I pastored Somerset Baptist Church in Mt Perry, Ohio, for eleven years in the 1980s and 1990s. Located in the Appalachian foothills, the church was surrounded by beautiful scenery, dusty country roads, stripper oil wells, illegal pot growers, and farms.
One family had a large farm a few miles away from the church. The mom and her three children attended church, but the dad did not. I was a hunter at the time. The dad gave me an open invitation to hunt on their land.
One sunny fall day, I decided to go squirrel hunting by myself on the aforementioned land. I walked the rolling hills for what seemed forever before finding a place to sit in the woods. My gun of choice that day was a bolt-action Mossberg .410 shotgun — a gun I bought for myself when I was twelve.
I plopped myself on the leaf-littered ground and leaned up against a huge tree. I thought that this would be a great spot for spotting squirrels. Long days and short nights had their way with me, and before long, I fell sound asleep. A while later, I was stirred by chipmunks running over and around me. As I lifted my head and looked off into the distance, imagine my surprise to see two foxes intently watching me. What a beautiful sight — breathtaking. Eventually, the foxes ran off, as did the chipmunks.
No squirrels were killed on this day or any other thereafter. I became increasingly uncomfortable with hunting, especially killing animals for no other reason than that I could. I no longer had the bloodlust necessary to kill wild animals. Photography became my new weapon of choice, “shooting” animals without killing them.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Our hillbilly mansion. We lived in this 720-square-foot mobile home for five years, all eight of us.
I was the pastor of Somerset Baptist Church in southeast Ohio for eleven years. The church had grown rapidly in the mid-1980s, but by 1988, attendance had declined, we stopped our bus ministry, and started a tuition-free Christian school for church children. To save the church money, I bought a 12’x60′ trailer for our family to live in, and parked it fifty feet from the church building. This was the first home that was ours.
Our son Jaime, and our two girls, Bethany and Laura.
One day, we found out that a stray female dog had gotten underneath the church building and given birth to a bunch of puppies. The dog warden picked the mother and her pups. We kept one of the puppies and named it Bear. This was long before my view on animal care changed. Bear was primarily an outside dog. He loved to run free, and since we lived in the country, Bear was free to roam the countryside. One day, Bear came home bleeding profusely from his head. I found out that the drug dealer up the road from us had shot Bear with a .22 caliber rifle. (His children tattled on him.) Fortunately, thanks to the small caliber of the bullet, Bear survived. If I remember correctly, the veterinarian bill was $120. Cheap, compared to today. Our vet charges $90 for an office visit. One of our cats recently had an eye infection. Cost? $194.
Nathan, Jaime, and Jason Gerencser, Somerset Baptist Church, 1989
My young children witnessed all of this, including what happened next. Down the dirt road came the drug dealer in his car. In a fit of homicidal rage, I stopped him in the middle of the road, intending to beat the shit out of him. He was bigger than me, but that didn’t matter. He started to get out of his car as I was screaming at him. I was sure we were going to duke it out. However, because my wife and children were standing nearby, I stopped myself and walked away. At the time, I credited the Holy Spirit for keeping me from murdering my neighbor. Today, I know that reason overcame my irrationality; that the future beckoned me from the present. If I had acted on my rage, I would have either ended up in jail or left my children fatherless. If I learned nothing on that day, it is this: Walk away. Never let anger overcome me and determine what I do next. I have had to learn this lesson over and over and over again.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
In July 1983, I started a new Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church in Somerset, Ohio. Our first service was held in a storefront building we rented for $100. A few months later, we rented the second floor of what was called the Landmark Building. Attendance growth was slow. By the summer of 1985, our average attendance was 50. To facilitate our expansion, we bought an abandoned United Methodist Church for $5,000. Built in 1831, the building was typical of Methodist churches built in the nineteenth century.
Over the next few years, Somerset Baptist grew to over 200 in attendance. Some of the members who attended the Methodist church when it was open were worried about our growth. Why? When we bought the Methodist building, it came with a cemetery, one that contained some of the early settlers of the area. The cemetery was a wreck, littered with toppled tombstones or stones that didn’t belong to any particular grave. We cleaned everything up, mowing the grass as needed. We were, in every way, good citizens.
Some of the people who formerly attended the Methodist church became worried that we were going to pull up the tombstones and turn the cemetery into a parking lot. They demanded we turn the cemetery over to the township, threatening us with a lawsuit if we didn’t submit. I remember being perplexed at the time. We hadn’t done anything with the cemetery other than maintain it (at our own cost).
Eventually, the township agreed to take over the cemetery. I told township commissioners that they would have to fence the cemetery and pay us for mowing the grass, which they agreed to do. And with that, the Methodists avoided the Baptists paving over the graves of former members and community residents. I never understood their paranoia over something we never would have done. Yes, we needed more parking, but turning the cemetery into a parking lot was never an option. Instead, we expanded the parking near the church building and encouraged healthy members to park along the road in front of the church and cemetery. Problem solved. 🙂
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Originally Published in 2015. Edited and Expanded.
I am often asked, when did you first begin to doubt? This is not an easy question for me to answer. As I look back over my life, there were many instances where I had doubts about certain theological or political beliefs. If there is one constant about life, it is change. Over time, our understanding, beliefs, and ideologies change. Sometimes, the change is so subtle that we are not really aware of it until we look back on our lives years later. Anyone who says that he has never changed his beliefs — and I know several pastors who say this about themselves — is either intellectually lazy, a liar, or living in denial.
Every preacher leaves Bible college with a borrowed theology. His theology is the theology that his parents, church, pastor, and college professors taught him. He believes what he believes because of the influence of others. Only when he is free of these influences does he begin to develop his own theological beliefs.
I have always been an avid student and reader. One of the frustrating things about the health problems I have is that I can no longer read as I used to. For many years, it was not uncommon for me to read 500 or more pages a week of theological and biographical texts. To this day, I rarely read fiction. Over the course of twenty-five years in the ministry, I accumulated a large library of books. These books were my constant companions and friends. When I left the ministry in 2003, I sold off my theological library on eBay.
While I learned many things as a student at Midwestern Baptist College, most of my theological education came from the countless hours I spent reading theological books, the Bible, and studying for my sermons. It was in the study that I began to come to theological conclusions different from what I had been taught by my parents, former churches, former pastors, and college professors. The most dramatic theological changes took place while I was pastor of Somerset Baptist Church in Somerset, (later Mt. Perry) Ohio.
I started the Somerset Baptist Church in July of 1983 and pastored the congregation for eleven years. At that time, I was a typical Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) pastor and remained so until the Jack Hyles scandal rocked the IFB world in 1986. As I waded through the Hyles sewer, I began to question the gospel preached by many IFB pastors and churches. Noted preachers such as Jack Hyles, Curtis Hutson, and the preachers associated with the Sword of the Lord, preached a truncated gospel, believing that repentance was a change of mind and not a change of conduct. Simply put, the unconverted sinner was against Jesus and now he was for him. Around this time, John MacArthur came out with his seminal book, The Gospel According to Jesus. MacArthur attacked the easy-believism gospel preached in many Evangelical/Baptist churches. MacArthur stated that repentance was not only a change of mind but also a change of behavior. If there was no turning from sin, then there was no true repentance, and without repentance, there was no salvation.
The Hyles scandal, my careful assessment of the gospel preached by many in the IFB church movement, and MacArthur’s book, led me to conclude that the gospel I had been preaching was wrong. I began preaching a gospel that demanded sinners turn from their sins. I believed that if Jesus was not Lord of all your life, then he was not Lord at all. I believed that if people said they were Christians, then they should act like it. Unless unregenerate sinners were willing to turn from their sin and fully embrace Jesus, there was no salvation for them.
In the late 1980s, I began to reconsider my eschatological beliefs. I was taught dispensational, pre-tribulational, and premillennial eschatology (end times) in college, and every church I attended growing up preached this end-times scheme. As I restudied the various eschatological positions, my beliefs gradually shifted and matured until I embraced post-tribulationalism and amillennialism. At this point, I was clearly theologically wandering outside the boundary of my IFB heritage. This shift in eschatology resulted in some people leaving the church; however, it also attracted new members who held similar eschatological views.
It was also in the late 1980s that my theological beliefs dramatically shifted from the one-point Calvinism (eternal security, once saved always saved) of the IFB church movement to five-point Calvinism. My introduction to Calvinism came through the preaching tapes of Rolfe Barnard, a former Southern Baptist and Sword of the Lord evangelist who died in the late 1960s. Barnard’s sermons were powerful declarations of the gospel according to Calvinism. As I listened to these tapes, it was like a light went on in my head. For a time, I was angry because I thought those who had taught me theology had lied to me. Why had no one ever told me about Calvinism? All they told me at Midwestern is that they were against Calvinism and anyone caught promoting it would be expelled.
I began devouring books about Calvinism. I opened a book account at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service and bought countless Calvinistic, Puritan, Sovereign Grace Baptist books. I read the books of Puritan/Calvinist authors from the 17th,18th, and 19th centuries. I discovered that Baptists, at one time, were quite Calvinistic, and some of my heroes of the faith, including Charles Spurgeon, were five-point Calvinists. I even learned that there were Calvinists, such as the late Bruce Cummons, pastor of the Massillon Baptist Temple, in the IFB church movement.
From the late 1980s until the early 2000s, I was a committed, zealous five-point Calvinist. My preaching style changed from topical/textual sermons to expository sermons. I stopped giving altar calls as I began transforming the Somerset Baptist Church into a Calvinistic church. This move cost me 99% of my IFB pastor friends, a handful of church members, along with almost all of my Arminian friends.
For several years, I published a newsletter called The Sovereign Grace Reporter. I sent the newsletter to hundreds of IFB pastors, and this caused quite a shit-storm. Surprisingly, Polly’s uncle, the late James Dennis, pastor of the IFB Newark Baptist Temple, was quite supportive. Keith Troyer, then pastor of Fallsburg Baptist Church, was also quite supportive. I would later be accused of leading Keith astray with the pernicious doctrines of John Calvin. (At the time, I considered Keith my best friend.)
Probably by now, some readers are wondering, Why the history lesson, Bruce? I think it is important for me to establish several things:
I was an avid reader of books
I was an avid student of whatever subject I was reading about
I was willing to go wherever the evidence led me
I was willing to change my beliefs even if it materially cost me or made me unpopular
Truth mattered more to me than being accepted by my peers, friends, or family
These things are still true today, though I can no longer read like I once did.
In my pastoring days, my colleagues in the ministry, friends, and parishioners loved me for these traits. They applauded my willingness to be true to the Word of God, even if they disagreed with me. Now these same people think I read and study too much. I have been told that the reason I am an atheist is because of books (and there is some truth in this statement)! If I would only stop reading all these books and just read THE BOOK, all would be well, one former parishioner told me.
Just as the leopard can’t change its spots, I can’t stop reading and studying. Sixty-two years ago, my mother created an intellectual monster when she taught me to read. She wanted her eldest son to be like her, a devourer of literature, a person who valued truth above the approbation of men. I owe her a great debt of gratitude.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Bruce Gerencser, street preaching, Crooksville, Ohio, with his young son Jaime.
I pastored the Somerset Baptist Church in Mt. Perry, Ohio for eleven years, from 1983-1994. I started the church in a storefront with 16 people. The church later grew to more than 200 people. In 1989, after stopping our multi-county bus ministry due to costs, I started a tuition-free non-chartered Christian school for church children.
For five years, Polly and I, along with a handful of dedicated church members, got up early each morning and made our way to Somerset Baptist Academy (SBA) to teach our church’s children. Best described as a one-room schoolhouse, SBA had fifteen students. Most of the students were lacking academically, and though in retrospect some aspects of our school program were lacking, when it came to the basics, we excelled.
During this time, I was introduced to street preaching by Evangelist Don Hardman. Annually, Hardman would come to our church and hold a fifteen-day protracted meeting — the highlight of the church calendar year. Hardman and I later had a falling out due to my embrace of Calvinism. (Please see the series, My Life as a Street Preacher.)
Several times a week, I would take the church children with me to Newark and Zanesville where I preached and they handed out tracts and attempted to evangelize passersby. After a few years of doing this, I stopped due to increasing criticism from locals, suggesting that it was wrong (cultic) for me to use the children in this manner. While I wholeheartedly objected to their assertions — how was selling school raffle tickets any different? — I recognized that their continued participation was harming the church’s “testimony.”
What follows is a story written in 1990 by then Newark Advocate writer Kathy Wesley (behind paywall). The main character in the story is Shawn Nelson, a ninth-grade student at Somerset Baptist Academy.
You Never Realize How Wicked the World Is by Kathy Wesley, a features writer for The Advocate. Published September 16, 1990
NEWARK– The summer breeze is playing tricks with Shawn Nelson’s sandy hair, blowing it to and fro like wheat straw.
The sun is bright, the afternoon warm, the streets full of people. But Shawn sees darkness around the Courthouse Square.
“You never realize how wicked the world is until you get out there and see it,” the 14-year-old says, glancing around. “You see women in these short skirts, and men wearing no shirts at all, yelling and cussing at their kids.”
While many of his friends are back on the public school playground tossing footballs or dribbling basketballs, Shawn is toting his well-worn Bible in a race against evil on the Courthouse Square.
He spends three hours a week on the streets of Newark and Zanesville with 11 classmates from Somerset Baptist Academy, handing out tracts and opening their Bibles to anyone who will listen.
“It’s fun,” he says, shifting his Good Book from one hand to another and fingering his quarter-inch-thick packet of tracts. “You get to show people how to go to heaven.”
A well-dressed woman passes by, brusquely refusing Shawn’s tract, which asks on its front cover, “Where are you going to spend eternity?”
“It’s OK,” he says afterward. “You get used to it.”
Shawn’s been on the streets since May, when a traveling evangelist sold his pastor, the Rev. Bruce Gerenscer [sic], on street ministering. It felt strange at first to walk up to complete strangers and push Bible tracts into their hands, but Shawn is now a pro.
The latter-day apostle knows all the ropes: don’t give people a chance to say no, don’t step off the sidewalk. “As long as you’re on the sidewalk,” he explains, “you’re on public property and no one can arrest you.”
Like the other children, ranging in age from 9 to 16, Shawn has a Bible marked at the two verses they are to show to people who might stop to ask them for spiritual guidance: John 3:16 (” For God so loved the world … “) and Revelations [sic] 3:20.
In four months on the street, nobody’s asked Shawn to show them the way to salvation, but he’s ready. He’s in the midst of memorizing his Bible.
“I want to memorize the whole thing,” he says. “That way, when someone asks you a Bible question, you’ll immediately know the answer.”
There’s not a lot of Bible quizzes given on the streets of downtown Newark, but Shawn seems fairly confident already. His answers to questions of faith spill quickly from memory with childlike enthusiasm.
“In the old days religion was different,” he says. “Then men decided they wanted new religions, which had nothing to do with the Bible.”
“The Mormons and Presbyterians, among others, are in trouble with the Bible,” Shawn says. “They believe in a different way to go to heaven. Some say you have to work your way to heaven … but the Bible says the only way to heaven is through the Father.”
He’s not sure what it is to be a Christian, “except that you should obey the Bible and you shouldn’t sin.” But the details of those requirements seem to be a little hazy.
With the exception of his ambition to memorize the Bible, Shawn’s future is likewise fuzzy. He hasn’t thought about a career, although he acknowledges he has a fondness for automobiles and engines.
It’s fun for him to be on the street; he recalls with delight the lemonade a Zanesville street vendor gave him one day. But behind it all is his deadly serious mission.
Unlike his predecessor Paul, who spread the story of Jesus of Nazareth in the streets of downtown Ephesus in the First Century, Shawn doesn’t have to dodge spears and unfriendly government officials. He just has to put up with the rejection of people who walk a half block out of their way to go around him, and the taunts of children his own age who pass on bicycles.
“Sometimes they ride by and they mock us,” Shawn says, “and I don’t like it.”
But not, he says, because they hurt his feelings.
“I don’t like it,” he says quietly, with the firmness of childhood certainty, “because I know they’re going to die and go to hell.”
— end of news story —
Shawn was what I made him. I regret doing so to this day.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
In the 1960s, the Gerencser family moved to California, the land of promise and a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. Like many who traveled west, my parents found that life in San Diego was not much different from the life they left in rural northwest Ohio. As in Ohio, my Dad worked sales jobs and drove truck. For the Gerencser family, the pot of gold was empty, and three or so years later we left California and moved back to Bryan, Ohio.
While moving to California and back proved to be a financial disaster for my parents, they did find Jesus at Scott Memorial Baptist Church in San Diego — a Fundamentalist church pastored by Tim LaHaye. Both of my parents made professions of faith at Scott Memorial, as did I when I was five years old. From that point forward, the Gerencser family, no matter where we lived, attended an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church.
Not only were my parents Fundamentalist Baptists, they were also members of the John Birch Society. While in California, my Mom actively campaigned for Barry Goldwater, and later, back in Ohio, she campaigned for George Wallace. Right-wing religious and political beliefs were very much a part of my young life, so it should come as no surprise that I turned out to be a fire-breathing right-wing Republican and a Fundamentalist Baptist preacher.
If the Baptist church taught me anything, it taught me to hate Catholics. According to my Sunday School teachers and pastors, and later my college professors and ministerial colleagues, the Catholic church was the whore of Babylon (Revelation 17), a false church, the church of Satan and the Antichrist. I was taught that Catholics believed in salvation by works and believed many things that weren’t found in the Bible; things such as: purgatory, church magisterium, the Pope is the Vicar of Christ, transubstantiation, infant baptism, confirmation, priests not permitted to marry, praying to statutes, worshiping the dead, and worshiping Mary. These things were never put in any sort of historical context for me, so by the time I left Midwestern Baptist College in 1979, I was a certified hater of all things Catholic.
In 1991, something happened that caused me to reassess my view of Catholics. My dogma ran head-on into a Catholic that didn’t fit my narrow, bigoted beliefs. In 1989, our fourth child and first daughter was born. We named her Bethany. Our family doctor was William Fiorini. He operated the Somerset Medical Clinic in Somerset, Ohio, the same town where I pastored an IFB church. Dr. Fiorini was a devout Catholic, a post-Vatican II Catholic who had been greatly influenced by the charismatic revival that swept through the Catholic church in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a kind and compassionate man. He knew our family didn’t have insurance or much money, and more than a few times the treatment slip turned in after a visit said N/C (no charge).
Bethany seemed quite normal at first. It wasn’t until she was sixteen months old that we began to see things that worried us. Her development was slow and she couldn’t walk. One evening, we drove over to Charity Baptist Church in Beavercreek, Ohio to attend a Bible conference. The woman watching the nursery asked us about Bethany having Down syndrome. Down syndrome? Our little girl wasn’t retarded. How dare this woman even suggest there was something wrong with our daughter.
Bethany continued to struggle, reaching development stages months after infants and toddlers typically do. Finally, we went to see Dr. Fiorini. He suggested that we have Bethany genetically tested. We took her to Ohio State University Hospital for the test, and a few weeks later, just days before Bethany’s second birthday and the birth of our daughter Laura, we received a phone call from Dr. Fiorini. He told us the test results were back and he wanted to talk to us about them. He told us to come to his office after he finished seeing patients for the day and he would sit down and talk with us about the test results.
The test showed that Bethany had Down syndrome. Her Down syndrome features were so mild that the obstetrician missed the signs when she was born. Here we were two years later finding out that our oldest daughter had a serious developmental disability. Our Catholic doctor, a man I thought was a member of the church Satan built and headed for Hell, sat down with us, and with great love and compassion shared the test results. He told us that many miscarriages are fetuses with Down syndrome, and that it was evident that God wanted to bless us with a special child like Bethany. He answered every question and treated us as he would a member of his own family.
This Catholic didn’t fit my narrow, bigoted picture of what a Catholic was. Here was a man who loved people, who came to an area that had one of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in Ohio, and started a one-doctor practice. (He later added a Nurse practitioner, a nun who treated us when we couldn’t get in to see the doctor.) He worked selflessly to help everyone he could. On more than one occasion, I would pass him on the highway as his wife shuttled him from Zanesville to Lancaster — the locations of the nearest hospitals. Often, he was slumped over and asleep in the passenger’s seat. He was the kind of doctor who gave me his home phone number and said to call him if I ever needed his help. He told us there was no need to take our kids to the emergency room for stitches or broken bones. He would gladly stitch them up, even if we didn’t have an appointment.
Dr. Fiorini wasn’t perfect. One time, he almost killed me. He regularly treated me for throat infections, ear infections, and the like. Preaching as often as I did, I abused my voice box and throat. I also have enlarged adenoids and tonsils, and I breathe mostly through my mouth. As a result, I battled throat and voice problems my entire preaching career. One day, I came to see Dr. Fiorini for yet a-n-o-t-h-e-r throat infection. He prescribed an antibiotic and told me to take it easy. He knew, like himself, I was a workaholic and would likely ignore his take-it-easy advice. Take the drug, wait a few weeks, and just like always I would be good as new. However, this time it didn’t work. Over two months, as I got sicker and sicker, he tried different treatments. Finally, he did some additional testing and found out I had mononucleosis; the kissing disease for teens, a deadly disease for a thirty-four-year-old man. Two days later, I was in the hospital with a 104-degree fever, a swollen spleen and liver, and an immune system on the verge of collapse.
An internist came in to talk with my wife and me. He told us that if my immune system didn’t pick up and fight there was nothing he could do. Fortunately, my body fought back and I am here to write about it. My bout with mononucleosis dramatically altered my immune system, making me susceptible to bacterial and viral infections. A strange result of the mononucleosis was that my normal body temperature dropped from 98.6 to 97.0. I lost 50 pounds and was unable to preach for several months.
Once I was back on my feet, Dr. Fiorini apologized to me for missing the mononucleosis. I was shocked by his admission. He showed me true humility by admitting his mistake. I wish I could say that I immediately stopped hating Catholics and condemning them to Hell, but it would be several years before I finally came to the place where I embraced everyone who called themselves a Christian. In the late 1990s, while pastoring Our Father’s House in West Unity, Ohio, I embraced what is commonly called the social gospel. Doctrine no longer mattered to me. Moving from a text-oriented belief system, I began to focus on good works. Tell me how you live. Better yet, show me; and in the showing, a Catholic doctor taught me what it really meant to be a Christian.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
In July of 1983, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) preacher Bruce Gerencser, his wife, Polly, and their two young boys, aged four and two, moved from Buckeye Lake, Ohio to Somerset to start a new IFB church. I would remain pastor of Somerset Baptist Church until we moved to San Antonio, Texas in March 1994 so I could become the co-pastor of Community Baptist Church in Elmendorf.
Over the eleven years I spent pastoring Somerset Baptist, we owned all sorts of automobiles — most of them cheap beaters or cars given to us by congregants. Every one of these cars has a story to tell. (Please see I Did It For You Jesus — Crank Windows and Vinyl Floor Mats.) One such car is the green Ford station wagon in the picture above.
John Nelson, a congregant who lived down the hill from the church with his wife and four sons (who later would attend our Christian academy), was what you would call a “wheeler and dealer.” John has been running a perpetual yard sale for decades. His father owned a junkyard in nearby Saltillo. Over the years, I bought or traded for cars from John. One such car was the green station wagon. If I remember right, I traded John a Chevy Caprice I had purchased from another church family for the station wagon. Polly hated this car the most of the 50+ cars I/we have owned over the years. I mean really, really, really hated the car. My three oldest sons hated the car too. Let me explain.
The station wagon was a huge car — common of the “boats” manufactured in the 1970s. Personally, I loved big cars — the bigger the better. Polly, however, did not. Not that what she liked or disliked mattered. I was officially in charge of all things auto-related — from purchases to repairs to sales. Polly oh-so-fondly remembers days when I left the house with one car, only to return home later that day with a different one. She never, ever said a word, but I have to think that she more than once thought the Baptist equivalent of “what the fuck” when I drove up with a new rolling wreck.
As you can see from the photo, the station wagon had an ugly green paint job. The car had been repainted by hand by a previous owner. Its paint really made the car stand out in a parking lot, much to the embarrassment of my family.
Typically, I looked at potential automobiles from one of two perspectives: looks and mechanical soundness. This car looked awful, but it was mechanically sound. I drove it all over southeast Ohio (and West Virginia on road trips) until I got bored with the car and traded it for something different.
Polly hated taking the car anywhere. At the time, she thought that the station wagon was a rolling advertisement for our poverty; not the kind of car a preacher’s wife should be forced to drive. Ever the trooper, she said nothing.
While Polly disliked driving the car, it was our sons who couldn’t stand the sight of the station wagon. At the time, our two oldest sons were enrolled at Licking County Christian Academy in Heath, Ohio. A ministry of the Newark Baptist Temple — an IFB church pastored by the late Jim Dennis (Polly’s uncle) — LCCA was a non-accredited school populated primarily with children from middle-class and affluent Christian families. The Gerencser children were among the poorest students to attend the school.
LCCA was thirty miles from our home. A Bible church near our home, Maranatha Bible Church, then pastored by Bob Shaw, bussed children to LCCA every day, but my request to let our children ride their bus was denied. I suspected then, and still do today, that the church and its pastor didn’t want our poor munchkins intermingling with theirs. So, we dutifully drove 60 miles a day to Heath to drop off and pick up our children from school. Later, a girl in our church started attending LCCA. We would take the children to LCCA in the morning, and her father would pick them up after school on his way home from work. He, too, drove a junker.
My sons have told me that they were embarrassed to see me pull up in the school parking lot driving the green station wagon. Other parents drove new or late-model automobiles. Not their preacher dad. Character building? Perhaps. I know this much. Neither of them drives their children to and from school with autos that look anything like the station wagon. Not going to happen. And these days, we drive a 2020 Ford Edge. No clunkers to be found in our driveway. If I came home with such a car today, I suspect the top of my head would be sporting an indentation left from a Lodge cast iron skillet. Polly is definitely no longer passive when it comes to making car-buying decisions.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
It all started with my belief that the Bible was the inspired, inerrant, infallible Word of God. I considered the Bible the road map for navigating through a Satan-dominated, sin-plagued world; a blueprint for everything from marriage to child-rearing to what clothing to wear. The Bible, along with the Holy Spirit who lived inside of me, was my God’s way of speaking to me and telling me what to do
According to how Evangelicals interpret the Protestant Bible, every person, from conception, is a vile, broken sinner under the just condemnation of God, deserving eternal punishment in Hell/Lake of Fire. Fortunately, God graciously provides a way for us to have our sins forgiven and avoid eternal punishment. God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to the earth to be the final atonement for our sins. Jesus Christ was executed on a Roman cross, and three days later rose again from the dead, conquering death and the grave. Our salvation and eternal destiny rest squarely on the merit and work of Jesus. He, and he alone, is the way, truth, and life. Through the preaching of the Word (the Bible) and the work of the Holy Spirit, God calls out to sinners, saying, repent and believe the gospel. Those who hear his voice are gloriously saved and adopted into the family of God.
The Bible taught me that as a God-called, God-ordained minister of the gospel, I had the solemn obligation to preach the good news to everyone. Work for the night is coming. Leave everything for the sake of the gospel. Only one life twill soon be past, only what’s done for Christ will last. These clichés were not mere words to me. They were clarion calls to forsake all, including my family and economic security, and follow Jesus.
Every church I attended, every youth group I was a part of, and every summer youth camp I went to, reinforced the belief that God wanted (demanded) one hundred percent of me. All to Jesus I surrender, All to Him I freely give, says the old gospel song, I Surrender All. I went to an Evangelical Bible college to train for the ministry. Every class curriculum, every professor, every chapel speaker shouted out to students:
Souls for Jesus is our battle cry. Souls for Jesus is our battle cry. We never will give in while souls are lost in sin Souls for Jesus is our battle cry.
My partner, Polly, went to college to get a Mrs. degree. She believed God wanted her to marry a preacher. Polly knew that she would have to make sacrifices for the sake of her husband’s call. She was taught that Jesus, the ministry, and the church came first. She was also taught that her husband was specially chosen by God to proclaim the good news of the gospel. She was encouraged to read biographies of great men and women of faith to learn how to deal with being married to a man of God. Polly and I entered marriage and the ministry knowing God had called us to a life of self-denial and devotion to the work of the ministry. Hand in hand, without complaint, we embraced the work we believed God had set before us.
I consider 1983-1994 to be the high point of my ministerial career. I pastored a growing, busy Evangelical church. Sinners were weekly being saved, baptized, and joining the church. Backsliders were being reclaimed. God was smiling on our work. Not only was this my observation, but it was the observation of my colleagues in the ministry. God was doing something special at Somerset Baptist Church.
During this time, I did a lot of preaching. A typical week for me looked something like this:
Jail ministry on Tuesday
Nursing home ministry on Wednesday
Midweek service on Thursday
Street preaching 2-3 days a week
Teaching the adult Sunday school class
Preaching twice on Sunday
We also had a tuition-free Christian academy, open only to the children of church members. In addition to my busy church preaching schedule, I held revival services and preached at bible conferences and pastor’s fellowships. I was motivated by what I believed the Bible taught me about the work of the ministry. I looked at the life of the disciples and thought that they were a pattern to follow. Run the race, the Apostle Paul told me. I was totally committed to what I believed was God’s calling on my life.
Some Christians object and say “you are the one who worked yourself to death. Don’t blame the Church or God. OUR pastor doesn’t work this way. He takes time for his family. Blah. Blah Blah.” Even now, as an atheist, I find such objections lame. If the Bible is true, if what it says about God, sin, salvation, death, Hell, and Heaven is true, how dare any preacher, or any Christian for that matter, treat the gospel of Jesus Christ so carelessly? How dare any preacher not burn himself out for the sake of those in need of salvation. No time for busywork. No time for golfing with your fellow preachers.
More than a few pastors are lazy hirelings who do just enough to keep from getting fired. They pastor a church for two or three years, wear out their welcome, and then move on down the road to another church. I have no respect for pastors who defend their laziness by stressing the importance of balance in their lives. Where do they find such a notion in the Bible they say they believe? Jesus doesn’t call them to balance. He calls them to forsake all and follow him.
One of the reasons I see Christianity as a bankrupt religion is the lackadaisical approach Christians and their spiritual leaders have toward matters that supposedly have eternal consequences. Most of what goes on in the average church is meaningless bullshit. Call a business meeting to decide on the color of the paint for the nursery walls and everyone shows up. Implore people to come out for church visitation and only the same three or four people show up, week after week.
Why should I take the Bible, God, Jesus, salvation, Heaven, or Hell seriously when most Christians and pastors live lives that suggest they don’t? It took me leaving the ministry in 2005 and Christianity in 2008 for me to realize that most of what I was chasing after was nothing more than a fool’s errand. Many of the ex-ministers who read this blog know what I am talking about. So much of life wasted, and for what? Too bad I had to be fifty years old before I realized what life is all about. Too bad I sacrificed my health on the altar of the eternal before I realized that there is no eternity, just the here and now.
From a psychological perspective, I understand that my type-A, workaholic personality made it easy for me to be the preacher I came to be. Whether it was pastoring churches or managing restaurants, I worked day and night, rarely taking time off for family or leisure. I still have the same tendencies, the difference now being that the list of things that matter to me is very small. Polly matters. Family matters. My neighbors matter. But matters of eternity, Heaven, and Hell? Nary a thought these days. If the Christian God exists, then I am screwed, and more than a few of the readers of this blog are too. However, I don’t think the Christian version of God exists, so I am investing all my time, money, and talent — how many times did you hear that phrase in a sermon? — on the only life I have — this one. I will leave it up to the gods and my family to do what they will with me after I am dead. Of course, depending on what happens to me after death, I could come back from the dead and write a book titled, “Heaven is for Real and Boy, Are the Atheists in Trouble.”
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Bruce Gerencser, age 25, Ordination 1983, Emmanuel Baptist Church Buckeye Lake, Ohio. Terry is the dark-haired boy on the right
Several days ago, I received a Facebook Messenger message from a former church member named Terry. Terry was a teenager and young adult in two churches I pastored: Emmanuel Baptist Church in Buckeye Lake, Ohio, and Somerset Baptist Church in Mt. Perry, Ohio. You can read my response to Terry’s message here.
I thought my post was thoughtful and polite, cognizant of the friendship and professional relationship I had in the 1980s. I tried to focus on our shared experiences instead of giving Terry what is humorously called “The Bruce Gerencser Treatment®. Had I viewed Terry as just another Bible-thumping, filled-with-certainty Fundamentalist Christian, I would have just said “sigh” (please see Why I Use the Word “Sigh”) or told him to fuck off. But, I value our past shared experiences and friendship we once had, so I decided to respond in a way that would hopefully encourage engagement and, perhaps, show Terry that he might want to rethink what he wrote to me.
Terry would have none of that. Looking at his profile revealed that he has, at least recently, been attending Full Armor of God Baptist Church in Pataskala — a King James-only Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) congregation. Whether Terry regularly attends this church, I do not know. That said, I felt bad when I saw Terry was attending an IFB church, having moved very little theologically or spiritually since his days as a teenager at Emmanuel Baptist Church. Certainly, he is free to worship and believe as he wants. Freedom of religion, right? But, where Terry attends church and who his pastor is might explain his abrasive and hostile response towards me. Or, he just may be an asshole, regardless of his religious background. I haven’t spoken to Terry since the late 80s, so I don’t know what kind of man, husband, father, and grandfather he has become.
Bruce Gerencser Ordination, Emmanuel Baptist Church, Buckeye Lake, Ohio April 2, 1983
What follows is my response to Terry. I doubt I will make any headway with him, but I hope I can educate him about atheism and pushback on some of the false claims he makes.
So what it boils down to is you believe now that nothing created everything. That’s comical. I suppose we came ashore out of the water with gills and a tail and later shed those for lungs and two legs and feet.
Do you have a science education? What do you really know about evolution, archeology, cosmology, and other science disciplines? I am the first to admit that I don’t know a lot about science. Much like you, religion neutered my thinking about science, wrongly teaching me that the Bible is a science textbook — that whatever the Bible says about science is true. Over the years, I have worked hard to fix my ignorance, but I still don’t know much about science.
I do know this much: the universe is not 6, 027 years old; the universe was not created in six literal twenty-four hour days; humans and dinosaurs did not exist at the same time; the earth was not destroyed by a universal flood. These are scientific facts, as any cursory reading of biology, archeology, geology, and cosmology shows.
Terry, what science books have you read over the past forty years? Not religious books or books written by Evangelical apologists — actual books by experts in their relevant fields? Or is your entire understanding of the universe based on what some unknown authors wrote centuries ago before science was even a thing; or it is based solely on what a non-science-educated preacher (such as the Bruce Gerencser of yesteryear) told you from the pulpit? Regardless, I find your certainty troubling; that you are willing to believe things that you haven’t studied or know anything about.
Evolution is a scientific fact. It best explains the existence of our biological world. Evolution and other science disciplines take us back to the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. The question, of course, is what happened before the Big Bang. None of us knows. There are numerous theories about what happened, but young (or old) earth creationism is not one of them. Creationism is religious dogma, not science.
Let me encourage you to read Why Evolution is True, by Dr. Jerry Coyne. Written at a popular level, I think you will find Dr. Coyne’s book to be an excellent primer and explanation of evolution. If you truly want to discuss evolution and creationism, I’m game. More than a few of the readers of this blog have university-level science backgrounds. I am sure they would love to have a friendly, thoughtful discussion with you about these issues.
You bring up creating something out of nothing, a common creationist canard. Keep in mind, you face the same problem: where did God come from? If everything requires a creator, so does God — your God, or any other deity, for that matter. The fact remains that none of us knows for certain what happened before the Big Bang. I am content to say, “I don’t know.” I am more focused on the present, the here and now. The only time I talk about the subject is when Evangelicals such as yourself ignorantly think that atheism and evolution are one and the same.
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.
As you can see, atheism is “an absence of belief in the existence of deities.” That’s it. The origin of the universe has nothing to do with atheism. Sure, most atheists also believe evolution best explains our biological world, but this belief is not a requirement to be an atheist. Atheists can and do have all sorts of beliefs. Some atheists are right-wing Republicans, believe in conspiracy theories, and are every bit as tribalistic as Fundamentalist Christians.
I love how you bash me on your blog and bash the community where I live and all your cronies chime right in.
Terry, I am perplexed by how butt-hurt you are. Did you expect me to just say nothing or to fall on my face in repentance and tears, and say, Terry, you are right. I found your Bible verse memes so convicting that I unfriended you. That’s not going to happen. If you didn’t want a response from me, you shouldn’t have messaged me.
I can’t find any place in my post where I bashed you as a person. In fact, I went out of my way to be friendly and polite, valuing our past relationship and experiences. As far as what I wrote about Buckeye Lake, what did I say that was factually incorrect? In the 1980s and 1990s, the village of Buckeye Lake proper (not North Bank or other lake edge communities where upper-middle-class, rich people live) was rife with poverty and rundown properties — mostly rentals, some of which were owned by slumlords. Most housing was converted cottages — 900-1,200 square feet in size. The poverty rate was high, with a sizeable percentage of residents on public assistance.
You seem to forget that I worked for the village of Buckeye Lake for three years as a grant administrator, workfare program manager, and building code enforcement officer. I administrated federal and state grants that were used for litter control enforcement and property rehabilitation and remediation. During my time at Buckeye Lake, my workers razed over fifty abandoned, shuttered cottages, the start of the community renewal that took place afterward.
I also oversaw the village’s workfare and court-offender work programs. Over 100 people worked for me every month, picking up roadside trash, reclaiming illegal dumping grounds, and tearing down abandoned houses. I am quite proud of what we did to make Buckeye Lake a better place to live.
Cronies: a close friend. Synonyns: brother, buddy, chum, pal, sidekick. I didn’t read any overtly harsh criticism of you from my “cronies.” Maybe the real issue is that your Fundamentalist butt cheeks are chapped or you expected to be able to preach AT me without any pushback or challenge. Regardless, how about we try to have an adult conversation, Terry. Have questions? Ask away. Want to politely challenge my beliefs? Please do so. Or you can keep rubbing Vasoline on your ass.
As far as asking you questions about your family you never gave me an opportunity to ask you anything before unfriending me.
Terry, I pared down my Facebook Friends list more two years ago, so we were “friends” before that. You had plenty of time to ask me questions before that, but you chose not to. That’s not my problem. I chose to have a small friend list of people who actually regularly interact with me. Neither of us interacted with the other, so that’s the reason I unfriended you. I am sorry that my doing so offended you in some way.
Here’s your chance now: ask me whatever you want. I will gladly answer whatever questions you might have. But, if all you want to do is preach at me, I have no interest in further engagement with you. Life is too short to involve myself in banal, fruitless discussions. Honest, sincere questions are always welcome. If that is what you want, I am game. Ask away and I will do the best I can to answer your questions.
You say you don’t remember if we were friends on Facebook or not but you can remember me as a friend from many years ago funny isn’t.
In other words, you are calling me a liar. Evidently, you must value Facebook or get some sort of existential importance from it, but I don’t. The ONLY reason I have a Facebook account is for my blog. Some readers prefer to read my blog on Facebook, so I oblige them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a Facebook account. As it is, I rarely post on my Facebook wall, and when I do I post articles and photos about family and cats. I reserve discussions about religion and politics for my Facebook business page or my blog. My friends list is reserved for people I regularly interact with, be they family, friends, or blog readers. I could have thousands of Facebook friends overnight if I chose to have them, but I don’t.
As far as my memory is concerned, your accusation reveals that you know nothing about me. If we were actually friends or you were a blog reader, you would have known that I have serious health problems; that I have gastroparesis and exocrine pancreatic insufficiency (EPI) — incurable stomach/bowel diseases. I also have fibromyalgia — a disease that affects muscles and nerves — osteoporosis, and degenerative spine disease:
Disc herniation (T7,T8)
Disc herniation (T6,T7)
Central spinal canal stenosis (T9/T10, T10/T11)
Foraminal stenosis (T5,T6)
Disc degeneration/spondylosis (T1/T2 through T10/T11)
Facet Arthropathy throughout the spine, particularly at T2/T3, T3/T4, T5/T6, and T7/T8 through the T12/L1 levels.
Hypertrophic arthropathy at T9/T10
I live with constant, unrelenting, debilitating pain, from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. I am nauseous all the time, and vomiting is common. Throw in diabetes and high blood pressure, and, well, I have plenty on my plate physically.
Because of my pain (which I take multiple medications to control), I typically sleep in 1-2 hour segments. I am fatigued and tired every moment of every day of my life. As a result, my short term memory is not what it used to be. Besides, I am almost sixty-seven years old. Memory issues are common. I tend to have a sharp memory when it comes to things that happened years ago, but not with current or recent events. Just ask Polly. She will tell you everything you need to know about my memory issues. Or you can just keep calling me a liar.
There’s nothing “funny” about your response to me. I find it sad that you would choose to treat me this way, especially since, as far as I know, I did nothing but befriend and help you. Perhaps your religion is getting in the way of you being a decent human being. Ponder all the ways you could have responded to me, yet you chose to be judgmental and argumentative. Your choice, but I am not sure what you hoped to gain. You have burnt whatever relationship we once had to the ground, and for what? To prove to yourself that you are “right?” To put me in my place? To put a good word in for Jesus? If so, this means you aren’t interested in fostering a renewed friendship with me; you just wanted to score points in the Christian vs. Atheist game.
You knew we were friends on Facebook but you unfriended me because of my love for a risen savior who is sitting on the right hand of God. One day you will bow before him and tell yourself how big of fool you really are.
Again, you are calling me a liar. You have no evidence for your claim, yet you continue to make it. Why is that? I told you the truth. You can accept it, or not. I don’t give a shit either way. You and I are no longer friends, and you seem to want to attack my character, so I hope you will forgive me for not wanting anything to do with you. If and when you can be a decent human being, let me know, and I will be glad to interact with you. I am NOT the enemy, your enemy, or anyone else’s enemy. I am a man you once knew that has different religious (and political) beliefs from you. Is this how you treat everyone you disagree with? Or perhaps my story bothers you, and instead of trying to understand it, you lash out in angry disrespect. Rage away, Terry, but I will not engage you further.
Thousands of people read my blog every day, and some of them are Christians. I am also friends with Christians on Facebook. I am confident that what I believe is true; that the Bible is not inerrant and infallible; that the central claims of Christianity are false; that Jesus was not divine; that Jesus was not a miracle worker; that Jesus was not born of a virgin or resurrected from the dead; that Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who was executed by the Roman government for crimes against the state, end of story.
I was an Evangelical Christian for fifty years. I spent twenty-five years pastoring churches in Ohio, Michigan, and Texas, before leaving the ministry in 2005 and deconverting in 2008. All told, I preached over 4,000 sermons and spent 20,000+ hours reading and studying the Bible. I know the B-i-b-l-e inside and out. That you think a Bible verse meme would convict me in some way or cause me to unfriend you is ludicrous. The Internet is awash in memes posted by Evangelical zealots. Check out my Facebook business page (and click follow) if you want to see my mockery of them. I don’t make fun of them out of fear. I mock them because they are silly, often ignorant, and more often than not promote heterodox or heretical beliefs. If you want to have a serious discussion with me, Terry, I am more than willing to do so. I will gladly answer any question or challenge you might have. However, if all you want to do is cast stones and call me a liar, I hope you will understand if I tell you to go fornicate with yourself.
I wish you well, Terry. I shall always remember (I hope) the good times you and I shared. I can see beyond your rigid Fundamentalist beliefs, choosing to focus on the wonderful experiences we once had. If you can’t or won’t do that, that’s on you.
Bruce
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Over the past seventeen years, I have received thousands of emails, phone calls, text messages, social media messages, and snail mail letters from (primarily) Evangelical Christians. When I first started blogging in 2007, I decided to use my real name and make myself available to anyone who wanted to contact me. I have, on occasion, regretted doing so.
The majority of the emails and messages I receive are hostile, violent, and argumentative. Laden with personal attacks, these contacts are meant to judge, correct, belittle me, or put me in my place. Seventeen years of such emails and messages have left me largely immune to such ill-bred, brutish behavior. I read every email I receive, answering them as I can. (Currently, I am three months behind on answering emails.) I pay close attention to emails from family, friends, former parishioners, and regular readers of this blog. I feel a sense of obligation to these folks, so I try to prioritize their correspondence.
Some emails and messages warrant a public response, as I will give with the message I received today. The following Facebook Messenger message came from a man who was a teen and young adult in two different churches I pastored: Emmanuel Baptist Church in Buckeye Lake, Ohio (1981-1983), and Somerset Baptist Church in Mt. Perry, Ohio (1983-1994).
I am generally polite and patient in my responses to former church members. I am well aware of how my story and deconversion trouble and upset people who once called me “Preacher” or “Pastor Bruce.” They know me from a time and place long ago that is very different from where I am today. Not morally or ethically; not personality-wise. I was twenty-four years old when I met Terry; now I am almost sixty-seven. Lots of water under, over, and around the metaphorical bridge, but to a large degree I am the same person today as I was forty-plus years ago. I am a kind, decent, and thoughtful man. Not perfect. I can be temperamental, argumentative, and opinionated, but I have become less so, telling Polly, my partner, the other day, in a moment of deep, dark depression, that most of the things I obsess over or that aggravate me really don’t matter. The danger, of course, for depressives, is “nothing matters” can quickly turn into suicide. That, so far, has not been the case for me, but I do recognize that not much matters beyond the people we love.
In the early days of this blog, I took to heart the nasty, hateful things Evangelicals said to me. Their words caused deep wounds, so much so that I would stop blogging. I would delete my social media accounts and even change my email address so people couldn’t contact me. Thanks to extensive and ongoing therapy, I have (most of the time) learned to handle such people. I no longer let people such as Dr. David Tee, whose real name is Derrick Thomas Thiessen, Elliot, Revival Fires, Silence of Mind, and other caustic, abrasive so-called Christians like them get under my skin. I don’t know them; they don’t know me; their words really don’t matter. They can go fornicate with themselves for all I care. They are little more than pissants, quickly dispatched with little thought or concern. However, when it comes to people with whom I had a significant personal relationship, I try to hear them out and respond accordingly. So it is with Terry, whose message I respond to below.
Here’s what Terry wrote to me (all spelling, grammar, and punctuation in the original):
Hey Bruce I’m not sure why u unfriended me. I still respect you and love u in Christ. I’m saddened you turned your back on Christianity. You know what Jesus did for us on that cross. Maybe u unfriended me because my bible versus was talking to your heart and the adversary turned u against me. I’m praying for you and Polly. God Bless
Bruce Gerencser, age 25, Ordination 1983, Emmanuel Baptist Church, Buckeye Lake, Ohio. Terry is the dark-haired boy to the right.
Dear Terry,
You and I go way back. I first met you in the early 1980s when you were a sophomore student at Lakewood High School and I was the assistant pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Buckeye Lake. My primary responsibility was working with junior high and high school students. I have many fond memories from the three years I spent at the church. As you may remember, the youth department quickly grew, reaching a high attendance of 90 people. The majority of church attendees were youth group participants. Unfortunately, when Polly and I left Emmanuel to start a new church in Somerset, attendance dropped by seventy percent. I always felt bad that this happened, but many of the teens had a close attachment to me. One of the reasons for this is that Polly and I, along with our two young sons and foster son (and later foster daughter) moved to Buckeye Lake to be close to the people we were pastoring. We moved into a ramshackle cottage a few blocks from where you lived at the time. Buckey Lake wasn’t the greatest place to live, but I felt it important to live with and among the people I ministered to. Polly’s mom refused to move from Newark to Buckeye Lake, not wanting to live around poor people or “welfare bums.” (Note for readers: Buckeye Lake, a community of around 3,000 people, was once home to an amusement park. Most of the housing was originally meant for seasonal use, but during WW II, much of it was converted to year-round use. Most of the homes were small, and of poor construction. The poverty rate was quite high compared to the surrounding area.)
You and I spent a lot of time together. You attended church every week, often bringing friends to the services. You were active in the youth group. I have many fond memories of you personally, and the youth group as a whole. I am sure you remember the lock-in we held at the Newark Y. You and your schoolmates worked hard to invite your unchurched friends and acquaintances to the event. If I remember correctly, more than 200 students bought tickets for the lock-in. The bring-your-own-team basketball tournament was the highlight of the night, for me.
So many memories . . . hunting rabbits together, the basketball program I sponsored at Jacktown Elementary School, playing tackle football and softball, attending your baseball games, and trying the best I could to help you navigate life. I performed your wedding ceremony — a double wedding at the Dawes Arboretum pond. After you got married and Polly and I moved on to a new church, you and your family attended Somerset Baptist occasionally, but distance prevented you from being a regular attendee, and eventually, we drifted apart. That said, I always considered you a friend.
I have given you this short history lesson to remind you of all the shared experiences we have. It would have been wonderful to talk with you about these things. I would have loved to hear about your family; your children and grandchildren. It would have been nice if you had asked me how I was doing, or inquired about Polly, our six adult children, or our sixteen grandchildren. Instead, you decided to skip the pleasantries and polite discourse and go on a religious rant, complete with a conspiracy theory about why I unfriended you on Facebook. You could have asked all sorts of questions about my deconversion, but you didn’t. Imagine if we had met face-to-face somewhere in Newark, after not seeing each other in over thirty years. Would you have said these things to me? Of course not. We would have talked about old times, sharing a warm embrace — a reminder of the friendship we once held dear. Evidently, all that matters to you is passing judgment on my life and putting in a word for Jesus.
Concerning Facebook, we may have been “friends,” but I don’t remember it. Two years ago, I pared over a thousand people from my friends list, choosing only to befriend people with whom I had regular interaction. I suspect you were one of many people I unfriended. I assure you that my unfriending you had nothing to do with your content or the fact that you posted Bible verses to your wall. What I find amusing (and oh so sad) is that you think that your posted verses were “talking to my heart,” and that I couldn’t handle the conviction, so I unfriended you. First, I don’t have a heart, and neither do you — at least not the one mentioned in the Bible. Second, why would words from an ancient religious text — one that I know inside and out and have read cover to cover numerous times and spent 20,000+ hours studying — bother me in the least? Third, I am an atheist, so I don’t believe in the existence of gods, including yours. It stands to reason, then, that I also don’t believe in the existence of “the adversary” (Satan). That you think I “turned against you” is silly. Few friendships last a lifetime, ours included. I haven’t talked to you in years, yet, suddenly, your Bible verse memes were used by Satan to turn me against you? Surely, you can see how silly this is. You are trying to judge my motivations when you have no reason or warrant to do so.
Terry, you say you love and respect me, in Christ. All I hear is the tired, worn-out Christian cliches I have heard countless times before. What in your message is loving and respectful? So many things you could have said or asked, but, instead, you chose to preach at me and remind me of what “Jesus did for us on the cross.” Did you think I didn’t know that already, or consider the fact that I don’t believe as you do; that, to me, Jesus is a dead man who lies buried somewhere in an unknown Judean grave?
People change. Beliefs change. I once was a Christian, and now I am not. If you really want to know why I am no longer a Christian, please check out the posts found here. Better yet, ask me. Don’t preach at me or condemn me. Ask . . . Better yet, dwell on the fond memories of yesteryear; of the times spent playing basketball or hunting rabbits; of the times we spent talking about life and the challenges you were facing. So many good things to remember and talk about. Why choose to preach at me about the one thing for which we have no common ground? Did you think your words would convict me of the error of my way or magically bring me back to Jesus? If so, you missed the mark. I am fully persuaded that the central claims of Christianity are untrue. If that means you can’t accept me as a fellow human being, someone who befriended you and always treated you well, so be it. I’m content to remember the times we once had.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
