I'm leaving my church. Please pray.

[Originalist]

First of all, if you happen to know my true identity, I ask that you please not blow my cover.

I must admit that I write you today with a very heavy heart. Something happened at church last night that has pretty much convinced me that it is time for me to find another church, and possibly resign from the UPC all together.

Let me give you some background before I get into that.

In January 2009 a prophecy went forth in the church I had been attending for 16 years that severe economic trials were coming to some people in our church . Part of the prophecy said that there was a specific person who was going to be defrauded out of thousands of dollars, and that it was going to be a hard pill to swallow, but that they’d have to just give it to God and accept it. The prophecy went on to say that God wanted us to be of good courage and fear not. Somehow in my heart I knew right then and there I was the one who was going to be defrauded, but that God was preparing me for the coming storm. In May of that year, the storm hit. I lived strictly on commission from the company I was involved with. For about 4 years I was making a modest but decent income of between 50 and 56 thousand dollars a year. In addition, I was substitute teaching about 60 hours a month.

That summer I made only a thousand dollars, and of course there was no teaching income because school was out for the Summer. My wife was pregnant with our second child. I began to apply for work because I had this sense that my income was going to soon completely vanish. I applied for work all over our county, but to no avail. Everything is done online now and nobody was even acknowledging they were viewing my resume. Of course this was during severe economic times nationally and businesses were swamped with applicants. My second child was about to be born, the county had stopped using sub teachers due to cutbacks, and I could not find a job. So I put my house for sale in the Fall of 2009.

It was about this time that my mom began to complain of a severe lack of energy. The real red flag came when one day she could not even get out of the bath tub. She checked herself into the hospital on November 22, 2009 and did not leave there until her death on February 2, 2010. Tests showed that she had developed a very rare autoimmune disorder. The prophesied storm was taking its toll.

As a result of my mom’s death, we inherited her house which was a 1980 model , double wide mobile home on 5 acres of land, about 90 minutes from where we were living. This was a silver lining to the tragedy of her death. We would be living mortgage/rent free. However, the place had fallen into some disrepair and it took allot of the small amount of money we earned from the sale of our house to make it livable again. But the good news was our income seemed to be ticking back up. I was making a couple of thousand dollars a month consistently, as well as substitute teaching. We still were not making as much as we had previously, but with no mortgage and a paid for car, we were hopeful that we’d be able to start saving some money.

At that time we made a personal commitment to start tithing off of the gross of our business income. Up until that point we had been incorporated and paid tithes off of the salary we paid ourselves from our business income. We started doing this as soon as we started attending our current church in June of 2010 and continued doing so until the end of 2011. We did not tell anyone we were doing this.

In December of 2011 another tragedy hit us. A couple of guys with the company we were with betrayed us secretly by working for a competitor company. They managed to steal away a considerable amount of the top money earners in my direct lineage, thus completely wiping out my income. The rest of the prophecy of January 2009 had come to pass. We were now totally dependent on my substitute teaching income. It was at this time that our pastor announced that our church was in a major financial crisis and that unless the members gave extra towards the building fund, there could be major consequences. Knowing he was about to notice a major drop in my giving (I ended up making only nine thousand dollars in 2012) I told him about our dilemma. I stressed to him that I was not looking for financial help, but that we did not want him to think we were bailing on him during his and the church’s difficult time. It was then that we divulged to him that we had been tithing on the gross of our business income. To his credit, our pastor had not taken a salary for about 3 months because of the church's financial problems

2012 was a difficult year. I had gotten allot of sub teaching work that spring semester, but I was unable to find a summer job. I mean there was NOTHING. I had to literally cash in gold and silver coins and sell my old boat just to survive. Even after school started that Fall, subbing was hit and miss. The search for a second part time job search continued, but nothing materialized. I couldn’t even land a job bagging groceries. Since the time we started attending our new church in June of 2010, we had been involved in Spanish ministry. Every Sunday we would attend the AM service, the Sunday afternoon Spanish service, and the PM service. For two solid years we did not even go home on Sundays. We brought our own lunch and took naps in the Sunday School rooms. I only mention that to stress that we were involved.

Finally, in November of 2012 I landed a part time job at Walgreens working 20 hours a week for 8 dollars an hour, with a Bach's degree. The manager had initially told me they were not hiring. But 15 minutes after I talked to her, an employee turned in their 2 weeks notice. So she decided to check out my online application, and to her delight it, and to my surprise, my application was flagged “highly recommended”. She would never have known that had she not manually looked up the application. This made me wonder how many more of my applications had been flagged “highly recommended” at the dozens of other places I had applied. But with thousands of applications flooding their inboxes, managers simply cannot view them all. If you don’t know someone at the place your applying, chances are you will not get a job there. I worked for one company from 1988 to 1999, and another company from 1999 to 2008 (besides my at home income). In both cases, I knew someone who worked there who put in a good word for me.

From November 2012 to April 2013, I worked 7 days a week between my two part time jobs. I was only able to make it to church one service a week. My participation in ministry came to a halt. I literally had 2 days off during that 5 month period. We have only one car, and for those 5 months the only time my wife left the house was when we went to church.

It was at that time I began to notice a change in my pastor's attitude. He made comments to me like “Brother, I know I do not need to remind you of the importance of church attendance”. Or from the pulpit he’d say things like, “If you have a job that makes you miss church, then you are out of God’s will.” But then one day he made this remark from the pulpit, “If someone in this church is struggling financially, all I have to do is check their tithing record to know why.” Both my wife and I thought for sure we had misunderstood him, so we basically put the comment out of our minds.