19 October 2022
Reminiscing over the past few days, I did some Internet searching about the state where I grew up during my late childhood and early teen years. It was there I sensed the Lord calling me to serve Him in the Word. My family belonged to the same church all those years, and that church still exists. It stands in the same place, with a new classroom wing added on one side, but otherwise the same building. One flowerbed has the same kind of plants still. It was where I discovered that mainstream middle class church folks didn't want me among them because we weren't culturally middle class.
This is not a sob story, but my age peers from the big four important families who ran that church were treated very differently from me. Now, those kids are holding important mainstream church positions in that state. I left that denomination about 15 years ago, about the time I realized they had left me back when I was a kid. It took me a while to finally realize they weren't going to put me to work -- ever. I don't miss those days.
This is the church where I was introduced to Dispensationalism. One of the big four families (the father was an immigrant from Sweden), right after they joined the church, displayed one evening a huge collection of polemical materials. Eventually it included photocopies of the original manuscript Joseph Smith stole from Solomon Spalding; it showed samples of Spalding's handwriting, quite different from Smith's. Apparently this Swedish man had friends in the academic apologetics community, because this was well before the scholars who found the materials (Cowdrey, Davis, and Scales) had published their book on it -- Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? (Vision House Publishers, 1977).
Two of the other big four families had joined the church a few years after my family did. They essentially took over with the support of another family that had been there before us. Once these four together established themselves, I was pressured in all kinds of ways to take a particular path to prepare for ministry, including what college I was supposed to attend. My apparent lack of interest in some of their choices was the final closure of the door, and I was marginalized from then on.
My family left that state the same year. That was God's sovereign mercy at work, because we left for entirely different reasons. I finished high school in another state and went to a different college. Over the decades since then, I've been through several major changes, and I'm so utterly alien to that bunch back there that we would have nothing to talk about.
This past week I was looking at the publicity photos and websites for the various denominational organizations where some of those kids are working these days. I can dig the missions stuff, though they would hardly want me on their team. I'll admit I do miss working with those mission organizations, even if I was already feeling like an outsider in those days. I had volunteered to go out on summer mission programs in their pioneer areas among the Native American communities. The work was fulfilling in one sense, because I really loved the native kids out in their villages. They seemed to know it and reciprocated.
But do I feel any kind of longing to be in that denomination again? No; not at the cost of being forced to use their manipulative sales-pitch brand of evangelism. Faith is not pressuring people to join the club. Faith is demonstrating the Father's eternal outlook in a messed-up world. I don't want what they have.
Indeed, what I sense the Lord says we should have would require starting from scratch, and doing things very few Christians are doing right now. I've previously noted that it could look a bit like the Amish or Mennonite communities. In some places the Mennonites are called Anabaptists; they had been all over the same Native American villages that I visited in my youth. Still, a genuine biblical faith calls for something so different I'd rather not lay down any guidelines for fear of saddling someone with ideas that won't work in their context.
Besides, we have so very much work to do, such a great distance to travel, just giving covenant and conviction primacy. That's a very big shift for someone who grew up in a mainstream church. It took me decades to make that journey. I felt like I was blazing trails in the wilderness, but that's where God wanted to meet with me. Going back to that place from so long ago would mean backtracking too far away from where the Father wants me to camp out.
The image of camping out is only half-joking. Those folks own an awful lot of real estate, facilities and equipment back in that state where I grew up. Their membership is one of the largest denominations in that state. I watched a couple of videos of churches worshiping; they are still culturally middle class with lots of middle class money. I still feel like a complete outsider. Where I belong is well away from their doors.
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