My Story: Introducing The Church Part 2
Terms and Authority Structure
As I am continuing in this series, I realize that what I have started doing is like defining terms at the beginning of a legal document (The Church, The Wolf, etc), which made me laugh a little bit to myself. I just can’t escape my legal education! Today’s installment, I want to introduce the authority structure and the terms and phrases in our church culture. I do feel that explaining these things ahead of continuing in a more flowing narrative will help give context for everything.
*Trigger warning, especially for those who grew up with me* (It took it out of me to write this!)
Authority Structure
Our church was independent but called itself an independent, fundamental, spirit-filled Baptist church. We were one hundred percent pastor led, and gradually, we ended up with three pastors, with The Wolf as the lead and main teaching pastor, and two others filling specific “offices” of evangelist and prophet. He never really said it explictly while I was in the cult, but I believe The Wolf believed himself to be akin to an apostle, and we believed in continuation of apostolic power today. (More on that later!) Although we had three pastors, we all knew who called the shots. The congregation had no say in anything whatsoever, and had to accept any pastor who was brought in an ordained because we were told God called them and they were anointed. Voting and congregational input was mocked, and churches who had that kind of structure were criticized because the congregation was just against submitting to biblical authority. The congregation was often likened to the nation of Israel in the Old Testament and The Wolf was like Moses, having to deal with all our mess. He was the mouthpiece of God in our lives, and everything he said was to be taken as such. Even if he was wrong. God would deal with an anointed man, and our job was just to listen, and stay under his “covering.”
The other two pastors had authority, but not really. Everything really went back up to The Wolf. Eventually, we added some other pastors, but we called them elders. They were lower down in authority. I truly can’t explain any clearer than that because it was weird and unclear. The one thing that always remained clear was that The Wolf was the God-ordained leader, and he was the one calling the shots. The pastors and elders families were also elevated in status. They were treated better and deserved more honor and respect than everyone else. This changed over the years, but eventually resulted in us having to always use their proper titles.
Even pastors’ and elders’ wives were in an upper tier and we were not permitted to just call them by their first name, but must call them “miss so-and-so”) This was especially jarring when my best friend’s husband became a pastor and suddenly, she was not my best friend anymore and I had to call her “Miss so-and-so.”
When I was little I remember my mom called the pastors’ wives the “ladies” and each woman had her lady that she was accountable to. I was only a child witnessing this, and I think initially it was meant as a kind of discipleship, at least on the surface, but like everything else in The Church, it was a way of keeping tabs and reporting back to The Wolf.
This was a divide that God does not make in the church in His Word. This was the upper class and the lower class, and we were the lower class, meant to serve the upper-class. In fact, The Wolf preached against servant leadership explicitly.
This structure shifted over the years, even with The Wolf deciding to demote various pastors and elders over the years because of their behavior that was not loyal enough to him, or for whatever controlling purpose he had. For the most part, though, what I have described here was the way things were structured. Additionally, as the years went on and children grew, the children of pastors were ordained into pastor/elder/deacon offices. They kept it all in the family. The Wolf’s son eventually became a pastor and now is the public facing leader of The Church, however, behind the scenes, The Wolf is still controlling.
Ordination did not include much other than the whim of The Wolf, and a service where the selected men were appointed and prayed over as pastor. Theological education was not viewed as important, and in fact, I grew up hearing that it was what killed good preaching.
Terms
We had our own vocabulary in The Church, and our words might have sounded normal to the outside, but they had meanings that only we understood. I believe the psychological term for this (or for a form of this) is dog whistling. (I’ll leave the deep dive on that tactic to the reader.) In sermons, there were phrases we were taught to always respond to with an emotional amen, or even a particular call and response that only our group knew, or perhaps as a quick way to shame and threaten one of the members of The Church.
I decided to just list the terms and phrases out in no particular order and do my best to define them. They will come up again and again as I write this narrative of my memories in The Church.
Communication a way of talking about how we were supposed to always be “in communication” which at various times could mean a daily email to the pastor or a pastor’s wife detailing your thoughts and day, or just an arbitrary frequency that no one knew what it was supposed to be until you “hadn’t been in communication” and got in trouble. If we were out of communication it meant we were thinking too much on our own, and that was not allowed. We had to communicate everything. Sometimes, I had to communicate every single thing I would do in a day to The Wolf’s wife, including if I was just going to stop on the way home at the grocery store.
counsel - asking The Wolf what to do. AKA “getting wisdom” but it eventually stopped being voluntary, and started being mandatory. It used to be for bigger decisions, but then it turned into needing counsel for nearly every decision. Once, I got in trouble because I opened a savings account without asking for counsel.
submit - shut up and do whatever The Wolf says and don’t ask questions. We must submit to biblical authority if we don’t want bad things to happen to us. God will deal with the authority, but it’s our job to just follow without thinking about it. “We don’t need to understand, but we need to stand under.”
The Vision - (this is wild WILD I tell you!) The Wolf had a vision. I don’t know if he claims to have had an actual supernatural vision, BUT that is what he called this plan: To have a city within a city and have The Church there, our own hospital, our own grocery store, doctors, lawyer (yours truly), everything a city has, and entire neighborhood of all of us living there. This was really a vision for an isolated community, more of a commune than anything else, and I AM SO THANKFUL this did not work out. From the depths of my soul, I praise God for this.
The Land- A big piece of land on Johns Island, South Carolina that was purchased for The Vision by a group of men called investors. The first and only thing built on the land was an extravagant home for The Wolf, which he complained about for years as not being good enough. (A house I lived in for years when I was told to move in with The Wolf and his family.)
Leaving the church - when someone left the church, they were leaving God because they were refusing to be submitted to The Wolf. Since we had to submit completely to him, there was never a good reason to leave the church, so leaving the church was often synonymous with not being saved, and we had to shun anyone who left. We were not permitted to communicate with them at all, unless we had permission, and that was just to tell them to repent and come back.
spirit of Jezebel - Any woman who questioned things, or even made decisions on her own had the spirit of jezebel. Once, I was told I “had the Spirit of Jezebel deeply intwined in my soul” because I missed an exit on the interstate. It was a control tactic to silence women, especially when a wife would question why her husband was never home, and why The Wolf was requiring so much out of him because he was working on The Vision.
the need - Words cannot describe the weight of this, but essentially, The Wolf demanded a certain lifestyle that The Church had to supply regardless of how the individual families lived or what the realistic budget of The Church was. The way this was addressed changed over the years, but I remember that there was a shakedown after the offering was counted on Sunday mornings, and the men were called into a meeting until they all coughed up enough money to cover the need. Sometimes, we didn’t have grocery money because of this. We had to cover “the need.”
heady - anyone who thought too much was heady. It was a sin, and I was always being reproved for my headiness. It was a catch all word that also meant that someone was thinking too much and needed to just “trust” and blindly follow everything.
covering - this is a lot like the umbrellas of protection concept. We all needed to be covered by our spiritual authority or we were in danger of bad things happening to us. Everyone needed spiritual covering, but women especially needed it. When I first left, I actually didn’t know what to do without this, and thought as a single woman that I was in a particularly bad place and had no place in the church without a man in authority over me.
the men - It was literally just the men of the church, but the term carried more weight than that. They were the ones that the weight of the burden of “The Need” “The Vision” and everything in between fell on them as providers. This was a way of seeing them as a unit, and they were often addressed in this way. They were heavily abused and used, often working their full time jobs during the day, and then forced to work in the evenings (and sometimes all night) on projects to fund whatever scheme The Wolf had thought up. My dad was gone most of the time during a certain span of my childhood, and my mom was always worried that he would fall asleep while he was out late driving home.
men’s meetings - The men’s meetings also carry a weight that is hard to describe. My most vivid memories of them were that they were after Wednesday night prayer service and that they would last into the wee hours of the morning, and the men were berated and discouraged into conformity and giving more money.
restriction - A kind of punishment, like being grounded.
restitution - another weighty word that carried a depth of shame with it. Any time anyone was inconvenienced or there was a wrong, whether real or perceived, the offending party had to make it up to the other person (usually The Wolf) by doing restitution above and beyond whatever the wrong was. For example, my roommates and I were late for church one Wednesday night and owed restitution to the pastors and their wives for being late. The Wolf made us dress up like clowns and attend church to pay back our lateness and shame us.
Probation - this was a kind of church discipline. It could be instituted for anything The Wolf determined was a sin worthy of this kind of punishment. A woman gets her hair cut too short? She got put on probation, which meant she was not a full member of the church and was not permitted to attend church fellowships and gatherings outside of the regular church meetings. They would be restored when they met the terms of restoration (or restitution) determined by The Wolf, or just whenever he felt like it. The person on probation was treated as an outsider and shamed.
There are more, but I have to stop for now, and will share more terms and phrases next time. And as a better parting note than all this darkness I just described, I am so grateful for God’s deliverance out of this mess, and for the actual beauty of the real church and real pastors! I’m breathing a sigh of relief that this part of my story is over, but I can’t handle writing about it anymore.
…Until next installment of more terms and phrases!