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A wayfaring man though a fool

Right after high school, I attended a UPC (United Pentecostal Church) Bible school. One lesson I remember was about the UPC oneness doctrine. S.G. Norris taught us to believe it by ‘revelation’; however, if we didn’t yet have the revelation, then we should just take it by faith until the revelation came because “obedience is better than sacrifice.”

Well, most of us were young, altruistic, very impressionable and looking for something to believe in. Many of our age-mates were buying into Hare Krishna, the Moonies, becoming a hippie, anything to give them the feeling of being important, on the cutting edge, far out . . . . . Believing the UPC ‘revelation’ was also a bit far out and cutting edge (after all this doctrine was only a couple of decades into existence at this time, Pentecost was not even old enough to be an antique yet) and it was also pretty safe –at least not likely to be physically harmful. So we gave ourselves passionately to this revelation or heresy depending on your viewpoint.

Years later, I graduated secular college. One lesson I remember from there was about logic, how you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you just can’t fool ALL of the people ALL of the time. The problem with logic was that no matter how illogical something might be on the surface, our human brains seemed to be wired so that we could twist them into believing even the most ridiculous dogma –for those of you who took humanities, think Jar Boy.

So, how does one decide what to believe?? My UPC pastor at the time said he could ‘argue all sides of almost any issue’. Today his UPC church has ‘levels of salvation.’

My then teenage son lamented “why doesn’t God just give us a specific list of rules?” My answer at the time was that God wanted us to have the pleasure of working it out using his instruction book, the Bible. I still think that is not too bad of an answer.

So if the plan of salvation is so simple that “a wayfaring man, though a fool need not err therein” why do we have a gazillion books and thousands of religions to explain it?? If God knows the ending from the beginning, why did he start with the LAW?? Why didn’t he just start with Christ and be done with it and not put humanity through all this angst?? Why did He need the OT (Old Testament)??

My thoughts:

The plan of salvation is truly very simple –Christ died as an atonement for man and anyone who believes has hope of salvation. So why is that so hard? That is so hard because human beings want to somehow be in charge, in the know, important, make up the rules, be in charge of the rules, etc. We can take any number of very simple tasks and write a thousand page manual.

So why did God make us this way? He could have made us more simple, more obedient, less questioning, less thoughtful. Well, that is an easy one — we are made in the image of God and even we understand the value of love that is not coerced, not paid for, not robotic. So God made us complicated beings for His pleasure – hey, He’s God, I have no problem with that.

Now back to the original question – why didn’t he just give us Christ from the beginning and save us all the OT angst? Why did He need the OT?

He didn’t need the OT, we did!

Because we would not have understood the value of Christ without what preceded Him. We have to have the LAW, the failures, the successes, the hopes, the dreams, the prophets, the kings, the priest, the plans, the fanfare to even begin to comprehend the value of the simplicity of a salvation so simple that even a “wayfaring man, though a fool need not err therein”.

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We Find A Hometown

For two years my husband was mostly in military hospitals with only a few weekend passes and I was either in TLQs, staying with family or in rental homes where I could ‘work out’ the rent by fixing up the places. We had three small children and no paycheck because he wouldn’t agree to sign a release for ‘severance’ pay, even though they offered up to $200,000, which at that time was a small fortune. He was wise enough to know that in his condition that wouldn’t last long—I was ready to take the money and take our chances –he was much wiser than I. Most weeks, our only income was $40 the Red Cross would give us for food. I spent $19 on Christmas that year, buying used FP toys and cleaning them with bleach –the kids thought it was a great Christmas. 🙂

Finally, after two years, the USAF put him on TDRL and gave us two years of ‘back pay’ which was several thousand dollars. We moved to the town we lived in until recently because it was close to medical facilities and the climate and area was good for the disabled. We bought a house. Eventually, my husband was put on the permanent and totally disabled list and everything pretty much stabilized –still lots of medical junk going on even today, but life did become more normal and we had a nice income, free medical, benefits, etc.

After a long drama, we finally began to live again, albeit a very different life. Hiding his hip to foot brace under his pants and removable back brace under his shirt, few people were totally aware of my husband’s condition; the kids were always a bit surprised when someone said something about him being disabled, they truly never realized he was.

For several years we went to a pretty normal UPC (United Pentecostal Church) church. The pastor was originally from my home state of Ohio and for the most part wasn’t a bad guy. There were a few incidents, like the time I developed numerous boils. I had never had a boil in my life and these were huge painful ones that put me in the hospital. The pastor in all seriousness told me ‘some people’ felt boils were a sign of sin in one’s life. I am not kidding! We called him a ‘Job’s comforter’ hahaha. One of the doctors thought it might be something in the city water that I couldn’t tolerate and we bought a water system for the house. The boils disappeared and even though we later moved and didn’t have a water system, they never came back. We do drink bottled water and have a filter on the fridge though —just don’t ever want to go through that again!

There were upsets in the church and good friends left (we had no involvement and stayed) but things were never the same after –people became paranoid and things were always tense. We bought a nicer house in a better neighborhood and changed to a different, closer UPC church. We didn’t ask for a letter and had no issues so were pretty much accepted at the new church, but it really didn’t surprise me that we seemed to no longer exist for the friends left at the old church. We had found this to be an expected UPC experience. (Another person recently blogged about the loss of friendships.)

We stayed at this church for several years also; in both churches, we did outreach, taught Sunday School, were totally involved, but in the new church even after several years we had no real friends. Our kids were cute, bright, sweet, well behaved and popular first in their home school groups and then in public high school, winning lots of awards, being president of clubs like National Honor Society and Mu Alpha Theta, Beta Club, Key Club, etc., but inexplicably were never accepted at church. It wasn’t the standards, at this time, we followed them more closely than most of the church. It wasn’t their personalities; our house was always full of their friends, just not generally friends from church.

They were baptized and had the Holy Ghost from an early age. They went to the church camp each summer and participated in all the children’s and youth activities but were never accepted. In talking to other parents later, we found that very few kids in this large church felt ‘accepted’ and most are not in church today at all.

When my son started college on the other side of town, we moved and began attending a small UPC church that was frowned upon by churches in the area because of their lack of ‘standards’. By this time, our standards were slipping a bit, mostly because my daughter and I had done the ‘read the Bible through in a year’ program a couple of times and discovered that some of this stuff wasn’t in there. LOL

I went back to college when she did and we graduated together in 2000. My husband and I were fine with the little non-conventional church. It was kind of like a mission church with no formality and though we participated and helped out a lot, we didn’t really make any close friends, we really just didn’t have much in common with anyone, but I traveled a lot for work and we were fine with everything. The kids married and my son and his wife moved to another state to do church work at a college.

My daughter started a family and then when my grandson was two and there were no activities at the church for him, my daughter and son-in-law wanted to go to another UPC church with more kids and activities. Of course, we were sticking with the grand kids. The new church was known for very strict standards and my husband and I thought this was not a good idea, but decided to go ahead and give it a try. At first it was OK –the kids and grand kids were a great ‘catch’ for this church and though they hadn’t come with a letter of permission, it was obvious the pastor wanted to accept them (they were and are nice looking, bright, educated, successful, what’s not to like hahaha).

We knew the drill, so my husband and I just played nice and ‘attended’ when we were in town. For three years the kids tried to belong, but without changing considerably –they didn’t make the changes of no more trimming hair or pants or makeup for my daughter, no more shorts, movies, etc. for my son-in-law– so they were not allowed to participate or ‘use their talents’.

They went to ‘discipleship’ classes that the whole church was asked to attend. My husband and I passed on these –been there, done that. Finally, they were asked to ‘sign a contract‘ stating they would follow all these ‘holiness’ standards to be a ‘real’ member of this church. That was kind of the end for all of us. My husband and I weren’t even asked to sign, I think it was pretty obvious we weren’t interested.

The pastor told my husband that cutting my hair was a ‘heaven or hell’ issue. My macho husband told him that how I looked was not the business of any man but him! hahaha I really love this guy.

At this point we thought we would just trot right back to the little non-conventional church and my husband called the pastor and was assured they would be very happy to have us back. My husband told him to ‘think about it’ and then let us know; we just didn’t want to cause anyone any problems. A couple of days later this pastor called and rambled on, barely taking a breath about why we were not welcome back –I at first thought it was a recorded message because it didn’t sound real. We were having a family get together and it was hard to hear the message (my husband just brought the phone in and before we realized what was going on, it was over and the pastor had said goodbye and hung up). We all sat there kind of dumbfounded asking each other –what in the world was that all about????

My son-in-law called both pastors to try to get an answer. Both wanted he and my daughter-in-law to come back –one with definite standards requirements, the other kind of ‘who knows what’ but made it clear that neither church wanted me or my husband. OK, this was definitely new; we should have been upset or hurt or something but so far, we just feel kind of a relief that we don’t have to keep trying to make these churches work.

We have been through an awful lot in our lifetime; this blog has many blank spaces because our story would fill a book. We know who we are, we are happily married, we love God, we have great kids and adorable, brilliant, beautiful, sweet grand kids LOL. We have good friends, just mostly not in UPC. I have a great job and my husband loves traveling with me. We also have an adopted 20 year old daughter that I haven’t even discussed here –she would rotate between our house and my bio kids houses and is a happy, well adjusted, very sweet kid.

Life is good. Eventually we will find a group of people in a church we can attend and enjoy. No hurry.

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The saga continues: Looking for love in all the wrong places

So we left and headed back ‘home’. I again learned the meaning of “you can’t go home again”.

After being married five years, we began to doubt we would be able to have children (there were real medical reasons for this) so we adopted a beautiful, blond, blue-eyed five year old problem child. 🙂 We adored him and loved him but after years of problems, he became an alcoholic, generally homeless and passed away in his 40s, but that is an entirely different story. Then almost three years later, God blessed us with a beautiful baby boy. But back to the church stuff.

My dad was ALJC (Assemblies of the Lord Jesus Christ), so my husband applied for ALJC license and got them so now he was both an ALJC and a UPC (United Pentecostal Church) general licensed minister. We did some evangelizing and I did a puppet ministry.

My husband really enjoyed outreach a lot more than pulpit ministry; I felt then and now that he was pushed into the ministry by an overly enthusiastic mother who wanted ALL her boys to be preachers. Anyway, the UPC evidently got wind of this guy with license in both organizations and after ignoring this town for 20 years, suddenly felt ‘led’ to start a UPC church there AND told my husband he would have to attend the UPC church or give up his license. He decided to give up BOTH licenses and joined the USAF –no kidding! Really the license thing was just one catalyst, we also had financial problems and since the town was small, we were occasionally running into our son’s birth family, so put it all together and another move seemed like a good thing to do.

He ended up in special forces on a base out west and I searched for a church. The ALJC was closest but something seemed off. (I soon learned that a couple years prior, the pastor had taken his teenage son to the woods and pretty much beaten him senseless.) I never saw this kid so he must have been put in foster care or something, along with an older sister I never saw. The only child they had then was an adorable little two year old boy that I pray didn’t suffer the same fate.

So moving on, I went to the UPC church across town. They had a daycare sponsored by the state. The state also bought them some beautiful indoor playground equipment that took up most of the fellowship hall. The ‘church’ kids (with the exception of the pastor’s kids) were NEVER to play on this equipment, even though we had several social church events in the fellowship hall, with the kids all looking longingly at the play stuff.

Lots of weird stuff in this church; the pastor even had a problem with watches other than plain banded Timex ones, LOL.

Two good things happened in this town, one is we were were again blessed with a beautiful baby, a girl (after this, my medical condition made it impossible to have any more children), and I met a friend at this church who would become a lifelong friend.

At this time, my husband was on duty 24/7 for three days and then home for six so we joined our good friends and both moved two hours away from his base to a big town with a bigger, more normal church. We really never got too involved at this church, I don’t think we were there long enough, so I don’t know a whole lot about this church.

Something happened then that would totally change our lives forever. In a freak accident, 42 sheets of plywood fell on my husband’s head and fractured his spine in five places. Being the tuff guy he was, he shrugged the whole thing off and went on a scheduled tour to Iceland with a load of morphine for pain. He soon OD’d on the morphine and was medevac’d to DC where he spent the next year and a half in a military hospital in a full body cast with metal rods in his spine.

I stayed there most of the time in a TLQ with three small children waiting to see what would happen next. His appendix burst while in the cast and he ‘died’ twice. I didn’t know until it was over and came to visit, finding him in a pitch black room thinking he was dead and that there was just nothing (we laugh now but it was not funny then).

Our baby turned two there. Daddy would spend the next few years in and out of hospitals and most of the time in body casts and wheelchairs. We spent a lot of time in different places, mainly having to do with his treatment, rather than churches, and at one point relied on $40 a week from the Red Cross for food.

I repainted the house we rented in lieu of rent. He was in the hospital and I was just doing the best I could –I went to church but wasn’t focused and the churches we went to were a lot more interested in what we could do for them than what they might do for us –for us they did absolutely nothing. A not in church sister-in-law brought us dinner many nites, showing more Christianity than anyone else in the area that I knew.

I am going to skip years here because while we both continued ‘in the faith’, our focus was more on just surviving and making sure our kids were OK than on anything in the churches where we were pretty much just a number. My husband says to remember there were also a lot of ‘good’ times and yes there were–they had really nothing to do with church, but a lot to do with God and we were definitely blessed with a lot of good times and our kids don’t even remember any bad times, so we did something right.

(one aside) At one point we had the kids in a UPC ACE school, my then three year old son completely memorized all the morning scripture passages. The pastor would put him up front on Sunday mornings and have him quote whole chapters from Isaiah and the old ladies in the church would follow along in the Bible –he never missed a single word. 🙂 He is a computer tech today and was an ALJC minister, albeit a bit unorthodox in some areas.

Ok, I’ve talked enough for now –there may not be many patient enough to read all this but it really is kind of a catharsis for me even if no one reads it. 🙂

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Shaking Foundations: The Start of Questions

Someone in an unhealthy church may ask a question like this:

Why did God find me in a UPC church if the teachings are wrong? What is so wrong now that was not wrong then? Why after all of these years do I have questions that rock the foundation of everything I have been taught and believe?

In responding, I could counter with, did God actually find you in a United Pentecostal Church? God was drawing you to Himself well before you stepped foot in a church. The type of church doesn’t matter. Where you were when you opened your heart to God doesn’t matter. It really has no bearing on you and God as our walk is a one-on-one relationship with Him. God could have just as easily met with you in a vacant field or a hot desert. See what I mean?

When we first come to God, we are overjoyed. We want to do anything and everything. We are not looking for things that may be wrong. We may have little to no knowledge of the Bible to know how to discern between true and false teachings. We aren’t expecting to be taught things which are not true.

So, did your church change? Was it different in the beginning? My guess is no. But your perception of it has changed. You are no longer in the beginning happy stages, ready to do anything without question that ones in leadership ask. You’ve now matured. You’ve gained knowledge. You think more critically.

When someone in an unhealthy church starts to question teachings, no matter what they may be, it often does feel like their foundation is being shaken- and in reality, it is. Yet if your foundation is based upon man’s imaginings, then you need it to be shaken, even though it doesn’t feel very good and can be quite scary.

I have found through my own experience, as well as listening to a great many people who have left the UPC or other Oneness Apostolic churches, that God often uses some incident to cause the person to start to look objectively into a matter. What that something is varies greatly. It may or may not have anything directly to do with the teachings themselves.

For me, it started when I helped at the church run daycare for the second time. Events that happened over several months helped cause me to feel that if things didn’t change, I’d be leaving the church.

I ended up voluntarily resigning my teaching position at the end of the summer program and went away for a few weeks and spent some time with UPC friends in the ministry, who knew how things could be at the church. (It has often helped me to go away somewhere while thinking things over.)

When I returned, I heard all kinds of things about a tape recording that the pastor played in a Thursday evening service. It was a Christian radio broadcast on spiritual abuse. The two guests were former members of the church. They didn’t mention the church name or any person in the church. His stated reason for playing it was so members could see what was being said about the church.

I asked to borrow the tape and found that my reaction was not what I had seen in others. I saw some truth to what they shared, though I didn’t agree with everything. Sometimes you have to have things happen directly to you in order to wake up.

I made a copy of the tape and took another trip to a couple who had left the church previously. While they listened to the tape, it was obvious the whole thing was difficult for me. It was painful to start realizing abuses that had taken place in my church and that the pastor played a part in some of it. If you were present, you would have found me pacing back and forth while they sat and listened, making occasional comments.

After my return home, I met with one of the daughters of the pastor and her husband, who had also left. That was an eye opener, too. PKs tend to see and hear many things.

From there I started to attend services less and also looked into the uncut hair issue for women. It wasn’t very long before I knew I could no longer remain. It got to a place where it didn’t even feel like my church anymore. After being a loyal member for just under 13 years, that was an odd feeling, indeed.

For me, my start into seriously questioning things was working in the daycare. I saw people do things against state rules. I was told by the pastor to lie if anyone from the state came when his daughter wasn’t there. (There was supposed to be a certain person there, with college credits, while we were open.) I got a first hand experience of what some others had gone through before me.

It had nothing to do with the church teachings at first. I believe God used a series of incidents to start to remove me from an unhealthy church environment and erroneous teachings.

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Backtracking: Where It Began For Me

My story began a really long time ago with two grandmothers influenced by Bro. Witherspoon and Bro. Fresh and a very young S.G. Norris and other early Oneness preachers. One grandmother was ‘shouting her hair down’ in a Methodist church prior to Oneness and the other came into Oneness with my great grandmother. No grandfathers in the picture –they all died really young.

My great grandmother died in the parking lot of a Oneness camp meeting; she had quit taking her heart medicine because this was a ‘healing’ camp meeting. My very young mother found her dead in the car. One of my grandmothers died in a car/train accident on her way to VBS –it was two blocks away and I remember all the kids (I was ten) going to the altar to pray. My grandma and my best friend (a cousin just a couple of weeks older than me) were two who died in the accident. I still mourn the loss after 50 years.

So I am 3rd or 4th generation Oneness before there even was an ALJC (Assemblies of the Lord Jesus Christ) or UPC (United Pentecostal Church) and of course my dad was a preacher, as were some of his brothers. By the time I got here, it was ALJC for us, but we had friends in the PA of W (Pentecostal Assemblies of the World) and some UPC, though in my area the ALJC and UPC were pretty strong rivals. We were the less strict but still plenty weird.

At one time, the Rambos went to our church and Bucky was our children’s orchestra leader (I played the cymbals 🙂 ) I remember Dottie’s song ‘Come Spring’ was written for my grandmother or dedicated to her. Reba and I were fast friends. I remember Reba contracted meningitis and almost dying. They left around that time and became famous but of course were ‘lost’ 🙂 We absolutely loved Dottie’s singing –especially LAZARUS 🙂 . As a teenager, I sang a lot of her songs at district youth and fellowship meetings.

I grew up having a rare haircut, sometimes wearing pants and my mom even sold Avon at one time and put lipstick on both of us then- almost rubbed my lips raw getting it off before my dad came home LOL. I wore miniskirts as a teenager and had a page boy haircut and wore powder and mascara with no real consequences but I did not get ‘saved’ until I was 18 and in Bible school (ABI- Apostolic Bible Institute).

I went to Bible school because it was my mother’s dream to go and she never had the chance (I just wanted to get away 🙂 .) On my application to Bible school, I remember writing –“I am coming to find out if there is a God and if there is, I will serve him”. I am sure S.G. Norris (then a much older man) got a kick out of that.

I was miserable at Bbible school –still had a page boy haircut and wore ‘natural’ makeup, but felt like I was the only sinner among a bunch of young saints (this is too funny now but then I took it very seriously). I cried nightly and begged a close by friend of the family to come and take me home.

Of course, he called my parents and they called my preacher uncles who called S.G, and without me knowing, the whole Bible school began around the clock prayer and fasting. S.G. called me into his office and told me his ‘story’ of how he received the Holy Ghost –if anyone is interested let me know–it was pretty cool. I had been begging God to speak in tongues ever since I was baptized at eight years old.

Anyway, after a week of the prayer and fasting, I skipped church to play board games with other less spiritual girls in the dorm and got conned into going to the prayer room where I was absolutely struck with tongues and a very personal interpretation and spoke in tongues for over an hour. It was real and changed my life.

I never did really ‘belong’ at ABI but I did get ‘saved’ and made some close friends (some still in church and some not) and then like most of the kids, I found my husband –we all called the school Apostolic Bridal Institute.

My husband was also 3rd generation Oneness but he had been AOG until he was twelve and then his parents were finally won back when he and his brothers went to a Oneness church camp with his preacher uncle and all three received the Holy Ghost and came home wanting to change to UPC. We were a good match –still are –it will be 45 years this December.

OK, that is all the good stuff, it kind of goes down hill from there, but it took me 40 years to finally say enough! I will start the rest of the story later. Thanks for listening –this might just be cathartic. 🙂

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