Growing Up
Growing Up
By Larry Wilson
Living with the Gospel message led him to rethink what was happening at church… that place where people sought to make everything comfortable and where to set a “good example” meant to be “nice.” He knew that when he decided to follow Jesus it felt dangerous, because to truly follow was somehow contrary to what he was taught that he should be. A friend once told him, “You don’t have to pay any attention to what is written in red because someone has already come up with a reason why it could not possibly be true.”
When he went off to college people told him to study hard and become an engineer… after all, the United States needed more engineers and engineers were well paid. There was no direct advice given about working for God’s Kingdom, and if he were to make a lot of money, he could contribute to boost the tithes. During the time he was in college, there was a surplus of engineers, many of whom were unemployed and pumping gas, a job he knew well and went to college to avoid (his father was an agent for an oil company). Some 35 years later he read an article in Atlantic Magazine stating that engineers, not the uneducated, were the group most likely to be terrorists!
He had been taught to be proud of his denomination. Pride was seen as a positive characteristic. However, the Gospel taught him that humility is a virtue and that pride causes one to believe he is superior to others. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet! Pride in one’s nation, one’s race, one’s gender is foolishness to the Gospel and a hindrance to community. Love is the power that overcomes pride…knowing that God’s love for us is the same as for our enemies.
He read the Bible, something they told him to do at church, but his reading often put him at odds with his denomination. It seemed that some read the Bible with a concordance looking for a text, any text, to support the maintaining of the status quo. The text from Jesus about loving your enemies was seldom preached when his country was at war with North Vietnam. The church, however, did seem concerned with the length of his hair and urged him to get a haircut.
He heard at church that black people were not fully human – an idea which could be traced to a son of Noah who saw his father naked (Genesis 9). A God who would make a people slaves for eternity because of an innocent indiscretion by Noah’s son seemed small and flew in the face of “Amazing Grace,” a favorite hymn of his church. He later learned that seeing someone’s nakedness meant having sex with him, his wife or his daughter, so the Genesis passage could have been about incest or homosexuality. However, making a people slaves forever is harsh for any reason.
The church taught him that God does not and will not call women to preach. They had the gall to limit God, a God they called all powerful. The Bible has many places where God calls women, but they only looked at a few where women were prohibited from speaking at church.
He was raised in a house with five brothers. When his youngest brother was born, he heard his mother tell his father that there would be no girls in this family. And indeed there were none until his own daughter was born. He did, however, have four double first cousins, all girls, who did not seem in any way to be “weaker vessels,” as the preacher said. They excelled in G.A.s (Baptist girl scouts) while he and his brothers did not do well as R.A.s (Baptist boy scouts). Why would God favor goof-off boys to the detriment of dedicated girls? The thought that God did not call women to preach was really strange since the only Southern Baptist missionaries anybody knew by name were female – Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon.
He, like all children, loved Jesus. He liked the songs, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (red, yellow, black and white), and his favorite, “Jesus Loves Me.” Jesus had a tall order to fill in loving him because he was rebellious and could not hold his tongue. He was glad for the advent of Jesus because Moses had written that rebellious sons were to be stoned.
There was great pressure put on him and his friends when they reached about ten years of age; they were urged to consider making professions of faith so that God would not send them to hell for their sins. The major sins were drinking, cussing and fornication. (Since North Carolina led the nation in the production of tobacco, smoking was not added to the list for several years.) He did not drink alcohol; if he cussed his mom washed his mouth out with soap; fornication was something he did not know about but assumed he would be able to stop when he figured out what it was. He decided to accept Christ and be saved. He entered the baptismal pool believing that he had his sin under control. He thought he had this “God thing” taken care of and would have no further decisions to make about it. Most of the testimonies he had heard began with, “When I walked down the aisle…” and since he had done that, he assumed everything was OK.
Once he and a friend (the only one in the intermediate class who had not made a decision to follow Jesus) were playing basketball during the week of revival when a strange car drove up in the yard. It was the visiting evangelist’s car, and he and the preacher got out. His friend said, “Damn… the preacher is in an unmarked car!” The friend probably did make a decision to follow Jesus but not during that week. Later this friend sent him a card from Parris Island, the Marine Corps training base, stating that he had discovered hell and was looking forward to moving away soon.
He embarked upon the business of living and learning. At school he learned that his country was most favored by God, and he believed it. He believed that his country was right in all things; the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement later negated that idea. He went to college and became a history major learning things about his country’s past that high school history had omitted. Whether it was the treatment of Native Americans and Africans or women’s rights, his country had not led the world in dealing with justice issues. It was not until the United States lost the Vietnam War that he learned his country had lost the War of 1812 to the British, and he came to the realization that his beloved South was wrong in the Civil War and its loss in that war was only the beginning of the struggle for justice for African- Americans.
Church had always been a part of his life, and he felt that he had met God there many times. His experience with God was what kept him active in the church, but he despised the limits the church imposed upon God. He was angry with those who took the radical Jesus and turned their proclamation of Him into a commercial for the way things are. The call to preach was difficult for him because he did not generally like preachers; they seemed, to him, to be fake and frail. One had to be polite to them for they might fly apart if ever they heard a bad word or encountered genuine anger. One of his favorite saints once told him, “You are the only preacher I’ve ever felt comfortable cussing in front of.” It was the best compliment he had ever received.
Church growth, not faithfulness to the Gospel, was the gauge used to evaluate a pastor’s worth. The Gospel is not exactly a manual for success. Loving your neighbor as yourself, or love for your enemies did not play well in a society that stressed “you get what you deserve.” “Go and give what you have to the poor and come and follow Jesus” was often discussed as a mistake Jesus made. “You have to look after yourself” was the preferred way to speak about wealth at church.
Preachers who could not possibly believe the sayings of Jesus were often very serious about who could and could not belong to his Kingdom. Some said that God does not listen to Jews pray…God does not like homosexuals and will destroy the homeland if the church accepts them. You would have thought if that behavior were so dangerous, Jesus, the unique Son of God, would have at least mentioned it once. Jesus does mention having too much money – more than anything – and having money seemed to be the highest virtue of these preachers with private planes and fine cars. As his friend said, “Somebody has already found a way to get around what was written in red.”