When I was verging on thirteen, my family moved from Brooklyn, New York to a small New Jersey town that was turning into a bedroom community for New York commuters.
I forgave my parents for that move when I turned 40.
Seriously, any sort of disruption is difficult for someone entering puberty. In previous posts, I discussed how conservative my old neighborhood—blue-collar, white, and Roman Catholic—was. While our new community was more middle-class and not as Catholic, it was, in some ways even more conservative—and religious. Or, at least, the prevailing attitude is perhaps more influenced by religion.
Some of that, I believe, had to do with the light and physical space. In Brooklyn, we lived in apartments until I was eight. Then my parents bought a row house, where we lived until we moved to New Jersey. That house, the apartment buildings, and most other structures in the neighborhood were constructed from bricks flaked and bubbled but somehow held together and insulated the people within them like the worn coats of old people. Those bricks, those houses, simmered softly in summer heat and glowed like embers at sunset, and echoed stories shared on stoops and over hearty meals.
There were no bricks on our block in New Jersey. In fact, there were few anywhere in the town, except in one of its older sections. Oh, and I was older than the house we moved into, or any of the others on our street. They were single-story or split-level, with no basements—or stoops. So neighbors couldn’t sit outside and chat unless one invited the other into their yard or house. The fronts of those houses were flat, painted in flat shades of white and beige.
Almost everybody I knew in my Brooklyn neighborhood attended the same church, in the middle of our neighborhood. Many of us also attended its Catholic school. Ironically, as much as we talked, and kids played with each other, we interacted very little, if at all, during Mass. If anything, the church served a purpose that, I would learn much later, Elizabeth I envisioned for the then-new Church of England: It wasn’t so much a unifying faith as much as a social glue. In other words, she cared more about attendance than belief. Likewise, we—even those of us who attended the church’s school– didn’t talk much, if at all, about our notions of the triune God but we all knew enough to attend or “assist” at mass on days of obligation.
The New Jersey town had a Roman Catholic parish, which I attended, as well as churches and chapels of the mainline Protestant denominations. If I recall correctly, there was also an Evangelical church, but I (and, I suspect, almost anybody who didn’t attend it) didn’t know what it was. On Sunday morning, the streets—quiet except when people were on their way to work or school—were all but deserted, as most people were in one of those churches. I don’t recall any open hostility or even debates between members of different churches, but there didn’t seem to be much communication between the leaders of those churches, or between members of churches about matters related to their institutions and faith.
As I described in an earlier post, my Catholic school in Brooklyn was, in essence, a Northern segregation academy. It opened around the time courts ordered the busing of Black and brown kids from other neighborhoods–”trouble,” as some called them—into public schools in white neighborhoods like ours. Our New Jersey enclave was “spared” such a fate because, well, there weren’t Black or Brown kids to bus to the school. I recall only one Black classmate: an extremely intelligent and talented girl whose family had a farm on the outskirts of town and, I would learn later, were descendants of a community of free Blacks and escaped slaves that once lived in the area. I would love to know how many times that girl and her family heard “we don’t mean you” from white people talking about the race “problem.”
I knew only one kid who attended the Catholic high school: an athlete whom the public high school (from which I graduated) barred from its football and track teams because of a medical condition. My guess is that other kids went to that school because their parents really wanted a Catholic education for their kids—or, perhaps, they wanted to protect their progeny from lowlifes like me!
So, that school didn’t have to be a segregation academy. But, in a sense, the town itself was one. I don’t know whether the local shade of skin has darkened any since I left, more than four decades ago, but it seems that some members of the local Board of Education are trying to “shield” kids from “unsavory” influences, just as they moved to the town to forget, and to keep their kids from knowing about, the darkness and rough edges in the bricks of the cities they left.
Lest you thought that only the likes of Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are trying to eradicate the existence of LGBTQ kids in the name of “parental rights,” consider this: the town I’m talking about—Middletown Township (ironically, the home of Governor Phil Murphy) has just mandated the “outing” of transgender and other gender-variant kids. Under the new policy, if, students ask to be called a different name or identified by a different gender from the one on their birth certificates, ask to use the bathroom, or participate on a sports team or other activity designated for the “opposite” gender, teachers must notify those kids’ parents.
(Three other New Jersey municipalities, including one that borders Middletown and another in the same county, have proposed policies with nearly identical language.)
Now, I understand parents wanting to know what their children are doing, in school or elsewhere. But I also know how vulnerable such kids are: After all, I was one, though I didn’t “come out” and begin my gender affirmation process until I was in my 40s. Moreover, from other experiences, I know of the perils some young people face. When I taught in a yeshiva, boys confided questions about their sexual orientation, or simply their wish to know what life was like outside the Orthodox bubble, to me. (One also talked about sexual abuse from a rabbi.) Later, as a college instructor—both before and after my gender affirmation—students came to me with questions and fears they couldn’t express to members of their families and communities. And, when I co-facilitated an LGBTQ youth group, I worked with 14 and 15-year-olds who were kicked out of their homes or bullied out of their schools when they “came out.”
Some of those parents who disowned their gay, trans, or genderqueer students, no doubt, thought they could “protect”–segregate– them from the “influences” of people like me. And, by getting rid of the “bad apple,” they can keep the rest from “spoiling.”
It’s hard for me not to think that the same kinds of people who supported Catholic Northern segregation academies like the one I attended in Brooklyn are also behind the proposals to out kids in the name of “parents’ rights”– in order to segregate other children from the ungodly influences of kids like the one I might’ve been had I the language or awareness to define myself, and those teachers and other adults who might’ve been my allies.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
As an ex-Christian and a person living with a mental illness, I have thought quite a bit these past few years about how religion and mental illness intersect, and the positive and negative effects their interaction can have on one’s well-being (especially the mental and emotional aspects). And my inspiration to write this came from a revealing question I asked myself.
What place would I never set foot in again?
I have been to some very remote, rural places where the soil seems to grow far-right extremists. Of course, I was drawn there not by the people, but for the natural beauty found in many such places. I have lived in Wyoming and worked in some of the reddest counties in Florida. And perhaps if I went back to such places, one of those areas would be the place I would never want to visit again, now that the political discourse has become even more toxic than it was in 2016.
But I went to this place in early 2015, just before (or shortly after) Trump announced his candidacy for President. There was no cult of Trump yet, and visible support for the man in this town was scant, if there was any at all.
But what I saw in Crescent City, Florida scared the shit out of me even more than Trump. What I saw there during my brief four-hour visit has existed in this country for decades longer than Trumpism. And it finds its most fertile soil in communities like these. What I saw there was an unadulterated display of Christian Nationalism that I have never seen the likes of since, even in the rural communities in which I have lived and worked.
I did not technically choose to be in Crescent City that night. I was only there because I was a volunteer for a community organization that served the area and my partner and I were tasked with setting up a booth there to promote it. We were working a community event taking place in the heart of their “downtown.”
The Crescent City Catfish Festival opened with a prayer (of the Evangelical variety), and the musical entertainment for the evening consisted entirely of worship music. Perhaps I am too much of a sheltered suburbanite, but such an overt display of religiosity at a nominally secular public event was not something I ever expected to see. But that is not the main reason I wouldn’t return there.
I can’t recall what the booth next to ours was sponsoring or selling, but the old man there gave me the creeps. I was already struggling with a depression that would eventually lead to my first suicide attempt and involuntary hospitalization, and I think my low mood must have been palpable, or perhaps the old man’s church taught him to spot the signs that a person might be open to a “word from the Lord.” Either way, what happened next was shocking, disgusting, and uncalled for.
Roughly two hours in, the old man walked up to me and looked at me. What came out of his mouth were not words of the good news of salvation through Jesus, but the exhortation to get right with God before we died and went to Hell, if we didn’t believe already. What made things even worse was the tone of the man, which I have since heard echoed in right-wing street protests by youth one-third his age. It was the tone of smug self-righteousness, mingled with sadistic glee, mixed with the emphasis on hellfire.
Vulnerable as I was, this only made me more anxious and eager to leave. When I told my colleague I was disturbed by what this man had done, he brushed it aside, leaving me to grapple with my anxieties and fears alone. Not knowing anything at all about my mental illness at the time, I began to think the old man was right. Maybe I needed to get right with a God I no longer believed in. Maybe God was punishing me for smoking weed, slacking off on my schoolwork and internship, et cetera. Maybe I had strayed off the path and needed chastisement to bring me back into the fold.
And while these doubts and worries did not end up bringing me back to the faith (nor have they in the times I’ve experienced them after that), they worsened my depression and my self-confidence greatly. Looking back, I now know what was happening. I was so overwhelmed I shut down completely. My internship and my classes, my roommates’ hostility towards me, my cluelessness as to what I would do after graduating college, and the feeling of alienation from my friends and family — they all weighed on me.
And so too, did the “get right or fry” message from this old man. Instead of the supposed love and grace of Christ, all I can think about is the pain and punishment of Hell conveyed through the words of a mean and intrusive old man. I already hated myself so much at the time that this was just gasoline on an already growing fire.
Seven years later, the public displays of religiosity in Crescent City are ever-present now at right-wing rallies, in the halls of government, and in the classrooms of children. And in most cases, the people most apt to publicly display their religion like this are the types who will go on to mentally scar others through interactions like the one I had with this old man.
There is no love in the Christianity these people proclaim, only destruction and dominion. The sooner people realize this and realize that Crescent City and places like it are the communities these Christian zealots idealize, maybe we can beat back the rising tide of Christian Nationalism before we are all swept up in its clutches.
I will never go back to Crescent City, but unless we do something about it, we may all be living in Crescent City sooner than we realize.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
I was a teacher, a new term started and I soon worked out that one of my class of six-year-olds, Ben, was from a Christian family. He was a chatty child and told me of church picnics and events, of the preacher he liked because he always brought a ventriloquist’s puppet teddy for children’s talks. (Cringe, cringe from me – it was called Brother Ted.) Ben said the name of his church. Google told me it was a Brethren Assembly, KJV-only church, and in pictures of the congregation, l saw that some of the older women wore hats that looked like ones my old grandma wore in the 1940s and 1950s. No one was smiling.
I was fundamentalist, mainstream Baptist, so not as dyed-in-the-wool fundy as Ben’s church obviously was. Looking back, my dissonances had begun partly through knowing young Ben, but it was years before I faced them, until finally, they got to be too many and too compelling for me to disregard any longer.
Over the coming months, having Ben in my class certainly brought some of them to the fore. The children were allowed to bring a new toy they’d had for their birthday. Ben brought a spaceship and explained it to me. He detached the capsule and said two astronauts were bringing a dead astronaut back to earth in it. When they got here, they’d bury the deceased spaceman in the ground and include a shovel. Naturally, I asked, ‘Why a shovel?’ and he said it was so that the man could dig himself out of his grave when Jesus came back and go to Heaven with him. (I still can’t pass a cemetery without smiling at the thought of all those graves with shovels in them, laid across deceased Christians’ chests. Maybe it’s true, God helps those who help themselves.)
One day he told me he’d learned the memory verse for Sunday School. From the Google pictures I’d seen, the Sunday School children all appeared to be under ten years old. Ben said they were going to stand out front next Sunday and say it to the adults with actions. Then they’d repeat it ten times so the adults learned it too. It was Romans 6:23, ‘The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life.’ (I daren’t ask what the actions to Romans 6:23 were.) What a verse to be indoctrinating small children with.
One morning, Ben’s mother asked to speak to me to tell me Ben might be upset that week, his grandad had just died, and Ben had also seen a funeral group leaving a house in their street and asked about death. As I expected, Ben wanted to tell me about this. He said neither grandad, nor the deceased man in his street, went to church. He paused and then added, ‘But they were both kind, good people, so I think they’re in Heaven now.’
What a mash-up that poor child was being indoctrinated with. They were told every week that they must accept Jesus as their Saviour or they wouldn’t go to Heaven when they died. Or when you die, do you stay dead in the cemetery with your shovel till Jesus returns? Or does God let good people into Heaven the minute they pop their clogs, even if they didn’t go to church? Which is it?
I wonder what happened to Ben. I do hope his keen mind enabled him to figure it all out and escape that rigid Brethren upbringing. He’s not the only one, of course, confused by the dissonances, contradictions, and clear-as-mud commands of the Bible — lots of us were — until we finally made our escape. I hope so very much that Ben did too.
(He also told me one day of a disappointment. He’d been assigned the part of Jesus in a church drama about the call of Matthew. I said that was a very important part. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I wanted to be Matthew, the Snack Collector.’ I guess in that role, he hoped he’d be able to legitimately extort chocolate bars or Pringles from the others in the play!)
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
Pat Robertson died last week, and this got me thinking about a couple of stories from when I used to watch. Back in the early 90s, we got cable television after a long wait living in the boonies. (I was a commuter college student living with my parents.) One source of amusement for me (and one of my brothers) was Pat and his 700 Club. In fact, I called Pat’s 700 Club the “other comedy channel.” Pat had some hilarious antics — “word of knowledge” where he’d “heal” someone in the audience. I always laughed when he’d squint his eyes down so hard when he’d pray that I’m certain he thought that was the key to its delivery to God. While most secular people I’ve seen were saying “Good Riddance” to Pat, I actually wish he had made it to his predicted Biblical 120. It seemed his antics got crazier the older he got, and they’d bring him in for occasional commentary (and jocularity).
The 700 Club had a great cast of characters. Pat of course, who looked like some sort of Tolkienesque gremlin, Scottish Sheila Walsh (Oh Pat, thar out thar on tha straits! They ‘haint got no food! We haf to teach ’em about Jaysus!”), Church lady Terry Meeuwsen and Ben Kinchlow “The Black Colonel Sanders.”
Story One
Pat (who always had his ear to the ground for crazy news) had heard an end-of-the-world prediction that the world would end on Thursday, June 9th, 1994. During an entire week that I was watching crazy Pat on the 700 Club he was talking about June 9th over and over again. We college kids liked to stay up late, and sometimes really late. In fact, it was so late it was early . . . I’m wide awake at 2:30 a.m. watching the 700 Club. Spontaneously, I start waving my arms and yelling out June 9th! June 9th! Then I see my dad lumbering down the basement stairs shirtless and in his sleeping shorts looking like death warmed over. (OH NO!) “What are you doing?!! You’re lucky, I thought someone was breaking in and I was going to get my gun!” I told him I was sorry and that was the end of it. Of course, the next day was June 9th . . . but the world didn’t end. Pat wasn’t ashamed. He pointed out that there had been several earthquakes! Of course, there are earthquakes pretty much every day somewhere in the world. I did find it interesting Pat died on June 8th, so maybe he was just a little bit off.
Second Story
Pat liked to give out little freebies, but you had to call in. This time my older brother was watching with me. Pat went on and on about Dungeons & Dragons. I was just curious what was Pat’s beef with D&D? Call now! Get a free pamphlet about Dungeons & Dragons! I wasn’t really comfortable calling the 700 Club to request it, so my brother volunteered to do so. There was a phone in the basement and he went to make the call. He comes back about 5 minutes later with a giant smile. “Troy, that guy was praying for your very soul! Pat might be a con artist, but his prayer line people are definitely sincere.” The 4-page pamphlet came a while later in the mail. I was very disappointed. It was really, really, really lame.
I suppose Pat and I parted ways after that. I’d just tune in for dribs and drabs. I did contact the 700 Club one final time though. I noticed that one of the old stand-by hosts Sheila Walsh was no longer on the show. It seemed like Pat would get very somber when he’d mention Sheila, as if she had betrayed him or died. I had no idea. So I sent the 700 Club an email and asked what happened to her. Nothing nefarious though, she just left to pursue her singing and other churchy stuff. It is possible Pat was upset about Sheila quitting the show, though the email didn’t get into it.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
When Mom and Dad got married in 1960, he left his childhood church at Central to attend Lockport with Mom. Her entire family attended there, except for her sister Mary Lou, who left Lockport to attend Central Church with her new husband, Vern “Levi” Beck. There was a lot of back and forth between Central, Lockport, and West Clinton. Central was the parent church to the other two, and it had only been a few years that they were functioning as three fully independent organizations. The rest of the Mennonite Churches in Northwest Ohio were started later than these three, and I always thought of these three as the foundation of everything.
It was confusing to me when Dad would refer to West Clinton as the East Church. East and West are usually pretty straightforward for me, but only when I’m outdoors. As soon as I’m in any building, I lose my sense of direction, something that happens to me still to this day. Mom loses sense of direction all the time. I remember lots of times when Dad would ask her which way north was, and she would think for a while before answering. Whenever I’m in a new building and someone leads me to the correct room, when it’s time to leave I ask which direction is the way out. My instinct is to turn in the opposite direction. Even when I try to go against my instinct, I’m still turning in the opposite direction from how I entered the room.
This habit, calling West Clinton the East Church, is because it’s east of Central, and Lockport is west of Central. For a long time, people called them the East Church and the West Church until they got their current names. I guess West Clinton is in the western part of Clinton Township, hence its name. Lockport is named after the historic village of Lockport, Ohio. It was a busy place for a while, because it was beside Bean Creek, and I think there was a grist mill and a saw mill there.
Then Stryker and West Unity grew larger, and Lockport ceased to exist as a village. The cemetery is still there and is still used. It’s next to the Lockport Church, and most people assume that it’s associated with the church. But the cemetery is a secular entity. I think it’s administrated at the township level. Most of my relatives on Mom’s side are buried there. Most of Dad’s side is buried in the Pettisville Cemetery near the Pettisville School.
I was in Mary Lou’s wedding, as a flower girl. The ring bearer was Levi’s nephew, Arlen “Dean” Beck, who was also in my Sunday school class. That Beck family liked their nicknames. My best friend a few years later was Linda “Pin” Beck, who also was in my Sunday school class, and who also was a nephew of Levi. And a cousin of Dean. I was sort of embarrassed to be in a wedding with Dean as my partner walking down the aisle. I was only about four years old, but somehow I knew it was a romantic thing, and I wasn’t sure about being paired up like that. Mom tells me that I behaved well as a flower girl, doing all the things that were expected of me.
Church was my entire social life, outside of relatives, for my first seven years. I only attended a few months of kindergarten, as it only occurred in the spring for kindergarteners in that school system. So I was two months short of seven years old when I finally went to school every day for an entire school year. For all of my childhood, church was superior to school. It was better morally, as we were following God. It was situated in a better place because it was closer to my house. It was better for my family because every time we went to church it was like a family reunion on Mom’s side of the family. School was an afterthought for me, even in high school. My first real boyfriend was in my youth group. I married my second real boyfriend. My best friend was in my youth group. My other best friends were also in my youth group, except for one or two. So my whole life was basically at church. School was like a job someone takes to get a paycheck. Church was the reason to live.
And church was better socially, as it was consistent throughout all my years. Kids would come and go from school, and I would have to change to a different building some years. But my Sunday school class had the same kids from preschool through my senior year, with very few exceptions. The girls were Linda, Pam, Lisa, and me, and the boys were Jeff B., Jeff W., Dean, and Todd. All of them were related to me in some way, other than perhaps Jeff B. They were some combination of second, third, and fourth cousins. Lisa’s dad was my dad’s first cousin. Todd’s mom was my mom’s first cousin.
Sometime in the middle school years, Gene joined our class. He lived in Michigan, and his parents drove about an hour to Lockport for church for many years. They became central figures in many things there, teaching marriage classes, and being fully involved. They were more involved than a lot of the people who lived nearby and were related to everyone. But because they didn’t live in the local community, their family always seemed outside the circle in my young mind.
Jeff W. was always a lot taller than the rest of us. He also shared my exact birthday. His mom and my mom were in the hospital together when we were born. I was born to a 21-year-old mother, and his mother already had several children and was probably nearly 40 years old. We had our first birthday party together, and we gave each other teddy bears. Jeff ended up living with his wife and children on the same farm where he was raised, in the same house. Years later, my brother Rick worked for Jeff when he needed help with his sandblasting business.
It’s funny how I categorized things in my little mind. My dad had a friend in Kidron, Ohio, from their time serving together in PAX in Germany in the late 1950s. They chose to build houses for war refugees, rather than enlist in the military. We made lots of trips back and forth to spend time with Ernie and Jeannie Geiser and their kids. I loved their house because it had an elegant stairway to the upstairs of the house. Instead of a straight passageway, the bottom several steps extended out into a half-circle shape, leading into the living room. So you could sit on the half-circle steps, and visit with people in the living room. This was the height of wonder to me.
On one of our trips back from visiting them, it was dark and we kids were sleeping in the back seat of the car. No seatbelts in those days. Dad built a wooden insert for the backseat of the car to cover where you put your feet, so the seat was twice as wide. It was like a bed, and we could all lie down and sleep on long trips. So I was in a sleepy state, but listening to my parents talk. Dad made a comment about Jeannie being a really wonderful wife, even if she wasn’t a Mennonite. My mind equated Mennonite with Christian, and while I knew there were other denominations, I also knew that only Mennonites go to heaven. I spent a long time thinking about how sad it is that Jeannie can’t go to heaven.
On a later trip, we went to church with them, and in fact, they attended a large Mennonite Church in their area. It made Lockport look like a village chapel. I think I stopped worrying about Jeannie after that.
My great uncle Walter Stuckey was the pastor of my church throughout my childhood. He was my mom’s dad’s brother. Every year I received a birthday card from him with a stick of gum and a note about how I’m making my parents proud. I later realized that he sent these to every child in Lockport.
I always liked how Walter would raise his hands over the congregation at the end of each service, and say, “Now may the Lord bless you and keep you, May he make his face shine upon you, and give you peace.” That’s how I remember it, although the verse he quoted may have been longer. It was always the same, and it was solemn and happy at the same time. I think this was the most religious ritual I ever had as a kid, and I loved it. I probably would have been very happy as a Catholic child.
When I was about 13, Walter was ready to retire. It was a long and mysterious process, but we finally found a new pastor. I think there were a few fill-in or short-term pastors, but eventually, Keith Leinbach became my pastor for the rest of my childhood. He talked a lot more about personal salvation. He told a lot more personal stories. He was fun to listen to. He was very different from Walter. In retrospect as an adult, I see this as a huge time of change for Lockport. I’m sure there were adults that didn’t like it and others who thought it wasn’t enough change and wasn’t fast enough.
I attended baptismal preparation classes when I was 12 or 13. Walter was involved in teaching them, as he hadn’t totally retired. We were the first group to be water baptized where the girls were given a choice of whether to wear the head covering. In the 1800s, all the Mennonite women covered their heads all the time, like the Amish still do. In the early 1900s, all the Mennonite women covered their heads when praying. My Grandma Wyse kept a head covering in her kitchen drawer, and put it on quickly before Grandpa prayed before a meal. She took it off right after the prayer and put it back in the drawer. By the 1970s, Mennonite women only wore the head covering to church services, and there were discussions about whether it was required.
So our little group in 1974 was given a choice. I chose to wear it. My dad talked with me about this decision, as he thought that if I started to wear it, then it would be harder to stop later when I no longer wanted to. He thought it would be better to never start. But all the women I admired wore one! So I did too. And then within a few years I stopped, as my dad predicted. By the 1980s, only the older Mennonite women were wearing one.
Mom couldn’t wear a veil at her wedding in 1960. She wore a head covering, with her fancy normal-looking wedding dress. She was fashionable and had short hair, but the veil was too much. The next wedding after that, the veil was allowed. Mom and Dad also couldn’t have wedding rings in their ceremony. They put them on each other privately between the ceremony and the reception. The next wedding ceremony after theirs had rings. Change was happening so fast in the 1960s.
So by the time I was in high school, I no longer wanted to be like all the other Mennonites. I was questioning everything. I was wearing dress pants to church for Sunday night services. That was living on the edge. I wanted to wear jeans but never pushed that hard against the unwritten rules. I also didn’t wear dress pants on Sunday mornings. I had friends who were conservative and only wore dresses to church. They were offended that I wore dress pants at all. I argued about it with the best of them. “God doesn’t care what I wear! I could wear jeans to church and he wouldn’t mind!” But then they argued back that we shouldn’t be a stumbling block to others, so I kept it to dress pants, not jeans.
This is so weird to write this out. People wear shorts to that church now. They’ve had female pastors. They have female elders. Divorce and remarriage are allowed. I didn’t know a divorced person until I was in high school. They discuss whether LGBTQ people can have leadership positions, although that one remains a little verboten to this day.
I know our society has changed since the 1960s throughout our country, but I think the rate and amount of change in the Mennonite church is far greater as compared with the change in our society.
So when I was born, there was a picture of a lamb that was placed on a bulletin board near the preschool Sunday school classrooms. It had my name on it. All the new babies had a similar lamb. When we were old enough to go to preschool, the lamb was removed and given to our parents. Mine is in my baby book. Imagine having such a consistent attendance at a church, that you could do that. The baby was still there several years later, and the group of children going to the preschool Sunday school class was essentially the same kids that graduated from high school together over a decade later.
For a child, this is reassuring and safe. For a church leader, this is a disaster. The only way to grow a church in this situation is for the families to have lots of kids. (Unless the church has lots of community outreach, but the Mennonites were pretty distinctive. Others were always welcome, but it wasn’t easy to join up with Mennonites before 1975 or so.)
The church growth era hit in the 1970s and 1980s, at the same time that family size was shrinking. There were lots of expectations that a church would continue to grow, or at least not shrink, My great grandma Roth was one of 15 children. She then had 7 children. Her daughter, who was my grandma, also had 7 children. My mom had 4 kids, and I had 3. Two of my adult children don’t have kids, and my son, Jesse, has two. Extrapolate that out for a century, and you can see that the church will no longer be growing.
In fact, Lockport is dealing with this reality as we speak. We often had 300-400 in attendance when I was a child. I think it’s less than half of that now. You’ll always have some kids grow up and move away, and some marry into other religious systems, or decide that being Mennonite is not for them.
I’m not lamenting that people are having fewer children, or that churches are shrinking, or that people move away. I’m just thinking about the impacts on our small communities when these social changes occur. The changes are neutral to me, but the social impacts are where my interest lies. Mennonites are not alone in this change. In the Western world, most religious institutions, and many community organizations like The Elks and The Masonic Lodge, have a similar process unfolding.
Every summer we had two weeks of Bible School. Some years it was in the morning, and some years in the evening, but it was always 4 hours of extreme fun! I think Bible school was my favorite thing in all of my childhood. We had snacks! We had crafts! We had recess! We had lots of extra kids there from the community! There were no grades or tests! There was the burdensome and strongly-worded suggestion that we memorize a few Bible verses each night in preparation to recite them to our teacher the next day. For which we would get a prize. Which I always did because I wanted the prize! But oh the burden of remembering that verse until I could unload it verbally and get my prize. Then I was free again! Hurrah!
As an adult college student in nursing school, I loaded up my brain with all the facts for each exam, and the first thing I did upon leaving the exam room was buy a candy bar. It was awesome. And just now I’m realizing that it’s a holdover from Bible School.
We played lots of organized games at recess, rather than being free to run and roam as we were in regular school. I loved this! One of my favorite games was Red Rover. The kids split into two groups, and stand in lines opposite each other, holding hands. Then one group shouts (after conferring together to make a group decision, which the teachers did not dictate to us!), “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Tammy come over!” Yes! They called my name! So I would go running toward the other group and try to break through their hands. I had to run really fast because so many of them were bigger than me.
One time I didn’t break through their hands. Instead, I flipped backward and fell onto my head on the sidewalk. I don’t remember this but I was told about it. My first memory of the event is lying on my grandma’s couch. I’m told that I hit my head hard enough that they thought I should rest instead of finishing Bible School that day. Grandma only lived a few miles away so someone took me there to rest. I have no memory of the time between running and lying on my grandma’s couch. I’m pretty sure it was a head injury that induced my memory loss. I was about six or seven years old, I think, based on which classroom and play area I remember from playing that game.
Youth group was awesome. We called it MYF, for Mennonite Youth Fellowship. It was as awesome as Bible School, but on Wednesdays all year long, and we were too cool to be THAT excited about it. There were Bible studies and praying and singing, but mostly it was hanging out with other high school kids and going away for weekends. Lots of campouts and bike trips and cookouts and games.
MYF sponsors were married couples who committed to a few years of guiding us through all of this activity. It was the most involved volunteer position in the church. The MYF would vote on who they wanted to be their sponsors, then the current sponsors would go ask them. We knew it was risky. Lots of people declined to do it because of the time commitment. But those who said yes were our heroes. My Aunt Donna and her husband Art said yes, and they were my favorite people for a long time. Also Richard and Teresa Stebbins. Yes, they are just enough older than me to have done that. They were probably only in their early 20s.
Pinegrove was a little church that Lockport had started in the 1950s or so, in the Stryker area. They were pretty small, so they teamed up with us for MYF. It was awesome to have new people with us, at a time when we were realizing how interrelated we all were as we saw each other at family reunions. My first real boyfriend went to Pinegrove and I met him through MYF. It turns out that he is my third cousin. No one seemed to mind. It didn’t even matter to me when I realized it. My own parents are third cousins to one another, I reasoned, and everything turned out fine. I had an awesome biology teacher in tenth grade, Mr. Dilbone. He focused a lot on genetics, as it was the hot new science of that era. I knew that beyond first cousins, it was ok to procreate. Maybe even first cousins were not a problem …
Now this all seems so funny to me. My daughter Lydia realized early on how many relatives she had in Northwest Ohio, and one time she said she wanted to marry a person of another race because they would be the least likely to be her relative.
One MYF game we played was Walk A Mile. It’s an excuse to hold hands with the opposite gender. Nobody thought about how LGBTQ people felt about that idea. Boys and girls paired off holding hands, stood in a long line, and extra people left over were the runners. We started walking down the country roads after dark. The runners would go to a person and say something like, “5 back”, and then they got to hold the girl’s hand and the other guy had to go back 5 couples and do the same. Or the girls were runners – depending upon which gender had more people. It was fun making up the instructions for the handoff. I didn’t realize until talking about this as an adult with my husband, that people cheated! Never entered my mind. They of course chose their partner based on their preferences. I was so honest that it was literally unthinkable.
Speaking of LGBTQ and Mennonites, Pam, from my Sunday school class, and I had quite an adventure. We were about 17 when we went to a Mennonite conference near Kitchener, Ontario. It was for both adults and youth, and we were part of a huge youth choir. We went to all sorts of meetings and workshops, and there was so much to do and see. Pam and I were interested in a workshop on sexuality. We were almost late, and got seats in the front row. As it started we realized that this was meant for the adults, not the youth, but we stayed anyway. Then we started to realize that the topic was not sexuality in general, but it was all about the homosexual question in the Mennonite Church. Then during the question-and-answer time, the man sitting beside Pam asked a question, the content of which made it clear that he was gay. This was the first gay person we had ever known! Afterward, we were so startled and excited and stunned and didn’t know how to feel about this! Pam whispered to me, “I was sitting by a gay man!”
The Mennonite Church continues to talk about this topic to this day. I think they decided that each church can decide for itself, but it has contributed to a lot of debate and a few church and conference splits over the years.
So on one MYF campout, Pin and I were sitting around a campfire with some boys a few years older than we were. One was her cousin, Lynn, and one was my boyfriend, Mark, and there were a few more. Mennonite boys were known for their pranks. But Pin and I were naively innocent. The guys started telling us which weeds and grass were edible. They were picking different ones and naming them. This went on for quite some time. Then one of them said you better roast it first to be sure it’s safe, and they held it over the fire like a marshmallow. Then they ate it. And we believed them the entire time.
On another MYF trip we were staying for a weekend at Brunk’s Cabin in Indiana. There was a lot of ice skating and sledding. On one trip down the hill, my sled spun out of control and I ended up hitting a big tree with the middle of my back. I laid there looking at the sky for a bit, as I couldn’t breathe. Pin’s cousin, Lynn, came to check on me and said, “Are you ok!?!?!” He looked really scared. By then I could breathe, and I simply said, “Yes”, and got up. I never let on how scary that was. Years later, my chiropractor saw scar tissue and a bone spur on that area of my back when he did x-rays. I think it was from that sledding accident.
I loved our annual MYF manhunts. I think it might be my favorite thing of all about MYF. We would choose a farm of about 80 acres, and trade years between which gender did the hiding. The others had a few hours to find them. The losers had to put on a banquet for the winners.
We also divided this activity by gender. I’m starting to think the whole purpose of MYF is to get the kids to marry someone, the opposite gender of course, within the church. And do it young so you have lots of kids.
Anyway, one year the girls hid in a cornfield on my great grandma Roth’s farm, which was by then being farmed by one of her kids. It was only a few miles east of where I lived. It was in October but the corn wasn’t harvested yet. So we just laid down between the corn rows, all in one long row. We thought that even if the guys walked through the cornfield, it would be difficult to cover every row. And yes, they walked through the cornfield and were only a few rows over from us. We could see them. But they never found us, so they had to arrange and serve the food at our banquet in November.
Another year, we hid on the top of Pam’s dad’s barn. He had a double roof on it, where there was an area where both roofs sloped downward toward each other, and if you went to the bottom of that roof area all you could see was the roof around you and the night sky. So we all laid on the roof, cozy and clean in sleeping bags, while the boys searched the whole farm. We won again.
I think we found the boys both years that I searched for them, but I don’t remember the details. Hiding was so much more fun.
It was traditional to welcome the freshman class to MYF in September of each year. For a few weeks, we would do everything as scheduled, but then we would have an MYF initiation night. Some classes were worse than others, and the one older than us was pretty bad. I ate dog food covered in chocolate, had raw eggs poured over my hair, crawled through straw, and more. It took me forever to get all that out of my hair that night. This was the one thing I hated about MYF. It just seemed mean.
The next year we were supposed to plan the initiation for the kids one year younger than us. I remember the meeting with the kids my age and the sponsors. We talked about how we didn’t want to do it. In the end, we had a harvest party in the abandoned house on my dad’s farm, and we didn’t do anything mean. Everyone else was surprised, and nobody did that sort of initiation for the rest of the time I was in MYF. My class stopped the hazing.
Bible quiz was another option for us. I was in it for three years, but not for my senior year. In my junior year, I had joined a lot of extra activities and ended up with a case of shingles on my forehead and in my hair. The doctor had talked with me about how it can be related to stress, when the chickenpox virus is activated into shingles. I decided to cut back and Bible quiz was one thing I let go of.
Quiz was a lot of memorizing. It made Bible school look like nothing. Over the three years I was in it, we studied the books of John, Amos, Mark, and James. We had it practically memorized. Once a month throughout the school year we would go to West Clinton’s sanctuary and be quizzed on our knowledge. I was pretty good at it. But I really liked the lack of pressure during my senior year.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
I was thinking about this recently and wondered, when I was a Christian, did I really love God? At the time, I believed that I did. But on this side of things, I realize it was a pretty weird and one-sided relationship. It certainly didn’t start out with me loving God. I was a 12-year-old at a YMCA summer camp in 1980. Most of the camp counselors were either Bible school students or just really devout Christians. One night towards the end of the session, all the campers assembled around a huge fire. It was during this time that the gospel was preached to us; a gospel that basically said because of Adam and Eve, we are all sinners; Jesus came and died and was resurrected to pay for our sins; if we believe this and confess him as Lord, we get to go to heaven instead of hell. Hell was described in Evangelical language: eternal burning in torment kind of thing. Well, shit! When they asked if we wanted to pray the prayer of salvation so we would go to heaven, of course, I prayed the prayer! I entered into this relationship with God not out of love, but out of fear. I can’t say that I ever thought about loving God until after college when I started hanging out with some Bible school students that I worked with.
And then there is the whole thing about being commanded to love God. In Mark 12, people are told to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” What does that mean, exactly? I’m not sure that I love anyone to that extent. What is the difference between heart and soul? And how do I love with all my mind and strength? What kind of strength are we talking about? And, can you love someone just because you are told to? I don’t think you can. Can you love someone that you’ve never seen or heard from? Mmmm . . . again, I don’t think so. I thought many times in my Christian days that God had communicated with me about something. But now, I realize it was just me talking to myself, or it was just my natural human intuition. It was all a one-sided relationship. I do remember being thankful, and thinking I loved God because he saved me from hell. But he saved me from the hell that he created. That sounds suspicious! I don’t believe in hell anymore, but you know what I mean.
I try not to think of all the money and volunteer time I gave to the church. Of course, the main reason I was told that this is what I was supposed to do is because I loved God. And, God loved me so much that he would reward me in this life and the one to come because of my love and dedication to him in the present. Yeah, still waiting for some of that. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed most of my time as a Christian in the churches I attended and my days in ministry. But looking back, there was a lot of manipulation and brainwashing going on. Think about the worship songs we used to sing. How many songs did we sing about how much we love God/Jesus/Holy Spirit?
I love you Lord And I lift my voice To worship you, Oh my soul rejoice. Take joy my king In what you hear, Let it be a sweet, Sweet sound in your ear.
And there is no shortage of songs just like this one. And don’t forget all the songs about how much God loves us. It’s like we had to keep this in front of us all the time so we wouldn’t start questioning God’s love or if we really loved him. Or was I really just trying to avoid hell and some kind of punishment while I’m on this earth? Again, at that time, I would have told you that I loved God and was doing my best to love him more all the time. But when I really re-visit the things I did and believed, there were selfish reasons for doing so. Number one, I didn’t want to go to hell — thus my initial salvation and many rededications through my teen years. I tithed and gave because I loved God and my church, but I also was taught, and preached, the prosperity gospel. You reap what you sow, right? So if I sow money, I’ll reap money. It might be raises at work, or a better job, or my car wouldn’t break down, or something like that. But I can’t honestly say there was no thought of that in my giving. I wanted to know and live God’s plan for my life. Yes, because I loved him and wanted to do what he created me to do. But part of that was I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I figured if God really had a plan, surely I would enjoy it more than how my life was at the time.
Interestingly enough about that last part — God’s plan for my life — I’ve found life much more fulfilling now that I’ve left the faith. When I was a believer, I was always waiting for some kind of divine guidance to get me from where I was to where I thought I’d be happier. So I was never really present in the life I was living day to day. And the fact that I couldn’t seem to figure out God’s plan for my life only made it worse. Now, I’m present in my daily life, doing what’s in front of me to do. I’ve benefited greatly from secular Buddhist and Taoist philosophies regarding mindfulness and all that goes along with that. Is life perfect? Of course not! I work a pretty stressful job, I’m dealing with stress at home, I have some health issues I’m working through, etc. But I have tools to help deal with life that I never had as a Christian. And they are much more effective than prayer ever was! And I can say that I’m much healthier mentally and emotionally than I ever was chasing after God and his plan and working on loving him more. So to answer my initial question, do believers really love God, especially the way the Bible says we should? I’d love to hear your thoughts and about your experiences with this.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
Guest Post by Elise Glassman. Originally published in Aji Magazine Spring 2023.
Growing up in a preacher’s family means hosting a lot of other peoples’ graduations, weddings, and funerals. Each of us has a role to play at these major life events: Dad preaches, Mom runs the reception, and my sisters and I do everything else – we set up chairs and tables, babysit, hand out programs, serve coffee and punch, and clean up after everyone goes home.
Nan’s memorial in 1980 is our first family funeral and I have a new, unfamiliar role: mourner. I didn’t know my great-grandmother well, didn’t understand how tough she was, a single mother in the1920s who lived through the Dust Bowl and World War II and taught at a one-room schoolhouse in Kansas. She was a librarian, property owner, and amateur genealogist, but I only knew her as an elderly relative who sucked on butterscotch candies and occasionally bought us Dairy Queen.
At her wake I sit quietly in the small, hushed funeral home parlor, studying the shiny coffin. Nan’s sunken face is covered in translucent powder, her snowy hair freshly set, shoulders prim under a silken blouse. The room smells of lilacs and a deep earthiness. I look at her and wonder if she’s in Hell.
In the front row, Gram and Aunt Helen weep and dab their eyes with tissues. Only the heathen cry when someone dies, Dad says. Their sadness is proof the godless have no hope. They know they’ll never see their loved one again. For IFB believers like us, funerals are joyous occasions because we celebrate the loved one’s reunification with the Lord, their homecoming. It’s selfish to cry and be sad.
Even in death, we judge.
And, caught between these binary worldviews of utter hopelessness or the triumph of spirit over flesh, the three deaths that befall our family in late 1986 shake my beliefs, and make me question if what Dad preaches about God being in control is actually true.
In September, Gramp Welch has a heart attack and dies. Dad’s brother calls that night to tell us, and we immediately load up the van and begin the long drive to Kansas. Rose and I split the driving so our parents can rest. Dad weeps openly in the back. “I hope he did something about it,” he says, meaning, accepted the Lord.
After the funeral, we go with Gram to the Methodist church basement where women in perms and flowered aprons are setting out punch and casseroles. It’s strange for someone else to be doing the arranging and serving. “I miss Bill terribly but I know I’ll see him in Heaven,” Gram Welch says bravely, picking at her pasta salad. “He trusted in the Lord.”
From her wheelchair at the end of the table, Great-Grandma Staab says mournfully, “It should have been me.”
Later, back at Gram’s house, Dad and his siblings argue at dinner about whether the elderly woman who dozed off in the second row was Great Aunt Mamie or Mabel.
“Did anyone see if Uncle Lester made it?” my grandmother interjects, voice muted.
“What?” my aunt laughs. “Mom, we can’t hear you over that giant gob of mashed potatoes.”
“Who’s Uncle Festus?” Dad’s youngest brother asks. “I thought she said ‘Uncle Fungus,’” my other uncle says.
Dad raises an eyebrow and the siblings start riffing off each other.
“Uncle Fungus was among us.”
”A fungus among us!”
“You could say he’s a fun guy.”
“Are you shitake’ing me?” My aunt’s joke gets a stern look from her brothers.
“Oh, spare us,” Dad says, to groans.
His middle brother says, “there’s no room for ‘shroom jokes at this table.”
“We oyster talk about something else,” Dad adds.
The three give him blank looks.
“No?” His eyes take on a steely glint. It’s a look I know to fear.
“No, dummy, that doesn’t work. We’re riffing on mushrooms,” his sister says.
“Who’s the dummy?” Dad snaps. “I’m not the one living off Mom and scrounging for cigarette money.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” my aunt mutters, getting up. “I sure didn’t miss you and your smart mouth. How do you live with this asshole, Marian?”
Mom’s smile stays frozen on her face but she doesn’t reply. Later, the adults – minus my aunt, who stormed out – drink coffee in the living room and talk. I sit quietly in a dusty corner of the dining room, eavesdropping and looking at my grandfather’s rock collection. During his work as an oil‑field wildcatter, he retrieved interesting stones and fossils from deep in the Earth. Turning a shark tooth over in my fingers, I feel sad. I loved Gramp’s gruff laugh, his homemade peanut brittle, and the Christmas stockings he stuffed with fruit and small toys. We’re supposed to rejoice that he’s gone to Heaven but selfishly I wish he was still here.
On November 7, our head deacon Mr. Foster has a heart attack and dies. It’s his first day at an appliance repair job. He was fifty, which seems elderly, and I feel sorry for the Foster family but Dad says we should feel comforted, even happy, because he was saved and we’ll see him again in Heaven.
A day later, Aunt Helen calls, asking for Mom. “No! Not Pauly!” my mother screams into the phone. Uncle Pauly collapsed in bed, she says when she can finally speak. He’s dead. My parents sag against each other, weeping aloud.
“He was only thirty-six,” Dad adds. He himself turned thirty-nine just weeks ago. “I’ll never see my little brother again.” Tears gush from Mom’s eyes and flow down her face like an undammed river.
I lie awake that night, staring at the ceiling, listening as my sisters weep in their beds. I think about playing burn out with Uncle Pauly in the side yard last summer. My tall, tan, cheerful uncle, who took us to the city swimming pool and taught us to wrestle, is gone forever. It feels unbearable.
Two days later Mom and my sisters and I fly to Kansas City. Mom’s other brother, Uncle David, picks us up. As we walk through baggage claim, I remember waiting here for Gramp and Gram last May. I wish I could go back in time to when Uncle Pauly was alive.
The next few days pass with agonizing slowness. Each event is a fresh occasion for sadness: the memorial in Topeka, where Uncle Pauly and his family lived, the funeral home viewing in Yatesville, then a wake, two rosaries, and finally the funeral mass at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church.
During the service, there are readings and hymns, times to stand and times to kneel on little padded benches, and I don’t know when to do any of it. I don’t know how to greet the priest or if I’m to turn around and look at the soprano singing in the balcony behind us. Yatesville has always felt like home, but sitting in this pew in this ornate sanctuary, I feel like I don’t belong.
I reach over to Gramp and take his tanned, strong hand in mine. His fingers lie cool and lifeless in my palm. “Why wasn’t it me, Lis?” he says sadly, and I think I might break from crying.
Gram sits at the end of the pew, her head lowered, her fingers caressing her rosary beads. I’ve been so cruel to her this past year, so harsh in my judgments and opinions. I wish I could hug her, but her face is grim and shoulders hunched, her grief cloaking her like armor.
“Now we invite the family to bring up the gifts,” the priest says, and Aunt Helen and Uncle David stand up. I look at the program. Liturgy of the Eucharist. It’s the Lord’s Table.
I look down the pew at Mom but she shakes her head. As non-Catholics, we aren’t allowed to partake in this Communion. My grandparents walk slowly up the main aisle to the front of the church, accepting a wafer on their tongues and sipping from a golden goblet the priest holds.
IFB communion is closed too, I think, so Catholics wouldn’t be welcome. We’re united, Independent Baptists and Roman Catholics, in excluding the other.
When the day comes to fly home, Uncle David drives us back to Kansas City. We stop at a Wendy’s in Salina for lunch. “You can eat healthy here,” he says pointedly, heading for the salad bar.
Mom and my sisters study the burger menu but I trail my uncle, piling a plate with greens and vegetables and Italian dressing. I want to spend more time with Uncle David. He’s a writer and teaches English at a university in Florida. It seems like a wonderful, literary life.
When we get back to his rental car, there’s a slip of paper stuck in the door. My uncle unfolds it. “‘Next time, Baldy, keep your nasty fingers out of the bread stix,’” he reads. “Hands carry germs!’”
“That’s not very nice,” Mom says, but she’s smirking.
“I’m not even that bald,” he protests, wadding up the paper and tossing it in the back seat. He and Mom burst out laughing, and keep laughing until tears stream from their eyes.
These sudden deaths bother me. One minute Mr. Foster was moving a refrigerator, the next he was gone. Gramp Welch was reading in his chair and suddenly slumped over unconscious. Uncle Pauly had had the flu. The day he died, Aunt Terry said he’d mowed the lawn and taken his daughters for a walk. He felt tired after supper and collapsed while reading the newspaper.
These abrupt departures remind me of the way the Bible describes the Rapture. Jesus will return like a thief in the night, Dad preaches from First Thessalonians. Suddenly. Without warning. These deaths are the Raptures of 1986. They represent what I fear most: goodbyes, and disappearances.
Dad schedules Mr. Foster’s memorial service two days after Mom and Rose and Paige and I return from Kansas. He’s expecting a big turnout: Mr. Foster was a retired pastor and filled the pulpit at churches all over the Northwest. “Can you girls keep the nursery?” he asks Rose and me, as he props up a large photo of Mr. Foster at the front of the Basel Building sanctuary.
The rest of us are folding programs. “I thought the ladies from Grace Baptist were,” Rose says.
“Isn’t Rose playing piano?” Mom says.
We all look at Dad. Of course, we expect to have a role to play, but this memorial feels personal. Mr. Foster was a deacon and my boss at the Mission, and Paige is best friends with Kelly Foster.
A dark look crosses Dad’s face. “I asked Morgana Mitchell to play piano, so Rose is freed up for nursery duty. Is that okay with everyone?”
Mom says, “Yes, Marty. We just didn’t know.”
He snaps, “I didn’t realize I had to check in with all you nags before I made a decision.”
Rose and I head to the nursery to get ready. It won’t do us any good to protest. I didn’t feel like I belonged at Pauly’s funeral and I don’t feel like I belong here. “You girls,” ”I echo angrily. “He treats us like little kids.”
“We’ll get through it,” Rose says. “They can’t control us forever.”
The trio of deaths spurs me on with soulwinning. We can’t miss any opportunity to tell Gram and Gramp Hoffman about the Lord, even if they don’t want to hear it. My grandmother, overwhelmed by anxiety and the loss of her beloved son, needs compassion and understanding, but what she’ll get from me is a hard line: be saved, or perish.
“Now we know why you’re not at Bible college this fall,” Mom comments to me.
So people could die? I think. Am I really such an integral part of God’s plan? Dad preaches that being in the center of God’s will brings peace and contentment. But I just feel sad.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
Nancy was widowed recently. She was 92 years old and her husband, Eddie was 96. In 2022, they’d celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary and, like all Brits on that occasion, had received a congratulatory Platinum Wedding Anniversary card from Queen Elizabeth, just a week before she herself died. Eddie’s mental and physical health was deteriorating, he’d had several minor accidents on the large grounds of the lovely English country mansion that had been their home for decades. He’d narrowly escaped death when he’d decided to dredge the lake he’d dug many years previously and whilst driving the digger, it had slid into the water, toppled over and he’d had to cling onto it till help came. He was snappy and irritable with Nancy in ways that were new to her.
The couple had a large extended family whom they loved to entertain — the east wing alone had 6 guest bedrooms. So this family was worried because just two weeks after Eddie’s death, Nancy packed her bags, dragged them downstairs, and told them she was taking a taxi to a nearby Care Home, one she’d had her eye on for a while, and it had a vacancy. The family thought she’d made a very wrong and hasty decision, one she’d later regret as she also said she planned to sell her beloved mansion home.
I saw it differently. I’d just learned the word ‘situationship’ and felt that was Nancy’s position. She’d loved Eddie, but watching him deteriorate, she dreaded every time he went into the gardens or his workshop, fearing yet another accident or that he’d collapse out there and not be found for several hours. I think her relationship had become a situationship, one that would never improve, it was all downhill for the foreseeable future.
She grieved for Eddie, but I think she had a sense of release, of relief that he’d died peacefully in his sleep and not after some collapse or accident, some long and painful stay in hospital leaving him even more incapacitated. She knew he’d be angry and frustrated if that happened, he’d take it out on her as she tried to care for him, and any caregivers they employed, would soon leave because of his bad behaviour with them.
I relate this to my deconversion, and learning this word ‘situationship’ made me realise that I’d believed I was in a wonderful and loving relationship with Jesus and my Father God who had his loving arms around me every moment. But gradually I became uneasy. I was Jesus-ing my socks off 24/7 and there was not even a glimpse of the great harvest of souls I thought my God promised his faithful ones. Our relationship was going downhill, however much I prayed for him to show me where I and my church were going wrong as we tried to ‘seek and save the lost.’ I could no longer put any trust in a belief that was often expressed by my fellow X-tians: that this reward for our efforts was just around the corner, we just had to perform one more evangelistic activity and the miracle would happen. I wasn’t in an awesome, loving relationship, I was stuck in a situationship, beginning to dread the future which was going to be one of sliding further and further downhill with more and more failed attempts at evangelism and at keeping our church active and relevant in our village.
I’m different from Nancy in that she was in a real relationship with her husband for over five decades until his health problems changed everything. I was in a fantasy one for the same length of time with a fictional God and Jesus. But I suggest that both of us celebrate our freedom now from many worries and inconsistencies. Our sense of relief is palpable. She’s happy in her one room in her Care Home — though her family is still sure she’s faking it, she must hate its small size after her mansion — and I’m happy and free too, differently of course, to do whatever I want with my life just as she’s done. I think both of us feel a sense of peace we wouldn’t have thought possible had we not been able to give it a try.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
Rarely do I have contact with anyone I knew from my campus Christian fellowship or Evangelical church. But when I do it is, to say the least, interesting.
In an earlier post, I talked about “Ivette” who, after many years, told me about something I’d long suspected: a deacon in the church raped her. Not long ago, someone else from that church, and the Christian fellowship, got in touch with me after reading something I’d written elsewhere.
“Marcus” was a kind of role model for me. Or so I wished. A few years older than I, he entered our college and Christian fellowship after serving in the Navy. He was following a family tradition, he explained. Also, being eligible for the draft, he calculated — correctly — that his enlistment and qualification for an in-demand specialty kept him from being tossed like an ember into the cauldron of Vietnam.
That wasn’t the reason I looked up to him, though. I never doubted his commitment to the Lord. He seemed to be an embodiment of something I hoped to be possible: a devotion to the intellect and the creative spirit that was entirely compatible with a love of Christ, and fellow humans.
We were in the same major, with specialties that overlapped, so we took a few classes together. Inside and outside of those classes, we debated whether John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” (before it was turned into a musical) were actually forms of Christian “witness.” (I have to admit that part of my admiration for “Marcus” was that he read “Les Miserables” in the original French without—as I did—reading a translation first.) Naturally, since he was a bit older and thus having had life experiences most of my peers lacked, those discussions were, I felt, more interesting than the usual college bull sessions.
Much later, it occurred to me that we were having such discussions out of earshot of other fellowship and church members. Likewise for our discussions about topics like gays and women’s rights (we were in the ’70s, after all!) and abortion. While I echoed the zealotry of my peers and the rigidity of fellow congregants, I think he knew that, deep down, I didn’t thoroughly agree with them.
By now, you might have guessed that he realized I was struggling to reconcile my own sexuality and gender identity with my faith. To my knowledge, he didn’t have a similar conflict but, I suspect, his experiences—including those in uniform — brought him into contact with a wider variety of people than most people in my college, at that time, would have known.
We graduated, went our ways, came back (I, for a short-lived stint in graduate school), and went our ways again. A couple of years after moving back to New York, I bumped into “Marcus” near St. Mark’s Place where — you guessed it — I’d gone to a poetry reading and had drinks with a couple of friends.
This was not long after Ronald Reagan brought himself to utter “AIDS” publicly. “Marcus” and his wife were helping its victims and the homeless (the term in use at the time) through a faith-based organization, I forget which. Anyway, he said that he had to get away from the “Comfort-ianity” of our old church and others he’d attended. Neither he nor his wife tried to bring me “into the fold” or questioned whether I was living a “godly lifestyle.” Instead, they told me to keep on reading — the Bible and anything else — and to “ask questions and pray.”
Had I continued to believe, that last phrase could have been my mantra. But now, as a non-believer, I believe that the first part — ask questions — is one of the essences of life itself. As I suspect, it was and is for “Marcus” and “Leilani.”
That, most likely, is what led to another event in their lives. In one of his last letters (remember those?) before our recent reunion, he mentioned a son who’d been born to them. He would’ve been a college student or, perhaps, a sailor (like his dad). Note that I said “would’ve”: He didn’t make it to one of those hallmarks of adulthood, or even his high school graduation. For that matter, he didn’t attend high school, or much of any school in the sense that most of us know it. Much like my cousin who passed away three years ago, he never learned to speak, walk without assistance, or do most of the things we do without thinking.
As you might expect, they — who were still believers — heard the usual Christian platitudes about God’s “will” and his unwillingness to “put you through anything he won’t help you through.” Few who haven’t been through the trials of raising someone with severe developmental disabilities can understand how condescending or simply insulting such declarations can sound even to someone who believes them. Not to mention that like “thoughts and prayers” for them (or victims of gun violence), they do nothing to help alleviate the suffering or offer strength to carry on.
But even that wasn’t enough to shake “Marcus’” or “Leilani’s” faith. Rather, it was a question “Marcus” tried to answer through his extensive reading of the Bible, as well as various theologians and apologists. His and his wife’s faith was premised on “accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior” and gleaning the will of said Lord through prayer and Bible reading. Their son, of course, could do none of those things. So, they wondered, would he join them in the joyous afterlife that, they believed, was promised to them for their commitment and faith?
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that one pastor, then another, and a scholar from the seminary “Marcus” attended for a time told him “No.” Their son, through no fault of his own, has no hope of eternal salvation — just like people who had the misfortune of being born in the “wrong” century or part of the world and thus missed out on the privilege of hearing the Word of God.
Oh, and if you don’t believe the “once saved, always saved” doctrine, “Marcus” and “LeilanI” are similarly doomed — for loving their child enough to abandon a belief in a God that condemns him for something he couldn’t control.
In a way, it’s ironic: Did Matthew ever consider that some people’s devotion to their faith is based on little or nothing more than the hope that they will accompany their loved ones in Heaven, or to whatever form of eternal bliss they hope to find after this life?
In any event, “Marcus” and “Leilani” did more than the God they once believed in for their son. If that isn’t reason enough for any parent to abandon their faith, I don’t know what is.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
(Editor’s note: And houses. And shopping. And minimalism. As is the custom of this author, she rambles.)
My earliest memory involves a toy. I’m sitting on a floor of red and black square tiles in the kitchen of our mostly underground home, in about 1964. The home was a rectangle, with a long hallway in the middle down the long axis, effectively dividing it into two areas. The area to the east was the parent’s bedroom, then the living room, then the gun room. We called Dad’s workshop the gun room because it was where he worked on his guns. I think he was rebuilding old muzzleloader guns back in the early 1960s, although my memories are unclear. The gun room was always locked when not in use, and I didn’t even go in there when he was working there. It was clearly my dad’s private space. He kept the door open, but still.
The hallway was useful for many things, including playing “Mother May I” with our babysitters. And racing toy cars. And it made a wonderful circle in the house, around which we could chase each other.
The other side of the house, to the west, was the kids’ bedroom (yes, I shared a bedroom with my two younger brothers, which didn’t bother me much. I just yelled at them to “get out” when I needed alone time.), then the junk room, then the shared bathroom/laundry room, then the kitchen. In between the bathroom and the kitchen was the entryway to the house. This was my favorite part. It was a long set of wooden stairs up to the surface of the world. It was like coming out of a hidden burrow each time we went outside. The wall between the stairway and the kitchen had a window without glass. We called it the kissing window. Because Dad would climb two stairs, stick his head through the window, and Mom would kiss him goodbye from the kitchen. We stored little items like keys and such on the windowsill. I can’t imagine why a window would be in that location but I loved it.
The bathroom was unique in that the toilet area was a foot higher than the rest of the floor. It was probably to accommodate plumbing, but it was truly a throne in my eyes.
The outside of the house was about 3 feet above ground level, with a flat roof covered in many layers of tar paper. The entrance stood up above the roofline, and when the snow drifts gathered around the house it was easy to imagine that the entrance was a tiny little building all on its own, barely big enough for one person to stand in. Decades before my parents bought it in 1959, someone else had built it as the first part of a whole house construction project. They lived in it, hoping to someday add the upper stories to the basement. That day never came.
My dad drew many iterations of plans for the new house. The new house was at least a decade in the planning stages, and then another five or so years in building it. I was an adult before I realized that a big house could be built in under half a year if you hired some help. My dad did most of the work on the new house himself. I helped him with the bricks. Over the course of several summers, I carried bricks and mortar to him while he laid the bricks. I also thought that bricking a house always took several years. I sang songs to him while we worked. His favorite was “This land is your land.” I had no idea of its colonialist message back then, celebrating the stealing of land from the original Americans. I just liked the song.
(Late footnote per the author’s sister Jackie: “This Land Is Your Land” is more of a communist/socialist song, written in opposition to “God Bless America”, a true colonialist anthem. She cited sources. She is correct. The author confused two anthems about her native land. The author believes that colonialism and socialism are, however, equally vilified depending upon which news channel one watches.)
My dad was always a champion of Native Americans. He often talked about how horribly we Europeans had treated them, sometimes with tears in his eyes. He read a lot about history, especially about the land around his farm and where he grew up. When Roots was on television, it was a family event each night of the miniseries. He also instilled in us how horrible slavery and racism are. We had some adopted black cousins, and I was always proud of that fact as a kid. I was eager to see more skin colors in my world.
I was an innocent and gullible child. When it was time to start digging the foundation of the new house, Dad took the whole family outside to look at the hill that he was about to start digging into with his bulldozer. He had marked out the outline of the new house in chalk on the hill. The back half of the house was two stories above ground, and the front half was only one story above ground. This half-basement plan made the house warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer, and also less susceptible to holding too much moisture like basements tend to do in swampy northwest Ohio. This was all clearly taught to us by our father. He wanted us to understand these things. He also demonstrated to us and to our visitors how the walls of the basement house were not straight. He would hold a wooden yardstick (always to be respected because, on the rare occasions when we were spanked, it was with that very yardstick) up against the wall of the living room, and the wall was at least six inches closer to the yardstick in some places as compared with others. It was clear that we should not complete the other man’s long-ago idea of adding stories on top of the basement house. The walls would fall in.
So we were out there looking at the chalk lines. And my mom turned to me and said, “Tammy, go over there and wash the dishes.” I thought she wanted me to go into the basement house and start the dishes, and I didn’t want to miss out on the first scoop of dirt that Dad was almost ready to take out of the hill! But she was in fact pointing at the imaginary kitchen in the new house. And I realized that I had been gullible once again. I was about ten years old and expected more of myself by that age.
Speaking of walls falling in, I was the sole responsible oldest person in the house when the water was falling in through those walls. My parents, with my youngest brother Joe, went to Toledo one evening and left me and my brother Rick home alone. There was a rainstorm, and then there was a lot of rain, and then something happened that had never happened before. The rain started pouring down the walls around the window in my bedroom. It was flooding the house, and as the oldest child and the person in charge, I was trying to figure out what to do. I got a bucket and old towels and started mopping up the water and dumping it down the shower drain. Rick continued to watch television. I continued to mop. After many buckets of water, I called my Grandma Stuckey. I needed help. She came over and stayed with us until our parents and Joe got home. Grandma didn’t seem to mind the flood. She just sat with us in the living room and I felt so much better. In retrospect, I think there were drains in the floors, seeing as it was a basement, and mopping was not necessary until the rain stopped refilling the puddles on our floors.
Back to toys.
So I’m sitting on the kitchen floor and Rick is sitting to my left. He’s only about a year old. He can’t walk yet. But he’s strong. I’m over three years old, but he seems stronger! He has a big plastic blue spoon, a toy for use in a sandbox. He is hitting the toy box with the blue spoon. Quite vigorously. I’m intimidated. I’m also shy. I also know he won’t understand my concern. So I moved away from him and let him hit the toybox. My first memory. Self-preservation.
I got a really cool Christmas gift one year at Grandma Stuckey’s house. I think it was from one of my young aunts. I had lots of aunts. But there were three young ones on the Stuckey side who ranged in age from six to ten years older than me. They were the best because they weren’t busy with their own husbands and kids! Joan, Donna, and Elaine. I’m sure it was one of them who got me this most wonderful Christmas gift. High heels! They were plastic, translucent, with a bow, and so very elegant. And they fit my feet! I walked around in those high heels for a very long time.
I also had a full set of plastic dishes, along with a little stove, refrigerator, and some other kitchen appliances. I played with them a lot. I usually liked them. But there were so many of them! Keeping them all organized was so hard. I didn’t even know how many there were in total. They were a source of fun and stress all at the same time. I liked toys that were more unified. Fewer pieces. Ideally one big piece. So easy to organize and keep track of those types of toys. So I’ll tell you a secret if you don’t tell my mom. I would dump all the plastic silverware and plates and bowls on the floor. I hoped my brothers would walk on them and break them. Then I could throw some away and have less to keep track of and less to pick up and less to organize. I would never break them on purpose. That would be so bad. But accidents do happen.
Minimalism was a part of me from the beginning. I liked playing “Girl Scout,” It involved one of my mother’s scarves and a blanket and a cookie and a doll. Brothers were welcome if they wanted to join me. The idea was to wrap myself in the blanket, tie the scarf around my head, and sit with my doll on the grass while eating the cookie. I had everything that I needed. All that stuff in the house was not necessary, and I could look at the sky and live outdoors on the grass. It made me so content to sit there with only a few things.
When I was older, I would take long walks on the farm. I often walked through the woods behind Dad’s shop, on the paths that he mowed with the lawnmower every summer. Once I got all the way through the woods and across a small creek, where there was a meadow. I would lie down in the meadow and look at the sky. All I could see was clouds and the meadow grass blowing around me. It was perfect. I needed almost nothing to be happy and no one knew where I was.
I wonder if the draw of minimalism comes from feeling overwhelmed. Too much stuff, too many people, too much noise – I just wanted less of everything.
Mom was ready to pull her hair out when I was in junior high. She took me shopping for clothing a few times a year. As I got older, I was more resistant to going. I don’t know that I ever refused her (I always wanted to be a good kid and get along with everyone) but I distinctly remember telling her that I don’t need more clothing. I told her that I had a pair of jeans, so why would I need a second one? Many of our shopping trips were all-day events, with various aunts and cousins joining us. It was a day of grand plans. A few different shopping malls in Toledo were involved.
My favorite thing was always lunch. I could sit down for a while and refuel. I remember being so tired in the stores. I would sit on the floor sometimes while waiting for others to finish their shopping. We tended to shop in a large group, so I had lots of people showing me clothing and asking me if I liked it. Then they would bring it in different sizes to the changing room for me. It was concierge-level service. But I had no idea what clothing I liked. I didn’t know if I liked it when I tried it on. I couldn’t really tell if it fit or looked good on me. There were so many opinions from everyone else that I couldn’t find mine. So I bought whatever my mom thought I should buy. After wearing things a few times to school, then I knew what I liked.
All of this shopping was with the Stuckey aunts. We never shopped with the aunts on the Wyse side, and I never asked why not. There were just some things that were as they were, not to be questioned.
I wonder if I had low blood sugar as a kid. The meal was such a relief. A physical relief, like I was going to fall over soon. I didn’t talk about this much, in my memory. Maybe my mom thinks otherwise! Anyway, I hate shopping to this day and online shopping is the best invention ever. In very small amounts as too much clothing causes one to want to throw it on the floor and hope someone rips it apart so the closet isn’t so full …
As an adult, I went shopping once with my sister-in-law Elaine. We went to a large discount store in Toledo, and I planned to buy some dress shirts for Jim. It’s so easy to buy for men. They have consistent sizing between brands and don’t even need to try things on most of the time. Elaine and I were walking around the store, and after several minutes she said, “You don’t have to stay with me. You can look around on your own, and we’ll meet up at the cash registers when we’re done.”
I then realized that I had been following her, probably because I didn’t like to shop and I thought that was how you shopped with another person. I was over two decades old before I realized that the aunts who had stayed close together as a large group, always within each other’s view throughout the entire shopping experience, were an anomaly. Elaine was gently redirecting me to a different way of shopping. I was probably annoying her. And I hate shopping. So there’s that.
When I was a preschooler, I remember lining up my stuffed animals on the back of the couch before taking a nap. They all needed to be sitting beside each other, looking out over the living room. Then I could go to sleep. A few decades later, there was a little boy named Aaron who lined up his dozens of stuffed animals in a similar manner before going to sleep. Only they shared his bed and each one had to have his eyes clearly visible above the blankets so they could see what was happening as he fell asleep.
My favorite toy ever was a 10-speed bike. I saved up about $100 and Dad took me to the bike shop. I think he paid half and I paid half. It was the coolest thing available in the 1970s. I rode that thing everywhere. I would ride it the eight miles to Archbold for marching band practice. Ride eight miles, march and play music for 3 hours, and ride home for eight miles. I often rode around the country mile on our farm, just for fun. I don’t remember telling my parents that I was doing that. I wonder if they ever thought they’d lost me.
In MYF (Mennonite Youth Fellowship, the best part of the entire church experience in my opinion) we had a biking/camping weekend with an organization that set those things up for church groups. I was in the four-person group with two high school guys and Sam Wenger, who was the pastor of the church whose kids combined with ours for youth group activities. This was before I knew that he would be my future brother-in-law. Sam told me to lead the group. So I did. I didn’t want them to be bored with a slow girl leading the way, so I made sure to go fast enough the whole time. Years later, after Sam was my brother-in-law, he told me that he chose me so that he would be able to keep up with the younger people. And I went so fast that he could hardly manage to stay with our group.
And my other memory of favorite toys are not toys at all, but pets. We had a few cocker spaniel dogs. We would have a litter or two of puppies from them every summer and would raise them to a few months old and then sell them to people from the nearby cities. We had so much fun with those puppies. I sat outdoors with them many times, playing with them for hours. One time I leaned back in the grass, and a bee stung my right hand. But the puppies were so much fun that I just pulled the bee’s stinger from my hand and kept on playing.
I also had a baby goat named Peggy, who climbed all over my dad’s car. And a baby raccoon named Racky, who I fed with a baby bottle. I had scratches on my arms from where Racky held onto me as I fed him. And there were chickens, geese, and turkeys. And we hatched eggs in the incubator my dad made. We had baby chickens, baby ducks, baby geese, baby turkeys, baby quail, and maybe more that I’m forgetting.
My first experience with grief was when my dog died. I was about twelve, and I cut some fur from her to remember her color before Dad buried her. It broke my heart. But there’s a grief experience that I don’t remember, except from the stories my mom tells me. My dog was named Do-Do, both O’s are pronounced with a long sound like in the word “So.” I named him. I think it was because he was trying to get the clean laundry off the clothesline and my mom called him a Do-Do. Like a dodo bird.
He died when a car hit him when he went on the road. Dad buried him behind the shop and put up a gravestone that was still there when I was in high school. I repeatedly said to my mom afterward, for many months, “Member Mommy? Do-Do died? Daddy cover up Do-Do? Member Mommy?”
All of our family pets were buried there over the years. When Jackie’s cat died a few years ago, in about 2015, I believe that she took it to the same site for its internment.
So there you go. A long rambling story about toys and all the other things that my mind wandered to while thinking about them.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 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.
