Lenten Project: Day Twenty-three

In the summer of 1994, I was 11 years old and traveling all over the States with my family on a short furlough. We lived in a trailer which we pulled around with a borrowed truck.  At one point, I was riding alone in the truck with Dad.  I don't remember where the other kids were--maybe riding in another vehicle with Mom.  At any rate, it was just and my daddy, and I was thrilled to get some alone time with him, since usually we all had to share him.  (Large family problems, y'know.)

The inside of the small trailer. The youngest child got her own bed...in the bathtub. So lucky!

I remember watching the white lines on the highway disappear under us, and vividly recall gazing at the glove compartment, absentmindedly staring at the plastic latch button. Nothing much was going through my mind, other than a stray thought that I wished I could think of something witty to say to impress my dad.

Hannah, 11, with two of her sisters

Then, out of the blue, he said, "Tell me your spiritual experiences, Hannah."

And I had no idea what he meant.  I asked him.  He just repeated what he'd said.  "Share with me your spiritual experiences with our Lord."

I got scared, because I didn't have any. And I didn't know what he wanted me to say.

Now, in the Fundamentalist world, the hatred for charismatics is strong.  The only context I had for "spiritual experience" was from sermons raging about those mushy minded Bible twisters and stiff-necked heretics called charismatics.  I didn't have any of those experiences, and if I did, I wouldn't be a true Christian.

So I thought it was a test.  Was my dad was trying to trap me into admitting that I was a heretic, or an unbeliever?  My mind scrambled with something convincing to say, and I may have babbled something mostly unintelligible, but it of course didn't pass inspection.

He repeated himself several times while I dissolved into a sobbing mess, my lack of "spiritual experiences" to share making me believe I was unsaved and on my way to hell.  I could imagine the heat of the flames, ready to swallow me up for not being a true believer. Maybe I failed the test by crying for ten miles.  But if I had had any spiritual experiences to share, it would have proven I was a heretic.  So it was a lose/lose, and I was the biggest loser of them all, having fallen from God's Grace.

Two of these girls don't belong. One isn't even a Schaefer girl (and none of us remember
who she was), and the other (Hannah, second from the left) was a doubter of her salvation.

This encounter formed a foundation to my childhood suspicion that I was not very tightly held in God's hand, that not only were my parents ashamed of me, but God also wouldn't mind if I didn't turn out to be one of the Elect after all. Sure, the Fundamentalist teaching is "once saved, always saved," but there are plenty of things a person can do to prove that he or she was never actually saved in the first place, like coming out as gay, getting divorced, or becoming a charismatic.

Apparently, there was some sort of "spiritual experience" that was acceptable for a Fundamentalist, and necessary for proving one's status as a believer.  But, at eleven years old, I couldn't figure out what it was.  Later on, in college, I'd be asked something similar: "How do you know for certain that if you die tonight, you'll go to heaven, Hannah?"  And my answers then would still not be satisfactory ("Because I asked Jesus into my heart when I was three.").  It wasn't until I discovered Sacramental theology that I realised my assurance in salvation comes from nothing I can or have done.  It all rests squarely on Christ, and His work in me through the waters of Baptism.

Lenten Project: Day Nineteen

Spiritual counseling at Bob Jones University is the worst kind of torture.  I was required to undergo this counseling the first semester of my junior year due to the wicked sin of "spiritual pride" uncovered the year prior.  Apart from that, I had no other clues as to why I'd been singled out for the terror of spiritual counseling.

20 year old Hannah

I'd been assigned to room with a hall leader in my dorm (hall leaders are prayer captains who are in charge of all the other prayer groups on the hall--they have a lot of power, and usually were nasty pieces of work who would turn a student in for the smallest infraction).  I'd been put in the hall leader's room because the dorm sup and dorm counselor wanted her to "keep an eye on me."  This is not mere paranoia--I was actually told this!  While the hall leader amazingly turned out to be a nice enough girl, I lived in constant fear of accidentally getting into trouble for forgetting some rule, or for talking about theology too much, or for not having the right kind of friends. (I'd been accused of not being a good Christian the year before, due to the fact that I didn't hang out mostly with my roommates.)

My counselor was a girl a year or two older than I, in her first year of grad school at the University.  She was the dorm counselor, but had no training, no experience, no skills whatsoever to qualify her for the job.

She demanded that I tell her everything, that I make her my confidant, but she made clear that she was not my friend.  She was my counselor.  Yet another spiritual leader to direct me.  During one meeting, I tried to share about my past doubts, asking questions, trying hard to understand, to get a foundation to my beliefs, and she mocked me, saying if I didn't know by now, then it was clear I really needed this counseling!  She didn't answer any of my questions, either.

She wanted me to confess things to her each week, but I had nothing to confess, so I caved in to pressure and just made up stuff to satisfy her.

"I was dissatisfied with my roommate when she talked on the phone too loudly.  I repent of the sin of discontentment."

"I felt anger at the boy who stood me up at my society's dating outing.  I repent of my bitter, proud spirit."

"One of the Academy kids I worked with last year has been asking me theological questions about salvation, and is unsure he's saved.  I repent of thinking I am a spiritual leader to him, since I haven't been appointed to that role by the University.  I should tell his parents and then stay out of it."

By the end of the semester, I couldn't remember all the things I'd confessed, but apparently I'd been marked as a bad apple, because I still couldn't advance in the spiritual hierarchy.

When I say Hell is Bob Jones University, this is what I'm remembering.  My futile efforts to try to be relabeled as good.  Trying to convince my APC that I really was saved, and she didn't have to hold a prayer service/intervention over me with the other APCs and PC (she even called in another hall leader to take me out for coffee...and a conversation trying to convince me I truly was not redeemed). Trying to show that I really did have a relationship with God, even though I didn't want to share all the details.  Trying so hard to live up to the BoJo model, to fit in and be like everyone else.  And failing, over and over again.

I would have given up all my questions, my doubts, by wonderings about greater Christianity, if only they'd accepted me into their group.  And I did, when I managed to convince the Administration to hire me as a University staff member the next year.  I conformed, tried not to think much, and did a very good job of being an ideal BJU model, till this messed up past came back to bite me in the arse.  That's a story for another day.

Lenten Project: Day Eighteen

We're halfway through Lent.  Far from running out of stories to tell and things to post on this blog, I keep uncovering more, remembering more. I'm facing myself in the mirror and coming to terms with a lifetime of abuse, and it has not been as easy as I imagined.

Today I dug out all my diaries and journals, from 1998 to 2003.  They're horrifying.  Not just my recounting what happened each day (usually not positive things), but also myself, who I was.  I was not an admirable person.  True, I was a product of my upbringing, but I was also a jerk.  A selfish creature with an ego the size of an airplane.

My husband likes to look at my old pictures and say he would have liked me and had the biggest crush on me if we'd known each other in my childhood.  But I was not lovely.  I was not nice.

In spite of my enormous character flaws, a few of which I've outgrown by virtue of the simple fact that I've grown up, and a few others which have been shed since I left Fundamentalism and then Evangelicalism, the truth remains that what was done to me was not merited at all.  It was not right, it was not good, it was not of Christ.

Two months after my 18th birthday, I wrote in my diary that all I wanted was to explore this faith of my parents, to be able to express doubts without fear of punishment.  I admitted I didn't believe God existed.  I confessed it, with much shame, in a prayer I wrote in my journal. (My father, in a strange attempt to save me from my rebellion, required me to write a prayer of at least 100 words each day. He also required me to correspond with him through another journal.  I still, to this day, don't know why he didn't just talk to me face to face.  We lived in the same house, after all.)  After trying and proving some of the teachings of Fundamentalism to be false, I jumped to the conclusion that all of Fundamentalism must be false, and that God was nothing, not true, not real. (Because I was taught that Christianity is Fundamentalism, and Fundamentalism is Christianity.  Everything else was pagan.  So to reject Fundamentalism was to reject God.)

Then, a few days later, I fearfully backtracked and apologised to God.  Later I wrote that I had to conform so I could survive.  And that's really sad.  I was never encouraged to believe because God is true and real and good.  I was compelled to pretend to believe "for the sake of the ministry," and because that's what was expected of me.  Doubts were not allowed. Exploring life, trying new things, deciding for myself were not allowed.  Challenging the teachings of Fundamentalism, examining our rules and practices, and trying to understand why, were all strongly discouraged.

Since I had to do all of those in secret, my attitude was nasty.  I didn't like hiding who I was or what I was discovering.

When I read my diaries, I agree with what my sweet mother-in-law said again this weekend: That is not true Christianity.

Lenten Project: Day Sixteen

There exists a confession fetish in the churches associated with Sovereign Grace Ministries. Every week in small group ("care group," they call it), it was always a competition to see who could outdo everyone else in confessing--but only the white sins, like pride. Never the heavy stuff, like suicide attempts.

When I talked openly about the urge to self harm, one of the pastors' wives eventually called me and we chatted. I vividly remember sitting on the grassy hill in my backyard, staring at the clouds while we talked. I also shredded many blades of grass during the conversation.

She gave me this advice to combat my severe depression and inner urges to kill myself: don't go on Facebook.  She said going on Facebook made her envious of other women's "perfect" lives and she got tempted to compare herself to them. When she avoided Facebook, she held on to her contentment.  Therefore, I ought to stay off Facebook so I wouldn't be discontent anymore. Since my friends on Facebook, constantly messaging me, checking on me, sending me Scripture and prayers, were all that were keeping me alive, I disregarded her advice.

At Sovereign Grace churches, there's a lot of, "our church is so amazing," and, "I love my pastor," and not so much, "I love Jesus," or, "Christ alone."  The overwhelming pastor worship made me wary when we first joined. I knew, even back in 2006, that CJ Mahaney was bad news, but I figured going to that church for a while would be okay.

And it wasn't all terrible. When we weren't busy confessing various petty offenses to one another, my small group was engaged in loving one another beyond measure. They came to my house and had a work day, we all went to the lake and spent a day on the water, and we had really amazing Christmas parties.

But there was always this underlying loyalty to SGM, the kind that screams, "Don't question too much, or examine too closely."  It was a manic loyalty.  And even our devotion to one another in our small groups had the sheen of artificiality.  For me at least, there was little substance to those relationships.  Lots of confession, yes.  But beyond trying to be the first in the group to confess being prideful every meeting, we didn't really create spaces for deeper understandings of one another.  We also were discouraged from trying other small groups.  Everyone stayed in the one assigned, unless asked to move by the pastors.

I questioned too much. And openly. I'd frequently disagree with some point or other from a pastor's sermon. And some of the young men from the church would attempt to quiet me--after all, Sovereign Grace Ministries is a staunchly complimentarian, patriarchal place, so women should shut up and sit down. Having a theological opinion should be secondary to keeping my home and raising my family. And even then, it should be closely monitored and filtered by my head, my lord, my husband. All the women were encouraged to do was repost and share articles from the Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel, and other Sovereign Grace affiliated and approved groups. Commenting anything other than, "I totally agree," or, "This convicted me," was frowned upon for women.  Even sharing opinions and convictions in small group as a woman wasn't given respect or weight.

CJ Mahaney once told me that my son was my highest calling. That my service to God in the form of motherhood was the biggest, most important thing I could do for Christ. While motherhood is a beautiful vocation, it certainly isn't my (or anyone else's) highest calling. I'm not defined by my mothering.

On the whole, I'm mostly just glad I escaped SGM without too much damage. The potential for great harm was always pretty high and very visible. And it scared me, though I tried to ignore it. That culture if shame and guilt, wrapped up in a cloak of "grace," is heavy and unbiblical, and I'm still unlearning some of the habits and attitudes instilled in me during my time as a young, restless, and reformed charismatic.

If anything, I hope I have put off the demeanor of haughtiness I wore so completely while I was a SGM devotee. I'v realised and embraced the fact that I don't have all the answers.  And maybe (probably) my church and pastor doesn't either.  And that's okay. 

Lenten Project: Day Eleven

In the late 1990s, the Independent Baptist community in Grenada, West Indies, suffered a terrible split over the KJV Only issue.  And it was partially my fault.

In the States, Pensacola Christian College, my parents' alma mater, and Bob Jones University, where Dad went to seminary, were bitterly butting heads over the KJV issue.  In the islands, we IFB missionaries pretty much all used and loved the KJV, but didn't waste much time calling down hellfire on other versions (that is to say, we didn't have any Bible burning services for NIVs).

Dad, in his role as teacher at the Bible school we had connected to our church, wrote a paper on the issue for a student who started asking difficult questions about translations and inerrancy.  That student copied the paper and passed it around to his friends, who passed it around to their pastors, and all of a sudden, the country was embroiled in a fight.

Only, I didn't know about that student's stupid move at the time.  I only knew that Dad had written a paper, and, when overhearing my parents talking about it, asked for a copy and read it myself.  A lot of it went over my head, but the main points I gleaned were that the KJV had mistakes in translation, and that anyone who claimed that the English translation was re-inspired was an idiot.

I was pretty shocked that the Bible translation I used and memorised had errors in it.  I looked up the verses that appeared contradictory and problematic, and got more and more concerned.  If the KJV had mistakes in it, why were we using it?!

I tried talking to an MK best friend about it, but she didn't seem interested.  So I called my other MK best friend and spilled my guts and read verses and generally freaked out to her.  I made her promise not to tell her dad, because I was worried everybody's ministry would collapse if we didn't have an error-free KJV as our foundation.

As a side note, it's really interesting that Fundamentalist elevate Scripture to almost an idolatry.  It's always placed first in their lists of beliefs, before anything about God or Christ or the Gospel.  So it isn't that far out of the realm of possibility that Fundamentalism would collapse without the Bible, as though God's very existence is tied to a book.  That's the way we viewed the Bible, anyhow.

Well, my friend couldn't give me the reassurance I needed to shore up my shaken faith in the KJV, and instead got scared by my being scared. She went to her dad and asked him the same questions I'd asked her.  He figured out the source and called MY dad to berate him for letting me corrupt his daughter with anti-KJV propaganda.

I was even more scared after that, because I thought I was the cause and reason for the "discord between brethren."  Amazingly, I wasn't punished, but Dad admonished me to not say anything else about the issue.  He didn't bother to reassure me.  Maybe there was no reassurance to be had.

After a special evening meeting at a fellow pastor's church, people were gathered and chatting in the church courtyard when another national pastor came up and started yelling at my dad.  I was standing right beside him as this man ranted and raved and shook his finger under my dad's nose, accusing him of crazy things like dad's supposedly encouraging his students to quit using the KJV, and not preaching from the KJV anymore, etc.  Dad just stood there with a fixed smile on his face and didn't say much.  Meanwhile, my breathing was accelerating and a panic attack was imminent.  I couldn't understand why Dad didn't say something, anything!  He was letting this other pastor say hateful untruths about him, and he wasn't even defending himself, or, at the very least, moving the discussion to a private place.  I heard, "Get thee behind me, Satan," at one point, but little else.

Finally, I couldn't hold back my own fear-induced anger, and shouted at the pastor, "Who told you that?!" when he paused for breath.

I wasn't really looking for an answer, and I remember I said it at a point in the diatribe that didn't really match my question. But that's all I could think at the moment.  Who had told this pastor all these lies about my dad?  I knew it had been my best friend's father, and that he'd gotten his information indirectly from me, and somehow, it had all gotten twisted up and changed in the retelling, because now none of the accusations resembled anything I'd said.  I just knew it was all my fault, and that really, this pastor should have been yelling at me.

The pastor stopped yelling for a moment, and our fellow pastor's wife came and dragged me away.  I suppose it was obvious to her that this sort of fight shouldn't be taking place in front of children.  I was never more thankful for her in my life.  She recognised my fear and flew to the rescue, assuring me that my dad would be okay and that everything was all right.  I so desperately needed to hear those words.

The result of that confrontation was that a clear divide emerged among the island's IFB congregations and pastors.  Those with my dad, and those who remained KJV-Only.  Of course, Dad was still using and clearly preferring the KJV as well, but that didn't matter to these folks.  One had to be KJV-Only to count.

One way to identify KJV-Only churches is to notice if they refer to their Bible as the 1611 version.

After that, our missionary friends had to choose: were they with us or against us.  One fellow missionary's mission board instructed him to to have nothing to do with our family, to cease participating in joint church services and ministries (like my baptism), to go to the other side of the street if he saw my dad, to urge others to shun us.  But he refused, because he knew we'd done nothing wrong.  (To illustrate in how small a world the Fundamentalists live, that same mission board chairman later officiated my first wedding, not remembering the sordid past associated with my last name.)

The furor eventually died down, but when the dust settled, I'd lost my two best friends to the KJV-Only split. Their families were on the opposite side of the line in the sand.  The father of one of those former friends wrote to my parents' alma mater and told them we were wickedly burning KJVs or something, and the Campus Church dropped our support. That really devastated my mom.  She wrote a long tearful letter to the Hortons, but as far as I know they didn't deign to reply.

As a result, another missionary family became a lot closer and dearer to us, since we really had no one else. We kids needed our MK friends, and this family had seven kids!  Thus, my two best friends were now boys, because that's all that was available.  Good thing they were pretty awesome.  To this day I still think of them as brothers.

Michael and Daniel are a lot less weird than they appear.

As for me, me trust in Fundamentalists and their Bible remained shaky, and I'd lost all respect for the national pastors and other missionaries.  I realised that questioning discrepancies in the Bible was as off limits as questioning ridiculous unBiblical rules, and that the safest policy was keeping one's head down in compliance.

Lenten Project: Day Eight

Much of my questioning of Fundamentalist theology and practice came to a head in Singapore in early 2000.  I'd been punished for going to the cinema, chastised for not-so-secretly liking CCM (my Avalon CD was confiscated), shamed for enjoying American teen tv shows (which I only knew about through the influence of other MKs), and generally had all privacy invaded and subsequently stripped away when my diary was read and taken.

I bought this album three times in the space of a couple years because, though it kept getting taken away and destroyed, I kept returning to my sin like a dog returns to vomit.

One day, after more, "Why can't you just be good, Hannah?  Why do you have to question everything?" I finally snapped.  I stomped to my room (which was shared with another sister), gathered up all my Bibles (every good Fundie has at least three) and Bible study books, and threw them into the dining room.

Only I didn't throw them, because I imagined that God would kill me, literally, right that moment, if I disrespected His book like that.  So I stacked them neatly outside my door instead.

I said, "If that's what being a Christian means, I don't want to be one anymore!"  And sat on my bed, contemplating this new-found agnosticism.  I liked it.  A lot.

The idea that I did not have to be just like my parents, that I could be different and unique (and not unique in the sense that I was the only one wearing a headcovering full-time), really grabbed a hold of me. For the first time, I honestly considered what it could be like if I rejected Christianity. I had no concept that there was anything other to the Christian faith than what I had been taught in Fundamentalism. All other "Christian" denominations, I was told, weren't really Christian, so I'd have to give up Jesus completely to leave Fundamentalism, I believed. What would it be like to be openly worldly?

Questioning the faith was never allowed. We had to all be fine, godly young women because we were the examples to the people we were trying to reach for Christ.  The show windows.  The attractive lure. People were supposed to be able to look at us and say, "you're different!  I want what you have," and thus be converted.  So there was never to be any doubt or dissent.  And what I was doing was both.

I wasn't allowed to meditate on agnosticism for very long.  My sister Mary came in to reason with me.  She warned me that Dad and Mom were discussing sending me away to someplace like Hephzibah House if I didn't conform.  I'd grown up regularly listening to the Hephzibah House radio program, and, though I didn't yet know about the severe abuse that goes on there still to this day, it still scared me that my parents were talking about sending me away, exiling me from the family.

My blood runs cold now at even the threat that I could have been sent to this house of horrors.

Mary said it was either send me away or give up the ministry and leave the mission field, because the Bible says a spiritual leader like Dad must rule his children well.  Since I was rebelling, it reflected badly on him (all about image again!), so I had the choice to conform or destroy my father's ministry.

That was really hard for me to hear.  Obviously, there wasn't really a choice.  I couldn't be the reason my parents left the mission field in disgrace! I couldn't let it happen. But in order to conform, I basically had to give up my brain and quit asking questions, quit believing things I knew from experience were true. It would have to be all in or nothing.

But I still wondered.  Would God punish me if I was the cause of their being forced to leave the mission field? And what would it look like, for them to move us all to the States?  Would I really be incarcerated in a reform school?  I knew Mary had been sent in by my parents to tell me all that. Mary has always been the peacemaker in our family, the one with the most tender of hearts, but for her to be able to tell me details like my parents plotting to send me to HH, they had to have either told her to relay the threat, or influenced her indirectly by openly discussing it in front of my siblings. I didn't understand why neither of them talked to me directly.

That night, as I was lying in bed, pretending to be asleep, my dad came into the room and kneeled beside my bed.  I stayed still, because I really didn't want to talk to him, since I believed he'd give me that ultimatum. I wanted to delay the choice making as long as possible. I'd only been given a few hours to contemplate the fact that I might be the destruction of our family's ministry. I still wasn't certain I could sacrifice my intellect, give up my hopes, and and live a submissive life, all for the sake of the ministry.

He didn't try to wake me up.  Instead, he started praying.  And weeping.

Now, I have never in all my life, before or since that night, ever seen my dad cry.  Not when people he'd respected and trusted were cruel and spread lies about him during an ugly, nationwide KJV-Only fight in Grenada.  Not at any of our weddings.  Not with us or for us during the normal trials of growing up.  Just never.

It scared me.  Then he started praying verses over me.  Things like how I deserved to be stoned to death.  How I was bringing shame upon my father's head.  How my disobedience was probably going to cause God to kill me with an early death and that grieved my father very much.  A lot of, "Oh, Lord, what am I to do with this, my wayward daughter who prefers wickedness to the joy of salvation."  And so on.

After a good bit of this, he finally stopped and left the room.

Now, here's the thing.  He may not have known I was awake, and was honestly praying over me while believing me to be asleep.  OR, more likely, he knew I was listening (because it was no mumbled prayer--he was really loud), and was choosing his words with care in order to hit me the hardest.

Basically telling your daughter she deserves to die (something he is an expert at) is a very manipulative way of getting her to capitulate and conform, fast!  Heaping on the guilt and shame certainly works.  It's also a great way to devalue a person.  Lots of MKs feel secondary to their parents' ministries, and I was no exception, despite being involved in that ministry.  I understood that preaching and teaching God's Word would always come first, before family.  Sure, missionaries love their kids.  But they love God more, right?  I believed that, if I were on the altar of sacrifice, there would be no hesitation.

In the morning I passed on the word that I'd decided to be a good little daughter and be a Fundamentalist again, so there would be no need to either call Ron Williams or buy plane tickets to move to the States.

Not rebellious anymore

And that was that. I was poised to begin my freshman year at Bob Jones University as a tried and confirmed Fundamentalist, one who refused to let herself question, refused to doubt, and who was intent on having higher standards than anyone else.  Because image is everything.