abuse.

But it’s church, right? There can’t be many abusers there. At the time I believed that. I didn’t have any evidence of any other abusers — other than the preacher’s disturbing response.

Time would prove me wrong. The evidence would mount. And I would have a hard time feeling safe in a church ever again.

Meanwhile I had a decision to make. I was being abused at home, and apparently the larger community in the form of the my community’s spiritual leader thought that my abuse was the right and proper way of the world. Where did that leave me? At this point there were two things I could believe. Either 1) there was something wrong with me that made people think they could get away with treating me like shit, or 2) the whole damn system was screwed. I’ll take Door #1, Monty.

I can hear the chorus now. “You just wanted to be a special snowflake!” Nothing could be further from the truth. I knew that what distinguished the scapegoat from the rest of the herd was the mark that others placed on it. If I could figure out where the scapegoat’s mark was on me, I could wash it off and vanish into the crowd. If #1 was correct, that meant I could someday escape. If #2 was correct I could never escape an entire world that saw all children as suitable playthings for monsters. I originally chose to believe #1 not out of shame, despair, or any perverse pride; but out of a desperate, desperate hope. In time that hope would fade, and despair would take it’s place. In even more time I would realize that what I had refused to believe was true. The whole damn system was screwed and no one was doing anything to fix it.

And then I would begin to get angry.

But I was eight and still in the grip of Persephone’s cruelest demon, hope.

(It would be 41 years later before my husband pointed out the most disturbing part of that conversation: the preacher did not stutter or fumble his words. To the veteran schoolteacher that meant only one thing — he’d had plenty of practice on other girls and boys.)

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

Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

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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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Neither Do I Condemn You

I watched Join Us, a documentary about a cultish group in TN, the other day. Twice. I’ve also watched a documentary on Westboro Baptist Church. It still amazes me that they use almost verbatim the same words, verses, and manipulative techniques, even if they preach against each other or say the other groups are absolutely wrong.

The thing that stood out yesterday wasn’t really misuse of scripture, but the way the pastor manipulated his people. Apparently some of the footage was live by hidden camera. A few times, one woman tried to contact her former pastor. Every time guilt was dumped on her, not love. It was so obvious to me, and reminded me of the same thing in my former church. When Jesus talked to the woman caught in the act of adultery, He didn’t say, “Just look at what you’ve done to yourself! This is your fault, and you hurt my reputation. Now I’ll just have to fight the devil because I love you so much. *sigh*” No, He said, “Where are your accusers?… Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

“Neither do I condemn you…” how opposite of what I experienced and witnessed in my former church, where people were stood up and their ‘sins’ (indiscretions, perhaps, and sometimes lies or misrepresentations) announced to the church at large. “Neither do I condemn you…” The woman wasn’t going to have to live with the guilt and shame of what she’d done forever. She wasn’t humiliated by Jesus, but loved.