My Testimony/Story II: Rejecting the Church

After my conversion, I still had to connect with the rest of the Christian Church. This was a journey of rejection and humiliation.

Wandering

Like my career life, I spent 2006 through 2020 wandering through a few dozen churches throughout the United States.

This ended up giving me the Grand Tour of every Christian denomination in the USA:

  • Evangelical Free Church of America x3: 5 years
  • Seventh-Day Adventist: 4.5 years elementary private-schooled
  • Southern Baptist Church x2: 4 years
  • Discipled/mentored by the now-transcended CEO of Mastermedia International: 2.5 years
  • Third-Wave Pentecostal: 1 year
  • Church of Christ: 1 year
  • Calvary Chapel x3: 1 year
  • House church with cult-like characteristics (Geftakys Assembly): 4 months
  • Big Eva x3: 4 months
  • Hutterite-inspired church: 2 months
  • Roman Catholic church: 2 months
  • House church inspired directly by Jack Langford: 1 month
  • Hebrew Roots Movement: <1 month
  • Foursquare Pentecostal: <1 month
  • Oneness Pentecostal: <1 month
  • Eastern Orthodox Catholic church: ~1 month Ancient Faith podcasts

My mother’s anti-authority, anti-establishment training didn’t help me integrate.

  • People generally resisted my ambitions to serve because I had a hard time conforming.
  • I also didn’t have the patience to stick around long enough to earn the leadership’s approval.

This built a pattern that reinforced future encounters.

Bad optics

Over time, I noticed a few patterns within those various churches:

  1. Many Christian leaders, of all denominations, spend a significant portion of their effort advertising their specific church or denomination as the “right” one.
    • They were very quick to dismiss “outsider” groups.
    • At the same time, I saw they shared 98% of the same things (e.g., Baptists rejecting Methodists, Roman Catholics rejecting Eastern Orthodox).
    • When I asked them about it, they saw it as promoting the Gospel. They were either unwilling or unable to see the distinction.
  2. The leadership cared deeply about “building up” the Christian Church, but usually only their congregation.
    • I only respected that authority as one leader, in one church, alongside ~31,000 denominations who all held at least some of the truth.
    • I didn’t mince my words, so most of them resented the equivocation.
  3. Many of my fellow laity didn’t prioritize understanding their Christian faith like I did.
    • It was more a social club than anything I had read about in the book of Acts.
    • Their general response to my passion was “dude, lighten up”, “trust in your leadership”, or “stop asking so many questions”.

In the midst of this, my personality and conversion magnified my optics issues.

  • As stated before, and will clarify later, I came from the Stoic philosophy, which severely emphasized mental performance.
  • My spiritual gifts are largely teaching, administration, and prophecy. These all at least somewhat require institutional consent (e.g., logistics, teaching, writing, organizing, technology).
  • I was extremely harsh when it came to truth, but triply harsh toward the Church. I saw they had the market on truths about the most important concepts in existence.
  • This harshness turned off most of the Church.

Long-term decay

This situation devolved over time through a series of phases.

First, I’d go to a church and offer to help almost immediately.

Then, for various reasons, the church leadership wouldn’t trust me.

I then imagined, for a while, there was something wrong with me. This came from internalized shame.

Then, after some years, I became inflated with tons of theological concepts, and started asking bigger questions. I thought I could fix the Church.

I didn’t feel like my attempts were working. However, I also found no meaning or corporate spiritual connection with sitting idly in the rest of the congregation.

Then, after enough failed effort, I’d move on to another church.

As I moved from “acolyte” to “embittered veteran”, I started facing more steady resistance from the leadership.

This got worse after I personally experienced multiple, repeated, profound successes outside the Church’s influence.

    False hope

    I met my wife in 2014, which was the best decision of my life at the time. I traveled across the country to get to know her, and we fell in love within months.

    God clearly guided us to each other, but our narcissistic mothers meant our marriage was trauma bonding through unresolved abuse.

    • She had very few opportunities in her life. She saw me as an opportunity to get out of her mother’s house.
    • My career and lifestyle at the time were tumultuously cycling, and I felt she accepted me when nobody else had.

    We conceived Victor in 2017, then Mia in 2020.

    I anticipated I’d get my opportunity soon to lead, and expected to find a church community that would accept me.

    However, all my efforts were through belief in myself, and I was trusting my own efforts through all of this.

    Nothing, however, seemed to change. Starting around late 2016, but really ramping up in 2020, I sought answers beyond the Church’s formalized authority.