Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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I attended a private Assembly of God-run middle school. And I also had a few weeks' experience with the Gainesville, FL Crossroads Church of Christ. So as far as the fundamentalist, evangelical experience... I've been there. The part about respecting truth turned out to be what I held onto over some of the other theological stances I encountered.
The Crossroads thing... looking back at it, the whole "discipling" element is clear now. I was recruited for the church by a UF staff member in the computer science department in my first semester at college. And things might have turned out quite differently except for the Bible Study component of the Crossroads experience. I'd probably been attending about six weeks when at the Bible Study they introduced a special leader of discussion for the evening, an associate pastor there. Our usual leader made the introduction, and there was no mistaking the note of awe in his voice. The associate pastor had a bible with him, one with about a half-dozen bookmarks in it. There was a reason. He had an argument to make, he told us. He proceeded to open his bible to one of the bookmarks, and read a couple of verses. He visited each bookmark, but there was no linear progression of the bookmarks, he went back and forth to put the snippets in the order he desired. Finishing with the last of the bookmarks, he closed the bible and lifted his face to us. "Therefore," he announced, "anyone who is not baptized by total immersion in water is going to hell."
I never went back. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't say anything out loud right at the moment, but I just kept my mouth shut and waited for the evening to be over. My "mentor" made periodic attempts to get me back into the fold over the next several months, none of them successful. I think I must have puzzled them, because a female student who was also in the honors dorm picked up where my mentor left off, inviting me to go to Sunday services with her. For those who never had the Crossroads experience, this was something quite out of character. Single people attending would sit in sections by gender. I wasn't there long enough to figure out how the transition from single to married status usually happened at Crossroads, but miracles might have been involved. So having someone of the opposite sex try to take the role of mentor was something I had never seen there before.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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