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.

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.

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 Holiness 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.

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.”

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, for my purposes, fundamentalism is:

• Any Protestant church
• that holds the characteristic fundamentalist teaching of an inerrant Bible (and related doctrines)
• and emphasizes separation for the sake of moral and doctrinal purity.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

First, who are the Holiness people?

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.

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

• Independent: Each church is self-governing, though there are loose affiliations or “fellowships” around the country created for the purposes of supporting each other and, often, organizing campmeetings. The pastor rules each church–which is why I’ve said before that each individual church can range from “merely” fundamentalist to cultish. I’ve been a member of churches all along that spectrum. As for their opinion of other Christians, the Holiness people believe they are pretty much the only ones going to Heaven. There are a couple of other (also rather obscure) groups that might be okay but that’s it.
• Traditional Pentecostal: They are not Charismatic or Word-Faith or Assembly of God or any of those folks you see on Christian TV. In fact, they loathe those people. The Holiness people believe in healing, yes, but not in the “name it and claim it” sense; for them, healing is a real but rare thing to be sought but not demanded. They also believe in ecstatic worship and speaking in tongues. Not learned tongues, mind you. That is one of the things they loathe about the TV Pentecostals: they “taught” people how to speak in tongues. For the Holiness people, speaking in tongues is a spontaneous act of the Holy Ghost speaking through a person. When they dance in the Spirit, it is not a choreographed, practiced step but a wild paroxysm. Though they would reject this framing, the Holiness people believe in worship that could be characterized as shamanistic. They utterly reject the “respectable” or the “formal.”
• Holiness: For the Holiness people, Christianity fell almost entirely into formalism and apostasy sometime in or after the apostolic age and did not recover until around the time of John Wesley or, at latest, the Azusa Street revival. Some Holiness people believe in a “second work of grace” experience of sanctification like the Wesleyans. Mostly, though, the “holiness” in Holiness people is less about a doctrine of sanctification than it is about “standards”, i.e, rules of dress and behavior. An incomplete list: women must have long, untrimmed hair; men’s hair must be cut at the natural hairline and no facial hair; women’s must wear dresses or skirts that are knee length; no makeup; no shorts or jewelry for anyone (some made an exception for wedding rings); no television or movies; no secular music; no Christian rock or pop music. The list really could go on for a while. Also, to be clear, these were not considered “house rules” but the very commandments of God. To violate these standards was to sin.

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.

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.