For a Friend
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly – my personal 24+ year experience in the ICOC
by Greg Hulbert
My nearly 25 year association with the group that later became known as the ICOC, began in Terre Haute, IN during the spring semester of my sophomore year as a chemical engineering major at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (RHIT). I was invited to the Eastside Church of Christ by a friend from high school (I’ll call him Bill) who was attending Indiana State University (also located in Terre Haute). The class before church, led by the campus minister (Greg Jackson), was very inspiring and was an exciting answer to my prayers. Despite going to the Catholic Church nearly every Sunday of my life, I grew up with very minimal exposure to the Bible. However, approximately one year earlier I started to read the Bible on a regular basis and was captivated by the power and relevance of God’s word. It described my life very accurately and exposed and judged the thoughts and attitudes of my heart (Heb 4:12-13
). I became convinced that the God of the Bible was real and started sharing what I was learning with my family and friends. The problem was I didn’t have sufficient power to live out the scriptures in my life. Attempts to stop being immoral with my girlfriend failed miserably, and after debating the existence of God with members of the RHIT tennis team on the way to a tournament I got drunk with them on the way home. The words of Paul kept ringing in my ears “For what I want to do I do not do but what I hate I do” (Rom 7:15). I prayed that God would give me a partner to help me obey His word. That Sunday morning my prayers were answered as there were approximately 40 college students in the campus ministry eager to oblige. The majority of the students were from Indiana State University and I knew a couple of them because they were on the tennis team. There were four Rose-Hulman students and one of them (I’ll call Joe) had been in several of my classes.
Greg Jackson brought the Bible to life in a way that was even more powerful than my personal readings. The dedication of the people within this group was very encouraging and the dramatic changes in both Bill and Joe were inspiring. Bill was a fellow tennis player and our families had been close for several years; however, we weren’t personally that close because Bill was even wilder than I was in terms of doing drugs and other illegal activities. At the time I was closer to his brother who graduated from high school the same year as I did. Joe was an extremely bright person that excelled academically in the very difficult chemical engineering curriculum at RHIT. However, he could be quite arrogant and obnoxious and was brutal with some of the professors. We had an Indian physics Prof that couldn’t pronounce the V sound in the word “vector”. Joe would harass him saying “Wector, wector, what’s a wector.” Both of these guys changed their lives radically and started studying the Bible with me to help me repent and become a Christian as well.
There was a series of studies that every potential recruit would go through and I was convicted and inspired by each one. I saw my life in the acts of the sinful nature (Gal 5:19-21) and I wanted to live instead with the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23). Although I could clearly see that I had never been a Christian and that I needed to repent and be baptized, I had a problem intellectually with the teaching that most of the religious people that I knew were not “true Christians” and therefore were not saved. I wrestled with this for some time before getting baptized as well as afterward. The bottom line was I wanted my life to change. I wanted to live for Jesus and for God. Although I had some reservations about the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, I knew that I personally needed to be born again and to repent and be baptized. I gradually became more and more convinced that the doctrine was right because of the sincere commitment of this group to follow the scriptures, and in interacting with other religious people I saw what I perceived to be shallowness, at least in comparison to the convictions and commitment of myself and those around me. I quickly began to accept the conviction that only those who were baptized for the forgiveness of sins in the churches of Christ or other related groups were Christians. Certainly they didn’t have to be in one of those groups, but there were not any other mainline Christian denominations that were teaching this, and if someone did believe in baptismal regeneration why would they remain in their particular denomination or church? The Catholic Church teaches baptismal regeneration, but they believe in infant baptism which does not involve a personal repentance and commitment.
Although I struggled somewhat with the arrogance of thinking “we are the only ones who are right”, or “we are the only true Christians,” it definitely did feel good to be a revolutionary and to go against the mainstream protestant thinking. After all, Jesus said, “Wide is the road that leads to destruction and narrow is the road that leads to eternal life” (Mt 7:13-14). My purpose in life was now to live for God and to call other people to do the same.
The reformation movement from which the churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and Christian churches were formed had been around for over a hundred years. They already had a reputation for being a fundamentalist group that taught exclusivity. The roots of the International churches of Christ (ICOC) were in this group. In the 1970’s, the Crossroads movement began in a campus ministry at the University of Florida. The church in Gainesville which sponsored that ministry was the Crossroads church of Christ. A campus minister named Chuck Lucas began to teach not only the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, but also the requirement of Christians to be “totally committed” to Jesus and his teachings. In the Bible followers of Jesus are most often referred to as believers or disciples – “Christian” was a label that came several years after Jesus’ death. The original 12 disciples were called to leave everything and follow Jesus (Mk 1:16-18), and Jesus said anyone who would follow him needed to give up everything (Lk 11:33). On the campus at UF, college students were baptized to become totally committed disciples of Jesus. Since disciples are called to go out and make other disciples of Jesus, this group grew rapidly and caught the attention of other churches of Christ. They began to hire students who graduated from the UF to lead campus ministries in their churches. There were also a few other campus groups that came to similar convictions and also joined forces with the Crossroads movement. I was converted into one of those campus ministries in 1981.
Many of the campus ministries grew very quickly and greatly encouraged the local churches they were a part of. The problem was that there was a dichotomy between the long term members of those churches and the campus group. The teachings of total commitment and forceful evangelism were foreign concepts to most of those people, and conflicts resulting in church splits often occurred. In 1979, Kip McKean went to the Boston, MA area to become the minister at the Lexington church of Christ which had dwindled down to only a handful of people. Kip was originally converted at UF and had led a successful campus ministry at Eastern Illinois University. The church in Boston grew extremely quickly to several thousand members and changed its name to the Boston church of Christ. Kip had the conviction that every city should have only one church that could be subdivided geographically into several regions. He believed that every church should be started essentially from scratch and be made up of only “sold out”, totally committed disciples. After sending out groups to start new churches in Chicago, New York, and London, the Boston church began to offer to “reconstruct” existing churches from the Crossroads movement to become a part of a new movement referred to simply as the Boston movement. The “reconstruction” of these churches normally involved sending a new minister from Boston to lead the church. The existing minister would move to Boston to be trained. Kip or someone else would come in with the new leader and have talks with the members of the congregation calling them to be sold out; if not, they could no longer be a part of the church. Many people had to go back through the Bible study series and be re-baptized if it was determined that they had not made such a commitment during their original conversion or had not lived up to it. They would lose a large number of people during these times, but they felt that it was the right thing to do and that long term it would lead to greater growth. As the movement grew it caught the attention of a church growth expert and he referred to it as the International churches of Christ to distinguish it from the mainline churches of Christ.
As I mentioned before, at the time of my conversion I had been seeking God through reading the Bible and religious tracts, and occasionally attending meetings of campus ministry groups. My first encounter with one of these groups was a very negative if not somewhat comical one. I spent the first semester of my freshman year at Rice University before transferring home to Rose-Hulman. In Houston, away from my family, I generally did not attend church, although at least once I went to one within walking distance of the campus. The campus ministries were not very evident at Rice; for example a Baptist student in my dorm wanted to transfer to a school that was less “decadent”. One Friday or Saturday night I was in my room studying and a couple of students from one of the campus ministries knocked on my door. They asked me if I believed in God and if they could come in and share some Bible versus with me. I told them that I had grown up Catholic and wasn’t very familiar with the Bible, but certainly had been thinking about God and would be interested in talking with them. They asked if I had ever prayed Jesus into my heart and I said that I hadn’t. The humorous part was that they then asked me if I wanted to, and I said, “Sure,” and prayed “God please come into my heart - I want to be right with you and be forgiven.” After that they said “No, no, no, you have to pray Jesus into your heart” and I said “I thought they were basically the same guy.” After they corrected my mistake and I said the prayer that they wanted to hear, they left the room and I never saw them again.
After transferring to Rose-Hulman, I started reading the Bible on a regular basis. The major campus ministry there was the campus crusade for Christ, and I did know some of the members of that group. I did have some discussions with them that were somewhat helpful, but they didn’t really get much below the surface. One time I went to one of their meetings and a guy there just blasted me as a hypocrite for showing up there. He was on the basketball team and I had gone on the preseason trip with them to south Florida and the Bahamas. We had gone into a bar in Fort Lauderdale where some women had decided to put on an impromptu strip show. When he saw me at the meeting he assumed I was a member or something and said, “What are you doing here – you got to be kidding me”. Of course I could have asked him the same thing, but his excuse was that he was taking this religious girl that was a friend of his from high school. Obviously this guy was in the wrong, but what bothers me is that no one in the group said anything to stand up for me or to lessen my embarrassment or to make me feel welcome. One of the members deepened the blow by asking where my hat was (the school was all male at the time and my normal MO was to wake up, throw on a baseball cap, and go to class) and said “I’ve never seen you without a hat – I thought you took a shower with your hat on.” Although I am grateful for the positive attempts that were made by some members to share their faith with me, they paled in comparison to what I experienced after visiting the Eastside Church of Christ in the spring of 1981.
I was warmly welcomed by everyone in the group which was racially diverse, and to a great extent racial and other socioeconomic barriers were obliterated. To me this was an almost utopian experience that I had only dreamed about before. I always hated the disunity that existed between groups and individuals and in high school wanted to be liked by everyone and not just a particular clique. As I mentioned before, the Bible really came alive to me as it was preached – I wondered how Greg Jackson seemed to be speaking directly to me as though someone had revealed to him my actions, hopes, dreams and innermost thoughts. After working through some of my doctrinal issues, I was baptized on May 14, 1981.
In order for the reader to understand the background of my life to this point, I will give a synopsis of my childhood. I was born on June 22, 1961, in North Hornell, New York where my father was a Ph.D. student in ceramic engineering at Alfred University. When I was two years old, we moved to the small college town of Clemson, SC where my father was a professor at Clemson University. This was a fantastic environment for raising a family, and I am very thankful for my years there. Surprisingly, it has changed very little in the past 42 years. My sister, Samantha, is only 15 months younger than I and my brother, Jeff, is six and a half years younger. My natural demeanor was to be reserved and shy, whereas my sister tended to be very outgoing, commanding a lot of attention. I can remember quite vividly being terrified of going to school and my father having to walk me to class in the morning in first grade and at least on one occasion having me run back out of the classroom after he coaxed me through the door. After working through the initial apprehension, I was blessed to make many friendships at school. Because Clemson is a small college town, almost everyone there had some association with the University and it was easy to get to know almost everyone by name. My parents enrolled me in every sports league and scouting, etc., at the time against my will. In hindsight I am glad that they did and in realty almost all the kids my age did the same. My time after school was spent either at organized football, basketball, baseball, or tennis practice or in the back yard of my neighbor playing one of those sports. Our next door neighbors had two boys: one my age, one two years and a girl my sister’s age. I spent a lot of time at their house and even stayed with them sometimes instead of going on a trip with my family. We went to almost every home football and basketball game that Clemson played and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of that. I remember desegregation at the beginning of fourth grade, although even after that the African American kids were definitely in the minority. At that point in my life, I had a very sensitive conscience and a desire to be righteous and please God. Other parents considered me to be very reliable and responsible and felt comfortable if I was there to keep things under control.
One example of my timid nature and over sensitive conscience occurred when I was at basketball camp in around fourth grade. We stayed in the dorms at Clemson University and had a meal ticket for the cafeteria. After losing my ticket I was too scared to report it and simply quit going to the cafeteria – I was determined to survive on oat meal cookies using my canteen money. Fortunately, my roommate saw my father on campus and when he asked how I was doing my roommate spilled the beans about the meal ticket. My parents then picked me up at camp and took me to Hardees and then the doctor. I was fine health wise, but quite embarrassed. I remember vividly hearing one of the coaches lecture the group that someone had done this and how stupid it was.
After graduating from elementary school we moved to the New Orleans area where my dad was the Dean of the College of Engineering at Tulane University. We lived in Gretna, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans on a very nice golf course (Timberlane Country Club). In seventh grade I attended the local public school which was a bit of a culture shock compared to Morrison Elementary School in Clemson. I remember the classes being comparatively easy and for the first time I received all A’s for the entire year. The next two years I spent at a Catholic prep school named De La Salle high school (it had an eighth grade program for a small number of students). I also achieved straight A’s there but had to study very hard. Winton Marsalis, the famous trumpet player, was in my classes there, and I remember competing with him for the top grade each six weeks period in those classes. This was an extremely difficult period in my life. It was a long commute to and from school from the west bank to uptown New Orleans. Although this was not an ideal situation, it was not totally wasted time because I could do homework and spend time with my father and my sister. The difficult part was that in my neighborhood I was ridiculed by the rest of the kids because I did not participate in their culture of drugs and vandalism. I did compromise my convictions and started smoking cigarettes and drinking, but it was not enough to gain acceptance into the group. My self esteem took a pretty good hit from that and from the normal struggles of adolescence such as acne and a desire to be popular with the opposite sex.
Just before my sophomore year in high school, we moved to Terre Haute, IN where my father became president of the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. This was a much better situation for me socially and emotionally. There were several kids my age in the neighborhood and the focus was more on academics and athletics and less on drugs and wild behavior. I began to concentrate athletically on tennis and would practice 3-4 hours a day in the summer and would play in 10-12 tournaments. On the weekends I would indulge in the party scene and would drink moderately to heavily. I started to become obsessive in some ways with regard to time management. My thought pattern was “I am happy when I succeed academically or athletically and therefore if I want to be happy the best approach is to work hard all the time in those areas that I feel a need to be successful in”. Although I had a pretty balanced lifestyle at that point since school was not too difficult, it was the beginning of a very destructive way of thinking. I could never be satisfied with what I accomplished and felt as though I couldn’t afford to take time to smell the roses. There was always a way that I could be more efficient with my time and get closer to perfection in order to maximize happiness.
This problem got much worse when I started college because of the rigors of majoring in chemical engineering at a very challenging academic institution. My obsession went over the top and I began to analyze and obsess about every minute of the day. I hardly watched any TV or engaged in many activities just for fun. Athletics was an exception because I reasoned that it was important to stay in shape and be successful in that way. I also had a serious girlfriend, but I feel sorry for exposing her to my obsessive controlling behaviors. I would analyze about how I had wasted time by not multitasking and getting a pencil sharpened while the microwave was heating up a snack. I would study most of my waking hours, and lived in the basement of my parents’ home where I would rarely interact with them if possible. Overall my life was not so unbalanced since I played on the tennis team and spent significant time with my girlfriend, but the self-torture that went on in my head was excruciating. I feel as though I can relate to those who struggle with an obsession such as anorexia. They want to have control of their lives so badly, and they know they can control their eating and exercise and obtain what in their minds is the perfect body. Even in class I would feel as though I couldn’t waste time – “just get to the equation and how to do the homework – don’t waste time showing me the derivation and what it really means”. I didn’t want to learn something that would waste my brain power or take up unnecessary space in my memory banks. Because of this I would often skip class so I could learn the material on my own. I would also try to multitask by trying to catnap in class or, after I became a Christian, to pray.
This is the state I was in when I decided to become a disciple of Jesus. Certainly, the fact that I had found a reason for my existence, a purpose for my life, and the promise of eternal life helped my emotional health. However, at the same time another dimension had been added to my life with its own requirements and demands. I felt an even greater need to push myself toward the perfect use of time. Even driving down the street, I would feel as though I needed to “be productive” and pray. The scheduled activities of the group were numerous and I participated in a church-related activity almost every day. This included church (Sunday school and worship on Sunday morning and worship on Sunday and Wednesday night), evangelistic bible study in the dorms on campus, campus devotional on Friday night, discipleship group, and eventually leaders’ classes and meetings. We also had one-on-one discipling or prayer partner times. I was scared to death that I wouldn’t be able to do all these activities in combination with personal bible study and prayer and still succeed in school.
I was baptized at the end of the spring quarter of my sophomore year, and my feeling was that I would do great spiritually that summer with no classes and then I would hit an insurmountable challenge when school started back up. As it turned out, the opposite was true. That summer I spent a lot of time with a couple of my friends who were home from college, and they influenced me more for the bad (drinking, carousing) than I influenced them for the good. After school started back up, I went to my first campus retreat in Muncie, IN and I was totally inspired and convicted of my sin. I repented and on faith I dedicated myself to the activities of the group and to evangelism and prayer, etc. Amazingly, that quarter I received the best grades of my undergraduate career. However, I still struggled with perfectionism and obsessing about time management.
Overall, the campus ministry in Terre Haute was fairly balanced and reasonable. This is largely due to Greg and Theresa Jackson being level headed and mature even though they were in their early twenties. Also, the rest of the congregation (what we called the “adult” ministry) was fairly typical of other mainline churches of Christ. They were great people with “normal” lives who weren’t quite sure how to take this group of fired up campus students. They were very hospitable and some great friendships developed, but there was always a dichotomy between the two groups. After Greg and Theresa left with several other couples to start a church in Kansas City, the church was even more like a mainline church of Christ.
The campus ministry did receive some mild persecution and we were sometimes accused of being a cult. However, Greg was very good at emphasizing the need to be balanced (Ecc 7:18) and to study out the scriptures to form your own convictions (Acts 17:11). Sometimes individuals would not be very balanced and this would lead to problems. The brother that converted me also became somewhat obsessive about personal discipline and time management and he would prepare his clothes etc. for the next morning. His mother became upset when the butter became rancid after he left it out all night so it would be ready for the morning. I am sure that there were less humorous and more consequential examples, but this would have been the exception and not the norm. Many of us did not handle sharing our convictions with our friends and families very tactfully and I personally regret this.
During the summer before my senior year, I met my future wife at a bible study at Indiana State University. I had not dated a lot as a disciple, but at the time I felt this was a positive thing since it had been such a big focus for me before coming to Christ. I did make really good friends with one of the sisters and spent quite a bit of time with her. The chemistry was not there to take the relationship to a dating level, but in my mind I felt like I should be open to it. However, when I met Rita things were quite different and I knew she was the one God wanted me to marry. She would become a fulfillment of God’s promise to give me the desires of my heart (Ps 37:4). I remember one of the campus women telling me about her friend named Rita who wanted to study the bible to consider becoming a disciple. She asked me to pray for Rita because she was an incredible woman who was extremely attractive, intelligent, and outgoing and she could be a real force for God. I did pray but I also couldn’t help thinking “I can’t wait to meet her”. At the bible study that night I saw she was even more incredible than had been described. Right after Rita was baptized, I asked her out and we dated for nine months before getting engaged.
Fortunately, the dating “guidelines” were in fact true guidelines instead of legalistic rules. Our relationship was allowed to develop and mature in a pure and healthy manner. We both wanted to go to graduate school for further training: me in chemical or bioengineering and Rita in English. We applied to several graduate schools, and both of us were offered assistantships (stipends) to attend Clemson University. I contacted the campus minister there, and it turned out that one of my friends from grade school, John Porter, was a disciple there. John was able to get me a job as a resident assistant in the Johnstone Hall dorm one floor below his.
The first couple of semesters there were relatively disastrous for Rita and me. I was in a bit over my head with the M.S. program in chemical engineering, and I was trying to take advantage of the move in terms of increasing my evangelistic zeal and commitment. I brought a lot of people to church but was having difficulty in school. Occasionally, I would miss a Sunday night worship or devotional to study, and I would catch a lot of grief from the brothers for “not putting the kingdom first”. I was able to rekindle a friendship with John Porter rather quickly and that was very helpful, but the campus minister and I had an oil and water relationship. At that time there was not a lot of conformity between the various campus ministries, and we had come from one that did not have a campus minister from Gainesville. Therefore, our status as “true disciples” was treated with a bit of skepticism.
As a side note: even after the movement became totally aligned under Kip McKean and there was total conformity from all congregations, it was still difficult to move from one congregation to another. Part of this was due to the fact that the people at the new congregation wouldn’t know your strengths and weaknesses or personal history. The people who converted you would see how far you had come in a particular area whereas the people in the new congregation would think “this brother struggles with that – what in the world are they doing in xyz town”. This would actually work both ways and the person who was moving would think “we would never have tolerated such and such behavior back in xyz town”. Sadly this mentality made its way to the highest levels of leadership. When Phil Lamb was leading the South Florida and Central and South America world sectors, it was practically taught that they were the “one true world sector”. Most other parts of the movement were thought to be weak, uncommitted, and wimpy.
The biggest tragedy occurred in my relationship with Rita. We had moved down to Clemson already engaged and planning to get married in May after two semesters in school. The dating “guidelines” (in this case rules) for the congregation were very strict and legalistic and even absurd in our case considering that we were engaged. We were supposed to have very little time together and even limited time on the phone. One of the problems was that Rita did not receive this same communication and wondered what in the world I was doing. The assumption was that left to our own devices we would spend way too much time together and be impure, etc. This was not true in my case with my difficult course load and workaholic tendencies. We very rarely even studied together. This led to some very strong negative feelings from Rita and the problems were further compounded by advice to both of us to postpone the wedding and reconsider the relationship altogether. At one point Rita actually called off the engagement and it wasn’t until we got help from Greg and Theresa Jackson back in Terre Haute that things gotten straightened out. We did end up getting married as scheduled, but the relationship with the campus minister at Clemson became even more strained.
After the wedding, life got much better. I had transferred from chemical engineering to the food science department where I flourished and really enjoyed my courses and research in food process engineering. Rita took the summer off from school and our relationship was able to thrive as well. We lived in married student housing where we led a bible study and converted several of the couples in neighboring units. This was a very fulfilling and fun time period and we enjoyed getting to know other young married couples from all over the world.
As our leadership responsibilities in the church grew, my desire was to go into the full time ministry after graduation. Rita did not share this desire as strongly as I did, because she didn’t want the personal burden of leading and being responsible to God for that many people. Although I certainly wanted to help people and devote myself fully to God, I definitely had selfish motivations for desiring the ministry. I wanted to be successful, and liked the power, prestige, and influence associated with the position. Also, to be honest, I was a bit intimidated about working as an engineer. The congregation was relatively small and already had other ministers on staff and we volunteered to be self supporting initially (living off about $7000 in Rita’s savings for the first six months). After that money ran out, the church paid us about $12,000 a year – the same amount as we had made as graduate assistants at the university.
Although I thoroughly enjoyed some aspects of the ministry, I had limited success and realized that my personal gifts were geared more toward an elder or shepherding role rather than that of an evangelist. At this time, I was also somewhat controlling and harsh to those I was leading. With my workaholic perfectionist character, I tended to be legalistic and not very sensitive to people and their needs. I particularly remember getting in a heated argument with one brother because he didn’t want to be in leadership when he actually had sound reasoning, being newly married and working while going to school. We decided to get out of the ministry and I got a job at Clemson University in the food science department. Ironically we had just moved with the church 30 minutes away to Greenville, SC because it was larger metropolitan area.
A couple of days later, our twin daughters, Anna and Kathryn, were born. After commuting for a while back to Clemson, I got a job at an engineering firm in Greenville. I must say that the church in Clemson\Greenville was a close knit group of about 100 people. We were blessed to have some great friends and they were tremendous in helping us to handle our two new bundles of joy. We were greatly loved and taken care of, and the whole congregation rejoiced at the miracle of their birth. They instantly had a large number of loving, spiritual aunts and uncles.
At this time, the Boston movement was starting to move ahead full force. We made several trips to Boston to go seminars held there and to receive training and inspiration from the church that was growing like wild fire. People started moving there to be trained and be a part of this success story. At first I resisted this notion that they were superior to other churches from the campus ministry (Crossroads) movement, but gradually gave into the “you can’t argue with success mentality”. I was rebaptized because of Kip McKean’s teaching that “you must be a disciple before you are baptized” which is a gross misinterpretation of Matthew 28:18-20. There were some things that I hadn’t repented of until a couple of months after my original baptism. I experienced one of my worst personal atrocities when I was told by the leader of the Greenville church at that time that I needed to fast for a minimum of 10 days before I would be ready to be baptized because my heart was hard. Months later when I challenged that same leader about some harshness and hypocrisy in his life, there was a special group meeting to rebuke me for this and I was also rebuked a couple of times from the pulpit. The church in Greenville was considered to be too small to warrant sending a new leader from Boston to do a “reconstruction”. Everyone was told to move to a city where Boston had already reconstructed a church. Just before this, in 1988, my engineering firm agreed to transfer me to Chicago where Greg and Theresa Jackson were leading a part of the Chicago church of Christ which had grown to around 1500 people.
It was good to be back with Greg and Theresa, but it was quite challenging to be in the large city with the church spread throughout the region. I had a long commute to work and it also took a lot of time to get to the various church meetings. The girls were one year olds and it was challenging to get them out much. I wouldn’t say there was a lot of abusiveness for us personally at that time, but I do remember feeling pressure and nervousness at church with the preaching from Marty Fuqua becoming harsh at times. The emphasis was on “radical commitment” and our number of personal visitors and conversions were increasingly emphasized as a measure of righteousness.
In 1999 my engineering firm transferred me to Cincinnati, because of a lack of projects in Chicago. In my opinion this was the time at which the movement was at the pinnacle of harshness and abusiveness. The evangelist in Cincinnati was Bob Harpole, and I can’t really say very much positive about his leadership style. He was a real bully from the pulpit and in person. He makes me think of the basketball coach Bobby Knight. I remember meeting him at a conference in Boston and telling him that we were moving to Cincinnati. He acted irritated and said something like “I think I should have been informed about this.” Actually I had communicated quite a bit with his right hand man, Ryan Howard. I told Ryan that we had found a good rental house quite close to work and wanted his opinion. He said “You should base your decision on being close to disciples, not close to work.” Never mind that we would be centrally located to a number of disciples in the group - he just wanted to rebuke me for not giving that as the reason. We were told that we should imitate leaders even in our dress, hairstyle etc. Bob Harpole would imitate Kip McKean in the way he spoke using phrases like “are you with me right there”, “amen to thattttt” (the t sound drawn out), “cotton pickin” and many others. We went to a leaders’ meeting one night and couldn’t find a babysitter. The girls were two years old and we were sitting in the back of the room and I was literally terrified that we would get rebuked even though they weren’t making much noise. One Sunday he was preaching and had prearranged with a guy to stand up and make some complaint about how his wife or someone else was treating him. I recognized this right away as a “creative” way to illustrate a similar event that happened to Jesus (I had thought about doing something similar when I used to preach). I leaned over to the guy next to me who was close to becoming a Christian and said “That guy is a plant” and then of course that is the way it played out. Later that night we were counting the cost with this same guy and Bob asked what we thought of the ploy during the sermon. The guy says “I knew it was a plant because Greg had it figured out.” Bob got really irritated and offended and said “I sure saw some scared looks and gasps.” Later that night I was told that I wasn’t spiritually mature enough to be the discipler of this new brother.
There were many strange things that occurred during out time in Cincinnati. Even though I had been studying the bible with and baptizing people for years, we were told that only certain people were qualified to do the official study series (studies used to qualify someone for conversion) with people. We were supposed to let one of the higher level leaders conduct the study and learn the “right way” to do it. This actually went on for years to come. The leader would have us read some of the passages, but even then it had to be read the right way: “with passion”. Because I have a relatively laid back demeanor, I would read the passage extra loud to earn the approval of the leader only to have him say “with passion–not just loud.”
We were literally trained to berate people in a group setting. In group discipling sessions we had practiced “good point – bad point” for years. Each person in the group would say one positive thing about each other person and one negative thing. However, in Cincinnati this reached new proportions. There were many “breaking sessions” where someone would be humiliated if they didn’t conform to the behavior or thinking that was desired. We would even get in trouble if we didn’t jump in with our own challenges to the person under attack. If someone tried to challenge the status quo or the person leading, the “sharks would quickly circle for a feeding frenzy.” Rita was rebaptized for the second time because she was told she never repented of her evil heart. One of Bob Harpole’s favorite sayings was “you scare me – you really scare me” and it got passed down through the group. The implication was that the person has a bad heart that is going to lead them away from God. In a leadership meeting with all the small group leaders in Ryan Howard’s zone, Ryan made each person say who among us they thought was doing the worst with evangelism. I got several votes mainly due to the fact that I was the most recently appointed leader. Legalistic evangelism was actually a strong point of mine in that I invited large numbers of people to church. The group kind of came to consensus on that point and gave the worst performer designation to someone else. That brother left the church not long after that.
We had one to two week long evangelistic “campaigns” where the whole church would go out and knock on people’s doors every night. There were quotas for the number of people we needed to invite and number of people we studied the bible with. We became quite legalistic at this point by sharing one passage with someone and calling it a study. I remember Rita’s discipler keeping her and my 3 year old daughters out late one night looking for homeless people in downtown Cincinnati to share a passage with so they could meet their quota. Even when Rita’s mother was in the hospital dying we were strongly advised to drive a couple of hours home to go to a New Year’s Eve party which was basically a sports night. After her mom died, she was told to “get over it – it is unspiritual to dwell on it or grieve for so long.” Similar negative things happened both before and after our two years in Cincinnati, but I believe this was a very harsh time throughout the movement and especially in Cincinnati. Shortly after that time I believe the church there lost at least half of its membership.
In 1991 I decided to go back to school as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois. We experienced a culture shock at the church in Champaign where Tomm Wilson was leading. Shortly after arriving I remember a young brother complaining to our small group leader about various issues within the church and scheduling problems, etc. I was ready for the group, including me, to let him have it. Instead, the leader thanked him for sharing those things and apologized for the things that he had done wrong. I was in disbelief and asked the leader afterward why we didn’t nuke him for his “unsupportive, sinful” attitudes. The leader said that he knew there had been something wrong and he was just glad that the brother had opened up about what he was feeling. Later Stan and Suzie Addis came to lead the church and they were very wise and mature in many ways. Some healing from the past abuses occurred and we began to restore our dreams for helping people and we led a couple of small groups. We are very thankful for the time period in which we were personally discipled by Stan and Suzie. Our family grew as Sam was born in 1990 and Jake was born in 1992.
In 1994 I graduated with a Ph.D. in food process engineering and was able to get a job at the Continental Baking Co. corporate headquarters in St. Louis which lasted less than a year because of a corporate take over. Again, this was a fairly large church and I don’t have very fond memories of our time in the church there. I received a lot of critical discipling and was even given a hard time for leaving in 1995 to become a professor at the University of Tennessee even though my job in St. Louis was eliminated.
In Knoxville, the situation was not much better because the evangelist and I did not mesh very well. He was an artistic type and told me I should grow my hair long and wear an earring to “look more cool” (I was rapidly balding and preferred a buzz cut). At lunch one day I shared with him some positive things that were happening at work. Later that week the person who discipled me challenged me for being too focused on my job. This was far from being true, and only came about because of the excitement I had expressed to the evangelist. I was also given a list of around seven or eight things that he thought was wrong with a communion message that I gave. I did get a bit defensive about this and that was later shared from the pulpit. When this occurred my name was not used, but when it occurred back in Greenville a couple of times enough details were given so that everyone would know who it was. The brother who discipled me often talked about finances and would project some of his money issues onto me. We were a family of six living on a single income of less than $60k and I have always been very frugal. He had similar challenges and in fact would stiff me when meeting for lunch, etc. One time I bought a casual winter jacket on sale and he asked me about all the details of the purchase and ridiculed me saying it was an “impulse buy”. I thought “Man, aren’t you a real encouragement.” I was strongly advised not to take the family with me on a business trip to Orlando even though the hotel and auto expenses were reimbursed. He was concerned about our not making all of our special contribution. I did not follow that advice. On the positive side, Knoxville was a great place to live and the church was around 100 people, so it was easy to get to know everyone.
When, Dean Toscano, the new evangelist, came we were initially in the dog house because of an unfavorable report from the former leaders. We were discipled by a couple that was not even married yet. However, we were frequently asked to watch the Toscanos’ kids, and they quickly began to see “potential” in us. Most of the remaining four years in Knoxville, we were in various positions of leadership. There were numerous abuses and unbiblical actions at that time in the church propagated by myself and others, but I will say for the most part I was convinced that Dean and his wife Cheryl loved us and had our best interests in mind. “Love covers over a multitude of sins” (I Pet 4:8).
As our daughters reached their preteen and early teen years, they started to express a lot of anger especially at me personally. There were a lot of reasons for this and certainly, we were under some stress due to the schedule and pressures and demands of the church. Most of it probably had to do with my perfectionist and legalistic controlling nature. They by nature also struggle with some of those same things and we butted heads quite often. Unfortunately there were only a few other teens in the church and none with both parents in the church. We went to Nashville to get help from one of the elders who concluded that the problems were all my fault. Although I don’t disagree with that assessment, beating up the father or husband about problems in the family tended to be the default answer for all domestic problems. We did meet with some professional counselors both inside and outside of the church and that was very helpful. We did consider moving to a city where the church had a teen ministry, but we were advised not to because “the church in Knoxville needs you and moving won’t fix your family.” Paradoxically when it was decided that our family problems were too much of a drain on the Toscanos we were told “we really think you should move.”
In 2000, I left the University of Tennessee to go to work for a small start up company. I was to work out of the home originally, but was promised the opportunity to move to a larger city as the business grew. However, the company went bankrupt. I was able to get a contract job in the auto industry near Indianapolis. The church in Indianapolis did have a large teen ministry in which Kathryn and Anna were quite active, and they were baptized in 2001. However, they found the teen ministry to be “cliquish” and some of the other disciples barely acknowledged their existence at school. The church did seem to have a more balanced view in terms of numbers of activities and being family oriented. I personally was determined to make family more of a priority and was not going to overextend myself in terms of schedule or finances. There was a significant period where I cut way back on our weekly contribution which did result in some interesting responses. The church as a whole was starting to change some of the unbiblical practices that were later exposed by the Henry Kriete letter, but our particular small group leader tended to be more “old school” by nature.
After my contract job ended, I got a job in Omaha, NE where we now live and attend the Omaha church of Christ. For the most part I feel great about the effort of the church here to repent of our former unbiblical practices even though some thought patterns are difficult to let go of. There are a number of great people here who really desire to please God and to create a safe, healthy, family focused church. I am still struggling with the concept of God’s kingdom, the role we play, and the relationship we should have with other churches and the lost. I grieve and feel ashamed for some of the abusive and unbiblical practices of our past, and pray to learn from those mistakes. I especially feel betrayed by some of the excesses and financial misrepresentations that took place, because we were continually told that those things would never happen. I did personally see some excesses in terms of pay and benefits received by ministry staff. These things bothered me but I didn’t realize the true depth of this problem was much worse than I imagined. I do feel thankful for the many close friendships that I have had throughout these past 25 years, and I can say that most of them were genuine and permanent. I do feel very sorry for those I have hurt and offer a sincere and complete apology.