Even the small city where we lived for 22 years seemed darkly strange and foreign after leaving.
I can remember going into the local Walmart where I had shopped for so many years and feeling envious of the other people shopping there because they all seemed comfortable, lighthearted-- carefree even.
I ached to feel this comfortable again.
But these feelings lessened as we immediately went about the work of rebuilding our lives.
One of the first things we did was get some counseling and advice from seasoned pastors in the area who knew us and knew plenty about the church we left.
The first pastor we spoke with was Clifford Clark. He had pastored Tulsa Baptist Temple for many years until he retired. He had also been a favored guest speaker for Missions Conferences in our former church for many years.
There is not a wiser, kinder, more gracious and beloved pastor than Clifford Clark.
We met with he and his wife, Geneva at a restaurant and shared the heartbreaking, shocking details of our leaving the church. They were both visibly saddened--even tearful—by the end of our story.
Suprisingly, he told us he had been concerned about the direction in which this pastor had been leading the church for a long time. Among the many enlightened words of wisdom he shared, one statement stood out. He said, "Roads have ditches on either side. Preachers must stay out of those ditches.”
We’d never heard that before.
He went on to inform us that true leaders will not be able to stay in such a high-control, shame-based church. People who stay and continue to defend such a pastor are the weak ones who need to be told what to believe and how to behave so that they don’t have to do the hard work of studying for themselves.
In reference to controlling preachers, another senior and veteran pastor from the area quoted this verse to us:
“My bretheren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation.”
James 3:1
We understood his interpretation to mean that a preacher (I do not believe ‘pastor’ is the appropriate title for such men) who exercises excessive control over his people become responsible and accountable for the wrongs committed when his followers fail to abide by all the extra-biblical rules he’s enacted and enforced.
We have found all these assertions to be true.
Those conversations were the first of many validations that we were not the only ones to perceive serious problems.
About two weeks after leaving, we attended service of our new church for the first time.
My husband and the pastor of a handful of members agreed to our joining there in hopes of bringing more people to this tiny congregation.
We spent six months there but the changes from a once thriving youth group and much larger church to one that barely could be called a ‘church’ was more than our 6 kids--who still lived at home--could bear.
We were all still hurting too much from the losses of family, friends and activities to expect our kids to be able to set their sorrow aside for the sake of this new mission.
It was unreasonable and unrealistic.
We had hoped by committing to work in another church of like faith and practice and one that was forty minutes away in another small city, we could minimize any suspicions by our former church that we had left on contentious terms.
The Preacher had earlier already expressed concern about how our leaving would be “perceived by the people”.
Even though Paul had presented to him a way to explain our leaving and lessen the harmful perceptions to either party, The Preacher rejected it. He had already decided he would present our leaving to the people.
It didn’t take long for us to realize his presentation of our leaving was nothing less than deceptive and harmful.
Paul told him not long before that he should just announce that we were called to help a struggling, sister church in a neighboring town. He could even take credit for helping this 'struggling, dying' work get on its feet and grow if he was so worried about the church's perception.
He could hold a small ‘going away’ event where we say our ‘Good-byes’ to the members and gradually the events of our last three months there would pass, and All could go on with fresh, newly revised ministries.
Paul told him that how this would be “perceived by the people” would depend entirely on what he tells them about our leaving.
The Preacher completely rejected Paul's suggestion.
It was quite evident from a history we knew all too well that in his mind, NO ONE WHO LEAVES IS EVER RIGHT FOR LEAVING and he must be sure to create enough suspicion about the leavers that the whole church believes his condemnation of their leaving to be 'right'.
If The Preacher sorrowfully planted the 'perception' that their Youth Director just abandoned his church and his duties, and would not honor his word to stay six months, then no one would want to follow him.
It didn't work.
The four of us: Paul, The Preacher, his wife and me, met officially and shortly thereafter, on two separate occasions totaling about ten hours to discuss our disagreements with the events that transpired over the past year and other things going further back.
At the end of each meeting, Paul and I expressed our desire that soon we should discuss a way to continue a relationship as family outside of this church.
Both times, he said, “In time”.
Since then, there were several other occasions where Paul and the Preacher encountered each other and each time, Paul urged him to consider meeting again to try and establish a way for our two families to stay connected.
Each time his response was the same, “Maybe in time” although there was one time he replied, “It wouldn’t work anyway”.
Only months-- maybe less-- more people from our former church began leaving. Some whole families. Some newly, of-age teens.
This has continued for twenty-four years.
While surely new people have joined the church, it is probable more have left than new ones have joined.
We never spoke to any of the ones who left about what had transpired between our two families before or after we left, until much time had passed and they were asking us for our side of the story.
It was nine years before I wrote and published a word in defense of our leaving.
They had NINE YEARS to correct their offenses to us and to their church's "perception" of our leaving.
NINE YEARS to show they are not a danger to people's reputations and relationships by being transparent about their own wrongs.
And, for twenty-four years since leaving, we have learned of continual, serious, even criminal activities that have increased as revealed by as many who have left the church as there are still in the church.
Paul and his sister were adopted as infants in Korea by American missionaries, Ike and Jane Foster. They grew up in Korea between furloughs until they were old enough to live on their own in the States.
His sister has been prohibited by her preacher/husband to have contact with her brother except concerning family business (sicknesses, deaths, funerals, weddings etc.) from their parents’ side of the family. They are each other's only known siblings.
Twenty-five years of close-knit family relationships, co-laboring relationships, cousin relationships, great nieces and nephew relationships (twenty something children our family has never even met) and so much more-- all as if our relationships and connections never existed and all at the direction of…
ONE MAN.
What kind of man demands this of his wife, children and grandchildren?
The Demilitarized Zone divides Communist North Korea, ruled by a dictator, from free South Korea. Families were separated on each side of this line between the enslaved people of North Korea and the free people of South Korea and have been since the end of the conflict in 1953.
It was not the good people of the free South who caused this...
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