I was raised Disciples of Christ (Christian). When I was nine, I repented and asked Jesus into my heart, and my life changed radically, especially in one way. I had been an angry child, so I started praying that Jesus would teach me to love. When I prayed this way, God would "hug me big, inside out"-my heart would be filled with love and joy in those moments of prayer. I kept this time very private. To my knowledge no one knew what had prompted the changes in my life. (They were just very thankful something had changed!!)

For the next few years there were times I was closer to God and times I wasn't, but He was always there. At 15, I was baptized. (Mom didn't believe in child baptism, so my request had been denied for several years.) At 18, I began attending a Pentecostal church. There, they taught that there was more for me. God has more for everyone, so this was an easy concept to grasp. Soon after starting to attend there, I was baptized in Jesus name and filled with the Holy Ghost. The pastor took us to ecumenical meetings, and I attended Baptist Bible studies and Disciples of Christ youth fellowships. We fellowshipped other churches and called their members Christians. I never heard anyone at church downplay their experiences.

A few years later, a new pastor came into my life. He taught that no one who had not repented, been baptized in Jesus' name, and received the Holy Ghost was saved. Had the teaching been that a person isn’t saved if they were taught Jesus’ name baptism and rejected it, I could have almost accepted it. But this new teaching was difficult to swallow; my earlier experiences were too real and life changing to doubt. Even more difficult for me to grasp was his teaching that other Pentecostals with fewer standards were also hell bound. Was my former pastor unsaved because he wore a watch, didn't follow some other standard, or fellowshipped Trinitarians? Was I unsaved because I had skirts with slits in them? I couldn't accept that, but stayed anyway.

One night, an evangelist came. He preached that night that if a hand is cut off from the body, the hand would die, but the body wouldn’t. Maybe the hand was diseased or injured. Sometimes the body needed to cut a part off to survive. If it did, the part that was cut off would die. There was no way for a hand to live apart from the body-it couldn’t be grafted onto another body, and it couldn’t be grafted back into the body it had been cut off from for very long after the blood supply stopped. Therefore, if the pastor cut a person out of the church, that person would be condemned, cut off from the blood of Jesus.

Very shortly after that disturbing message, my pastor got up and preached that a person was going to leave soon, and would almost immediately cut their hair and wear pants. He said everyone would be surprised who it was, but that it would happen. After church that night, he called me at home and told me to never...

mary

I prayed through in a church where TV "in the home" was preached against. However, the pastor admitted to having gone to friends' homes to watch TV as a kid. He also allowed the saints to have a VCR and monitor. He even eventually got one. I watched more PG movies in the 6 months after I got in church than I had in the world. Many of us would also go to places like Walmart and watch movies there.

Later, another pastor ended up teaching against TV, video, moving pictures, monitors-I wasn't even sure it was acceptable to go to a play. So here is what's funny to me: There could be no VCRs, movies, or TV. Sometimes youtube was also preached against. But at least some would watch videoclips online at work regularly. Several e-mailed me videoclips, too. And video games that look exactly like cartoons were never taught against at all.

I'm a very visual person. To me, video is an art form, if done tastefully. But I didn't watch a movie or TV for years because it was "wrong". Not biblically wrong, pastorally wrong.

I don't have a pastor now. Yesterday I checked out three videos from the library. Last night was the first time in my life I'd ever watched a video in my own home. And I cried. I don't even know why. It wasn't that I felt guilty. Maybe I was so relieved to be able to chose to do something just for the enjoyment of it. It was a beautiful movie. And it felt so nice to be able to just do something for the fun of it!


I've heard video preached against because we remember so much of what we see. However, we must remember that not everything we see is bad.

Do we truly remember more of a video than we do of real life? It may seem that way at first, but in reality, we haven't-it's just that in real life we remember snapshots of scenes. The best movies are simply limited to a well-directed series of these types of snapshots. This creates an illusion of remembering more from the movie than real life, when in fact we are still just remembering snapshots of the best pieces of life.

I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me. (Ps 101:3) Obviously no verse in the Bible speaks specifically against television or movies. However, this verse has been used in many circles to show people they should not watch movies or TV. We should, indeed, be careful not to engross ourselves in anything that is wicked-book, tv, movie, everyday life... but if we used this verse to say that TV or movies on the whole were wrong, then we would need to go through life with our eyes closed. Those who walk with their eyes closed are most likely to fall.

mary

Can you believe I have nothing to say today?



I didn't realize how uptight I was lately, until last night. I heard something outside, went to the door to check what it was, and there was a woman standing on my deck. I'm not a screamer, but I sure squeaked! I've been anticipating that someone would show up or call. I don't like confrontation, so I was leaving the lights off on church nights and hiding in my house. I wouldn't do anything except during service times on church nights because I was so intimidated that people would "catch" me staying home and either think or say that I was backslid.

Maybe I need to work on that. LOL

mary

"When you go through a trial, if you don't pass, you're bound to repeat it til you get it right."
What is the indication that someone has "passed" a trial? Does a righteous God make people repeatedly go through something, and without indicating what they have done wrong, force them to repeat the trial because they somehow unwittingly failed? What is a mark of failure or success, from a pentecostal perspective? Is it staying in church? Keeping a right attitude? Keeping a smile on your face in public even when you are dying inside? Forgiving and loving the people who hurt you?

When I was in school, we were given quizzes through a week or month. The quizzes and later our tests were scored, corrected, and returned to us. If we students reviewed our corrected quizzes, we saw the errors we had made and would learn from them. Many times, when I saw the correct answer to a question I had missed, that fact or answer would be etched in my memory. I would never make the same mistake again.

If the tests had not been scored, reviewed, or corrected, but only returned with "Pass" or "Fail" written at the top, we would not have known what we did wrong. We would not have been able to improve. We would have become frustrated by this method of grading. Any teacher who had graded this way would have been considered a very poor teacher and would probably been released from their position.

How then, in a walk with God, can people be repeatedly told they must have "failed" some test without being told what they did wrong or how to improve? What kind of teacher is God if he simply says, "You failed. Try again," without showing us how to do better when we ask? That doesn't make sense.

Someone might say, "all the answers are right there in the Bible-you're just missing it." Am I? God hasn't opened his word and my understanding after years of the same problem?
For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? (Luke 11:10-13)

God isn't playing games with us. He doesn't leave us to fail repeatedly without giving us the answers as to how to succeed with Him when we ask.


As a child, when I would bring some supposed wrong to my mom, I'd often here: "There are always two sides to a story," "it takes two to tango," or "and what did you do to her?" Mom loved me, but she raised me to understand that most things were not totally one person's fault or another's. If I were...

mary

I am struggling with anger, and with guilt for the anger that I feel. Oh, the anger is well founded. I don’t think my anger is off base, unchristian, or unfounded. I have been lied to, lied on, falsely accused, and misrepresented. I’ve been discredited, shamed and humiliated, falsely accused by saints and then the pastor and informed that I cannot even speak in my own defense because doing so questions his authority. I have seen backbiting, bitterness, variance, envying, strife, contention, gossip, and lying promoted in the name of religion. And I have seen true religion negated due to these promotions. Pure religion and undefiled is this… to visit the fatherless and widows... and to keep himself unspotted from the world...

My anger is as justified as Jesus’ when he drove out the money changers in the temple. No, I’m not being haughty or proud. I am not justifying bitterness, nor am I thinking more highly of myself than I ought. I am simply stating the facts. Jesus got angry, he even made a whip and drove out the money changers, yet He was without sin. To lay sin at my feet for saying the attitudes directly spoken against in the Bible should not be ignored in the church is neither reasonable nor biblical.

I have been told multiple times that I should forgive and forget things that should not be forgotten and which the offender never repented of. According to the unspoken rules of the church, if I tell the pastor he has offended me, I will be “reproved and rebuked” and told that I have a bitter, unforgiving spirit. Further, if I call and ask to go back to church, I will be dealt with harshly for leaving. I will be expected to attend four services a week and will have little or no privacy. I will not be able to use the internet for anything but work purposes. And I will only be sitting on a pew waiting to be called out for some new false report or supposed infraction anyway.

So I’m angry. Not sinfully angry, but angry in a way that has prompted change and research on my part. Anger that has made me relook and rethink several teachings of the conservative oneness movement. Anger that has made me realize that I’d prefer to go to a church where the women wear pants and they sing the doxology than to sit in a church where brothers and sisters distrust each other, where people are judged more than they are loved and accepted, and where there are some big names and also many no names.

I’m angry. I have a right and a need to be angry. When my anger shows through in my writing, it is not because I’m a horrible backslidden reprobate. It is because there are terrible wrongs taking place under God’s name, and good people are being hurt as a result. There is no greater hypocrisy, no worse way to take God’s name in vain than to do these things “in His name” and then attempt to silence those who have been so misused.

mary