Religion, Part Two

In a previous post, we started a discussion about religion. This post begins my story.

As a child, I was raised in a Southern Baptist church in a small town in Oklahoma, where my grandfather was the pastor and my father was the youth minister. They managed to grow that small church into a rather large church, with a gymnasium and everything. Wow! The fun I had there!

When I was 10 or 11, my grandfather spoke one Sunday morning about divorce, and what the Apostle Paul thought about the matter. This got some people upset, and those people decided to start their own revolution. One of the tactics they used was to take people out to lunch- in a town 10 miles down the road. Why 10 miles? That's 20 minutes in a car that were "religiously" used to discuss the shortcomings of my grandfather, what they had heard about him, how they thought that maybe it was time for the church to find a new pastor.

The deacons of the church held some secret meetings, and then started calling special "business meetings" at the end of the Sunday services. I remember lots of screaming- it was craziness. It brought out the worst in people that were our friends.

When it finally came down to it, a night was set for a vote "by secret ballot". The opposition managed to get everyone in town who had ever had anything against my grandfather to come and vote against him. I'd never seen som many people in that building. After the votes were counted, my grandfather stood up at the front of the church and simply stated "I am no longer your pastor." That ended his 21 years there.

When my father went in to work the next day, the "Education Minister" (whatever that is) told my father that if he didn't resign his position, "the same will happen to you." Of course, he would have (obviously) resigned anyway, but this moronic "Man Of God" didn't have the brain cells to rub together and come up with that.

What were the reasons stated for outing my grandfather? Well, there really weren't any. Some people didn't like the fact that he sold used cars on the side- in fact, the head of the deacons had this as a major argument. The term being tossed around was "bi-vocational pastor" - never mind that most New Testament accounts of leaders were people who managed to have regular jobs. The best part was when this head deacon broke off, started and became pastor of his own church- while owning and operating a horse farm. Hyprocrosy? Perhaps.

Being Good Baptists, we had to find another "church home", because that's just what Good Baptists do. We went down the road (10 miles, on the road where so much about my grandfather was apparently discussed) and "joined" another Baptist church, where my father was hired as their new part time youth minister.

We stayed there a few years (until after I graduated from high school, in fact) and had a good time. During this period, my father (being only a part-timer at the church) was building up his own electrical contracting business, and was doing well. The church leaders (in their infinite wisdom) determined that it was time for them to spend a lot of money by hiring a full-time youth pastor. They offered the position to my father, who not only declined, but attempted to show them that they probably didn't really need to spend the money on a full time person. He was probably putting in 40 hours a week there anyway. Being much smarter than my father, they let him know that they were intent on finding a full time youth pastor and somewhere in all of that mess, I stopped going altogether, and he stopped being the part-time youth minister.

The point of part two is, don't be a Baptist pastor, don't sell cars, don't trust deacons, and don't be a youth minister!

In the next article in our religion series, we'll go over the churches that ignored me entirely and the ones that straight out asked me to leave!