A Personal Exodus

This is a condensed version of the story of why and how I left the Bob Jones Fundamentalist circles.

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Five years ago this week I was just leaving Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC, for summer break. The past week had been horrendous.

To give some background, I had gone to BJU when I was only 17. There was nothing significant about that age in and of itself. By the age of 17, I had been working full time for the last 3.5 years. I did not have a curfew as I always came home at night. I didn't party. Mostly my life was wrapped up in work and school.

This left me in a funny predicament when I got to BJU. Underclassmen were not allowed to drive their cars off campus for any reason other than to go home. If they went off at all they needed permission. At home if I went somewhere, it was always for a reason. I would inform my mom where I was going and I would go. At BJU there were hoops one had to jump through even to get this permission. I for one refused to jump.

This attitude didn't get me in any trouble for my first year, but in the first semester of my second year my sins caught up with me.

One night after being off campus in a fellow underclassman's car, we got pinched by public safety. This in turn led to the Dean of Men investigating the situation and coming down hard on us.

Please don't get me wrong. I am not attempting to explain away my sin. I was wrong, but through this situation I saw sides of Bob Jones that had only existed in dorm rumors and TV interrogation rooms. During this situation, in order to make us admit to more wrong than we had committed, we were pitted against each other and were told lies in attempts to turn more people in.

This is where it started. My eyes were opened.

I was bitter; Yet another sin to start my summer off. 

I took the next semester off in order to clear my head. I wanted to work on the farm and not have to deal with BJU. As the fall progressed, I realized through scripture that my attitude was not what it should be and I started to think that maybe I had made up the things I saw in my head.

I returned to BJU with a resolve to obey and fit in. The irony was that deep down I could feel the Holy Spirit saying that something wasn't right.

That semester  I took some of the best classes ever. My favorites were about learning to study scripture and how to apply it. This was what I yearned for. The problem was that the more I read scripture and listened to the Holy Spirit the more I realized that while the principles I was being taught were right, the application was way off base.

I honestly was confused and thought that I was in the wrong. Some of you out there reading this are convinced that I still am in the wrong but by the leading of the Holy Spirit and reading the Scriptures, I came to the realization that I in fact was right.

The issue was despite the fact that I was convinced it was right, I couldn't really tell anyone what I had realized. I was surrounded by a school who thought that my views were wrong. I had parents who wouldn't agree with me, as my father had been a pastor in the Bob Jones circles for 20 plus years.

I was dating a woman who's parents wouldn't agree with me on my viewpoints either. I realized that summer that it was all or nothing. I either had to toss of the legalistic views of the Bob Jones fundamentalist circles or accept them and live it out.

I refused to live those views out. I refused to accept their views on music, movies, drinking, dress, and separation from other churches and believers, just to name a few. I could not agree to accept things that had no criptural backing. 

This is not to say I do not believe in the fundamentals of Christianity. I most certainly do. I live them out and believe them. Ironically the fundamentals of Christianity do not talk about the things on the list stated above yet the Bob Jones fundamentalists and many other groups of fundamentalists seem to think it does. My one and only difference was that I refused to allow my opinions dictate what scripture says but rather go to scripture for guidance.

With the refusal to accept these views I felt out of place. I kept seeing the fakeness and the dryness of this faction of fundamentalism. I couldn't stand it.  The irony to this was that I was placed as a spiritual leader in my room at Bob Jones. I tend to think my views peaked through a little. By the end of the year, it got to the point that just about everyone close to me knew what I believed and knew I did not agree with the restrictions and limitations of the brand of fundamentalism we were entrenched in. I knew for that matter I couldn't go back.

This is not to say that my views and convictions were solid at this point. If anything they were quite spongy. I knew what scripture said and my views were being changed every day.

I was engaged to the woman who is now my wife so that complicated things. I had started on a journey that I was dragging her into and she being raised in these circles all her life was a few steps behind me since she had not started her evolution at the same time I did.

We were to be married in December so Elissa in an attempt to complete her degree continued her education at Bob Jones that fall. After we got married we were to move down to Greenville, so Elissa could finish her education, but I never had peace about it. Despite my lack of peace, we forged ahead with the plan.

In October my father gave his resignation to Whiting Community Church. He was to be done the Sunday following my wedding. With this revelation, God began telling me I needed to stay in Vermont and help out in this church that would have no pastor.

Complicating matters was that we had a family in the church who had recently joined who was radically fundamental. One of the members of the family led Sunday school and preached some things that were doctrinally wrong. Leaving in a few months, my father believed he could do nothing about it. God kept whispering to me that I needed to stay. 

With much planning Elissa was able to work out her final semester so she could take it via correspondence and one summer school class. This was confirmation of what I had felt God telling me.

December came around. The church held a business meeting and I was elected to the pulpit committee along with 2 members of the radical family, and 2 others. We were tasked with finding a new pastor for the church. Various issues reared their dirty heads like what version of the Bible the pastor should use, does he have to be married, and several other legalistically minded things.

I was quite open in my views and this did not help the situation but I refused to be silent any longer. It eventually came to the conclusion that the family mandated that either I left the church or they would. I was willing to leave as I saw this situation being divisive to the body of Christ. The church family decided that they would rather see the radical family leave than me.

I was humbled by this. As a group we asked them to leave. We were told by them that our church was of the devil and we were going to hell. We were told the only reason they became members was to help us turn from our wickedness. We lost a week sister in Christ to their diatribes.

But praise the Lord that part is over. Dan Berry and I took care of the preaching for the next few months and by March we had figured a rough idea of what we were looking for in a candidate and selected a close friend of mine to come and be our pastor.

I saw many things that made me shake my head in shame in those fundamentalist circles. I was always told that just because one was bad doesn't make them all bad. You're right. It doesn't but it should make you reconsider your views.

I could tell you of dozens of truthful stories of people being abused and destroyed by these circles. Just recently they hit mainstream with 20/20 doing a report on a woman who was abused.  

Today my life looks quite different than it did 5 years ago. For one I am married to a wonderful wife who supports and agrees with my viewpoints. She came to her conclusion alone without my persuasion, praise the Lord! Second, While I hate playing the what if games, I imagine that if I had not changed, I probably would have washed out of church all together. I was hurt and I was burnt. I saw people who believed they had a to do list after salvation in order to be acceptable to God. There were double standards all over the place. The only consistency is that they were consistent in their inconsistencies.

Today our church looks quite different than it did 3 years ago. Today we have a contemporary service on Saturday nights as well as a traditional service on Sunday mornings. We don't separate from people who believe slightly different than we do as long as we agree on the fundamentals, in fact we now belong to the SBC. We don't judge someone who walks in the door with earrings and tattoos. We don't look down upon the single mom who made a mistake when she was younger. Perhaps you doubt the validity or the impact that we are having. We have had 4 souls come to Christ in the last 3 weeks and we are holding membership classes on a monthly basis.

Christ, salvation, and the Christian life is so much more than that. It is not a list of rules, but an act of love. After salvation we have an urge to love God more and more and to serve Him. We desire to love others like we love ourselves. Jesus himself said the greatest commands were to love God and to love our neighbor as our selves. Peter later gives mandates to the gentile believers not to eat meat offered to idols and not to commit immorality. Other than that, there are no lists. I don't even believe you can call the mandates from Peter a list as the commands from Jesus cover both of them. They are more a statement of clarification.

I am not bitter. Please do not misunderstand me. I hold no grudges. My in-laws and my parents are still in those circles. As stated before, not all of the people in those circles are bad, but most of them are misguided. I am actually the happiest I have ever been. I have found true freedom in Christ.