For a serious Evangelical kid in the 1980’s, Youth Group was the setting that mattered. We met every Friday night in the dusty church gym. Those were good times in so many ways — wholesome friends, volleyball, a space free of drugs and other evils that were already beginning to consume kids in the high schools.
Our youth pastor at the time, Pastor Knutsen, was an intense man who wore a bad hairpiece and led worship choruses using a banjo. He often talked in gruesome detail about his multiple surgeries for some obscure digestive tract ailment. And he literally scared the Hell out of me.
Pastor K had been deeply influenced by Charles Finney. I doubt that he knew this. He was of course not an immediate disciple of Finney, who preached during the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century. But Pastor K often echoed Finney’s notion of true versus false repentance. If your life wasn’t right, Pastor K said, then you probably have not really surrendered it to Christ. Christ is savior and Lord. If Christ is really your Lord, you will not think the wrong things, dwell on lust, make out, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or enjoy worldly entertainments. If Christ is really your Lord, you will want to serve him in missions and evangelism, and you will read your Bible and believe whatever it says. If Christ is really your Lord, you will defend your faith against all the onslaughts of the world, and particularly against false liberal Christians.
Being a sensitive and introspective person, it was not hard for me to find ways in which I had failed to live up to Pastor K’s standards, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried hard. I only listened to Christian music. I openly shared my faith in school. I argued with my science teachers against evolution (I vividly recall one such argument about the lack of mutations in fruit flies). I didn’t drink or smoke. I was sexually utterly naive.
But there was always something. Once in my Senior year in high school I decided to go fishing instead of attending the evening service at church. Here it was: I had failed again to live up to perfection, and so I probably was not really saved. As a sort of penance, after I got home from fishing I read through the entire book of Job and wrote up an amazingly complex, and if I recall it correctly, quite brilliant outline of the text.
Since certainty was eluding me based on my conduct, just about every time there was an altar call, I responded, even if only quietly “in my heart.” And there were many, many altar calls.
Part way through high school, a new young pastor, Pastor John, took over Pastor K’s role as youth director. Pastor John’s soteriology (of course I didn’t know that word then) was rather different than Pastor K’s. At the time, the so-called “Lordship Salvation” controversy was raging through Evangelical-Fundamentalism. Pastor John went to the leading “Free Grace” seminary, which taught that so-called “Lordship Salvation” was really a diabiolical theology of salvation by works.
Sometimes I found Pastor John’s altar calls soothing — I didn’t have to worry about perfection after all! But usually I found myself on the horns of a dilemma: either Pastor K or Pastor John was right, I reasoned. If I chose the wrong one, I’d be damned. Either I would not work hard enough to justify the claim that Jesus really was my Lord, or I would try to earn my salvation through works and thereby forfeit salvation by grace alone.
This was torture. I became highly attuned to the nuances in the altar calls of various preachers who would visit our church or who I would hear on the radio or at Christian rock concerts, and I would respond accordingly, so as to cover all the bases. My obsessive-compulsive personality grabbed on to this impossible conundrum, and I flagellated myself with it day and night, often resulting in very deep and very dark nights of the soul.
I was rewarded by our system — I was a very, very good kid, President of the Youth Group, chaste boyfriend of the prettiest girl in church, a model for the parents of wayward sons and daughters. But internally, most of the time, I was dying, guilt-ridden, confused, and profoundly insecure.