Episode 008 – Community in the Fold

1 May 2021

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Find this episode on your usual podcast player,  on YouTube, or listen here.

 

B: Well gidday T, how are we?

T: I’m good – I can’t believe it’s already been seven days.

B: It has been seven days, it’s almost like it’s been a week. It’s been crazy.

T: You know what I love, I love that the audience is growing. We’re consistently getting more and more people logging into the episodes for the first time, we’re hitting over 500 downloads, it’s phenomenal.

B: It’s good! We started this as let’s get together and have a chat, and record it and put it out there and see if people want to listen. It’s good to see people are commenting online, people have reached out independently saying it’s helping them and also bringing stuff up for them.

T: Yeah, it’s digging into stuff they thought they were past and over.

B: Yeah, and that’s going to happen. It happens with everything, I think. But here we are at Episode 8, and we’re going to call this one Community in the Fold. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, so we’ll jump into that in a minute. Sorry, you were going to say something?

T: Oh I was going to say it really follows on from what we did last week when we were talking about leadership, because the leaders are the managers of the fold – they’re the shepherds.

B: The shepherds – the pastors.

T: The shepherds – that’s what they are.

B: So I guess we just want to offer a couple of points of clarification as well, just around when we talk about Great Big AOG which is now the Australian Christian Churches, back then Hillsong was part of the AOG before they broke away and became their own entity, and have now come back into the fold.

T: So we talk about Great Big AOG as the proto-organisation that became the ACC – Australian Christian Churches and Hillsong – which are still separate from each other.

B: They are, but part of it is the same big machine.

T: Oh totally, same shit, different bucket. But once upon a time same shit, same bucket.

B: Yeah, that’s it. I guess it’s just the interchangeability of some of that language. Also our online platforms continue to engage – it is great to have people engaging, tell your friends, all that sort of business. If you think someone might be interested in listening and engaging, flick this on.

T: Please, that would be really helpful for us. We’re available on all the good podcast platforms, you know that because you’re listening to us now, but tell your friends. We want to try and get the word out that we’re talking about – this.

B: Yeah absolutely, I guess it’s encouraging that sense of community that you can talk about the stuff that’s sitting on your chest – let’s engage with each other.

T: I don’t think that anyone is having this conversation – I mean, I’m not aware. It was a long time after I left Great Big AOG and basically that whole church scene completely – there was nowhere to go. There was no one talking about it, there were no books to read. I think there was a book that came out on Hillsong written by – I can’t remember her name, but it was called People in Glass Houses, but she wrote a book about her experience in Hillsong.

B: Oh, I think I remember that one actually.

T: Yeah, I read that book, I reached out to her. Might be good to try and get her on here one day.

B: Yeah that would be good. And as we’ve said before too, we don’t want to make this a negative fest, we really want to make sure we couch this in positives and we can pull forward things from this, and stuff that we’ve learned. For us it’s been many years since we came out of this space so we’ve got maturity on our side – well you’d hope anyway – and the ability to contextualise some of that stuff from back then.

T: Someone reached out to me and we were talking, and they said I’m still trying to deal with all these wasted years. I felt like that for a long time too, but my response to them was everybody has a story, and nobody gets from point A to point B in a straight line, everybody’s got a story and yours just happens to be this, and it’s not in any way wasted years. They’re formative years, it’s learning, you wouldn’t be who you were or who you are now if you hadn’t gone through this. I’m not just saying this to stay positive, I genuinely don’t see it as wasted years. Have you seen that meme where it says “my plans” and it’s got point A to point B and there’s a straight line going up, and it says “what actually happens” and it’s a squiggly line that goes backwards, around in circles and all this kind of thing and finally gets to point B – that’s true of all of us, and this just happens to be the path we walked. Everybody’s got challenges and struggles to get to where we are, so it’s not wasted years at all.

B: This is part of our squiggly line.

T: This is part of our squiggly line!

B: The reality is life’s too short to couch anything as a wasted time or wasted years, so use it, pull the good stuff out of it, contextualise it and there’s always good stuff in it, I promise you.

T: You know something else B I was thinking about in terms of wasted years, I look back and in terms of that game, and that’s what it was being in Great Big AOG in a lot of ways was a game, we were a fucking success. We were young, we weren’t ever going to be senior pastors or anything like that but we were a fucking success when we had to play that game. And then when we worked out eh it’s not for us and we moved on, and we’re doing what we’re doing now, we’re successful at what we’re doing now. And we reinvented ourselves and moved on. I think that’s the good way to see it – that was then, this is now.

B: As I said in the last episode, a lot of my career – this is how old I feel, this is my 35th year in the workforce full-time, and a lot of the things I learned while I was in the church scene in leadership absolutely apply now.

T: Like speaking in tongues.

B: (laughs) that’s it.

T: In board meetings.

B: Absolutely! But some of those things are the negatives where you go I’m not going to do this…

T: That’s learning, right?

B: Absolutely.

T: Because I watch people do shit – I work for a little tech company where I see people doing stuff and I think ooee that no good. You know. That happens everywhere.

B: It does, it’s about lifelong learning. So we’ve waffled a little bit at the start, but I think it was useful waffle. I’m going to throw it to you first, T. Talk us through some of your experience about community in the fold. 

T: Yeah sure. So the thing about the Revival Centre, which is where I started – I was in the Revival Centre from about 13-17, then I came into Great Big AOG from about 19-20 onwards. But the Revival Centre, as I’ve said before unashamedly I will say they’re a cult, but thinking about cult being a spectrum right – what is a cult? Culty-ness (if that’s a word) is a spectrum, and you’re going to have organisations that are worse than the one you’re in, and further up that end of the cult spectrum, and you’re going to have organisations that are better than the one you’re in. So if we were to plot where do these two organisations exist on the cult spectrum, the Revival Centres are a bazillion times worse than Great Big AOG. So they were very closed, but that said there was a real sense of community and a real sense of camaraderie. I am still in touch with people I was in the Revival Centre with to this day, and we are friends – genuine friends, because no one else understands each other and what we went through then. When we were there together it was awesome, we had such a good time, we had such a lot of fun. I remember one day we were driving along at a summer camp, a friend of ours was older and had a car, we were driving along and we pulled up next to these people, wound down the windows, because it was at night time right – we didn’t drink, we didn’t smoke, we were looking for ways to kick up our heels, we were driving along and there was this group of people walking down the road. We stopped, this was in the days when you wound down the window, so we yelled out the window to them hey, what religion are you? And they go oh we’re Catholic, and we said oh, then burn in hell! and we wound up the windows and drove away. I mean, this is what cult kids do, right?

B: That’s fun in a cult.

T: It was huge, it was great!

B: I’m slightly disturbed, sitting here.

T: Yeah sure, but we had a great time. So there was a great sense of belonging and great friends and all that kind of thing, but the dark side of that of course, was that we were largely cut off. I was lucky that my family was never really in it so I could go home and get away from it, but a lot of the kids and families that were in there – the whole family, they could never escape it. I think that was pretty hard for them, so in that sense I was kind of lucky. The organisation was all consuming, even for me as a teenager. I used to go to church twice on Sundays, I used to go to a home group on Wednesdays, when my mum would let me – especially the school holidays. Home group meeting – a house meeting they called it, so it’s a bible study in someone’s home, then we’d go to youth on Saturday, so there was no time for sport and other things. It was definitely all consuming, but I used to have a really good time. It was a lot of fun. Then I guess moving into Great Big AOG I took a couple of years off from church and from God.

B: Sort of like long service leave.

T: Yeah possibly, or maybe we could call it recovery. Nevertheless, moving into there – when I first got into Great Big AOG I thought wow this is really different. The feeling and the culture – I wouldn’t have called it that as a 20 year old, but the feeling and culture was so much lighter, so much more welcoming and accepting. Over time that’s when I started to realise this is actually more of the same but further on the good side of the spectrum. But I’ll come back to that – what about you?

B: For me – and I think I’ve spoken about this before, I didn’t really know who I was around 17ish. I was a bit of a lost unit, I was drinking and partying a lot.

T: You never smoked though, did you?

B: Yeah yeah I was a heavy smoker.

T: Oh really? I thought you were never a smoker.

B: I actually started smoking when I was 11. I was smoking about 20 a day from the time I was 11.

T: Oh wow. I used to occasionally nick them from mum and dad’s packet. I didn’t know you were a hardcore smoker.

B: No, I was terrible. Interestingly I gave up when I was 20, I think, but I was up to smoking a couple of packets of 30 a day as a teenager, so I was terrible. But I didn’t really know who I was, I didn’t know where I was heading. At that time I was doing an apprenticeship, I was almost a qualified tradesperson at 17 so I had a lot of good things happening in my life, but I think I was quite lost. I never felt like I fitted anywhere. When I got involved in the space I felt amazing things. I felt acceptance, I felt belonging, I felt love, I felt concern for me as a person. I didn’t feel like a cog in the wheel, I felt important. And I think it was genuine. I think it was a real, genuine feeling, it wasn’t something to just get me involved in the space and make sure I didn’t leave. All in all, despite all of the really shitty things that happened – similar to you, I’m still in contact with many people from the space, some of whom are still involved and we’re very different, but we do have a connection from the past which gives us a bit of glue.

T: Well, here are we.

B: Well that’s right.

T: All these years later making a podcast about the whole thing.

B: You and I stayed in contact I think, the whole time, and have been in very, very different spaces many times, but we still had that connection – and also a mutual respect for each other. And I still have that for these people I’m in contact with – we’re not in contact all the time, some of it’s through Facebook, some through other mediums or we’ll catch up with mutual friends, but it’s still there.

T: I find it hard to stay in touch with the ones that are still heavily embedded in Pentecostalism, whether it’s Great Big AOG or another one. It’s not totally impossible, there’s a couple of people that I still can connect with, and that has also depended on my attitude towards the group. When I was really angry I would (metaphorically of course) go piss in their front garden. Like you said, you talked about turning up to weddings knowing they don’t listen to anything but Christian music, and saying have you listened to the latest Oasis album (which was What’s the Story Morning Glory by the way, which was a fantastic album, they missed out), but that’s exactly what it was like. When I went through my very angry, militant atheist stage, I had people pushing me away.

B: You were quite antagonistic.

T: I was aggressive, because I was just so fucking angry.

B: But as a side note, I think no one still knows what a Wonderwall is. Anyway, if anyone listening knows what a Wonderwall is, please tell us.

T: Put it on our Facebook page. Wasn’t it a Facebook add in for a little while? Wasn’t it called Wonderwall – this was after the album. But we digress.

B: We do digress, but for me I think what it did was, because I had that acceptance and love, it built confidence in me that I’d never felt, and I felt a confidence in being able to be me.

T: Really. That’s fascinating, because my experience was so much about the diminishing of my individuality. But keep going.

B: Well it was interesting. When I reflect on it, there’s definitely parts of it I felt like I had to be something different, but all in all I think I stayed relatively true to myself. It shaped the way I became, and I definitely modified behaviour for particular settings, because there was very clear rules on what was accepted and what wasn’t accepted about how you could act, how you could speak, but all in all I stayed true.

T: Sure, ok. I guess the way I see it is what you said then, there’s certain rules about how you acted and what you did, because if you broached those rules, the acceptance would end.

B: Yeah but you know, if I reflect on that, in my workplace you have to fit within particular rules and say particular things, and you definitely have to modify and shape your behaviour when you’re part of particular groups and settings at work. It’s probably no different, when I reflect on that.

T: All right, I hear what you’re saying, but the challenge there is – the difference between work is, you’re not giving your heart to the creator of the universe, who is saying they accept you as you are. (sings) Just as I am…, you know. These kind of altar calls and hymns – I’ve heard it said before about why is the US Marines not a cult, and that’s because everything is transparent and open, you know they’re bossing you around, they’re not coming to you saying we accept you, Jesus loves you and died for you as you are – it’s somewhat different.

B: Yep, no, I agree, it is and it’s a good point you make. I guess for me, because I wasn’t confident when I went in, it built a confidence. I think if I went with a degree of confidence and it got chipped away – and maybe my confidence was a bit of a false confidence at the time and was built on a house of straw.

T: You quoting Scripture or the Three Little Pigs?

B: Three Little Pigs – and I haven’t shaved, so I’ve got hair on my chinny chin chin. But reality is, for me it built a confidence because I think for me it was something I was able to – I’ve usually been a fairly natural communicator and a leader in that space, and when you have that built and fostered, it built a confidence.

T: Look I don’t want for a minute to dismiss how you’re feeling,

B: Yes you do.

T: No I genuinely don’t

B: I’m joking.

T: We’ve talked about the contrast of our starts and our personalities and the different experiences we’ve had in Great Big AOG because of who we were and where we came from, so 100% this is what it did for you, I get that. I also want to resonate with some of those things – in my job now I do a lot of public speaking, I teach in my role, I was a school teacher for a long time, a lot of those skills in being able to hold groups of people came from my preaching practice and experience within Great Big AOG, so 100% there’s no doubt there’s those skills, and some of my ability to network and connect with people I think was developed in the cult. Whereas now I try to use those powers for good and not for evil, but I resonate with that. I do want to reiterate that the promise of joining this organisation and coming into the fold, I can remember waking up when I left Great Big AOG and saying to people this isn’t what I signed up for all these years ago when I joined the organisation. When I started to think about where I was and what I’d done, who I’d related to and who I’d become, very very different. So yes 100% there was things that were good. But at the same time there were things – I didn’t like who I’d become in a lot of ways at the end. I had to write letters to people apologising for some of the stuff I’d done as a member of these organisations.

B: As I reflected in the last Episode and others as well, there was a point where I had to leave because it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I’d certainly been shaped in a particular way, so there’s no doubt that that space influenced who I’d become and who I was, but I think for me overall it was positive. It was a positive shaping. I’ve been able to chip away and get rid of those bits that haven’t worked for me. It has taken time, it has taken a lot of self-reflection and some of it has been very difficult too.

T: Very painful. 

B: Very painful, but also in the earlier days when I left I shed some things that were probably useful because I threw the baby out with the bath water.

T: 100%, I did that too.

B: So I had to bring some of those back and go you know what, that was good.

T: So we are having a baptism service after this session.

B: We are!

T: One of the things we brought back.

B: But don’t throw the baby out with that baptism water. But for me you know that does happen, you quite often have to strip away all the rubbish then rebuild a bit. Interestingly, they talk about that when you go into the fundamentalist scene, you have to strip away everything and rebuild it with Christ, that sort of stuff, so it’s a similar approach, but…

T: You know, Buddhism talks about the idea of rebirth, right, and if you take it literally, you die, you come back as a new personality, a new person, you live again then you die, and they call it samsara. But if you look at it metaphorically, the idea that we re-invent ourselves many times in our lives, and I think what happens in the same way Buddhism says you bring the karma from the last life into the new life, I think metaphorically – for example, leaving the Revival Centre or leaving the AOG, some other major signpost in my life, I’ve reinvented myself numerous times but I’m always bringing the karma or the things that have made me who I was in the last iteration of myself, into the new one. You can’t escape that. Working, taking the good and bringing that with you – it’s a metaphor right, I’m not sitting here saying we’re all born again. 

So I was thinking in some of my reading, you look at what’s called dualism, which is two factors to life, there’s in and there’s out, there’s us and there’s them, and I think that my time in the Revival Centres was much more, but in the AOG as well, there’s this dualism of in the group or out of the group. And when you’re in the group, you have all these benefits, but when you’re out of the group, you don’t.  So we used to see the world – even within the AOG/Australian Christian Church itself, we were in Great Big AOG, and they were in some of these smaller groups, they weren’t quite part of us either, even though they were in the one big organisation.

B: Yep, it’s very true. There was an us and them. And like you say it wasn’t just internally, it was externally as well, and you were also led to believe that people who weren’t part of the organisation weren’t truly happy or satisfied in life, until they came into the fold they couldn’t be truly happy. I think some of that was about the controlling of cutting your ties with your past life or whatever, because it wasn’t really valued if you still connected with some of your friends outside the space – unless you were trying to convert them.

T: So that’s different to the Buddhism thing where I’m saying you bring part of who you are and you incorporate these past iterations of yourself; instead you’re saying no, there was no value, you’re in now, and it all starts here.

B: Yes, strip it away and rebuild.

T: History-less is what it’s called. I have no history until I join the group. 

B: Yes, stripping away and rebuilding, but the problem was the rebuilding could only be done within the walls of the organisation. So to do that, there was definitely an inclusiveness, but it was an exclusive inclusiveness. 

T: That’s the dualism. It’s excluding the outside and including the inside.

B: And as you spoke before, it was youth group on Saturday night, it was church twice on Sunday, it was a home or study group during the week, and if you had any more energy then you could be part of something else. 

T: I was thinking about that before – I’ve talked about how the Revival Centre kept me busy, but in the AOG I was twice on Sunday, I was home group on Wednesday, I was involved in an outreach thing on Thursday night to the street kids, then I was involved in the street team going out and handing out leaflets and bible bashing on a Friday night, then I was in Youth on Saturday, and remember church twice on Sunday – your weekend was gone. But then I went to bible college, and I was in bible college four days a week. The Revival Centre had nothing on the AOG as far as keeping you busy and keeping you in the fold.

B: And you had nothing to contextualise it with, if you had your job there was that, but your job was just going 38 hours a week, and get out. But there wasn’t an ability to contextualise this stuff that you were doing, so it just became – I found it quite arduous. If sometimes you needed a bit of a break and thought I’m going to have a bit of a sleep in on Sunday and just came Sunday night to church, you were often referred to as a spiritual oncer.

T: A spiritual oncer!

B: Do you remember that. Just turning up once on Sunday.

T: That’s what they called it.

B: I remember copping that one or two times, and that hurt, so I made sure that I came twice whenever I could, then I found myself referring to others as spiritual oncers.

T: I remember the street team leader once saying to us that he wanted to do something on a Saturday night, and he was going to speak to Great Big AOG senior pastor and get us excused for the Sunday morning. This was very early on when I was in there, and I remember looking at him and thinking to myself what? We have to get permission to miss church? This sounds like the Revival Centre. What do you mean we have to get permission? We just don’t go! But no, exactly right, you become a spiritual oncer.

B: And it was known that you weren’t there. There were eyes and ears. It was done under the guise of caring, and all that sort of things, and I don’t think there was anything sinister behind most people’s motivation for it, but they saw the only way you could actually be protected or kept in the fold is make sure you were completely absorbed by it. I think it’s a lack of trust. There was a lack of trust that you could actually have friends outside the organisation and not be polluted by them.

T: Because they had learned by experience that that’s what happens. If people are not engulfed by the organisation and in the organisation’s events and all that, they will float away. So whether it’s intentional, or if they even know why and are conscious of it, they’re still pushing you to attend everything. You know, something else I wanted to bring up was the way that we saw other Christian groups, right? Like we saw the Salvos, the Baptists, the Anglicans, and even other Pentecostal denominations as somewhat less than our group.

B: Oh totally. I remember even before Great Big AOG, the place I was connected in with lost a large swathe of young people who all went to Great Big AOG because it was the bright lights and the big city.

T: Well, eventually you.

B: Eventually me, and it was 3-400 young people that all got together on a Saturday night. It was huge, it was like a massive party. 

T: And there were girls, and if you were a girl, there were boys, and if you were a boy there were other boys, depending on what you were into – it was all there, not that you could ever do that. But socially it was happening.

B: Yeah totally. But I remember looking at others as lesser. 

T: I can remember once Pastor H I’ll call him, who was the Senior Pastor, he was saying one day oh we did a prayer meeting once and we marched around and we looked like a group of Salvos, not that we are of course, Salvos, and he made this big point to distinguish that we are nothing like the Salvation Army. Which of course from an Australian cultural perspective, you want to be more like the Salvation Army, don’t you. But no, we’re not lukewarm like them, we’re spirit filled. Hey, I’ll tell you a story about when I became the youth pastor of let’s call it Country Town AOG. When I went to Country Town AOG with another pastor, and as I said, I was like the Assistant Pastor/Youth Pastor. He had come from Great Big AOG, and when we got there, the Youth Alive group in this country town had been – because the AOG had never really taken off in this town, it had always struggled, change of leadership, so another Pentecostal denomination had taken Youth Alive and was running rallies, bringing in people from other denominations to be a part of it. So when I got there the pastor that I was working with pulled me aside and said the State leadership of the AOG has made it clear that we need to take Youth Alive back from these other denominations, basically take control of it and make it part of the AOG. That is 100% true story. They were getting people saved, bringing kids in – all the things that mattered to the AOG, they were doing great, but the Assemblies of God State Executive had decided we needed to take it back, so I was tasked with going in and subverting – and it was so hard, I was so torn and upset by it, because these were really good people. I was looking up to them. If I’d been a member of their church they would have been like Pastor B, Pastor J, Pastor M, Pastor Q, and yet I was put at odds with them, and they had no idea that we were going in there to eventually try and take Youth Alive which was an AOG thing, back from them.

B: That is just frightening, but it’s quite telling isn’t it, the whole space was quite exclusive, we were the only ones with the true truth. 

T: With the most pure form of the truth, exactly right. So the organisation, I think we can say that there were some great times, some great things came out of being a part of it, otherwise we wouldn’t have been there as long as we were, so let’s not forget that. But at the same time, when you make the decision to move away from the organisation, there’s a cost.

B: Yeah, absolutely, and some of that is quite scary, because some people were cut – we’ll talk about that in other episodes, but when people were cut it was very difficult to reconnect with them, because they were polluted since they were no longer part of the fold.

T: Whether they were ejected, or whether they chose to leave it was pretty much the same. And you lose touch with them, and they sort of disappear. And it wasn’t until they leave as well that you reconnect – that’s what happened with you and I.

B: This is true.

T: Well, cool. Guess what.

B: I think our time’s done.

T: It is.

B: It goes so quick.

T: That just flew. There was obviously a lot in that. This may be another part 1. 

B: There’s our disclaimer. Everything can be a part 1. All right, until next week, see you later.

T: See you then, and see you on Facebook.