I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  “Did you lock all the doors?” I asked.

  “Yes!”

  “Did you lock the windows?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then call the police, Melissa!” It was something no self-respecting IFB pastor’s wife would suggest. Their counsel would have been to run to the nearest IFB church, confess, and turn back to the truth. But I knew her life was in danger. I was sure the next call I got would be from the police, telling me that my father had strangled my sister to death.

  To keep him from banging down her door, Melissa agreed to meet Bart in a restaurant. We both thought she would be marginally safer in a public place, but I encouraged her to keep her cell phone set to 911 just in case.

  Melissa told me later that the minute she sat down at the table, Bart demanded she break up with her boyfriend. “If you don’t, God will kill you,” he said.

  “No,” she told him, trying to steady her shaky voice just as she had before the unforgettable flogging that turned her into an introvert at age eleven.

  “No?”

  “No. And you need to leave. If you come back, I’ll call the police.”

  Bart ranted and raged, ignoring shocked looks from other patrons, and finally stormed off to the parking lot, his face apoplectic and his fists clenched.

  Melissa watched him peel furiously out of the lot and called me as soon as his car disappeared. “Thank God I met him in public,” she said. “If I hadn’t, I’m sure he would have killed me.”

  My father took Melissa’s threat of calling the police seriously enough that he flew home, where he fired off a five-page handwritten letter outlining all the ways in which she was displeasing God. The Lord’s wrath seemed less chill-inducing than my father’s, though, given some of his other statements.

  “Melissa, you have played a dangerous game and you are about to lose,” he wrote. “Remember our hike to Promise Rock? You kissed me and promised me you would marry pure. Maybe I should not have put so much trust in your kisses. Marrying a lost man is one of the Bible’s descriptions of a filthy act of fornication.… Melissa, you have disgraced your testimony and your Savior Jesus Christ, who is God.”

  The day Melissa decided to flee the IFB cult once and for all and elope with her boyfriend in 2004 was a major turning point for our family. My father had forbidden us from talking to her when she started “going astray” three years earlier, but I had secretly called her at least once a week. I told Joseph I was trying to win her back to the one true church, but really we talked all about her new life. I found it fascinating. I wanted to hear about everything she was discovering.

  Melissa never gave up her personal faith. She and her husband attended a small Bible fellowship together for the next six years and she delivered a beautiful baby girl in 2008.

  At the time, I had no idea how much her actions would impact my own future—but sometimes the universe masterminds a plan for us that we could never have imagined.

  Dying to Myself: The Outhouse Years

  The year 2004 was not only a turning point in my sister Melissa’s life, but in mine as well. For eight of the eleven years we spent in Wisconsin, Joseph pastored a small church an hour from our home called Long Lake Community Bible Church. Fueled by the countless audio lectures I’d heard, I resolved to set a good example for my fellow “church ladies.” Every Saturday, I donned a long skirt or dress and left the kids with a babysitter to plod through the snow with Joseph on church visitations and canvassing efforts, knocking on doors and inviting people to attend our services. Every Sunday I woke the kids up at seven and helped them into their Sunday best dresses, suits, and ties for the hour-long drive to church, often on icy, sleet-covered roads. It was a dangerous drive in the winter and it always kept me on edge.

  I supervised the church nursery while Joseph taught Sunday school to the adults and then led the morning worship service. Our musician friends from Northland provided special music each week or sang. I often sang too or played the violin, since I was one of the few church members who knew how to play an instrument. After that, I headed back to the nursery to supervise my own kids and other congregation members’ children.

  The low point was taking them to the potty. There was no running water in the building, so I had to escort toddlers through foot-deep snow to an old wooden outhouse that smelled foul and seemed to be full of spiders even in the coldest weather. Invariably, one of my children would seize up with cold and fear, let out an ear-piercing scream, and refuse either to get undressed enough to use the potty or dressed again after using it. I would have to muster up my most saintly demeanor, calm the child down, and patiently coax him back to the nursery. Every once in a while another lady in the church would offer help, but I did the bulk of it on my own. With my feet soaked and my frozen fingers fumbling to get endless cold little hands back into endless winter mittens, I would remind myself that a godly, submissive wife would not feel resentful about having to spend so much time in a rank latrine.

  That worked reasonably well until several of my children got sick enough for a visit to the pediatrician’s office. I happened to mention that every Sunday they were using an outhouse that no one ever seemed to clean, and the doctor was flabbergasted. “Do other people in the community use it?” she asked.

  “I guess so,” I told her. “It’s open.”

  She ran a battery of tests right away, fearful my children had contracted hepatitis. Thankfully, they hadn’t. Still, I came home sobbing at the thought of what might have happened.

  “We have to come up with safer facilities,” I told Joseph. But he was at a loss. All the board members lived within easy walking distance of the church, so they never used the outhouse. They didn’t consider it a problem, and they insisted it was too expensive to put in a new bathroom, especially since we needed a new church building anyway. I knew our small congregation had no way to raise enough money for such extensive renovations, so I was stuck indefinitely. Those with homes near the church refused to let me take our kids there to use the bathroom because, they said, it would clog up their sewer pipes. Once again, IFB wives and children came last.

  I started to despise going to church. Every Saturday night as I prepared the kids’ clothes, I got a migraine dreading what lay ahead. Joseph kept assuring me that we were suffering for the Lord. But he wasn’t suffering. I was. And it wasn’t because of the Lord. It was because the men in the IFB never had to walk in a woman’s shoes. It was impossible not to feel resentful. Joseph says now that I should have separated from him as a wake-up call for the way he had started treating me. He says I shouldn’t have agreed to come home until he went to professional counseling and promised to put the children’s and my needs first—and he would tell any woman in my situation to do the same. But it took him many years to come around to that way of thinking.

  The Most Painful Migraine

  As 2004 dragged on, my migraines got worse and more frequent. Sometimes I couldn’t lift my head off the pillow on Sunday mornings.

  “What are people going to think?” Joseph would insist. “You are the pastor’s wife and you’ve missed two weeks in a row now. Even if you have a headache, you should still come.”

  “I’m too sick,” I would mumble.

  As further incentive, Joseph would pull out the Bible and sit on the side of the bed, quoting Scripture. “Do not forsake the assembling of your selves together,” he would read. “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Then he’d preach a mini-sermon about the importance of being in the presence of God’s people whenever the church doors were open. Joseph thought I was starting to “backslide” away from the truth and that he owed it to both God and me to insist on my doing what was right.

  Usually I would relent and drag myself out of bed despite my splitting headache, huddling mutely in the passenger’s seat during the ride to church and cringing as I thought about the marathon nursery duty that lay ahead. The hygiene issues never improved. With no proper restroom and no running
water to wash their hands, sickness was rampant among the kids, but I could never convince Joseph that the lack of sanitation at the church was the cause. We didn’t know it at the time, but the church had a black mold problem, too, which aggravated the sinus infections and strep throat.

  Just as I had at camp, I tried to get my heart “right with God,” praying for a submissive, broken spirit. But the more I prayed, the more depressed, hopeless, and trapped I felt.

  The clincher came one Sunday when I had a shattering migraine, but Joseph felt that he had to stop and visit a woman from church after the service. When we got to the woman’s house, I told her I was ill and asked if I could lie down for a few minutes. She led me to a back bedroom, where I collapsed instantly. She laid a blanket over me and I slept for the next hour.

  Finally, she came back to get me. As I stood up, I glanced down at the bed. I was horrified to see that I had been lying on a crosshatch of dark, damp streaks.

  “Oh my!” she exclaimed, following my gaze. “The dog just had puppies. She must have wiped her afterbirth all over my bed. I’m sorry.”

  I fought back an urge to gag and assured her it was okay. On the long ride home, I tried to erase the sickening image from my mind, but the second I got the kids tucked in for their late-afternoon nap, I started crying uncontrollably. I was cracking under the pressure of my crazy schedule, my nauseating headaches, constant nightmares, financial worries, an endless succession of pregnancies and child care duties, and the stranglehold the IFB had over every aspect of my life.

  I got no sympathy from Joseph. Instead, he scolded me for being ungrateful, rattling off a laundry list of all the wonderful things God had provided. Then he prayed with me that I would become more submissive to God’s will. It’s a beautiful belief system for men, isn’t it? You get treated like a king and called “God’s representative over your family,” and if your wife objects to anything, it’s her “sin problem.” This patriarchal philosophy was turning my once kind and gentle husband—a man who genuinely loved me—into a monster.

  My Father: The Instigator

  My father still insisted on coming to visit us and, whenever he did, he stoked the fire by coaching Joseph to be more patriarchal, more domineering. At this point in our marriage, the two of them spent hours talking shop in our living room. Bart had been officially ordained as a senior pastor by Les Heinze and taken the helm of a church in Brighton, Colorado. After years of pastoring children and teens, he was reveling in his newfound power over adults. He took great pride in a series of draconian rules he had imposed on his church members, including mandatory nursery duty for women and keeping tithing logs on everyone. He even went so far as to knock on people’s doors during the Christmas season to remind them of their financial responsibility to the church. Erupting into boisterous fits of laughter, he’d talk about how surprised his church members were when he reprimanded them for failing to give what they had promised in their faith mission statements. Joseph listened, out of filial respect, but internally, he cringed at Bart’s tales.

  Invariably, the conversations would turn toward our marriage. By now, he was at a loss as to how to lead me into “proper godly submission,” so he started seeking my father’s advice and sharing details of our disagreements out of desperation.

  “She’s trying to control you,” Bart would warn. “You need to put your foot down.” I would sit at the top of the stairs, listening to the two of them in the living room and cry, knowing Joseph was absorbing every word.

  My Brother: The Hero

  Bart always held Jason up as the gold standard of IFB leadership and his wife as the ideal of sweetness and submission, and urged us to be more like them. By now, my brother was an outspoken voice for the cult, standing on the capitol steps in Denver and railing against the state of Colorado for allowing shock-rock singer Marilyn Manson to perform. His theatrics earned him a clip in filmmaker Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine. Moore was holding Jason up for ridicule, of course, but in my father’s mind my brother was being persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

  My father also sang Jason’s praises for “having the guts” to take on the producers of a Christian movie called End of the Spear, which starred an openly gay actor named Chad Allen. Jason launched a campaign to convince IFB pastors to boycott the movie—and to demand that the producers apologize for choosing Allen as an actor. His efforts backfired in the evangelical community, a market he had always wanted to break into, after IFB theologian Kevin Bauder from Central Baptist Theological Seminary posted a blog comment about fire-bombing gay men’s homes in connection with the movie, and The New York Times picked it up. The evangelical community blamed Jason for sabotaging a movie they saw as a way to spread the “Good News.”

  Despite what “compromisers” thought, Jason was a hero to my father, and he took full credit for having broken Jason’s will sufficiently to mold him into a true warrior for God. In a way, Jason’s influence was now so strong in the IFB that his power was eclipsing my father’s, and Bart was keen to stay on his good side.

  My Husband: The Enabler

  Joseph was never physically or sexually abusive, but emotional abuse of women was part and parcel of the IFB lifestyle—and Bart reinforced the message to my husband whenever he had the chance. Men in IFB organizations understood that if they couldn’t keep their wives in line they could lose their jobs, so they lived under tremendous pressure. As a result, Joseph grew more autocratic and critical with every year of marriage. He started thinking any problems we had were my fault.

  Whenever we disagreed, he would dredge up a convenient anecdote about another IFB leader and his wife. One of the worst was his story of how prominent IFB evangelist “Dr.” Jim Van Gelderen, one of our wedding pastors, wanted to make sure he was getting a submissive wife before he tied the knot. So he waited until a storm was forecast, then he took his future bride, Rhonda, on a hike to the top of a mountain. When the downpour started, he told her to stay put while he fetched umbrellas from the car. She did exactly as he said, without question, standing stock-still in the wind and rain until he returned. After that test of Rhonda’s obedience, Van Gelderen said, he knew she was the one for him.

  When Joseph was in college, he spent six months traveling on Van Gelderen’s revivalistic team Minutemen Ministries, a promotional student group sent out by Bob Jones University. On several occasions, Joseph saw him literally command his then thirty-year-old wife to take a nap in the back of the van, in spite of her repeated, humble biblical appeals that she wasn’t tired. Van Gelderen would always say that he knew best and that she needed to be fresh for the service that evening. With that, Rhonda would go submissively to the back of the van, wanting to set a good example of a godly wife to the college team.

  I knew a lot more inside stories about the marriages of key IFB leaders because of my husband’s position. Many women were quite frank with me about how two-faced their husbands were—gentle and charming in public, while treating their families like dirt in private. Some told me they had shut down emotionally in their marriages, but, as long as they still provided sex on demand, their husbands never seemed to mind. “Dr.” Bob Jones III’s wife, Beneth, famously taught IFB wives for decades that they must learn to submit when their spiritual head made what seemed like bad decisions. “Duck so God can deck your husbands,” she would counsel. That statement always baffled me. Would a good wife want her husband to be “decked” by God instead of trying to spare him from making a wrong decision that would hurt his family? Would she want to say, “I told you so” instead of protecting him? It was as twisted and sadistic as the philosophy that parents had to inflict pain on their children as “God’s refining fire” to their soul.

  My friend Tami Herron often expressed contempt for the way decisions were made at Northland and the fact that her husband, Marty, who was vice president of the school at the time, wouldn’t intervene. Once, when Joseph sought counsel from Marty about his struggle to keep me in line, Marty advised, �
��What my wife, Tami, has had to learn through the years is that she is responsible to me before God, not for me and the decisions I make in our family and ministry. Jocelyn has just got to learn the same thing.”

  During some of our own marriage conflicts, Joseph even reminded me about how my father had grounded my mother, taking away her checkbook and banning her from the den, when he discovered she had gone through his things. “At least I don’t treat you like that,” my husband told me. There was nothing I could do. If it got out that we were having marriage struggles, I would certainly be blamed for my lack of submission and my husband could lose his job.

  Suicide was looking more and more appealing. With my usual methodical approach, I spent hours devising a plan. I didn’t want to kill myself in a way that my children would find out about and be damaged for life. What if they blamed themselves? So I started running through scenarios that would let me avoid that. If I slit my wrists, it would be obvious. Leaving the car running in the garage was a possibility, but people would probably still figure it was suicide. I finally settled on running my car head-on into a semi. It would be a tragic accident. I never thought about the driver of the truck. I was just looking for an avenue to escape the pain.

  Welcome to the Boys’ Club

  While I sank ever deeper into despair, Joseph’s career was ascendant. His influence in the church leadership got stronger every year. The year before Melissa eloped, “Dr.” Bob Jones III awarded him with an honorary doctorate at the commencement ceremony. Joseph was just thirty-three. Only one other man had been given this high honor at such a young age and that was Billy Graham, before he fell out with the IFB in the 1950s.

  Joseph had been writing music since he was sixteen and more than forty of his songs had been published in the IFB music venue. Technically Jones was awarding the degree to Joseph and three of his fellow composers for “not crossing the line of music by publishing in the Christian contemporary music industry.” In reality, though, it meant “Dr.” Bob Jones III was officially inducting Joseph into the boys’ club. The IFB godfather himself was bestowing one of the cult’s greatest laurels on Joseph. In mob terms, he was a made man.