3. Leaving

I’ll never forget my daddy’s words…”you never leave in the midst of trouble.”  It was the moment I knew that we would be returning to our little church even though after what had happened, returning seemed impossible.

The Sunday morning after the “town meeting”, I walked into the church that had been so wonderful, familiar, and happy for my entire life, and that morning it felt like a huge dark cloud hanging over the whole place.

The pastor of our church was like a second dad to me and his wife like a second mom.  This church was their first pastorate.  They were young.  I was two years old when they came.  I loved them and I still do.

For a young pastor, what had gone on in the church that fateful night wasn’t something from which he could recover.  He felt responsible, even though he wasn’t. He stood before the church that next Sunday and offered his resignation.  It was like a funeral.

I remember asking my parents if we could stay up all night and pray that he would change his mind. 

I feel like this is a good place to enter some of my childhood theology.

Remember, I was raised in church from day one of my life. We went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night.  Our church was a Missionary Baptist Church.  The best way I can describe this denomination is that it’s more conservative than Southern Baptist but with the same basic theological ideas.  We were taught that the Southern Baptists were the liberal Baptists who drank and danced.  This is not a joke.  We were actually taught this. 

We wore dresses to church, even on Wednesday nights. Alcohol was evil.  To be seen with alcohol was to destroy your witness.  Dancing was wrong, rock music was evil.  I clearly remember boycotting all Procter and Gamble products because they were somehow supposedly connected to Satanism.  As funny as it sounds, what I remember most about that is having to switch toothpaste and toilet paper.  To put it simply, we lived in a bubble, a Missionary Baptist bubble. 

Some things I didn’t understand then, but can clearly see now, was the influence the Independent Fundamental Baptist world had on our little church.  Our pastor attended Jack Hyles Pastor’s School each year.  It was easy to be swooned by a church that was growing as rapidly as First Baptist Hammond, Indiana. 

Our pastor was by no means dogmatic or mean like Jack Hyles, he was a kind gentle, man, but the teachings crept in.  They weren’t meant to be scary, but to a young child, they were, and some of those fears plagued me even into my adulthood. As a child, I thought that fear was part of Christianity.  I didn’t walk around thinking that there was anything wrong with what we believed, I just embraced it.

I believed that you wanted to make sure you were saved because hell was hot and scary.  I believed that Jesus was coming in the clouds at any moment.  I believed you had to say “the prayer” just right to make sure your salvation was real.  I believed that your church attendance was a sign of whether your salvation was true. I believed that women were to be silent in the church. I believed that all other denominations were wrong. I believed that if you just prayed hard enough and had faith you could change God’s mind. Maybe the most detrimental belief that I had was that God punished you if you didn’t keep all His commandments and the added commandments we were taught as well.

If you take all those things and put them into the mind of an 11-year-old little girl whose world is falling apart before her eyes, you can easily see how I would blame myself in some way for the things that were happening, and how I would think that if we were just faithful enough, just prayed enough that maybe God would take this punishment away.  Maybe our pastor could stay and maybe things could go back to the way they were.

But it didn’t happen.  No amount of prayer, no amount of begging God to fix it was going to put things back the way they were.  Life was about to really change.  Church hurt was about to turn my life upside down.  My parents would never be the same, my pastor would be gone, the people in the church that I loved would never hold the same place in my life.

Because my dad wisely knew that you didn’t leave in the midst of trouble, we stayed at that church for an entire year.  We helped bring a new pastor in, we tried to love him and his family.  My dad resigned as music director and instead of leading music, he sat with us each week on the fourth pew behind my grandmother.  By the time we finally left I was ready to go. 

At that time I had no idea how hard it was for my parents to walk away from that church. I didn’t know how bad it hurt. Many times we will stay in something that is comfortable even when it is painful. My parents were brave. They realized that staying in that church would be detrimental to all of us, and they made the hard decision to leave. Every Sunday from that day on we would drive by that little church. For years the pain was fresh. Even today I can look out the window of my house and see that little church. The pain is gone, but the memory of the hurt will never leave. If you drive by that church today, many of the same people still attend. It hasn’t grown any over the years. I guess it serves its purpose in the community. Time has healed many wounds, and I genuinely love those people. And if I’m totally honest, there are fleeting moments when I wish I could unsee everything that I have seen. I wish I could just get up on a Sunday morning and drive right down the road, pick up that red Heavenly Highway Hymbook, sing the songs, listen to the sermon and come back home to eat a roast cooked in the crockpot. But I can’t. My eyes have been opened.