The audacity of Pentecostals.

I’ve been out of the church for about 3 1/2 years now. I’m none religious. I went to my last pastor’s church for about 11 years, and developed a strong bond with some of the people there. The pastor’s son and I were good friends inside and outside the church. We even worked together for a year or so. He got married in his early twenties and had three kids with a wonderful woman. She is one of the few people I still respect from the church because once I left she was the only one who treated me normally when I’d occasionally visit.

I have increasingly visited less and less to the point that I go about once or twice a year now, usually for something like Mother’s Day to make my mom happy.

A couple months ago I was browsing instagram and noticed that this woman I mentioned had a story. I viewed it expecting it to be a picture of her kids like normal but instead it was just text that read something like “[pastor’s son] you are a nasty man, cheating on your wife for 8 years.”

I was stunned. So I talked to my mom a few days later and she said that they had not been going for several months, but that the pastor’s son had showed up the very Sunday we were talking and was crying and left church early. She has been getting fed up with the bullshit in the church for other reasons I will probably go into in another post, but that was kind of her deal breaker and she has stopped going to the church for the past couple weeks. She’s still Pentecostal but she can’t tolerate their rudeness towards her and lies and deceit.

But the kicker is that this past Saturday, I was getting ready to start my day and my phone starts ringing. The name on the caller ID? The pastor’s son! I was busy so I called him back a little later. And of course his reason for calling was to invite me to a revival service they were having Sunday. It was all I could do to not burst out laughing while talking to him. He tried to peer pressure me into going to service and I was just thinking of what a massive hypocrite he was. This was literally the first time he had reached out to me since I left over 3 years ago. These people have no shame.

But anyway I got a deep satisfaction from not going yesterday and instead watched movies and ate ice cream. It was a good day.