Before I was born, my mother was in her early childhood and from within this time frame my mother claims that her mentally ill uncle attempted to sacrifice her to Satan. My mother claimed that she prayed to God while she was wrapped in some type of sacrificial shroud, and she claims that an audible voice told her that help was on the way (she thus was rescued after much psychological torture). On another account my mother claimed to have had a vision that no one else could see while she was on a school bus in youth, and the vision showed a shepherd that was very harsh with his sheep as she interpreted that the shepherd had an extremely high view of discipline. Overall, my mother told the story of the shepherd many times over decades and no one (including my mother) ever knew what it meant, but because of what my mother had gone through as a child, she decided to pray at my birth that I be a minister and to dedicate me to God with the name Jacob Aaron Mount (my father disagreed with this name and instead named me according to his will).
My mother attended a strange type of church that taught the salvation by works because she claimed that it allowed her to know and understand God’s ways to apply to her life, and because of a distant relative she had she was considered a (third or fourth) generation member. The church was nearly identical to Judaism in so many ways that onetime a Jewish Rabbi gave the sermon as he was well received, and my father, mother, and I attended the church for twenty years as I did not believe that I had any other choice. The fact that the church only recognized their own baptism and no other church’s baptism meant that a huge divine existed between the church and the Christian world (the church believed that Christ was not the savior of the world but instead was the perfect example to follow for salvation).
I was an atheist during most of the years of my church life until I first attended college in 1998. When I attempted to debunk the Christian faith when some preachers came on campus, I bought my first Bible and works of Plato as I thought that I would use the truth to analyze the falsehood. Not only that but also I wanted to debunk the spiritual world, so I bought a work on astral dynamics in an attempt to practice the teachings and to disprove the spiritual world and the spiritual body. The fact is that things did not go according to plan, obviously, and I found myself practically clinging (for six years) with everything I had to a college instructor that home schooled all eight of his children, read the bible even while driving, and taught Sunday school at a church of over 1,000 people (This was my call to faith that Wilson talks about). (See Wilson, 69)
My church that I had attended all along believed that many contradictions existed in the Bible and they ordained a very large portion of their congregation (at this time the number ordained is about 95% of church goers), and the more that I studied with the college instructor at school the more that I was enraged at my church at false and stupid teaching and preaching. For about a year and a half or more I was the only one during testimony time, in a church that proclaimed peace as their central focus that would read aloud all the condemnations in a powerful voice that the Bible had against false prophets. People listened to me very carefully in fear and horror because I would only answer yes or no to questions for the 20 years prior to that because by father tried to control my emotions in extreme ways to get me to do his extreme legalistic will. Overall, I took the same calling as Exodus 32:26-29 that describes Moses commanding the Levites to kill until everyone had lost a loved one as a result of golden calf worship to be my paradigm for ministry, so I had the attitude, “God dam peace” (this was my call to minister that Wilson talks about). (See Wilson, 69)
The fact of the matter is that some church leaders really wanted to talk to me to say the least, so I actually went to the home of the pastor and her husband (that was also ordained) and I would go to the home after college and diligently train the man until the next morning as he practically opened his Bible for the first time (this went on for several months). Eventually the man felt that I was called to ministry (even though I had rejected baptism in the church from a very early age), and so he spoke to some people and I was so afraid about during ministry that I fled all together and did not attend church in a formal way for many years. Overall, I continued to be evangelized at school under the college instructor despite the fact that I could not find a church to go to, and eventually I found myself in a lot of churches in a lot of different locations as others felt that I should be doing ministry as well (I fled from many of them as well).
The fact that my father (the same man that named me) had been completely opposed to me going to college meant that I had to completely oppose him (this was the same man that caused me to only be able to answer a yes or a no when asked questions). The fact that my father and his entire church had opposed professional ministry as they saw professional ministers as like lazy busybodies meant that I would have to oppose not only every dream in his life for my life but also his world view as well and practically cut him, his church, and the family off emotionally from me. The fact also that I did not consider myself worthy to do any ministry, and that many Christian’s outside my parents church did not believe any type of revelations or anything else like that meant that I felt like I had to downplay my call to ministry and my ministry work all the time. The fact is that when I eventually did get ordained (under a different group), my mother during the ordination reception at a dining table told the story about the shepherd that she saw from the school bus in her youth as she just wanted to make regular, “small talk” and suddenly everyone was wide eyed and realized the meaning of the vision from decades past as no one had to explain it to anyone else because it was suddenly self evident. This became the beginning of what Wilson would call, “The call into the ministry”, (Wilson, 70) and I learned to stand my ground against two Bishop’s (one that died of complications of cocaine and another that eventually closed his church after I stopped attending) while I took an incredible journey of faith.
Bibliography:
Wilson, Michael and Brad Hoffmann. Preventing Ministry Failure: A ShepherdCare Guide for Pastors, Ministers and Other Caregivers. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2007.