In July 1983, I started a new Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church in the southeast Ohio community of Somerset. I rented a storefront, spent a couple of weeks cleaning up and remodeling the space, and then on the second Sunday in July, Somerset Baptist Church held its first service. There were sixteen people in attendance, including Polly and our two youngest children. At the time, we lived half an hour north of Somerset in the lakeside community of Buckeye Lake. I worked for the village as a grant writer, litter control program manager, workfare program manager, and property code enforcement officer. In September of 1983, we moved from Buckeye Lake to New Lexington, ten miles south of Somerset. We didn’t live but a few months in New Lexington, thanks to our rented home having a horrible odor from the previous renter’s animals peeing all through the house. Our landlord replaced the carpet and shellacked the underlying wood floors, but the awful smell remained. In early December, we packed up our meager belongings and moved to a ramshackle farmhouse near Glenford.
Our new home had been moved from Glenford proper to the top of a hill just outside of town. It was an uninsulated, drafty house that had free natural gas for heating. Perry County had a lot of oil/gas wells, including the one that sat behind our house. It was good that the gas was free. Ohio winters can be cold, and the winter of 1983-84 was one such winter. We set the furnace at eighty degrees, running it constantly, just to keep the house warm enough to live in. One of the side effects of having a natural gas well nearby was that our water well was infiltrated by the gas. Drinking water had to sit before use so the gas could dissipate. The gas levels were such that we could light the gas straight out of the kitchen faucet. Fun times. Worse yet, the gas made the water quite hard, so we had to use water-softening agents when we took baths.
The one nice thing about this house was that it had a fairly new basement. It became the inside playground for our two young children and our foster child. Of course, there were things our boys could get into. One day I went to the basement only to find our son Nathan and our foster son JR rolling up papers and sticking them in the standing pilot on the hot water tank so they could set them on fire! (The boys had seen me do the very same thing when lighting the pilot.) One spring day, the boys were playing in the basement when Polly called them up for lunch and a nap. At the time, we had two kittens. The boys had been playing with the kittens and left them in the basement when they came up to eat. Unbeknownst to us, they left them in the cooler and shut the lid. This, of course, killed the kittens.
Christmas 1983 was one we would never forget. My grandparents, John and Ann Tieken, along with my mother, her new husband Michael Monshine, and my sister and her family joined us for Christmas. Polly and I were excited about having my family over for Christmas — our first and only such event. The Tiekens joined us for church that morning, and everyone else arrived early afternoon. It was bitterly cold and snowy, and while driving the five miles to our home from church, the radiator on our car froze up, leaving me stranded. I walked to a nearby house, used their phone, and had someone come and get me. Little did I know that my car radiator freezing was the best thing that would happen to me on that day.
The radiator freezing, of course, elicited a lecture from my grandfather about making sure I had enough antifreeze in the radiator. Grandpa’s lectures, warranted or not, were a “gift” he gave me every time he saw me. Having my mom and the Tiekens in the same room was risky, thanks to past violence, sexual abuse, and Jesus-loves-you judgmental behavior. Grandpa was a mean, judgmental son-of-a-bitch who loved Jesus. Ann was more of a passive-aggressive type of person, but she too could cut you to the quick with her self-righteous judgments. Needless to say, the entire afternoon was filled with tension; so much so that Polly and I were relieved when it was over. I made matters worse by not letting Mom or her husband smoke inside our home. I told them they would have to stand outside on our front porch to smoke. The temperature that day? Nine degrees below zero. This “order,” of course, infuriated my mother. She let it be known that she would NOT come to my house again if she couldn’t smoke inside. She kept her word, killing herself a decade later without ever darkening the door of my home again.
1983 was quite the year for the Gerencser family. We would have many more eventful days in the years ahead. In fact, I suspect if I gave a full and honest reckoning of my life, I would find that EVERY year had life-altering moments. Sure, life is filled with the mundane, but there are those days and moments when the circumstances of life alter our present and transform our future. The eleven years Polly and I and our growing family spent in Somerset fundamentally changed us and laid the groundwork for what one day would result in us leaving the ministry and walking away from Christianity.
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.
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Hell, you could post that picture alone and the words, “Nuff said,” and the reader would get the message! Look at the place! A sign that hilariously says, Fortune, and right where it belongs, a fire hydrant that should soon be called into service. What a run-down mess of a joint!
What a year!
Of course, if you had ever really enjoyed a genuine IFB copyright conversion and been truly saved instead of your fake conversion that later wore off, you’d surely enjoy the blessings due you from a generous God! Why, you’d no doubt be pastoring a well-behaved congregation in some church in Jesu-town and be a fine repairman of the soul as well as an eagle-eye cameraman and computer wizard!
And your house on the gas field just floors me! “Hey Polly, It’s cold this morning. Turn the water on in all the kichen sink and light it, will you? I’ll fill the tub and get a good flame there too. We’ll have this place all toasty for Jesus in no time! “
isn’t it strange that we accepted living situations like you talk about for the sake of the so called ministry. your writing resonates w/me because we lived in similar situations when I was a child due to dad’s belief he was called to the ministry. my grandparents held our family up financially but mom and dad wanted to live in iffy situations still. they still pick bad homes/living situations even though they inherited money. guess they figure it adds to all the holiness.
mary g is correct in her observation that harming oneself is an act of holiness according to this kind of religion. Harming children in the family is also obeying God and serving Him. This is ultimate love and this is doublespeak, saying one thing (love) and maening another thing (the opposite). Christianity is well-designed to do this and when you scratch at it, it shows its true nature and lets you have it: It isn’t me condemning you, it’s God.
You’ve written before about your mean, judgmental, hypocritical, washed in the blood of Jesus and therefore sanctified grandparents. Each time I think how Jesus saves but he doesn’t change folks from being a$$holes.
I still find tiny churches weird. When I was in high school (at fundamentalist Christian school), several of the faculty members were pastors. I played piano, and there was a group of boys in my grade who formed a small singing group with me as the accompanist (I had a crush on one of the boys at the time so that worked out). One of the faculty members started a new church that met in a small office building – you know, the type where you’d find a small accounting office or insurance agent or attorney with their own small firm. We were asked to provide music for a couple of their church services. There were probably 20-25 members in attendance, and I found it so strange having always attended a church with a few hundred members, multiple buildings, and a ministry staff. I wondered at the time, why can’t these people just go to a real church? 🙄
Same. I understand that some tiny churches are just getting started and hope(pray) to grow, others are gasping out their dying breath (almost literally in some cases), but some seem to be small to maintain ‘purity of doctrine’.
There was a tiny Calvinist church that met in private business office in my area which waxed and waned over the several years I was aware of them. It never grew beyond a few dozen people so far as I know. I attended a single funeral there and even though I was an evangelical, I was definitely an outsider. I may have completely misread this church-I didn’t ask anyone there to confirm or deny my impressions-but my feeling was that they were Calvinist to the degree that disputing the doctrines of grace was tantamount to declaring your reprobation and anyone doing so would not be welcome there.
@OC
Looking at the picture, you have to wonder how long or IF such a church is viable. I guess churches have some tax advantages, but even a strip mall temple is going to be pricey. I’d also wonder if Bruce dropping out of fundy college was ever an issue? Usually “some college” on a resume isn’t exactly a stunner, but for an unaffiliated Pastor would it even matter?
The average church in the United States has 60 members. The church in the picture reached 200 in attendance five years later — the largest non-Catholic church in the county.
Every church starts somewhere.
My education never played a part in my ministerial travels. Skill and experience are what mattered. I’ve known plenty of “educated” preachers who couldn’t preach their way out of a wet paper bag. Preaching is a learned art, not a taught one.
What did you do with the kittens?
Gave them the last rites and sent them to kitty 🐈⬛ heaven.
In today’s NY Times, a Canadian makes a case for enshrining Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) as a holiday in the US. Although BD has its origins in giving gifts (boxes) to the poor or upper-class families sending the help (who worked on Christmas) home with gifts, the editorial’s author says the day after Christmas should be a holiday because, well, sometimes we need a holiday from a holiday. Your account of Christmas with relatives makes a case for that!
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/style/boxing-day-holiday-extra.html
i experienced the other side of a storefront ministry, around 1984… i was on my way to a halloween party with a couple of friends of mine. i wore a black devil mask, and one of the other guys wore a santa claus mask. our walking route to the party took us right in front of a storefront ministry in bellingham, washington. as we were walking past, a bunch of thugs streamed out from the storefront ministry, knocked me and one of my friends down and one of them (i think he was the pastor) started babbling stuff about “thebloodofjeezisisuponyou” as i was surrounded by a menacing crowd… my third friend managed to escape the fracas, and called the police from about half a block away, but when he said the address of the place, the police said that it would take them 45 minutes to get there, and we decided that it would be expedient to avoid hanging around for that long.
I’m sure that your Christmas of of 1983 was not a good one. I really don’t remember exactly what went on
the day of Christmas of 1983. I do remember what happened a couple of days after Christmas of 1983. That was was when my mother, my two youngest siblings ( older sister living outside the home at the time) and myself cleared out of the house because of my father’s increasing violent behavior fueled by alcoholism. We lived in an apartment in the same town for a few months before my father went to a chemical dependence unit in a hospital in a larger town fifteen miles away. He stayed sober for about five years before he went back to becoming addicted to alcohol again in the summer of 1989. the night after Christmas 1983 I had gotten home from an evening job at a now defunct department store. When I opened the door I heard my Dad yell ” Who left her back in!” The her being my mother. My younger brother was still living at home at the time. My mother and my youngest sister had left the house. My younger brother and myself remained there for the night, but not before I had loaded a small caliber revolver and kept it close besides me in case Dad barged into our bedroom. He was down in the full basement of the house when I got home and he finally passed out down there. Me and my bother moved out the following day.