took that as a compliment.
When we arrived at church, a deacon—maybe Mr. Davis or Mr. Cooper—stood at the door and greeted us with a big smile and outstretched hand. “Mr. Himsel, Mrs. Himsel.” Close to 200 people attended services with us every Saturday. They came from the tristate area: southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and northwest Kentucky. Until the mid-1970s, they were all white. Growing up, I was oblivious to the lack of racial diversity in the church. Though why would any black person wish to join a church that stated dogmatically that blacks were intended by God to be slaves because their ancestor, Noah’s son Ham, was cursed to be “a servant of servants unto his brethren”?
My mother greeted other women warmly by their first names, while my father offered a formal handshake and addressed everyone by “Mr.” and “Mrs.” We walked down the aisle to claim a row of hard metal chairs, where we would sit for the next two hours. Wanda, eight years older than me, and Mary, four years older, often sat with friends they’d made. My older brothers, Jim, Ed, and Paul, sat with us. Sarah, the youngest, sat between my parents and occupied herself with her coloring books. Abby, Liz, John, and I—all of us a little over a year apart in age—were clumped together, and we shared a hymnal, passed notes, and poked each other if someone was yawning loudly or if a whisper had become too loud.
In the back was a soda vending machine. The deacons had placed a piece of paper over the coin slot so we could not buy soda on the Sabbath, as we were forbidden to shop or spend money. While we were, of course, not allowed to work on the Sabbath, the church shifted its position on what exactly constituted “work” whenever “new truths” were revealed to Mr. Armstrong. At one point, we were not even allowed to buy gas for the car to drive to services; later, a new truth emerged to allow us to buy gas if it was an emergency. It was difficult to keep track of the ever-changing rules, and just as I’d figured something out, it was altered. It felt like walking on spiritual quicksand.
I liked to turn around in my chair and look at all of the other church members. I had yet to learn that staring was rude. There was a pale, emaciated woman with jet black hair. She fascinated me because she looked so different than everyone else. Only many years later did it occur to me that she was anorexic. Her best friend was one of the heaviest women in the church, a nice lady who would host us in her home when we needed to stay close by to attend church socials on Saturday night or church softball games on Sunday.
I remember being mesmerized by a woman scratching her elbow back and forth in an almost hypnotic way. White flakes fell from her elbow onto her black dress, like stars against a night sky.
Another couple, who had two sons, sat with each other during services, but didn’t live together. Though married, they had been forced to separate because she was previously divorced. According to church doctrine, anyone who got divorced and then remarried must leave his or her current spouse and either return to the one they’d divorced or remain unmarried.
I never knew how the family felt about the rule. If anyone disagreed with church doctrine, they didn’t dare verbalize it. Otherwise, the minister would show up at the house unexpectedly and give them a talking-to. He would remind them that Herbert Armstrong was God’s appointed one. If we wanted to grumble and complain like the Israelites had in the desert to Moses, then, just as the Israelites didn’t make it into the Promised Land, we wouldn’t make it into the World Tomorrow when Jesus returned. Church members lived in fear of those surprise visits.
The ministers had dropped by our house unexpectedly a few times. I never knew exactly why. My oldest sister, Wanda, who was more keenly aware of what was going on, thought it was because they wanted to remind us that they were in control. Or they wanted to make sure our parents were accurately tithing. Wanda surmised that the minister had told my parents not to have more kids, or maybe he was concerned about the spankings my father meted out, mostly to my older brothers, whom he deemed “rebellious.”
The spankings were, in fact, more like beatings. “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” was my father’s definition of parenting, at least of the older ones. Corporal punishment was encouraged, and when you went into the bathroom during church services, you would often hear the sharp slapslapslapslapslap of a mother’s hand against a child’s bare bottom. Not until the child stopped crying would she exit the stall, toddler in hand, the three-year-old’s face blotchy with crying. The mother felt no shame. In fact, she had done her parental duty.
I was completely unaware of the personal lives of any of the members. I found out that a man we all thought was upstanding actually liked young girls. One of the regular door greeters drank three martinis during Spokesman Club and got looped at restaurants. Several of the men spanked their wives to discipline them. And children were beaten regularly for any infraction.
When everyone was seated, the music director went to the front and said, “Please rise for the opening hymn.” Old and young voices joined together to sing songs from The Bible Hymnal, most written by Herbert Armstrong’s brother Dwight. The first song, “Blest and Happy Is the Man,” taken from Psalms 1, was a crowd favorite:
Blest and happy is the man Who doth never walk astray,
Nor with the ungodly men Stands in sinner’s way.
All he does prospers well,
But the wicked are not so;
They are chaff before the wind,
Driven to and fro.
I imagined myself, a fluff of chaff, being tossed about in the wind, never coming to a rest. I feared being wicked.
Next, another deacon offered the opening prayer. Heads bowed, eyes closed, hands clasped either in front or behind us, we listened. “Our merciful Father in Heaven, we thank you great God for bringing us here together on your Sabbath Day, and Lord, we pray that we will take the spiritual nourishment we need today. We pray that your work be done here on earth, and that you just strengthen and lift up your apostle, Herbert Armstrong, to witness to the nations and spread the gospel. In Jesus’s most holy name we pray, Amen.” The deacon’s prayer filled the creaky old room, and it was as if the entire congregation was one soul, praying to God, who bent His ear toward us, taking note of what was being asked.
Depending on the deacon, the prayer could go on for quite some time and incorporate asking God to help us remain strong in the face of persecution (“persecution” was code for one’s extended family or community opposing the church) and thanking God that we knew the Truth, and praying for those in our families who had not yet come to the Truth. Then we sat, placed our Bibles and notebooks in our laps, and listened to the sermonette, followed by the sermon.
Whether the topic of the sermon on any particular Saturday was “What Is Spiritual Sin?” or “Why Were You Born?,” it invariably became a shouting exhortation to remain steadfast in the church because these were the End Times. “You can be alive in Christ or dead in Adam!” the minister would scream. “You must love correction, and diligently seek the sin in yourself. Satan roams society like a lion seeking to devour you! God has raised up this church to witness for the End Times!
“God’s Holy Work must be done so Jesus can return,” the minister would remind us. “God needs YOU! God has called us—the weak and the poor—to confound the wise. Many are called, but few are chosen. This church and God’s chosen prophet, Herbert Armstrong, need your prayers, your loyalty, and your money to do the End Times work.”
My parents tithed ten percent of their income and gave it to the church; another ten percent they set aside to spend at the Feast of Tabernacles, plus there was a third tithe in the third and sixth years of a seven-year cycle that went to the poor, as well as the various “free will” offerings and pleas for money from Mr. Armstrong. My parents believed that our relatives, who disapproved of the money we gave the church, failed to understand that we’d been chosen for an important purpose: so Jesus could return. I was proud to be a part of God’s work on earth, even in a small way. As God’s soldier, I was heralding Jesus’s return to the earth. Nothing could be more important than that. I was proud that my family was chosen but also worried that too much pride was a sin. It was hard to calibrate how much pride was acceptable and how much would