You are here: Home / About Me

From Cult to Christian, The Long Journey Home

September 29, 2010 By Randy Olds 7 Comments

Today I stumbled upon another blog of a woman who is chronicling her journey out of religious abuse. I lingered for a while, reading some of her posts…feeling her pain.

There are essentially three types of blogs that I follow. I have found a number of respected Christian scholars, most of whom are professors at one university or another. Of these, I tend to avoid those who are too far extreme either to the left or the right. I also follow a number of seminarians, of who most are working on advanced theology degrees. These advanced students often ask questions that others are afraid to ask.

The last category of bloggers that I like to read are those who have been involved in some sort of cult or “extreme fundamentalism” and are trying to find their way home. Many, but not all, of these spent time in the same cult that I grew up in, Armstrongism.

I read the professors and the academic types because I seek to learn from them. Although I don’t always agree with their conclusions, they delve much deeper into various theological ideas than I will ever find in a Sunday School class. Over the course of the last couple of years, I have weeded down the blogs that I follow to those who approach theology and the Bible with open minds and are willing to ask the same hard questions that I do.

And hard questions I ask.

I think that growing up in a cult will force a person to do one of two things. Either give up on religion completely, or start completely from scratch. I’ve seen a great many who grew up in the cult that I did who did the former, and I was very close to giving up on God my own self. How could I trust anything that any religious leader said when the one that I grew up thinking was “God’s Apostle” turned out to be blatantly wrong on 90% of what he taught?

Fortunately, God never gave up on me, and the day eventually came when I set out to once-and-for-all determine if Christianity’s claims had any validity at all. Through many, many painstaking hours of study and a few heartfelt prayers, I finally determined that the basic claim of Christianity must be true. That is, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, lived, died on the cross, and was resurrected three days later. And that He did it for me.

However, past that basic fact, I have had to prove nearly every tenant of the Christian faith for myself, and that is still an ongoing process.I had to start from scratch.

Just because a bunch of people came up with a creed or two, or a church committee developed a “statement of faith” is simply not good enough for me. Having been burned, and burned badly, by the Worldwide Church of God’s erroneous “statement of faith”, I doubt that I will ever be able to simply say, “Hey, that’s a great creed, I think I’ll go with it!”

So, as I read through the blogs of recovering fundamentalists, quivering daughters, and cult survivors of all sorts, I realize that it is much the same for all of these people. Like me, most of these have lost faith not in God, but in those who tell us who God is. Quite often, the cult survivors that I run across escaped the cults that they were in decades ago, but are still struggling to find a Christian church that they can feel comfortable in and a pastor that they can trust.

For me, it’s been over twenty years since I set foot in an Armstrongite church, but I know that I still haven’t fully recovered. Of course, I spent a good many years of those two decades in no church at all, and it has only been in the last few years that I really started digging into the Bible in earnest to find the message held within. But that too is often a hallmark of cult survivors.

The shell-shock of coming out of a cult often discourages survivors from any sort of church membership at all. And as I pointed out in a post last year, the experience quite often drives cult survivors into a stance of complete disbelief or atheism.

Perhaps the day will come when I read an account of someones journey away from spiritual abuse and it won’t hit that nerve that is still raw. Perhaps one day I will have, to my satisfaction, proven enough of the tenants of the creeds that I can stop asking so many questions. Perhaps one day I will find myself completely healed from having grown up in a cult, and simply call myself Christian, instead of “a-Christian-who-grew-up-in-a-cult-but-who-is-now-just-a-normal-Christian.”

Filed Under: About Me, Armstrongism, atheism, cults, Fundamentalism, Spiritual Abuse Tagged With:

Some Additional Thoughts on Forgiveness, Love and the Ground Zero Mosque

September 6, 2010 By Randy Olds 2 Comments

There are few things that I dislike more than strife and contention. I suppose that it probably comes from growing up in a family where arguing, bigotry and angry words were the norm. Intolerance towards just about anybody you can name were demonstrated to me by many members of my family as well as the Armstrongite church that I grew up in. The grandiosity and narcissism that ran throughout my family was like a deadly virus that ran its tentacles throughout every part of our daily lives. And the religious separatism and narcissism of Armstrongism simply reinforced the idea that we were right and everybody else in the world was wrong.

Although I have grown past much of what I was raised in, I still have lingering effects from growing up in a home where arguing, hate, strife and intolerance was rife.

My distaste for arguing has grown to a point to where I will often simply ignore offenses to myself or even my family rather than engage in a fight. More than anything I simply want peace and will often go to any lengths to obtain said peace, even if what I really should be doing is standing up and fighting for what I know is right. I pride myself on being a “Peacemaker”, but I sometimes question whether or not my resistance to strife crosses over into cowardice. And quite often, even when I do feel wronged, I simply bottle up those feelings and may indeed deal with them inappropriately in other ways.

And because I have found a way to simply turn off my emotions to many personal affronts and “turn the other cheek”, I find myself having much difficulty in finding empathy for those who instead process those affronts with pain and anger. I often think of those people who are expressing pain or anger at situations where they have been wronged as being “judgmental”.  In my mind there is often a set time period for mourning a loss or being angry over an affront and if I deem that a person is carrying a grudge or hurt for too long I begin to wonder what is wrong with that person.

I wrote a post last year about forgiveness. In my post I wrote about the story found in Luke 7:36-47. The story focuses on the sinful woman who anointed Jesus feet with her tears and hair and of who Jesus said that she loved much because she had been forgiven much. In that post I wrote about how I had difficulties relating to those who have problems with forgiveness and judgmentalism and associated myself with the woman who had been forgiven much. I associated myself with her because of the life that I had led and the multitude of sins that Christ had forgiven me for.

Perhaps a portion of the reason that I don’t have a huge problem with forgiveness is related to the forgiveness that I have received, but perhaps even more of it is because of my oversensitivity to strife and conflict.

During a discussion with John Guthrie over the last couple of days about my post on the controversy about the Ground Zero Mosque, he mentioned how being critical of those who are opposed to the Mosque could be perceived as a violation of 1 Cor 13:5 . It took me a little while to understand where he was going with that and I had to do a bit of study of his comments as well as the mentioned verse as well as a couple other related verses.On the verse, John wrote:

“…love thinks no evil;” (NKJV) The word “think”, or accounted is from the Greek word logidzomai which metephorically refers to an act of considering, reckoning, reasoning, deeming, evaluating, valueing. “Logidzomai finalizes thought, judges matters, draws logical conclusions, decides outcomes, and puts every action into a debit or credit position.” (from “The Spirit Filled Life Bible.”) To attribute all opposition to the Mosque to hatred of Muslims and a desire for revenge is a violation of I Cor 13: 5 and that is the verse to which I was referring. It is a sin to hate Muslims, even for those who lost loved ones on 911.”

After a bit of study on the verse, I was able to see where he was coming from, but it was actually a cross reference to Ephesians 4:2-3 that helped me to gain a better understanding;  “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” (HCSB). On this passage Matthew Henry writes:“By meekness, that excellent disposition of soul, which makes men unwilling to provoke, and not easily to be provoked or offended. We find much in ourselves for which we can hardly forgive ourselves; therefore we must not be surprised if we find in others that which we think it hard to forgive.”

Because of a multitude of factors, I may never be able to completely understand why many people hold onto certain hurts as long as they do. Although I am able to brush off many things and not hold a grudge for a long time doesn’t necessarily mean that I am “better” than others who may indeed take many years to process those wrongs. There are times where being a “peacemaker” is a good thing, but there are others where perhaps I should be angry and am not. These characteristics of my personality could be more due to genetic predispositions or upbringing than actually a gift of the Spirit.

I do wish for a world where there is no conflict or strife; a world where forgiveness and tolerance was automatic. However, that is not the world in which I live. And in being critical of those who do have difficulties with forgiveness and judgmentalism perhaps I am being guilty of judging them.  I am sure that they can find many areas of my life that they simply could not understand my own struggles with other sins.

A quote from Kempis from a post a couple of months ago comes to mind; “Watch your own step; be slow to criticize the doings of other people. When we criticize others, we get nothing for our pains; how often we make mistakes! How carelessly it can lead us into sin! Be your own critic; pull yourself to pieces; then you will have something to shew for your trouble”

I still don’t understand all of the hoopla about the Ground Zero Mosque. I suggested to John that perhaps we should allow those who where directly affected by 9-11 vote on it, and although I have no direct ties to anyone who lost their life that day, I imagine that even if I did that I wouldn’t vote against it. But that is me, and just because I feel that way doesn’t mean that I am right. And even if I am right, I need to be more patient and loving of others who don’t think the same way as I do about things.

I do think that in a perfect world that all of the conflict about the mosque would not exist; however, in a perfect world 9-11 would have never happened to begin with.

Filed Under: About Me, Forgiveness, humility Tagged With:

Wacky Week, No Time for Posting

August 5, 2010 By Randy Olds 1 Comment

I have given up on getting any posts in this week. I’ve been working twelve hour+ days in a Texas heat wave. The air conditioning went out in my office. My dishwasher broke at the house. And all of this while trying to get everything ready for the major surgery that my wife is scheduled for on Friday morning.

I am taking the next week and a half off of work to care for my wife after her surgery and play “Mr. Mom”, so if time allows I hope to get back to my series on Thomas Kempis’ “The Imitation of Christ” next week. A lot of that depends on my wife’s post-op needs.

Hope to be back online soon. ‘Til then, God bless.

Randy

Filed Under: About Me, blogging

Joining Community of Hope

March 30, 2010 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

Well, after five months of attending services at Community of Hope United Methodist Church, my wife and I turned in our membership cards last Sunday. That is to say, we are officially transferring our membership from First United Methodist in Mansfield to Community of Hope. This was not a decision reached lightly, but we have both prayed about it for several months and feel that this is definitely where God is leading us. I actually felt that way back in November, but like I said, we did not make this decision on a whim.

I’m not a big fan of ‘Church-Shopping.” I know in our consumer driven world, many people hop from church to church, looking for one that fits their ‘taste,’ and some never become a permanent part of any church community. I have no intention of changing churches until I find the perfect one, because I know that isn’t going to happen. I want to go to church where God want me to go. I personally think that God was the one who initially led us to First United Methodist and that He has now led us to Community of Hope.

It wasn’t that we disliked First United Methodist or it’s people or pastors. It is a great church. It is listed as one of the 50 largest United Methodist Churches in the country and has some great ministries. I simply felt in my heart even when we joined that we were only going to be there for a season, and that God was using that time to prepare us for some place else to worship and serve Him at. I feel very comfortable that Community of Hope is that place.

It is a very young church that was planted a few short years ago and only has about 400 people attending two services on Sunday, compared with the 4,000 or so attending the six services at First Methodist. I personally am not a “Big Church” fan. I know that there are many people who enjoy worshiping at the larger churches, and that is fine for them. I even have some of my Tres-Dias friends here in the Dallas area who attend some of the “Mega-Churches” and seem quite happy there, but that is simply not for me. I want to be able to know everybody in the church community and I just don’t know how you can ever do that in a huge church.

I have sensed from the first service at Community of Hope that the Holy Spirit is present there and that there is a lot of God’s work getting ready to burst upon the scene. Jeanie and I are excited about where God is leading us in our lives and eagerly anticipating the discoveries of where He is going to use us at Community of Hope. I’ll write more about Community of Hope as we continue to integrate into the church. I value the time and friendships that I had at First United Methodist and plan to stay in touch, but it is time to really get plugged in at this new, vibrant and growing church that God has led us to.

Filed Under: About Me

Searching for Christ – The Early Years

November 6, 2009 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

I hope that nobody reading my last post gets the idea that I was trying to launch a scathing attack on the Worldwide Church of God or its members or clergy. Nor do I wish to imply that I believe that salvation in Christ is not possible within the constraints of Armstrongism. There were (and are) some very fine people that were in the church that I grew up in. I believe that, although misled and in error, that the great majority of the clergy and members in that church were sincere in their beliefs. The problem with Armstrongism goes back to Jesus’ words that “when the blind lead the blind, they both fall in the ditch.”

The point that I was trying to get at is this. By the time that I began in earnest to search for a salvific relationship with Jesus Christ, my views on christology and soteriology were at complete odds with virtually every major Christian denomination in the world, with the possible exception of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists. These views were a stumbling block and it took years for me to understand the truth about Jesus and therefore be able to fully accept Him as my Savior so begin a meaningful and life-changing relationship with Him.

My first experience in a church outside of the WCG came a few months after I moved out of my mothers house to go and live with my father. I had begun dating the girl that I had mentioned in my previous post, and she invited me to go to church with her at her charismatic Assemblies of God church. I was in no way prepared for the experience. Although I remember enjoying the music and singing, as well as how overwhelmingly friendly everyone was to me, I just couldn’t get over the feeling that I was participating in something that was fundamentally wrong. I was not prepared for all of the talk about Jesus, of whom I had been taught we should not worship, nor of the prominent crucifixes everywhere, which I had been taught were pagan symbols. And of course, all of the talking in tongues was more than I could bear. Although I attended church with her a number of times during the months that we dated, I couldn’t shake the idea that I was somehow or another in a “synagogue of Satan.”

After me and her broke up, I didn’t attend any church at all for the next year or so. A neighbor then invited me to go to a revival with him at a United Pentecostal Church. Anybody who has ever been to a United Pentecostal revival will be able to imagine my reaction. Whereas the Assemblies of God church was mildly charismatic, the United Pentecostals are wildly charismatic. I simply couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

At this point, I decided that church was simply not for me, and I attended no church whatsoever for the next six years or so. I had not become an atheist or anything like that, but I had no real interest in finding out who God really was. Through some superficial Bible study, I had become convinced that much of what the WCG had taught was wrong, but I still didn’t have any idea what was right, and decided that, at least for the time that I didn’t care. I threw myself into enjoying everything that the “world” had to offer. I got into drinking, drugs and sex. There were a few times that I prayed for God to get me out of one jam or another, but other than that, I completely turned my back on anything that resembled Christianity.

My next experience with Christianity came at the age of twenty-five, shortly after I got married to the wonderful woman who has patiently endured my journey in finding Christ for the last eighteen years. She had grown up in a devout Baptist home and had accepted Christ at the age of eight and so suggested that we go to the little Baptist church down the road.

Although there were still things about the Baptist church that I was uncomfortable with, I decided that this was a brand of Christianity that I could live with. Although the idea of the Trinity still bothered me, and I still in the back of my mind had not conclusively ruled that the WCG was totally in error with all of their doctrines, I decided to make an attempt to worship God in this setting. I got baptised, and made an attempt to be a good Baptist.

The problem of course was that I still had the idea in the back of my head that perhaps these Baptists were in fact wrong, and maybe, just maybe, the church that I grew up in was right. I had also by this time developed a drinking problem as well as a secret addiction to pornography, and somehow or another expected that the baptismal experience was going to “wash that away.” I was under the impression that I was going to come out of the water “a changed man” and that living a Christian life from that point on was just going to come naturally.

But because my soteriological and christological views were essentially the same as they had been at the age of sixteen, I didn’t realize that the key to salvation was a complete faith in Jesus Christ as my personal savior and that it was only in coming to a complete surrender of my life to Him that would allow the sanctification process to take place. I somehow or another thought that the baptismal process was the crucial part of regeneration. Although I had publicly confessed Christ as my savior, in the back of my head I still had lingering doubts about whether or not Jesus was who the Protestants that I had come in contact with said that He was or if He was in actuality who Herbert Armstrong said that He was.

Of course, the baptism didn’t “take” and I found myself still struggling with all of the same issues that I had before getting dunked. After time I lost heart and quit attending church. My concept of God, Jesus and religion was more muddled than ever.

It was not long after this that I decided that I had to once and for all either prove Herbert Armstrong right or prove him wrong. This was about 1994 or so and the Internet had not yet really taken off, so I had to do my research the old fashioned way by reading the Bible and Bible commentaries and any relevant books that I could get my hands upon. In my next post I will go into some of that, as well as some additional exposures to different churches that I tried out along the way while I was trying to find out who Jesus Christ really was and what it would take for me to find a meaningful salvific relationship with Him.

Filed Under: About Me, Armstrongism, Salvation

Growing Up In Armstrongism (or How the WCG Prevented me from Knowing Christ)

November 5, 2009 By Randy Olds 1 Comment



Note: This begins a series of posts on how I came to believe in Jesus Christ as My Lord and Savior

My journey of finding faith in Christ has been long and arduous to say the least. It has by no means a typical journey, but I suppose that the end result is the same as others; that is, ultimately finding a saving faith in Jesus Christ.

I suppose that I must start from the beginning, because I feel like the beginning was a primary factor in what made this journey so long and so arduous.

The church that I grew up in didn’t preach Jesus or salvation in any way close to anything else I have ever seen. The teachings of Herbert Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God (WCG) concerning salvation and Jesus were semi-Arianistic and had a bit of Calvinist flavor. I grew up believing that the only people who were “saved” were those that God had soveriegnly “called” to become members of this particular church. And although they acknowledged that Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection was a necessary part of the process, Jesus was rarely preached. Looking back, it seems that the church that I grew up in considered Jesus Christ as just a minor albeit necessary part of God’s master plan.

I was also taught that the Catholic Church was the Great Harlot of Babylon, and that all of the Protestant churches were minor harlots, and therefore salvation through any other church was not possible. I was told that the only reason that I had received any grace at all was because I had the good fortune of having a mother who had been called out of “the world” by God and that I was “set apart” because I was the child of one of the “true believers” in the “one true Church of God.” My continued salvation was to be secured only by continuing in the practices of this church, and my reward in “God’s Kingdom” was directly commiserate with how well I performed the legalistic requirements of “God’s true church” while here on earth.

In short, salvation was through Divine election and then secured by works, and had little or nothing to do with faith in Jesus Christ.

There were no alter calls in my church, no confessions of faith, no talk about how much Jesus had done for anybody, but rather a smug assurance that we were God’s “chosen people” and that all of the other so-called Christians out there were basically practicing a form of paganism disguised as Christianity. The youth events that I attended back then somewhat remind me now of the Hitler-Youth groups that I’ve since seen in old video footage, as they were not much more than an attempt to more fully indoctrinate the youth in the church.

The only Jesus that I remember hearing about was the one who was going to come at the end of the Great Tribulation to defeat all of the armies of the world. Yea, sure, excerpts from the Gospels were read, but somehow the message of a Jesus who loved the world enough to come down and die on the Cross for each individuals sins was for the most part left out.

I began to have serious doubts about the veracity of this doctrine that I had been force-fed by around the age of thirteen or so. I began to surreptitiously study the Bible myself and started finding things that didn’t quite agree with the church’s doctrines. I also began to question why was it that the other “Christians” that I knew had to be so wrong; they seemed to be nice enough people. Surely they weren’t going to burn in the Lake of Fire (AKA Hell) just because they went to Church on Sunday, celebrated Christmas and ate pepperoni pizza?

I suppose that the beginning of the end came at the Feast of Tabernacles when I was fifteen years old. Although I had not yet fully rejected the tenants of Armstrongism, I had pretty much decided that I really didn’t want to be in this “Church” anymore. The Winnebego that we had rented for the Feast had a cassette player in it and the former occupents had left Journey’s “Escape” inside the player. Although Armstrong had clearly taught that any sort whatsoever of rock music was the Devil’s work and that by listening to it, you were somehow or another inviting demonic possession, I decided that I wanted to hear this “evil music” for myself. I don’t know how many times that I listened to that tape over the next seven days, but by the end of the Feast I had decided that any music that sounded that good couldn’t be that bad. I had also decided that I was going back to services at “my Mother’s Church” anymore.

At about the same time, my parents were going through a divorce. My father was sick of my mother’s “cult” and Armstrong had given members permission to divorce their unbelieving spouses. I therefore decided to go live with my father so that I could not be forced to continue attending my mother’s church and so that I could be friends with the people that I went to school with. Up to this point in time I had not been allowed to have any friends outside the “church”, and I kind of had a crush on a girl that I went to school with who attended an Assemblies of God church.

I still remember coming home from school the day after I had told my mother that I was moving in with my “non-believing” father. There were not one, but two, pastors from “the Church” waiting for me in the den. They proceeded to tell me that if I continued to proceed down the path that I was choosing that I was inviting eternal damnation along with a whole lot of other really, really bad stuff along the way. I politely listened to what they had to say and tried in vain to tell them that I no longer believed what they were preaching and why. They of course told me that I must be under the influence of the Devil and told my mother that they’d be praying for me to repent so that I wouldn’t burn in the “Lake of Fire.”

Looking back, I believe that I would have been much better off if I had never been exposed to Christianity at all rather than have had this warped, distorted view of God and Jesus crammed down my throat. It has me taken many years to overcome the teachings of the Worldwide Church of God, and I think that some of the effects may still linger, some twenty-seven years later.

My next post will concern my initial exposure to Evangelical Fundamentalism in a variety of flavors, and my continued journey through my late teens and early twenties trying to overcome the scars of the past. I’ll try as best as I can to underline the difficulties that I had acclimating out of Armstrongism and into Christianity and how the effects of the indoctrination that I had experienced as a youth made it very difficult for me to find a saving faith in Jesus Christ.

.

Filed Under: About Me, Armstrongism, Salvation, Spiritual Abuse
« Older Posts