To really tell my story, I have to first go back to before I was born. My mom and dad first met backstage at a show my mom was touring with. She was a new Christian, newly converted from Satanism. She was an actress, singer and dancer at Radio City Music Hall, living in New York City. My dad was a divorced father of two boys, having left his family to pursue life as a musician. For lack of a better description, he was that guy in sleazy nightclubs that introduced each new act. I don’t share those things to make them look bad, but it’s important to note that neither of my parents grew up particularly religious or were who you’d expect to go into a life of full-time ministry. Shortly after they became a couple, my dad became a Christian as well, and they moved out of the city together and left the show business world. They relocated upstate and got married. My dad worked as a salesman in a music store, where my mom also taught piano lessons. They joined a teeny tiny church where they grew deeply in their faith, and eventually surrendered their lives together, at the altar, to whatever it was God wanted them to do. It was not long after that a man came to their church claiming that he was starting a full time Christian ministry, and he was recruiting staff members. My parents were one of the first families at this place. The year was 1980. I wouldn’t pop into the picture until 1987.
I have an older sister who was born in 1980, and an older brother who came along in 1985. By the time I was born, this place we all lived in had grown to quite the program. The place itself was an old college campus with two dormitories, two office buildings, a football field, cafeteria, chapel, and various on-campus staff homes. They had also purchased several homes located close to the campus so that virtually anyone who worked there lived in a staff home that was owned by the ministry. The focus was on troubled teenagers, with backgrounds consisting of almost anything you can think of. The teens would commit to a year-long program, heavily steeped in the culture of church, Scripture, counselling, Christian schooling, and an array of other activities. My dad was a fundraiser, putting his knack for being a killer salesman to good use. The program was not government-funded, so everything revolved around donors and sponsorship from people who gave for the cause. My mom started the music ministry there, first starting a choir with the program teens, which then led to forming a travelling singing group that would tour all over the US and Canada. The group was made up of teens who had progressed enough in the program and would tour and share their “testimonies”–a very churchy word that basically means your story and how you decided to follow Christ. It was powerful to hear so many teenagers who had made such dramatic turnarounds in their lives, always giving credit to God. But they were also giving the credit to someone else, and that was “pastor.”
Let me pause here…I have debated with myself endlessly about what to call this man. I’m talking about the man who started the whole place. I will not say his name, and it would be too vague to keep referring to him as “that man,” so I’m left with the only option of calling him pastor. This somewhat nauseates me, you see, because that was what we were all expected to call him. No one added his last or first name to it, like you usually see. (Pastor Steve, or Pastor Johnson) He wanted everyone to simply call him “Pastor”, and we did. It’s really only now that I see how strange and creepy that is. I don’t want to spend too much time talking about him, but he is too much a part of the story not to.
If I think back to my earliest memories, I remember him being the highest figure of my life. He was Pastor. He made the rules we all lived by. He had the power to make your life wonderful, or he could make your life an absolute living Hell if you crossed him. As a staff family, my mom, dad, brother, sister and I all had to adhere to his standards, even within the walls of our own home. Until the age of around 9 or 10, I never wore pants, only skirts. The pastor didn’t believe it was right for a woman or girl to wear pants, so we didn’t. Even when we went on family vacations, or were going to the grocery store, we all lived by his standards. We wore what he told us to wear, we likstened to music that was approved by him, we watched movies and tv that were approved by him. If he thought a woman’s or girl’s clothes were too tight, he would tell them to change. This created an atmosphere of fear. As a little kid, I didn’t know that you should not be afraid of your pastor. As soon as he walked into the room, I felt torn between wanting his attention and approval, and simply wanting to disappear because I was afraid he would find something wrong with me.
When I look back to the years I was a child, I remember there being 10-15 other staff families there. Even though my family lived off-campus, it was all designed to be very contained in the way we were raised. There was a school on the campus for us, taught by other staff people. My siblings, friends and I were called “staff kids.” I wasn’t integrated with the “program kids” alot when I was little, but from a very young age I was well-informed on all of the crazy pasts these teenagers had. I cannot count the number of times I heard, ” Awww, you’re so lucky you’re a staff kid. You’re life is so perfect! I wish my family was just like yours.” And honestly, my life was not bad. Looking back on memories from when I was little, I remember being happy. I had good friends and a huge, close-knit community of people around me looking out for me. Everyone knew everyone, everyone was like family.
One day when I was a little girl, I found out my very best friend was leaving. Not moving away, leaving. Before I knew it, she was just gone. I wanted to say goodbye! Would they come and visit? Could we still be best friends?
These were the kind of answers I got. This is what everyone told me, a CHILD:
“They won’t be back. You can’t have visits with her. They left God’s will. That wife (my best friend’s mom) was controlling and wore the pants in that marriage. You watch and see what happens to them.”
I’ll just wait here and let that sink in.
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I was so young when I began to form judgments about people. I was 7-8 years old and would see a girl in a tank top and think how awful she was for wearing something so immodest. One of the most used phrases the pastor would say in church, especially in my childhood, was, “Obedience brings blessings, disobedience brings consequences.” This meant to me, “Obey God to earn His blessings, but if you disobey Him, be very AFRAID.” I believed my best friend’s family disobeyed God.
I would end up having so many of my close friends leave over the years, and every time they left with their own families, it was as if they had died. If you left this place, it was on bad terms. There was no leaving peacefully. And once you were gone, a smear campaign would begin and rumors would start around the entire ministry like wildfire. All contact with families who had left the ministry was literally forbidden. As you can imagine, every time a friend left, my next close friendship would be a little less deep. I saw so many families come and go, and once they were gone we all heard stories of how their families were destroyed out there in the real world…out from under the umbrella of “God’s will.” What I didn’t know then was that nearly everyone who ever left did it because of disagreements with the pastor. Either they questioned his authority, or they refused to adhere to one of his rules and they would be fired. The next Sunday in church, he would preach to everyone about that ex staff family and tell us all what would happen to them. “Obedience brings blessings, disobedience brings consequences.” This lead everyone who worked there to believe that we couldn’t make it out on our own. Now, to my astonishment, I remember families that actually came back after they had left to work there again. Maybe they had lost their job, or couldn’t make ends meet, and back they’d be….kissing you-know-who’s feet. I say all of that to give you a glimpse into what the culture of the place was. Being a little kid there was still easy, albeit the revolving door of friends.
But my early years were spent going to school, going to church, playing with my friends, exploring the ministry campus, tagging along on singing trips with my mom, and learning about God. I learned that Jesus saves, that He can work miracles in people’s lives. I have personally seen hundreds and hundreds of people’s lives dramatically changed, and I treasure that. Simultaneously though, I was growing up singing the praises of the pastor who gave my parents this job, this incredible ministry, who I always hoped I could impress. I didn’t want to become one of those families that rebelled against God and left. I have a clear as day memory of being 9 or 10, and telling my dad that if we ever left that place, I would hate him.
I believe that it was a very calculated effort to create that culture, so that if my parents ever questioned the pastor, or didn’t let him lead our family in every way, I would resent my parents instead of the pastor himself. And that is just so very wrong. It created an atmosphere of families slowly being ripped apart and broken. Wives resenting husbands for not being the man of their home, husbands resenting their wives if they were a little too “strong,” and kids living with a growing fear that their parents would make a mistake and get the family fired. It was a fear that still manifests in me today, as a 30 year old woman. I fear that I will do something wrong, maybe without even fully realizing it, and I will cost my whole family God’s blessings. It’s led me to feeling scrutinized by people 100% of the time I’m around them. It makes me have crazy anxiety that people are upset with me, when in fact, they aren’t and have no reason to be.
Those are some of the faint scars I’ll show from that period of my life, my childhood. I can trace how it molded alot of who I am today, but I can also say with confidence that I am an ever evolving piece of art. My Maker knows me, and to Him, I now know that I am precious. He knows my heart, my soft heart that was once taken advantage of and taught to fear…and He’s taken that heart and slowly began healing it. Perfect love casts out fear. So, I’ll end this chapter trying to encourage you that if you live in the grip of Fear or Anxiety, it is only His perfect love that can heal you. I am still not healed completely, but I recently have felt that scared little girl fade away more and more.
Hey, if your’e reading this, then that means I published this…..and that’s pretty brave.
Until Chapter 3…I’ll see ya. 🙂
Gripping! Thank you for sharing your reality.