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  • #16
    Originally posted by Carrikature View Post
    For what it's worth, I was born in June 1984. I don't know anything about the dynamics at the time.
    Yeah...I figured...

    Ok, just briefly, the "charismatic" movement had really been making headlines and there were rumblings of this "speaking in tongues" in a lot of churches. The SBC was seeing this as well. Unfortunately, there were church splits over it as some members became very vocal after experiencing it. As a (relatively) newbie (since I had just recently come back into the church) I didn't know all this was going on until I was introduced to it via "Jerry's" church. Of course, it's like when you by a car, you think, I haven't seen to many of these cars especially in this color, and as soon as you buy it, you start seeing the same car in the same color every time you turn the corner... So all of the sudden I was seeing different people, even in SBC churches, promoting it. It was an interesting time. CP might could give some more insight as he was more involved with SBC churches at this time...



    Was this a one-shot deal?
    If these two questions were related I apologize, but it's really two different answers.
    This particular experience was a one-time thing. I've never before or since had anything like it.
    Have you spoken in tongues since then?
    Yes, I continue to speak in tongues to this day. If I am in a church service, I am very careful to be low and quiet with it so as to not give the impression I am giving a message in tongues. I pray in tongues often though.

    It's interesting to me that your account is something you experienced directly while Bill's is something other people told him had happened. They're drastically different experiences, from where I sit. I understand you needing to know it yourself since no one was there to tell you what happened, but I'm not sure I understand why Bill couldn't have experienced his directly, as well.
    That's a good question...and I'm not sure I have an answer. As you said, since I was alone, and because of it's importance to me, it was crucial I remember. I don't know how much or how little Bill remembers of his experience, he obviously remembered enough to know something definitely happened. Otherwise he could just say he feinted...

    If you're open to second hand anecdotal accounts, I have a really good friend who is a Baptist minister (SBC) and he related a similar type experience as mine only his was even more incredible. I was setting here trying to recount his exact experience and find it's a little fuzzy. But I remember he was in a "vision" and in the vision the roof was torn off of his house and a mighty wind rushed into his room and he began to speak in tongues. (That's as close as I can get.) When I tried to describe my experience - like I said in my previous account, "my spirit being split and pure joy being poured into the center of my being..." he was setting there nodding with a stunned look on his face and said, that's the best description I've ever heard and it's really close to what I felt. It's funny because his experience and mine are similar enough we both believe it was God's way of confirming for us our faith, yet some of our other beliefs are quite a ways apart. For instance, he's a pretty staunch Calvinist and I'm the polar opposite - Open Theist.

    ETA: Really, I think there are quite a bit of similarity in Bill's and my experience. About the only difference is possibly... the "depth" of the experience...as well I guess as the public vs. private settings, otherwise it looks like they are pretty close to the same.
    Last edited by Littlejoe; 04-13-2016, 12:27 PM.
    "What has the Church gained if it is popular, but there is no conviction, no repentance, no power?" - A.W. Tozer

    "... there are two parties in Washington, the stupid party and the evil party, who occasionally get together and do something both stupid and evil, and this is called bipartisanship." - Everett Dirksen

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    • #17
      Originally posted by Littlejoe View Post
      Ok, just briefly, the "charismatic" movement had really been making headlines and there were rumblings of this "speaking in tongues" in a lot of churches.
      Incidentally, the church my family was attending billed itself as 'charismatic'. I never understood what that was supposed to mean. That would have been mid-90's, so it's probably more of the same.



      I am going to detail my own experiences more. I'll post again with that. Fair warning that it will be long.
      I'm not here anymore.

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      • #18
        I'm sorry it's taking me so long to reply to this thread. I am working on it, but it's proving a lot harder than I thought it would. In the interest of getting something down, I thought I'd give a little bit of background information/context. Some of these things might not be relevant, but you never know. (It's also 2am so please forgive grammar/spelling mistakes.)


        None of you will know this, but I have a really horrible memory when it comes to events and dates. IF I remember events, my memory tends to be fairly detailed. It's a pretty big 'if', though. A lot of what I know happened when I was a kid comes from other people telling stories. Direct memories of anything are pretty rare. I can, sometimes, piece together things that led up to and out of a specific event that I do recall. I have a rough sense of how events relate to each other in time. I can use that information to piece together approximate dates. It's mostly context-dependent, though. A good example is the ages of my four cousins in one family. I never forget how far apart their ages are, but I seldom can figure out how old any one of them is. If I can get one sorted, I can get the rest sorted. It's kinda weird, and I don't know if that makes sense, but that's how it works. I can try to explain better if needed.

        I think I have more milestones these days, so it's easier for me to keep events in their relative place in time. That wasn't the case when most of these things were happening to me. I've tried to sort out what was happening when, but it's not working very well. So here's what I do know, but understand this is more knowledge of facts than specific memories. This is going to be disjointed. Please bear with me.

        1) It's May-ish 1992, as best I can figure. My grandfather on my dad's side dies. I don't remember much about him, though. It was his second heart attack. I remember being at someone's house for the post-funeral reception (pretty sure it was my uncle's house). One of the 'this doesn't make sense' things is that I distinctly remember my cousins (who I didn't know) watching a real-person version of Jungle Book, but that didn't come out until 1994. It might have been the 1942 version, but that doesn't make much sense, either. It's not important, obviously, but this should give you a sense of what I mean regarding timelines and memories.

        2) My parents split up sometime after grandpa's death. I don't know when this happened, but I can sort of work back to 1992. My guess is August. I know that my parents were split up for ~5.5 years. My mother, both sisters, and I moved back in with my dad the first of January 1998. That was middle of 8th grade for me. So yeah, that puts the split was in the summer of 1992. I would have been 8. For what it's worth, I have no internal sense that these two events were so close together. Mom has said that part of their split was due to dad's reaction to grandpa's death, though, so I guess it makes sense.

        3) My great-grandmother on my mom's side dies. I don't know what year this happened, but I'm 99% certain it was 1992 also. It had to be pre-split, though. My great-grandparents lived in Indiana, but would come down to Texas for the winters. The four of us (two sisters, mom, and I) moved into their Texas house after the split, and I'm under the impression we knew he wouldn't be using it anytime soon. This bit isn't terribly important, but it supports the sense I had at ~11ish that everything happened when I was 8.

        4) The whole time my parents were split-up, we were living on my mom's parents' property near Waco. My great-grandparent's house was there. We later moved an old mobile home that my parents owned to the property. At various points in time, both of my mom's sisters and their families were also living on the same property. Some of them still do. (Dad calls it the commune. Mom calls it a blackhole, since no one but us seems capable of leaving that place. Both are pretty spot on.)

        5) My sisters and I started out at the local public school. I know I was bullied pretty bad by this one girl, but I honestly don't remember any of it.

        6) I have no idea what mom was doing for work at first. At some point, I know she got an emergency teaching certification and started teaching math at a private Christian school. I don't know how long she was working there before we were able to switch schools, but I know it was middle of 4th grade for me when we changed over. I have the sense that a serious consideration for getting us into the new school quickly was to get me out of the public school, but I don't know that for a fact.

        7) Mom spent the summers finishing her bachelor's degree. I don't know when this started, but I don't think it was the first summer. I think it was 1994, and it was due in part to getting a full teaching certification. Thing is, her classes were out of UTSA, so she spent most of the summer in San Antonio while us three kids stayed with my grandparents. I have no idea how many years this happened, but it was at least two.

        8) My mom's parents are not nice people, particularly my grandmother. This isn't just me saying that, either. For example, my wife and I got married in San Antonio, but I was living in Dallas at the time. My grandparents seriously considered not bringing our presents to the wedding so that we would have to stop by their house after our honeymoon to pick them up. Another time, my grandmother told one of my cousins, that he needed to stop drinking diet soda because he couldn't afford the damage it did to his brain (based on some report that the artificial sweetener caused memory loss or something). He was ~10 at the time. The last time I saw them, I was meeting them for dinner on my way down to San Antonio for Christmas. My daughter was probably 6mos old at the time. One of the first things they talked about was one of my cousins starting soccer. My grandpa's comment was that maybe she would actually move faster, and something to the effect of having to put stakes down to see she was moving. My grandmother caught the look on my face and proceeded to assure me it was ok for him to say that because he had said the same thing to her pretty much their whole life (since they started dating). They drove down one time unannounced...grandpa took my youngest sister and I out to pick up pizza so my grandmother could tell mom how she was supposed to handle my other sister (said advice unsolicited and undesired). I could go on and on. I'm not even sure if these sound that bad, but trust me when I say they're merely the tip of the iceberg. Everything revolves around them, but it's never their fault when people get upset by their actions. They're huge hypocrites, extremely judgmental, and prone to "credit cards are the Mark of the Beast" sort of thinking (not making that one up).

        Suffice to say, if I never see them again, it will be too soon. I don't want my daughter to be around them at all. One advantage to moving to Oregon is that I can finally stop worrying that they'll show up on my doorstep one day. I can't tell you how much time I've spent worrying how to handle that event.

        9) My uncle (at the time) was a pastor. He was in the Air Force prior to that, stationed in San Antonio, but I don't know if he was a chaplain there or not. I think not. I know when he and my aunt moved up to my grandparent's property, he became pastor for a tiny church that was roughly 5 miles away. Tiny means maybe twenty regular attendees. I know we went there sometimes, but I don't know when or why. I know it wasn't all the time. At some point in there, he was youth pastor for another local church.

        This is the guy that baptized me. It's also the same guy that had a kid out of wedlock with my aunt. Same guy who had at least one affair, a lady he married after he and my aunt divorced. The same guy that afterward moved back to San Antonio and was working as part of the SBC and was children's pastor (maybe assistant pastor?) at one of the bigger churches there.

        10) We attended at least four churches while we lived on my parents were separated. Three of them were Baptist. One was charismatic. The charismatic church we started going to with my grandparents. That church was, and is, super into Kenneth Copeland, Jesse Duplantis, and the like. Google them if you don't know who they are. It's super Word of Faith movement and super prosperity theology. It's speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, casting out demons, talking to angels, etc., etc.

        At some point, something snapped with my mom, and she quit going. She told me the specific event, but I'll save that for later. My sisters and I were reluctant to change churches (me most of all), but we eventually did. My grandparents stopped going eventually, but for many years they were involved in what they called (I think) freedom and recovery. Short version is they believed that bad actions, thoughts, habits are due to demonic influence. They helped exorcise the demons and establish new patterns of behavior that would keep the demons from coming back.



        I think that's a good place to stop for now. It gets messier from here, but I think this establishes a pretty good foundation for what's going on at the time. Part 2 will be what happened during my time at the charismatic church. Part 3 will be what I'll call 'aftermath'...basically where I ended up with all this in high school and college.

        Feel free to ask questions on any of this.
        I'm not here anymore.

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        • #19
          Originally posted by Carrikature View Post
          Fair warning that it will be long.
          I did warn you that this would be long.
          I'm not here anymore.

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          • #20
            I think #10 is the most disturbing...Neither Bill nor I think much of Ken Nopeland, Jessie Dupe-us and their ilk. Pretty much anything they say needs to be discounted. So I can already see a problem...
            "What has the Church gained if it is popular, but there is no conviction, no repentance, no power?" - A.W. Tozer

            "... there are two parties in Washington, the stupid party and the evil party, who occasionally get together and do something both stupid and evil, and this is called bipartisanship." - Everett Dirksen

            Comment


            • #21
              Originally posted by Littlejoe View Post
              I think #10 is the most disturbing...Neither Bill nor I think much of Ken Nopeland, Jessie Dupe-us and their ilk. Pretty much anything they say needs to be discounted. So I can already see a problem...
              I saw a video recently where Ken and Jesse were discussing their private planes. Apparently, Ken thinks it's necessary because he'd be surrounded by demons on a normal airplane. Jesse was telling how God was telling him that he was getting complacent for not having his sights set on a better one. So yeah...
              I'm not here anymore.

              Comment


              • #22
                Originally posted by Carrikature View Post
                I saw a video recently where Ken and Jesse were discussing their private planes. Apparently, Ken thinks it's necessary because he'd be surrounded by demons on a normal airplane. Jesse was telling how God was telling him that he was getting complacent for not having his sights set on a better one. So yeah...
                You MIGHT go back far enough and find that some of these guys started off legit and sincere...but I think greed and a hunger for power overtook them long ago and IMO they are now, nothing but Wolves in Sheep's clothing.
                "What has the Church gained if it is popular, but there is no conviction, no repentance, no power?" - A.W. Tozer

                "... there are two parties in Washington, the stupid party and the evil party, who occasionally get together and do something both stupid and evil, and this is called bipartisanship." - Everett Dirksen

                Comment


                • #23
                  Originally posted by Littlejoe View Post
                  You MIGHT go back far enough and find that some of these guys started off legit and sincere...but I think greed and a hunger for power overtook them long ago and IMO they are now, nothing but Wolves in Sheep's clothing.
                  The thing is, I'm not entirely convinced they aren't sincere. I don't see how someone can operate at that level without believing the stuff they say.
                  I'm not here anymore.

                  Comment

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