For a serious\u00a0Evangelical kid in the 1980’s, Youth Group was the setting that mattered.\u00a0 We met every Friday night in the dusty church gym.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Our youth pastor at the time, Pastor Knutsen,\u00a0was an intense man who wore a bad hairpiece and led worship choruses using a banjo.\u00a0 He often talked in gruesome detail about his multiple surgeries for some obscure digestive tract ailment.\u00a0 And he literally scared the Hell out of me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Pastor K had been deeply influenced by Charles Finney.\u00a0 I doubt that he knew this.\u00a0 He was of course not an immediate disciple of Finney, who preached during the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century.\u00a0 But Pastor K often echoed Finney’s notion of true versus false repentance.\u00a0 If your life wasn’t right, Pastor K said, then you probably have not really surrendered it to Christ.\u00a0 Christ is savior and Lord.\u00a0 <\/em>If Christ is really<\/em> your Lord, you will not think the wrong things, dwell on lust, make out, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or enjoy worldly entertainments.\u00a0 If Christ is really<\/em> your Lord, you will want to serve him in missions and evangelism, and you will read your Bible and believe whatever it says.\u00a0 If Christ is really<\/em> your Lord, you will defend your faith against all the onslaughts of the world, and particularly against false liberal Christians.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 And I tried hard.\u00a0 I only listened to Christian music.\u00a0 I openly shared my faith in school.\u00a0 I argued with my science teachers against evolution (I vividly recall one such argument about the lack of mutations in fruit flies).\u00a0 I didn’t drink or smoke.\u00a0 I was sexually utterly naive.<\/p>\n But there was always something.\u00a0 Once in my Senior year in high school I decided to go fishing instead of attending the evening service at church.\u00a0 Here it was:\u00a0 I had failed again to live up to perfection, and so I probably was not really saved.\u00a0 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\u00a0recall it correctly, quite brilliant\u00a0outline of the text.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.”\u00a0 And there were many, many altar calls.<\/p>\n Part way through high school, a new young pastor, Pastor John, took over Pastor K’s role as youth director.\u00a0 Pastor John’s soteriology (of course I didn’t know that word then) was rather different than Pastor K’s.\u00a0 At the time, the so-called “Lordship Salvation” controversy was raging through Evangelical-Fundamentalism.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Sometimes I found Pastor John’s altar calls soothing — I didn’t have to worry about perfection after all!\u00a0 But usually I found myself on the horns of a dilemma:\u00a0 either Pastor K or Pastor John was right, I reasoned.\u00a0 If I chose the wrong one, I’d be damned.\u00a0 Either I would\u00a0not\u00a0work hard enough to justify the claim that Jesus really was my Lord, or\u00a0I would\u00a0try to earn my salvation through works and thereby forfeit salvation by grace alone.<\/p>\n This was torture.\u00a0 I became highly attuned to the nuances in the altar calls of various preachers who would visit\u00a0our 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 But internally, most of the time, I was dying, guilt-ridden, confused, and profoundly insecure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For a serious\u00a0Evangelical kid in the 1980’s, Youth Group was the setting that mattered.\u00a0 We met every Friday night in the dusty church gym.\u00a0 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. 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