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Where Are The Dead?

This was a lesson title taught by SG Norris at ABI. I loved (and feared) SG and appreciated him immensely, but as the years have gone by and my losses have been many, I am realizing the arrogance of any of us to proclaim to know with any certainty ‘where are the dead’. Just as life is in God’s control –we can’t create it or even change it much– so death and the dead are also in God’s control.

I choose to believe a loving, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God whose mercy endureth forever, will not leave ANY of us nor forsake us even through our final journey. God is LOVE. I am forever thankful that we are in His hands and not in the hands of those on earth who would decide our destiny based on their limited, finite, self righteous understanding. There is shelter in His arms.

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A New Family In Our Church

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

Eventually, Dad came back home and back to church. The painful questions from members stopped after awhile, and things were pretty good. Then a new family came to church.

It was a husband and wife and two teenage kids. The husband and wife were preachers, and the teenagers (a boy and a girl) both claimed that they’d been ‘called to preach’. About half the church welcomed them with open arms, the other half stayed aloof from them. Friendly, but not friends. I remember my Great-Grandma (who helped build the church building) saying that her spirit just didn’t recognize their spirit.

My mom and the mom of this family became ‘best friends’. We started spending a LOT of time with them. Our whole family would go spend the weekend at their house almost every weekend, and during the week they were at our house all the time. Once again, things started changing.

The woman in this family told Mom how they’d all been Satanists before coming to God, and that she believed occult was infiltrating the church. They started buying tons of occult/witchcraft instruction books and comparing the practices outlined in these books to things happening in the church. Their conclusion was – demons were running rampant in the church and possessing the believers of the Truth in an attempt to thwart God’s Oneness revival.

My family was always the first ones to arrive at the church building, lots of times the doors weren’t even unlocked yet when we got there. This other family started joining us in arriving extra early. Mom and this woman and her daughter would go into a Sunday School room and ‘pray’. Often you could hear them ‘praying’ all over the church, other times there was silence. A few times Dad asked me to go in and get Mom for one reason or another. The times I went in they were sitting at a table talking, and stopped immediately and Mom angrily asked why I interrupted them. After a couple of those instances, they started locking the door.

Some things from this time that I heard them state: They could literally ‘see’ demons running around inside the church building. They could see demons when they looked in the eyes of some of the male preachers in the church. The pastor was ‘obviously’ demon possessed. The people who didn’t come to church as early as them to pray were ‘spiritually bound’ by evil, if not actually possessed.

Gossip started about their ‘prayer sessions’ and the questioning of me started just like it did when my parents had separated. “Why does your Mom go in there to pray with those women? Why can’t she pray out in the open? Why do they spend so much time in there? If they are actually talking to God, there’s no reason they should have to lock the door.” People seemed afraid to say these things to my Mom and the other women, so they said them to me, a child about 8 years old. Several of the men in the church started saying things like “locking the door gave an appearance of homosexuality more than prayer”. At one point the pastor actually asked them to stop going in there. They refused. He didn’t feel that it was right to “force” people into things, and didn’t want to start making rules about use of the church building, so nothing else official was done beyond his personal request to them to stop.

Mom’s behavior at home got more and more strange. She started giving away my things to the teenage girl in this family. I was tall for my age and she was short, so even though we were about 10 years apart we were pretty much the same size. A lot of times when I got new clothes she would ‘suggest’ that I give them to this girl. (Side note – we were poor, and new clothes were a rarity so I not only wanted, but needed to keep them.) Also, mother-daughter time had ceased to exist. This girl was 18 and out of school, so she spent a lot of weekdays at our house. Mom would send me outside to do my homeschooling with instructions to watch over my 4 year old sister at the same time. On days that they didn’t come over, she spent hours on the phone with the girl and her mother.

If my Dad, my sister, or myself complained, we were hindering her ministry. She would state things such as “I have a call from God to ‘clean up the church’ and if you stand in my way you’ll be judged with blasphemy. Do you want to go to hell and burn forever? Is that what you want? You kids don’t go bother your Dad at his job, don’t bother me while I’m doing mine.”

I started to act out against these things. Since I was a child, I acted out in very childish ways. I cried and would run away and hide whenever Mom would announce that we were seeing these people again. I intentionally started messing up my schoolwork hoping to force Mom to spend time with me. I tried to run away from home. I spent as much time at relatives houses as I possibly could. Soon, I noticed Mom and these other women watching me with a look of suspicion and hatred that scared me – badly.

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Denying The Power

I was always taught that other churches were dead, dull, boring, and denying the ‘power’ because they didn’t jump, shout, dance, speak in tongues, etc.

So what really is the ‘power’? Is it the emotional hype as it is taught in Pentecostal churches??? So are we denying the ‘power’ if we don’t go for all the slain in the spirit stuff? Do we only have a form of godliness but deny the power in all the mainstream churches?

When studying the Bible, does it really seem that God would put the ‘power’ in a physical, emotional, sign??? I find that very difficult to read into His nature that prizes a still small voice and rejects ‘signs’.

So what could the power that some are denying be??? Perhaps the power that is being denied is the power of the Christ and the power of His redeeming love and grace. Perhaps we are denying the ‘power’ if we are trying to earn salvation by our own works. Perhaps the power we are denying is the power of the cross as the finished work that through faith has the power to redeem us. Perhaps the hype, show, and focus on performance is denying the power . . . . . . .

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The First Pastor Of The Church I Grew Up In

OK, a little foundation on the things I’ve discussed so far. This post will be about the Pastor of the UPC (United Pentecostal Church) church we started out in.

He was a wonderful, elderly man. Elderly physically, and elderly in the sense of meeting the Biblical qualifications for an elder of the church. A true shepherd, loving and kind. I’ve often wondered how he came to get involved in the UPC.

I was a child when under him, so there may have been doctrinal issues with his preaching that I don’t remember, but children recognize and identify with a kind spirit, and this is what I remember about him. His preaching was always delivered lovingly.

When he baptized me, I remember being very surprised. Everyone who’s been in the UPC knows what a big deal they make about the words that are said when you’re baptized – “it HAS to be in Jesus name, or you’re not saved!”. But, when this Pastor baptized me, he said “I baptize you in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, which is Jesus Christ”.

My Mom complained endlessly about this pastor. He was too old-fashioned, and also not old-fashioned enough (in her opinions). Even though she was a fellow preacher, he wouldn’t talk to her in his office without someone else present and she took this as a slight against her character. (In reality, he was protecting them both against gossip and slander and generally making a good practice of common sense.) He objected to suggestions of hers that would offend many families in the church, and she saw this as “political pandering”. He saw it as loving your brothers and sisters in Christ, to take care to preach ‘the truth’ in a way that would not hurt people.

Mom and the other female preachers in the church would meet at our house and spend hours on end talking about what they didn’t like about this pastor. These sessions are something else that I would get punished for interrupting if me or my sister needed things, like food or maybe a band aid for an injury. How dare we interrupt the workings of God! Because to them, all this gossiping was just “sharing concerns to be prayed about” and this was of God in their way of thinking. It seems that gossip and slander wasn’t possible for them, because everything they said about somebody no matter how bad, damaging, or unfounded it was, was only for the purpose of prayer. The only time the concept of gossip seemed to even exist to them was if something bad was said about them.

Another thing about this pastor – many of the men on the board of the church didn’t believe in female preachers. But he did, and he overrode them to allow Mom and the other women to preach in his church. This seems pretty progressive to me, and also very different from the “political pandering” he was accused of by them. If you have a group of people in a mindset of extremism, often giving them a leader with a good heart still can’t sway them away from their extremes.

At this point in my childhood, I already knew that there were major problems with the UPC beliefs and lifestyle I was being taught. I could see them so clearly with the non-jaded vision of a child. But, because our pastor was such a kind man, I felt that the problem was the people in the church (like my Mom) who refused to be Christlike in their actions. I didn’t see yet that my pastor was actually a major exception to the rule when it came to the personalities of UPC ministers.

Edited to add: I forgot to mention that this pastor was the presbyter of our UPC “section”, so he was big in the organization. I’ve never seen anyone else like him in the UPC.

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A Memory

Just got some news from a friend requesting prayer, her Uncle died this weekend, possibly from suicide. That hasn’t been determined for sure yet.

This brought back a memory that I’d shoved to the back of my mind not wanting to think about the tragedy. I’m going to get out of my timeline a bit in sharing this, but I want to get this written down while I’m thinking of it.

My Uncle committed suicide when I was about 9. He’d never known God, and the only “christians” he knew were my parents. A few weeks before he died, he came to their house asking them to tell him about God. He wanted to know how to be saved! But, instead of telling him about Jesus, they simply told him that he had to go to church. He replied that he couldn’t go on Sunday nights because the races were on Sundays and he was on the pit crew, he had a commitment to be there throughout the season. They replied that if races were more important to him than church, he couldn’t be saved.

He hung himself in my Aunt’s garage a week or two later.

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