Welcome to OO: Rant/Rave » WERE WE ALL CRAZY?

Thu, 03 July 2008 13:37

jisamazed
Messages: 170
Registered: January 2008
Location: Grand Rapids, MI

Senior Member

I know what you were thinking when you read the title of this entry. You think that I'm going to rail on HEF or FA. Actually, I am trying to reflect the experience that a lot of us have had, regardless of what your opinion is about FA nowadays. A few stories:

A young woman in our GR group is expecting a child. She is told to not worry about the birth, the Lord will take care of everything, and is ill-prepared for it. Her mother-in-law functions as the midwife. There are complications in the labor, which takes forever it seems. The mother-in-law tries a procedure that only a trained midwife or obstetrician should perform. The baby dies, and the mother is in severe pain for weeks. After the birth is over and it is clear that the baby will not rise from the dead, the father-in-law says, "That was judgment from the Lord!" and slams the door. Years later, after enduring more pain and emotional abuse, the mother goes to a doctor, who states that she was in worse shape than any woman he has ever examined.

The father of the child sings a song at church the next week, Carl Seitz' "Psalm 84." The beautiful song is powerful and expresses faith in God in spite of the man's incredible grief. However, after church the teacher from FA tells someone else, "Rebuke him for singing that song. We don't sing funeral songs here."

A woman in the church was regularly abused by her husband, who had left the church years pervious. She stuck with him in spite of his abuse and philandering. One day he threw her out of the house without any clothes on. She had to hide in the bushes, but somehow got access to a phone. She called her sister-in-law, crying. The sister-in-law told her, "Stop confessing that. Don't you believe that your husband is saved, spirit-filled and walking by faith?" Eventually the poor woman got divorced and married a stable man.

My wife grew up in a FA-planted church in Lansing, and it was particularly dysfunctional. A handful of people thought that they should divorce their spouse and "believe" to remarry their first spouse, even if that first spouse was already remarried to someone else. Therefore there were a lot of couples that were separated from each other, and the children devastated. Of course none of them remarried their first spouse. Most of them wised up eventually to the ludicrousness of that practice.

A man in that church was found to be a serial rapist. No one had any clue about it. In one day he was arrested and the family's life was permanently altered. I can't imagine the emotion that his wife experienced, and she tried to "stand strong in faith", but sometimes would start crying after church when talking to a friend about her experiences. A man who was a local leader in that church told her, "You are not on believing ground because of this, this and this..." He was very harsh with her.

The Tomax7 site contains many other such stories. I know that such experiences were replicated many times over.

When I think about all that happened, I sometimes want to scream, "Were we all crazy?" How did this group get this way? What possessed us to behave like that? Where did we get the idea that this was Christianity? What was I thinking to join myself to a group like that?

I know that the Lord had His reasons. For my part, I benefited from some of the teaching, some of which was very good. The problem is, it was mixed with some very bad teaching, and many of us did not have the tools to discern between the two at the time. Some of us were afraid to discern it because we would have been ostracized.

I'm still trying to answer some of those questions. Any input would be appreciated.

Amazed smitten astonished stunned floored blown away astounded shocked flabbergasted surprised wonderfully devastated awed shattered overwhelmed incredulous speechless sense of wonder at the love of God.

Report message to a moderator