Somerset Baptist Church Mt Perry Archives

1986-1995: A Look at My Writing as an IFB Pastor

Bruce Gerencser October 7, 2020 Evangelicalism 6 Comments

What follows is a small sampling of the letters to the editor of The Zanesville Times Recorder I wrote between November 1986 and January 1995. These letters should forever put an end to the notion that I was never a True Christian®. These letters also should help current readers understand why former congregants and colleagues in the ministry are so troubled and upset by my defection from the one true faith. The contrast between then and now is glaring.

Personally, I find these letters embarrassing, but I publish them today to help readers better understand my journey from Evangelicalism to atheism. (Please see From Evangelicalism to Atheism.)

November 13, 1986

TEXTBOOK READING CASE BADLY REPORTED

To The Editor:

I have for some weeks now very carefully read the articles presented for public reading in The Times Recorder. I have particularly paid attention to those that deal with religion in general and fundamentalist Christianity in specific.

I am of the opinion that The Times Recorder is extremely biased in its reporting of fundamentalist activities. Case in point: the Tennessee textbook-reading book court case. While I certainly do not agree with all of the values these Christians held in regard to some of the books they wished banned from their schools, I believe they have a right to decide what or what not their children are to be exposed to in school.

Remember, children belong to their parents, not the state! Opponents say the state has a compelling interest. Why not have enough compelling interest to make sure kids can read and write? Parents have a right, to mold their children in the religious and ethnic values they see fit. Many will say then remove your children from the public school system and put them in a private school. This is exactly what many Christian parents have done, but even then the state tries to exert control. We are a nation founded on freedom. Why not allow fundamentalist parents to exercise that freedom by keeping their children from reading books they feel are offensive?

I feel that The Times Recorder in its reporting of this issue has tried very hard to present only the liberals’ point of view. When the fundamentalist point of view is presented it seems it is always presented in a negative, scornful, dumber-than-a-ridge-runner way.

How about some unbiased reporting and truly delved into why these parents believe the way they do? How about finding out what those in Muskingum County feel on the Issue? People have the right to know both sides of an issue. It’s time that newspapers begin presenting it.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

January 25, 1988

EDUCATION CHOICE IS PARENTS’ RIGHT

To The Editor:

I am writing to express my view on the recent article regarding the contemplated jailing of a Toledo couple for home schooling their children without Wood County school board approval.

It is a sad day in America when parents do not have the opportunity to choose how to educate their children. Studies show that children taught in a home school or Christian school environment consistently test higher than their counterparts in the public school. So the issue cannot be educational quality.

The real issue is control. The state, through its government sponsored schools wants to control our children. They feed our children a daily diet of humanistic philosophy and teaching.

They are taught there is no God, no authority and no absolutes. Is it any wonder our country is in the shape it is? We are products of our teaching.

We are told much of a person’s character is formed in their early years of life. He who gets the children when they are young will usually get them for life. For the humanists to further their cause, they must control the educational system. Thus, the reason for the case in Toledo.

I applaud this couple for standing up for their right to educate their children. They will be children who I am sure will know that there is a God, that there is authority and that there are absolutes. That is the only hope for America.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

July 5, 1989

THERE IS PRIDE IN FLAG-WAVING

To The Editor:

I am writing to express my view in regard to the recent Supreme Court decision dealing with flag burning.

It is appalling to think that we have come to the point in this country where we are even discussing whether or not it is acceptable to burn the American flag. Previous generations would roll over in their graves if they could bear the discussion going on today.

We live in the greatest country in the world. We are a nation founded as “One nation under God.” The flag of the United States of America represents that “One nation under God.” It is a great honor to be born in this country. We are the freest country that has ever graced the pages of history.

Our flag represents that freedom. Those who want to desecrate our flag should be given a one way ticket to Beijing, China. Let’s see how they like freedom Chinese style.

I would also like to suggest that Sen. Howard Metzenbaum be given the first ticket. He is a disgrace to this country and the State of Ohio. If he is personally against flag burning, then let his voting record reflect that. It sounds to me like Sen. Metzenbaum wants to have it both ways, and that is not possible.

It seems to me the issue is patriotism or left wing liberalism. Which will it be? As for me I’m with the countless throngs of people who still revere and honor “Old Glory.” I’m proud to be a flag waving American.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

November 7, 1989

STORY ABOUT RALLY FULL OF HALF-TRUTHS

To The Editor:

I am writing to express my disgust over the liberal reporting by The Times Recorder as exhibited in the article entitled, “Abortion Rallies Have Large Turnout,” which appeared in the Monday, Oct. 30, edition of The Times Recorder. The article is full of half-truths and it is evident the writer of the article is pro-choice. I had the privilege of attending the Rally of Hope, a pro-life rally on Saturday, October 28. It will go down as one of the highlights of my life. It’s too bad The TR chose not to give more newspaper space to this event.

Now to the article. It is statistically proven that most Republicans are pro-life. I thought it was ironic, you were able to dig up one Republican at the pro-choice rally that was for abortion. As a Republican, I assure you, most Republicans are pro-life. Thelma Moore does not represent the sentiments of most Republicans.

I also thought it was noteworthy that the article did not mention that Gov. Celeste participated in the pro-choice rally. Are you afraid to let the local citizens know that our governor is for killing innocent unborn children?

Finally, the article only printed half of Mr. John Willkes comments. It will be noted that his comments were in reference to how a survey can be tainted by the questions asked.

The rest of the statistical quote was “69 percent of Americans believe there should be laws to protect the lives of the unborn?” I wonder why this statistic was left out. Could it be that indeed America is a Pro-Life people?

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

November 10, 1989

SATAN ALIVE IN OUR WORLD

To The Editor:

I am writing in response to the editorial on Halloween by Dave Claypool. Mr. Claypool seems to doubt the reality of a person called Satan (or the Devil). The Bible says in I Peter 5:8, “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”

One only has to look around our country and see pornography, AIDS, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, rampant drug and alcohol abuse, child abuse, and many other signs of decadence,. to know that the Devil is alive and well. He desires to destroy our families and our country. One way he accomplishes this is by getting people to believe his actions are harmless. Such is the case with Halloween.

Halloween is the High Holy Day of the Satanic Church. You will find that clearly stated in the “Satanic Bible,” by Anton LaVey. Halloween has always had its roots in the occult and satanism.

Mr. Claypool may call objectors to Halloween, zealots, but at the least, we are not blinded to the devices of Satan. Mr. Claypool may, in satirical humor, mock those who believe Halloween is Satanic; but someday, each of us will draw our last breath in this life. Then we will see if there is a real Satan and who has been blinded.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

January 31, 1990

MORAL APPROACH IS MISDIRECTED

To The Editor:

I am writing in response to the letter written by Kenneth Prior in the Jan. 19, issue of The Times Recorder.

The purpose of my letter is not to debate the issue of the group called “Strike Force.” I personally have a problem with those types of ministries and the Jesus Christ they portray.

My issue of contention rests with the statements about the assemblies held at various schools. It was discussed, but not Jesus Christ.

Morals without Jesus Christ are nothing but self-righteous acts.

The permanent solution to drugs, booze, sexual pressures, etc., is a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. The public school system for 25 years has been teaching a situational morality without God and the Bible.

The Result? A nation of young people that have little, if any, moral values.

Drugs, premarital sex, booze drinking, abortion, and venereal disease are all on the upswing among our young people. First-time occurrences of many of these things mentioned now occur with our elementary-aged children. Why? Morals without Jesus Christ and the Bible.

What this country needs is less Hollywood religion and more old-fashioned Bible preaching. An assembly on morals without a clear presentation of Jesus and the Word of God is like an automobile without tires. It is useless and it’s not going anywhere.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

October 8, 1990

GOOD QUESTION FOR CHRISTIANS

To The Editor:

This is in response to the article on Armageddon in the Sept. 30th Times Recorder.

While I would agree with some of the facts, I disagree wholeheartedly with much of the article. The Bible teaches the world as we know it is headed down a path that leads to destruction.

The final event that takes place on that trek is the Battle of Armageddon. When sin has been destroyed and the Lord Jesus Christ vindicated, God will bring into existence a new heaven and a new earth.

His people, those who have been born again, will live for eternity in the new heaven and new earth. Those who reject Jesus Christ and his salvation will spend their eternity in the lake of fire.

Prior to the end, God will pour out his wrath on this earth in a period which is commonly called the tribulation. My point of disagreement with the article is the issue of Christians being absent from the earth while God judges it.

This is nothing more than “pie in the sky” thinking. God’s people will face persecution and death during the tribulation, God’s people have always faced trial. Why should this generation of weak, carnal, and loose-living Christians be any different?

During the tribulation, God intends to purify His Church. It is time for Christians to WAKE UP!

A lost world needs to see a Christianity that really matters. We have had enough Bakkers and Swaggarts. The world needs to see a holy people who love God and obey His Word. Is God’s closing in on Armageddon and the tribulation?

While most preachers are too busy building their kingdoms on this earth, I intend to be on the street corners of our communities proclaiming a message of repentance! There are still some of us who believe in preaching “REPENT, for the end of the world is at hand.”

But this message is not only for lost sinners, but for Christians also. Luke 18:8 says, “When the Son of cometh, shall He find Faith on the earth?” I would suggest that is a good question for each Christian to answer.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

February 2, 1991

BIBLE IS CLEAR TRAINING GUIDE

To The Editor:

I am writing in response to an article ‘entitled “Controlling Your Household Tyrants,” written by Ron Smitley of Six County Inc.

From the tone of the article I can see Dr. Spock lives on.

God did not leave child training to chance. He gave each of us a clear guide for training children, and it’s the Bible.

The problem is many so-called experts have called the teachings of the Bible outdated. They would even suggest the Bible teaches child abuse. But is that the case?

The Bible teaches sexual abstinence before marriage. Planned Parenthood and public school sex education programs teach children safe and responsible sex. Result? Rampant venereal disease and pregnancy. Who shall we blame?

The Bible teaches homosexuality is a gross perversion. The liberals of the day call it an alternative lifestyle. Result? AIDS. Who shall we blame?

The Bible teaches marriage for life with monogamy inside the marriage. Society says live together, get a divorce if you are not happy, etc. Result? Broken homes, venereal disease and abused children. Who shall we blame? I could go on and on.

The Bible says in Proverbs 22:15, “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.” I will agree with Smitley on one point, we DO have tyrants in our homes. The reason? No Biblical discipline.

A parent who loves their children will spank them if they rebel against their authority. (Which is, by the way, a God given authority.) Proverbs 13:24 says, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”

The hope of America rests in its families. We need to get back to Bible-based family practice. It is the only way!

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

April 10, 1992

CHILD ABUSE LIST COULD BE FAULTY

To The Editor:

I am writing in response to the article on the secret child abuse record, which appeared in the March 30 issue of The Times Recorder.

If the statistics quoted are to be believed, 10 to 20 percent of all adult Ohioans are on this list. Are we really to believe 600,000 Adults in this state are suspected Child abusers? Either the statistics are incorrect or the method by which one ends up on this list is faulty.

Granted, child abuse is a serious problem. In 15 years of pastoral ministry I have seen my share of cases. I have no objection to those who have been convicted of bonafide child abuse crimes, being placed on a list.

But I have a sneaking suspicion many on this “McCarthy Era” list are guilty of nothing more than good discipline practices.

The official philosophy of the Ohio Department of Human Services, the state teachers’ unions, and the different departments that offer help to children, is that of no corporal punishment. According to them, to paddle a child, for any reason, is child abuse. Several other states are trying to pass laws that will outlaw all forms of corporal punishment.

Our schools in Ohio have removed corporal punishment as a means of discipline. Result? Read the newspaper and see the mayhem in the public school system.

Educators blame it on the family structure. Perhaps this is true, but who suggested to this generation’s parents that they discard time-tested, God-mandated forms of child discipline? We must lay the blame at the feet of social workers, educators, liberal ministers, and mental health workers who bought Benjamin Spock’s line on discipline. The result of all this is a Society that is in rebellion to all authority including God’s!

The only thing Spock’s book is good for is paddling a rebellious child. OOPS! I better not say that. Some liberal bureaucrat might turn my name in to the DHS list keepers.

May we ever be reminded to: Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. Prov. 22:6. That training includes proper child discipline.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

August 31, 1992

DEMOCRATS ARE AT ODDS WITH GOD

To The Editor:

I am writing in response to recent articles dealing with President Bush’s comments about Bill Clinton’s views of God and religion.

Bill Clinton and Albert Gore are Democrats in the truest sense. They try to pass themselves off as conservative, family-oriented politicians, but such is not the case. To be a Democrat is to be a liberal. While there may be good, conservative people in the Democratic Party, the official party stance is a liberal one. President Bush has every right to call Bill Clinton into question in regards to his views of God and religion.

The official Democratic line is pro-abortion, anti-capital punishment, expanded social programs, and pro-homosexual. This and many other issues puts the Democratic Party in direct opposition to the Bible, which then puts them at odds with God.

While I am not so naive to believe that being a Republican and a Christian are synonymous, the Republican Party does stand for many things that are right. I am a Republican not because of George Bush, but rather because of what the party stands for. Pro-life, pro-capital punishment, and social programs that help people (and not enslave them) are some of the reasons for being a Republican. These are Biblical values.

I have my concerns about the Republican Party. My fear is that they are just a few years behind the Democrats. This is evidenced in their courting of the homosexual vote. Instead of openly courting the homosexuals, better time would be spent passing and enforcing sodomy laws. God declares that homosexuality is a perverse sin.

Bill Clinton and Albert Gore both claim to be Baptist and Christian. Their views are incompatible with true Christianity, and as far as them being Baptists, I am ashamed that they would number themselves with those who for the most part oppose what they hold to politically. The Baptist churches which Clinton and Gore are members of should speedily exercise church discipline and remove these men from their church rolls. They have no right to the name Baptist, let alone the name Christian.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

January 15, 1993

CHOICE OF CHELSEA’S SCHOOL SHOWS CLINTON’S HYPOCRISY

To The Editor:

I am writing to express my views in regards to Bill Clinton’s decision to put his daughter in a private school. While I am an ardent advocate of private education, I believe Mr. Clinton shows utter hypocrisy in his decision.

We should remember, just months ago, Mr. Clinton ran on a platform of anti-school choice. He strongly believes that children should be educated in state schools. Unless of course it is your child and then you do what is best for the child. Mr. Clinton needs to practice what he preaches. If public education is so wonderful, why not enroll your daughter in the Washington, D.C., city schools?

No, Mr. Clinton knows that the D.C. schools are for the most part juvenile detention centers. Crime, violence, guns, etc. are commonplace. I wouldn’t want to educate my children in that environment either. Where are the teacher’s unions, now? Or do they know, like Mr. Clinton, the true shape of many of our school systems.

I am one parent who has determined to provide my children with a private, religious education. As progressive education, coupled with an amoral society, moves in force in our local communities, we can expect to see the same problems here that they face in Washington, D.C.

I trust Mr. Clinton will see what a hypocrite he has been. I don’t condemn him for doing what is best for his daughter. My prayer is that each of us will be allowed to do the same. For my family it is to send them to a non-chartered, non-tax supported Baptist school that teaches Bible morals, ethics, and doctrine. If Mr. Clinton has a right to choose, so should we!

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

February 5, 1993

HOMOSEXUALITY PERVERSE SIN

To The Editor:

I am writing to express my views in regards to the issue of homosexuals in the military. It is an admitted fact that homosexuals have long existed in the various branches of the military. The issue is whether or not their conduct or lifestyle should be given sanction.

This issue is much deeper than whether or not homosexuals can serve in the military. It clearly is a moral issue. If we have not, as yet, become a paganistic, amoral society, then it would do us well to address the morality of this issue. Is homosexuality moral?

For those who hold to the Bible being their standard of morality, homosexuality is indeed a perverse sin. While adultery and fornication are grievous sins as well, homosexuality goes beyond them in the fact that it goes against nature (Romans 1)God made man and woman to have distinctive roles. The very core of homosexuality goes against ALL that God intends. Bible believers reject the notion that homosexuals are born that way. Homosexuality is a lifestyle choice.

I would implore Congress to override the intentions of the Clinton administration and ban homosexuals from the military. Their lifestyle is incompatible with the rigor and order of military life. To those caught in the web of homosexuality I would beg them to turn to Christ in repentance and I believe they will find a Savior who will not only forgive them but will also deliver them from the deep sin they are in (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

April 11, 1993

CHRISTIANS MUST MAKE JUDGMENTS

To The Editor:

I am writing in response to the letter by Doug Allen in The Times Recorder April 1. Mr. Allen’s views show very forcefully what is wrong with professing Christianity.

As Christians, we have been called to a life of holiness and commitment. We are to love what God loves and hate what He hates. We are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. But today, the salt has lost its savor and the light has gone out.

Mr. Allen equates those who make Biblical Judgments with those who hate and spew forth bitterness. Who is judging now, Mr. Allen? I have no hatred or bitterness in my heart toward others. My desire is to reach the sinner man with the gospel of Christ. My desire is to imitate my Lord in his love and compassion for sinners. But that DOES NOT mean we throw Bible truth and judgment to the wind.

People who take the view of Mr. Allen and claim to be Christians are in direct violation of the Scripture. We are to judge righteously and properly. To do so means making judgments about the society we live in. Contrary to the opinion stated by Mr. Allen, we ARE to speak for God. If His people do not speak for Him, who will? God gave us the Bible, which we must proclaim to our generation. It’s repent or perish!

Finally, I would say that perhaps the root problem is a theological one. Mr. Allen suggests that the only difference between a Christian and all others is a sincere prayer. This thought is the core of Arminianism and is utterly false. True Christianity is a turning from sin and an embracing of Christ by faith. It is the adopting of a new life in Christ in which Christ becomes the Lord and Savior of a person. Anything less will not avail. Some people are sincere and certainly some even pray but that is not true Christianity.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

May 26, 1993

JESUS CHRIST IS THE ONLY HOPE

To The Editor:

I am writing in response to the May 19 letter by William Lacy. Mr. Lacy shows the demeanor and character of a man who rejects God and His infallible truth, the Bible. His letter is filled with distortions and inaccuracies.

First, he would have us believe that those of a “fundamentalist” persuasion do not think for themselves. While there are those who are “closed-minded,” and who would argue that Mr. Lacy himself doesn’t have a very closed mind, most Christians think for themselves. We wrestle with the truth of the Scripture. Some of the greatest thinkers in history have been Christians. I would gladly allow Mr. Lacy to look over my library. He will find books by men of education and stature.

Secondly, Mr. Lacy takes the approach that all who say they are Christian are indeed one. Not so! The Bible does not teach a salvation of many different roads all leading to one place. There is one hope of salvation and that is in Jesus Christ.

Such is the case on the moral issues Mr. Lacy brings up. There are not two ways to look at ANY of the issues he raises. It is not what man says, but God. It is of little concern to me that most denominations advocate abortion and homosexuality. The Bible declares both to be wicked and that is sufficient for me. The problem today is that what is called Christianity in America, for the most part, is false religion.

Mr. Lacy would have you believe that Christians believe they are not accountable to civil government. Sure we are, as long as that government rules in a righteous manner. The law of God is sufficient for any society. It is when civil government attempts to become god that conscientious Christians must object and stand against their government. We will either be ruled by God’s law or man’s law.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

July 9, 1993

OUTRAGED AT HISTORY REWRITE

To The Editor:

I am writing to express my outrage at the deliberate attempt to rewrite American history as attempted on the Mini Page June 28. The issue, which is mainly for children, featured Thomas Jefferson as the main subject. In among many historically correct facts were at least two blatant distortions of history.

The first dealt with the quote from the Declaration of Independence. It is remarkable that two important words, Creator and unalienable, were left out. They talk about being endowed with rights, but who did Jefferson say endowed us with those rights? Their Creator! The proof that this is a deliberate misrepresentation rests in the fact that all other phrases left out in the context of the quote were represented with ellipses. Such was not the case with the omission of “their Creator.” The word unalienable was also deliberately left out. The politically correct would have us believe that the government endows people with rights, which at any time can be taken away. Hogwash! Men are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, rights that cannot be taken away by man. The foremost of these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Daily our government continues to encroach in the areas of our unalienable rights.

I would also note in passing that the part in the Mini Page dealing with religious freedom paints a very biased and skewed view. It shows the symbols of the supposed five major religions in America. Would the writers of this article have us believe that these five religions were in existence when Jefferson wrote his various thoughts on religious freedom? The 18th century of America was a century dominated by Christianity. No Buddhists, Hinduists or Islamics and very few Jews. Let’s at least paint an accurate picture. Next we’ll be reading articles from these historical reconstructionists that the doctrine of separation of church and state as practiced today was what Jefferson meant when he wrote of the issues of government and church separation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

December 9, 1993

GOD HATES SIN AND SINNERS

To the Editor:

I am replying to the Dec. 3 letter written by J.D. Kimple. Mr. Kimple accuses me of being uninformed and of using rash generalizations. The truth of the matter is that Mr. Kimple has bought into the government line about AIDS. We can quote statistics galore but they prove nothing.

The largest percentage of those having AIDS is homosexual. Yes, it has spread to the heterosexual population, but the issue is still the same. Heterosexuals are getting AIDS for the most part because of immoral sexual practices. Show me two people who were virgins when they married and were faithful to each other and now they have AIDS. There is no such case. Morality and fidelity and the only cures for AIDS.

As to God being a kind, loving God, yes, he is. I am thankful for his saving grace. But God also hates sin. God punishes sinful men for their wicked practices. The old cliche “God hates the sin, but loves the sinner” is not in the Bible. God hates sin and those who do it. Man must flee from the wrath of God. Only then will man find love and forgiveness. God saves men out of their sin and does not leave them in it. God’s view of homosexuality is summed up in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Mr. Kimple is not questioning my religious convictions, but rather the word of God. Let God be true and every man a liar.

Bruce Gerencser
Somerset Baptist Church

November 15, 1994

ALL LIFE IS PRECIOUS

To The Editor:

Recent news reports have touted a new test that can be used for detecting Down Syndrome a month earlier than before. This new test is called Chorionic villus sampling, or CVS. Prior to this new test, amniocentesis was the primary method used to detect Down Syndrome while the child was still in the womb.

We are told that women over 35 should have this testing done to determine whether or not their child has Down Syndrome. What is not being said? That the only reason for this type of testing is so an abortion can take place if the test comes back postitive. Now we can kill the unwanted Down’s child at 10 weeks instead of 16 weeks. Our nation continues down the path of decadence, murdering those who don’t fit the accepted criteria of life. God help us.

All life is precious. It is the gift of God. Who are we to determine what is “quality” or “acceptable” life? God never gave us that right. Some would argue that the over 35 mother would like to know if she is carrying a Down’s child. When the test came back negative she would then be relieved. Why does it matter? If abortion is not the issue then it does not matter if the child is Down’s. But abortion is the issue, and we continue our killing ways.

God will hold us accountable for how we treat the innocent and the helpless. As a parent of a Down Syndrome child, I thank God for allowing us the privilege to have our daughter. Yes, there are those difficult moments, but the precious moments far outweigh the difficult ones. We wouldn’t trade our daughter for all the money in the world. May God help each of us to view life as precious. May we stand against anything and anyone that depreciates human life. From the womb to the grave we uphold the sanctity of life.

Bruce Gerencser
Frazeysburg

December 16, 1994

RAZE THE STRUCTURE

To The Editor:

The issue of school prayer will prove to be one of the hottest topics of 1995. Newt Gingerich and other ardent right wing Republicans plan on making it one of the first topics addressed in 1995. I guess we should feel excited that the Republicans are trying to get God on our side again. If we can just get prayer back in the schools, then America will have the favor of God

Please don’t do God any favors. For the first time in my life, and I am sweating as I write this, I agree with the liberal, card-carrying, ACLU members. Let’s keep prayer out of school. Do we really think, that a moment of prayer, at the start of the school day, is going to make a difference in our society? I think not By the time the politicians and the courts get done with what type of prayer will be acceptable, it will certainly not resemble anything that would be pleasing to the God of the Bible.

Christian parents are naive if they think that a momentary prayer at the start of the public school day will keep their children safe from the onslaught of humanistic instruction. Instead, Christian parents need to ask themselves if their children belong in public schools in which everything the Bible teaches is held up to question and ridicule. We can put our heads in the sand, Christians, but when we come out of our hole, the fact still remains: the public school system is bankrupt and no place for Christians to educate their children.

Yes, I am aware of the fact that there are fine Christian educators in the public school system, and they are to be commended for their diligent effort, but the Titanic is sinking and it is time to man the lifeboats.

Do you want prayer, real prayer in school? Then put your children in a school that believes the Bible and which encourages, by teaching and action, students to pray to the God of the Bible. Or perhaps, like some of the rest of us, home school your children. Prayer is always legal in the home school.

My main objection about school prayer has nothing to do with the school itself. It is time that Christians and churches quit being hypocrites. We want the public schools to practice what we are not practicing ourselves. The average Christian prays less than five minutes a day. Churches have prayer meetings in which nobody prays. Are we concerned about America? Then let’s pray. Let’s make our churches houses of prayer again. Religious leaders continue to clamor about the need for revival The precursor to every great revival is prayer. The New York revival of 1858 came forth from a small prayer meeting. Thousands were converted. Moral change was effected. But today, where are the cries of mourning coupled with prayer and fasting?

It is time to be honest. School prayer is just new paint on the outside of a dilapidated, soon to collapse structure. Oh, it may look nice for a while, but the building is sure to collapse. We don’t need any more paint Instead, let’s raze the structure and build it again.

People of prayer. That is what America needs. When we become a people of prayer, we will not have to worry about school prayer. When Christians determine to walk according to the teachings of the Bible, the public school systems will either change or their buildings will be empty.

It’s time to quit blaming the devil, the Democrats, or Bill Clinton, and instead put the blame where it belongs. We, as Christians, have forsaken our duties and responsibilities. We are to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, but we have become a salt that has lost its savor and it’s pretty dark out there.

Bruce Gerencser
Frazeysburg

January 4, 1995

SHOOTINGS ARE WRONG, BUT SO IS ABORTION

To The Editor:

We find in the news again the report of another abortion clinic shooting. First, the paper was filled with articles on Paul Hill the Presbyterian minister recently convicted of murder in Florida. Now, I am sure we will be fed a continued diet of stories about John Salvi, the purported Boston abortion clinic shooter.

Paul Hill and John Salvi committed horrible acts; acts that God does not condone. God, in his unalterable moral law, declared “Thou shalt not kill.” The end never justifies the means, and the killing of abortion clinic workers will never bring an end to abortion. These two men are murderers and must face the consequences of their sin.

Sometimes men and women can become so committed to “the cause” that they lose sight of moral rightness. Instead any action becomes justified as long as it serves the cause. In the end, Paul Hill and John Salvi must answer to God.

But just as killing abortion clinic workers is murder, so is the aborting of babies. People who work in abortion clinics are employed in the killing fields. They, by their employment in such places, lend their support to the killing that goes on in the name of a “woman’s right to choose.”

While I feel sorry for the Nichols family who lost their daughter, Lee Ann, in the recent clinic shootings, let us not forget that Lee Ann Nichols was a willing participant in the killing fields. She may have only been a receptionist, but she knew what went on behind closed doors. Her brother was quick to quote the Bible and decry his sister’s murder, and rightly so. But his sister has blood on her hands also.

Lee Ann Nichols wanted the world to be more civilized. Abortion will never make us more civilized. Abortion, for any reason, devalues the worth of a human life. Human life is now nothing more than fetal tissue to be tossed away at a woman’s whim.

There is only one answer to this problem. Man must obey his God. And Jehovah God said “thou shalt not kill.” It is time that we figure out God really meant what He said.

Bruce Gerencser
Frazeysburg

Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 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.

Connect with me on social media:

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Blast From the Past (1990): Is TV an Idol in America?

Bruce Gerencser June 23, 2020 Evangelicalism 4 Comments

What follows is an essay written by my ten-year-old son while a student at Somerset Baptist Academy in Mt. Perry, Ohio. As you will see, my son had been paying attention to my sermons. My three oldest sons, now 41 39, and 36, watched very little TV growing up. We did not own a TV until they were teenagers. (Please see The Preacher and His TV.)

Yes, television is an idol. We worship the TV every time we turn it on and watch it. The Devil is behind the television. It was his idea to make the television so he could enter people’s houses and rule over them. He loves his idea. It gives him his chance to kill people like that Bible says: that he’s a roaring lion and seeketh to devour someone.

In people’s houses everything is turned towards the television. We do not talk to guests. We watch TV and once in awhile make a comment about what there is to watch or something else. Even so-called “Christians” watch filthy, junky, and ungodly stuff on TV. Soon we become slaves and addicts to the TV.

When people watching the TV it is hard for them to stop watching it. People watch dirty and gruesome things and just say, what was wrong with it? or how terrible it was, and keep watching it. No one even bothered to not watch it or get rid of it. The devil laughs at us when we do this because he has won. People have let TV become a part of their lives, so therefore they let it control them instead of them controlling it.

When we as people come home we turn on the TV right away. Whatever there’s to see, it is on full blast. TV damages adults, but totally destroys children. One school teacher had her students not watch TV for 24 hours, and then write a report on it. One boy thought one minute [not watching TV] was like a month, another imagined that his favorite shows were on TV. Japanese children think that they cannot live without it. They have at least 3 TV’s in their homes. They think you are “different” if you do not have a TV to look at all the time.

The TV is a things that lays the way for the Anti-Christ. The Anti-Christ will rule the world by way of the TV. He will have everybody hooked on to the TV and watching filthy stuff, which allows demons come into their homes. TV is man’s number one idol besides other things. The Anti-Christ will speak through the TV. Unsaved people cannot watch or worship the TV during the Tribulation because they will be killed for not bowing down to him [Anti-Christ] when he comes on TV. We should not watch filthy things on TV. (Over 400 words)

Connect with me on social media:

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Life: It All Depends on Where You Are Standing

Bruce Gerencser May 2, 2020 Evangelicalism 11 Comments

creamery road zanesville ohio — Creamery Road, Zanesville, Ohio

Repost from 2015. Edited, rewritten, and corrected.

As long-time readers know, I spend a lot of time writing about my past: people, places, and events that are very much a part of the fabric of my life. I try to be as truthful and accurate as possible when I recount the past, but I am ever aware of the fact that I am giving an account of things as I remember them. Having read a good bit about the brain and memories, I know my retelling of my past may or may not be accurate. As best I can remember, I try to give an honest accounting of my life.

I have a younger brother and sister, and it is amazing how differently we each view events that happened in our childhood. Who is right? I’ve come to understand, we all are. The story we tell depends on where we were standing at the time. As a fifteen-year-old boy and the oldest son, my view of our parent’s divorce is much different from that of my then eleven-year-old sister. The same can be said about many of our shared seminal experiences.

I live with a lot of guilt. I am prone to depression, and I can be quite pessimistic. I have faced long, deep bouts of depression, times where I have felt that death would be too good for me. With my words, theology, and religious practice, I hurt people. I’ve come to have these feelings because I am looking back at my past with the eyes of a sixty-two-year-old man. How could I have been Bruce Gerencser, the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) preacher? Who was that man, I ask myself. Thanks be to Loki, he no longer exists, having been slain by reason and maturity, but I still live with the memories of the past.

I am Facebook friends with several of the kids who were members of Somerset Baptist Church — an IFB congregation I pastored from 1983-1994. I was their pastor through the formative years of their lives. Not only did they sit under my preaching at least three times a week, but they also attended Somerset Baptist Academy, a private Christian school I started in 1989. I often feel I hurt them and let them down. I think back to how narrow I was over things like certain kinds of clothing, music, physical contact between the sexes, movies, and TV. If these children hated me, I wouldn’t blame them. Thankfully, they don’t.

When I talk to these former students, I hear their perspective on our shared experiences. All of them are in their late 30s and 40s now, and many of them are married and have children. Several of them are gay. Their religious persuasions run from atheism to liberal Christianity. None of them retained the IFB Christianity of their youth. From their vantage point, they recall things quite differently from the way I do. Several of them recall my wife teaching them to read. One man mentioned going back to the old church grounds and playing another game of kickball for old time’s sake. Again, what we remember depends on where we were standing at the time.

I recently re-read several posts I wrote about IFB evangelist Don Hardman and his wife Laura. (Please see Book Review: Laura’s Light by Laura Hardman and Book Review: The Preacher: The Life and Times of Donald A. Hardman.) As I read these posts, I felt twinges of guilt and sadness. When I was a pastor, I had no closer friends than Don and Laura Hardman. I loved them like they were family. When they came to our church it was the highlight of the year. For fifteen days and seventeen services, we would focus on God and his Word. Every day, Don and I would go out evangelizing and street preaching. The church loved the Hardmans and graciously gave of their money and food to help them.

From my vantage point as pastor of Somerset Baptist Church, I have nothing but good memories and feelings when I think of Don and Laura Hardman. I never saw them fight, and I never had a cross word with them. Even when we parted company for a few years over my Calvinistic beliefs, we remained friends. In the early 2000s, the Hardmans came to Grace Baptist Church (later named Our Father’s House) in West Unity, Ohio, a church I was pastoring at the time, and conducted a week-long meeting. We had a great time, but I knew that I could not have them back. While they remained right where I met them in 1987, I had changed. My view of God, the Bible, politics, culture, and other Christian sects was evolving. Yet, we remained friends until 2008, when my deconversion permanently fractured the relationship. Laura wrote me a scathing letter after hearing of my deconversion, letting me know that I never was a real Christian.

Here I stand in 2020, no longer a Christian, and now an atheist. My view of the past is clouded with the tincture of time. While I still have fond memories of evangelist Don Hardman’s protracted revival meetings, I have come to see that the preaching and the theology behind it was psychologically controlling and damaging. This is how I view much of my preaching as well, especially the first 15 years or so. Over time I matured. I began preaching expositionally, and I turned from a Bible-quoting, hellfire-and-brimstone-preacher to more of a teacher of the Bible. Oh, I was still quite passionate about God, the Bible, and how we ought to apply it to our lives, but I was much more careful about using the Bible in context and letting the text speak for itself. While the Hardmans remained steadfast and unmovable throughout our friendship, my understanding of them changed. Again, my vantage point changed, resulting in me viewing the Hardmans differently.

My wife and I have known each other for almost forty-four years. This coming July we will celebrate our forty-second wedding anniversary. Several years ago, I uploaded a bunch of old pictures to Facebook: family pictures; pictures from Somerset Baptist Church, and pictures from Our Father’s House. As I uploaded these photos I began to weep. The memories of years gone by flooded my mind; memories of the people I pastored and the children I taught at Somerset Baptist Academy; memories of my wonderful wife and our little babies. Good memories. Wonderful memories.

Now that I have a different perspective, I view the events recorded in these pictures differently. Is this maturity? I don’t know. Time changes how we view the past. What were once wonderful memories are now clouded by what I now know about the emotional and mental manipulation I perpetrated on those who called me Pastor. As I have shared before, I am in a unique position. I am both a victim and a victimizer. I followed in the footsteps of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) preachers who emotionally and mentally scarred my life. Victimized by their manipulation, I in turn victimized those who were members of the IFB and Evangelical churches I pastored. It’s an ugly cycle of abuse, one that I was fortunately able to put an end to during my latter years in the ministry and subsequent post-Jesus life.

So it is with Polly. While she and I walked side by side through the years we spent in the ministry, Polly’s viewpoint is very different from mine. I was the leader of the churches I pastored, the center of attention. People, for the most part, respected me, loved me, and supported my work as a pastor. For Polly it was different. Like many pastor’s wives, she was my gofer. She did what others didn’t or wouldn’t do. No one in the nursery? Polly filled in. Entertain people every Sunday for twenty years? Polly did it without a complaint, even when her pastor husband forgot to tell her so and so was coming over for dinner. She quietly submitted to a life as the helpmeet of a poorly paid, Type A, constantly-working, never-home, Baptist preacher.

Polly did without. Our entire family did without, but Polly more so than the children and I. She never said a word. She quietly lived in ramshackle houses and drove cars that were better suited for demolition derbies. She made do with what she had. This much I know, I do WISH there were a Heaven, because Polly deserves a huge mansion right next door to Dottie Rambo’s Log Cabin.

Video Link

However, since there is no Heaven, all I can do is make sure that Polly has the best life possible for the rest of this life. She deserves it!

It should come as no surprise then that Polly remembers the past much differently from what I recall. One time I said, wouldn’t you like to go back to __________church? Immediately she replied, No I wouldn’t. I was surprised by her quick and negative response. I asked, why not? I then quickly learned, from where Polly was standing, that her view of this church was very different from mine. Who is right? We both are.

I have written a good bit about the abuse that went on and continues to go on in IFB group homes. (Please see Sexual Abuse in the Name of God: New Bethany Home for Girls, Teen Group Homes: Dear IFB Pastor, It’s Time for You to Atone for Your Sin and The Dogma that Followed Me Home.) The stories that some people share from their time in these facilities break my heart. I want to personally find these abusive miscreants and beat the shit out of them. They deserve to have punishment heaped upon them. They hurt people that I love and respect, and the fact that these dear friends of mine still suffer from the abuse received from men like Mack Ford angers me to this day. Every once in a while, someone will come along and leave a glowing testimony from their time in the same facilities. They loved their time there. They were helped and their life is the better for it. How can this be? Surely, someone is lying, right? Not at all. While it is possible that someone is lying or they are living in denial, more often than not, the difference is simply a matter of where the person was standing in relation to the person, place, or event.

Time shapes how we view the past. For me, I am finding that the further a person, place, or event is in the past, the fonder my memories are. I suspect that’s how we as humans cope with life. The tincture of time often brings healing, and it also allows us to gain enough distance from the negative things in our past that they no longer feel harmful or threatening. While time rarely heals all wounds, it does allow us the space and distance necessary to be at peace with those things that cut us to the quick. Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for.

Connect with me on social media:

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Book Review: The Preacher: The Life and Times of Donald A. Hardman

Bruce Gerencser May 2, 2020 Evangelicalism 33 Comments

the preacher the life and times of don hardman

Repost from 2015. Edited, rewritten, and corrected.

Laura Hardman, wife of Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) Evangelist Don Hardman, has written a biography about her husband titled. The Preacher: The Life and Times of Donald A. Hardman. This self-published book is 201 pages long. In 2010, Laura published an autobiography titled Laura’s Light. You can read my review of the book here.

Like Laura’s Light, The Preacher reads quite a bit like the Bible. Don Hardman’s story is one of bondage to sin and deliverance from that sin through the blood of Jesus Christ. Also, like the Bible, it is littered with fictions and omissions. I will illustrate some of these fictions and omissions later.

While the book is meant to be a biography of Don Hardman’s life, it is sparse on details, except for those that paint Don in a favorable light. In the preface, Laura states:

I will endeavor to write about a man whom I watched God transform into literally another person over the last thirty-seven years. It is my desire not to glorify or make much of what he did when he was lost, but make much of his new life in Christ.

In other words, the past is the past, it is under the blood, praise Jesus! Time to move on. The greater objective, according to Laura, is for some “sinner or saint” to “read this biography and realize there is hope for a victorious life, not only when we get to heaven, but also here as we walk in this world.” Laura wants readers to know that they too can be just like Don and Laura Hardman and achieve the victorious Christian life.

The book has eight chapters:

A Struggle Through Childhood
No Purpose for Life
Time for Change
The Call of God
Just a Servant of the Lord
A Street Preacher
The Chance of a Lifetime
The Life of Evangelism

These eight chapters take up 142 pages. The other 70 pages are what Laura calls a “Summary and Sketches of What the Preacher Said.” While Laura had uncounted recordings of Don’s sermons that she could have transcribed, she instead decided to summarize thirty of his sermons. While Laura says the reason for doing this is because “the Lord laid on my heart that giving a short essay and sharing how the people reacted might be more edifying,” I suspect the real reason for not transcribing Don’s sermons is because he often preached for sixty to ninety minutes. Over the years, Don lost meetings because he refused to shorten the length of his sermons.

Chapter one details Don’s birth in Canton, Ohio in 1950, his battle with polio, and a bit about his parents, brother, and grandparents. The chapter ends with Don graduating from high school — a rebellious young man who frequently skipped school, hung out at pool halls, smoked, drank beer, and rarely thought about God. According to Laura, Don graduated in May of 1968 “with a diploma in hand and no purpose in life.”

What’s interesting is that Laura makes no mention of the fact that Don married a thirteen-year-old girl by the name of Cheryl, one month before he graduated from high school. At the time of their marriage, Cheryl was four months pregnant and both Don and she were wards of the court. While I can certainly understand why Laura might not want to mention this, wouldn’t this juicy tidbit enhance Don’s sinner-to-saint story?

In chapter two, Laura skips Don’s marriage to Cheryl, the birth of their two children, Joe and Tangi, and their foster daughter Shelly. Again, if what I am being told is correct, there are plenty of stories that Laura could have shared from this period that would have enhanced Don’s sinner creds. Outside of mentioning Don’s drinking habit, nothing more is said about Don’s life until May of 1977. During this nine-year period, Don was married to Cheryl. An uninformed reader would assume that Laura is Don’s first wife, and that Joe and Tangi are her biological children. In my review of Laura’s first book, I wrote:

Two children were born of Don’s first marriage. Laura claims the children as her own, a claim I suspect the biological mother finds quite offensive (a woman I have corresponded with over the years). While Hardman does say Don had two children, she never calls herself their step-mother. In her mind, when Jesus came into their life EVERYTHING became brand-new and that included the children having a new mother.

In May of 1977, Don, Laura, and their two children moved to Findlay, Ohio so Don could begin working for Ashland Oil. According to Laura:

In June of 1977, things seemed to be going great for us as a family. We moved into a government house on 1143 Concord Court, Findlay, Ohio. Our neighborhood was made up drunks, unmarried couples living together, and a slew of hoodlum kids. Needless to say, we added to their list of hoodlums. Little did we know that this wicked little neighborhood would become a mission field in the months to come.

Laura may have forgotten that I lived in Findlay in the 1970s — grades eight through eleven. I am quite familiar with the neighborhood the Hardmans lived in. The house in question is a single-family dwelling. At the time the Hardmans moved into the house it was around twenty years old. I seriously doubt that the home was government housing. It is possible that it was Section 8 housing, but this would mean that the Hardmans were either on welfare or quite poor. Having already stated that Don had a job at Ashland Oil — which was a well-paying job in the 1970s — it is unlikely that the Hardmans were poor or on welfare. (Put 1143 Concord Court into Google Earth or Google Map and take a street view look of the house and neighborhood.)

As far as the Concord Court neighborhood is concerned, I seriously doubt the neighborhood was as Laura describes it. While my memory is certainly not what it once was, I do remember that the Concord Court area was a working-class neighborhood of moderately priced, small homes — not unlike the neighborhood on National Court that my parents, siblings, and I lived in the 1970s.

If my memory is correct, what are we to make of Laura’s description of the neighborhood? The easy answer would be that she is lying and that certainly might be the case. However, I am more inclined to believe that this story, like much of The Preacher’s Life, is like a testimony given during Sunday night church. Over the years, I heard hundreds of testimonies, often from people who told the same story over and over. I found that, over time, the stories become more exciting. A story that started out with a person being a drug user years later became the story of a person selling heroin for the mob. As we age, we tend to change, reformulate, correct, and expand the narratives of our lives. The challenge for any reader is to be able to pick the facts out of the bullshit.

Chapter three details Don’s and Laura’s salvation experience. On June 20, 1977, Paul Reimer, pastor of First Baptist Church and church deacon Mike Roberts visited the Hardman home and shared the gospel with Don and Laura. After Reimer had shared the good news with them and Roberts gave a personal testimony of what Jesus had done for him:

Don was the first to take a step forward, and prayed to God for forgiveness. Because we did not know how to pray, they led us in a prayer. Our hearts had been smitten and conviction brought tears to our eyes. We understood for the first time in our lives what Jesus had suffered for us on the cross that we might have life. Our lives were heavily burdened down with guilt and shame, and the chains of sin kept us shackled to the old life. Now we are given the choice of Freedom in Christ or Bondage withe the devil. It’s doesn’t seem like much of a choice even though many choose bondage with the devil.
Shortly after Don cried out to God, I also gave my life to God. We literally gave our lives to Christ!

The next Sunday, the Hardmans walked the aisle at First Baptist Church and made their profession of faith public. Several weeks later, they were baptized, and not long afterward they stopped smoking and drinking beer.

Laura writes:

It took about four months of battling our flesh, but God did give us the victory. At the beginning, we only went to church on Sundays, but realized how important that midweek service was in our growth. Not only did I watch a thrice-Holy God changing my life, but also transforming my husband into another man, from a man whose mouth had a cuss word coming out every other word, to one thanking and praising God.

These excerpts are typical of testimonies of those saved in IFB churches. Years ago, an Amish-Mennonite neighbor confided in me that he was troubled because he didn’t have a sin to salvation story like Baptists have. Raised in the church — a devout Amish-Mennonite — he grew into salvation. He wanted to know if his salvation was defective because he didn’t have any bad sinner stories to tell. His question illustrated the fact that IFB congregants and preachers play up the bad sinner part of their testimonies. Everyone wants to be viewed as the baddest sinner in town, a sinner whom God miraculously delivered. As I mentioned previously, most of these testimonies are a mixture of lie, half-truth, fabrication, and fact.

The Hardmans were saved in an era when the IFB churches made much of bad sinner testimonies. While these testimonies were meant to give God all the glory, what they really did was make much of the sinners and their debauched lives before Jesus. Who wants to hear the testimony of the aforementioned Amish-Mennonite man when they can hear the testimony of Mike Warnke, Chuck Colson, Pat Boone, Joanna Michaelsen, and Eldridge Cleaver?

Nine months or so later, in the spring of 1978, “God spoke to his (Don’s) heart about full-time service.” According to Laura, a short time later, God gave Don his life verse, 2 Timothy 4:5:

But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.

Laura writes, “of course, he never understood what that meant until later on.” Don later told their church family that God had called him to preach. Pastor Fred Crown, also a pastor at First Baptist Church, came and talked to Don about his call to preach. Laura writes:

Pastor Crown looked him dead in the eyes and said “So you feel God has called you to preach” and Don said, “Yes Sir.” He (Crown) said, “Then you need to consider not stealing from Him.” Of course, he was dealing with tithes and offerings. Don told him we could not see how we could pay our bills and tithe our income. The wisdom from this preacher never ceases to amaze me. He told us to try tithing for a month, and he would take care of every unpaid bill himself. Needless to say, we never had an unpaid bill and never again robbed from God.

While Don and Laura may never have robbed from God again, they did rob the U.S. Treasury. Some of the churches Don preached at over the years, including the churches I pastored, paid Don in cash. Don did not claim some or all of this cash income on his tax return. This proved to be quite a financial boon to the Hardmans.

Chapters four through six detail Don’s life as a pastor and evangelist. In 1980, Don graduated with a one-year certificate from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist correspondence school. By this time, Don was on disability and he and his family moved back to eastern Ohio to be near family. While in eastern Ohio, the Hardmans helped Victory Baptist Church in Kensington, Ohio, and the Lisbon Baptist Temple in Lisbon, Ohio.

Jim Midcap was their pastor while they attended the Lisbon Baptist Temple. I preached for Jim in the late 1980s when he was pastor of Bible Baptist Church in Negley, Ohio. Jim returned the favor and preached for me while I was pastor of churches in Mt. Perry and West Unity, Ohio. For several years, Jim operated a clothing and food ministry that provided the Hardmans with food and clothing to distribute to the poor and homeless in New Orleans. I had the privilege of taking a trip with Jim and a few other men from Ohio to Louisiana to deliver and distribute food and clothing. I had a great time, and my eyes were opened to the plight of the poor in cities like The Big Easy.

In November of 1980, the Hardmans moved to Pennsboro, West Virginia to begin pastoring Pennsboro Baptist Church. According to Laura:

…We used all of our money to transport our mobile home and did not have enough money to have our gas turned on…Here we were far hence unto the Gentiles and not a penny to our name until the disability check came in. Still, this Preacher had not come here to become a Pastor, but to be a Servant of the Lord in whatever capacity he was needed.
Don began filling the pulpit at the Pennsboro Baptist Church every Sunday. Some liked him, and some did not like his free spirit in decision, but the congregation asked him to candidate as Pastor anyways. He was voted in as Pastor in December of 1980.

I am sure readers will ask, as I did, why move to Pennsboro unless you planned on pastoring the church? Why move without having the funds necessary to turn on the gas? What happened in Kensington and Lisbon, Ohio that resulted in the Hardmans quickly moving to West Virginia? The book answers none of these questions.

According to Laura, while at Pennboro Baptist, Don became “a friend to the friendless, a father to the fatherless and a teacher to the unlearned.” All Don wanted to do was “try to make a difference in people’s lives and get them to the God who changed his life.” Don spent two years trying to change the church, but, according to Laura, Don “could not seem to override the traditions of the church.” In the fall of 1982, Don resigned from the church and moved down the road to start Freedom Baptist Church. Five years later, Don left Freedom Baptist and began working full-time on what he called the Streets of America. From this time, until today, Don’s ministry is operated from a base in New Orleans and Midway Bible Baptist Church in Fishersville, Virginia.

I looked in vain for any mention in the book of myself and Somerset Baptist Church, Mt. Perry, Ohio. While Laura mentions numerous churches and preachers who gave Don his start, she makes no mention of me or Somerset Baptist. Laura seems to have forgotten that I was one of the first pastors to have Don hold a meeting for them. She seems to have forgotten than Don held at least five meetings for me — most of them two weeks long — at Somerset Baptist Church and Grace Baptist Church (later Our Father’s House) in West Unity, Ohio. She also fails to mention that we spent time with them at their parents’ home, named our youngest daughter after her, and brought a group from our church to their church’s Bible conference in Virginia. Again, an uninformed reader would never learn that Bruce and Polly Gerencser, Somerset Baptist, and Grace Baptist, played an instrumental part in Don getting started in evangelism.

Of course, I understand why Laura might want to edit me and the churches I pastored out of Don’s life story. Nothing like having a preacher-friend-turned-atheist muck up Don’s story of spiritual ascendency from drunk to Holy Spirit-filled man of God.

As I mentioned in my review of Laura’s first book:

Hardman portrays life in the ministry as one of standing for the truth at all costs. She details loss of friends and loss of meetings because of their stand for the blessed truths of the King James Bible. Not one time does Hardman ever speak of a problem being their fault. It’s always the liberals’ fault. There is always an enemy, imaginary or real, they are fighting. This is the kind of life narrow Baptist Fundamentalism brings.

This thinking is on prominent display in The Preacher. Not one time does the book implicate Don or Laura. It’s always family, a church, or a pastor, who is to blame for broken fellowship or lost relationships. In Laura’s mind, her husband is a God-called man who is tight with the Almighty. Those who take issue with Don’s preaching are liberals or carnal. Over the years, I saw Don repeatedly browbeat church members with the Bible, calling out their sins. One time, he went from teenager to teenager pointing his finger at them, exposing their secret sins. These tactics worked, with church members, visitors, and teenagers alike getting saved or repenting of secret sin. Was this God? Of course not. Like most skilled Baptist preachers, myself included, Don was an expert manipulator of emotions. He knew how to set the hook and reel the fish in.

And here’s thing, I know a lot of things that I cannot share in this review. Since I have no way of verifying what I know, I can’t share it. I mentioned Don impregnating a thirteen-year-old girl and marrying her because I have a copy of the marriage application. Other things that I think are likely true lack evidence. I can say this: there are those who think Don Hardman is an Elmer Gantry-like grifter; that he and Laura have spent four decades making an easy living off their marks. For readers not familiar with the term grifter, a grifter is someone who swindles you through deception or fraud.

Is it possible that Don and Laura Hardman are frauds? Sure. I have no way of knowing or proving this, but I do know that the IFB church has turned out a number of con artists, some of whom have gone on to pastor large churches. Bob Gray pastored Trinity Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida for decades. He was finally exposed as an adulterer and child molester, a life of perversion that began when he entered the ministry in 1949. I heard Bob Gray and Don preach at the same preacher’s meeting in Cambridge, Ohio in the 1980s. The Hardmans are or were close friends with a number of the men who operated IFB teen group homes. Many of these men have been accused of child abuse, sexual assault, and rape.

Supposedly, a few years back, I can’t remember the exact date, Don had cancer. This cancer was killing Don and modern western medicine couldn’t cure him. The Hardmans raised a significant amount of money so Don could get alternative cancer treatment in Mexico. Yet, Don’s cancer story is not mentioned in the book. Wouldn’t a miraculous healing from deadly cancer be an important story to share? While this story isn’t shared, Laura spends thirty-two pages — almost twenty-five percent of the biography part of the book — detailing the lightning story.

Based on the amount of space given to this story, it’s safe to say that the Hardmans consider this the highlight of their time in the ministry.

July 1, 2003, finds Don and Laura holding a meeting at First Baptist Church in Forest, Ohio. Don’s sermon text for the night is I Kings 8. Laura writes:

About halfway into the message, we could hear the thunder and see the lightning through the stained glass windows, During his preaching, when a loud crack of thunder rang out, Don would say, “Yes, Lord, we are listening.” He made reference to the verse God’s voice was like thunder. (Psalms 77:18)
All of a sudden, a lightning bolt hit the church and burnt out the sound system, blowing the light bulbs out of their sockets behind the pulpit. We could smell the burning wires but still did not know we had taken a direct hit. Not once did we lose our electricity, so Don kept preaching on Solomon’s prayer of repentance. About 20 minutes later, a women came running into the church and said, “the church is on fire.”

This event made the news, from the Findlay Republican Courier to the Toledo Blade. It was mentioned on CNN, and Don had interviews with the BBC, the NBC Today Show, and Paul Harvey. The book has several of the news stories along with a transcript of Don’s interview with Matt Lauer on the Today Show.

Again, what I find interesting is what is missing from this chapter. Laura makes no mention of the name of the pastor of First Baptist Church in Forest. Why is this? Perhaps it is because not too long after God’s lightning bolt sign from above, the pastor of the church was removed for sexual misconduct. The image of Evangelist Hardman must not be tainted by any connection with an atheist, adulterers, child abusers, or rapists. Like the precious blood of Jesus that wipes away all recollection of sin before salvation, Laura conveniently writes out of the book anyone who doesn’t affirm, strengthen, or reinforce Don’s drunk to Holy Spirit-filled traveling evangelist testimony.

Over the years, Don has lost meetings at a number of the churches he once preached for. Whether this was due to his refusal to answer questions about his past or the length and content of his sermons, Don now has just a handful of churches he regularly holds meetings for; churches such as Old Time Baptist Church, (Pastor Lou Guadagno) Buffalo, New York and Lighthouse Baptist Church, (Pastor David Constantino) North Tonawanda, New York. As Laura admits in the book, most of the churches that once had Don preach for them no longer do so.

For the churches and pastors Don still preaches for, Don is a God-called evangelist mightily used by Jesus to win souls and call backslidden church members to repentance. For others, Don is a long-winded, legalistic preacher. And for a few others — perhaps those who know Don and Laura Hardman best — the Hardmans are grifters who have found an easy way to make a buck. For me personally, there are things I have been told that deeply trouble me. While there is no hard evidence for these things, especially since many of these events happened decades ago, there’s enough smoke to make wonder if there is a fire. If I had known these things when Don first preached for me in 1987, I doubt that I would have had him do so. If I was still a Christian, I could play the pious preacher and say that God will make all things known on judgment day. As an atheist, all I can do is review Laura Hardman’s books and make my observations known. It is up to you, the reader, to determine whether what I write is true.

Note: I do not know of any place this book can be purchased. Someone connected to the Hardman family sent me a copy of the book. Laura Hardman’s first book was published by Victory Baptist Press, but I did not find The Preacher in their online catalog.

Connect with me on social media:

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

How Religion Obscures Seeing People as They Are

Bruce Gerencser March 25, 2020 Evangelicalism 6 Comments

Reposted from 2015, edited, updated, and revised

Six years ago, Polly and I drove to Southeast Ohio to pay our respects to a man who was once a vital part of the church I pastored in Somerset. The family asked me to conduct the funeral and I was delighted to do so. Surprisingly, they asked for a non-religious service. It had been twenty years since I had seen this family face to face. In recent years, I have reconnected with some of the children via Facebook. It was good to see them, the children now in their 30s and 40s, with children of their own.

As I pondered what to say, I couldn’t help but think about the eleven years I spent as their pastor. They knew me when I was a fire-breathing Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) preacher and school administrator, and they were at the church when I became a Calvinist. They remembered my preaching, the rules, and the standards. They remembered my commitment to the God and the Bible. I hope they also remembered my goodness and kindness. While those things certainly provided the backdrop for our reconnection, they were not the substance of what I said at the service. Why? Because the past, with all its religious and Biblical trappings, would obscure the man we were honoring. I most wanted to talk about him.

You see, he was a good man. He was a friend who would do anything for me, any time, day or night. When I needed help, he always made himself available. While he could be temperamental at times, most of the time he was a kind, compassionate man. But these traits were obscured and mattered little years ago. Instead of seeing the man, I tended to see the sin. Isn’t that what we were taught to do? Holiness and purity were the objective, without which no man shall see the Lord.

He and I were different in many ways. When it came to sin, I could always hide my sin better than he could. Over time, preachers get good at hiding their failures. After all, they are supposed to be shining examples of spiritual maturity and holiness. No one wants a preacher who is just like everyone else. People want a Moses, a Paul, or a Jesus, someone to inspire them and show them the way. So preachers lie, giving the appearance that they, if need be, could walk on water. Deep down they know, that like everyone else, if they walked on water, they would drown. Strip away the clerical façade, and what you see is a man no different from those sitting in the pews.

I remember the first time Greg came to church. He was wearing a shirt that said Zig-Zag; and no, he didn’t roll his own cigarettes. This is a perfect picture of the kind of man he was. He had little pretense; what you saw was what you got. So when he sinned, he didn’t hide it well. I remember one Sunday afternoon he went to the movies with his wife. They saw Born on the Fourth of July. Now, this was a big sin at our church. No movies, especially R-rated movies. I could tell that he was a little antsy at evening service, but he said nothing about the movie. The next day at school, one of his children mentioned that Mom and Dad had gone to see a movie. I asked them, WHAT movie? They confessed, with nary a thought that they had just gotten their Dad in trouble. Of course, the good pastor that I was, watching out for his soul, I called him and asked him to come to my office so we could talk. Nothing like getting called to the principal’s office, right?

Before he started coming to the church, he had been an avid listener of rock and roll music. Well, at Somerset Baptist Church we didn’t listen to THAT kind of music! One day he came to church all excited. He had found out that there was music called Christian rock. He had bought a cassette tape of a group by the name of Stryper. (He loved the song To Hell with the Devil.) I took one look at the pictures on the cassette box and I knew that Stryper was nothing more than a tool used by Satan to deceive Christians. I told him it was a bad idea for him to listen to such worldly music. I think he was deeply discouraged by my “Godly” opinion. He thought he had finally found something that was not only Christ-honoring but that also met his desire to listen to rock music. I, the arbiter of what was Christ-honoring, knew better.

There were a lot of these sinful moments, and as I look back on it, I can see how discouraging it must have been for him. Most of the things I called sin were not sin at all. But, because I thought they were, they kept me from seeing the man for who and what he really was. My religion obscured this man’s humanity, as all religions do to some degree or another, Instead of seeing the man, I saw him through the lens of the Bible and my interpretation of it. My sin list and my dogma got in the way of me seeing this man as a flawed and frail good man. Like his preacher, he wasn’t perfect.

We spent a lot of non-religious time together, and it is from those times I drew the stories I shared with his family. Great stories. Crazy stories. Funny stories. Stories that testified to the kind of man he was. Yes, I could have shared the “other” stories too, but to what end? As I told Polly at the time, if we live long enough, we all will have moments in our lives that are less than stellar. We all have those times where we went the wrong way or made a bad choice, where we hurt others and hurt ourselves. But these stories are not who we really are. They are the exceptions to the rule, the reminder that no one is perfect, including Jesus.

So on that Saturday I mourned the loss of a man I once knew, but I also rejoiced with his family as we shared stories about the good man that he was. This was my first time doing a funeral where there were no religious expectations. No preaching, no need to get a word in for Jesus; no evangelizing or making everything about the church. On that spring day, in the hills of Southeast Ohio, we celebrated the life of a man whom others loved dearly. While his body will molder in the ground, Greg will live on in the memories we have of him. In the end, this is all the living have.

Connect with me on social media:

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Dear Greg

Bruce Gerencser February 3, 2020 Evangelicalism 8 Comments

bruce gerencser 1987 — Bruce Gerencser, Somerset Baptist Church, 1987

What follows is a record of several emails I traded with Greg, a former church member at Somerset Baptist Church in Mt. Perry, Ohio, over the past three years. I was Greg’s pastor for several years. He was quite active in our church, teaching Sunday school, going out on visitation, and occasionally filling the pulpit. As you will note from the emails, Greg and I had some social interaction outside of the church. There is lots to this story, but for Greg’s sake and that of his wife and children, I will just stick to responding to his latest email to me.

Some spelling and grammar corrected.

In March 2017, Greg wrote:

Dear Bruce,

Yesterday I was reading some about Jack Hyles and saw an article (s) by you and have done some reading by you.

I hear you have had some bad health. Hope your health is improving and hope your family is doing well. I imagine if you and I went and played basketball, we better play half-court, and slow tempo. And with my arthritis, I don’t move too well.

Nowadays, my best game is chess, which I play on the internet, against people from all over the world.

I had to have colon cancer surgery back in June 2013. I am doing well now and take Essiac now that I know about it. It has healed many people of cancer.

Planning on going to Athens tomorrow to see some regional basketball games.

Well, It was good to hear from you.

Well in closing, take care and tell your family I say hello.

Your Friend,
Greg ******

In April 2017, I responded:

Good to hear from you. Boy, it has been a long time, hasn’t it? You have gotten old. ? I turn 60 in June. It’s been 23 years since I pastored the Somerset church, almost 34 years since we started the church. Time marches on.

Sorry to hear you had cancer, but I am glad you have recovered. Getting old is not what it is cracked up to be. My health struggles are many, but I try to live each day to its fullest. I know I will die sooner, and not later, so I need to do what I can while I am still among the living.

Our family is doing well. Polly and I will soon celebrate our 39th wedding anniversary. Our six children live within 20 minutes of our home. We have 11 grandchildren — 10 girls, one boy. Polly works for Sauder Woodworking. She is a manager there, as is Jason.

Nice to hear you are still going to tournament games. I attended several district and regional games this year. My oldest granddaughter plays on the Stryker High School JV team (volleyball too). I have a cousin who plays for nearby Swanton High School. I got to see a lot of girls’ basketball games this year. Several grandchildren are playing baseball/softball this summer, so I will be busy attending games.

Write when you can. I would love to hear more about how things are with you. If you are on Facebook, I would love to connect with you there. Just send me a friend request.

Have a great week.

Bruce

In August 2018, Greg wrote:

Dear Bruce,

How are you and Polly and the children doing? Fine, I hope.

How has your health been?

What are your children doing nowadays and do they live near you?

My wife ****** is doing ok, she has some trouble with diabetes, and has to put up with me. ( That’s a challenge)

My oldest daughter ****** is 27 now. She is living in Greenville Ohio, and working at the Whirlpool plant there. She makes decent money there and lives with some guy there, who is like 6’9″ or so. Man if I could have had that height when I use to play basketball.

Now my favorite sport to play is chess, on the internet.

My youngest daughter ***** is 25 and is still single, and living at Cambridge. She does home health care.

Back in February this year, after living going on eighteen years, near New Concord, ***** and I had to move because of our landlord selling the property.

We now live in a senior apartment in Cambridge, which we like. There are some benefits to being old.

I don’t know for sure if you cheer for any specific professional team, but I have seen you with Bengals apparel on. Have you or are you a Browns fan? With that new quarterback that WE have from Oklahoma, we are ready for great things NOW, AS IN NOW.
Bruce, you are, and will always be my friend. Yes nowadays there would be a lot of differences we would have, but you are still my friend and always will be. Even if you don’t like the Cowboys and Yankees.

In closing, I just have one church, not Bible question for you. Where can a man that is KJV, post-tribulational, amillennial, non-eternal torment believer, non-Calvinistic, who wants to preach, and is married to a lady who was married once before find a church that would let him preach, and where he would be in one accord?

And that man would be me. And in all of my searching, talking about trying to find a needle in a haystack, even if you could locate the haystack.

May you and your family have a wonderful rest of the year.

Your FRIEND,

Greg ****

In October 2018, I responded:

Hey Greg,

It was a delight to hear from you. Thank you for updating me on the coming and goings of you and your family.

Our six children all live within 20 minutes of our home. We have twelve grandchildren — ages three months to seventeen. We see them often. Now that the NFL season is in full swing, some of the boys are here almost every Sunday to watch the Bengals with me. Polly cooks a nice meal and we sit around and yell at the TV.

Browns fans, eternal sufferers to be sure. Nice to see them win a couple of games. I think Mayfield is the man for them going forward.

Health-wise, things remain the same for me. I am slowly losing functionality and strength. I do what I can, but I have resigned myself to the fact that I can no longer do many of the things I once did with ease. Fortunately, my children are quite helpful. Polly was in the hospital twice this year: once for a heart problem and once for a bleeding problem. We are getting old, falling apart. That said, we celebrated forty years of marriage this year, and next week we will celebrate Polly’s sixtieth birthday (I am two years older than she).

I hope you will keep in touch. If you have some family photos, I would love to see them.

Have a good weekend.

Bruce

Up to this point, you will likely have noticed that Greg considers me a friend, and that he, much like he did when I was his pastor, has exacting theological beliefs. You will also note that I did not respond to his theologically oriented questions. I am no longer his pastor, and neither am I a Christian. When contacted by people from my ministerial past, I make sure they understand that I am quite happy to correspond with them and even renew our friendship, but I am not interested in arguing with them about theology or atheism. Over the course of the twenty-five years I spent in the ministry, I had a handful of relationships that transcended the pastor-congregant connection. Greg was one such person. At the time, I considered him a friend, even though he left the church several times over a doctrinal differences with me. In particular, Greg objected to my Calvinism.

After my response to Greg in October 2018, I did not hear from him again until yesterday:

Dear Bruce, in the past after hearing about how you left the ministry, etc., I never responded with preaching or anything like that.

I just wrote to you as a friend, which I still am.

But after reading some more, let me talk some.

I don’t know if you will listen, seeing it seems like you want to talk, but maybe not listen to anything you don’t want to hear.
I guess you always win when you don’t let the other team have the ball.

Does that mean that you are the player and REFEREE?

It is easy to say that God loves Tim Tebow more than a Ethiopian when your a Calvinist or Robot (no difference).

Tell me, did John Calvin make you one of the non-elect. Or were you with Job, trying to give God advice during the creation?

Tell me, if you don’t believe that Jesus exists, why do you hate Him?

But The Lord Jesus does exist, and you will now your knee to Him.

WOW, just imagine if you are wrong?

AND YOU ARE!!

How shall we escape, if we neglect, so great salvation?

Dear Greg,

Having not heard from you for almost seventeen months, I was surprised to receive an email from you. I was even more surprised (and saddened) to see that you decided in this email to take an adversarial, preachy, judgmental approach to me. What changed? Couldn’t we just be friends, revel in our past experiences, and share the things we have in common — family, sports, and memories from southeast Ohio? Instead, you decided to be Greg, the Fundamentalist Baptist preacher. What did you hope to accomplish by taking this approach with me? You say you still consider me a friend, but I find little friendliness in your words.

You mention reading more of my blog, but as I looked at the site server logs, I found that you only read two posts: Why I Hate Jesus and Dear Evangelical. Let me suggest it might be helpful for your understanding of my journey to read the posts listed on the WHY? page. Instead of looking for and focusing on doctrinal deviancy, try to enter into my story, and hopefully this will help you understand why I am an atheist today. I don’t expect you to join the ranks of the godless, but at the very least I expect you to make a good faith effort to understand my past and present life (as I have understood yours through our conversations and counseling sessions).

I have been blogging for over twelve years now. On this iteration of my blog, I have written over 3,600 posts. If you are willing to do your homework, you will likely find most, if not all, of your questions answered somewhere in my writing. It’s not that I don’t want to hear what people have to say, but when it comes to Evangelicals (and I know you may object to me calling you an Evangelical) such as yourself, I have heard the same stuff over, and over, and over again. No new evidence; no new arguments; same shit, new day. And it is for this reason, I wrote the Dear Evangelical post. Ask yourself, did you say anything in your email to me that I likely haven’t heard countless times before? Why would I need to hear it yet again?

I originally responded to you because I hoped we could have some semblance of a friendship outside of our differences about God, Jesus, and the Bible. Silly me, to think that an Evangelical can set his dogma aside for the sake of maintaining or nurturing a friendship. For people such as yourself to be friends with me, they must be willing to let me go to Hell in peace. They must agree not to preach at me or attempt to sneak apologetical arguments into discussions. And I will do the same. I am quite happy to set aside my atheism and humanist beliefs and, instead, focus on the things we have in common. Sadly, I have yet to have a former congregant, friend, or colleague in the ministry do that. Eventually, they always bring things back around to the BLOOD, the BOOK, and the BLESSED HOPE.

As an atheist, Greg, I have no truck with arguments from the Bible. Threats, imprecations, passive-aggressive attacks — none of them are effective in reaching me. Consider me, from your theological perspective, an apostate or reprobate. I don’t think the Christian God exists, and that includes Jesus. I do believe that Jesus, the man, lived and died 2,000 years ago, but Jesus, the son of God, the miracle-worker, the savior of the world (or the elect)? That God-man does not exist. So telling me that I am WRONG and one day I WILL bow my knee to Jesus has no effect on me. Surely, you are aware of how much I know about Christianity and the Bible. Do you really think that bald assertions typed in caps will somehow magically change my mind? You know me better than that, Greg. Not going to happen . . .

If your intent is to continue to preach to me and attempt to evangelize me, please don’t. I am more than willing to continue to be friends with you, sans religion. If you can keep Jesus out of the relationship, I am confident we can find plenty of things to share and talk about. If not, let this be our last correspondence. Let’s bury our relationship here, letting the good times we spent together cover our gravestones.

Sincerely,

Bruce

About Bruce Gerencser

Bruce Gerencser, 62, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 41 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve 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. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.

Are you on Social Media? Follow Bruce on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section. If you are a first-time commenter, please read the commenting policy before wowing readers with your words. All first-time comments are moderated. If you would like to contact Bruce directly, please use the contact form to do so.

Donations are always appreciated. Donations on a monthly basis can be made through Patreon. One-time donations can be made through PayPal.

I Thought Jesus Would Take Care of Me When I Got Old

Bruce Gerencser March 2, 2019 Evangelicalism 12 Comments

I started preaching at age fifteen, enrolled at Midwestern Baptist College to study for the ministry at nineteen, married my wife at age twenty-one, and took my first church job a few months before I turned twenty-two. I was young, full of life, and raring to go for Jesus. I also was clueless about what awaited me in the ministry. Little did I know, that life would not turn out as Polly and I envisioned; that our fairy tale would not be one of love, peace, and potluck dinners; that our vision of a future with a white two-story home with a boy named Jason, a girl named Bethany, and a white picket fence would turn into a 12’x60′ trailer, six children, food stamps, and a $200 station wagon.

It’s common for young marrieds to have all sorts of hopes and dreams. Polly and I thought that God would surely use us in a mighty way to bring countless people to Christ; that we would be respected and rewarded for our hard work; that our children would grow up, get married, and follow in our footsteps. As a young man, I believed Jesus would always take care of me. He, after all, gave me a wonderful wife, blessed us with children, and favored the work we accomplished in his vineyard. Though Jesus never personally appeared to me, I saw all my ministerial success as coming directly from him. Boy, was I wrong!

One Tuesday in the early 1980s, I attended a Buckeye Baptist Fellowship Meeting at High Street Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio. I thoroughly enjoyed the monthly pastors’ fellowships I attended at various Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) churches. These meetings were a time for me to shoot the breeze with my ministerial colleagues and listen to what I considered, then, to be great preaching. On this particular Tuesday, one of the speakers was Charles Mainous, the pastor at High Street. Mainous was known for his virulent anti-government sermons. At the time, the steeple of his church was red, white and blue, church members carried firearms, and posted warnings on the doors warned government agents of this fact. I had heard him several times before, so I knew what to expect. During his harangue, Mainous said that it was a sin for pastors to pay into Social Security; that it was up to God to take care of his preachers, not the government. If Catholic priests could take a vow of poverty and be tax exempt, so should Baptist preachers. I thought, “he’s right. God called me, God leads me, God talks to me, and God gives me my sermons to preach. Surely, God can take care of me when I get old.” And so, following Mainous’ advice, I filed for exemption from paying social security taxes on my ministerial income (and housing) (IRS Form 4361). I was twenty-five years old. Still physically fit, playing competitive basketball in the winter and softball in the summer, I looked good, felt good, and thought of myself as downright invincible. Jesus and Bruce were ready to take on the unwashed, uncircumcised Philistines of the world!

I thought that I would one day set up a retirement plan and the churches I pastored would pay into it, providing for my care when I retired. Not that I ever planned on retiring. My goal was to keep preaching until I died. I even thought it would be an awesome sermon illustration if my appointed time to die (Hebrews 9:27) was right at the end of one of my sermons. What a way to punctuate my message, right?

I am, however, still here, and the only thing that died was my relationship with Jesus. What did change was that the youthful preacher named Bruce Gerencser came down with mononucleosis in 1991 and almost died. For the first time, there was a chink in my supposedly invincible armor. I was sidelined from preaching for over a month, and mono left me with physical problems that I deal with to this day.

In 1997, after a year of unexplained fatigue and muscle pain, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. This forced me to reconsider the naïve notion that Jesus was going to take care of me. In 2000, I decided to opt back into Social Security. Unfortunately, the paltry wages I received from this point to 2005 when I left the ministry didn’t do much to improve the level of social security I would receive at retirement. My health continued to decline, and by 2005 I was totally disabled, unable to find meaningful, paying work that meshed with my disability. Since that time, we have been a one-wage-earner family.

I looked in vain for Jesus. He was there when I was healthy, but nowhere to be found when I was sick. Of course, he was just a figment of my imagination, but I really did believe he was a friend who would stick closer to me than a brother; a supernatural being that would take care of me no matter what I faced in life. You see, religious beliefs are not benign. They can and do have consequences; they can and do cause psychological and physical harm; they can and do make a mess of your life. At least, that was the case for me. Thanks to not paying Social Security for twenty years, the only retirement income I’ll have will be based on the secular work I did on and off while pastoring churches.

In seventeen days, I will file for early Social Security. Come June, I will draw my first check for about $600. I sent a message to Jesus, asking him to make up the difference, but he did not respond. “I know I am an atheist and all that now, but come on Jesus, I worked seven days a week for you, month in and month out for over two decades. Surely the laborer is worthy of his hire, as the Bible you wrote says!”

Jesus is too busy building imaginary mansions in Heaven (John 14:1-6) to be bothered with my needs. He owes me, as he owes billions of people before me, but he’s never paid on his promises. He promised, at least in my IFB-addled mind, to take care of me, and to be my BFF. Instead, as he is wont to do, Jesus left me to fend for myself. And that, my friend, is the point of this post. Each of us is responsible for our own lives. Deep down, at some level, I knew that, but I convinced myself that Jesus would come through for me in the end. The responsible thing for me to have done was to pay into Social Security. The responsible thing for me to have done was to demand the churches I worked for do a better job at providing for my future needs, and those of my family. Of course, I was Head Cheese® at most of the churches I pastored, so to some degree I am to blame for them not taking care of me. I allowed myself to become a cheap whore for Jesus. I allowed myself to be paid poverty wages with no promises for tomorrow.

During my time at Somerset Baptist Church, a man who had pastored a nearby church for decades died. He and his wife (and children), had lived in the church’s parsonage for thirty years. There was an unspoken promise — an assumption — made to the pastor’s wife: “we will take care of you.” Much to her horror, “we will take care of you” meant “you can live in the parsonage for two months and then you will have to move. Our nice, new, shiny young pastor will need the parsonage for him and his wife and children,” And just like that the aged preacher’s wife was out on the street, forced to move in with one of her children. I thought, at the time, “how awful,” but I never considered why she was in that position. Her husband was a church slave. He worked for paltry wages, supplementing his income with side hustles. Living in the church parsonage allowed him and his family to live frugally, yet keep working in God’s coal mine for slave wages. I am sure they had no thoughts of retirement. Jesus promised to care for them too. Imagine the dead preacher’s wife’s surprise when she found out that the people they had labored with and cared for had no interest in reciprocation. “Our pastor is dead. Time for a new one!” End of story.

Over the years, I have given numerous young preachers advice. I tell every one of them the same thing: be bivocational. Get a “real” job, one that allows you to adequately provide for your family’s needs. Don’t let paltry wages from the church keep you on the bread line. Expect the church to pay you a decent salary and provide the same benefits you would have in the secular world. If a church won’t pay you, then don’t pastor that church. (In retrospect, I should have been far pickier about the churches I pastored.) If a church can’t pay you as much as you need due to its size, then get a job and pastor the church part-time. And above all, DON’T let anyone convince you to opt out of Social Security. The government is NOT your enemy!

If I had it to do all over again, I would have been a bivocational pastor. I would have worked jobs that adequately provided income for my family. I would have put my wife and children first, not God. It’s not God who suffers when there’s no money. It’s not Jesus who suffers when the cupboards are bare and your children are wearing bread bags on their feet to keep them from getting wet in the winter. And don’t even get me started on the Holy Spirit. Why that dumb ass “led” me to do all sorts of stupid things, things that caused harm to my health and the financial well-being of my family. I should have listened for the beep-beep-beep of a Brink’s truck backing up to my house instead of just, with a wing and a prayer, “trusting” the triune God of Evangelicalism to take care of me.

About Bruce Gerencser

Bruce Gerencser, 61, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 40 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve 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. For more information about Bruce, please read the About page.

Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.

Donations are always appreciated. Donations on a monthly basis can be made through Patreon. One-time donations can be made through PayPal.

Questions: Bruce, Have You Ever Seen Someone Who Was Demon-Possessed?

Bruce Gerencser October 3, 2018 Questions 3 Comments

I recently asked readers to submit questions to me they would like me to answer. If you would like to submit a question, please follow the instructions listed here.

Geoff asked: Bruce, in your many years of pastoral ministry have you ever come across what you would consider demonic possession or any strange paranormal stuff? Have you ever heard of anything that you would consider legitimate?

I had no exposure to or experience with demonic possession until the mid-1990s. Before then, I didn’t put much stock in demon possession. I thought it was an excuse used to cover up bad or bizarre behavior. In 1994, I left Somerset Baptist Church in Mt. Perry, Ohio and moved to San Antonio, Texas to become the co-pastor of Community Baptist Church. Community’s other pastor, Pat Horner, was a big believer in demon possession. He even believed that Christians could be oppressed by demons. This openness to all-things-demonic caused congregants to believe all sort of outlandish things. One woman thought that every time she heard a coyote howl, it was her unsaved husband. Another woman believed in generational curses; that demonic possession and oppression could be passed down from generation to generation. What I learned during the short time I was at Community was that if a pastor believed in demonic possession, so would his people. I remember in the early 1990s when I embraced Calvinism, I thought I would have mutiny on my hands, but what I found was that church members changed their beliefs to fit mine (with a few notable exceptions). Most Evangelicals believe whatever their pastor believes. Their theology is borrowed from the men who teach them. This is not surprising since Evangelicals are taught to seek out like-minded churches. What’s fellowship? It is a bunch of fellows in a boat rowing in the same direction. Diversity of belief is discouraged or condemned.

I have attended a number of charismatic churches where the “gifts of the Spirit” were supposedly in full operation. These full-gospel churches had all sorts of demonic activity going on their midst; or so they said, anyway. Again, if you are looking for demons, you will find them. There’s a religious version of McCarthyism practiced by many Evangelical pastors and churches. Here a demon, there a demon, everywhere a demon.

As an atheist, not only do I reject the notion of the existence of the Christian God, I also reject the belief that there is a tangible, real Devil. People can’t be demon possessed because there are no demons to possess them. The behaviors that are called demonic possession are either fake, learned behaviors, or signs of mental illness.

I have never seen any sort of paranormal activity. I have experienced several things for which I have no explanation. When these things happened, I attributed them to God or Satan. Now? I am content with saying, I don’t know. I take the same approach with prayer. Almost all of my “answered” prayers came from human intervention. The few I can’t explain? I don’t know, but they are not enough to convince me that there is a God. Evangelicals see God in the unexplainable, but I all see a question without, so far, an answer.

About Bruce Gerencser

Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.

Donations are always appreciated. Donations on a monthly basis can be made through Patreon. One-time donations can be made through PayPal.

John

Bruce Gerencser September 19, 2018 Evangelicalism 3 Comments

My mom’s parents, known to me as Grandma Rausch and Grandpa Tieken, divorced in the late 1940s. By all accounts, their marriage was an alcohol-fueled, violent brawl which caused untold heartache and pain to their two children. My mother, in particular, faced the indignity and shame of being sexually molested by her father, a deep wound she carried all the days of her life.

My grandfather’s name was John. My first recollections of him come from when I was a young child. On Christmas day, both sets of my grandparents would come to our home, often arriving at the same time. Instead of figuring out a way to avoid family conflict, both John and Grandma Rausch were determined to be the grandparent of choice. Every Christmas, they would square off, each in his or her own corner. The bitterness of their divorce carried over into our family. As a child, I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. All I knew was that Grandpa and Grandma didn’t like each other. As I got older, my grandparents finally figured out it was best if they steered clear of one another, so every year we had two Christmases and two Thanksgivings.

I saw a lot more of Grandma Rausch than I did Grandpa Tieken (John), and she became my favorite grandparent. My dad’s Hungarian parents died in 1963, weeks apart. I was six when they died, so I have very few memories of Grandpa and Grandma Gerencser. (Please see My Hungarian Grandparents, Paul and Mary Gerencser.) Grandma Rausch, on the other hand, was very much a part of my life, all the way until she died of cancer in 1995. She bought me my first baseball glove and took me to my first baseball game, and she was the only grandparent to ever attend my Little League and Pony League games. I remember to this day hearing Grandma screaming at the umpire, telling him in no uncertain terms that the pitch to her grandson was NOT a strike. Not that it mattered. Strike or ball, I was a terrible batter, so it unlikely that I would have hit the pitch. Grandma Rausch, a stickler for proper grammar, would write me letters during my preaching days. I loved getting letters from her. I always appreciated her interest in my life and support of whatever it was that I was doing at the time. Grandma Rausch had her faults. She was an alcoholic until age sixty-five, when, due to health concerns, she quit cold turkey. Warts and all, I never doubted Grandma loved me.

I can’t say the same for John or his third wife Ann. (Please see Dear Ann.) I would love to write of my grandfather’s love and support, but alas I can’t remember a time where he told me he loved me or unconditionally supported what I was doing. On those rare occasions he “supported” my work in the ministry, there were always strings attached or criticisms heaped upon me when I didn’t meet his expectations.

I have two good memories of John, and that’s it. I am sure there were more, but I only remember two. Perhaps other good memories were drowned out by John’s violent temper and frequent criticisms of my mom, dad, and me personally. John, a pilot, and mechanic, was the co-owner of T&W (Tieken and Wyman) Engine Service at Pontiac (Michigan) Airport. My first fond memory of John was when he took me up in a twin-prop cargo plane he had just overhauled. My other fond memory dates back to the summer of 1968. For my eleventh birthday, John took me to watch the Detroit Tigers play the Cleveland Indians. This was the year the Tigers won the World Series. On this day, I felt close to my grandfather. Just a grandfather and his oldest grandson enjoying their favorite sport. Alas, this would be the first and last time we did anything together.

John married Ann in the late 1950s or early 1960s. She had a son by the name of David from a previous marriage. Dave was my uncle, but only a few years separated us age-wise. Dave was an avid fisherman and played baseball for Waterford Township High School. One summer, I remember us sitting around the dinner table eating and Dave saying something his stepfather didn’t like. All of a sudden, John stood, doubled up his fist, and hit Dave as hard as he could, knocking him onto the floor. Dave said nothing, but the message was clear: No one back talked to John Tieken. Dave and I became closer when I moved to Pontiac to attend Midwestern Baptist College. Dave was married and worked as a foreman for General Motors. I have fond memories of Dave helping me put a clutch in my car — he the teacher and I the student. Sadly, Dave was murdered in 1981.

Ann attended Sunnyvale Chapel, a generic Evangelical church. In the early to mid-1960s, John got “saved” and began attending church with Ann. He soon became a Fundamentalist zealot who was known for his aggressive witnessing. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it was to watch John corner a waitress so he could tell her the “truth” about Jesus and her need of salvation. John loved the Christian gospel. In his mind, when Jesus saved him, all his past sins were washed away and everything became new. He believed that whatever he did in the past was forgiven and forgotten. Forgotten by God, perhaps, but for those who were psychologically and physically harmed by him, no forgiveness was forthcoming. And John didn’t care. Jesus had forgiven him, and that’s all that mattered. My mom, late in her life, confronted her father over him sexually abusing her. She hoped he would at least admit what he did and ask for forgiveness. No admission was forthcoming. John told his daughter that his sins were under the blood and Jesus had forgiven him. Jesus may have forgiven him, but my mom sure hadn’t.

There’s so much more I could share here, but for the sake of brevity, I want to fast forward to the 1980s. From 1983-1994, I pastored Somerset Baptist Church in Mt. Perry, Ohio. John and Ann were quite proud of the fact that their grandson was a pastor. In their eyes, I, unlike my mother, father, and siblings, was doing the right things: serving the Evangelical God, preaching the gospel, and winning souls to Christ. For a time, they even financially supported me through donations to the church. These donations abruptly stopped when they didn’t get an annual donation statement when they thought they should have. That was the Tiekens. Much like their exacting God, displease them and judgment was sure to follow.

John and Ann came to visit the church twice in the eleven years I was there. One Sunday, John thoroughly embarrassed me in front of the entire congregation. The building was packed. This was during the time when the church was growing rapidly. After I preached and gave an invitation, I asked if anyone had something to share. John did. He stood and told the entire congregation what was wrong with my sermon. I wanted to die.

The last time John and Ann came to visit was in 1988. We were living in Junction City at the time. After church, we invited them over for dinner. In the post Dear Ann, I describe their visit this way:

Grandpa spent a good bit of time lecturing me about my car being dirty. Evidently, having a dirty car was a bad testimony. Too bad he didn’t take that same approach with Mom.
After dinner — oh, I remember it as if it were yesterday! — we were sitting in the living room and one of our young children got too close to Grandpa. What did he do? He kicked him. I knew then and there that, regardless of his love for Jesus, he didn’t love our family, and he would always be a mean son-of-a-bitch.

A decade later, John died. Upon hearing of his death, I had no emotions; I felt nothing. I had no love for the man. After all, his wife a few years prior had called to let me know that I was a worthless grandson. In fact, according to Ann, the entire Gerencser family was worthless. My sin? I couldn’t attend John’s seventy-fifth birthday party. Ann’s vicious and vindictive words finally pushed me over the edge. I told her that I was no longer interested in having any contact with them. And with that, I hung up the phone. Whatever little feeling and connection I had for John and Ann Tieken died. I learned then, that some relationships — even family — aren’t worth keeping.

Connect with me on social media:

Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

Reliving the “Good Old Days”: Do You Have Any Change?

Bruce Gerencser August 10, 2018 Evangelicalism 5 Comments

somerset baptist church 1983-1994 2 — Our hillbilly mansion. We lived in this 720 square foot mobile home for five years, all eight of us.

Several weeks ago, Polly and I were reliving what we call the “good old days.” The “good old days” span the first seventeen years of our marriage, including the eleven years I spent pastoring Somerset Baptist Church in Mt. Perry, Ohio. Somerset Baptist, for a few years, was a fast-growing Independent Fundamentalist Baptist congregation, developing from a handful of attendees to over two hundred in attendance. Located in rural Southeast Ohio, in the northernmost county of the Appalachian region, Somerset Baptist was made up primarily of poor blue-collar workers or people who were on public assistance (it was not uncommon to find food stamp coupons in the offering plate). The highest total annual offering was $40,000. Most years, the offerings were in the $25,000 range. I pastored Somerset Baptist full-time, receiving what meager salary the church could provide, supplementing my income with jobs pumping gas, delivering newspapers, selling insurance, and taking in foster children. We literally lived from hand to mouth, rarely having two nickels to rub together.

We mostly drove cheap cars. I did all my own repair work, so I would buy junk cars, repair them, and keep them running until they were worn out. During the “good” years, we bought a new car — a 1984 Plymouth Horizon ($6,000) This car has a story unto itself, which I will tell at a later date. I drove the car for two years, putting 102,000 miles on the car. That’s right at 50,000 miles a year. By the end of second year of the loan, the car was worn out.

Thanks to us having a large family, we were eligible for food stamps and energy assistance. This fact thoroughly embarrassed us. We would drive to Columbus, where no one knew us, to do our grocery shopping. When the government offered free cheese or peanut butter to welfare recipients, I couldn’t bear to stand in line to get it (the “why” is yet another story for another day). Polly was embarrassed too, but she really loved what she called “welfare cheese,” so she would swallow her pride and stand in line with the other poor people.

somerset baptist church 1983-1994 — Our son Jaime, and our two girls, Bethany and Laura.

I had grown up poor so I knew a good bit about poverty. Polly, on the other hand, was raised in a middle-class home where new cars, home ownership, money in the bank, and annual vacations were common. Polly’s dad worked for the railroad, and when he got the itch to go to college to study for the ministry at age thirty-five, he found a well- paying job at General Motors’ Pontiac Truck and Coach plant which enabled him to study without depriving his family. Neither of us knew the first thing about handling money responsibly. Both of us thought a life of poverty was God’s will for us, so we hunkered down and endured. Boy, did we endure!

Polly and I had six children during our years in Southeast Ohio. The first child’s birth was covered in full by insurance. The next five children were covered by state medical insurance. All told, we had private health insurance three of the first seventeen years of our marriage. The rest of the time, we either did without — thank you, oh Great Physician — or were covered by state medical insurance.

In 1989, we purchased an old, beat up 12×60-foot trailer and parked it fifty feet from the church building on the far end of the church parking lot. By then, the church had stopped running its four bus routes and attendance was less than one hundred. There were eight Gerencsers by then, so try to imagine us all living in 720 square feet. Try to picture the amount of laundry and pails of soiled cloth diapers Polly washed. Polly and I had one bedroom, the three oldest boys had another bedroom, and our daughters and youngest son had a bedroom the size of a large closet. Playing, for the children, meant going outside. Our children were four-season players, complete with bread bags on their feet in the winter so their feet didn’t get wet. Somehow we survived. That’s what Polly and Bruce Gerencser and munchkins did — we survived.

Our youngest children have very few, if any, memories of our “Somerset days.” Our oldest sons, however, have lots of memories. They, themselves, could write a book about their experiences as the pastor’s children living in the poverty-sicken hills of Perry County. To this day, my oldest sons remind me that Christmas comes in March. As children, they got very few gifts for Christmas, and most of the gifts they received were courtesy of their grandparents — my father excepted, who never sent one card or gift, ever. Christmas, then, was when we received our federal income tax return. Thanks to the earned income credit, we yearly received a large tax refund. We used this money to pay bills and buy our children clothing, shoes, underwear, and a few non-essential gifts. This was the one time of the year we had a large sum of cash. The rest of the year was spent raiding change jars and searching cars for spare coins. Ah, the good old years.

Several weeks ago, we had one of those oh-so-rare occasions where we were very low on money. Polly often laughs and tells me that I have a knack for pulling money out of my ass! On this particular day, my ass was broke. We needed bread and I had a hankering for a grilled steak. The checkbook was empty and I had $6.00 to my name. Off to Bryan we drove, stopping at Chief — a local grocery company — to see what we could get for $6.00. Polly dug through her cavernous purse and checked places were change collects in the car. She scraped up $1.48, giving us a grand total of $7.48. This gave us just enough money to buy one loaf of cheap bread and a one-pound sirloin steak (split three ways). Woo Hoo!

somerset baptist church 1985 — Somerset Baptist Church, Mt Perry, Ohio, Bruce and Polly Gerencser and kids, 1985

As we got back in the car, both of us laughed about our change-fueled forage, reminding us of our days in Southeast Ohio. The good old days, we both said. I added, yeah except for the fact we are driving home in a $30,000 automobile, a car that cost more than most of our other cars combined.

The “good old days” certainly helped to make us into the people we are today, but neither of us has any desire to relive them. We are grateful for Polly’s job and its benefits. Above all, we are thankful that our children escaped the poverty of their youth and have solid, well-paying middle-class jobs. Some of them are in management positions, and all of them, save one, own homes without wheels. They, too, have fond memories of their days living as sardines in a 12×60-foot trailer, but they have no hankering to relive those days. Instead, they regale their children with stories that almost sound unbelievable — that is, except to we who lived them.

About Bruce Gerencser

Bruce is a local photography business owner, operating Defiance County Photo out of his home. If you live in Northwest Ohio and would like to hire Bruce, please email him.

Donations are always appreciated. Donations on a monthly basis can be made through Patreon. One-time donations can be made through PayPal.

Tag: Somerset Baptist Church Mt Perry

1986-1995: A Look at My Writing as an IFB Pastor

Blast From the Past (1990): Is TV an Idol in America?

Life: It All Depends on Where You Are Standing

Book Review: The Preacher: The Life and Times of Donald A. Hardman

How Religion Obscures Seeing People as They Are

Dear Greg

Questions: Bruce, Have You Ever Seen Someone Who Was Demon-Possessed?

John

Reliving the “Good Old Days”: Do You Have Any Change?

Categories

Series

RSS Feeds

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Tag: Somerset Baptist Church Mt Perry

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Share This Post On Social Media:

Categories

Series

RSS Feeds

Subscribe to Blog via Email