Churchianity.

As a young man in my 20s, I was searching for a way of life that would help me become a loving husband to my wife and a good father to my boys. Like most young families, we looked to the church to find the new life we heard about. The solution seemed clear. If we wanted a healthy family, all we had to do was join a healthy church.

This is what America believes. Right? I don’t think I was wrong here, I only saw what promises the American church offered and decided to take advantage of the opportunity. I wasn’t any different than most young fathers searching for help to become a good family man. If you have ever been to a big church on Sunday morning, you know the majority of the people there are doing exactly what I was doing; trying to make a happy life for their family.

So when we got to Oregon to start our family, the first thing we did was find a church. The trend at that time was Calvary Chapel, as it was the church that emerged from the Jesus Movement. Imagine thousands of hippies and surfers all coming to Jesus wearing board shorts and flip flops! Awesome! Unlike the traditional churches, I thought this was a place where you could be yourself and “come as you are.” On the surface, the Calvary Chapel churches appear to be transparent, probably the reason I was drawn to them. But as you will see, that is not the case whatsoever.

This may have been true in the 70s, but today when you go to a Non-Denomination Evangelical Christian church, like Calvary Chapel or any of the big churches in your area, you are expected to: look, act, dress, talk, vote, and believe a very particular way. You might be given a visitor’s pass, a few weeks to check it out and prove that you are going to start to conform to the sub-culture, but that’s about it. You are expected to transform into the image of the pastor within a few months. Only then can you truly be a member of the church.

If you choose to conform and plug in, meaning sign up for everything in that week’s church bulletin, then you will be taken into the embrace of the church family. If you don’t, you will likely be placed into the non-member spectator group who just come for the show. Or if they really don’t like you, then you will be shunned so badly you will be running for the door, and likely never try that kind of church again.

So in October of 2005, we joined the local Calvary Chapel in town that we were misled to believe was just starting off and were meeting in a local school. We were excited to join this new church as they began this journey to help our city! Later, we learned the church was not new, but had recently been repackaged and replanted after their latest church split. We didn’t know anything about church politics yet, and like most young families just went on trusting the pastor with our hearts, our children, and our dollars. It would take me a few years to really get noticed but once I did, I became a part of the church family. I was finally in.

Then in April of 2008, after I finally quit drugs and alcohol, I was fully embraced by the church. We started going to every service available, every Bible study and home group. I tried to prove to everyone including myself that I was just like them. I pulled off the transformation nicely and by October of 2008, I actually became a youth pastor for middle school kids.

To say I was put into leadership quickly would be an understatement. I was literally only 6 months sober at this point in my life. Granted I never told anybody that because nobody asked. I never did a background check, even though everyone knew I came from a crazy life. If I had I can’t imagine I would have passed and been allowed to teach youth, as I have quite the arrest record from when I was a kid.

I guess I just have an honest face, so I have been told, but I did not have an honest heart. Also, I knew how to work a crowd with my humor, and silence the room with my passion. Not that I was a great preacher, but I was raw, and people tuned in when I spoke. It did not take long before I was given a shot preaching the big service on Sunday morning and it was like a rush I had never felt before. I was hooked.

Nothing in my life besides drugs made me feel so invincible as when I was preaching. The energy you get from a large crowd of your peers hanging on your every word is equivalent to a shot of speed in your arm. This is probably why I loved it so much, and did whatever I had to do to become a good preacher.

I had never been accepted like this into the mainstream before and it felt good. Even more than being accepted as a brother into this new family I found at Calvary Chapel, I was somehow put on the fast track to elite status and soon everyone saw me almost more as a father. It was the strangest thing ever, but at church, it seemed perfectly normal.

Business owners twice my age were asking me for advice about their companies. Parents of teenagers asked me for help with their kids even though I only had babies. It seemed all of a sudden I was transformed into this wise monk in the eyes of the church. Somehow they all just figured I was made perfect overnight and I had it all together. Not just the Bible and Christianity, but everything?

The day I became a pastor and especially a church elder, I lost the opportunity to be human. What’s worse is that I lost the freedom to grow and to heal from my own sins and all the sins done to me. God was doing a powerful work in my heart everyday, but the more I pressed into the church life, the less I was able to work on what was really killing me. I had to just cover it all up and pretend it never happened and forget about my old life.

As much as I wanted this to work, I knew I was a fake. I had to walk on water in order to pull off this act and it was exhausting. I basically just tried to be like Jesus. I honestly thought that was the goal and so if I just walk, talk, and act like Jesus, everything would keep going smoothly, and soon I would be the pastor of my own Calvary Chapel!

This probably sounds extremely arrogant because it was. Until a few years ago, I had a text-book Messiah complex. It was bad, and it almost cost me my family! I selfishly dictated and controlled my family. I was called to be a pastor so that meant they needed to act like a pastor’s family. There was no time for healing or growing. There was no excuse for weakness or imperfection. We just had to act the part long enough and eventually it would become reality.

The problem is that it doesn't work. You don’t fake it til you make it. You only fake it until you start to hurt people you love. The sins, the pain, and the suffering you’ve tried to hide finds a way out, with strength multiplied, and hurts people around you. The reality is, until you deal with your past in a real and healthy way, it will slowly rob you and everyone around you of ever knowing true happiness and never finding peace.

The corrupt American church life almost cost us everything. Thankfully in the close of 2014, we left the church and God started painfully but powerfully rebuilding our lives.

Please follow our story to learn how we made it out. Out of the fog, out of the darkness, and into the light. Life is beautiful again.

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