{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "The Given Life (religious memoir) on jabel", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2021/97100.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://jabel.blog/", "feed_url": "https://jabel.blog/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2025/09/19/this-looks-like-the-churches.html", "content_html": "

This looks like the churches I grew up in, with two differences:

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  1. We would not have had a baptistery. We did baptisms in a deep spot in a local creek.
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  2. If we would have had a baptistery, we would not have jumped into it. We would have said that brother “got in the flesh.”
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Otherwise, totally us.

\n", "date_published": "2025-09-19T16:40:08-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2025/09/19/this-looks-like-the-churches.html", "tags": ["Memories","The Given Life (religious memoir)"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/12/13/the-given-life.html", "title": "The Given Life, part four", "content_html": "

Just beneath my skin is a religious zealot, full of fierce denunciation, austerity and ecstasy. Twenty years ago, I tried to kill him with intellectual ambition and respectable religion–and then finally with atheism. The attempt failed and, over the past few years, he and I have begun talking again. But that’s a story for another time. Today’s story is about the birth and early years of my inner zealot.

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As I said in my last post, my teen years at Hilltop were busy. In addition to all the usual teenage activities, we were always traveling to revivals or special services or youth camps or campmeetings. We even flew to some of the more distant youth camps; for most of us, it was our first experience on an airplane.

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This Bible traveled with me throughout my teenage years.
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It’s not surprising, then, given my personality, that these repeated high doses of potent religion made me into one of the most committed Christians in my youth group. At some point, I began reading Leonard Ravenhill and A.W. Tozer, who both became heroes of mine. I was, often enough, a typical teenager (all the usual awkward, hormonal silliness) but throughout those years there was always within me a passion for genuine encounters with God.

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Adventures in self-publishing. Plagiarized some of my favorite sermons. No, I won't let you read it.
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I framed this longing for religious experience in terms I learned from Leonard Ravenhill: revival. Many of our churches, I believed, were moribund; we needed more passionate worship and life-changing experiences. In addition to the booklet above, I wrote many articles for our church newsletter on these themes. I recorded interviews with a few of the elders in our church to get their stories of the “good old days”–because I was certain that in those days our churches had more frequent and consequential contact with God.

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(This documentary footage of Holiness worship is the best I’ve found. There are more modern recordings but they don’t have the same manic energy. This one is perfect. The exhortations and gestures of the singer. The piano player–both his playing style and the way he’s backing up the lead singer. The simplicity and relentlessness of the song. (It was a favorite in our churches.) The dancing and speaking in tongues and shaking fits. The crowning glory is the final shot of the child sleeping through the chaos; I remember being that child, drifting in and out of sleep as the Holy Ghost walked among the pews, touching this person and that.)

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While my local church never quite lived up to my impossible expectations, youth camps and campmeetings were the highlights of my year. A week of three or more services daily with great preachers in attendance and rollicking good music–it was heaven on earth. One time we heard a sermon on Hell, illustrated with a piece of hamburger dropped into pot of boiling water and closed with an audio recording of the camp choir acting out the fate of the damned, screaming and howling as they remembered all of their opportunities to repent. Another time we heard a message in tongues and its interpretation that called out the hidden sin of one of the preachers on the stage. Another time we saw the exorcism of a gay teenager who was told he was demon possessed; those of us who had not been baptized in the Holy Ghost were ordered to go to the back of the church, out of exit trajectory of the demon.

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I could tell you a lot of stories, good and bad. I’ll end this part of the story with one of my experiences. One year at our local youth camp, my friend Andy sought for the baptism of the Holy Ghost in every service, to no avail. Finally the night came: Brother Mike B preached on “The Key to the Corn Crib” (about Joseph and his brothers, if I recall correctly). Andy prayed and prayed, sweating through his silk shirt, until finally he began to speak in tongues. The group helping him pray erupted. I became what we called “drunk on the Spirit.” Needless to say, I had never tasted alcohol to that point; needless to say, I’ve tasted plenty since then. My experience was exactly like being very drunk. I stumbled when I tried to walk. My speech was slurred. Everything seemed to be in a haze. I was slow to understand when people talked to me. At no point was I faking it. I was sufficiently delirious that it didn’t occur to me. I don’t recall exactly how long it lasted but it was on the order of a half-hour or more. Finally the experience began to fade. Reluctant for it to end, I began to try to make it last by faking and it immediately ceased. Stone cold sober.

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Was that experience real? Of course it was! Is such an experience unique to Pentecostalism or even Christianity? No. Stuff like that happens all the time. Like every account of the strange or miraculous, it doesn’t prove anything about the truth claims of the religion in which it occurs. Personally, I hold that and some other strange religious experiences loosely in my hand. I am thankful for the experiences but I don’t place too much emphasis on them. They are fingers pointing to the mystery at the heart of things.

\n", "date_published": "2024-12-13T17:51:48-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/12/13/the-given-life.html", "tags": ["The Given Life (religious memoir)"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/10/21/the-given-life.html", "title": "The Given Life, part 3", "content_html": "

After we left Springville church, we started attending Peerless Trinity Pentecostal Church.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

\n", "date_published": "2024-10-21T17:54:55-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/10/21/the-given-life.html", "tags": ["The Given Life (religious memoir)"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/10/16/225230.html", "title": "The Given Life, part two ", "content_html": "

My earliest religious memories took place at Trinity Pentecost Mission. (Yes, Pentecost. Like Episcopal and Episcopalian, the folks weren’t always sure whether they were Pentecost or Pentecostal.) My grandpa helped build the church when the congregation outgrew its old building around 1970.

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My grandpa was also Sunday School superintendent at that church for thirty years. I have the bell he used to ring to round up the children.

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Springville church (as it was more commonly known) was truly a country church. For me, that’s as much a feeling as anything, but I’ll try to put it into words. Springville was not a “destination” church. Both its members and pastors were people within the rural community itself. There were no preachers from states away dreaming of becoming its pastor. It was not known as a church with particularly fiery worship or lofty goals. The music was old-fashioned, even for a\nHoliness church. (Sierra Ferrell’s harmony on this song takes me straight back there, laying under the pews looking at the old chewing gum or dozing while the people sang.) They lived by Holiness standards, certainly, but they weren’t aggressive about it. The church was part of the local fellowship of Holiness churches but the big name preachers never showed up there. Guest preachers were mostly just local men.

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One of these local guest preachers made quite an impression on me once. Like most children I didn’t pay much attention to the preaching. I’d usually be stacking hymnals into roads and buildings for my toy cars. But this man was preaching about the end times and it caught my attention. He went on to describe the end in great detail and I was amazed at the detailed knowledge this man had about the future. At one point I recall saying to him, with some amazement, “Really?” A few people chuckled but he looked at me with serious eyes and replied, “Really.”

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But the most impressive preacher in those days was the pastor himself. Not for the content of his sermons (I don’t remember a scrap of them and he was long winded by reputation) but for the bizarre way he would catch his breath. First, you should understand that no Holiness preacher ever preached in a normal voice. Never. They would read their text normally, maybe make a few introductory remarks, and then whoop and holler for the next 45-90 minutes. The wonders Holiness preaching must do for your lung capacity!

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Brother Chet, the pastor, had a barrel chest and would yell like any other Holiness preacher but when he came to the end of his breath, he would go through this three part inhalation/exhalation that distressed everyone who heard him for the first time. It was like he was having a heart attack. To this day, I can hear it in my mind and, to this day, I can’t make any sense of how he did it.

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Mostly I associate Springville church with my maternal grandparents, Bud and Alta. I was only ten when they died but they live on with something like reverence among everyone who knew them. I’ve never heard a single word spoken against them. Quite the opposite, in fact.

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Grandpa was a strong and gentle man, who worked first in the limestone quarries and later on bombs at the local naval base. Somewhere along the line half his ring finger was “mashed right off.” He would always carry me on his back down the hill after we picked blackberries, despite me always promising that I’d walk on my own this time. When he got older and needed an oxygen tank and a wheelchair, some men from the church built him a porch with a ramp on the front of his trailer.

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Grandma was a legendary cook. She cooked at a local campground and at the school. The she cooked for her family of nine children. Then she’d cook for all the church events. Her chicken and dumplings were one of the favorites at the all day meetings. But she was also known for having prophetic dreams. If she ever told you she’d had a dream about you, you listened. When she dreamed of snakes, there was always trouble ahead.

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Grandpa died first and very shortly thereafter all the widowers in the community started talking up Grandma the legendary cook, but she would have none of it. She lived about six months after Grandpa died.

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We were devastated. We left Springville church shortly after their deaths. The official reason was that the church was shrinking, there were no kids other than me, and I was losing interest. But the real reason, I think, is that once Grandpa and Grandma were gone, the church would never be the same for us again.

\n", "date_published": "2024-10-16T22:52:30-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/10/16/225230.html", "tags": ["The Given Life (religious memoir)"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/10/16/the-given-life.html", "title": "The Given Life, part 1.5", "content_html": "

I need to clarify some terminology. I mentioned in the first post in this series that the Holiness churches were “fundamentalist.” Now, I know many people use that as a term of abuse for basically any conservative religious organization that they don’t like but I do have a specific meaning for it.

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I believe I got this from James Ault’s book Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church, which I read shortly after leaving the Holiness churches. It was very influential on me, as it put words to so much of my experience.

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Fundamentalism was a term first coined for early 20th century American Protestants who resisted what they perceived as modernism or liberalism, e.g., evolution, critical study of the Bible. The movement was thus named because of the publication of an influential series of pamphlets called The Fundamentals. These pamphlets advocated for an inerrant Bible, the virgin birth and bodily resurrection of Jesus, and many other doctrines that would come to characterize fundamentalism and then evangelicalism.

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Many ministers and churches left their denominations in order to form their own independent churches, seminaries, and parachurch organizations uncorrupted by modernism. Their vehement rejection of modernism formed a habit in them of fiercely policing their borders. In the postwar years, some of these fundamentalists would temper their separatism in order to work together on common goals. These people would become the first evangelicals: fundamentalism minus the separatism.

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So, for my purposes, fundamentalism is:

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Evangelicalism fits point one and mostly fits point two (though that’s less certain than it used to be) but does not fit point three. Evangelicals get together with other evangelicals of various stripes (Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist, and so on) to work on joint projects; fundamentalists don’t.

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So separatism is the key characteristic of fundamentalism for me. Evangelicalism is conservative, yes, but it is meant to be a big tent. Fundamentalism is an intentionally closed system.

\n", "date_published": "2024-10-16T16:03:40-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/10/16/the-given-life.html", "tags": ["The Given Life (religious memoir)"] }, { "id": "http://jabel.micro.blog/2024/09/26/my-wife-and.html", "title": "The Given Life, part 1", "content_html": "

My wife and I left the Holiness churches at the beginning of 2004 and joined the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS). I was already a heavy reader of theology at that time (both books and blogs), which is partly why we left Holiness. Once I no longer had to hide my growing and serious disagreements with the churches of my childhood, I started my own blog. My first post was an explanation of why I left Holiness. The post was titled “The Given Life” after the Wendell Berry poem. I’ve thought about reproducing it on this blog but it’s so badly written that I can’t bear it. While I’m not a great writer now, I was much worse then.

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Ten years after that I wrote an essay cleverly entitled “Ten Years Out of Fundamentalism.” That one is a bit less embarrassing.

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Since this is the twentieth year since we left, I’ve often thought over the last few months of writing a new version of the essay but never got started. So rather than trying to write a single, long piece, I’ve decided to make it easy on myself and write a series of shorter posts, which I’ll gather under a category “The Given Life”, named after that first essay.

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First, who are the Holiness people?

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I’ll tell you now: you’ve never heard of them. You may think you have but you’re very likely wrong. Not only are they an obscure branch of fundamentalist Christianity, they’re fiercely independent and don’t have a single denominational identifier. Say what you will about the alphabet soup of Christian denominations; at least they’re identifiable.

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The Holiness people are a group of independent, traditional Pentecostal Holiness churches.

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I should note that I’m explaining the Holiness people as they were when I was among them 20+ years ago. I suspect, based on what I see of them today, that they are not quite so strict as they used to be.

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I think that will serve as a decent introduction to the Holiness people. Feel free to add comments or questions, and if anything significant comes up I may edit this post to include it. The next post will shift to my experience in the Holiness churches.

\n", "date_published": "2024-09-26T16:55:16-04:00", "url": "https://jabel.blog/2024/09/26/my-wife-and.html", "tags": ["The Given Life (religious memoir)"] } ] }