Yesterday, I received the following email from a young Independent Fundamentalist Baptist man (IFB) named Nate Lesmeister. My response is italicized and indented:
Hello Mr. Gerencser, thank you for reading my email. I just wanted to ask you a quick favor. Please stop writing such negative articles about independent fundamental Baptist churches.
I grew up in the IFB church movement, attended an IFB college in the 1970s, married an IFB preacher’s daughter, and pastored IFB and other Evangelical churches for 25 years. I visited countless IFB churches, preached for numerous IFB pastors, and attended/preached at IFB conferences and preacher’s meetings for years.
My wife’s family is littered with IFB pastors, evangelists, missionaries, and their spouses. I continue daily to follow and read IFB blogs and websites, even though what I read sickens me. I can safely say that I am an expert when it comes to the IFB church movement. And journalists and reporters think so too. I am regularly contacted for input, background, or comment on IFB stories.
Maybe Lesmeister doesn’t know these things, but he should. I have made it very easy for readers to find out about my background. I have led the proverbial horse to water, but it’s up to the horse to drink.
Are there some messed-up, awful people within the movement? Yes! However, although you may be sincere in simply wanting to point out the bad folks, you’re also hurting a lot of good ones. The majority of pastors and members of IFB churches truly love God and just want to do what’s right.
Let me be crystal clear, the IFB church movement is a cult. Some of the cultists are nicer than others, but that doesn’t change the fact that they psychologically, and, at times, physically harm people. This blog has provided ample evidence to back up the claim that the IFB church movement is a cult.
I have no doubt that many IFB preachers are “good” people and want to do what is “right.” I was one such man for many years. But, regardless of their “goodness,” these men of God teach, preach, and practice harmful, hateful, and dangerous beliefs.
Over the past 12 years, I have received hundreds and hundreds of emails from IFB preachers, pastor’s wives, and congregants who have been seriously harmed by the IFB church movement. Beliefs have consequences.
Worse, thousands of IFB zealots have emailed me or left comments on this blog that can best be described as vile and hateful. These “loving” people you speak of have attacked me personally, attacked my wife, and said despicable things about my children and grandchildren. Nice people? I think not!
I have gone to an IFB church my entire life, two in Minnesota and one in Kentucky, all them had loving, kind pastors who were not the “control freaks” that you seem to paint all IFB preachers to be. The majority of their church members were extremelly gracious in their speech and many times I would here a first-time guest say something like, “This is the friendliest church I’ve ever been to.”
I have done enough research on you to know that you are a young guy in his 20s. You have attended all of three IFB churches in your lifetime, and have only been old enough to make critical judgments about your tribe for a few years. I have attended more IFB churches in a week than you have attended in your lifetime. My advice to you is that you need to get out more and critically survey the broad spectrum of the IFB church movement. And then run!
Not all of us are like the weird, crazy, heretical, money-grabbing, numbers-driven group that you paint us out to be. Whether you mean to or not, you often give the impression that all IFB churches are followers of Steven Anderson, Phil Kidd, or some other crazy “pastor”.
I have never said that all IFB churches are “followers of Steven Anderson, Phil Kidd, or some other crazy “pastor.” I can, however, say with confidence, that IFB churches and pastors tend to be quite tribal; that churches often fellowship around particular IFB colleges or fellowship groups; that these tribes have chiefs that are considered the stars of their tribes.
You came to this site via a Bing search for Phil Kidd. Why? You viewed two posts about Kidd, did a search for Steven Anderson, read several pages, including the ABOUT page. You did not, however, read any of my autobiographical work, yet you deemed yourself sufficiently educated enough to pass judgment on my motives. This is, by the way, typical IFB behavior.
Evidently, your inspired, inerrant, infallible, King James Bible is missing Proverbs 18:13:
He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.
I do not mean to be unkind or rude. I simply want to ask that you please stop hurting the thousands of honest, well-meaning people in our type of churches. Even if you disagree with our theology, no one can say that we don’t love people and mean well.
How can you possibly know that I am “hurting thousands of honest, well-meaning people” in IFB churches? What evidence do you have for this claim? In fact, I have helped countless IFB preachers, pastor’s wives, deacons, evangelists, missionaries, and congregants leave the IFB church movement. Some have even become atheists and agnostics, while others have moved on to kinder, friendlier expressions of Christianity.
My goal as a former IFB preacher and a critic of the IFB church movement is to expose the movement for what it is: a cult. IFB churches and colleges are declining numerically and financially, and many of the IFB megachurches of the 70s and 80s are now closed or are shells of what they once were. While I won’t be alive to see the death of the IFB church movement, I hope my children and grandchildren will. I hope they will, with pillows in hand, stand over the wheezing, dying body of the IFB church and hold their pillows over its face as it draws its last breath. To that I will say, from the grave, “mission accomplished. All praise be to reason!”
I encourage you to leave the IFB church movement as soon as possible. Don’t wait five decades like I did to extract yourself from the cult. Don’t wait until deep, lasting psychological harm has been done to you, your spouse, and your children. Run! Now!
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Connect with me on social media:
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
‘Messed up, awful people’? Let’s start right at the TOP with what a MESSED UP, AWFUL DEITY these people are taught from the time most of them are just about out of diapers…..it all falls in line, and makes perfect sense from there, doesn’t it? 🙂
Exactly. Richard Dawkins has made himself famous lately for being insufferable on many social issues, but he did nail the god of the Bible pretty dead on.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
This is the perfect description of trump. No wonder the evangelicals love and worship him.
You gotta admire the energy of the young, even as you bemoan their lack of wisdom.
Hey Nate, you don’t have the right to tell ANYONE what they can write. Instead of whining to Bruce to stop, why don’t you show us with your actions that you are a true, kind loving Christian? I wouldn’t mind seeing a Christian that actually loves their neighbor as themself. But what shows up on this blog are Christians who complain, who tell Bruce he’s wrong. There are hundreds of churches and I doubt you can speak for each one and how kind any one person is. So why don’t you just show us Christian love? You know, a love that doesn’t judge a person, but tries to help them. A love that doesn’t turn against strangers, refugees, people of other races and religions, people with diverse gender identities. No, I believe you’ll just consider us heathens. C’est la vie, n’est-ce pas?
Dear Mr Lesmeister, you say ‘….I do not mean to be unkind or rude….’ Many other x-tians who come here are part of the same pattern with phrases like that, or ‘I truly want to understand your position’. I suggest 99% of you don’t. You start from the utterly arrogant position of KNOWING that your deluded fantasy beliefs are the only right ones and we all need to convert to YOUR flavour of faith or it’s the lake of fire for us.
‘….I simply want to ask that you please stop hurting the thousands of honest, well-meaning people in our type of churches….’ Wow Bruce, you refer to yourself as Bruce Almighty sometimes. I hadn’t realised how much Power and Influence you have over thousands and thousands of fundy believers! Just amazing!
Nate, you seem like a nice guy, and I have no doubt that you know some really nice people in your IFB church. I didn’t attend IFB church (Southern Baptist, not far from IFB in theology), but I attended a fundamentalist Christian school whose administration, board of directors, and staff were almost all IFB pastors or teachers who were educated at Bob Jones university or Pensacola Christian college. Were they nice people? Yes, even loving my gay classmate while teaching that his attraction to men was a choice and that he was in danger of God’s wrath if he didn’t give up his sinful proclivities and date women instead. Yes, even loving us girls and encouraging us to get an education while making it clear that we were unfit for plastering or being in authority over men. Yes, loving my Hindu friend and her sisters whose immigrant parents sent the girls to private school (because they thought it would be academically better than public school) while preaching over and over that Hindus are all going to hell.
Nate, I am assuming that you are a heterosexual white man. If I am wrong, I apologize. But if you are, you enjoy the highest privileges in the IFB and general white evangelical movement. The IFB world is your oyster, and you can be one of its princes, maybe even its King one day. But any of us who do not have a penis, or who are LGBTQ, or most who are not white, are lesser members of those communities. There isn’t just a Glass ceiling, we are indoctrinated to KNOW our God-ordained place in the evangelical world. We are taught that if we do not accept that place, God wi rain down punishment upon us.
So when Bruce and others speak about the IFB and white evangelical movement, they are speaking truth about the experiences of more than half of those in that system. Granted, many accept the indoctrination, accept their place within the movement. Many leave. And many suffer years of psychological and emotional abuse within a system they fear leaving.
So Nate, I hope you will look around you and talk with women, children, LGBTQ people, people of color, and find out about their experiences. I think you will find their experiences are quite different from yours.i would be happy to tell you mine.
Not sure why an atheist writing negative things about religion would hurt them…well unless he’s exposing all their dirty secrets to the antiseptic action of daylight.
IFB cultural configuration with independent church, with each church having a little male pope (with little oversight) is a recipe for abuse. And this abuse occurs and shatters lives as it stifles the joys of life. No question it is much worse for girls, something Nate might not notice, being male.
As Nate puts it “no one can deny that we love people and mean well.”. Well if that’s the case continue doing that. Bruce’s writing isn’t going to stop this. Not exposing the cult’s dirty laundry is a problem: In fact you see Nate’s instinct to hide and misdirect from it is part of the culture. This is common in religions that are rife with abuse, don’t spoil the perception of the clergy as being perfect (and therefore godly), or people will lose faith in the clergy. Nate unwittingly reveals that he is part of the problem.
Nate, if you read this:
I’m curious as to how Bruce writing about the bad folks does harm to the good ones. What damage is being done to them, exactly? How is it being done?
On a related note, I think the way you’re looking at causes and effects here is somewhat skewed. Given how often Bruce is able to write these posts, it seems to me like a better solution would be for the IFB movement to take steps to give Bruce a less… target-rich environment. In other words, if there were fewer of these folks acting badly, that sort of behavior would come up as a topic here considerable less frequently. This would have the additional benefit of reducing the amount of actual damage done by people in positions of authority.
I see saying “well-meaning” is just an excuse for being assholes.
Hello, Nate. Being in your twenties, and especially if you were raised in a church culture, I wouldn’t expect you to have much life experience when it comes to these issues. This blog is basically to help those of us who had negative experiences with churches, to have a safe place to come to. We wouldn’t expect you to understand where we’re coming from, suffering from such religious traumas as we have. However, I notice that various Christian blogs don’t mince words about those THEY disagree with ! And these groups freely make use of the First Amendment. As does our Mr. Gerencser. You need to back up and realize he has the legal right to describe these people and events he writes about. No harm has touched anyone he’s written about, to this day, Dec.3rd,2020. We won’t allow anyone to impose a double standard here, we’ll call you out. That said, please take Michael Mick’s advice and launch a clean- up campaign among these IFB churches, which is a better and more productive way to place your energy. Telling Bruce to stop exposing these crazy antics of IFB, and other sects benefits no one at all- including your fellow church- goers- can you see that ? How I wish I’d been given a proper warning about the places I went to !! It would have saved me DECADES of suffering. So, consider doing the right thing, and working to ” de- bug ” the churches that need it. Besides this, Bruce says he knows Christians who are actually decent people. Don’t put words in his mouth.
Man, even if you hadn’t dug into his background I’d have guessed this guy was a 20-something kid. So well-meaning, and yet so unable to see the flaws in a belief system that obviously means a great deal to him. I hope as he ages he will look with a more critical eye at what the IFB movement really is and does, and realize that even within Christianity there are so many spiritual avenues that can provide what he’s looking for without the cult power structure.
It’s exactly your exhaustive experience with the IFB cult that makes your writings about it revealing and authoritative. That’s why they want you to shut up. I hope you never do.
Hashtag “not all——“ hashtag “yes indeed all——“ now go look up Dunning Kruger effect.
When I was in my 20s, I was a lot like Nate. So there’s hope for him yet!
Yielding to the Spirit of God not known in the New IFB Church
I have carefully observed the New IFB movement. The Pastors and their congregations are often self made people relying on their own faith and knowledge of the Bible in the KJV. I do agree that the KJV bible is the most correct. However Christians in this sect fail to be yielded to the Holy Spirit working in their hearts. They DONT have understanding of brokenness and dying to self so the Power of Christ lives in them to preach the Gospel soley by the power of God working in them. The whole New IFB sect fail in this aspect greatly: 2 Corinthians 4:10 KJV: Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. Their main leader Steven L Anderson has NEVER known this in his life.
Paul,
As far as I’m concerned, there’s no difference between the IFB and the NIFB. Different lipstick 💄 same pig 🐖.
http://brucegerencser.net/2021/07/is-there-a-difference-between-the-ifb-and-the-nifb/
Be well.
Bruce