I did not leave the church of Christ as soon as I got out of the house. There was an aspect of me staying in the church of Christ because of how my defection would be reacted to by my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. All of my family, both immediate and extended, were members of the church of Christ. I imagined that defection would be horrible, that I would be cut off, alone in the world, and would have no one to care about me if I lost the love of my family. But it would be very wrong of me to say that my family was the only reason I stayed in the church of Christ.
I have to admit to myself and all the world that I stayed in the church of Christ because I was afraid of hell. I was about 14 years old when I heard Jimmy Allen preach his What Is Hell Like sermon, a sermon that touched me like Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God must have impacted the Christians that first heard that sermon.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is a sermon written and preached by Jonathan Edwards to his Northampton Massachusetts congregation. While there is no actual account of how this sermon was received, tradition claims that Edwards was interrupted numerous times before he finished the sermon, by people in the congregation moaning and crying out, “What must I do to be saved?” The Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God sermon is read in literature classes in high schools and colleges and it is given as an example of the renewed religious fanaticism in a period that is now known as the Great Awakening.
I understand that What Is Hell Like is not as widely known and is perhaps less influential than the Edwards sermon, but in my life it was one of the most influential elements in my young life. [More about this Jimmy Allen sermon later.]
I guess my point is that I was not only pressured by my family not to leave the church of Christ, I was also afraid to leave the church of Christ. The fact that I had doubts was not enough to drive me from the confines of the church of Christ.
The Doubts
As I grew up I felt that the church of Christ was made up of mean people.
My first experience with church of Christ dogma and cruelty happened when I was about 5 years old. I guess the age because I was 6 years old when my brother Tim was born and Tim had not been born yet. We had just come home from church. My father had lead the singing at the Skillman-Avenue Church of Christ. Skillman-Avenue was the largest and fanciest church I'd ever attended. It was the first church I'd ever been too that had padded pews with this rich purple crushed velvet covering to the pad.
This would have been 1954, before I'd ever experienced refrigerated air [air conditioning]. My parents had a water cooler window unit in their bedroom, but the rest of our apartment was hot. I remember getting home from church that morning, a service that was way too long for a 5 year old boy, and I was anxious to peel off my church clothes, that were stuck to me by sweat, and to get on shorts and a t-shirt.
I'd just got my pants off when my father stepped into the room. He was manic, excited. He started talking about music.
He said something like this: You know that it is a sin to sing a hymn while an instrument is being played. But how can you learn to tune, or the parts, if you can't work out the music using a piano?
I not only didn't know, but I didn't care.
The way we can learn the music without a piano is by using shaped notes, my father said.
I didn't know shaped notes from the back of my own head. Much later I learned that shaped notes was a seven-shape systems, which give a different shape and syllable to every note of the scale. Such systems use as their syllables the note names "do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do" familiar to most people. Think of The Sound of Music and the song “DO a deer a female deer. RE a drop of golden sun.” Someone gave each note a shape. If the hymn was published using the shaped note system, then if you know your Do, Re, Mi you could learn the music of a hymn without risking your immortal soul's eternal damnation by plinking the tune out on a piano.
For some reason, some stupid, stupid reason, my father decided that if he taught me shaped note theory immediately that Sunday afternoon, that I would grow up to be a powerful song leader in the church of Christ and I would have have to depend on, or ever use, a piano to learn a hymn.
I had this little black board in my room hung on a nail by a clothesline cord. My father drew the shapes of the notes on my blackboard, he told me the name and sung each note as he finished a note.
I was still in my underwear. We called them Fruit of the Looms then, but today they would be called Tighty Whities.
When my father got all seven notes on my black board [the DO is repeated as note number 8] my father sang the scale: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. He asked me to sing it with him. I did, but not too well. My father was getting aggravated. Pay attention to me, he said. Richie, stop playing with that. Richie, are you listening to me?
Then a sort of oral test started. My father would point to a note and ask me the name of that note?
I didn't know. Or care.
He would tell me the name, sing the pitch of that note and move on to another note.
Each time, I didn't know. He would go back to another note, one we had previously gone over, and again, I didn't know. If I recall, I refused to even guess. I was tired. I was hot. I was ready to play.
At some point my father blew up. He yelled that I was a stupid idiot as he jerked his belt thorugh all the belt loops of his dress pants. He looped the belt in his right hand and grabbed my by my left arm, just above the elbow. My feet were almost off the floor. He began to lash at me with the belt, hitting my thighs over and over. I heard my mother come to the door and she shouted, “Dick, Dick you're going to kill him.”
Now, at age 65, I am fairly sure my father was not going to kill me. My father was frustrated, and angry and he gave me a whipping using a belt. I don't remember if there were any marks on my thighs. I don't remember being sore later. What I do remember is that based on what my mother had shouted, I thought I was in the process of being killed, and I was forever afraid of my father. My father could go from OK to rage in a matter of moments. What I also learned was that this belting and fear was connected somehow to the church of Christ.
Beyond the Reach of Salvation
I grew up thinking I was stupid, but I was also wicked, and more than likely I was heading for hell, no IF's, AN's, or BUT's about it.
Another incident that happened before my brother was born was me learning that I was a murderer.
I know this happened in 1955 or 1956 because my mother was preganant and very near time to give birth to my brother Tim.
I got up and stepped out of my room. We were living in the Dangerfield Apartments in Pleasant Grove, Texas. The bathroom was closest to my room. A long hallway lead from my room and the apartment's one bathroom to my parent's room. In my memory the hallway walk was a long walk. That is probably wrong. My mother, with her big belly was sitting in a rocking chair, and my father was talking with her. I went to their room and backed up to my mother so she could pick me up and hold me in her lap.
I felt this sting of pain on the back of my head. My father had thumped the back of my head hard and it hurt.
No, sir ree, my father probably said. Then he said something like, You have already killed two babies. You caused your mother to lose those two babies by demanding that she pick you up, and you will not cause another baby to die.
I was sick to my stomach. I was perhaps 6 years of age, but I knew what death was. I'd had a playmate from the Skillman-Avenue Church of Christ, Jack McMullins. One evening after Sunday night services Jack, his mother, father, and sister were going home. Someone who had been in a Car-hop eating icecream and he backed out of his parking slot, into the road, right in front of the on-coming McMullins car. The entire family suffered serious injuries, but Jack was killed.
Mother told me that the man in the car that caused the accident was delirious and also seriously injured. My mother told me that driver kept saying over and over again, That ice cream made me sick. I believe my mother told me the other driver also died.
I remember missing school and going with my mother to Jack's funeral. He had a coffin that was covered in fabric with a rich pattern. The lid to the casket was up, and I went to the front with my mother and looked into the box. Jack's hair was combed perfectly and was staying in place. I don't recall him ever looking like that. Jack looked asleep. I saw no injuries.
Later ambulance people came in with a gurney and on the gurney was Jack's mother. The ambulance workers lifted the head of the gurney up, so that his mother was able to look in and view her son's body. Jack's mother was clearly injured. Her face was covered with bruises and there were red places around her eyes that to me looked like blood. Jack's father was too injured to come, even with ambulance workers to help.
After the service my mother took me to the graveside service. I remember there was a little girl standing a few feet from me. During the graveside service that little girl suddenly calapsed. She had fainted, but I didn't know about fainting at that point in my life. I thought the little girl had just dropped dead. I was terrified. Children were dying all around me.
So when my father told me I'd killed two babies, I had some context in which to place that information.
Now, in my old age, I am fairly sure my father would not even remember this incident. I don't think he really meant that I was a killer, but he told me that I was, and he never took it back. I lived for many years before I realized that my mother had had two miscarriages. If picking up a child and rocking them was the cause of miscarriages there would be millions more miscarriages in this world. I feel sure my parents had no clue that I carried the guilt of murder throughout my early life. In a sense, even knowing better, I still carry some guilt over killing those unborn babies.
Puberty Hell
If it hadn't been clear to me before I was absolutely certain, after puberty, that I was bound for hell, and that I might as well give up.
I sometimes say that in the church of Christ they don't believe babies are born with the sin of Adam, but they do believe in the sin of puberty. It is around puberty that adults start thinking the kids in church old enough to be baptised, that they have reached THE AGE OF ACCOUNTABILITY. I heard this phrase, THE AGE OF ACCOUNTABILITY so often that I assumed it was part of the Bible. When I looked it up in a good concordance I failed to find the phrase.
I started getting hair and tingling feelings in my privates around age 8.
One of the reasons I don't believe homosexuality is a choice is because I am heterosexual and I never once had a choice to make. I never thought, Am I sexually attracted to guys or gals? That moment never came. I was always attracted to girls. Unfortunately for me, girls were never too attracted to me. As I got into my tweens and teens it was clear that I had sexual urges that could only be satisfied by me, and it was clear to me that all sexual desire was sinful, at least outside the bounds of marriage. Well what is a 13 year old boy supposed to do with all these sexual urges? We don't get married in Junior High School.
Once my mother caught me studying the bra and panty section of the Sears and Roebuck Catalogue. I remember my mother saying,
I tried not to have sexual desires. The more I tried, the clearer it was to me that I could not NOT have these urges. I remember praying to God to take this sexual desire away from me. I remember asking God why he would make girls so sexy if I was not supposed to notice them? You try, and try, and try not to have sexual urges and at some point you give up. I am going to continue to be horney. Nothing I can do is going to take those feelings away from me. I could pretend to others that I was not horney, but I couldn't pretend to myself, and I knew that I wasn't fooling God. I have never forgotten a church we went to once in my early childhood. On the wall above the pulpit and baptistery was this giant sized eyeball with the words above and below the eye that read: There's an all seeing eye watching you.
It comes from one of the scary hymns of the same title:
Watching You
All along the road
to the soul's true abode,
There's an Eye watching you.
Every step that you take
that great Eye is awake,
There's an Eye watching you.
As you make life’s flight,
keep the pathway of right
There’s an Eye watching you.
God will warn not to go
in the path of the foe
There’s an Eye watching you.
Fix your mind on the goal
that sweet home of the soul
There’s an Eye watching you.
Never turn from the
way to the Kingdom of the Day
There’s an Eye watching you.
(CHORUS)
Watching you, watching you,
Everyday mind the course you pursue;
Watching you, watching you,
There's an all-seeing Eye watching you.
Evangelism and Hell
As I grew up I learned that the great commission [see Matthew 28:18 20:
Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.
I wish someone had reasoned with me. Someone might have pointed out that Jesus was talking to the 11 remaining Apostles. I wasn't an Apostle. Yeah, maybe this commission does apply to all Christians, but if, when I was young, I could have thought the whole burden was not my burden alone, I might not have felt so hopeless.
From a very early age I knew that converting other people was one of the criteria God would use to judge me. I could imagine standing before God's great Judgement Seat [whatever that is] and God asking me how many people had I brought to salvation.
I'm not sure why God would ask me how many I had lead to Christ, since He knows everything, still, He would ask, and through all of my childhood and teen years, the answer was zero.
I knew this was how it would happen because of a hymn I'd heard sung numerous times entitled, You Never Mentioned Him To Me.
When in the better land,
before the bar we stand
How deeply grieved our souls will be
If any lost one there,
should cry in deep despair
You never mentioned him to me.
CHORUS
You never mentioned him to me
Nor help me the light to see
You met me day by day
and knew I was astray
But you never mentioned him to me.
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This song leaves little wiggle room. If I don't talk people into baptism and joining the church of Christ, I can't be saved myself.
When I was way too young to do this, the church I attended, Webb Chapel Church of Christ, they had this traveling salesman like guy come in selling his own program for personal evangelism that he called The Bird's Eye View of the Bible. It was a package program where you have flipcharts with words and illustrations and you went through the Bible with the aim of eventually bringing the people in your study getting baptised by immersion.
I was too young for the church leadership to ever actually entrust potential candidates to my tween skills. But I felt like I had to at least try. I even tried to get some school chums to go through the program with me. They wouldn't.
Later, when I got my driver's license I remember driving some place after dark and I stopped on a hill overlooking the little town we were living in then. I remember seeing all the lights on in the houses and buildings of the city. I remember thinking, Each one of those lights represents at least one soul, and God is holding me responsible for saving all of those souls. I felt the numbers were too great, the burden was too heavy. I was too uncomfortable, too hindered by my own doubts and guilts and blaringly obvious sins.
As a tween I signed up several times for THE TIMOTHY CLASS a class that was usually held Sunday evening before the Sunday night services. It was a class designed to train young men to give talks and sermons. By age 10 I had given the sermon message on Wednesday nights several times.
By the age of 15 I was writing for Teenage Christ Magazine, and preaching for churches at some Sunday night services.
I was frequently asked to do the Sunday night communion service with a couple of peers. It was scary to me, but there really was not that much to the activity. You just said a prayer for the bread and the cup [it wasn't wine it was Welch's Grape Juice] and then a prayer for the contribution.
Often I did not try very hard to be a good Christian, but often I did try. I would try, and try until I felt I there was no need for me to try any longer. Then I would throw my hands up in despair and give up on a god that had either already given up on me, or who could not wait to dunk me into the lake of fire.
Next Time: I will confess my own stupidity and sinful nature as I attempted to be a Church of Christ minister.
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