My Salvation

I was thirteen years old and a freshman in high school when I accepted Jesus as my savior. We had returned from living in Paris, France for more than three years and I had accepted an invitation from my neighbors to attend their church.

It was a special moment in my life for more reasons than the obvious. My new church home and my new church friends took me in and made me feel very welcomed. I was a faithful servant. I attended Sunday school and Sunday worship services both morning and evening and even Wednesday Bible Study. I wanted to share this new feeling with my brothers and sisters. So I convinced them to attend Sunday school with me. My parents were not big church goers so we had to rely on our neighbors for transportation.

The preacher at this Church was fairly new to the ministry. He filled the church with his excitement about the Lord and brought many people to the altar. He was moving his congregation in very new and bold ways. The entire membership was excited about their new preacher. He was a young married pastor with two small children of his own. His fiery red hair and his bigger than life personality brought new life to this little old rural church.

My siblings followed suit and accepted Jesus into their lives as well. The difference was that my brother and little sister were very young, ages 7 and 5 respectively. That wasn’t a problem for the new preacher, but it was for my parents. My father was concerned that neither understood what they were doing. The new preacher had several conversations with my father and mother over the phone. He wasn’t persuasive enough and my parents were not budging.

My father was very familiar with salvation and baptism. His own father was a lay preacher and his mother was a faithful servant. The preacher came calling on one occasion to try one more time to convince my father that he needed to let these two children of God receive the gift of baptism. My father reacted in a rage and threw the preacher out of his home and threatened to shoot him if he stepped foot on his property again.

That same evening I attended the Sunday worship service. I knew that the preacher had visited my father but I didn’t know any details. The preacher began to preach about the importance of salvation and the importance of bringing all God’s children to the altar. Then he said something that made me angry. He told his congregation that the parents of Sister Christine would not allow their younger children to be baptized. He said that these two ‘heathens’ did not understand the importance of their children’s salvation because they themselves were not saved. He asked that the congregation pray for my parents and he called them out by name. I was so embarrassed. How dare he single out my parents? How dare he judge them? He taught me that only God could judge.

Everyone trailed out of the church but not before walking by the preacher to shake his hand. Something he did after every sermon. I stood in line fuming. When it was my turn to shake his hand, I placed my hand behind my back. The preacher stuck his hand out with a big smile on his face. I looked up at him and simply said “shame on you” and then walked out.

I left that church and decided to join another church. It would be several Sundays following that awful incident when word got out in the community that the new preacher had been arrested. My brain raced to formulate what could have happened. Did he push his way into the homes of other people like he did ours and take it too far? Our neighbors who had remained members of the church visited our home to share the bad news. The preacher had been arrested for abusing children. He had taken it upon himself to discipline the children of the church with his belt strap. The puncture wounds from the hook on his belt were all the evidence the police needed to arrest him. I felt sick at my stomach.

This encounter was not my only unfortunate experience with men of God. It didn’t affect my love for our creator but it did affect my ability to trust religious institutions.