Russ Wold, a Christian man from Yuma, Arizona, stopped by this blog the other day to peruse my writing. After spending a few minutes reading several posts, Wold was ready to render judgment:
You are an amazing specimen, or perhaps I should say, . . . FOOL. It is incredible that one individual can display as much confusion, bitterness, and discord, as you are revealing you have fallen into and are determined to wallow in . . . like a pig in the mud. You not only followed, . . . but served, the ecclesiastical disaster called CHURCH, which has evolved from the Roman Religion of the Popes, for many years without a clue as to the fact that it…IS NOT…”the faith which was once delivered unto the saints,” but then when you finally saw the hideousness of man’s religious contrivances (sectarian religious clubs), you turned to hate instead of to The Lord Jesus Christ whom you had long been pretending to serve. I leave it there! And I leave you and your website with disgust, and with dismay that a human being can even be capable of such blindness, delusion, and confusion. You deceived people for many years in “the church” . . . and now you are deceiving people still.
I wonder what Wold hoped to accomplish with his email? He doesn’t know me, and he made no effort to remedy his ignorance. According to the logs for his IP address, Wold came to this site via a Bing search. He first read the post titled Poking Geri Ungurean, An Evangelical Conspiracy Theorist. Three minutes later, he loaded the front page and, I assume, read one or more posts. (I don’t use post excerpts, so someone accessing the front page can read one to eight posts and it only shows as one post. I do this to make this site easier to read. Fewer clicks, more content.) Thirty minutes later, Wold sent me the aforementioned email. Two minutes after that, he re-sent his Christ-honoring email. Twelve minutes later, Wold read the post titled Why I Hate Jesus. And then, much like the vile snakes before him, Wold slithered off into the night.
Wold made no attempt to engage me in any way. He didn’t comment on any of the posts he read, nor did he mention them in his email. Wold couldn’t be bothered to read any of my autobiographical material, in direct disobedience to the Word of God. Proverbs 18:13 says: Answering before listening is both stupid and rude.
Wold belongs to a group of Christians who think they have found “true Christianity.” Wold looks at 2,000 years of Christian church history and says “fake news.” I saw this same kind of thinking in the house church movement in the late 1990s. Organized religion was bad, small living room-based churches were good. The early church met in homes, and so should modern twenty-first-century churches. Wold thinks organized Christianity is a false religion, the evil child of Roman Catholicism. In his mind, he and his fellow band of travelers have found the “faith once delivered to the saints.” Everyone else, of course, is worshiping a false God in false churches led by false prophets. According to Wold, I was a false prophet back in my preaching days, and I am still a false prophet today.
Well . . . enough. Time for me to get back to false propheting, back to deceiving you, dear readers. 🙂
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.
Thanks for the heads up! 🙂
Oh come on Bruce. We know you made a metric fuckton of money selling Jesus. You can’t spell it ‘prophet’, you have to spell it ‘profit’. You know, like all the big names in religion.
Well, if you’re a false prophet, isn’t it time to start a church…of the Bruce Almighty kind? 😉
I read that paragraph three times and I’m still not entirely sure WTF he’s saying, other than BRUCE BAD! Oh well.
You definitely hit a nerve with this fellow. An outburst like this makes me think his underlying belief is shaky. He lashes out at you because you make a good case against Christianity. I bet deep down he knows he really can’t make a good case for it.
I am not a theologian. I am just a wayward preachers kid who has studied the origins of Christianity. Russ may want to understand that everything he believes about Christianity was cultivated and made doctrine by the Catholic Church. The trinity..the content of the bible..Jesus being both god and human…the list is quite long.
I guess he could be a gnostic? Whatever…the diatribe was interesting, though I would say leaving in “disgust” was maybe a bit overly dramatic.
poor Russ, just one more Christian twit who will die knowing he lived a lie.
Saying that he left in “disgust” is his way of slamming the door.
Karuna Gal–The harder someone attacks someone else for not sharing his or her beliefs, the shakier the attacker’s beliefs are.
That’s funny. He is one of those who thinks he is the chosen Smartest Person in the Room. Even “the church” in all its iterations is wrong. Only Russ Wold with his Direct Illumination From Jesus is right. Everyone else is a Grade A #1 FOOL. (I could be wrong, but wasn’t there a Bible verse that stated that we aren’t supposed to call other people fools?)