Missionary Kid: How I Learned to Say Goodbye details the fascinating life of a friend of mine, John Haines. Raised in a devoutly Evangelical home, John spent much of his life on the foreign mission field as his parents attempted to win Moroccan Muslims for Christ. John later returned to the United States, and is now a professor at the University of Toronto where he teaches music, film, and things medieval.
John’s book is memoir, but written in a delightful conversational form. I prefer this style of writing. Far too often, memoirs are page after page of boring minute details. Missionary Kid, instead, tells John’s life story in a way that allows readers to enter the story and travel along with the author as goes from Morocco to France and from Germany to the United States. If you are interested in reading a first person account of what it was like growing up in the home of Evangelical missionaries, this book is for you.
Missionary Kid: How I Learned to Say Goodbye comes in at 202 pages and can be purchased from Amazon, either in print ($9.95) or Kindle ($4.95) form.
Christian women are floundering today. They have no idea what they are supposed to do with their lives? Should they work after having children or be home full time? But if they don’t work outside of the home, they will probably get bored and won’t make any money so they will feel useless. Oh, what should they do?
Mark Taspon did an interview with Mallory Millet who is the sister of Kate Millet. Kate is one of the founders of the second wave of feminism. Mallory admits that Kate was mentally ill and was a terror to live with:
I was with them at that table as they founded the Women’s Movement and NOW. The entire stated point of their activities was to destroy the American family and with that, Western Civilization. Is this not crazy? They were tooth-grittingly determined.
They were driven by destruction and deeply violent impulses toward men and the patriarchy. Their goal? To establish a matriarchy in order to end all war because that’s what men do, wage war. They believed that if women ran everything there would be no more war. In their madness they have conspired to destroy masculinity, drugging our little boys while trying to remake them into little girls and thus, emboldening our enemies who now see us as easy pickings. No nation is easier to overwhelm than one which has feminized the men and put females at the head of the tribe. Matriarchies never survive – never have, never will!
God tells us that those who “hold the truth in unrighteousness” (they know the truth but rebel against it) are given over to a reprobate mind (Romans 1). Reprobate means “a person abandoned to sin; one lost to virtue and religion.” This completely describes the founders of feminism since they were against all of God’s beautiful ways and they deceived women, even Christian women, into believing that leaving their homes all day and their children in the care of others is best
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Instead of following culture and the lies of the mentally ill, young women should consider this when making life decisions:“If all mothers based their choices on whether to return to work by asking the questions, ‘What does the Bible say?’ and ‘What is best for my child spiritually?’ different choices would be made” (Judy Turner)
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Christian women need to wake up and understand that they need to stop following women who had and have reprobate minds and begin following Jesus and His ways instead. Our culture is a mess and it’s because women have left their God-ordained roles at home and pursued their own selfish gain at the expense of their children.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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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What follows is a short video of journalist Kurt Andersen explaining how Fundamentalist Christianity has made the United States (especially the Republican Party) lose its marbles.
My grandparents were members of what has been termed “the Greatest Generation”; that generation of people who came of age during World War II. My grandfather was a combat war veteran in the Pacific theater — drafted into the US Army/Air Corps as an 18 year-old. He was newly married to his 16-year-old sweetheart, and their baby was born while he was in boot camp. Because he assaulted his superior officer after his drunken father called saying his baby was going blind (untrue), grandpa was demoted from corporal to private. He was required to serve an extra tour of duty, and was sent overseas early with another unit. His previous unit’s ship was sunk by the Japanese when they were finally deployed, so his bad behavior saved his life.
After the war, grandpa took advantage of the GI Bill, studying electrical and refrigeration in night school. He had only completed 6th grade (he lied and told us all that he completed 8th grade but his Army records stated 6th). Army testing proved that he was intelligent, and he was put into the emerging signal corps with much more educated men. After the war, my grandparents and mother lived in government housing, and they eventually had another child, my uncle. They bought a house, then later bought a bigger house in the suburbs of Nashville.
My grandparents were Southern Baptists, with my grandfather serving as a deacon and my grandmother serving as a Sunday school teacher and Women’s Missionary Union leader. I was never sure how much my grandfather bought into all the religious stuff, though he did implore me to “get saved” when I was about 12 years old. He stated what I later learned as Pascal’s wager when questioned about the existence of heaven and hell. He prayed the blessing over meals and at church, but he never really talked about having a personal relationship with God, and I never saw him reading the Bible. He always found a way to be busy at church during Sunday School, so he rarely sat through a class, but he was generally present for most of the Sunday church service in his deacon capacity. My grandmother, on the other hand, was consumed with studying the Bible and Christianity. She had her own personal library of Bible concordances, study guides, commentaries, Bible history, Bible geography, and Bible archaeology, as well as books by authors like James Dobson, Hal Lindsey, Billy Graham and Christian biographies about Johnny Cash, Corrie Ten Boom, and many others. Living near Nashville, she would travel to the Baptist Book Store to pick up whatever books she needed. Every day, she devoted 2 hours in the afternoon to studying and making lesson plans for women’s Sunday school and Women’s Missionary Union classes. I suspect that her lessons were way beyond the understanding of many of the women she taught due to the thoroughness in her research and planning. I always thought she would have made a great university professor. Although she dropped out of high school in 10th grade due to severe anemia, she earned her GED as an adult (I asked her why she bothered, and she said it was because she wanted to earn her high school degree).
My mother was twice divorced and thrice married. She was a National Merit Semi-Finalist in high school, tied for second in her graduating class of over 300 (she and the other student were required to take a test to determine salutatorian, and because my mom was painfully shy and did not want to make a speech, she threw the test). Her high school counselor suggested she should apply to college. No one in our family had attended college, and she had no idea what to pursue as a career. She always figured she would be a wife and mother like her mother. But she applied to a local university, got a scholarship, and went to college like a good student who always did what was expected of her. Not knowing what she wanted to do, she majored in education. Most young women in 1961 majored in education or nursing — she cared for neither — but given a choice she thought education would be a better option. Without a passion for pursuing a career, she dropped out of college after the first semester of her junior year and got married. She was divorced a year later. Her excellent verbal skills helped her procure a job as a secretary. She married my father who ended up being a selfish and abusive man. When I was 3 years old, my mom left my dad because he threatened her, and we moved in with my mom’s parents and my great-grandmother. My mom suffered from depression, anxiety, and loneliness for many years. When I was 11, she married my stepdad, and my brother was born a year later. I chose to live with my grandparents, but eventually my mom and stepdad built a house across the street, so I spent time in both houses. I considered my grandparents more like my parents, with my mom and stepdad more like older siblings.
My grandfather’s biggest regret in life was that he did not convince my mother to stay in college, earn her degree, and pursue a career. In his mind, if she had gotten her degree and pursued a career, she would not have ended up a single mom struggling financially. Even in her 3rd marriage, they struggled financially, especially after my stepdad became disabled and could no longer work. Despite his severe pain, though, that man worked hard doing most of the cooking, cleaning, home repair, and yard work. If he couldn’t stand, he would sit on a stool. He worked relentlessly until the day he died.
Because of my mother’s circumstances, my grandfather made it his mission to instill in me that pursuing education and preparing for a career was my number one priority in life. He told me, “Never be dependent on a man.” From the time I was 11 years old, I remember him saying repeatedly that my education came first and that NOTHING should come in the way of that. He did everything he could to facilitate my ability to obtain what he believed was a good education by paying for my private school tuition and piano lessons. While I might argue now that the fundamentalist evangelical Christian school might not have been the best choice, I was admitted to a top secular university despite my lack of knowledge on evolution (the school taught young earth creationism).
His teaching that I should never be dependent on a man was contrary to the teachings of his church. In the 1980s, our church started teaching complementarianism (see previous post: Biblical Manhood and Womanhood), offering courses to men and women in the church. My grandmother and mom took the married women’s course, and I took the single women’s course. My grandmother, ever striving to be the most obedient Christian — following her God’s dictates — took on the role of the submissive “helpmeet” wife. My grandfather had no interest in that. He valued my grandmother’s intellect and spirit. My grandmother struggled against what she considered her rebellious nature, but she tried as hard as she could to be a submissive wife. My mom took the course too, but when I asked her why she was not submissive, she said, “We all know that I am smarter than your stepdad so we agreed that I make the decisions.” And that was the end of that.
The concept of complementarianism was one of the major reasons I began my exit from evangelical fundamentalist Christianity. I have never taken well to the notion that women are somehow lesser. As I studied biology and psychology, I found that gender and sexuality are present on a spectrum, not strictly binary. We learn in grade school about XX and XY chromosomes, but in fact, there are X0, XXY, XXX, XYY possibilities as well.
My grandfather lived to see me graduate from college, but died a couple of months later. I think he would be proud of the fact that I married someone who is my partner, and as it so happened I am the primary bread-winner in the family (both of us work).
My grandfather wasn’t someone we would call a feminist by today’s standards, and he might roll over in his grave if he heard me call him a feminist. Indeed, his feminism was situational, based on personal experience. I never asked him if he thought ALL women should never be dependent on men. He still believed women should not serve in combat because (a) he didn’t think most were physically strong enough and (b) he was concerned that female combat troops could be captured by the enemy and raped by their captors. And he wasn’t too keen on homosexuality, but I’m not sure if it was because of his religion or if he just personally didn’t like it. I do know that my grandfather’s brother disowned his son (my grandfather’s nephew) for being gay, but my grandfather would invite his nephew to our house to visit and to provide a place for his sister-in-law to visit her son, as the nephew was not allowed in his parents’ house. But compared to most men of his religion and generation, he was more progressive than his peers. Therefore, oddly enough, I consider my grandfather instrumental in sending me on the path toward feminism.
The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
Officers were sent to the 800 block of Beechland Street around 11:30 p.m. Friday for a report of a suspicious vehicle parked outside of a home.
According to a criminal complaint, when the officers arrived on the scene, they could see two men inside the vehicle. Police say one man — identified as 61-year-old George Nelson Gregory, of Munhall — was in the back seat, and the other man was completely naked and bound with nylon rope in the front seat.
The criminal complaint says when officers asked what was going on, Gregory told the officers that they “were just playing” and he and the other man “meet up from time to time to play with each other.” The other man confirmed that what they were doing was consensual.
The man who reported the suspicious vehicle told police that at one point, he saw the second man get out of the vehicle without any clothes on, and he was concerned because the car was parked outside his daughter’s window.
Gregory allegedly told the officers he thought they were in a private place, and when an officer said their vehicle was on a well-lit public street in clear view of several homes, Gregory told police, “I know.”
Gregory, however, says none of that is true and “that conversation never happened.”
“I have nothing to hide. I did nothing wrong,” Gregory said.
He says they were approached by police because they “thought somebody had passed out or something, that’s what the call was.”
“I was counseling a young man with a drug problem,” Gregory said. “It did turn strange, but it wasn’t my doing, OK? And I was adamant that I’m not participating in that way. And so that’s when the police pulled up, and they assume things, but I’m standing by my story. It’s not true.”
According to Gregory, he has been working with the man for a few years, and he and his wife have tried to get him help.
“I won’t deny that he began to take his clothes off and propositioned me, but I will deny, on a stack of Bibles with God as my witness, that I did nothing,” Gregory said.
Gregory says he had his clothes on during the alleged incident, so “there’s no reason for me to be charged with open lewdness.”
According to a criminal complaint, Gregory and the other man will receive summons paperwork in the mail.
Gregory’s church bio page states:
Serves as preacher and teacher at Waterfront Christian Community Church. George grew up in Munhall and graduated from Steel Valley High School. He attended church all of his life, but he actually began his journey with Christ when he was in his early 20s. When he was 25, George set off to become a preacher and attended Johnson Bible College, in Knoxville, Tennessee. If you have ever heard him preach or teach, you will agree that he is definitely using the gifts God gave him. George has a way of presenting messages from God’s Word, the Bible, in such a way that you walk away saying, “Now it makes sense”. He speaks with clarity and conviction. There is no doubt that George believes and lives what he preaches.
The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
Albert Phillips, pastor of New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, was charged Friday with sex crimes against children. Astoundingly, Phillips has been accused of such crimes numerous times over the years, but this is the first time he has been charged with a crime.
A 74-year-old former Sarasota pastor is accused of inappropriately touching children.
The Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office charged Albert L. Phillips with sex crimes against children and detectives are concerned there could be more victims. Phillips is the former pastor of New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church.
On Dec. 8, 2017, a 15-year-old victim told authorities that she was inappropriately touched on several occasions by Phillips. Some of the incidents happened when she was only 4 years old, a Sarasota County affidavit stated.
Some happened when Phillips and his wife were caring for the girl when she stayed with them at their Tarpon Avenue home.
The victim said she was shown porn in Phillips’ office and he would touch her in private areas and he tried to get her to touch him, too, on several occasions. He would say that it was their secret and there would be consequences if she told anyone, according to the affidavit.
Sarasota police said there were similar reports in 2015 and 2005 with allegations dating back to the mid-1980s.
On Friday, Phillips was arrested and charged with Lewd or Lascivious Molestation of a Victim Under 12, Lewd or Lascivious Conduct on a Victim Under 16 and Lewd or Lascivious Exhibition on a Victim Under 16.
There is an infatuation with the body, and, of course, the sexual aspects of the body as well. Some sports encourage immodesty, revealing large portions of the body and this happens in some sports. These are the risky sports. Here they are, what are the risky sports? Gymnastics. Gymnastics and swimming. These are the sports in which there is an added risk.
Why are all of the gymnasts [at] more of a risk than other sports? Do you really want your daughters involved in a sport that involves a fair amount of immodesty in which red-blooded American male coaches are interacting with these girls? Or, worse yet, where the infatuation of the body eventually effects the lesbian coaches?
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
Douglas Rivera, pastor of God’s Gypsy Christian Church in Glendale, California, stands accused of sexually assaulting a preteen girl. The church’s website still lists Rivera as its pastor.
Douglas Rivera, the pastor accused of sexually assaulting a preteen girl at a Covina hotel last week, turned himself in to police Sunday morning and was out on bail by early afternoon, CBS Los Angeles reports. Police have confirmed that Rivera, accompanied by his attorney, turned himself in to Covina Police Department at 11 a.m. local time. He was out on bail by 2 p.m.
Rivera, 40, was accused last week of assaulting a girl visiting from China at the Vanllee Hotel and Suites, located at 1211 E. Garvey Ave. North, Wednesday night.
The pastor of God’s Gypsy Christian Church in Glendale had been on the run since Friday. Later in the day, he posted a video to social media claiming his innocence.
Police said Rivera drove through the parking lot of the Vanllee Hotel late Wednesday, stopping to peer into a room where two girls were staying during a school trip from China.
Rivera allegedly masturbated outside the room, then pretended to be on the phone for about 30 minutes. He then entered the hotel and knocked on the girls’ door. Thinking he was their chaperone, the girls opened the door. Police said Rivera then entered the room and sexually assaulting one of the girls, police said.
After images from the hotel’s security footage were made public, Rivera was identified as a person of interest in the case.
Police raided his Baldwin Hills home Friday, towing a truck similar to the one seen in the security video.
According to a neighbor, Rivera was painting that truck black with a roller and paintbrush Thursday.
Late Friday, Rivera, whose congregation shares a building with Glendale City Church, posted a video to Instagram from inside a vehicle in which he said he “was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
He went on to say the accusations against him were false, asking people to keep him “in prayer.” He also said he planned to turn himself in to police Wednesday accompanied by his attorney.
The Black Collar Crime Series relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact Bruce Gerencser. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.
David Cooper, pastor of Mountain Moves Ministries in Eloise, Florida, was arrested Thursday on accusations that he sexually assaulted and raped a minor girl. As of the publication of this post, Cooper is still listed as the pastor of Mountain Moves Ministries on its website.
A pastor in Florida exposed himself to a young girl several times in the past year – and raped another girl at least five times when she was a preteen decades ago, authorities said.
David Cooper, the 43-year-old pastor of Mountain Moves Ministries in Eloise, was arrested Thursday for the sexual battery of a girl under the age of twelve and lewd exhibition with another girl under twelve after a months-long probe was launched when deputies responded to a possible instance of sexual abuse last September, according to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.
The victim told investigators that Cooper had exposed his “private spot” to her four times since last year, when she was 7 years old, deputies said.
Weeks later, investigators learned of a second possible victim, an adult woman who said Cooper sexually abused her several times when she was a child, including raping her at least five times between the ages of 10 and 12.
Deputies, according to Miami Herald, tracked the woman down in January. Now 32, she told investigators that Cooper would enter her room as her mother slept sometime in 1995 or 1996 after Cooper started dating her mother and moved in with the family.
What started as comments about her body eventually moved to “oral sex and cuddling” and ultimately sex, she told Polk County investigators, who later listened in on a phone call between her and Cooper.
“What did you do then?” the woman asked Cooper, according to an arrest report obtained by the Miami Herald.
“You know what we did,” Cooper replied. “I can’t really discuss it openly, I’m not standing here alone.”
“Doing all that sexual stuff, it messes with a kid’s head, you know what I mean?” the woman replied. “And growing up and all that and trusting people, I was 10, I was a kid, you know what I mean, it messes with your head and it —– you up. But you are sorry?”
“I am,” replied Cooper, who denied taking the woman’s virginity but did apologize “for everything.” He was later arrested on Feb. 1, the Miami Herald reports.
Quote from Sean Carroll’s article in the upcoming Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics:
It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute answer to why it exists. I argue that any attempt to account for the existence of something rather than nothing must ultimately bottom out in a set of brute facts; the universe simply is, without ultimate cause or explanation.
Carroll goes on to say:
As you can see, my basic tack hasn’t changed: this kind of question might be the kind of thing that doesn’t have a sensible answer. In our everyday lives, it makes sense to ask “why” this or that event occurs, but such questions have answers only because they are embedded in a larger explanatory context. In particular, because the world of our everyday experience is an emergent approximation with an extremely strong arrow of time, such that we can safely associate “causes” with subsequent “effects.” The universe, considered as all of reality (i.e. let’s include the multiverse, if any), isn’t like that. The right question to ask isn’t “Why did this happen?”, but “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — is a relic piece of metaphysical baggage we would be better off to discard.
This perspective gets pushback from two different sides. On the one hand we have theists, who believe that they can answer why the universe exists, and the answer is God. As we all know, this raises the question of why God exists; but aha, say the theists, that’s different, because God necessarily exists, unlike the universe which could plausibly have not. The problem with that is that nothing exists necessarily, so the move is pretty obviously a cheat. I didn’t have a lot of room in the paper to discuss this in detail (in what after all was meant as a contribution to a volume on the philosophy of physics, not the philosophy of religion), but the basic idea is there. Whether or not you want to invoke God, you will be left with certain features of reality that have to be explained by “and that’s just the way it is.” (Theism could possibly offer a better account of the nature of reality than naturalism — that’s a different question — but it doesn’t let you wiggle out of positing some brute facts about what exists.)
