By Don Mears
I am a church kid--a second-generation member of the Worldwide Church of God, having attended with my parents since age 9. I have learned that the memories of church kids about the teachings, practices and opinions of the WCG are often quite different from the memories of their parents, who became members of the WCG as adults. Why is this?
Those who came to the Worldwide Church of God as adults had a conceptual framework or world view against which they could test each statement, pronouncement or opinion they encountered in the church.
This framework was a product of years of education, experience and maturity. It enabled them to see flaws or exaggerations in some of the statements made in church.
They could reject such statements and retain only the ideas that made sense to them. They would not identify and reject all flawed statements, but at least they had some filters. They would tend to overlook, even forget, the more extreme statements.
A child, on the other hand, has little or no conceptual framework in place. A child tends to take everything seriously if it is told to him or her seriously.
As children we sat in church, heard sermon after sermon, and took them all literally and seriously. We heard sermons describing the Great Tribulation and how only the righteous would escape. We knew we weren't righteous, so we had nightmares about the Germans coming to get us, or about coming home from school to find our baptized parents had fled to the place of safety and left us behind.
We church kids remember these things vividly. We didn't filter and forget them, as many adults were able to do. We heard clearly the message that if you don't measure up, if you don't qualify, you won't be in the kingdom--salvation based on performance.
Some of us despaired of ever measuring up. The despair led to anger, and the anger often showed itself in some type of revolt. Others acquired a desire to be perfect, which inevitably became accompanied by a sense of failure. Because no matter how hard we tried, we knew we were failing.
The result was anger directed at ourselves and a secret anger, unadmitted even to ourselves, at our parents and at God. Secret, because we believed it was a sin to be angry with our parents, and suicide to be angry with God. The end result was a lot of us became perfectionists suffering from depression and despair.
Others bought into the performance-based salvation model, but convinced themselves they were good enough to be saved, and became proud and judgmental toward others.
A few did see the grace of God, but not clearly. It was only visible in momentary flashes, in that brief but blessed interval between our repentance over the last sin and our commission of the next.
I weep for us all. Most of all, I weep for generations of teenagers who left the church in what was called rebellion. How many of them left because they were starved of grace?
They had been told often enough that by the standard of the law of God, they were condemned. But did they know--were they ever told--that Jesus loves them? That his grace is sufficient?
May God forgive us. And please, God, may we have the chance someday to show the grace of God to those teenagers (adults now, many with children of their own) we drove away.
Don and Beth Mears pastor the Big Sandy, Texas, church and also serve as regional pastor.
Dec. 23, 1997, WN, page 4
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