I was raised in the Missionary Baptist Church. At eight years old I publicly made my confession, was water-baptized, received communion, and was offered the right hand of fellowship with membership into my childhood home church, from here on out to be called NNMBC. About nine years later that church split, let’s just say over issues with follow-on leadership. I would spend the next year of my Christianity absorbing religious teachings with an unbelievable and relatively new zeal in a new church, from here on out to be called NBMBC. Later, I would start cautiously wandering away from what I was taught, testing ideas about my religion, and finding out some truths for myself.
Daddy was my trusted personal religious leader and when I had questions about anything regarding religion – ours and others – I trusted him to be completely honest in his responses. I would go to Daddy before anyone else because I knew that what he had to say would be based on experience or from his own research and education, and that he would refer me to texts that would support his answers. I also trusted him to honestly admit if he didn’t know something and that he would do the research and get back to me or encourage me to do the research with him. Even though some of what he would say would fall in the category of dogma, his delivery was never dogmatic and always logical (despite religion or spirituality not being what I would define as logical). But then I went to college, and everything went to hell. Okay, everything didn’t go to hell, and I can’t even justify that level of melodrama here, so, I take it back. But college was the start of curiosity, circumstance, and independence taking me along a slightly different path than I ever imagined.
The first year of college, I partnered up with a new friend who matched my particular freshman demographic in my search for a church family in the town where I attended school. We were both female, away from home, and part of the 5% minority population of the university. One of the things that created a firmer bond early in our friendship was that we were both daughters of black Baptist preachers who needed to find a church to attend regularly while we were away from home, and we believed it should be a Baptist church. We were glad to be on this search together and found we wanted similar things from a church-home-away-from-home. Unfortunately and universally we found, beyond doctrine and styles of worship, that we didn’t feel welcome in those churches. We were our best Baptist Christian selves and were snubbed by those who we expected to welcome us to the family and offer the right hand of fellowship. We dutifully stood as visitors, reciting the most relevant details of what I like to call our “Christian resumes”, offering ourselves to be cradled in the arms of the churches and we didn’t find a place that felt like home as we hoped. After reporting back to our families our lack of success and the new routes we planned to take – seeking Christian churches of other denominations – neither of our families were particularly happy but they trusted us to make the right decision (which was simply joining a church). It wasn’t terribly long after we started with this new plan that we landed at a charismatic church – House of God I believe was the official denomination. This church will be referred to as BHOG going forward.
I didn’t know much about the charismatic churches at that time and had to be brought up to speed on the charismatic denominations. To shorten my learning curve, those who knew I grew up in Memphis likened House of God to the Church of God In Christ. I had been curious about the Church of God In Christ forever. In my ignorance, it was the only church that I would consider charismatic (even though I didn’t get that vocabulary until I was an adult) and therefore stood alone as a strange but intriguing group of Christians. When I was growing up, Memphis was where their official leadership & headquarters was located and the place where they held a large annual conference. I knew it as “the saints coming to town” or “the COGIC coming for conference”. I wouldn’t understand that COGIC was an acronym for the Church of God In Christ until I was a little older so it sounded more like an affliction than an affiliation, and is partly why I seldom use the acronym today, even in writing. The other thing sparking my curiosity as a child about the Church of God In Christ was that Daddy and my siblings from his first wife were involved in that church for a period of time and something went terribly wrong because they spoke about the church with some unpleasantness that I don’t want to give a label. I know the story from a couple of points of view but each of them experienced it in their own way and I can’t articulate their feelings and don’t want to label them. But the point is I was always curious about the Church of God In Christ. And because the pastor of my NBMBC came from the Church of God In Christ I was exposed to certain influences that made for a more energetic style of worship than I had been accustomed.
As I said earlier, curiosity (about charismatic churches and styles of worship), circumstances (feeling terribly unwelcome in the local Baptist churches and incredibly valued in a charismatic church), and independence (more on my own than I wanted to be) led me to BHOG, ready to join under Watch Care. Watch Care was a way of joining a church under temporary circumstances – being away from home at college – so that we’d have a spiritual leader, spiritual family, and could fulfill our Christian obligations and rituals for the duration of the temporary relocation. That’s my own definition by the way, based on my experience at the time. The process of joining a church under Watch Care included presenting a letter from the pastor of your home church (NBMBC) to the Watch Care pastor (BHOG) and then finding out if you were “accepted” which, as long as there was no issue regarding beliefs about baptism (water and immersion) and you came to an understanding of where your tithes were going, you would generally be “accepted”. What I was unprepared for was that my pastor (NBMBC) would outright refuse to write me a letter because, as he explained, he’d spent time in the Church of God In Christ which to him was equivalent to BHOG and I had no clue what I was getting myself into. I found this a bit irrational and not only insufficient but also an unacceptable explanation, so I decided to go to Daddy. He was not my pastor, but he was the assistant pastor at NBMBC; the person who responded to my tugs on his heartstrings; and the person whose guidance, for me, would trump anyone else’s. I would explain all this to BHOG so that I would be “accepted”. Unfortunately it was one of the few times that Daddy hid behind a very weak excuse, refusing to write a letter because he wasn’t officially my pastor. But I knew it was because he didn’t support my choice of church. He did believe in order and that it was my pastor’s place to write the letter, but if he’d felt differently about the church I’d chosen, he would have written the letter and that would have been the end of it. So, with no possibilities of getting a letter, I approached the BHOG pastor and before I could even start to explain that I couldn’t get a letter, he told me that he never expected that I’d get a letter and that if I was still interested in joining his church, he’d give me a modified version of the process which combined regular membership orientation with Watch Care orientation. And he was careful to explain to me that my tithes were expected to go to BHOG and not NBMBC.
While in college I took two religious studies courses while having “left” my home church and denomination for a “new” church and denomination. It was so interesting learning academically about so many other religions and this was the first time I began to embrace all the Abrahamic religions and became unusually fascinated by the Wiccan studies. I’d determined that if I had been born with absolutely no religious belief set and sought out my own by studying them all, I probably would be Wiccan. It would be years, literally over a decade, before I would openly share that with Christians who felt invested in my religious path. It didn’t go over well but at least I wasn’t met with rescue efforts because by then I was certain that I was going to be a Christian for life.
Daddy got sick when I had about two years left in my college career. He was struggling with a cancer diagnosis, and he was nearly 80 years old. As the possibility of his death felt almost tangible, I took my prayer requests to my BHOG church family. I didn’t feel I had a place at NBMBC anymore except on paper and my NBMBC pastor was in jail much of this time anyway. (Yes, I’m going to leave that right there for now and I can’t promise I’ll revisit it with any significance.) And so my BHOG family supported me and prayed with me and believed with me for Daddy’s healing. While I prayed for his healing, I also began grieving him. I had no doubt that God would hear my prayer, but I also didn’t want Daddy to suffer simply for the sake of my not wanting to let him go. After some time Daddy was effectually healed of the cancer but his body was a wreck from the treatment. Not to mention, as assistant pastor at NBMBC he took on the responsibility of managing the church in my pastor’s absence. He fell into a vicious cycle of taking care of the church until he would get sick and be admitted to the hospital. He’d recover somewhat and head back to the church to start the cycle all over again. I was infuriated. All along I had begged my NBMBC pastor not to make Daddy the assistant pastor because he was in his 70s and to get some more preachers at the church. My NBMBC pastor was not in agreement with what I thought was quite logical – having someone who is twice your age be your second in command was impractical to say the least and stupid to say the most. Don’t you want someone who can take on the torch after you’re gone? And hadn’t we as a church just struggled with the idea that my NNMBC pastor had to be “sat down” by the parishioners because he was too old and didn’t want to let go of pastoring? I mean if you are of the opinion that there is such a thing as “too old”, why would anyone who was over 70 years old be in position to takeover the church? I appreciated that he regarded Daddy as a wise advisor – the only reason he gave me for his choice – but I disagreed that Daddy needed any responsibility for the actual running of the church. I digress, but only a bit. My experiences, disappointments, and other slights from NBMBC (along with the ones from NNMBC that I haven’t mentioned) began to change the way I viewed what it meant to be a Christian.
After Daddy’s cancer was in remission and while he was sick from the treatment, I continued with my grieving. I felt he wouldn’t be with me much longer – even though I still had ideas that he’d at least see 90 – and I needed to be ready to let him go. The only problem with my acceptance that he was nearing the end of his life is that my BHOG family didn’t listen to me and continued to pray for something I was no longer believing for or wanted. And my confidences were betrayed – with the best intentions of caring for me – so my trust in them faltered. Daddy died during my last semester of college and while my BHOG family cared for me during my grief more than any other spiritual family, I felt unseen and therefore, though it sounds extreme, no longer loved or safe. I remember being asked to stand at BHOG during the Sunday evening service held the same night I returned to college from having attended Daddy’s funeral. I went because I didn’t want to be alone with my grief and my religion was supposed to be the thing that held me up and strengthened me and would help me finish my college degree. My BHOG pastor said something about how impressive it was that I was at church because it said something about my commitment to the church – not being lazy or using my travel to bury my father as an excuse to not make it to church – and that was the end of my time at BHOG even though I would not officially leave until I graduated.
Just before I graduated college I began isolating myself from the church in general, beginning with intentionally not attending church regularly. I remember the first Sunday I purposely didn’t go to church. I sat on my bed and read the newspaper and felt so free. I very specifically felt exactly free. People came by to check on me after service – because as I said I truly had a church family – and I was a bit defiant with some, testing their ministry to me. I remember one thing I thought truly trivial yet hypocritical was that in all the years I had heard “come as you are” in every church, it apparently didn’t apply to me and no one could even hear the contradiction in what they were telling me. What I heard was that based on what I call my religious resume, I was no longer in the category of folks who could just come as they were, and if I didn’t attend church in my regular “uniform” (which at the time was a suit or dress, control top pantyhose, and heels) then I would be inappropriately dressed. Offering that I couldn’t afford dry-cleaning was not met with an offer of financial help but with encouragement to just find a way. I maintained it should have been acceptable for me to wear jeans to church. All of these tiny contradictions and small hypocrisies, the prophe-lies* and the manipulations, and all the things that humans tend to do to anything they put their hands on all wrapped up into one big trauma, and it wore on the ties I had to the religion I was born into and loved – Missionary Baptist Christianity. Add to that the season of Rebel Gina which followed college graduation – my seemingly unpredictable, irrational and consistent anger along with a uniform of olive green and black – and I essentially walked away from the church. It is most important that I am clear that I walked away from the church (the building and the fellowship) – not my beliefs. While I agree that I am instructed not to forsake the fellowship, I maintain that I should be particular in choosing who is in the fellowship.
Tons of words again. Have we made this a three-parter? Probably.
I am Regina Lynette. I am a Baptist Christian. Probably.
*Prophe-lies, pronounced ‘prof-uh-lize’, is a lie, typically that serves another’s own agenda, that is shared under the cover of a prophecy.
I am Regina Lynette 