Chapter 1: Sensing the Call
I sensed a call to the Christian ministry from the time I was in ninth
grade, at a high school in southern West Virginia. It did not seem to me to be incompatible with
the fact that I had cerebral palsy. I
loved Jesus and wanted to follow and serve him, and I had a clear sense that
ministry was the way I was to do that.
God had given me a gift of insight into the Scriptures, and I did not
believe that gift was just for my own edification. I anticipated going to college, and then to
seminary.
I was not even aware of skepticism people seemed to have, at least not
yet. We moved my senior year of high
school, and after that move I began to encounter skepticism, but the first high
school I attended, most of my friends knew I had a call to preach, and they
never said anything to me which cast any doubt on it. It was not until after we moved and were
attending a different church that the doubt and skepticism began. When I encountered it, frankly, I was shocked
and horrified. I did not know Christian
people, and especially ministers, could be so cruel. This was the beginning of a decade of pain
and abuse in what I now consider a quasi-Christian cult. I have no doubt many of the people in the
group were real, sincere, loving followers of Jesus Christ. They are some of
the finest people I have ever known.
However, I do not believe the leadership was devoted to Jesus at all. I believe they were devoted to themselves and
their own little kingdoms.
My purpose in writing this narrative is to not only share what I
experienced, but how God’s grace carried me through the most painful decade of
my life. I have already written a
biographical memoir, Finding My Voice Through a Wilderness Journey, on
what my life has been like growing up and living with a disability and how that
impacted my life and my life’s work.
Here the intent is simply to tell the story of what happened to me in
this decade, what I learned from it, and what lessons I hope to share with
others who have had similar experiences.
There are many such testimonials out there. That is sad, because it is a testimony to the pervasive reality of spiritual abuse which is much more prevalent than it needs to be. I think it is especially an epidemic in more conservative traditions. As a mature Christian philosopher, I am rather liberal, but my upbringing in church was very conservative. I believe conservative Christianity is more susceptible to this because it tends toward dogmatism and black-and-white, rather than gray thinking. There are two mistakes we can make here, and both can be harmful. It can be a “pick your poison” type of thing. There is the danger on the one hand of seeing everything as black-and-white, (it isn’t) or on the other hand seeing everything as gray (and again, it isn’t.)
Let me say all the accounts out there, each story of abuse in a church,
are important, and they need to be heard.
Each one is different, because we are different people, and because
these various groups will have charismatic leaders who have their own
personalities, strengths, and flaws. Not
every such leader presents the exact same vision, nor makes the exact same
demands, of his or her followers.
I am naming names as I tell this story.
That was a difficult decision to make.
I chose to do so for several reasons.
First, the principals in my story are now deceased. An evangelist and a pastor who deeply hurt
me, have both died, in 2006 and 2021, respectively. Secondly, as I did a survey of the available
literature in this area, naming the cult leaders and the group seemed to be
common practice. Third, though deceased,
both men, who I consider corrupt, still have devoted followers who venerate
them. I do not want to leave doubt about
who they are, because I want to add my voice to the encouragement to stay
away. This narrative is, I hope, a “Danger
Will Robinson” appeal. I feel
constrained to share what happened to me because it negates the very message
these two men proclaimed. They both
claimed to “love everyone in the world, just like Jesus loves them.” One day it dawned on me that if this is true,
then I must conclude that Jesus would treat me the way these men did. I knew that was not true, so I knew their own
behavior invalidated their own claims about themselves.
This story takes place between December 1976, and January 1988. Just a bit more than a decade. To make sense of the story however, I need to
go back to 1974. That is when my journey
toward ministry began, and it sets the stage for what happened in the decade I
spent in this abusive ministry.
I grew up attending the Baptist church in Whitesville, WV. But then we kind of got out of going to
church. As I write in my memoir, Finding
My Voice Through a Wilderness Journey:
Somewhere
around Jr. High, we stopped attending church regularly. I do not know why. Mom and Dad had both been Sunday School
teachers, and both sang in the choir.
But then we just stopped. So,
when we moved from Montcoal to Racine, I had not been in church for some
time. As a ninth grader, I was the
manager for the Sherman Tide football team.
I would often get a ride home after practice from one of the assistant
coaches, Coach Mike Linsky, who did not live far from us. One day, as his Volkswagen pulled into our
driveway, he asked me if I attended church anywhere. I said we used to go to the Baptist church in
Whitesville, but we had not done so in a few years. Mike attended First Baptist there in Racine
and invited me to the next Sunday’s services.
It was “Youth Sunday.” He said he
would pick me up and bring me home, so I agreed to go.
That morning
the youth choir sang a cantata about Love.
The pastor, Dave Anderson, preached a short message and then gave an
invitation. Dave became one of the most
pivotal figures in my life, and I am still grateful to him nearly 50 years
later. As it turned out, he eventually
became pastor of the non-denominational church in Louisville which had, about
13 years before that, ordained me to the ministry. My mother-in-law attended that church, and in
2003, when she died, Dave and I officiated at her funeral together. As we stood by her casket and family members
passed by, Dave squeezed my hand and said, “I am proud of you!” That meant so much to me. But of course, in October of 1974, neither of
us saw any of that unfolding.
I went down the
aisle during that invitation and recommitted my life to Christ, and to live my
faith. About a month later, Dave
baptized me. I remember I fell out of
his arms while I was under the water and came up thrashing on the water, but I
guess it took. I began attending on
Sunday mornings and BYF (Baptist Youth Fellowship) on Tuesday nights. Before long, my whole family was attending,
and it was Sunday morning, Sunday evening, BYF, and Wednesday night. My parents moved their membership to Racine,
and we attended there for almost three years.
Dave was a
powerful preacher, and there was some sense of divine presence in that church
that I had never seen before and have not experienced anything exactly like it
since.
Every Sunday
morning service began with this call to worship from the choir:
There’s a sweet, sweet Spirit in
this place
And I know that it’s the Spirit of
the Lord.
There are sweet expressions on
each face
And I know they feel the Spirit of
the Lord.
Sweet Holy Spirit, sweet heavenly
dove
Stay right here with us, filling
us with your
love.
And for these blessings, we lift
our hearts in
praise.
Without a doubt, we’ll know that
we’ve been
revived When we shall leave this place.[1]
And
that is exactly how it felt. I was so
happy to be there.
The remainder of my high school time was spent with a clear sense I was
headed for Christian ministry. I think
the rest of those years were somewhat uneventful for me spiritually. Until one day I ran into Pastor Dan Light at
the Burger Chef in Marmet, WV. I did not
know that the events of that day would lead to my family moving, my changing
high schools, and a re-ordering of the entire trajectory of my life. But it did.
I knew Dan Light to be a wonderful preacher. I still think he is. We are friends to this day. He was Dave Anderson’s pastor at Marshall University. Dan was by now pastor of one of the major
churches of the West Virginia Baptist Convention. Dan had preached at Racine. In fact, he married a Racine girl and was
ordained by the First Baptist Church of Racine.
His mother-in-law, Mrs. Tamplin, had been my teacher.
Dan had a sister named Jeanne, and like Dan she had a beautiful
voice. She had sung all over the
world. She attended the Scott Depot
Church of God. It was affiliated with
the Church of God—Anderson, Indiana. And
the pastor there, Oliver Hogue, had a close relationship with a Methodist
evangelist, Loran Helm. The story was
that Oliver Hogue prayed that if there was someone on earth who walked with God
like the apostles and prophets of the Bible, that he could meet such a
man. That was not my prayer. I did not want to settle for that. I wanted to be one of those men myself.
Because of this connection, Dan Light had become connected with Rev.
Helm’s ministry. The morning of the day
I spoke to Dan at the Burger Chef, he had been to Racine and had shared with
Dave Anderson a copy of Loran Helm’s book, A Voice in the Wilderness. This led to Dave going on a trip to the Holy
Land with Rev. Helm’s group, and his thinking influenced Dave’s preaching,
which made the Baptist deacons in Racine unhappy. They ended up letting him go, and he became
an assistant pastor at the Scott Depot Church of God. By then, Dan Light was co-pastor of a
fellowship connected with Loran Helm which was in Muskegon, Michigan. Several families, including mine, followed
Dave to Scott Depot. While at first this new ministry and way of worship were
exciting, it turned out to be a window into the most depressing and painful
time in my life.
Let me say that even though the part of the story which follows is a
narration of what is most assuredly the most anguishing and painful part of my
entire life, there was also good that came out of it. I want to elaborate on some of the good
before getting to the pain.
The
biggest plus which came for me was that if this had never happened, I would
have never met my wife. Her mother
attended a Church of God in Louisville.
The number of people in the Church of God who became affiliated with
Rev. Helm caused quite a problem within the denomination. Many of them left and
started other churches. Others were
entire churches which had withdrawn from the Church of God. Technically independent of one another, these
churches were loosely connected and mostly called themselves “Christian
Fellowship” or “Christ Fellowship.” My
future mother-in-law was part of the Louisville Christ Fellowship. This is
where I was originally ordained, and where my pastor, Dave Anderson, eventually
became the pastor. My wife Gay and I met
when I came to be part of Louisville Christ Fellowship in 1984. When I got there, Gay, who was raised
Catholic, had been coming to church with her mom for a couple of months. We would never have met if it were not for
this group.
The second big blessing which was
a direct result of my becoming part of this group was that I would never have
had the education I have. Most notably, I never would have met D. Elton
Trueblood, who, more than anyone I have ever known, changed the trajectory of
my life.
The third blessing was friends I made, all over the country. Good, decent, Christian people who were often
victimized in this situation just like I was.
I am still in touch with many of them.
I will have more to say about all these blessings as I write.
Going to the Church of God, which eventually became known as Scott Depot
Christ Fellowship, was exciting. The
music was outstanding. The pianist
eventually became my sister’s mother-in-law.
There was a sense of the Holy Spirit in the services. They anointed the
sick with oil and prayed for their healing, just like it says in the book of
James. They did not speak in tongues in
the services, but they believed that all the gifts of the Holy Spirit which are
mentioned in scripture still exist in the church today. Frankly, many Baptists I knew believed those
gifts ceased when the twelve apostles had all died. This was new and different. I was learning about the Wesleyan view of
sanctification—which I came to believe was more biblical than the views of the
Baptist churches I had attended. I still
somewhat believe that.
We began attending the Scott Depot Church of God in February of 1977 and
had moved from Racine to Scott Depot by December of that year. In what turned out to be the most painful
episode of my life—by far, I had just assumed that because I already had a call
to the ministry, changing churches would not impact that in any way. I found out that was not true.
Even in the days we were in Racine, I was hungry to learn all the
Christian truth I could. I began the
habit of daily Bible reading and prayer at age 14, and with God’s help, I do
not think I have missed a single day of doing that in 47 years! I came home, did my homework, opened my
Bible, and read, and prayed, sometimes for hours. This is what I did.
I was not only reading Scripture, but also other Christian literature I
heard our pastor talk about. I was
voracious in my reading. Some of these
were names I had never heard of before.
And I was reading A Voice in the Wilderness, which was Loran
Helm’s autobiography. We had been told
the Holy Spirit had revealed that people would need to read it ten times to
begin to grasp its truth. Not wanting to
settle for that, I read it fifteen times.
I was earnest in trying to practice the spiritual disciplines we were
being taught. We were told Rev. Helm was
an apostle, and that he walked as closely with God as the apostles and prophets
in the Bible did. I wanted a walk like
that too. I took this quite
seriously. And as I read, I would see
connections between things. I saw
connections between the books I was reading, and the Scripture I read, and what
was going on in my life and the world around me. I eventually wrote some of it down in a red
notebook. I do not know what happened to
that notebook, but I have not had it for probably 40 years now.
At first in this new church, I
remember the pastor, Oliver Hogue, saying things like, “I have visions of this
young man preaching the Gospel.” I was
not surprised, because I already had known for over two years that was what I
was called to do. I did not expect that
just because we were attending a different church, this would change in any way
at all.
Then, one Wednesday evening, January 25, 1978, I preached for the second
time in my life, but it was the first time at this church. I had preached at a
youth rally at a Baptist church about a year before this. That January evening,
I spoke on the Old Testament temple and how it had an outer court, an inner
court (called the Holy Place) and then the Holy of Holies. What would happen is that the high priest
would go behind a veil and pour out the blood libation in the Holy of
Holies. The Book of Hebrews says Jesus
is our great High Priest, and that our bodies are the Temples of the Holy
Spirit. The writer of Hebrews compared
this veil to Jesus’ flesh. The veil was
torn open when Jesus was crucified.
I said the Scriptures say we have our own cross too, and if the veil in
the Temple represented Jesus’ flesh, then the fleshly nature which wants to do
what we want but not what God wants is the veil in our Temple, and Jesus, our
High Priest, wants to get into the innermost sanctum, the Holy of Holies of our
lives, and we hang a veil to keep him out.
People were shocked to hear this from an eighteen-year-old high school
senior. I do not think the phrase “blown
away” was popular then, but it describes the reaction I got. Pastor Hogue said experienced preachers could
not have done better, it was a masterpiece.
Right away, I scheduled an
appointment and met with Pastor Hogue and associate pastor Steven Reinhardt
five days later. I remember the date, it
was a Monday, January 30, 1978. I will
never forget it because it was the most hurtful thing which had happened to me
up to that point and the beginning of the most hurtful experience of my life.
When I sat down with these two men
five days after preaching what they called a masterpiece, I shared with them
that I knew I was called to preach the gospel, which is why the sermon had been
so powerful. There were a few other
young men identified as having a call to preaching ministry, and they were
constantly getting encouragement, being blessed, and prayed for. I fully expected they would just accept this
and consider me part of that group.
But Oliver Hogue, my pastor, five
days after hearing me preach and calling it a masterpiece, said to me that he
would only believe God had called me to do that if God would reveal it to him
personally. And I remember Steven said,
“and besides, in order to preach you will have to be married…” as if for some
reason that was considered something not even possible for me. This was the
first step in a struggle which lasted for years over what God had called me to
do. I left that day feeling dehumanized.
I am at a loss to describe what this did to wound my mind and
spirit. Every time something was said
about one of these other guys and how wonderful it was that God had called
them, I felt left out. Now, I had a
lifetime of feeling left out, being the last kid chosen to play ball, the guy
nobody wanted to date, etc. I was no
stranger to discouragement and doubting my self-worth. But I did not think the church should be
where this kind of thing was happening.
And it would make me fearful because they were preaching that to be
saved, we had to do God’s will—and I could see that if they had their way,
God’s will for me wasn’t happening. It led to anguish, suicidal thoughts, and
sleepless nights. I cannot tell you how
angry and grieved I was. I literally had
no hope for a meaningful life.
I have reflected on this experience many times over the years, and I am
not sure which idea was more hurtful, that I could not preach or that I could
not be married. I was maybe naïve, but I
did not see why having cerebral palsy should have been an obstacle to either of
these. Looking back, I think they, and
maybe even my own parents, thought I would be unable to care for myself or have
a job or a family. I know I have proved
them wrong.
Many times, I have thought about a biblical passage, 1 Timothy 4:1-5:
Now the Spirit expressly says that in
later times some will renounce the faith by paying attention to deceitful
spirits and teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose
consciences are seared with a hot iron. They forbid marriage and demand
abstinence from foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by
those who believe and know the truth. For
everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it
is received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by God’s word and by
prayer. (NRSV)
Sometimes they gave lip service to my calling, and sometimes they would
say, “Oh, we believe you, but we cannot affirm it unless the Holy Spirit
reveals it to us.” One time the youth
pastor, who eventually became the senior pastor after Oliver Hogue left, told
me I had more spiritual insight than anyone in a youth group of nearly 100
kids. I said, “You know, that is not
just for my private edification, it is because God has called me to proclaim
the Word.” But they never really
accepted that.
Despite all that, they asked me to
preach a few more times. I never
understood why that was. I was always
happy to do so, and it usually went well, but they did not want to see me in a
ministry role, and I knew it. I was
walking through a grief which I did not understand. Finally, in September of
1979, a half-hearted statement was made about my future preaching ministry. I purchased the cassette tape of that
service, so I had proof it had been acknowledged. That helped a lot with my depression over the
situation, but there were still active efforts going on behind the scenes to
make it difficult for me to pursue ministry.
This went on until after I was married.
This same pastor, Oliver Hogue,
had said a couple of things to me privately, while I was in college, which were
very hurtful. One time he said anyone as gifted and talented as I was had no
right to ever be discouraged about anything.
I think he was trying to offer something with one hand and take it back
with the other. He was admitting I had some gifts, so I guess he thought that
should make me feel affirmed. But to say
someone has no right to ever be discouraged took all that away. He may as well have said, “Look, it really
does not matter what happens to you. It
does not matter if people help or hurt you.
Whether people treat you fairly or not does not matter. You are supposed
to be equally happy either way. You have
no right to ever be unhappy.” It
amounted to taking my feelings away from me. Today people call that blaming the
victim. I do not think cruel is too
strong a description for that.
One of the things which I have observed over the years is that it is
often gifted people who are very discouraged.
I believe it is because they have a way of looking at the world which is
different from other people. I know that
in my own life, I have had six decades of seeing connections in things which
other people do not seem to see. The
founder of the Quakers, George Fox, called these openings. These openings have been described in this
manner:
Over the course of his journey, as Fox met others
searching for a more direct spiritual experience, he came to believe that the
presence of God was found within people rather than in churches. He experienced
what he referred to as “openings,” instances in which he felt God was talking
directly to him. [2]
I began having openings in my teens, and they have been part of my life
for over 45 years. Often, in my case,
they involve a new understanding of a Scripture verse, or an insight into how
spiritual truths are connected to one another.
In my years of preaching, I regularly tried to make these openings the
subject matter of my sermons. But part
of the price of having these openings is discouragement at times—because I see
some vital spiritual connection and I am saddened that it seems so many of
God’s people do not see it. Therefore,
to me, telling a person they have no right to ever be discouraged, because they
are gifted, is a cruel thing to say which indicates one does not have an
appreciation of those gifts. I believe
history is replete with artists, poets, musicians, prophets, and visionaries
who are well-acquainted with discouragement.
It is my conviction that these are the people who see how the world
could be, and see how it is, and bear in their souls the sadness of that
discrepancy. Telling me I had no right
to ever be discouraged seemed to discount those gifts rather than affirm them.
I have come to believe in Christian non-violence. I believe Jesus Christ calls each of his
followers to complete pacifism.
(Remember, I said not everything is black-and-white, but I honestly
believe this one is.) However, that does
not mean we are not allowed to feel hurt, to grieve, to be sad. The laments in the book of Psalms are
wonderful prayers for these times. I do
not believe we should ever seek redress through violence, but we are called,
not only to mourn, but to mourn with those who mourn. What these men did to me, however, felt like
inflicting mourning on me. It is cruel
to tell someone they should not ever hurt.
After becoming Catholic, I have these openings during the liturgy of the
Mass. I perceive how different aspects
of Christian truth fit together. One
Sunday as we sang,
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb
of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
I had an opening. I said right out loud, “I see it.” Someone asked me after church what I saw. I saw Christian non-violence. If it is by being a Lamb that Jesus wins our redemption, it can never be the case that his cause is advanced by violence. That is an example of one of these openings.
The other thing Oliver said was, “Don’t ever take a philosophy
class. It will mess with your
mind.” Now, I had heard him say that
from the pulpit, but he said it to me privately. I do not know why. I do not know if he thought I did not have
the intellectual wherewithal to handle it, or if he thought I could be
successful at it, and he did not want that to happen. I honestly do not know. The funny thing is, now I make my living as a
philosophy professor!
The last year I was living in West Virginia, Oliver asked me to organize
his library. He even said I should feel
free to read whatever I wanted. By then
I was taking philosophy and doing well at it.
Oliver’s library had several books by Elton Trueblood, a Quaker
philosopher who taught at Earlham College in Indiana. Decades later my own daughter taught at
Earlham. Oliver described Dr. Trueblood
as the best Christian philosopher in America.
I believe I read all the Trueblood books he had.
Not too long after this, I was at the mall, I had a date and my date and I were going to a movie, but we got to the mall an hour or so before the movie, so we were walking around in the mall and we ran into Steven Reinhardt, the associate pastor at the church. He handed me a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Go buy yourself a book. But then bring it later and show me what you bought.” We walked into the Christian bookstore, and the young lady noticed a book, The Best of Elton Trueblood: an Anthology. That was the book I bought. It was edited by an associate of Dr. Trueblood’s, James R. Newby. Little did I know that in a year Jim Newby and I would meet, and we are still good friends 40 years later. In fact, my first “official” ministry assignment was as associate pastor of the Friends Memorial Church in Muncie, Indiana, where Jim’s dad, Richard Newby, was pastor. That encounter was the first step on my way to really being able to do what God had called me to do. This was, even though I did not know it then, the first step in my journey out of this abuse and pain.
Again, from my memoir, I describe what this led to:
Not long after this, the
fellowship we were part of had a national gathering, to “wait on the Lord” in
Indianapolis. I took a couple of days to
stay in Indiana, and was at the home of a close friend, Sheila London. I had met Sheila three years before, on an
Israel trip, at the Dead Sea. It was
about 120 degrees that day, and the air was not uncomfortable because it was a
dry air without much humidity, but the sun was beating down on the sand and it
was probably over 100 degrees itself. I
was barefoot and trying to get to the water, but the heat just froze me and was
burning the soles of my feet. A lady I
did not know came and put some towels down and allowed me to get to the
water. I was touched. I learned her name was Sheila, she was a
widow with three teens. She lived near
Muncie, Indiana. Her husband was an
airplane pilot who had died in a crash.
I became close to her family and visited many times. When I was living in Muncie, I was able to
visit frequently, and she and her children welcomed me with open arms. We are still friends. She was like an older sister.
I was visiting
her house and it dawned on me, I am not far from Elton Trueblood in Richmond, I
wanted to go meet him. Sheila looked him
up in the phone book and called. She had
no real idea of who he was, but when he got on the phone, she said, “I have a
gentleman with me who has come from West Virginia to meet you.” He asked us to come that afternoon.
Oliver Hogue
had said he thought Dr. Trueblood might be the best Christian philosopher in
America. I had read several of Trueblood’s books and his wisdom, and his way of
putting complex concepts into clear, simple words, impressed me. His idea that
the Christian life was a three-legged stool of intellectual pursuit of truth, a
warm devotional life, and service to others strongly resonated with me.
I met this
wonderful man on an afternoon in July 1982. I thought I would have him
autograph a couple of books and be happily on my way. Instead, we talked for an
hour. Then he looked at me and said, “I can see you have an unusually keen
mind. I want you to come here to Earlham School of Religion to study and help
us here at the Yokefellows ministry.” Ten days later, I lived in Richmond,
IN.
People back
home were surprised. My own parents did not believe me when I came home and
relayed to them that Trueblood had extended this invitation to me, so I went
back in my room and came out with a dozen books he had autographed for me. Usually his standard autograph was
“Faithfully, Elton Trueblood.” But he
autographed my copy of his autobiography, While It Is Day, with “with
the high hopes of Elton Trueblood.” When
word got around of what I would be doing, the daycare director came up to me
and said, “you remember when you told me God had something bigger in store for
you. I believed you. I guess this is it.”
Yokefellows was an ecumenical ministry which
intersected even with Catholic Christians. Its purpose was to provide resources
for people to serve in what Trueblood called “The Ministry of Common Life.” The
idea of the Yokefellows ministry is to have such a focus on Christ that
whatever one does in life is done in the spirit of service to Christ and
others. This ministry began in 1949, after Dr. Trueblood had an insight into
what he called “Christ’s clearest call to commitment”: “Take my yoke upon you
and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest
for your souls” (Matthew 11:29).
Raised as an Iowa farm boy, Trueblood knew yokes usually were placed on teams of animals. He saw Jesus as calling us to be yoked with Himself in service to the Gospel. It was one of the joys of my life to serve alongside this Christian thinker in the Yokefellows ministry from 1982 to 1984.[3]
I do not believe anyone could have foreseen this when Oliver suggested I
should not take philosophy. He did not
think I had the intellect for it. But
evidently Elton Trueblood did, as he invited me to be part of his life and
ministry.
Comments
Post a Comment