I had a healing experience this weekend.
As most of you probably know, I was raised in a pretty toxic and abusive fundamentalist Christian environment - actually, more than one. Some of this was a result of my father's untreated serious mental illness and some of it was the result of the toxic nature of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity (and, to be honest, religious leadership in any community can exacerbate the narcissistic personality disorder that my father had, but fundamentalism does so in a much more intense and unchecked way). I had already left fundamentalism behind by the time I was in high school.
Last night, I had the desire, which I acted upon, to list all the congregations I've regularly worshiped with in my life. Looking at the list certainly confirms that I've led a "sectually promiscuous" life (an Orthodox rabbinical student at Yeshivat Maharat who is a mutual follow on Twitter, when I used that phrase recently in a tweet, responded by saying, "HOW is sectually promiscuous not your handle?", lol). I also decided to look up the websites of my childhood churches, and was pleasantly surprised by one of them, the First Baptist Church of Jefferson City, Tennessee.
After a couple of disastrous pastorates in the Assemblies of God, around the time I was turning 10, my father decided to return to the Southern Baptist fold, and we joined this church for a few months before he was called to pastor another Southern Baptist congregation. It was larger than most of the churches I was a part of growing up, and the children's programming was decent. To my great surprise, I discovered that while this church is still connected with the Southern Baptist Convention (I gather rather tenuously), their primary affiliation is now the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a more moderate Baptist denomination that came out of the SBC after the fundamentalist takeover. The CBF ordains women and, while not yet fully lgbt-affirming, are grappling with the issue and not reflexively anti-lgbt like the Southern Baptists (with a spectrum of views among Cooperative Baptist congregations). Indeed, this congregation now has a female minister on their staff.
I decided to watch a service last night. Definitely not what my preference is worship-wise these days, but also not what I remember growing up (there was a "hymn of commitment" after the sermon, but the minister who preached said that if anyone wanted to talk to him, to do so after the service or at any time, effectively making this NOT an "altar call" or "invitation"), and the sermon was pretty good and did not express the fundamentalism that I regularly heard growing up - it was a good expository sermon on the incident of Moses and the burning bush - and, frankly, very similar to what I've heard rabbis say in synagogues.
This evening, I remembered that today is actually the fiftieth anniversary of my baptism, which took place in another Southern Baptist church. I decided to watch the recording of this morning's service, and again, had a fairly similar experience. Tonight, the sermon was on the Ten Commandments - he's doing a sermon series "What I Learned from Moses" - I would quibble with a couple of things he said, which I think one might also hear in much more liberal Christian churches, but again, overall, a good sermon.
I'm not going to return to the Baptist fold. I will continue doing what I'm doing religiously (indeed, I attended a Zoom Talmud class this morning and Zoom Bible class this evening, both through the local Orthodox synagogue I attend along with another more liberal synagogue). I'm sure my theology is different from that of the minister.
But it was healing to know that one of the churches I was a member of as a child with my parents has moved on from the toxic fundamentalism in which I was raised and is, from what I can tell, a healthy spiritual environment, and for that I am grateful. And it was something I needed to know on this day.
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