Nick's Story

This blog is for the silenced, the marginalized, and the victims of the many types of abuse that the leadership and members of Liberty Church in O'Fallon Missouri have inflicted on their members and any who opposed their love for control. These are the stories of the witnesses:
*Not everyone that Liberty has hurt has found a new church home. Some of us have left our former faith and beliefs behind because of the actions and thinking of Liberty and others like them.

Nick's Story


"-Liberty Church and TFC
I attended Liberty Christian Church (LCC) and its associated youth ministry, Teens for Christ (TFC) in my teens and early twenties. LCC is the last church I attended as a Christian.
I am now thirty-four years of age and have been an atheist for eleven years.
I do not necessarily consider myself any more abused by LCC and TFC staff and doctrine than I would have been in many other churches. There are many close to me who experienced things much worse than I, and their testimony stands on its own merits. Here I merely wish to catalog a few distinct memories that have stuck with through the years -- things that formed the general milieu of control and manipulation that LCC and TFC radiated.

"-Worship" as emotional manipulation
Though LCC and TFC aligned with Reformed Calvinist Protestantism, the "worship" time at every meeting followed the path of modern Evangelicalism, with simplified, repetitive songs -- easy to memorize, catchy choruses, delivered by a rock band -- rather than the traditional mode of hymns accompanied by organs and pianos.

The style of music is important insofar as it was used as a tool of emotional manipulation. "Worship" time would often run long -- over an hour of singing songs, sometimes longer -- but the song selection was often small while individual songs would be repeated over and over and over, often escalating into that musical point of bliss where a single keyboard would ping out the chorus in slow, painful, agony as everyone wept or swayed, frequently with closed eyes, and always with the disposition of a junkie on a binge.

When I was younger I understood this to be the "movement of the holy spirit", filling people with its mighty presence in the face of god. Indeed, there would often be droning prayers, or cries from attendees, for the spirit to come and "fill this place". Odd, since the Bible clearly states that a gathering of two or more people by itself performs that function. But the point of the music was never to conjure the spirit, it was always to prime the emotions to be played. Which is why worship time always preceded the sermon, or any call to the alter (and on occasion would also follow the sermon to further stroke the flames of irrational commitment). I cannot recall a single meeting where music did not take precedence.

-Don't talk to girls, it makes them pregnant

There is nothing a horny teenage boy wants more than the attention of pretty teenage girls. This is biology. This is how the species survives. The sexual impulse forms the motivation for, and sociological conditions of, most human relationships. And I was certainly not immune to it. So how does one corral the budding sexual interests of both young men and women within the authoritarian construct of Christianity? Teach biblical courtship, of course.

The TFC youth ministry of LCC used to hold annual seminars called "The Heart's Desire Conference" where young people (middle school and high school, mostly) were directly discouraged from forming "inappropriate" relationships with members of the opposite sex. In this context "inappropriate" meant: any physical or emotional relationship not directly sanctioned by each individual's family and the LCC and TFC church leaders.

The justification for this oversight springs from three sources: first, the desire to cultivate "biblical character" in young people before they become intimate; second, overprotection as insurance against divorce (a grievous sin in the church), as if the personality and character of young people will stratify at some point and never change after marriage; and third, the plain allure of power over others.

Normal, sexual interest became something to fear. "Unapproved" relationships led to chastisement from parents and church leadership, and ostracization from "friends" who were all trying to prove themselves worthy and pure in hopes of securing the eventual blessings of the church for their own sexual interests.

I recall a very specific evening at a TFC group meeting where I sat very close to a girl in which I had an obvious interest. After the meeting we were both ushered into separate rooms and grilled by group leaders as to our intentions with one another, level of intimacy, etc., in manner that Orwell would painfully recognize. We were ordered not to sit together in the future.
And so while LCC and TFC preached that sex per se was not a sin, any practical expression of sexual interest was, more often than not, treated as such, and any dissent or defiance in the face of this condemnation were grounds for emotional abuse and disassociation. In my own experience and that of others with whom I've talked, the damages wrought by this twisted control mechanism in the lives of young men and women who have come and gone through LCC and TFC is legion.

-Same prayers, same responses
That prayer doesn't convert more people to atheism surprises me. I recall many evenings at LCC and TFC listening to the same people pray for the same things and get the same results, which were inevitably not the answers they sought. So-and-so is dying of some disease, or has some physical ailment, or needs some financial support, ad infinitum. These prayers repeated endlessly, week after week, and never got answered.

On an individual level it's easy to buy the bromides that "god works in mysterious ways" and "god works in his own time", but at scale, when you stand in a sanctuary full of people begging a deity for relief from some of the most painful things life has to offer, it becomes uncomfortable, and sad.

Help did come, sometimes; from people in the church who, through pity, took up the mantle of aid. And god received the credit, because the doctrine of sin categorically excludes human beings from genuinely good, self- generated actions. So not only did prayer offer false comfort to those engaged, it robbed those who acted with genuine kindness of their due recognition and gratitude.

-Pastor as rainmaker
Do the clergy need money? Of course, they're human and need to survive in a culture where money is a medium of exchange for goods and services. Volumes could be written about the validity of exchanging lies (comforting or not) for money, but whatever those moral implications might be there is certainly nothing illegal about a pastor taking money from church members as salary, or for tithes being used to build and maintain church facilities. LCC is not a "prosperity gospel" church, so it never used the promise of worldly riches to convince members to give. And I certainly never thought church staff lived luxuriously at the expense of members. But it became painfully obvious that god's provisions for his own house were directly contingent on how many consecutive sermons could be delivered on the duty to tithe.

I recently shredded some old tax returns that were over a decade old, in which I found a worksheet of charitable donations. While I was at the very beginning of my career -- making minimum wage, driving a junker, and living in an apartment with no window blinds -- I still managed to carve out ten+ percent of my earnings, an amount of interest the IRS. So it may come as no surprise when I found weeks of sermons on tithing to be a bit tedious. And certainly it spoke little to me of god's ability to provide. If I could scrape the pennies from my paycheck why couldn't the almighty move others to do the same so we could get on with it? For all the emphasis on individualism, Protestantism still relies on the engine of guilt that fuels collectivism to fund itself, and that is just dumb. Biblical, but dumb.

-The after
My experiences aren't unique -- I know many share them. I know many have worse. I know some have better. But they tainted my formative years and it has only been with great effort and much self-repair that I've mitigated the damage. Some of the broken pieces can't be fixed, but they can be managed. To an extent this is just life anyway, and to claim special status or victimhood or pity would be an insult to the human spirit's capacity to triumph in spite of circumstance.
I am relieved that some of those who experienced abuses at LCC and TFC found their way to healthier communities and better lives, and it is my sincere wish that those who are still in the throes of indecision find the strength and courage to do the same." 

Do you have a story to tell? Has Liberty Church hurt you? Email your story to petertkintz@gmail.com and I will have it posted!