My home church, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, is on its sixth pastor, and he is a gem. But the path to him was rocky. We gathered, just 25 of us, in the community room above a firehouse when I was 12 years old. My young father had died suddenly, and my mother had taken it as a sign to get right with the Lord. Running up the stairs every week past shiny red trucks and perfectly aligned yellow coats felt like home.
The founding pastor was a gentle shepherd who communicated peace and safety to this fearful girl. Then a few troublesome congregants ran him off and replaced him with a star who had served with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. What had been a casual, hippy-era church was then infiltrated by old-school Baptists. Tension between traditionalists and innovators gnawed at the ministry.
One day, when I was an 18-year-old new convert and the pastor at the time was 60-something, he took me out evangelizing with him. Afterward, we went back to his house for ice cream. I dished it out, and he suggested I come snuggle with him on the couch. Having seen the unholy mingle with the holy in each of my first two pastors, I should have expected to see it again. Instead, my naiveté continued.
Churches fail and clergy fail, but this seems like an awful lot for one person.
Hmmm. This brings back two painful memories of church splits and deep division and disunity among Christians that did quite a bit to shape me as a Christian and form my calling. (Thankfully God DOES use the painful things in our lives for good if we offer them to Him! The testimony above is deeply painful reading, but I’m thankful the author has clung to Christ in the midst of everything and the Lord has used her experiences to shape her for a fruitful ministry.)
***
Although I grew up attending an ECUSA church (in the diocese of Newark), I did not truly hear and understand the Gospel or commit my life to Christ until I was in Junior High and invited to a Bible Club started by a friend’s mom (who had become a Christian after a dramatic healing from brain cancer…!)
That Bible Club continued for about 3-4 years and was where I was taught and discipled in the faith. But by about my sophomore year in high school, the leader moved away, and we all sort of morphed into the youth group at a local independent Charismatic church. Basically all of the other kids in the Bible Club belonged to this church, I was just about the only outsider, but i was warmly welcomed and for me this group was my spiritual lifeline given that I had no solid teaching or fellowship in my Episcopal parish.
Then one week in the fall of my junior year, the church split, suddenly without warning. At least no warning to me, as one not in the church an unaware of the turmoil. And, it split the families of my friends in youth group down the middle. Half stayed in the church, half left. And neither half was talking to each other. And neither half would let their children participate in any joint youth group / Bible Club meetings. (To this day I have no idea what the split was about, and some of those youth group friends I never saw again!)
And so Bam! I was left with virtually no fellowship. I was shocked to my core. I just couldn’t understand how such a thing could happen among Bible believing Christians.
My spiritual life suffered greatly for maybe 8 – 9 months. I was grieving and deeply angry at God. I’d not gotten in the habit of feeding myself all that deeply from the Word, always having had excellent teaching and resources in this Bible Club / church youth group. So, all of a sudden I was starving spiritually…
When I finally turned back to God and poured out all my anger and bitterness to Him, God used it for good in the long run in that I learned I needed to depend on God alone and began, slowly, to learn how to study Scripture and feed on it for myself. (And that morphed into a one-on-one Bible study with a friend from my ECUSA youth group who to my joy later became a Christian!) But oh it was such a painful and spiritually risky time.
And then again… my freshman year at Princeton. I arrived on campus so excited about the prospect of excellent fellowship and teaching, having already had some contact with one of the campus Christian fellowship groups on a visit to the campus before I accepted admission. When I arrived on campus, however, I discovered there were in fact 3 Christian evangelical fellowship groups on campus that had virtually nothing to do with one another. (The two largest groups were a reformed evangelical (strongly dispensationalist-leaning) group, and a Charismatic / Pentecostal group loosely affiliated with the local Assemblies of God church, and the AoG ministry Chi Alpha.) It so happened that I was/am both Evangelical and Charismatic. And the split between these groups grieved me deeply. I found it utterly scandalous. I quickly made friends in both groups. Participated in both groups — or actually all 3 for awhile! (the third was really just a small Navigators’ Bible study, not a big fellowship group) — (which caused some real scandal for awhile…!) and worked as a peacemaker where I could.
The devastating blow came when in the middle of my sophomore year, one of the groups changed their meeting night. You guessed it. Both groups decided to meet at the exact same time. I had to choose. It was awful. I cried for days. I was at this point rooming with dear friends and sisters in the reformed Evangelical group. But my heart (especially because of the lively worship and the very very strong passion for missions) was with the Charismatic group, which I eventually chose for my primary allegiance. I can’t tell you how unspeakably awful it was for me every Friday night to have dinner with my roommates and then have them head off to PEF while I went to Alpha-Omega. Sure, I occasionally attended PEF and was active in non-Friday night events like a women’s Bible study. But the division was real and difficult.
I must have read every book that was written at the time on the Charismatic – Dispensationalist divide. I have something like 20 – 30 such books in my library! I had Pentecostal friends giving me one set of books, and Dispensationalist friends giving me another. Shocking and eye-opening reading to see what one group of Christians could say about another. Deep theological issues to wrestle through. Many long hours of prayer.
The good lesson that came out of all that mess was to begin to understand and accept just a bit of the reality of things that are adiaphora if I can use that word which I wouldn’t have known at the time. (Of course some of my friends didn’t consider these issues adiaphora at all!!!) I had to wrestle with what are the essential truths of the faith. What can Christians agree to differ over. That is a lesson that has served me well time and time and time again here on the mission field as I work to plant a church among an unreached people with no history of Christian witness. And as I serve as part of a multi-national and very diverse team in terms of our Christian backgrounds. I don’t know that I would have lasted on the mission field if I hadn’t wrestled with many of these issues before I got here. I’ve seen some leave over just such conflicts where they just can’t accept living and working with Christians who believe “X” or do “Y” — in the stress of the mission field, such conflicts can be hugely exacerbated.
So these days, I can look back and be thankful for God’s mercy in using these trials for good. But oh they were painful. And I do still have scars…
But just maybe the fact that the church on earth is so imperfect just helps us long a little bit more deeply and fully for when we shall see Christ face to face and be perfected in His likeness and in unity as we worship Him and all else fades away.
Karen – Thank you for sharing some of your journey with us. I am blessed to have read it and to have seen the Providence of God and how He can take evil (schism and splits) and turn it to good.
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Karen B.
Thank you so much for that. I have just finished a talk with my deacon about this Fall’s programs (if you remember I had said yesterday I had a sense from God the previous Sunday that we were to go on) and we were talking of what has happened in our church community and how hard it has been these past few years.
My deacon said, “Yes, these have been hard trials, but God is teaching us, and continues to teach us through them that He must be the Center, He must be the focus, He must be the reason we go on” – not buildings, people, pastors, or churches but, as Lewis says Christ says, “Myself”.
You confirm that – thank you so much.
Thanks, Karen, for your testimony. It seems like I read that previously somewhere. It matters not — it is timely, and points to the gain that we can receive in Christ from the hurt and suffering that everyone has been and will be experiencing.
RGEaton
Rob+ I think I’d posted a bit on the Princeton situation back in May (Pentecost) on the speaking in tongues thread that drew quite a lot of comment. But I don’t recall having ever posted about the earlier church split, when I was in high school. I’m not sure I’d even thought about it for years until reading this piece and it all came flooding back in vivid detail.
But this piece was so helpful because of its focus on finding God’s purpose and grace in the midst of these trials. I doubt I’d ever quite connected before how the wrestling I had to do with the charismatic non-charismatic issue in college, for instance, prepared me for the mission field. But it really did. It was deeply formative, and I can look back and be quite grateful for how God shepherded me through those painful times.
Glad my long comments above were helpful to some. To God be the glory!
Dear Karen B:
I read that last night before I went to bed and have spent a great deal of time thinking about it. I wonder how many of us could write, “Tales of the Christian Church Darkside” – I’d suspect it’d be a majority of us.
If I tried to write an account of all that has happened during my life in Christian circles, I think you’d have to devote an entire section of the site to it. Like you, so many impressions and memories flashed through my mind when I read that account. I remembered being Catholic as a child and my mother being shunned and excommunicated from the church because my father ran off from her and us four kids to live with an already married woman. I remember her eventual return to the Faith in the Baptist church I grew up and was married in only to have the pastor kicked out by the deacons because he confronted a man in the church community who had molested some of the preschool children. I could write of my brother who became a pastor – who repeatedly destroyed church after church with his skewed vision of Christianity and who finally ran off with the church secretary and eventually became a Wiccan [i](you can’t even make that kind of stuff up)[/i]. I could write of my own journey of Faith – finally finding a church community of which I felt safe, able to grow in the Spirit, sheltered by my priest and community only to have in 2003 the priest leave [i](for extended family)[/i], the community fractured and suddenly finding myself in the Anglican Star Wars battlefield on the side of the rebels after the temple had been invaded. The list goes on and on.
I have a niece, who from just the experiences from my family became an atheist. I have said, in moments of great discouragement, “If I didn’t know the Person of Christ, I could join her.”
However, all that being said and appreciated [i](and in my case experienced) [/i] do we draw from this that God’s church is a waste of time? That we should not draw together as community? That no church is perfect so we should just go find God with our local Wilderness area?
I do not believe that is the lesson Christ tries to teach in the midst of our human frailty. No, I think He is trying to teach us as we [b]TRY[/b] to cling to things, people and places that our trust can only be in Him. As I’ve trailed across the moonscape of this fractured Anglican Communion and wondered how or why God made me a part of it [i](for as you can see – I am no cradle TEC person)[/i] I realize how tenaciously I cling to people instead of Jesus, of places or anything tangible I can grasp. However, God doesn’t put up with competition well – so He allows us to come to a place where we can trust solely Him.
When we learn that, then we can be part of the church without the churches’ failings breaking our hearts. Then we can be part of the Universal Church has He has given it and has designed it to be.
I hope some of that, at least, is on point.
Wow! What a thread! Karen and Eclipse, I feel so back on track, after reading your entries. We so often forget the first sentence of the Jesus Creed – Love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. When we do that, the other things fade into insignificance and He shows us what we are to do. We reasserters sometimes get so caught up in the politics of our church, that we forget Love God, but rather we substitute Love Church. If we really have faith, we just have to trust Him, and He will show us the way. In all things, to Him be the glory!