derkrash-at-yahoo-dot-com
I would like to expand upon the most subversive things that Pentecost does to people: breaking traditional bonds of friends and family. After all the love bombing and the “friendly” introductions when entering into a Pentecostal church, one will often find himself a bit estranged from one’s family. The problem is not the family, but one’s new methods of thinking and speaking. Gone are the old conversations that were easy-going and mutually understood by common custom. Gone are the instinctive gestures and nods that families and friends develop over years’ time. A new convert has such a wild and life changing hypnotic experience that it changes his outlook on things to the point that normal family and friends cannot understand. They can no longer communicate like before. The new convert wants to talk about religion all the time. He has new words that he uses like “Praise God!” or “I felt a check in the Holy Ghost about that person.” These new speech patterns appear foreign and bizarre to the old friends and family members. The new convert thinks that his experience felt so good that he pushes this new religion on his friends and family to the point where he makes himself a pest. He thinks that his friends and family should do as he has done and he is frustrated that they cannot “see the truth.” The problems gets worse, because the friends and family actually see the strange changes and want nothing to do with such religion because they fear that they will lose their mind and become strange too. So, for a time the friends and family will try to get the new convert to change his ways. The new convert is shocked by this seemingly audacious attempt to get him “away from God.” He cannot see through his new hypnosis that he is the one that is strange and not the friends and family. He goes back to his Pentecostal friends and discusses the problem. They tell him that he needs to preach the truth to his people and get them to come to church. So, the rhetoric steps up and he becomes more of a pest to his friends and family. The family responds in kind that they will not under any circumstances become a part of that “crazy religion.” The new convert cannot comprehend this, begins to think that his family and friends lost their mind, and cannot see that in fact HE actually lost HIS mind. So, his mind forms images of Satan and God in a big fight over his family and friends. He initially thinks that he can rescue them from the devil and tries even harder to get them to come to the new church. He sees that “the devil” has the minds of his friends and family.
After much effort, he thinks that it is hopeless. His new church friends tell him that they rejected the truth and there is nothing more that he can do. Why waste time on these people when there is a world filled with billions of people who want Jesus? So the process of breaking the traditional social bonds begins. He separates from his family because the old things in common are no longer there. They are now strangers to each other. His former friends go their separate ways because they cannot understand his new life and they do not want to become a part of this new life. His new church friends tell him that he will have new friends “in the Lord” who will not lead him astray from God. So, he sees all these cheesy smiley faces and thinks that he can start visiting these people in their homes and start going out to eat with them. The problem is that the only thing that they have in common is this hypnotic experience in religion and likely would never form social bonds in the real world. Thus, his friends and family are now gone, so its feels good and fresh to make new friends to replace the old family and friends.
He jumps into friendships promiscuously without reference to another’s past or present. Are they former criminals? This does not matter since all the previous sins are “under the blood.” Are they respectable people? This does not matter – they spoke in tongues, so they must be “changed and good people.” So he forms bonds that he otherwise would not have formed with people that really would otherwise not cared for him. So, these new social bonds are artificial. They are constructed on a fantasy that all these people are just like him because they “have the Holy Ghost.”
Normally, friendship takes a lifetime or at least a fairly long time. Family bonds form over a lifetime. The normal bonds of family and friends are what help us through serious life trials. We lean on them and they are there through thick and thin no matter what. But, to reject these bonds is to cut us off from natural human structures and survival. With the new church friends, we have to replace the old safety net structures of friends and family with the new church people, who are inherently unstable from the constant hypnotic emotional experiences. The new bonds are – in the most profound sense – UNSTABLE.
So this new convert gets sucked into a system, breaks all serious bonds with friends and family and forms new artificial bonds based on a common hypnotic experience. This opens him up to spiritual abuse. Well, the pastor of such places has dictatorial authority over the church people. If this new member seeks to challenge the authority of the pastor, the pastor has enormous power over him by the threat of breaking these new social bonds by excommunication, slander, or gossip. Since these new “friends” are scared to death of the pastor, and will drop this new convert at the drop of the hat if the pastor tells them that he is rebellious or “of the devil.” This gives the pastor total powers over the physical and emotional life of this new convert.
And so, after the process of breaking the old bonds and forming new ones is complete, the spiritual abuse starts. He is a sitting duck for the pastor. Since the pastor is by nature emotionally self-indulgent and hypersensitive, he thinks nothing of abusing these people to get them to do what he wants. If someone offends the pastor, he thinks nothing of getting back at them by destroying the artificial bonds because since he is unstable, he will do anything he can to make himself feel better – he is after all the “man of God” and the most important person in the congregation. If the pastor does indeed kick this member out of the congregation, the person will be devastated because he will be thrown into the world with no social support whatsoever. His friends and family cannot help him; the relations are soured and they will not understand in any case. His church friends are now gone. He is helpless, alone, and afraid. He has nobody to lean on and no one to speak with. This is where he can crash emotionally from all this sudden pressure of alienation and confusion. So, as he gets angry and emotionally hostile to this treatment, the church calls him “angry” and “bitter,” not seeing that they are the cause of this phenomenon.
It takes years to recover form this type of abuse. It takes time to find new friends and it takes time to repair the damage from the old family fights. Most people will instinctively see this before excommunication, and go along with the pastor because they cannot fathom the hurt and the pain. And thus, one has the outline of an unstable system based on fear and emotional manipulation with the absolute power to destroy somebody. Ask the question: Who has the right to possess such power over people?
JP Istre
