If you’ve ever made $ 11,000 per year working in a ministry, while supporting a wife, three children, and a dog and then had the senior pastor you work for tell you that taking government assistance wasn’t “trusting God”…you might have been a fundamentalist.

Fundamentalist churches are generally not full of professional, high-income members. Doctors, Lawyers, and other such folks are noticeably absent from the church rolls and their tithes are noticeably absent from the church budget. As a result of this lack of funds, these churches often rely on a workforce of very poorly paid employees to take care of the ministry. Woe unto you if you’ve spent six years in school to get a Masters Degree in Education at an unaccredited fundamentalist college. At the local fundy school (the only place you’re qualified to work) that effort will probably net you church staff housing, no insurance, and less pay than you might get working at the local McDonalds.

To compound this problem, — and for reasons more political than doctrinal — many fundamentalists are deathly opposed to welfare of any kind. The claim is that if the government is helping you then they get the credit instead of God getting the credit. The idea that maybe God uses the government to help folks sometimes has evidently never dawned on them.

This lack of funds combined with an inability to seek help from any other source (not to mention threats that leaving this glorious ministry will ruin God’s will for your life), combines to create a class of indentured servitude with people who are too literally too poor to escape the cycle. Add to this the bellowing of preachers who blast their lackeys for even daring to inquire about how much money a ministry position might pay and you end up with a very sad situation indeed.

It’s all fine and good to be told that slaving away for sub-minimum wages is laying up treasure in heaven. One has to wonder if it’s inconceivable that it might be possible to get both treasure in heaven and a decent dental plan down here on earth in the meantime.

College Lakes Baptist Church in Fayetteville,NC describes themselves this way:

“The church family believes in: an unlimited atonement, a universal resistible call,resistible grace, using the King James Version of the Bible, deference to the pastor in all matters, serving at the pleasure of the pastor, a church-led government, a person with a servant’s heart who is seeking to meet spiritual needs rather than being recognized as a person with a title, traditional church music only, a wife actively involved in the ministry, and the church is anti-Calvinistic.”

Oh, but it gets better. A quick trip to their website reveals a student handbook for their Christian Academy that reads like something you’d expect to find in a volume entitled “Total Domination and You: Cult Making For Fun And Profit.”

A few excerpts:

Is your kid having a problem with the way a rule is being enforced? Forgetaboutit!

WE DO NOT TOLERATE GRIPING
If your child comes home complaining about a policy or discipline, please follow this procedure:

1. Reread the handbook; it states our policies. You can then remind the student that you both
were aware of the policy when he enrolled in the Academy.
2. Realize that your child’s reporting is emotionally biased and may not include all the
information.
3. Realize that the school has reasons for all rules and we enforce them without partiality.
4. Support and contact the school for all the facts. You may talk with the lead supervisor in
each Learning Center. Please do not seek to talk with the principal or anyone else because
discipline is left to the discretion of the supervisor

And let’s not forget to include a section on CHRISTIAN AMERICANISM!

Christian Americanism places emphasis upon the greatness of America’s heritage and the sacrifices of her heroes. America’s constitution guarantees liberties to educate in order to preserve freedom. We unashamedly teach the Biblical doctrines of self-discipline, respect for those in authority, obedience to law and their natural outgrowth, and love for what the flag originally represented.

Ready for the best part? The church description I started with was from a listing on the BJU church placement service website as part of an advertisement for an associate pastor position. Crazyland is never as far from “mainstream” as the fundies would like you to think.

Fundamentalists no longer literally keep their women barefoot and pregnant  (or at least not barefoot) but they do tend to want to keep them at home. After all, “keepers at home” is what Paul said, right? Of course, he also gave rules for how a man should treat his slaves, so there may be a wee bit of a cultural gap there. But cultural context is for liberals and feminists, amen?

After all, the Proverbs 31 woman is the perfect example of  a keeper at home. Yeah, she bought and sold goods but that was a…uh…home based business! And all that stuff about her traipsing around buying and selling real estate is…um…well, I’m sure it’s a lot more complicated in the original Hebrew and a fundamentalist pastor can set it all straight if given half a chance.

Turns out there are a lot of women doing all kinds of stuff in the Bible: Deborah, Lydia, Priscilla, Phoebe, Mary, Tryphaena, Typhosa and Persis to name a few. And other than being judges, businesswomen, deaconesses, and apostles, I’m sure none of them would ever have dreamed of putting on shoes and leaving the house.

Here’s a Grand Old Hymn submitted by loyal SFL reader Dan. Evidently the children in his church used to march around the room to this…peppy (yes, we’ll stick with that) tune. Once can only hope they did it on the 2 and 4.

The Assurance March. And by “March” they mean “Polka.”

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Do you have a Grand Old Hymn you’d like to share? Hurl it into the suggestion box.

(Thanks, JP)

Yes, I know that posting video from members of “Pastor” Steven Anderson’s church is like shooting fish in a barrel but I’m still recovering from a root canal so tonight I’m picking the low hanging fruit. Beside which, the idea of us “getting someone saved” is all too familiar even in the relatively more sane branches of fundamentalism.

In fundamentalist circles there is no greater crime than publicly declaring that there is a problem in fundamentalist circles. Indeed it is far worse to notice that there are problems than to actually be part of the problem. Anyone who aspires to be a naysayer will labeled with the most heinous of descriptors known to fundamentalism: “having a critical spirit.”

The critical spirit (and its cousin “evil questioning”) often shows up in the text of pastoral rants against those who would ask questions such as “If we really had 300 people saved last year, why did our membership only grow because of the two people who came here from the Baptist church down the road?” It’s better to just say “amen!” when the stats are read and not think about it too hard.

Whether it’s poor exegesis, pitiful orthopraxy, or just plain wrong-headed thinking in your church, the fundamentalist solution is simply to ignore it hope it will go away on its own before anybody gets the courage to admit they noticed.  Go thou and do likewise.  And whatever you do, don’t start a vaguely humorous, often long-winded blog to talk about these issues. They’ll just call you bitter and spiteful too.

The “lunatic fringe” of fundamentalism is never quite as far away from the “mainstream” as those who claim to be the mainstream would have you believe. Since guilt by association is a favorite game of many fundies, I’ll beg your indulgence while I try my own hand at it for a moment.

Consider Tony Hutson, son of former Sword of  the Lord editor Curtis Hutson. A few minutes spent listening to the Tony Hutson One-Liner Podcast will reveal a slew of crazy rants that attempt to pass for preaching. Don’t miss the story on apologetics that ends with a recounting of an alleged conversation where Curtis Hutson tells Tony “boy, you’re even more ignorant than your mama.” Um…amen?

Yet for all of this craziness, he still maintains close ties with Sword of the Lord. He has a listing at the top of their Tenessee Church Directory and routinely preaches at SOTL conferences. Meanwhile, the Sword of the Lord has grown increasingly close to none other than the “mainstream” fundamentalist organization Pensacola Christian College who from all accounts puts quite a sum of money into keeping the Sword afloat. To emphasize that tie, SOTL Editor Shelton Smith will be preaching at the PCC Campus Church from Jan. 18-22 of this month. There is no stronger endorsement in fundyland than letting a man fill your pulpit.

Hutson->Smith->PCC. Is there really a “mainstream” of fundamentalism when crazyland is never more than a hop skip and a jump away? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Love America? Love Jesus? Want to combine the two in a totally awesome way?

(I do find the 14 stars just a tad confusing. It was suggested to me that perhaps those are representative of the states in the Bible belt. Who knows.)

If you’ve ever heard your pastor use the word’s “touch not the Lord’s anointed” to refer to…himself, you probably have been a fundamentalist.

It is the great irony of fundamentalism that after having decried the centralized control of the Roman church, fundamentalist churches each hasten to set up their own local pope who speaks to them ex cathedra on matters of Scriptural interpretation and practice. Based on the passages most often used to justify this dominance, one can only assume that the local church pastor fills the roles of prophet, priest, and king with a generous helping of apostle thrown in for good measure. Not bad for a position where the only entrance requirement is an invisible “call” to preach.

Since the fundy pastor says he will be called to “give an account” for the minutest details of the lives of those under his care, it only stands to reason that nothing is outside of his purview. Some of the more extreme will even say that since the authority of the church stands above the family, the pastor is responsible for the decisions made in each home down to where each child goes to school and whom they marry. Resist this “man-of-god” at your own peril; the pastor may not have she bears to do his bidding but he does have a deacon board.

Of course, most fundamentalists will tell you that we are all merely sinner saved by grace and that the ground at the foot of the cross is all equal. Some parts are just a bit more equal than others; and evidently some also come with a direct line to God’s will for everyone else’s life.