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If you have not already done so, please read Part One of this series.
In February 1979, my wife and I packed up our meager belongings and moved from Pontiac, Michigan to the place of my birth, Bryan, Ohio. We lived with my sister and her husband for a few weeks while I secured employment and found us suitable housing. Polly, at the time, was six months pregnant with our first child.
As hardcore Fundamentalist Baptists, our first order of business was to find a church to attend. We had been taught that missing church was a grievous sin, a transgression that brought swift judgment from God. Family and friends thought that we would attend First Baptist Church. It was, after all, the church I attended before college and it was pastored by a distant relative, Jack Bennett. My sister and her husband were attending Montpelier Baptist Church, pastored by Jay Stuckey. Polly thought First Baptist was an aging, dead church, with little to offer a young family such as ours. My feelings were a bit more conflicted due to the fact that I knew many of the people at First Baptist, but I knew Polly was right. So, instead of going where everyone expected us to go, we started attending Montpelier Baptist Church.
Montpelier Baptist was a young church, affiliated with General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARBC). The church’s pastor and his wife were a few years older than we, and many of the congregants were young adults. The nursery teemed with newborns, and there was an excitement in the air as, week after week, the church continued to grow. Pastor Stuckey was what I would now call a newspaper-headlines preacher. He preached sermons about the ends times, the rapture, and the Illuminati — the things you found in Chick Tracts. For those who interested in prophecy and evangelism, Montpelier Baptist was the place to be.
Several weeks after we started attending the church, Jay asked me to be his assistant, working with the bus ministry and the church’s evangelistic efforts. The position paid me exactly zero dollars and zero cents, even though I would, in a few weeks, find myself working at the church over thirty hours a week. Fortunately, I had secured a union job working at ARO in the shipping and receiving department, so money was not a concern.
Between the church and ARO, I was gone from home almost eighty hours a week. Polly was left alone most days, rarely seeing me until late in the evening or at church. I quickly became consumed with the work of the ministry, neglecting my wife for the sake of supernatural call God had on my life. Polly saw my devotion to the church as the way pastors were supposed to be — sold out, on fire for Jesus. As my wife, Polly knew that God, ministry, and church came before her and whatever children we might have.
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No matter how many hours I worked or how long I was away from home, Polly never said a word. She could see that God was blessing my work at the church. Thanks to my work with the bus ministry and the church’s visitation program, church attendance grew rapidly. We were bringing so many children in on the buses that they had to sit on the floor at the front of the church. The crowded pews lent themselves to the belief among the congregation that God was doing something great at Montpelier Baptist Church. In October 1979, nine months after I started working with Jay, the church had a record attendance of five hundred.
Three weeks later, Polly and I, along with our newborn son, would again pack up our belongings, this time so we could move to Newark, Ohio. During our time at Montpelier Baptist, it became clear that I was a workaholic; that I was unable to rest and relax when there was work to do for God. Shortly after our record attendance, I started having health problems that landed me in the hospital for several days. The doctor determined that my problems were stress related. During my hospital stay, Jay never came to see me. He never bothered to ask how I was doing. It was during this time that I was also facing a layoff at work. I went to talk to Jay about the difficulties we were having financially — thinking that the church might help us a bit since I was devoting so much of my time to its ministries — and he suggested I apply for welfare. Jay’s indifference towards us was quite hurtful, and later that day Polly and I decided we would move to Newark. We went over to Jay’s home to tell him, thinking he would understand. He didn’t. He became quite belligerent (as did his wife), laying a guilt trip on me for wanting to leave. He so shamed me that I changed my mind about leaving.
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A week or so later, it became clear that we were going to have to move. I went to Jay’s office to tell him we were moving, and he looked up from his desk and basically said to me, see ya later, and then went back to whatever it was he was doing. By the end of the week, we had packed up our belongings and moved to Newark to live temporarily with Polly’s parents until I found a job.
In all of this, Polly was a passive bystander. It was my job to be the head of the home, to make all the decisions. She was taught, and believed, that her God-called preacher husband was led by the Holy Spirit and knew exactly what he was doing. I don’t remember her ever questioning our moves from college to Bryan, and from Montpelier to Newark. She was content to follow me wherever I went, and whatever difficulties, burdens, and trials came her way she would gladly bear without a word of complaint. As far as patriarchal thinking goes, she was the perfect wife.
Stay tuned for part three.
Note
Montpelier Baptist Church completed a $120,000 building program a short time after we moved to Newark. A year or so later, Jay Stuckey left the church. The church had two hardcore Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) pastors after Jay. One pastor started a Christian school. Rife with strife and internecine warfare, Montpelier Baptist precipitously declined in attendance, reaching a point where they could no longer pay their bills. The church went bankrupt, closed its doors, and the bank sold the building to the Montpelier Church of the Nazarene. Ironically, in the mid-1980s, a church board member called me and wanted to know if I was interested in pastoring the church. I was pastoring a fast-growing church in Southeast Ohio at the time. I declined his offer, not wanting to be responsible for cleaning up a decade of dysfunction.
The post How the IFB Church Turned My Wife Into a Martyr — Part Two appeared first on The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser.