My Story - pt. 2, Life Words.

Let me explain last weeks post a little more.

I grew up in a conservative “Evangelical” home in the great state of Alaska. From the time I was in third grade (about a year after seeing “The Dark Crystal”) my family went to church every Sunday at our beautiful stained glass and steepled Sothern Baptist Church.

At some point this church changed pastors, and the incoming pastor had a decidedly closed view on faith. He withdrew our church’s participation in local ecumenical ministry, stating that the Sothern Baptist theology was superior to that of all other faiths and that believing otherwise amounted to heresy. Granted, this is my adult interpretation of what happened, but my parents’ response seems to support my belief: We left.

At the time, we lived across the street from an intensely Pentecostal Assemblies of God Church, and to my great surprise it was here that our wanderings led us. My parents received the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit, with evidence of speaking in tongues,” and we jumped into charismata with both feet. My father quickly became the worship leader and my sister and I were thrust into the life of “part-time” PKs (preachers’ kids.)

These two denominational experiences were worlds apart. For a time I struggled with a sort of denominational schizophrenia, never quite able to figure out how I should act in church. Should I be shouting “Hallelujah” or sitting quietly and occasionally nodding my head with an “Amen” under my breath? While the differences between these expressions of faith are vast and potentially confusing to a child, what I am most struck by today is not their differences but the message they share in common.

Finding footing in the holiness movement, both congregations fervently taught a pious, radical Christian life, separate from the world around it. Separation from the “world” was a theological imperative for the “true” Christian life. “Come out from them and be separate,” the preachers shouted at us (2 Corinthians 6:17, Isaiah 52:11). More than any one sermon, this cry became a rallying call to all believers. The call was to create a divide between the sacred and the secular, holy and profane, God and the devil.

In response, the “Thou Shalt Not” list was formed which prohibited everything from drinking and smoking to playing cards. The sermons often targeted one of these banned practices and condemned those who partook as “friends of the world,” which, according to the book of James, is akin to being an “enemy of God” (Jas. 4:4.)

The central truth of the preaching was correct, I suppose; as people marked with the title “little Christ,” we are set apart, holy and distinctly different from the “world” around us. However, in so focusing on this one aspect of Christian living, congregations, myself included, fell into the ancient trap of extreme pious differentiation; the result of which is, on a cultural level, irrelevance. (Ancient Judaism, Christians at different points of history and extreme Islam have all landed in this same trap.)

There are moments in life where words are spoken to a person and they seep into the recipient’s psyche (or soul, depending on your theology and philosophy) and stay there like a fly stuck in the globe of a light. I have heard these statements called “life messages,” because they stay with you your whole life. Sometimes these messages can be positive and life giving, other times they can be destructive.

This separatist, holiness teaching of my early Christian development became the latter for me; it became the hammer that shatters the crystal and divides the species into two, one good and the other, not so much. Rather than making a more Godly person, holiness created two separate spheres in which I had to operate; dual lives each ruled by their own gods.

Question for you, How has your experience with "church" shaped your faith views? What life words have stuck with you and formed who you are today?(these can be from parents, friends, enemies, pastors, even the culture.)

More to come...