Over the weekend, a Christian man named Steve Williams sent me the following message on Facebook Messenger. All spelling, grammar, and punctuation in the original. My response follows.
I’ve been concerned about professing believers falling away from the faith since a teenager over fifty years ago. About a year ago I came across something of your story in Texas, I think you were involved with a church plant in San Antonio. It seems that I recall you transitioned from being an independent, fundamental Baptist to become a Reformed Baptist but there were problems with a dictator type pastor who greatly opposed you. I may be wrong on some of the details.
That’s way too bad. If sad stories like that made you feel justified to leave the faith, my guess is that there were doubts in your mind apart from that tragedy. I would plead with you to seek the mercy and grace of God, that He would do a saving work in your mind and heart and life. He is a merciful Saviour, however His judgment is severe for the apostate. Do turn to Him today.
I was actually the co-pastor of Community Baptist Church in Elemendorf, Texas for seven months in 1994. I detail my experiences at Community in a five-part series: Part One — Part Two — Part Three — Part Four — Part Five.
Pat Horner, a former Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) preacher started Community Baptist Church in 1983. Horner, as was I at the time, was a hardcore Fundamentalist Baptist and Calvinist. By the time I arrived in Elmendorf in 1994, the church was running several hundred people in attendance. Horner and I were hardheaded, opinionated, inflexible preachers. That said, personality-wise, we couldn’t have been more different. Both of us had what I call an entrepreneurial spirit. What Community had after I showed up on the scene was two chiefs; two managers; two owners; two honchos. For readers who have owned businesses or managed concerns for others, you know this was a recipe for disaster; a colossal clusterfuck-in-the-making. Both Horner and I were authoritarian, we expressed our authority differently. Horner was a stickler on doctrine. The slightest misspoken word would bring rebuke and correction. I had more grace in my theology than Horner did. That said, when it came to how we “lived” the Christian life, my standards were more extreme than his. These differences in focus led to conflict. There were personal squabbles too, as I recount in the series mentioned above. And after seven months of conflict, I had had enough (and I am sure Horner felt similarly). So, what we really were was a couple who ran headlong into marriage, only to find out that they were incompatible. Divorce was inevitable.
While I am sure my negative experiences at Community played a small part in my deconversion, what has troubled me more is my treatment by this church post-deconversion. I have added their words, sermons, and whispers to those of former friends and colleagues in the ministry. Their hateful, judgmental words were heard loud and clear; evidence of the moral bankruptcy of Evangelical Christianity. Again, these things played a part in my deconversion, but they were not the deciding factors. I left Christianity because I no longer believed the central claims of Christianity were true. (Please read The Michael Mock Rule: It Just Doesn’t Make Sense.)
I was an Evangelical Christian for fifty years, and a Bible college-trained pastor for twenty-five years. I have written numerous posts about my story; about my life as a follower of Jesus, and my later deconversion from Christianity. Any fair reading of my story shows that I was a Christian; that I not only understood the gospel, but also preached it to others. There’s nothing in my story that remotely suggests that I never was a Christian, or that “God” had never performed a “saving work in my mind and heart and life.” Since God cannot speak for himself, it is up to my critics to provide evidence for their claim that I was a false Christian. I wasn’t perfect, but the bent of my life was towards holiness. Over the years I pastored scores of people and counted numerous men as colleagues in the ministry. Not one of them has ever said, “Bruce Gerencser was never a Christian.”
The bottom line is this: I once was saved, and now I am not. I know what I know, and no amount of rock-throwing from the outside will change this fact. That Williams and other Christians can’t square my story with their theology is their problem, not mine.
Williams ended his message as Evangelicals are fond of doing with a threat: “His [Williams’ God’s] judgment is severe for the apostate. ” In other words, “Bruce, you are going to burn in Hell unless you repent!” Over the past seventeen years, I have been threatened with eternal torture and Hell countless times — hundreds and hundreds of times. Look, I’m an atheist. I have not been presented with sufficient evidence for the existence of God — particularly the Christian deity. Jesus is dead, God is a myth, as are Heaven and Hell. Knowing this about me, why do Christians continue to threaten me with eternal, everlasting, neverending torture at the hands of their God? I suspect that these threatenings aren’t about me at all; that the need to be right fuels thundering pronouncements and imprecatory prayers against people different from them.
I am not low-hanging fruit, so it is beyond me why Evangelicals ignorantly think they can win me back to Jesus or, according to their theology, win me to Jesus for the first time. Regardless, I know all I need to know about God, Jesus, Christianity, and salvation. I am an atheist today, not because of a traumatic religious experience thirty years ago. but because I have weighed Christianity in the balance and found it wanting. It is really that simple. (Please read Why?)
Saved by Reason,
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen 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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