After my conversion, I still had to connect with the rest of the Christian Church.
Like my career life, 2006 through 2020 had me wandering through a few dozen churches throughout the United States.
All in all, this situation mixed with my background gave me the Grand Tour of Christian denominations:
- 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 anti-authority, anti-establishment trained by my mother didn’t help me to integrate. My ambitions to serve were met with a general resistance because I had a hard time conforming, and I didn’t have the patience to stick around long enough to earn the leadership’s approval. This built a pattern that carried into the rest of my experience.
Over time, I started becoming bitter over a few patterns within those various churches:
- The typical concern of many Christian leaders, of all denominations, was advertising their specific church or denomination as the “right” one.
- Some of what they said was right, but they were very quick to dismiss “outsider” groups.
- This was particularly egregious when I saw they shared 98% of the same things (e.g., Baptists rejecting Methodists, Roman Catholics rejecting Eastern Orthodox).
- Further, if you asked them about it, they saw it as promoting the Gospel, and they were either unwilling or unable to see the distinction.
- The leadership cared deeply about “building up” the Christian Church, but that usually meant their specific church.
- I only respected their authority as one leader, in one church, alongside ~31,000 denominations who all held at least some of the truth.
- Since I didn’t mince my words, most of them resented my equivocation.
- Many of my fellow laity didn’t make understanding their Christian faith much of a priority.
- 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, I had come from the Stoic philosophy, with a severe emphasis on performance-based obsession.
- Most of my spiritual gifts are flavored toward teaching, administration, and prophecy, which all at least somewhat require the consent of the institution (e.g., logistics, teaching, writing, organizing, or technology.
- Generally, when it came to the truth, I was extremely harsh. For spiritual truths, I was triply harsh because I saw the Church had the market cornered on the truth about eternity.
- This harshness turned off most of the Church.
This devolved over time:
- I’d go to a church and offer to help almost immediately.
- For various reasons, the church leadership wouldn’t trust me.
- I imagined for a while that there was something wrong with me within the Christian Church. This came from internalized shame.
- Then, after some years, I started to become inflated with tons of theological concepts, and started asking bigger questions. It was an attempt to fix the Church.
- Since I didn’t feel wanted or useful, I found no meaning or corporate spiritual connection with sitting idly with the rest of the congregation.
- I moved on to another church.
- I started facing more steady resistance from the leadership as I moved from “acolyte” to “embittered veteran”.
- This got worse after I personally experienced multiple, repeated, profound successes outside the Church’s influence.
I met my wife in 2014, and it was the best decision of my life.
- I traveled across the country to meet her, and we fell in love within months.
- My career and lifestyle at the time was still in a tumultuous cycle of self-discovery, but she still accepted me when hardly any people elsewhere had.
- While it was evident God guided us to each other, we were both trauma bonding from the abuse from our respective covert narcissistic mothers.
- While she softened my jagged edges and civilized me immensely, this didn’t address the brokenness deep within both of us.
- We had a child together in 2017, then another one in 2020.
I had anticipated that I’d get my opportunity soon, and that I’d be able to find a church community that would accept my involvement. I worked hard to implement what I understood about social standards, and believed it was only a matter of time.
But, nothing seemed to change. Starting around late 2016, but really ramping up in 2020, I sought answers beyond the Church’s formalized authority.