I've been seeing a lot of postings on Facebook and online about Jesus Camps that are directed towards small children. The videos and images shown are of crying children being taken over by the spirit of god under the guidance of adults.
I'm going to share some of my personal experiences with such things.
When I was 11, my father remarried and began attending his new wife's church. It was a living church, which means they aren't dead in the spirit and use praise and worship with upbeat and emotive music instead of traditional hymns. I admit I enjoyed the music and at the age of 12 joined the praise and worship team as a violinist.
The church hosted a summer camp for the members and of course, we went. Free childcare! Free food! It usually wasn't too bad, but as the program progressed it started to get a bit odd. We'd always start out with prayer, some fun songs, and then go off to crafts and bible lessons. It was pretty typical vacation bible school fare, but it always ended in the chapel with an intense praise and worship session.
Soon, however, following the prayer and fun songs, our leaders would ask if anyone wanted to get in some extra praise and worship time. This was always followed by energetic cheering so the music would continue and instead of Onward Christian Soldier! and other such fun songs, we'd start singing modern praise and worship.
Each day this P&W would extend and extend until it was all we did. Then people started talking about speaking in tongues. We were encouraged to open our minds to the spirit and to allow it to take hold of our mind and tongue so that we could speak our special language that was between ourselves and god. One by one, kids started jabbering and blabbering in gibberish as they mimed the adults. I kind of sat there uncomfortable because it wasn't happening to me.
An adult came over to me and a few others who looked just as confused and uncomfortable as I and pulled us up onto the stage in front of the congregation for a "private" meeting. She was kind and caring as she asked us why we weren't speaking in tongues. I looked down at my shoes and started wringing my hands while casting furtive glances at the congregation staring at these kids who were in trouble on stage. I could feel myself starting to sweat which made me begin to perspire even more. I just sort of mumbled that I didn't know how.
The sweet lady brightly asked us what our favorite motorcycle was. I perked up instantly and shot my hand into the air. She pointed at me and I said "Harley Davidson!" because my dad rode a Harley and I was SO proud of his motorcycle. She kind of chuckled and asked for Japanese motorcycles...like a Kawasaki, Suzuki, or Mitsubishi. I had no clue where she was going with this and reverted back to staring at my shoes while wringing my hands.
She then went through a lesson on how to speak in tongues. She said to repeat those three motorcycle names over and over and over again, very fast, and before we knew it, god would take over our tongue. We just had to practice!
I looked at her in horror. I knew scripture well, even at that age I read the scriptures voraciously every morning while my dad had his coffee and we had our cereal and juice. Perhaps because of our new church's beliefs, we'd been studying speaking in tongues that summer and what I was being taught at VBS completely conflicted with what I had read in the bible. I was under the understanding that the disciples were speaking in tongues ONLY when they were in a crowd of unbelievers who did not speak their language. That tongues were just a language you didn't understand, but was understood by everyone else. It was a known language.
This is not what the church was teaching. They were teaching babble talk, nonsense gibberish, and if I didn't do it, and do it soon, I'd be the last kid standing on the stage in front of the entire church. I'd be a bad child who didn't believe in god like the rest of them, someone who had hardened her heart and stood apart, separate from the rest of the flock.
So I started to jibber and jabber and mutter odd words. I was hugged and god was praised before being sent back to my seat with a taint of someone who couldn't accept god on her own. It felt so wrong.
This is the first of many odd experiences I had in church.
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