Consider this: I accepted Jesus into my heart when I was nine. My pastor baptized me in a cold lake--no head dipping or sprinkling. It was outdoor immersion, to be rid of the old man and take on the new. I was filled with the Holy Spirit, as manifested by speaking in tongues, casting out devils, laying hands on the sick. When the sick didn't get better, it was because of someone's sin or lack of faith. Or God was punishing them, or allowing them to be punished to prove their worth, as he had done with Job.

That gets me back to my faith. Doubt was sinful, weak, and despicable. Doubt failed the man who loved us and died for us, Jesus. I accepted every line of the King James Bible literally, including the age of Methuselah, how the sun stood still for a Stone Age battle (in the Book of Joshua), and that God slew a man for touching His Ark when it shook in a wagon. The Psalms celebrated dashing the heads of babies (if they were enemies of Israel), and we accepted that, too. The Old Testament was a rough time, we realized. The most important thing was that God had led the Israelites to create a country that birthed the Messiah. If it got a bit ugly, that was okay.

We believed the Bible because it told us to believe it. Focusing on historical and other errors in the Bible was a weakness. Denying there were completely contradictory Gospels was a sign of strength and faith. The Bible was inerrant. Science was untrustworthy. Flawed unbelieving men created it who didn't understand that faith was the best way to know anything. They were of the world--and we were opposed to that. After all, we knew the wind existed even if we didn't see it. Darwin's evolutionary concepts were somehow blasphemous, although the Bible didn't exactly contradict them, either.

Forget Darwin. I believed there were one man and one woman who produced the entire human race, which made us wonder how Cain and Abel were able to find mates when incest is also a sin. (We guessed it was because genetics and incest hadn't become a problem yet. Somehow.) Dinosaurs, and their great age beyond the accepted 6,000 years of the Bible, were a bit of a distraction. But, those dinosaur bones might have been planted by Satan to cause doubt, we guessed.

Back to doubt: We didn't tolerate it. Or questioning authority. And hadn't sin entered the world because the Serpent had first asked a question of Eve: "Hath not God said?"

Although there was no really good country, we were the best because we could speak in tongues in freedom. Sort of.  But the country hadn't been real good since the Puritans, even if they hadn't exactly accepted Jesus as their personal savior. We waited for Ronald Reagan with joy, although we found politicians were untrustworthy, as they had to serve sinners and make compromises we found intolerable. The point of the state was to help support the Gospel and end the genocide of babies known as abortion. The rest was silly compromise.

Men and women had an odd relationship. They were brothers and sisters; sometimes, lovers. St. Paul had told us lust and marriage were unnecessary as we were waiting for Christ to return. But we still had marriages, and children were born both in and out of wedlock. When it came to same-sexers, we were puzzled why they had made such an unnatural choice. We knew that no one should drop a single tear over the lost rights of homosexuals; they deserved jail or worse and were probably full of demons.

The civil rights movement--what was the point of that? Paul had told slaves to submit to masters, so social change was not just pointless, it was wrong. Women's lib--a violation of the injunction for wives to submit to husbands. Witches should be burned or hanged, but no one was sure how to implement that. The environment--pointless to save. We never questioned, however, why it was somehow fine and acceptable to burn gas in cars and create pollution. But then again, God had given us the planet to be fruitful and multiply.

What was the purpose of welfare? It was there to encourage the poor to breed and commit fornication. Unions: crooks. Transcendental meditation: a dangerous way of allowing demons into your soul. All eastern philosophy was demonic and pointless: Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius: all deceivers and led by Satan. In this church, Roman Catholics believed in false gods by way of the saints; the Jews had been appointed to suffer because they had taken the blood and guilt of Christ's on themselves and had rejected him as messiah. Other Protestants, such as the Congregationalists and Methodists, were lukewarm and betrayers of the faith: They were the Pharisees. For real faith, only the Baptists were trustworthy brethren.

Although God had spoken once and for all in the Bible, sometimes people claimed personal revelation. We also believed God talked to us when someone began speaking in tongues in the middle of the service. We had to wait for translation from an interpreter, and it was a sin to doubt it. We believed in dreams, and visions. The elect of us were prophets. Some believed they were able to see and cast out demons.

A lot of the saved found living with their sinner families had become intolerable. My mother was saved and my father wasn't: they never seemed to have a civil word together . My father wanted to sue the church for alienation of affection. For a long time, we didn't get along and I spied on him for my mother.  He didn't like that, but I accepted the arrangement as the lot of a the saint.  Jesus said he'd come to set brother against brother.
Being saved had a lot of advantages. If someone made a major mistake, they could write it off: God had willed it. Or they could blame it on Satan, too. It depended on the circumstance, but there was always an excuse or reason. Former criminals or outright liars were often guests at the church, telling us lurid stories of their pasts in testimony. We always looked forward to that. Once, there was a problem in the church when a born again murderer tried to date a member's daughter and the member wasn't keen on the idea. He didn't really believe in the power of regeneration and was frowned on.

My Assembly of God was a church plagued by teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, drug abuse, promiscuity, strict social castes, and outright mental illness. It had every problem that existed in every other organization of people. It was full of sniping, backbiting, toadying, and gossip. Only the members refused to see the problems and speak about them or seek real remedies. They would just pray and hope or pretend a problem or abuse didn't exist. Besides, we were all headed to Heaven, so what did a few minor indiscretions here on earth matter, anyway? This was just the practice run. Those that had authority in the church generally weren't humble or meek. They were confident they'd been saved and God worked through them; they weren't much for saying they were sorry.

The church members also ignored odd behavior that would never have escaped notice in any other sort of organization. The pastor started an outreach to Haiti. (We didn't care about improving the island's economy. There was no point in helping the body when the soul was at risk.) We sent some pitiful supplies but it was just a way to get the natives saved. As for the pastor: He eventually all but disappeared. Again and again other preachers stood in his pulpit. Eventually it became clear, painfully so, he had a mistress and that was the point of his outreach. It took a long time for that to become apparent.

None of the ideas about God, money, sex, America, the afterlife, or prosperity were ever really synchronized and made consistent. Metaphorically speaking, if they were all assembled together, they would have made a very odd and contradictory house that couldn't really hang together. The members just accepted it on faith that their system of faith made some sort of integrated whole.

The future and present were bleak: we wanted both to be bleaker. That would hasten the Second Coming of Christ--as prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The Angry Christ with a sword in his mouth would appear: not the gentle Lamb of God who had put up with too much, already. I also believed the world would end in fire, there would be a 144,000 Jews saved, and the Antichrist would be somehow connected to the European Union and the Roman Catholic Church (because of the mention of the seven hills). Armageddon would happen when Russia invaded Israel: we were disappointed when that didn't happen. But, someday, we'd have our day and eventually, there would be the Millennium and the New Jerusalem and we'd judge Angels. Sinners, such as my father, had rejected Christ, and would be damned forever, and deservedly so.

I ceased to believe these things a long time ago and took what I thought was best of the AOG with me.  I know  a lot of the Assembly of God people are still disappointed that the rapture hasn't come off yet--but they haven't lost faith that the world might end by fire in their lifetimes. After all, they'll have someone that thinks like them in the White House.

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