A group of people we love, a church we serve in, family, friends, familiarity… those are just a few of the things we loved about our church.
One thing we didn’t love was the way the pastor led the church. Remember how I told you that my childhood pastor was kind, loving, and not dogmatic? This pastor was arrogant, loud, and extremely dogmatic. For the first few years, we really didn’t have a problem with him. There were red flags that we chose to ignore, but the one thing we couldn’t ignore was that the church seemed to have a revolving door. People would come for a while and then disappear without any explanation. We would grow and then shrink again. It was strange. After getting to know the pastor better, it wasn’t long before we realized that he was the problem.
He was a dynamic man. He preached long and loud. We eventually realized that he preached the same sermon over and over, he just changed the title. His favorite thing to preach about was everything we were doing wrong as a congregation. It wasn’t unusual for him to tailor his sermon after something that happened the week before to address a situation instead of talking to an individual one-on-one. I’m proud to say that I made several appearances in the sermons. A private conversation would almost always make its way into his sermon outline. If I contacted him over any issue or complained about anything, it would be in the sermon and not in a subtle way.
He was divorced, which was something unheard of in the Missionary Baptist World.
He also followed the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement. He was heavily into the Sword of the Lord movement. He attended the conferences every year and always returned with a new “fire” inside him. He loved all the “famous” Independent Baptist preachers. Our church was “honored” to host the best of the best, including Larry Brown and R.B. Oulette. We spent thousands of dollars to have these men preach our revivals. Honestly, at the time we thought it was better than sliced bread. I mean wasn’t it normal to pay someone to scream at you for an entire week?
We were required to attend Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday night visitation. Even when on vacation we were to attend a church and bring the bulletin back to prove we had done so. I’m not exaggerating. To not do this meant you would be called out, many times even from the pulpit. These things were expected of “faithful” church members.
This preacher spent many sermons preaching against any version of the Bible that wasn’t the King James Version. He even hired a youth pastor that threw a New King James Version Bible in the trash can during a sermon to make a point that anything besides the KJV was completely unacceptable. It was discussed that it probably wasn’t even possible to win someone to Jesus using anything but the KJV. He vehemently taught that alcohol of any kind was a sin. He believed that every mention of wine in the Bible was actually grape juice. He would have the church repeat the words grape juice in unison after those scripture readings just to make sure we didn’t forget. Every Mother’s Day he preached against working moms. Every Father’s Day he preached that men were the heads of their households and women should submit to their authority. Every Fourth of July we had a nice moving political sermon, insert eye roll. You’re probably getting the picture… this was a pastor with a personal agenda.
It didn’t take me too many years to have enough of this man. I was a woman with an opinion who could manage programs, teach Sunday School, and hold her own in a Biblical discussion. To say he didn’t appreciate that would be an understatement. Women had their place in the church and women like me could cause trouble in the system.
I could write a book about things we encountered in this church, but I’m anxious to move on to the things that have happened to us more recently, so I might come back later to tell more of those stories. I’ll just hit the high points in this post.
Our marriage counseling… it lasted 5 minutes. We told the pastor the date we would like to be married, he wrote it down, told us it would be interfering with his deer season, then he gave us a copy of “The Act of Marriage” by Tim Lahaye, and told us to read it before the wedding; not together of course… that would be scandalous. I told him during that meeting that we would like him to handle the vow part of the ceremony and that my childhood pastor would handle the rest. I distinctly told him that we had decided together that we wanted the word “obey” removed from the vows. We didn’t like the connotation that went along with the word “obey” and preferred that it not be included. You know what I’m going to say… he put it in the vows and then smirked at me during the wedding. He couldn’t remove something that important. Men were the heads of the household, and obedience was a requirement for the woman.
We held many positions in the church and one of the more important ones was working with the teenagers. We loved this job, and after several hired “youth directors” left, we took it on as a full-time volunteer position. We enjoyed it, but the pastor gave us no freedom. We couldn’t take them to any event that had Contemporary Christian or Christian Rock music or preached from anything but the KJV. There were so many retreats and camp options, but they weren’t options for us. So instead, the pastor created his own retreats. He hired the preachers and the musicians… it was no different than a Sunday morning service for the kids, just a different location and it was an event he could control. It was painful to watch other churches take their youth group to these fun conferences and concerts while we were so tied down to the pastor’s preferences. We lost a lot of kids because of that. Who wouldn’t want to go to the fun things? We couldn’t blame them.
We weren’t allowed to even teach out of anything but the KJV; “easier” translations were evil. All our curriculum had to either be ordered with the scripture in KJV or redacted so we could read from the “real Bible”.
We began to rebel against his leadership. We took the kids to Winter Jam, where some amazing Christian Rock artists performed. I’m still not sure how we pulled that off but the kids loved it! We began to teach using different Bible versions. We began to do whatever we wanted, and our hearts began to harden.
He once preached a sermon about the sins of Calvinism. He told the church that it was evil, and we shouldn’t even study this topic on our own. He had studied it, and he would tell us what to believe. It was too dangerous for us to study anything like that on our own… red flag? Also, he had never been to a seminary, he had no formal training to be a pastor, just a “calling”. What was this? A cult? We couldn’t study the Bible for ourselves?
Just FYI, we studied the doctrines of reformed theology for ourselves. I’ll reserve a later post to visit our findings.
We thought for sure he would resign and go elsewhere, and a few times he preached in view of a call at other churches. We would cross our fingers and hope for the best, but his divorced status kept anyone else from wanting him to be their pastor.
He dug his heels in even deeper.
Our church building was in a section of town that had been subdivided into government project housing. The area wasn’t exactly safe. I will admit that there were lots of times when I wished we could move. I was wrong to feel that way, but I just want to be completely honest. I felt like we could really grow and start fresh in a new location. I wasn’t the only one, and the church began a relocation program.
We purchased 10 acres of land in a nice, up-and-coming area of town. The pastor formed a building committee… yes, you read that right, he chose the ones he wanted on the committee.
The committee began to travel around looking at other churches to get building ideas. We put the current church on the real estate market, and for a while, we had several people interested. It seemed that relocation would happen. We were excited.
One odd thing… throughout the planning phase the pastor kept pushing this very distinctive design for the new church building. He wanted a metal building 120 ft by 120 ft with a 3 to 12 pitched roof. Any time someone would propose a new idea, he would repeat these specs. This wasn’t anything close to what the Building Committee wanted to recommend to the church, but this was all the pastor would consider.
The selling and planning phase began to drag on. The property wasn’t worth what everyone had hoped. The offers were low.
I like to think that the Holy Spirit started working overtime, because many of us became convicted that if the church couldn’t grow in its current location, then it couldn’t grow in the new one. We needed changes, but the changes needed to occur in our hearts. When a decent offer came in, the people voted it down. It just wasn’t the time. We had other things to work on. This relocation project needed to be put on pause for an indefinite amount of time.
The pastor didn’t receive the news well. He was visibly angry at the end of the business meeting.
The church was divided. They were divided over the building project and in turn, were divided over the pastor.
I tried to fit this whole story into one post, but it was impossible. I guess you’ll have to wait until the next post to find out what happens next…
Until Next Time,
Whitney