After we left Springville church, we started attending Peerless Trinity Pentecostal Church.
A digression: you’ll notice both of the churches so far include a reference to the Trinity in their name. The reason for this is to distinguish ourselves from the “Oneness” or “Apostolic” Pentecostals. I think we were close to the same numerically in our local area, but on any larger scale the Oneness Pentecostals outnumbered us significantly. Oneness Pentecostals are so named because they deny the Trinity. They also believe water baptism and speaking in tongues are required for salvation. We did not. As for Holiness standards of dress and behavior, we were pretty much the same. Another interesting difference between us (at least locally) was the we were working class and the Oneness folks were middle class. You could always tell which group a stranger belonged to by how nicely they dressed. I don’t know if that remains true today. End of digression.
As I was saying, we started attending Peerless. Honestly, I don’t remember a whole lot about our time there because it was relatively brief. It was nevertheless crucial in that I became friends with Andy while we were there. We have remained friends ever since and our conversations over the years have had a strong influence on my development. He’ll enter this story a few times.
I don’t think we stayed at Peerless more than a year or two before moving on to Hilltop Pentecostal Church, which had a larger and more active youth group. We arrived just in time for a major split. I don’t remember the details and they’re probably too boring to narrate even if I did. Basically, Brother David was voted out as pastor and a large chunk (maybe even half?) the congregants left in protest. Brother David went on to pastor a church in another state and most of the congregants that left started going to one of the other Holiness churches in the local fellowship. This happened a lot in our churches. Not necessarily the dramatic splits (though those happened plenty often!) but the ebb and flow of the churches in the fellowship. One would get hot and draw in members of the other churches, then decline when another church got hot. It’s very common for local Holiness people to have been members of several of the churches over their lifetimes.
In Holiness churches, truly new converts are very rare. Whenever a church gets a new member it’s almost always because 1. they came from a different church or 2. they were a “backslider” who had come back. Backsliding is when a believer lost their salvation and returned to a life of sin. Most often that person also stopped attending church, but it was possible to backslide while still sitting in the pews. There’s a remarkable stickiness with Holiness churches. It seems that very few people leave and never look back, like Rachel and I and a few others would eventually do. Most backsliders still believed what the churches taught; they just didn’t feel like they could live it for whatever reason.
Soon enough we got a new pastor, Brother J. My pre-teen and teenage years at Hilltop were eventful and fun. At some point Andy and his family also started attending. A lot of good memories of going on trips to campmeetings and churches all over the Midwest and South. For the purposes of this story, however, I’ll try to confine myself to those things that I think contributed to my development.
I’ll end this post with that inaugural experience of Pentecostals: the baptism of the Holy Ghost. (Yes, always Holy Ghost, never Holy Spirit. We were KJV-only folks.)
For classical Pentecostals like the Holiness people, the baptism of the Holy Ghost was an experience subsequent to salvation that empowered the believer to live a more victorious life (i.e., less sinning) and be a better witness to unbelievers. The evidence that a person had attained this experience was that the Holy Ghost would speak through them in a language unknown by them, i.e., “speak in tongues.” For us, this was only genuine when it was an ecstatic, untaught experience.
Strangely enough, I don’t remember that much about my experience. I know it was at our church camp and it was the summer before I entered high school in 1991. I’m fairly sure the preacher that year was Brother Gary E, who was known to be something like a specialist in preaching young people into the experience.
What I remember of my experience was pretty typical of the way young men received the baptism of the Holy Ghost in those days: praying for an extended time at the altar after the preaching, surrounded by other people praying with and encouraging you, head and arms up, praising God vocally. This last thing was important because the Holy Ghost always seemed to take possession of a voice vocally praising God. At some point I was “slain in the Spirit” (fell backwards onto the floor) and began speaking in tongues.
The inevitable question when people hear that I spoke in tongues as a teenager is whether I think the experience was “real.” Let’s set that aside, though, until I get to an experience later in my teenage years that I remember more vividly.