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.
Todd Baldwin, an employee for Valley Christian Schools in San Jose, California, stands accused of felony possession and distribution of child sexual material.
Police in California are calling on victims to come forward to assist a child pornography investigation into a San Jose Christian school system facility worker arrested for allegedly giving students money to send him explicit images and videos.
Todd Baldwin, a 43-year-old employee at the Valley Christian Schools, was arrested last week and charged with felony possession and distribution of child sexual material.
On Aug. 16, the Silicon Valley Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force’s Child Exploit Detail was notified that a member of the facilities department at Valley Christian Schools was “in possession of explicit digital media of juveniles,” according to a public notice from the San Jose Police Department.
Investigators identified Baldwin as the staff member who “allegedly paid students for providing the explicit images and video.” The task force arrested Baldwin the next day and served a search warrant for his campus office and San Jose residence.
Baldwin was booked at Santa Clara County Main Jail.
According to investigators, Valley Christian Schools immediately cooperated and assisted with the investigation. Authorities have not yet released information about where the alleged crimes took place or the ages of students involved.
….
In a statement released to media, the school stated that it is “deeply disturbed by the actions outlined in these charges” against Baldwin and that those actions are “antithetical to our Christian faith, values, and standards.”
“Upon learning of the allegations, we fully cooperated with authorities,” the statement reads. “Additionally, we placed the individual in question on administrative leave.”
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.
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.
Jarod Mills, pastor of Clifton Flats Alliance Church in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and a part-time instructor at Butler County Community College was convicted of unlawful attempted sexual contact with a minor and sentenced to six months in jail.
Ohio prosecutors recently filed a bill of particulars in the case, showing more detailed accusations against Jarod Mills, including the age and sex of the minor the undercover law enforcement officer portrayed in the sting.
Mills, a New Castle resident, faces charges of fourth-degree felony attempted unlawful conduct with a minor as well as fifth-degree felonies importuning, disseminating matter harmful to juveniles and possessing criminal tools.
The prosecutors accuse Mills of soliciting a law enforcement officer posing as a 15-year-old boy, and specifically accused him of soliciting the officer for oral sex.
He was arrested Oct. 22 and a Mahoning County grand jury indicted him Dec. 17.
Other documents filed in the case indicate Mills may have come in contact with the undercover officer on Grindr, which describes itself as a “social networking and online dating application for gay, bi, trans and queer people.”
That other filing, a response to Mills’ request for discovery, indicates prosecutors have as evidence screenshots of chats on Grindr, which include pornography. Another charge, disseminating matter harmful to juveniles, may relate to those screenshots, as prosecutors allege Mills sent a sexually explicit photograph to the officer posing as a 15-year-old.
In addition, on the charge of attempted unlawful sexual contact with a minor, prosecutors accuse Mills of attempting to engage in oral sex with the officer. For the final charge, of possessing criminal tools, the bill of particulars states Mills possessed a cell phone, condoms and lubrication, which prosecutors allege he intended to use in the commission of importuning and attempted unlawful sexual contact.
A New Castle man accused of child sex trafficking and corrupting children in Ohio has been found guilty by a jury in Mahoning County Court.
The Ohio jury’s verdict was delivered Wednesday against 35-year-old Jarod Mills of West Terrace Avenue of unlawful attempted sexual contact with a minor.
Mill was arrested in Mahoning County in May 2021 in a sex sting operation by the Operation for Child Trafficking and Sex With Children. His bond has been revoked and he’s remains in the Mahoning County jail, awaiting sentencing.
He was a pastor at the Clifton Flats Church at the time.
Mills was one of 14 people arrested in 2020 in what Ohio’s attorney general called the “largest anti-human trafficking operation in state history.”
Mills is charged with attempted unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, importuning or soliciting of an adolescent, possessing criminal tools and displaying matter harmful to juveniles.
….
Mills also had been a part-time instructor at Butler County Community College, which at the time of his arrest placed him on a leave of absence. He no longer is affiliated with the church or BC3.
A New Castle man caught in a statewide human trafficking sting will be spending some time in prison.
According to court employees, 36-year-old Jarod Mills was sentenced to six months in prison on one count of importuning.
The charge stems from a statewide sex sting, which led to Mills’ arrest in Mahoning County in October of 2020. Mills was one of 14 men arrested in Mahoning County during this sting.
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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Myron Mooney is the pastor of Trinity Free Presbyterian Church in Trinity, Alabama. Free Presbyterians are the Presbyterian version of Independent Fundamentalist Baptists (IFB). Staunchly Evangelical, Calvinistic, and separatist, Free Presbyterians believe women should be silent in church and wear head coverings. In 2017, Mooney made the news with his unwavering support of Roy Moore. When asked about his name being on the letter of support for Moore, Mooney stated:
I’m proud to have my name on that letter.I don’t put any stock in (these accusations) because of the timing.
According to Mooney, his wife said the recent coverage and outrage over Moore’s scandalous behavior with underage girls is akin to being raped:
Here’s what my wife has to say about rape right now. My wife says the state of Alabama is being raped by Washington and being raped by the country with these allegations.
According to the Decatur Daily, Mooney believes that Moore’s opponents have been working for months to orchestrate an attack against Moore. Specifically, Mooney blames the Democrats. I am always amused when Evangelicals resort to wild conspiracy theories to explain reports of immoral or criminal behavior. Does Mooney really believe that there is some nefarious force behind nine women accusing Moore of creepy, criminal sexual misconduct? Imagine how many people it would take to pull off such a large-scale left-wing conspiracy. Occam’s razor applies here. The shortest answer is likely the truth; and the truth is that 30-year-old district attorney Moore had a perverse, stalker-like obsession with teenage girls; and that this obsession resulted in inappropriate sexual behavior.
According to Mooney, if the sexual misconduct claims are true, then the girls making them should be held accountable for not coming forward sooner. Ever the Fundamentalist, Mooney has a proof-text to justify his slut-shaming:
If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. (Deuteronomy 22:23,24)
She is then as guilty as the person that is said to have done the molestation The guilt is shared.
Pause for a moment and let Mooney’s abhorrent viewpoint sink in. Are you angry? Sick to your stomach? I know, I am.
Deuteronomy 22:23,24 teaches that if a woman is walking down the street in a city and a man rapes her, and she doesn’t cry out for help — meaning she must have really “wanted” it, then she should be executed along with her rapist. In other words, God says the rape victim is just as guilty as her rapist. Why? Because she didn’t scream loudly enough for someone to hear and come and rescue her.
Deuteronomy 22 is the same chapter of God’s inspired, inerrant, infallible Word that commands:
Women who fail a virgin test on their wedding night shall be labeled whores and executed (vs 13-21)
Women who wear “men’s” clothing are abominations (vs 5)
If a man has sex with a woman who is not engaged and they are found out, he must pay the woman’s father fifty silver shekels and marry her (with no possibility of divorce) (vs 28,29)
Mooney should roundly be condemned for what he said, but that’s not going to happen. He quoted the Bible, and dammit, God said it, and that settles it! I wonder, as I conclude this post, if, in the picture above, the tie, shirt, underwear, and suit Mooney is wearing is made of “mixed” cloth. The Bible also says in Deuteronomy 22:
Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together. (vs 11)
How dare Pastor Mooney sin against the thrice holy God and wear mixed material clothing. Surely, his fellow Presbyterians will demand Mooney be defrocked for wearing clothing God condemns. After all, God said it, and that settles it, right? If Fundamentalists such as Mooney are going to use the Bible to justify their slut-shaming, the least they can do is obey all 635 laws in the Old Testament, and not just the ones that prop up, support, and provide cover for anti-woman views.
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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
It is common for Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) preachers and their wives to reach certain milestones in their lives such as longevity of marriage or ministry and then feel “led” by God to write a book about why they were successful.
Jack Schaap took over the helm of First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana after the death of IFB luminary Jack Hyles. Schaap’s wife Cindy — the author of the above book — is Hyles’ daughter. In this book, Cindy reveals how and why the Schaaps had a successful marriage. Three years after the book’s publication, Jack Schaap was arrested for taking a minor across state lines to have sex with her. Schaap pleaded guilty and was sentenced to twelve years in federal prison. He was released in May 2022. Cindy divorced Jack, wrote a book titled My Journey to Grace: What I Learned about Jesus in the Dark, and based on available public information is still an Evangelical Christian today. Jack Schaap also wrote a book about marriage titled Marriage: The Divine Intimacy.
Biographical or autobiographical books written by IFB preachers and their wives are almost always an admixture of “ain’t Jesus wonderful?” and fiction. The goal is to give God all the glory and present sanitized, PG-rated tellings of their lives in general, and their marriages in particular. Reality is often far different from what is portrayed in their books.
One Sunday evening in the late 1970s, Polly and I visited Trinity Baptist Church in Findlay, Ohio — an IFB church I attended for forty months as a teenager. After church, the pastor and his wife invited us to their home for refreshments. I had always thought that the pastor and his wife were wonderful people. They had always presented themselves in public as devoted followers of Jesus; a happily married couple. I learned that this was a facade, that things were not as they seemed. Over the next twenty-five years, I would interact with scores of preachers and their wives, learning that there was a big difference between perception and reality; that preachers were not as put-together as they seemed; that their marriages were every bit as challenging, and troubled, as those of the people who looked up to them and called them “pastor.” In other words, they were normal, everyday people, prone to the same frailties as the unwashed masses. The difference, of course, is that these preachers and their wives hid their frailties behind put-together public personas. Spend enough time in the ministry and you learn to play the game.
Polly and I were experts at playing the game. We knew congregants expected us to be winners — victory in Jesus! Church members expected us to have a perfect marriage and well-behaved children. And we gave them exactly what they wanted (needed). However, once in the privacy of our home or automobile, the “real” Bruce and Polly Gerencser came out. There are no deep, dark secrets to be revealed, but both Polly and I were certainly “human.” We had a lot of rough times, especially early in our marriage. After the birth of our second child, Polly gave all of her attention to our two children. In response, I started working sixty-plus hours a week as a general manager for Arthur Treacher’s. Three years into our marriage, we had become busily distant. For a time, both of us wondered if our marriage would survive.
It took us almost thirty years to recognize that we had our priorities wrong; and that putting God/Jesus/Bible/Ministry/Church first was a bad idea. We reprioritized our lives, putting our family and our marriage first. Unfortunately, by the time we were enlightened, our three oldest sons were already adults. While both Polly and I will testify that our marriage is 98.9 percent awesome today, we recognize that there were points in life where we could have destroyed our marriage. Fortunately, we survived and are confident that we will embrace and survive (unless it kills us) what comes our way.
Polly and I have known each other for forty-seven years. Polly was seventeen and I was nineteen when we first met at Midwestern Baptist College. Two years later, we married. By all accounts, we have a “successful” marriage — whatever the hell “successful” means. Over the years, I have had readers ask me to share with them the keys to a successful marriage. Surely, Bruce and Polly Gerencser know what it takes to have a successful marriage, right?
Here’s the truth of the matter: We are lucky that our marriage has lasted forty-five years. Yes, we are committed to one another. Yes, we deeply love one another. Yes, we have built a wonderful life together. Yet, I know couples who had all of these things, but ended up separated or divorced. Married life is a crap shoot. So many variables, so many unknowns. Have you ever played the woulda, coulda, shoulda game? What if I (we) did B instead of A? Would our lives have been different? Maybe, but not necessarily better. I can’t know for sure, so all I know to do is live in the moment, making the best decisions possible on any given day.
Let me conclude this post by giving several pieces of advice; things helped Polly and I as a married couple.
First, don’t let the sun go down on your wrath. Polly and I have fought a time or two over the years. We have had some doozies, often over nothing. Sometimes, we would go to our separate corners for part of a day, but we never sent the other to the couch for the night. We determined to seek forgiveness and make things right between us, never forsaking our shared bed because we were mad.
Second, not only love your spouse but “like” them. Our love was never in question, but it took us years to “like” one another. Now we are best friends. We genuinely enjoy one another’s company.
Third, have your own space; one that is yours alone. Polly and I spend a lot of time together, yet we also have carved out time and space for ourselves, to do the things we want and like to do. Polly and I have completely different reading habits. I read non-fiction, and Polly reads fiction. I used to give Polly a hard time over her book choices, but then I realized she has a right to read whatever she wants. While I may still make a snarky comment now and again over this or that novel Polly is reading, she doesn’t need my approval. And that goes for everything, by the way. As Fundamentalist Christians, we had a patriarchal marriage. I was the final answer to every question — as God ordained. Deconverting forced us to rethink how we wanted our marriage to work. While patriarchal thinking still lurks in the shadows — old habits die hard — we have chosen an egalitarian path; a relationship where each of us has our own space.
Finally, don’t be afraid to turn a critical eye towards your marriage. While most people marry with the intention that their marriages will last “until death do us part,” many marriages fail. Does this mean that these couples were failures? Of course not. Polly and I were naive Independent Baptists with no real-world experience when we married. We had no idea what a “good” marriage looked like. Neither of us would say that what our parents modeled to us was a “good” marriage, especially in my case. My parents divorced when I was fourteen, and remarried several months later. Mom married her first cousin, a recent Texas prison parolee. Dad married a nineteen-year-old girl with a baby; the trophy presenter at the local dirt track. Mom would go on to marry two more times. All I knew was trauma and dysfunction. All Polly knew was emotional distance and secrets. Her parents never argued in public; and never modeled to her how to have a good and happy marriage. We came into marriage ignorant about everything from sex to money. We truly made it up as we went. Fortunately, we kinda, maybe, possibly — hell if I know! — figured it out. Coming to this place required an honest accounting by both of us of not only our personal lives but also of our marital relationship.
Polly and I were lucky that our marriage survived. Many people realize that they married the wrong person or that they are not well-suited. Life is too short to spend it married to the wrong person. Better to get out of the marriage sooner than spending decades persevering, hoping things will change. Sometimes, readers in problem marriages tell me that they wish they had a “successful” marriage like Polly and me. I am quick to deflect, knowing that our success isn’t formulaic; that luck and circumstance had (have) a lot more to do with our success than following certain rules or principles.
For you who have been married for a long time, do you think you have a “successful” marriage? How do you define “success?” What advice would give to a young couple considering marriage? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I grew up in a religious faith that taught me the Bible was the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God. The word “inspired” meant that the Bible was the word of God; that holy men of old who wrote the Bible were told by the Holy Spirit exactly what to write. Some of my pastors and professors believed in the dictation theory. The authors of the Bible were mere automatons who wrote what God dictated to them. Other pastors believed that men wrote the Bible, thus their writing reflects their personality and culture. God, through some sort of unknown supernatural means, made sure that human influence on the Bible was in every way perfect and aligned with what he wanted to say.
Inspiration gets complicated when dealing with the question of WHAT, exactly, is inspired. Were the original manuscripts alone inspired? If so, there’s no such thing as the “inspired” Word of God because the original manuscripts do not exist. Are the extant manuscripts inspired? Some Evangelical pastors believe that the totality of existing manuscripts make up the inspired Word of God, and some pastors believe that certain translations — namely the King James Version — are the inspired Word of God. Regardless of how they answer the WHAT question, all of them believe that God supernaturally preserves his Word down through the ages, and the Bibles we hold in our hands is the very Words of God.
The word “inerrant” means “without mistake, contradiction, or error.” Some Evangelical pastors, knowing that every Bible translation has errors and mistakes, say they believe the original manuscripts are inerrant, and modern translations are faithful, reliable, and can be depended on in matters of faith, practice, morality, and anything else the Bible addresses. Of course, these men are arguing for the inerrancy of a text they had never seen Whatever the “original” manuscripts might have been, their exact wording and content are lost, likely never to be found.
The word “infallible” means incapable of error in every matter the Bible addresses. Thus, when the Bible speaks about matters of science and history, it is always true, and without error. No matter what scientists and historians say about a particular matter, what the Bible says is the final authority. That’s why almost half of Americans believe the Christian God created the universe sometime in the past 10,000 years.
At the age of nineteen, I enrolled in classes at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan. Midwestern was an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) institution that prided itself in turning out hellfire and brimstone preacher boys. My three years at Midwestern reinforced everything I had been taught as a youth. Every professor and chapel speaker believed the King James Bible was the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God. I was a seedling and Midwestern was a controlled-environment hothouse. Is it any wonder that I grew up to be a Bible thumper; believing that EVERY word in the Bible was straight from the mouth of God? If ever someone was a product of his environment, it was Bruce Gerencser.
I left Midwestern in 1979 and embarked on a ministerial career that took me to churches in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. I stood before thousands of people with Bible held high and declared, THUS SAITH THE LORD! For many years, I preached only from the King James Bible. I believed it was the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God for English-speaking people. Towards the end of my ministerial career, I started using the New American Standard Bible (NASB), and after that, I began using the English Standard Version (ESV).
Many of my former colleagues in the ministry and congregants trace the beginning of my unbelief back to my voracious reading habit and my abandonment of the King James Bible. One woman, after hearing of my loss of faith. wrote to me and said that I should stop reading books and only read the B-I-B-L-E. She just knew that if I would stop reading non-Biblical books, my doubts would magically disappear. In other words, ignorance is bliss.
As I ponder my past and what ultimately led to my loss of faith, two things stand out: a book on alleged Bible contradictions and a list of the differences between the 1611 and 1769 editions of the King James Bible.
As I studied for my sermons, I would often come across verses or passages of Scripture that didn’t make sense to me. I would consult various commentaries and grammatical aids, and, usually, I was able to reconcile whatever it was that was giving me difficulty. Sometimes, however, I ran into what could only be described as contradictions – competing passages of Scripture. In these times, I consulted the book on alleged contradictions in the Bible. Often, my confusion would dissipate, but over time I began to think that the explanations and resolutions the book gave were shallow, not on point, or downright nonsensical. Finally, I quit reading this book and decided to just trust God, believing that he would never give us a Bible with errors, mistakes, and contradictions. I decided, as many Evangelicals do, to “faith” it.
For many years, the only Bible translation I used was the 1769 edition of the King James Bible. I had been taught as a child and in college that the original version — 1611 — of the King James Version and the 1769 version were identical. I later found out they were not; and that there were numerous differences between the two editions. (Please read the Wikipedia article on the 1769 King James Bible for more information on this subject.)
I remember finding a list of the differences between the two editions and sharing it with my best friend — who was also an IFB pastor. He dismissed the differences out of hand, telling me that even if I could show him an error in the King James Bible, he would still, by faith, believe the KJV was inerrant! Over the next few months, he would repeat this mantra to me again and again. He, to this day, believes the King James Bible is inerrant. I, on the other hand, couldn’t do so. Learning that there were differences between the editions forced me to alter my beliefs, at least inwardly. It would be another decade before I could admit that the Bible was not inerrant. But even then, I downplayed the errors, mistakes, and contradictions. I continued to read about the nature of the Biblical text, but I kept that knowledge to myself. It was not until I left the ministry that I finally could see that the Bible was NOT what my pastors and professors said it was; that it was not what I told countless congregants it was. Once the Bible lost its authority, I was then free to question other aspects of my faith, leading, ultimately, to where I am today. My journey away from Evangelicalism to atheism began and ended with the Bible.
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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Every day, Polly, without fail, texts me when she arrives at work. The screenshot above is of a text conversation we had several years ago.
I love the last text from Polly, “I’d go to hell and back with you!” — complete with two smileys, signifying that her words are meant in a humorous way. We can’t, of course, go to Hell and back. There is no hell. Hell and Heaven are mythical places used by preachers to keep congregants in line. In classic carrot-and-stick fashion, preachers promise congregants Heaven if they will play by the rules, and Hell if they don’t.
While there is no such thing as Hell, it is an apt metaphor for many of the things Polly and I have experienced over the past forty-seven years. We started dating in the fall of 1976 and married the summer of 1978. In July we celebrated our forty-fifth wedding anniversary. Polly and I have had a wide range of experiences as a married couple. Good times, hard times. Heaven, Hell. I can look back over our lives together and see we have experienced a fair bit of Hell in our lives: Poverty. A child born with Down Syndrome. Church strife. Severe health problems. Disagreements with parents and extended family. Loss of faith. We have had extended periods as husband and wife when we wondered if would ever stop raining; if the sun would ever shine again; if life would ever return to “normal.” Yet, through it all, we persevered; and in that sense we have indeed been to Hell and back. No matter the circumstance, with stoic determination, we hung on, hoping (and praying) for a better tomorrow. And as sure as Marjorie Taylor Greene will say something stupid, better times did come our way.
I could list numerous reasons why I love Polly, but the one reason that stands above all others is that when I have descended into Hell, she has been right beside me, and when I emerge from the pit into the sunshine of a better day, she is still there.
Forty-five years ago, Polly and I stood before friends and family at the Newark Baptist Temple and recited the following vows:
Groom: I, Bruce, take thee, Polly, to be my wedded Wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.
Bride: I, Polly, take thee, Bruce, to be my wedded Husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I give thee my troth.
Till death do us part. The hells of life have certainly left us scarred, but we have endured. Every day presents us with new challenges, but hand-in-hand, Polly and I meet them together. And if we must, yet again, descend into Hell for a time, we know we will make it because we have one another. To each other, we are friends who will be there through thick and thin.
Polly and Bruce Gerencser, Wedding July 1978
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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
In the fall of 1970, Dad moved us from Deshler, Ohio — a small rural community in northwest Ohio — to a moderate-sized city of 35,000 residents called Findlay. Findlay is home to Marathon Oil and a large Whirlpool plant. I lived in Findlay in eighth grade, ninth grade, and half of the tenth grade (moved to Arizona), and then returned for my eleventh-grade year. All told, I lived in Findlay forty months.
As good Independent Fundamentalist Baptists (IFB), Dad and Mom looked for a church to attend. Our first stop was Calvary Baptist Church. We didn’t stay long. My parents thought Calvary was too uptown; too upper class, for their liking. Our next stop was Trinity Baptist Church, a fast-growing congregation affiliated with the Baptist Bible Fellowship in Springfield, Illinois.
Trinity was definitely our kind of people — poor, working class, with a few rich folks sprinkled in. Wall-to-wall Sunday attendances were common. Trinity had a large bus ministry that brought hundreds of riders to church every week, as well as a large youth group — one hundred or so students from seventh to twelfth grade.
The summer of 1971 brought Uncle Carl and Aunt Pat Brandenburg to Trinity to hold a five-day Super Summer Bible Rally (SSBR). Hailing out of the Troy Baptist Temple, the Brandenburgs held youth-oriented events for IFB churches. The SSBR held at Trinity gathered all the children into the auditorium (500 kids one night) for ninety minutes of entertainment with a Jesus flavor, and a call to salvation at the end of the night.
While I don’t remember much about the program, I do remember Carl and Pat’s daughter, Charlotte. Both of us were fifteen. While I had been interested in girls for a while, I had never had a serious girlfriend. I hung out with my girl friends, but they were not my girlfriends. Charlotte would soon change that for me.
After the first night of the SSBR, Charlotte and I struck up a conversation, and it was not long before our conversation moved from “acquaintance” to “I like you” to by the end of the week good old-fashioned IFB “puppy love.” For the following four days, I would walk a few blocks to the motel where the Brandenburgs were staying, pick up Charlotte, and we would walk to Riverside Park. There we would walk along the river and sit on the banks of the Blanchard River. Mutual infatuation to be sure, but it seemed “real” to both of us.
Alas, Friday night came and went, and then it was time for Charlotte to return to Troy. We vowed to keep in touch with one another, and so we did with letters and phone calls. While Charlotte and I held hands and put our arms around each other, we didn’t kiss. Doing so was a crime in IFB circles. Kissing leads to premarital sex . . . need I say more?
In September, I talked my youth director into taking a busload of teens to Troy Baptist Temple to view the movie, A Thief in the Night. Of course, Charlotte would be in attendance too. We sat together, holding hands the whole time. “Was this the making of something special?” I wondered at the time.
After the movie, Charlotte and I were lingering near the church bus, lamenting my soon departure. I really, really, really wanted to kiss her. My youth director, Bruce Turner, told me it was time to get on the bus, and then he looked at the both of us as he turned away and said, “get it over with.” And so we did. A quick kiss and a promise to keep the flame burning.
Alas, absence does not make the heart grow founder, proximity does. By Christmas, both of us had moved on to other people.
I would remain a casual dater until I had my first real adult romance at age eighteen with a woman named Anita. (Please see 1975: Anita, My First Love.) We talked marriage, but our relationship did not last. After Anita, I swore off dating for a while, focusing instead on work, friends, and my 1970 Nova SS. It would not be until the fall of 1976 that I was ready to play the field again. Little did I know the field only had one woman, a beautiful, dark-haired girl named Polly. Two years later we married.
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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Breaking balls should be banned from youth baseball.
After another week of bad calls from umpires such as Angel Hernandez, it is time for Major League Baseball to start using ABS (automatic balls and strikes). I’ve seen the technology in use in the minor leagues. I’m sold.
Last night’s Baltimore Ravens vs Washington Commanders NFL game was the best preseason game I’ve ever seen.
Just because Subway is slicing its own meats doesn’t mean their pricy sandwiches are any better.
It seems Liam Neeson’s latest movie is just a rehash of a Taken movie. In fact, I can’t remember a Neeson movie that wasn’t.
Favorite movies of mine: Mars Attacks, Hell in the Pacific, Beyond Rangoon, and Mosquito Coast.
All time favorite TV crime procedural: Homicide: Life on the Street.
Using Ozempic for weight loss can and does cause an incurable stomach disease: gastroparesis. Sufferers can now lose weight without drugs. Nausea, vomiting, and a loss of appetite will do that to you.
It remains to be seen if the United States will survive the prosecution of Donald Trump.
There is a God: Kid Rock was recorded drinking Bud Light.
Bonus: Headline screams: new tool takes the hassle out of peeling boiled eggs. Oh my, how did we ever survive.
Bruce and Polly Gerencser, in front of our first apartment in Pontiac, Michigan, Fall 1978 with Polly’s Grandfather and Parents
My wife, Polly, and I met as freshman students at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan — an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) institution. Two years later, in July 1978, we stood before God and man and professed our love, devotion, and commitment to one another. After a short honeymoon, we returned to Pontiac to begin our new life as husband and wife.
Several months before our wedding, we rented an upstairs apartment on Premont Avenue in Waterford Township (Pontiac) Michigan. Our upstairs apartment had four rooms: a living room, bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen. The walls were freshly painted. The living room floor had recently been covered with green and white shag carpeting. The heat was controlled by the people who lived in the first-story apartment.
Shortly before Polly and I started living together, I stopped at a yard sale that had a bunch of furniture for sale. I made them a $150 offer for all the furniture, an offer they quickly accepted. Upon returning home from our honeymoon, Polly was quite surprised to see all the “wonderful” furniture that I had purchased to furnish our apartment. After a few months of marriage, we bought a love seat from Kay’s Furniture to replace the piece-of-junk futon I had purchased at the yard sale. The love seat, along with a new double bed we bought from J.L. Hudson’s, would be the last new furniture we would own for the next 20 years.
Our little apartment was all that we needed. Polly and I were quite busy. Both of us were full-time students. I also worked forty hours a week for a Detroit machine shop. Polly cleaned the homes of a Bloomfield Hills rabbi (Richard Hertz) and his wife, along with their daughter. Financially we were secure, and looking forward to starting our junior year at Midwestern. We learned quickly that life circumstances can and do change overnight. Six weeks into our marriage, Polly learned that she was pregnant. Severe morning sickness forced her to stop cleaning houses. This was a hit on our finances, but not a fatal blow. That would come three months later when I was laid off from my job.
One afternoon, I came home from school to eat lunch and then change my clothes for work. No ties were needed at the machine shop. We were still in the honeymoon phase of our marriage. All was well between us. That quickly changed on this day when I walked in the door and noticed a large brown stain on our brand-new light-colored carpet.
Polly had been drinking iced tea in the living room and accidentally spilled her large glass of tea on the carpet. Panicked, Polly decided to clean the spot; not with water; not with carpet cleaner. She used the one thing she thought would turn the dark stain light — bleach. That fateful decision turned the dark brown spot into a lighter-brown spot. The tea stain became permanent.
In February 1979, Polly and I informed our landlord that we had to move. The landlord told me she wanted to talk to us before we moved to Ohio. I thought, “What are we going to do about the stain?”
On the appointed day, the landlord came to our apartment. Everything was just as it was when she rented us the place months before. What happened to the spot? Oh, “God” led me to move a footstool over the stain. Viola! The stain magically disappeared.
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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
My wife, Polly, and I are the parents of six children — four boys and two girls. We have two distinct families: our three oldest sons, then our two daughters and youngest son. There are almost nine years between these “families” of ours. Their experiences as the children of Bruce and Polly Gerencser, an ordained Baptist pastor and his wife, vary greatly.
Polly and our oldest three sons often went with me when I visited church families. I visited every family in the church at least once a year. I wanted them to get to know me personally, away from the church and pulpit.
I love to talk. I used to apologize for this trait, but I no longer do so. Being talkative is who I am. I am not boorish, only talking about myself. When visiting with congregants, I was interested in hearing about their families, their needs, and their spiritual struggles. Sometimes, I would spend an hour or two with church members, depending on what they want to talk about.
Much like an airplane circling an airport, getting ready to land, I would eventually know it was time to leave. Polly and the boys said to themselves countless times, “Finally. We can go home.” Several minutes later, I uttered the words my dear children hated hearing from me: “Go get in the car, and I will be right out!” Inwardly they groaned, knowing that the airplane wasn’t ready to land; that Dad wouldn’t make it to the car for another fifteen minutes.
You see, I like to talk. I genuinely enjoy conversing with people. As I would get up to leave, all of a sudden a question or comment would stop me in my tracks, and a “forever” (according to the way my children kept time) later I was still talking.
Being a part of a strict patriarchal family, neither Polly nor our sons objected to being left in the car. Today, I suspect my sons would say “I ain’t going anywhere until you get in the car,” and Polly would likely say, “Hey, Bud, I’m not getting in the car until you do.” Such protestations would have been impossible when we had a “Biblical” family, but today I hope they would demand I respect their time.
While Polly and I, along with our oldest sons, reminiscence about the good old days when I said ” Go get in the car, and I will be right out” we all laugh, but I can’t help but think in my heart that I wish I had never walked out of countless doors without Polly and our boys in hand. I wish I had shown them more respect and less authority.
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.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
