IHOP=International House of Prayer in Kansas City.
I could hardly watch this video. I felt so sorry for this young man. Delivered? How about more deceived and deluded? How about conned by modern day Elmer Gantry like preachers? This is spiritual manipulation and abuse.
Child abuse, is quite common in the Evangelical/Fundamentalist Church. The Bible DOES teach it, after all.
He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes. (Proverbs 13:24)
Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying. (Proverbs 19:18)
Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell. (Proverbs 22:13,14)
Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him. (Proverbs 22:15)
If you don’t beat your children you are not a good parent.
A popular book among Evangelicals/Fundamentalists is Richard Fugate’s book What the Bible says about Child Training.
I wasn’t able to find a text copy of the book online. What follows is a few screen captures from a website devoted to Fugate’s teachings. I will leave it to you to decide if Fugate teaches child abuse in the name of Jesus.
One of the most common lines heard in Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christian Churches is “Don’t Judge.”
After all the Bible says:
Judge not, that ye be not judged. (Matthew 7:1)
Anytime the leadership, pastor, elders, deacons, or Granny Jones is questioned about an issue, teaching, etc….the questioner is told DON’T JUDGE.
Christians are expected to suspend rational judgment and just believe. After all faith is belief when there is no evidence.
In the 1980’s Jack Hyles, at the time pastor of the largest Church in America, was carrying on with his secretary. The evidence of his affair and misconduct was overwhelming.
People were told DON’T JUDGE. No matter what the evidence said, just believe. Believe that Jack Hyles was a man of God who could NEVER do such things. Believe that it was all a Satanic plot to destroy him.
Pastors use the DON’T JUDGE line to hide their misconduct, sometimes getting by with improprieties for years until someone/somewhere is willing to stand up and say I WILL JUDGE.
On one hand it seems strange to hear DON’T judge because Evangelical and Fundamentalist Churches are notorious for judging the world. It seems that the no judging only applies to the Church itself. Pastors thunder from pulpit on every real and imagined social ill. Many sermons are 90% judgment, 10% grace.
Yet, these same Churches have lists of rules that every member is expected to keep. (both written and unwritten) As a Fundamentalist Baptist we drew up lists of rules that Moses could only dream of. Please don’t tell me YOUR Church doesn’t have any rules. You are not being honest. EVERY Church has some set of rules, written or unwritten, that govern what is acceptable and unacceptable. No Church, no matter the flavor, is without rules. (they may hide as “Bible truth” but they are rules)
So the NO judging actually becomes a lot of judging. Self-judgment. Judgment of fellow Church members. Are they keeping the rules? Are they really, really, really following Jesus? After look at how they are dressed. Do you know they cuss at their house? I heard they drink beer. He looks like a hippie. They are pro-choice. They watch R rated movies. They voted for Obama. Did you know they are a Democrat? They didn’t even vote at all. Did you hear what they said about Saint Sarah Palin? That skirt is pretty short. Did you see that they have a tattoo? They are divorced. She is pregnant and NOT married. They read Harry Potter. They saw Jesus Christ Superstar. Do you know they went to a secular college? Do you know they send their kids to the public school? Do you know they use the NIV?
And on and on it goes…
At this juncture I suspect some of my more smug liberal, emerging Church Christian readers are smiling and saying “See we are not like that. We don’t make any judgments.” While I question if that is really true (just different rule standard you judge by) I actually have more respect for the Evangelical/Fundamentalist non-judger/judger. While they deny they should judge they know that life is filled with making judgments. Every day we make judgments.
The liberal wants everyone to love them. The liberal wants to be voted most liked person in the class. The liberal piously say don’t judge and makes few judgments about anything. They fear confrontation so they judge nothing. They cross themselves and say “ I leave the judging to God. “
Have I pissed everyone off? Good. Let it out. Judge me. You can do it.
Stop living in denial.
We all make judgments. We all judge people, places, and things every day. We judge our family, spouse, children, government, neighbor, and the dog next door.
What matter is HOW we judge. What matters is whether we make judgments according to knowledge.
Few people read the verses that follow Matthew 7:1. Let’s look for a moment at verses 2-5:
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
So much for NOT judging.
The Bible ACTUALLY teaches that we SHOULD judge. Gotta love context. There are two things that jump out of these verses.
Preacher when you stand up in the pulpit and preach your famous “holiness” sermon remember you’ll be held to the same standard. You will be judged! (in this life btw)
Before we judge others let’s take a long, hard look at our own life. Let’s clean up our own trailer lot before we clean up someone else’s. Before we judge anyone let’s make sure we can clearly see the issues before us.
Let’s be honest with each other. We are going to make judgments. We will judge each other. You will make a judgment about this post. If you leave a comment I will make a judgment about your comment. (and my wife may know my judgment when I shout out bullshit)
In fact I welcome your judgments. I write what I believe at any given moment. I am not infallible. I expect challenge. But I expect to challenge me with reason, facts, etc.
Challenging my posts on the ten Christians in Haiti who took the children with comments that say “Don’t Judge. Only God can Judge” will be summarily dismissed as Bible thumping rhetoric that I don’t believe and neither does the person quoting it. The real problem is that I have a different judgment than theirs and they don’t like opposition or being challenged.
So, please do judge. Use your brain. Make intelligent, reasoned judgments. The future of human race, of the world, depends on people being able to make rational judgments.
Thanks to Lorena for provoking me to think about this bit (a comment she left on her blog)
The Dominican consul general Wednesday rejected the claim from an American church leader that she thought her paperwork was in order when she attempted to take 33 Haitian children out of the country, saying he had told her it was not.
“I warned her, I said as soon as you get there without the proper documents, you are going to get into trouble, because they are going to accuse you, because you have the intent to pass the border without the proper papers and they are going to accuse you with kids trafficking,” Carlos Castillo said he told the group’s leader, Laura Silsby, during a meeting Friday.
Four hours later, Silsby and nine other Americans were turned back from the border. They were arrested and taken to a jail in Port-au-Prince.
“This woman knew what she was trying to do was not legal,” Castillo said.
A CNN reporter attempted to get reaction to Castillo’s comment from the jailed Americans, but they would not discuss the matter, responding to questions by singing “Amazing Grace” and praying.
Told earlier that many of the children had living parents, Silsby said, “I did not know that.”
She added, “In our hearts, our intention was to help children that had been orphaned or abandoned by their parents.”
But the interpreters the group had used said the conversations between Silsby and the parents in the Haitian town of Calebasse made clear to them that Silsby must have been aware of the children’s status.
SOS Children’s Villages, an Austrian charity, said that it has determined that at least two-thirds of the children are not orphans.
Authorities on Wednesday questioned a Haitian police officer who works at the Dominican Embassy about whether he provided illegal paperwork to Silsby and the other Americans to facilitate their efforts as alleged by interpreters who had translated for the Americans…
It seems that the Church group knew what they were doing was illegal.
The group leader is using the “in our hearts” defense to defend their taking children that were not orphans. (as if taking children that WERE orphans was OK)
This defense is often used by religious people to justify most anything. “In my heart” I believe I did the right thing. (right thing being anything and everything from adultery to murder to child stealing.)
Supposedly Americans believe in the rule of law. Even the Christian religion teaches that civil law is to be obeyed. (Romans 13)
While I am not ready to call the Church group traffickers in children I do hope they will drop the phony “we are like the Apostle Paul, in jail for the sake of the gospel, defense.” It is time they own up to their error, confess it, and ask for leniency from the Haitian government.
The Christian doctrine of human depravity teaches that all of us are sinners. We don’t become sinners. We are sinners. We are born into sin. It is our nature.
As a pure-bred sinner each of us have the potential to do the most heinous of sins. Even after we have put our faith and trust in Jesus we still have the potential to do awful, terrible sins. The daily news reminds us of murderous preachers, sodomizing priests, and thieving deacons.
Yes, there is still a lot of sin in the church BUT imagine how bad it COULD be without Jesus. While Jesus saves people from the spiritual penalty of sin it seems that eradicating the sin nature is not part of the salvation deal. Christians sin with the best of us.
Preachers spend a lot of time preaching about sin. The blood-washed band is warned of the dangers of playing around with the fire of sin. You will get burned. Many a preacher has said “Sin will take you farther than you want to go and cost you more than you are willing to pay.”
Preachers stress the danger of the slippery slope. A little sin will turn into a big sin. Eating one grape will just whet your taste for more. Who can stop at just one grape? Before you know it you will have eaten the whole bunch. Who can eat just one Oreo? One Pringle?
According to the preachers, God considers every sin the same. There are NO small sins with God. They do warn that, while every sin is the same in the eyes of God, some sins have greater consequences.
There is a special class of sins that preachers focus on above all others. Sexual sins. Adultery. Fornication. Homosexuality. The Big Three of preaching on sexual sin. Adultery is married sex sins. Fornication is unmarried sex sins. Homosexuality is married/unmarried same-sex sex sins.
Sexual sins are bad, I mean real bad.
Why? The slippery slope.
Having sex is like going to the Dairy Queen for a milkshake. Once you have had a Dairy Queen milkshake every time you pass a Dairy Queen you’ll want to stop and have a milkshake. (actual sermon illustration)
Men in particular are prone to sexual sin. If you listen to the preachers long enough you’ll be convinced of one thing: men are so weak that they fall into sexual sin at the slightest temptation. In fact Christian women are often berated for not being modest in their dress thereby causing their brother to sin.
Years ago a Church member was arrested for molesting his teenage stepdaughter. He told me “I couldn’t help myself.” I said “Yes you could. That’s what God gave you hands for. Use them.”
Christian men are often given a free pass on sexual sins. If the world didn’t tempt them, if TV didn’t tempt them, if worldly women didn’t tempt them, if immodest Christian women didn’t tempt them…well they would never commit a sexual sin.
It seems that Christian men are especially prone to slip sliding their way down the slippery slope. Even Jesus said that if a man looks at a woman with lust he has committed adultery already with her in his heart.
It all starts so innocently. Perhaps looking at the lingerie ads in the catalog. Next thing you know you find scantily clad women on TV shows enticing. Before you know it you are watching movies with nudity in them.
Before long you’ll get tired of R rated movies and you’ll move on to NC-17 or X-rated movies.
Then one day you’ll wake up and find your life is consumed with surfing porn sites on the internet. You’ll intimately know how to use the private browsing feature of your internet browser.
Then it happens. You cross the line from digital flesh to real flesh. You commit a real, flesh and blood sexual sin.
You are now an adulterer, a fornicator, or a homosexual.
But it doesn’t stop there. The slippery slope causes you to slide ever so quickly, doing more terrible sins as you slide along. One day, to your horror, you will have become a member of Congress. 
The slippery slope is used to put fear into the hearts of conscientious Christian men. Fear the slope. Fear the “nice ass” look for tomorrow you will be an adulterous, porn addicted man. Many a man is afraid of their sexuality as a result of such preaching.
Al Mohler, a Southern Baptist preacher and theologian writes:
“The simplest explanation for why men view pornography (or solicit prostitutes) is that they are driven to seek out sexual intimacy,” he explains. The urge for sexual intimacy is God-given and essential to the male, he acknowledges, but it is easily misdirected. Men are tempted to seek “a shortcut to sexual pleasure via pornography” and now find this shortcut easily accessed.
In a fallen world, pornography becomes more than a distraction and a distortion of God’s intention for human sexuality. It comes as an addictive poison…
And then, enough is never enough. “If I take the same dose of a drug over and over and my body begins to tolerate it, I will need to take a higher dose of the drug in order for it to have the same effect that it did with a lower dose the first time,” Struthers reminds us. So, the experience of viewing pornography and acting out on it creates a demand in the brain for more and more, just to achieve the same level of pleasure in the brain.
There ya have it. Men seek out porn because they are looking for sexual intimacy and porn leads you down that slippery slope to destruction.
Granted human beings have the capacity to be addicted to most anything. I love Goetz caramel creams. I can eat an entire bag of them. I love them. I want them. I lust after them. And one will never satisfy me.
Back to porn.
Maybe I am different from other men. Porn doesn’t do much for me. Oh, at first, it was exciting. The whole forbidden fruit thing. (I missed out on the whole Playboy phase growing up) But, after awhile it lost its thrill value. (so much for the slippery slope) After all, you’ve seen one boob you’ve seen them all. I don’t have any desire to become a rampaging adulterer. The women in the community I live in are safe. They need not fear that I am lurking in the bushes waiting to have sex with them.
Preachers do a great injustice to men by telling them they are poor, helpless creatures lacking any sexual self-control. Instead of learning about respect and self-control they are taught to fear the slippery slope.
It should come as no surprise that the rate of sexual sin within the Christian Church mirrors the world.
It’s time for Christian men to grow up. Stop fearing the naked body. Stop thinking you are an adulterer in training. Be prudent. Be disciplined. Be self-controlled.
As an agnostic I no longer concern myself with the sexual rules of Christianity. I am governed by love of my wife and family. How will doing _____________affect my marriage is the question I must consider. Will watching porn have a negative effect on my marriage? Maybe, probably not. Will subscribing to Playboy (for the articles) hurt my marriage? Probably not. Will having an adulterous affair with my neighbor cause harm to my marriage. Most certainly.
Above all I want to live a life sexually that is healthy, honoring to the body, and honoring to my marriage.
I don’t need a preacher to tell me what is right.
Someone might ask “If you are not a Christian why do concern yourself with the Christian teaching on sexuality?”
This is an important matter because the Christian teaching on sexuality dominates our culture.
It affects all of us.
The Christian teaching on sexuality works its way into our laws, our schools, and our homes.
It matters…
Let’s face it. Christian men are a bunch of pussies. They have allowed the feminists to take over the Church and now the men in the Church have become a bunch of latte sipping, weak muscled, small dick, little boys. Flowered shirt wearing preachers are the worst.
This problem must be fixed immediately. If left unchallenged women might actually take over the pulpit, the boardroom, and the bedroom and expect equality.
So what’s the answer?
Wait for it.
Here it comes.
Christian MMA.
Yep, that’s the answer. Time to turn all those little boys into ass kicking, ear deforming, blood letting, marital arts specialists. (disclaimer: this is not an attack on MMA, boxing, and martial arts)
In the back room of a theater on Beale Street, John Renken, 42, a pastor, recently led a group of young men in prayer.
Before the Cage Assault bout in Memphis, Mr. Lane got his hands taped by Pastor John Renken of Xtreme Ministries.
“Father, we thank you for tonight,” he said. “We pray that we will be a representation of you.”
An hour later, a member of his flock who had bowed his head was now unleashing a torrent of blows on an opponent, and Mr. Renken was offering guidance that was not exactly prayerful.
“Hard punches!” he shouted from the sidelines of a martial arts event called Cage Assault. “Finish the fight! To the head! To the head!”
The young man was a member of a fight team at Xtreme Ministries, a small church near Nashville that doubles as a mixed martial arts academy. Mr. Renken, who founded the church and academy, doubles as the team’s coach. The school’s motto is “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide.”
Mr. Renken’s ministry is one of a small but growing number of evangelical churches that have embraced mixed martial arts — a sport with a reputation for violence and blood that combines kickboxing, wrestling and other fighting styles — to reach and convert young men, whose church attendance has been persistently low. Mixed martial arts events have drawn millions of television viewers, and one was the top pay-per-view event in 2009.
Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.
The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”
The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.
“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”
These pastors say the marriage of faith and fighting is intended to promote Christian values, quoting verses like “fight the good fight of faith” from Timothy 6:12. Several put the number of churches taking up mixed martial arts at roughly 700 of an estimated 115,000 white evangelical churches in America. The sport is seen as a legitimate outreach tool by the youth ministry affiliate of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 churches…
…Yet even among more experimental sects, mixed martial arts has critics.
“What you attract people to Christ with is also what you need to get people to stay,” said Eugene Cho, 39, a pastor at Quest Church, an evangelical congregation in Seattle. “I don’t live for the Jesus who eats red meat, drinks beer and beats on other men…”
…Over the past year and a half, a subculture has evolved, with Christian mixed martial arts clothing brands like Jesus Didn’t Tap (in the sport, “tap” means to give up) and Christian social networking Web sites like Anointedfighter.com…
…Roughly 100 young men, many sporting shaved heads and tattoos, attend fight parties at Canyon Creek near Seattle, watching bouts on the church’s four big-screen televisions. Vendors hustle hot dogs and “Predestined to Fight” T-shirts. About half are not church members but heard about the parties through friends, said Mr. Beals, who is known as the Fight Pastor.
Men ages 18 to 34 are absent from churches, some pastors said, because churches have become more amenable to women and children. “We grew up in a church that had pastel pews,” said Tom Skiles, 37, the pastor of Spirit of St. Louis Church in Arnold, Mo. “The men fell asleep…”
So women are the problem but who is it that is running the Church? MEN.
Men don’t come to Church? Who is at fault? The women. Now, once again who is running the Church? MEN.
Men should be offended and incensed that they are reduced to a Tarzan caricature.
I am a man’s man. I am a jock. I love sports. I used to hunt. I like porn. (oops scratch that) I believe in standing up for my family and protecting them. I am not afraid to threaten violence when needed, especially when cut off in traffic.
Yet, I cry easily. I love chick flicks. I like a good book. (real men don’t read) I don’t like violent movies. I don’t like MMA or boxing.
Instead of promoting a homogenous view of men in the Church how about allowing men to be themselves, with all their contradictions.
I have talked to more than a few men who are sickened by the macho men approach many pastors and churches are adopting . They don’t fit the macho man mold. They LIKE silk underwear. They don’t know who won what game when or where. They couldn’t tell you the difference between a foul shot and a slap shot.
Yet, they are men. Real men. Men who love their families, their wife, their children. They support their parents. They respect their neighbors and love their fellow man.
Manhood is not defined by who you beat the shit out of.
Are there any fish guru’s among the readers of Restless Wanderings?
I am getting ready to buy an aquarium and some freshwater fish. I am a novice. I have read a few books on the subject and I am amazed at what goes into having an aquarium.
Any advice?
Any links to sites that would be helpful?
Thanks!
Many years ago I was watching the Old Time Gospel Hour on TV. The Old Time Gospel Hour was the flagship program of Thomas Road Baptist Church and Jerry Falwell.
Falwell was preaching about women and the Equal Rights Amendment.
I have never forgotten what Jerry Falwell said:
We don’t believe in equal rights for women. We believe in superior rights for women. We believe in putting women on a pedestal.
I remember thinking, at the time, that makes a lot of sense. The Equal Rights Amendment was viewed as an attempt to blur the lines between the sexes. To make our culture unisex, which was considered by all to be a grievous sin. (and still is by some today)
The Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christianity of my youth taught me:
The viewpoints above showed up in sermon after sermon. Is it any wonder so many Fundamentalist/Evangelical marriages are dysfunctional? That women schooled in such an environment have difficultly functioning in the real world?
Even in my own marriage, I was a typical “I am the boss, chief decision-maker, you submit to me” husband. I made ALL the decisions. For twenty years this is how we “did” marriage. Gradually, as I became more liberal in my understanding of life, I realized how hurtful this was to women in general and to my dear wife in particular.
My wife finds it hard to make decisions. She told me one time that she was “afraid to make decisions because she might might make a wrong decision and then you’ll be mad at me.” I said ‘Yep. That’s the price of admission. Making decisions means you might piss someone off.” I see my wife throwing off the bondage of the past but I wonder if she’ll ever be totally free of teachings of the the past. Submit. Obey. Do what your husband says. He is the head of the home. It is hard to shake such indoctrination.
Is marriage really a partnership when only one partner decides everything? Certainly we each have our strengths, our weaknesses. I am not about to enter my wife’s kitchen. First, we will all starve. Second she is a far better cook than I will ever be in ten lifetimes. I pay the bills. I write the checks. I manage the money. I am good at it. I am able to analyze numbers on the fly. (it is called Gerencser math in the family) So, I do what I am good at and so does my wife.
Now there is ONE area I refuse to relinquish control. The remote control!! It’s mine. Don’t touch it.
I digress…
How did Jerry Falwell’s superior rights for women work out practically in the Church?
You judge. Does what follows seem so superior to you?
Looks very similar to what was expected of women at home.
Women were not allowed to be pastors, deacons, elders, teach older children. They were never allowed to teach any group of people that had adult men in it.( thus usurping the authority do men)
Granted, there is great improvement in some sectors of the Christian Church. Women can now be pastors, elders, deacons, worship leaders ,etc. Women teach theology at some Christian colleges. Thanks to feminism women have a lot more opportunities than they did years ago.
But the Church still has a long ways to go.(i.e the Catholic Church is still in the 12th century) Vast swaths of the Fundamentalist/Evangelical Church still practice the repression of women, They sincerely believe they are following the teachings of the Bible when they do so. If God said it…end of discussion. As a result thousands upon thousands of Churches continue to be man only institutions.
One Church I pastored wouldn’t even allow women to speak in a public Church business meeting. If they had a question they were required to whisper the question to a man and then he would ask the question.
I visited a Mennonite Church years ago where the women sat on one side and the men on the other. Keeping to the mantra that women should never lead, when the Congregation sang the women always started singing a note after the men. (that said, the singing was spectacular)
In the early 1970’s my mother gave me an important lesson in equal rights. She worked as as nurses aide at Winebrenner’s Nursing Home in Findlay Ohio. Female aides were paid less than male aides because the male aides did more of the “heavy” work. Truth was, that both sexes did the “heavy” work.
So my Mom, the crusader that she was, sued Winebrenner’s. It seemed so silly. There was only a bit of change difference in the wages. I was so embarrassed when the lawsuit story hit the front page of the newspaper.
But, she was right. Winebrenner was discriminatory in their treatment of women. My mother filed a federal lawsuit under the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (Title 7) The courts agreed and my mother won.
While I was embarrassed at the time (I was 15) I now see how brave my mother was. To stand up for what was right. To dare suggest that women should be treated equally.
We still have a long way to go on the issue of equality. Women are still treated as inferior to men. The glass ceiling exists, regardless of whether or not bigots like Phyllis Schlafly can see it. Yes, things are BETTER but we should not rest until we are a society that is blind to sex, sexuality, race, and religion.
Utopian? Perhaps.
Justice and fairness require that we press forward even when it seems failure is certain. That’s one lesson my Mom taught me that I will never forget.
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