“So, You Wanna Go Back to Egypt?” Part 11 – “Oh we’re having so much trouble even now; Why’d he get so mad about that cow?” – title and lyrics from Keith Green’s album, circa. 1980
Author’s Note: This series is autobiographical to provide background for the books and articles you will find on this website. When the series is finished, I will provide a summation in a bio-page. Links to previous installments are found at the bottom of the article. —JWS, website creator.
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Sometimes there is a reason why small towns are small, and why small churches stay small: small-minded people.
To the outsider, their quaintness may seem charming, but closer examination can reveal dark secrets.
While my parachurch ministry through the Internet mushroomed, we settled into the local community church and participated in its programs. I became the adult Sunday School teacher and enjoyed several years of sleepy contentment.
The local pastor with four small children – who matched the ages of some of mine – had come from Seattle and had quit his very comfortable position at Boeing Corporation to preach the Gospel. The local church was affiliated with a “non-denominational” denomination called “Village Missions” which has for many years sponsored training and support for ministers to small rural communities that cannot afford to hire pastors.
Not surprisingly, the church grew and also, not surprisingly, some old timers complained about the changes.
For the pastor, the career-change was a big step down financially and with a struggling congregation led by a negligent church board, insufficient resources required frequent contributions from the pastor’s purse to keep things going. In the convoluted accounting methods of the organization, the pastor was not supposed to do that and since his wife handled the monthly reports, she committed the “unpardonable sin” of non-disclosure to make sure that monthly payments from corporate headquarters were not disrupted or diminished. In other words, the donations were not reported in order to prevent inflating the church’s income which would in turn, according to the formula, lower the monthly subsidy from the parent organization.
What should have been, at the very most, an infraction requiring financial counseling, instead, the corporate overseer treated it like larceny and summarily dismissed the pastor from his position. He also threatened criminal prosecution, demanded a high-profile and humiliating “confession,” and then for good measure, literally threw them out on the streets.
Locked out of the parsonage in the dead of winter, with small children, he packed up his belongings as best he could and fled the state, lest his wife be subjected to a warrant for arrest. All of this over a sum which would be a mere trifle in the corporate world.
Well liked by members of the community, the episode shocked the sensibilities of decent people. This was all done with the approval of the church board, which exploited the incident to get him out of the church and out of town. They did not want him to start a new church down the street with disaffected members. So they leveraged the fake criminal accusation to keep him away.
This would become a watershed moment for me. Aside from the wrenching sight of watching my 11-year old daughter weep uncontrollably over the loss of her dearest friends in what I knew was a power play by the church board typical of “churchists,” I decided that I had to take a stand. And stand I did, alienating almost the entire older membership which were desperate to keep the boat steady and the way things were before.
While the humanitarian aspects of this episode were shameful enough, the assault on the pastoral office seemed sacrilegious to me. If the clergy are meant to be unique representatives of the ministry of Christ, they should never be treated this way, even when in sin.
I was unwilling to let the church leadership sweep this under the rug. The church organizations responsible for this fiasco had to be held accountable. I sent out a few bulk mailing newsletters to the community and held a meeting which offered my analysis to exonerate the pastor. It can be found here:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/SUMMARY-OF-THE-AKERILL-REPORT.pdf
As expected, that effort was not unanswered.
The church board organized special meetings in which I was denounced as a polygamist cult, even though in the five years in attendance, I had never mentioned the subject. And I was obviously monogamous.
But they had obtained my public profile via the Internet and were already aware of my study from over a decade before, published as “Eros Made Sacred.” This was not new information for them. They knew about my publications, even while I was their adult Sunday School teacher. As long as I was a team player, it was not a problem. When I became a “trouble maker,” well, my unconventional writings have always been misused as a weapon for ad hominem attacks.
Ever after, any attempt to attend other local churches would be met by a request for me to leave. I was shunned and I have not attended church services, other than a Christmas event or a funeral, now for 20 years.
The young people of the church left. One became an atheist. My sons were disillusioned, and had I taken sides with the “churchists,” I would have lost all credibility in their eyes. So, I exchanged the church for my family and have never regretted it. If anything, the years have confirmed for me the utter futility of organized religion. Churches are composed of gutless, heartless, covenant breakers. They are “sacred cow” worshippers. One is much better off worshipping at home with family and close friends in the purity of the teachings of Jesus than to contend with the melodrama of churches and their gossip.
If you worry about neglecting the sacraments, observe them at home. I wrote the third volume to what has become my trilogy on the patriarchal faith (Restoring the Foundations & Eros Made Sacred):
Readers will be aware that I was developing this concept of the family abbey throughout the 2000’s as indicated in these lectures.
Men ought to be priests in their own homes.
My publishing ministry continued to flourish for the benefit of Grail Church catechumens. In addition to numerous Peshers, The House of Bethany was published in 2007 and Merlin: High Priest of the Holy Grail would be published serially and then bound in a single volume in 2011.
In the interim would be a stint in politics, inspired by Ron Paul’s run for President in 2008. A new chapter in my public story would unfold with interesting and sometimes painful consequences
. . . to be continued
