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Posted by Kate on 11/24/2008, 6:43 am, in reply to "go ask Alice"
And so it went. I got to where I could dutifully and sincerely spout the Fundy creed, 'I believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God, inerrant and infallible.' I couldn't quite make it past the literal part -- I couldn't accept that the world is only 6000 years old, so I just learned to keep my mouth shut when that subject came up. I learned to keep my mouth shut about a lot of things.
Then our church had a community outreach -- sort of a tent revival. I wasn't involved, but one man came who had sort of a reputation in town for being a bit of a drinker and partier (small town gossip). He had been living with a divorced woman for over ten years; she had a teen-age daughter from her previous marriage, and she and this fellow had two sons together. So this guy comes to the revival meeting and gets saved. He goes home and gets the lady he lives with, and she starts coming to church, too. But...there were always stares and whispers, you know, everybody shuts up quick when she comes in the room. So they pair me up with the lady as her newbie Christian buddy -- guess they figured with my wild and checkered past, I had more in common with her than any of them did. I tried my best to make her feel welcome, went to her home, had lunch with her, babysat her boys...but I was very much a Welcome Wagon of One.
So...the guy decides that he wants to do the right thing. He's lived with her in sin for over ten years, and they have two kids, for Pete's sake. So he goes to the pastor and says, I want to marry her.
The pastor's reply? No. She is a divorced woman.
Oh. My. God. You have got to be kidding me. And so what are these people supposed to do now? Her ex-husband was out of state and remarried, so were they supposed to keep living in sin? Was she supposed to break up her ex's current marriage? What about their sons?
And thus, I learned about 'legalism'.
There was another couple in the church -- the husband was an ordained minister, and they just didn't have a church at the time. But he had just been given...what...pastorship? Leadership? A job? as the pastor of a church in another town, and they would be moving away. I think they might have even been the family that invited the guy to the revival meeting in the first place. Anyway, this other pastor said, forget it, I'll marry you two, you are doing the best thing you can in the sight of God, not one of us is perfect, not one of us has no mistakes in their past. So he married them in their backyard.
And they never came back to the church.
And I started looking for another church.
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