Talking Out Of Turn

Off to the Southern Baptist Convention, then. Dad was baptized, and at some point after that, I made a profession of faith and was also baptized. Did I believe the facts? Yes, certainly. Was I convinced of my sin and my need for a Savior? In theory. But repentance must be there, along with faith, and it wasn’t. My life didn’t change; I was a good boy (for the most part) before, and I remained a good boy afterwards. Well, until high school, at any rate.

I will say that I was convinced at the time that baptism was for believers only, and that the sacraments (or “ordinances” as good Baptists called them) were signs and symbols, and not efficacious. My theology in some ways improved, but in other ways it got worse.

It is hard to recount specific sins, simply because it was a long time ago (twenty-plus years) and they weren’t anything that would land me in juvenile hall, but I distinctly remember that this was the period where I started to become seriously arrogant about my academic record. I was an honor student, usually bored at school, and I trudged along from day to day, doing the bare minimum to keep my grades respectable. I also started to really show off regarding my general Bible knowledge (gleaned from years of reading ahead in Sunday School literature and reading instead of listening to sermons). It became a game to see how many clergymen of various stripes I could beat at Bible Trivia. I don’t say these things to impress you; if you’re like me you would read this and think, “ugh, what a prig.” That, really, is what I’m going for here. I was a prig. Eustace Clarence Scrubb had nothing on me, except his good eating habits. Every chance I got, I would take over the Bible study held at school and just tell the stories, not because I was better at it, but because all eyes turned to me.

While we were in the Baptist church, a controversy erupted at my public school over the teaching of various secular humanist things (and things haven’t improved, by the way), and my brother and I were pulled and placed in a local Christian school, run by the local charismatic church. I do seem to recall Dad receiving assurances that they didn’t push their theology on students, but maybe I am misremembering. Somewhere around ninth or tenth grade, a local woman pastor (and mother of one of the students) came in and taught on the “baptism of the Holy Spirit with evidence of speaking in tongues,” and that combined with recent literature I had read led me to ask to be prayed for, to receive the same thing. After a quick confab with the principal and the pastor, I was brought into the pastor’s office and we prayed for several minutes, until I started to make babbling noises. I was convinced it was real; the pastor had encouraged me to say whatever came to mind, and I did just that. I went home and told Dad, and that weekend he made an appointment to see the pastor about this. He came home reporting that he had had the same experience.

Can Southern Baptists do that?

Now I really fit in with the crowd at school; most of them were charismatics of various kinds, although the majority of the leadership of the church was (oddly enough) trained as LCMS pastors and missionaries before they became charismatics. So we had Christian Instruction classes which were more or less the Small Catechism, plus speaking in tongues. Luther was stalking me.

In the meantime Dad applied at the seminary (connected with the charismatic church there), and was accepted conditionally, since he was attending a non-charismatic church. After a while things clearly weren’t going to work out for us to stay at a Baptist church where we were the only ones who “had a prayer language” and so forth, and I was chomping at the bit to attend church with my new friends, there with the charismatics. Praise choruses were all the rage with me, and I was tired of one piano and two Fanny Crosby hymns every week. I think that the pastor at the SBC church was sorry to see the turn we had taken, and looking back I’d have to say that he was right, but speaking for myself, I wasn’t driven by right theology or an understanding of Scripture. I just knew that I wanted something new and exciting, healing services and miracles and words from the Lord every Sunday. The simple preaching of the Word wasn’t enough. This should have been a warning flag, but it wasn’t for me. I can’t speak for Dad, but for myself, I can say that I was just finding more and more ways to celebrate myself, and elevate myself, and hang out with my new friends (I had never had real friends before, just people I hung out with at school). As I bumbled toward puberty, things began to take a turn for the worse, and Dad saw it coming long before I did (as usual).