Category: Assemblies of God Church

Assemblies of God Church, boundaries, C-PTSD, Family, Rapture, Uncategorized

Spiritual Abuse From Within The Family

Deb M

I’m back after a long break! I’m writing a book and so I’ve been putting much of my focus there. There are some things happening within the UPC Wisconsin District and hopefully soon I will have an update for you all.

The reason I’m here today has to do with some fresh spiritual abuse coming from my family. I do not have a ton of extended family and I’ve mostly put space between them and myself due to how judgmental they can be. I know that my mother’s fear of the rapture and hell came directly from her parents and then she passed it on down to me. When she decided to attend a church that her parents disapproved of it created a ton of drama in the family. Their brand of Christianity comes with a heavy dose of fear and standing in judgement of others. My uncle Mike is an assistant pastor in Florida. He posts the services from his church onto Youtube. A family member made me aware of some things that my uncle Mike first said about me and then about my brother. This all came about because my uncle has had some really unkind things to say about my brother and his sexuality and lack of church attendance. I stayed out of it until I felt I had to step in as a shield for my little brother. Then my uncle Mike turned his venom onto me. After I asked him to stop talking about my brother and I in his sermons and also to stop harassing my brother I blocked him from my social media. After this he went in front of his church and told them that he had been to the gates of hell because of the conversations my brother and I had with him. He has gone on to lie further about his communications with my brother. I just don’t understand how you can get up in front of your church and lie about your family. Both my brother and I have been nothing but respectful toward him in these conversations. I did tell him to remove the beam from his own eye before trying to remove it from my brother and I. I tried to explain to him in language that he could understand that he should focus on his own salvation.

My brother and I have suffered a lot because of our family. Many of them have held a zero tolerance policy towards homosexuality but also just towards churches that are not exactly like theirs. Every time they attempt to speak with us about God it always comes with a fear chaser. They dangle hell over our heads and then wonder why we want nothing to do with them. Here on earth they have not been kind, loving, or nurturing. Instead they have been judgmental, intolerant, and cold. They speak about the love of Christ but that is not what they are projecting out into the world. They only have love for those who are exactly like them or believe close enough to what they believe. Over and over I have heard how much they miss me and yet whenever I interact with them I’m told that hell is waiting for me. My uncle Mike even alluded to wanting to be present when we are standing before God so he could bare witness to what happens to us. Maybe if they approached us with love, acceptance, and care we wouldn’t feel the need to run away from them. Maybe if they presented God as love instead of a wrathful judge we would be more inclined to want to be a part of their faith. I have presented my uncle Mike with this perspective but he doesn’t want to hear it. Instead he uses his interactions with my brother and I to talk about how there isn’t much time and you never know when you’re going to die. He talks about us making his life so hard when we didn’t go looking for a fight with him, we are just living our lives. He attacked and then is hurt that he didn’t get the response that he wanted. I feel that even if we agreed with him and came back to church we wouldn’t ever be good enough. We would never be right. We only serve as a way for him to toot his own horn and celebrate his ability to scare us back into the fold.

I wish I could say that I’m beyond being hurt by them. Whenever something like this happens it triggers that part of me that has suffered so much at the hands of the church. It reminds me of my mother and all that she suffered because of her family. I think of her praying night after night begging God for help and never feeling rapture ready. I was the only witness to that pain and I lay the blame firmly at the feet of our family. In this moment as I feel the tightness in my chest that comes when my C-PTSD is triggered, I’m trying to remember to be grateful. I’m so grateful to be free from the fear virus that my family line carries. I may not always feel free and so I have to remind myself. I’m surrounded by my children and grandchildren who love me and a supportive community of friends. Lastly I’m free from the scary, always constant monster of a God that was introduced to me in my childhood.

Assemblies of God Church, Childhood, Family, Fear, Government, isolation, Poverty, United Pentecostal Church

Isolation, Bootstraps, and Fear of the Government

Deb M

My mother was a very strong woman. She often worked two jobs and still made the time to do things like refinishing the living room floor. We were very poor for most of my childhood but my mother would not consider asking the government for assistance. In the 70’s it was much easier for men to get out of paying child support and my father very rarely paid anything. Because of her stubborn resistance regarding asking for help, we often were on the edge of losing our housing and we often did not have enough to eat. I would walk home from school at lunch and scoop peanut butter out of the jar because that is all we had. I also have memories of my mother fishing for dinner. If she did not catch anything we did not have dinner. At times she would keep a cooler with milk, bologna, and maybe some kind of fruit. When you don’t have electricity it can be impossible to cook or keep food cold. It wasn’t always that bad but it happened pretty regularly.

Where did her resistance regarding asking for help come from? It can be traced back to her parents and religion. My grandparents were rugged people who believed you should help yourself through hard work and determination. They tended to only associate with others from their church because of fear of the world and the devil’s influence on it. They passed that fear down to my mother. They felt that you never ask the government for assistance and you don’t let them into your life if you can help it. This means don’t call the police unless you are dying and never answer the door for social services. You should never apply for things like food stamps because you would have to fill out government forms, thus giving them info about yourself and because you should be able to help yourself through hard work.

All of this kind of thinking tends to lead to isolation. You cannot ask for help without shame, you can only associate with others from your church, and your church is pretty anti-government. On the surface, it might seem like the UPC is patriotic and pro-government, but that isn’t really the truth. My grandparent’s Assemblies of God church was pretty much the same. Once you are isolated from the community around you all you can do is hope your church will help, in our case that help never came.

I have many memories of sitting on the floor at my grandparent’s house listening to the adults talking. They often talked about the end times and the One World Government. They speculated about who the anti-Christ was and how he would take over the U.S. They talked about the government being able to watch us through our televisions and about how someday they would be able to see through the walls of our homes. They felt we were already being watched. I know this may sound crazy to someone who has not grown up around this stuff but I assure you they believed it all. My mother and her family saw the government as evil and this meant you did not go to them unless you had no other option.

This distaste for the government may have led to my molestation not being reported. Sure the church did not want the bad press of having a molestation case coming out of their church, but there is also a distrust of the government happening there. In the end, the pastor is your government. He makes the rules, punishes the sinners, and decided who rises and who falls. You cannot question him because that is taboo.

1 Chronicles 16:22 “Saying, Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm.”

Anyone could be the anti-Christ. It could even be the U.S. president. He might even be serving right now. With that always being the case then how could you trust the government? It will be the government that eventually gives out the mark of the beast so…you can see where all of the fear comes from. The end result makes pastors into kings of their own little kingdoms. They are not to be questioned and if you do you will soon find yourself out in that cruel world they have warned you about. You will be shunned and subject to a different type of isolation.

All of these beliefs kept my family in poverty and kept my mother suffering for much of her life. It makes me sad that she worked herself to death trying to live and pay medical bills. It makes me angry that her mental illness went untreated for so long because she thought it was sin and not illness causing her depression. If she had not been afraid maybe she could have received help from the county with childcare, food stamps, and medical assistance. How could my life have been different if I had better medical care, enough food so that I could concentrate on school, and childcare so I wouldn’t have to be a latchkey kid? If some of these things had been in place maybe I would have not been such a good target for Steve Dahl. Being with him was an escape from a pretty hard life, at least I knew he would feed me.

D