The late seventies was a time when Americans of my generation were seeking to create a better world than the one they had grown up in. As children we grew with stories from the Great Depression, two World Wars, The Korean Conflict and The Vietnam War and then lived for years in the shadow of Communist Russia. My generation experienced an energy crisis that made it necessary for the government to mandate a 55 mph speed limit. It even darkened our Christmas that year with a prohibition on outdoor Christmas lights. Around that same time President Nixon was impeached and the singer Jim Croche was killed in a plane crash. We lived with the threat that our brain on drugs was like an egg in a frying pan. It was all back in good old days, right?

Religion in the late 70’s had mixed reviews and for most of us in the Midwest it was just part of the landscape we grew up in. My family was part of a theologically liberal Lutheran denomination where infant baptism, confirmation, communion and then membership all happened because we were born Lutheran. It was barely relevant to my family or to me personally. When the Evangelicals came along with their emphasis on a personal faith they also made it clear that my Lutheran church had been so influenced by secular humanism that it was no longer true. What was true according to them was that I was a sinner, separated from God and that in order to be a true Christian I would have to ask Jesus into my heart. I did that and shortly thereafter joined the Southern Baptist church that most of my new friends went to.

I found my life’s center in this new faith primarily because I was so welcomed and wanted. A year after entry into this world, when I was 17, one of the leaders of the youth group approached me and asked me to consider joining a small group from the church going on a road trip to Dallas, Texas, to attend a seminar called The Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts. He explained that it was going to be a seminar taught by Bill Gothard whose expertise was in explaining the Bible in a way that made it easy to understand. I couldn’t wait to join them.

The seminar did not disappoint. It was an entire week long with a lecture every evening on M-Th and then all day on Friday and Saturday. It was the equivalent of an intense summer camp. I was surrounded by the perfect combination of people and places in the midst of a full on immersion of biblical passages and what they were said to mean. I was away from all that was familiar to me and day after day I became convinced that God had brought me there to change my life. I left and committed my life to becoming all that Bill Gothard had encouraged those in attendance to be.

I arrived back home after the seminar and immediately broke away from all of my friends. I threw away all of my secular music and vowed to stop smoking. I studied the seminar syllabus a lot and vowed to date and marry a growing Christian. My choices were continually reinforced by the youth group leaders, the people in my church and my new friends. I loved my new life and never imagined that I would ever leave it.

By the time I graduated from high school and went off to college in 1979 the teachings from the IBYC (IBLP) had become intimately integrated into my life. I was guided by its perspectives but because I was on a secular campus I threw my energy into another para church ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ. There I quickly became a leader and enjoyed being mentored (discipled) by one of the full time staff at our campus. I met Dean in the ministry discovered that he too had been to the seminar and was a serious Christian. That seriousness was common among those of us who had attended at we shared a general admiration for its principles. I had dated other Christian men but few were like him. What distinguished him from the others for me was his willingness to learn, grow and change. I thank whatever God there is that I had that commitment, learned at the seminar, because it has saved me. I so easily could have ended up in an awful and toxic patriarchal marriage instead of the egalitarian relationship we’ve had from hello. This one single thing about us allowed us to think out loud with each other. Using our rational minds in the safety of each other eventually paved the way for us to break free. That said, it still took so very long to get there.

Shortly after our marriage we devoted ourselves to an Evangelical church that had split off from a small Southern Baptist church because after an associate pastor and some other members in the church attended the Advanced Institute In Basic Life Principles they were inspired to rethink church structure. After a period of study, the Baptist church held meetings for the congregation to consider changing its structure to become more in line with Bill Gothard’s authoritarian version of church government.

The pushback on any kind of structure other than the original democratic, majority rule one the church was founded with was not going to change. As a result, the associate pastor left with those loyal to him and started an entirely different church. Realities like this began to take shape all across the American Evangelical landscape in response to Bill Gothard’s seminars. He spoke as a mouthpiece for God and what no one seemed to grasp is that he’d created that image of himself, sold it to a small group first and then to larger and larger ones in succession until entire sports arenas were full of devoted, serious Christians who would soak up his every word.

Bill Gothard prepared those assembled together to accept his biblical expertise first by sharing his personal story. He told those gathered together that while he was in high school he would encounter problems and as he did he would memorize scripture to solve them. I can still hear him say the word scripture with a tonal quality that was mesmerizing to the devout. He went on to say that memorization proved insufficient so he began to look more deeply at specific verses, cross referencing them with others, making observations about the culture of the day and history in order to really come to understand the said scripture he started with. By the time he got to this part the crowd was pretty much under his spell.

Scripture memorization and meditation were seen by Evangelicals as the gold standard for understanding the will of God. We were taught that any kind of academic pursuit of the Bible or Christian faith by the liberally minded of our day had taken us away from the authentic gospel. The way to really grasp God through His Word (the Bible) was to memorize and meditate upon it. It was very much the way above all ways to know God. When this soft spoken, kind, perfectly attired in his Sunday church clothes, hair cut neat as a pin man opened his mouth with such reverence, the result was that he could say almost anything and those in attendance were going to buy into it. He convinced us that he had solved every basic problem to mankind through this method of study and observation in his youth and over time as he assembled his findings in a curriculum and taught them to others the Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts was born. The name was later changed to the Institute in Basic Life Principles. Pretty brass, don’t you think? We didn’t even notice.

Those assembled listening to Bill Gothard that week when I attended in Dallas did so with utmost respect and deference to his conclusions about everything from self esteem, parental relationships and dating. I did too. We had no thought of questioning the reality of life as he presented it. Instead of grasping that a young man in high school had developed an obsession with perfection in response to his own issues, we saw him as the mouthpiece of God.

The lectures were personable and full of stories validating his perception of anointed insight. In the basic seminars I attended, Mr. Gothard did not emphasize his home school, quiverful teachings. Those came from his Advanced Seminar. Thankfully, I never did make it to one of those. In 1984 Dean traveled with a group from our church to somewhere in Kansas to attend the Advanced Seminar but I was dealing with some intense morning sickness and didn’t go. I remember vividly the continual ask from the leaders in my church to rethink my decision to stay home and trust God for the strength and stamina to go. I was relatively knew to the whole umbrella of authority in the context of a church like that so without any hesitation stood my ground with a firm no.

Sadly, that ability to know my own voice was chipped away at in the years to follow and I went to many a meeting, conference and worked way beyond what I should have in response to someone else’s determination that they had spiritual authority over me and my life. I take full responsibility for giving it to them but at the same time, I know full well that any time there is this kind of willingness to forego one’s own wise mind, they have been carefully molded by those they follow to do so. No person with a sound mind just jumps in and says, “I’ll do whatever you say no matter what the cost.” It just doesn’t happen that way, even in the military one has to learn how to follow without question.

My church community did not embrace Bill Gothard’s Advanced seminar and for that I am beyond grateful because had they, I am pretty sure Dean and I would have been right in the middle of it. We are so grateful for the highly educated people in our midst, especially a couple of family practice doctors who saw the reality of what a quiverful movement would bring to our lives. The stories of women harmed by this movement are many. Believing that God can over rule reality brought about any number of pregnancies that were medically fragile and ill advised. The tragedies of abuse that took place in homes in the years that followed this idea of having as many children as God gives you are abundant. Families lacking adequate food, clothing and shelter let alone adequate medical care etc. are scattered all over the America we live in at present. We are not one of those with that story. But we are one of those with a story of how destructive Bill Gothard’s Umbrella of Authority was. The idea that we are vulnerable to destructive temptations when we are not in submission to anointed authorities God has placed over nearly cost us everything.

I do not know what it was in us that gave us the courage to question our church authorities or those of Evangelical Christianity in general but our questions began early on and never stopped until we finally left. That said, the painful reality of departure is still with us. The reality that so much of what we understood as true was an entirely manufactured reality and had nothing to do with God has been a huge pill to swallow. Dealing with the grief and pain seems to never end. It doesn’t own us as much as it once did and yet, because of the reality that what began with Bill Gothard and others has morphed into a very radical far right political movement, it seems even more regretful as we count ourselves lucky to be removed from it.

We have been grateful for the real healers who came into our lives and have empowered us to be our best selves over the years. We are grateful for our children’s growth and clarity that continues to teach us. We’ve healed and are still healing. I write these posts most of all because to continue to heal I must own this story.