My own little 20/20 article..

My husband was so excited the other day when he had heard that 20/20 had done a expose about IFB churches. We missed the viewing of it, but we watched the show on YouTube. It is truly scary to think that there are other churches, even worse ones than what we attended. There was a lot of talk about sexual abuse involved. At first I was shocked, but then when I think about the things that were done and that were swept under the rug, why not take it to that next level or so. I am not in any way stating that I was "sexually abused" by anyone. There are several instances where I believe that people were overstepping their bounds as a "elder" or a teen counselor. The church is a very touchy feely church, the Pastor used to always say if you don't like being hugged your in the wrong place. Well for most people the hugs were a sign of warm welcoming and family, but there was this one man, elder in the church (also a deep pocket, allowing these certain few who gave much to the church liberty to do whatever) who whenever I would go to hug him, he would wrap his arms around me in a way where he would either grab my butt or side boob and squeeze as hard as possible, after a few rounds of this and telling my associate pastor and Sunday school teacher that this made me very uncomfortable and nothing being done I just had to make the conscious decision to no longer go near this man. There were also instances of another teenager who would come up behind  myself and another young lady and grab our butts, pinch our butts and poke at our breasts. I immediately told my parents and told the youth pastor and Sunday school teacher, who supposedly pulled the young man aside, however his behaviors never changed, I again had to consciously stay away from him. I was also told each time that I would report these actions that it was probably just me and that I was making something out of nothing, even when there were several of us complaining about the same thing. Another instance of allowing weirdness to happen was the oh so obvious lesbian Teen Counselors. Now, after being involved in a cult that condemns the gay and lesbian community to hell, my views have changed. That is neither here nor there really, but when you are a part of something that is telling you repeatedly over and over again how wrong this one thing is and you have two very obvious lesbians running your youth group ( I will say that after these ladies left the youth group was never ran the same and it immediately went straight down hill) something just doesn't seem right. These ladies were the best of friends and lived in the same house. The girls were always invited over to their house every weekend for one reason or another. Cooking, baking, decorating, swimming, bible study, to watch a movie, I mean you name it, we were there. I recall one time we were having a spend the night party over there and we were trying to get changed for bed. The one teacher said something to a group of us girls who were changing in her bedroom, we were saying something about being comfortable, and she said, "you can walk around in your sport bras or topless here, I don't care. We are all girls". This always struck me as an odd thing to say, but of course us being stupid naive little girls we just laughed it off.

Santa is just another word for Satan right?

Wrong! First I apologize for the length in between my posts, life gets busy sometimes you know. Anywho, back to the topic at hand. One Sunday we recieved, when I was younger, was exactly the title up above. Well, actually I believe it was "Santa is Satan!". Semantics. So in the sermon we were taught how wrong it is to allow your chidren to idolize a man of fiction, whom you write letters too, asking for toys, baking cookies ( this was considered an offering to the idol) and other nonsenical reasons, but that you should teach your children the true meaning of Christmas, the birth of Jesus. This last part I do not disagree with in the least, many of my veiws have changed because of the cult, but knowing that Jesus was born of a virgin, died on a cross and rose 3 days later is not one of them, I will believe that forever. But teaching your parishiners that Santa is Satan and that by allowing your children to believe in him is blasphemous and you will surely be sent straight to hell for this. Of course any thing that differed from what was being taught would result in the same ending, eternal damnation!! Because if you were truly saved and a true believer you would not even entertain these ideas! Blech! So another case of do as I say and not as I do, once the associate pastor and his wife had children, guess who they are waiting in bach breaking long lines to sit on a jolly fat man with rosy cheeks and a beautiful red suit to out on the Christmas cards and use as the Facebook profile picture??? Not SATAN, but SANTA!!

Do as I say, not as I do right?

I had always heard that phrase "do as I say, not as I do" never really understanding what it meant. That is until attending the church. The pastors and the elitist were the epitome of this. There were sooooo many times when we were taught not to do something and they did that particular thing, or we were told to do something and they didn't. So i decided what better way than to just list everything that I can remember......here they are in no particular order....

Garbage in, Garbage out= only listen to Christian music/ the pastor loved several secular artist I found out on one teen activity where I had to ride somewhere with him, and after being drilled about only listening to Christian music and music that glorifies God, I got in his vehicle to see the Beatles number ones cd, Elvis, a couple of Country artists the radio station was on some oldies channel.

Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight and like movies are from the devil himself and watching them, even wanting to, will send you straight to hell immediately=i was scared to death, literally of watching any of these movies for a very long time, I actually only felt comfortable enough with myself and my faith to watch the Harry Potter movies this year! The reasoning behind this ban of the movies was that we weren't strong enough to seperate the fantasy and the reality of these movies and we would fall prey to the belief in magic and spells and imagination and lose our selves. I went to my teen teachers house one night for an activity and what did i see next to her tv??? The Lord of the Rings (1st movie) and Harry Potter!! Can you imagine the horror i felt and the betrayal!?

Drinking, wanting to drink it or even having the thought of drinking strong drink will lead you straight to hell=we had this huge entire study about how even thinking about strong drink is the same as going out and getting drunk. We even would go to a certain fish restaurant every year for thanksgiving until they started serving wine that is. The pastor vowed that we would never patron them again for this reason. That all changed the minute a deep pocket opened up a pizza parlor selling alcohol, then we can visit them anytime we wanted, even have them sponsoring the teens for camp and having the teens selling their pizza to raise money for the teens. Our standing up against this was truly the beginning of the end for my husband and I.

Owls are a representation of aliens and demons and you should never, ever wear them or have a statue of them in your house=we had a study when the movie came out called district 9 or something where the people were claiming that they all were visited by a white owl, that turned out to be a alien, where the pastor attempted to prove that the bible, a few weeks later, the pastors wife redoes her daughters room and decorates with what???? OWLS!!!

You may read these things and think I am just being picky, but when you are drilled and scolded over and over again at how going against these things makes you a bad Christian and that you should question whether or not you are really saved, things like this matter to me.

i will post more as they come to me!

And then there was this one time at camp.....

Notice I didn't say band camp, so No, it's not like that, but I did think it was time to talk about our camp experience! Where to begin...well with the beginning i guess. I had just begun attending, maybe had 4 or 5 months under my pre-teen belt when it was announced that we were going to be traveling down to the Okefenokee Swamp for camp. 4 nights and 5 days away from my parents and brother, i was scared and excited. Of course, like with everything else there were rules. Shorts and skirts had to be knee or finger length, no spaghetti strap shirts, no cleavage, no personal contact was to be had at all with the opposite sex (keep at least a pencils length between you at all times), no boys were allowed in the pool area while the girls were swimming (in tshirts no less) and vice versa. All seemed somewhat reasonable, but of course when you tell kids what not to do they have the inane desire to do just that! Schedules were strict. Bible study twice a day, sermons at night and mandatory games (unless you were dying and even then that wasn't acceptable). Of course we were the more "liberal" of the churches that attended with us so we weren't allowed to talk about us wearing pants and listening to music with "drums" aka contemporary Christian music! The last rule...whatever happens at camp should stay at camp, our discussions and bible studies are between us and y'all. As the years rolled on, we drew away from the other churches, picking and choosing who was allowed to join us in our attempt to get away from the secular world. Things kept changing, the basketball shorts gave way to cool-lots (yuck), the pc rules became even stricter and the fun seemed to be sucked right out of everything. By the time my children were attending camp, the camp experience as I knew it was long gone, replaced with a terrible excuse for drilling the teens with more rederick about how evil parents/adults are and you should only befriend those who are in attendance of the church.
The things that were being taught to the teens started turning a corner for loopy as well. I remember the night that my daughter came home and wanted to tell me what they were being told at her Wednesday night study. Imagination was a sin, because imagining leads to magic which leads to the devil and hell. Yes people this is real! They were also told, that no girl and boy should ever be alone, no matter what age or the circumstance until they are married. Now i have my ideals of how dating should go, but this seemed a bit extreme to me. This and many other things are what led me to begin questioning the way of life we were living, not question God, but man and his ideas of what he thought God meant.

This memory came to me last night..

I remember this one time, we (the ladies of the core group) were shopping for some clothes for camp I believe, and we decided to go to Goodwill. We were looking thru the racks of T-shirts and one of the ladies found a old VBS t-shirt from one of our previous VBS's. The oldest woman who was with us got so flabbergasted, she immediately snatched it up and saw there was a few other of our Church shirts and bought them all with this logic "we need to buy these shirts, we don't want some outsider wearing "OUR" church shirts". I remember being a bit thrown back by this, I mean it's just a shirt, or it was to me. But this type of thing would repeat itself thruout my stay at the church several times. I remember just a few years back, my family was scary broke, so i was researching different ways to help us save money and one of the ways I found was the most amazing blessing, Angel Food Ministries, a weeks worth of groceries for $30. You cant beat that. Well I was so blessed by this I of course was sharing this with everyone I could. So my friend who had grown up to marry the youth pastor wanted to start, but he couldn't lower himself to go to another church and pick it up, so I was doing it for her. I eventually suggested that our church should consider getting involved in this ministry, the youth pastor's wife thought it was a great idea, but didn't want to take it to him herself, so i did. Big mistake. I was told that we didn't want to let "outsiders" in our church, people we didn't know coming in our church. As if I had spoken blasphemy against God himself. I apologized and tucked my tail and left, stunned. How could a church not want to help others in need? Isn't that what a church is supposed to do? Now let me run this by you the reader, we are claiming that we are a church, an outreach, but we don't want outsiders in our church (so how do you expect to grow as a church body?)????? Isn't that the picture of IRONY?? We can't send people to help feed the homeless, donate money to a shelter, send people as missionaries to help spread the word of God, BUT what we can do is take up a collection to send the youth pastor on a "Baptist History" trip across many states, asking for thousands of dollars so he can tool around the U.S looking at old markers of men who died doing something to "better" the Baptist name, spending thousands of dollars to have some guy recreate a painting of certain Baptist's in their best moments, putting up horribly ugly gaudy grave markers to commemorate certain men out in the middle of only God knows where that will never be seen by men other than those who were there when it was put down. They have their priorities so ass backwards. My heart has always been to help, and to be in a place where they wanted nothing to do with this was just one part of me wanting to leave!

I saw this guy....

Let's fast forward a for more years, when I met my husband. I don't know what it was, but the moment I saw him walk unto the church, I knew he was mine. Of course anyone I shared this with thought it was cute and awesome and the youth pastor and his co-teachers even helped convince him to go out with me on a date (back story: he had just been thru a nasty divorce, had two young children and he was 16 years my senior!) So after awhile, we started getting some not nice things said about us from the church congregation. Mostly about our age difference. Most of it I was able to ignore, but some of it hurt, especially when some of my family members chided in. There was even these two older ladies, well older than I was (19) who were literally trying to seduce him from under my nose! One of the ladies approached him after a church service, in front of me no less and told him that "if he ever wanted a real woman that could satisfy him, to give her a call"!!! This was in church people!!! She was offering him SEX in a church. This just blew me away, so of course i was crying and all upset and when my mom came around the corner to see me crying she of course went all protective mother bear on the lady, well the pastor walked up at this point that my mother is talking loudly to the other lady and guess who gets in trouble.....we do. he even threatened to throw us out of the building that day, US..not her. I quickly told the pastor what happened and just dismissed it. Again we were being small people. The other lady actually called my boyfriend at the time and said "she had a hotel room, was all alone and wanted some company, and no one but work knew she was there and no one would ever find out"!! These low lives were my elders in the church trying to entice my boyfriend away from me with SEX!! What the junk people! And there was nothing EVER said to these ladies, ever..!!! We were even brought into the pastors office and had to be asked that we not sit so close in the pews, because it was upsetting some of the members,  that maybe we shouldn't even be able to touch, don't hold hands, no rubbing backs, no leaning together, etc. All PC should be stopped. I mean to hear it, you would think that we were making out in church during service. And trust me, i was doing things by the book, so we were doing no such thing!! I remember that first Christmas we were together, instead of me going all the way home late and coming back to his house early to help set out the things that "SANTA" had brought for the kids, we asked the pastor if we could have his "blessing" for me to sleep over, and to make sure that there was nothing that could be even viewed of as sin, I was going to sleep in the same bed as his mother (who never slept). Of course this was shot down immediately, we were just asking permission to sin and no matter what it gave the appearance of evil. I was so devastated, but that night I drove home at midnight, and was back over at his house at 4am! But I technically didn't spend the night! Ha, take that!

There's always those who are exempt...

Of course as in any type of social higherarchy there are always those who are "untouchable" for one reason or another. People who either contribute greatly ( a deep pocket ) or people who just fawn all over the pastors, bending over so far to kiss their hind end that you can't tell what's what any longer. You know the type. I never understood why some people could do certain things, say certain things and never get in any kind of trouble. Well we started, and by we I mean my family, having trouble with this one certain busy body. Let's for privacy sake call her Skeletora! She started nosing around in my families business, spreading rumors for the humor of her own self. When we brought it to the attention of the pastors, we were told that we were just imagining things, being petty, we should be the bigger people and not let it bother us etc. All because this stupid lady Skeletora was a deep pocket! How Godly is that? Here you have a lady treating God's people like trash, but you sweep it under the rug because of her money? Nope, this never sat well with me. Ever. Eventually the choices of this woman are what led to one of our many reasons of leaving the church all together.