This transcript has been edited for clarity.

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T: You hear our rocking music, it’s time for our I was a Teenage Fundamentalist podcast, episode something season 2.

B: Yeah, and every time you say I was a Teenage Fundamentalist I always think I was a Teenage Dirtbag, by Wheatus. Every time. 

T: That would be a good theme song if we could afford that one, wouldn’t it. 

B: It would be great. One of the things that surprised me about that song, a cover of it, which is awesome – don’t judge me, or judge me, whatever –

T: I know what you’re going to say and I’m already judging you. One Direction. Yeah, or one of the guys in One Direction.

B: No, no. It was fully One Direction. One of my daughters was obsessed by One Direction.

T: I remember that – remember my son came and drew on one of her posters one day, and I had to go and buy her a new one, because he decided to draw moustaches and glasses on all the members of One Direction.

B: Half of them have now grown moustaches and beards, and a couple of them wear glasses, so I think he was a futurist. He wasn’t wrecking things. I’d forgotten about that. That was a little bit funny. But yeah they do an amazing cover of it. But anyway, I digress.

T: I’ve never heard it. My son told me about it, he said oh One Direction do a cover of this, he was upset that people didn’t realise it was a cover. I’ve indoctrinated him well and truly into 90s music, so he was quite upset his mates thought it was a One Direction song. 

B: Remember, jump into our Facebook page of I was a Teenage Fundamentalist, there’s a bunch of good people in there having lots of good chats. Big group therapy session essentially, but I think it’s really helpful. There’s a bit of reminiscing in there, but there’s some good work happening with people helping each other out. Also our Twitter account, @wasteenage. That’s been awesome as well, a bit of traffic coming through that, so jump in, get involved.

T: And if you want to support us with the podcast, help with the advertising and getting the word out, that kind of thing, you can find us on Patreon. You can search I was a Teenage Fundamentalist, or IWATF. If a couple of people give a few bucks then we can run some ongoing commercials across Facebook, and hopefully keep building the community. 

B: You can give a one off, or you can subscribe. Anything is helpful, and thank you to those who have contributed to that. Again, we will remain 100% free regardless. Also Red Bubble is another opportunity to have a bit of fun, get in, get some IWATF merch, whether it’s a hoodie that T is wearing right now, or a long sleeve T-shirt my partner stole from me when I got it – she loves it and wears it around. You can get a mug, you can get stickers, it’s a bit of fun. Get on board, we do get 20% of every sale which again goes towards the advertising and running costs.

T: Very good. So, dating and marriage. Now this is something that was really high profile in terms of our experience. A big part of it was because we were young – we were in our teens and 20s, still thinking with our genitals, but it was a huge part of our experience, wasn’t it.

B: A huge part. And I think it was a huge part of the control which we experienced in our lives as well. There was certainly a lot of control exerted by leaders through the dating and marriage space. 

T: I’m going to start with the Revival Centre if that’s all right, and I know not everyone listening to this can relate to the extreme cultishness of the Revival Centre but I do think what we see as seeds in broader Pentecostalism blew out to full-grown fruit, to use the Pente lingo in the Revival Centre. Some of the things I’m going to talk about today you may have seen in your broader Pentecostal church, your AOG, your CCC, your COC. Nobody loves an acronym more than the Pentecostals. But I do want to start in the Revival Centre because that’s where it all started for me. We were obsessed with relationships and marriage, and I think that’s partly because the church was obsessed with our relationships and marriages. And the church was obsessed with the f word which everybody knows, isn’t fuck, it’s fornication. 

B: Yes.

T: So we had special guidelines, special rules – printed rules in the Revival Centre around what you could and couldn’t do around your relationship. I don’t have them as a list anymore, but I can remember them. They were seared in our brains. One of the first things we had in there was called keeping company. You had to notify the pastor if you decided to keep company. Boys had to be 17 and girls could be 16 before they could officially keep company in the church. Do you know why, B?

B: No.

T: Because the state legislation for being allowed to marry, in case you did f-fo-fo-fo-f-f-fornicate, was those ages. So they needed to make sure if you did fuck around they could force you to marry. So 16 for girls, and 17 for boys, before you were allowed to officially keep company. Of course we all kept company when we were a bit younger, but that was the extent of the control, because if you f-fo-fo-fo-f-f-fornicate they wanted to be able to force you to marry.

B: Wow. That is quite frightening. Although from a logistic sense – good on them!

T: Well that’s right. A lot of the Revival Centre leaders were ex-military, so they were all about rules and guidelines. They said you had to notify the pastors, they said it’s not asking for permission, it’s just notifying us, but they could fucking say no. And they could tell you nup, you can’t date that person, or it’s not in your best interest, or we’re not even going to give you a reason. So it was certainly about asking for permission. Also if you broke up, you had to notify the pastors. I don’t think they would necessarily force you back into a relationship – unless you fornicated (we’ll come to that in a minute) but yeah, they wanted to know everything.

B: That’s control at its best.

T: That’s control at its absolute best. Like I’ve told you before, the Revival Centres did a good cult. There was a three month waiting period – this is true, this is the sort of control they had, and you had to keep these rules. So if you broke up with someone you weren’t allowed to go out with another person for three months. Of course what that did is it drove everybody underground. They were all keeping it secret for the extra month they had to do or whatever, but that was another rule. You could only date people in the church. In the Revival Centres. You couldn’t date someone from the AOG or some other Pentecostal church, only people in the Revival Centres, so there was a very small pool of people to draw from, especially in your local assembly. That’s what we called it, we didn’t call them campuses back then. We called them assemblies. So a very small pool of people to draw from and there was a lot of long distance relationships across assemblies. People would be dating someone from a smaller town or a bigger city, or whatever they were doing. But what a lot of people did, B, is they would try to bring people in from outside the church. So they would meet a girl at work or at school, whatever, then they would bring her into the church, try and get her saved, baptised, speaking in tongues, wait that three month period, then they could go out with her or him. So there was a lot of people doing that. But another thing to stress is that people were marrying very quickly, and people were marrying very young. You had to get in there before you got in there, if you know what I’m saying, and you were in a great big hurry. The Revival Centre young people – that’s what we were called, we weren’t called youth, we were called young people, and our youth group was called young peoples, they were obsessed with marriage and they were obsessed with sex.

B: Do you think it was much different in the Pentecostal scene, or the Great Big AOG scene? 

T: I want to put a bit of a pin in that one and come back to it, and do a really deep comparison, but I think it was similar. Like I said there were those seeds in broader Pentecostalism, which was full-blown fruit of control in the Revival Centre –that was there, but certainly not to the same extreme. We didn’t have printed rules. But it might have been different from church to church, or from campus to campus as we say now. People may have a different experience in their AOG time.

B: Yeah, while I agree that there was not printed forms or rules that you were sat down to comply with, there was inference of that control. There was definitely elements of leaders trying to control who dated, who saw each other, people pushed together, who should be married. There was definitely a forcing of getting married early. I’ve observed people who are our age now and who have had kids, and who are still in the church, quite often they get married quite early. I’ve seen 19 or 20 year olds getting married which by community standards is incredibly young, because I think the average age of marriage these days in Australia is in the early to mid 30s. Quite different standards – I think a lot of that is because sex before marriage is frowned upon, so people are forced into it. If they want to have sex, they need to get married, or they’re not going to please God.

T: The other thing the Revival Centre did obviously was force people to marry, so I want to tell you a story about this couple. I was quite good friends with the girl, she was young, she was about 17, I was probably about 14 or 15. She started dating this guy from another assembly but it was in the same city we lived in. So they were seeing each other quite often. They broke up after a little while, and she said nothing but horrible things about him, he loves himself, he’s this and that and I hate him yada yada yada (that was them speaking in tongues). And then one day she disappeared from the assembly, and you know what that meant. That meant she’d been put out for something. No one knew where she’d gone, what had happened. Then she turns up three months later, married to this guy. What had happened was they’d split up, he’d pined for her and missed her, and wanted to get back together with her. He would try all the time to get back together and she wouldn’t have a bar of him. So what he did was he went to the pastors, reported some sort of sexual behaviour, I don’t know whether they’d actually slept together or he’d just got her tits or she’d wrapped her hand around his balls – I don’t know what had actually happened and I never found out. But whatever it was, the pastors deemed it serious enough to force them to marry. So this girl had broken up with him, hated him, didn’t want to know him, told us all about how horrible he was, next thing you know she’s tied to him for the rest of her life.

B: Do you know to this day whether they’re still together?

T: Last time I checked they still were, because they were both still in the church. 

B: Gee.

T: That is not an uncommon story, but I think where it’s got that little bit of a twist is that instead of just being into each other, slipping up, dobbing each other in or getting caught and then getting married – they’d actually split. She didn’t want a bar of him, and he knew what he needed to do, and he manipulated the situation so he was able to not only get back together with her, but force her to marry. The story that I heard was that after they got married she wouldn’t sleep with him, for a very long time. And the story that I heard was that eventually he came in one night, took control – I’m going to use more gentle language – took control, if you know what I’m saying, and basically forced her to consummate the marriage. When she reported that back, nothing was done because now you’re married. You should be doing this.

B: Yeah, she was his property, probably by the standards of the congregation. It’s a disgrace in anyone’s language. I’ll call it out – it’s rape, even in marriage. But he used the system didn’t he. That was probably learned behaviour, just like you used the system to try and get out of the Revival Centre.

T: Yeah, well that’s exactly right. So tragic story. I did look them up a little while ago, as I said, and I saw they were still together but who knows. Maybe it became like an arranged marriage, you see that sort of stuff that happens in India, where people don’t know each other, they don’t want to be together, then after years they actually do fall in love. Maybe that happened, but I’m guessing probably not.

B: Yeah, probably not, but who knows. Who knows their story now – that was a long time ago obviously, and things do happen. People find commonalities and stay together, but definitely the foundation of that relationship is something that would take a hell of a lot of getting over and working through, that’s for sure.

T: Definitely. I want to tell you another story. There was a young girl who came into the church. Her brothers were already in the church, she came and she was quite pretty, so she got saved, spoke in tongues, got baptised, all the bits, and all of a sudden I turned up one day and there was this girl. I’m going to call her V. There was a buzz around the older teens and the 20 somethings, oh look at her, look at her. So different guys all waited the three months, tick, tick, tick, then different guys – and she must have loved it, she had all these desperate men just throwing themselves at her, or maybe she didn’t love it. Who knows. But she was dating a couple of guys, then all of a sudden she disappears for three months, comes back, married to this one guy we didn’t even know they were together. She was older, she was in her 20s, so she may in fact have been sexually active already, she comes into the church, who knows whether they actually had sex – again, it could have just been some heavy petting, whatever. All of a sudden bang, she’s married to this guy. I thought it was an interesting story, because when she stepped in, everyone went nuts over this girl, oh she’s gorgeous – there was desperation from a lot of the men, and a lot of the young men in the church, then some guy went too far, or she went too far with him, or they went too far with each other, however you want to frame it, and next thing you know – poor girl. When she signed up to come into the church, speak in tongues, get baptised, hang out with her brothers, I’m sure she wasn’t signing up to be forced to marry someone. And I would imagine there would be a lot of pressure from her brothers who had been in the church for quite a long time, to make sure she followed through.

B: Absolutely. You think of our times in youth group, whether it was a new guy or a new girl coming in, it was a bit like fresh meat, wasn’t it. They generally would have a hive of activity around them. Any of the single people who were interested were buzzing around, because it was quite an incestuous space. Everyone dated within the same circles, quite often at Great Big AOG people weren’t dating people at other churches or congregations. There was certainly examples of that, but generally it was fairly incestuous.

T: Why do you think that was? I know some of the smaller suburban AOGs around us, they did tend – and maybe they were forced to, because they were so small – but they did tend to mix and date each other from different assemblies. Why do you think in Great Big AOG that we didn’t? And it wasn’t just dating. We didn’t mix with them hardly at all.  We’d go to Youth Alive rallies and go oh there’s them, then we wouldn’t see them again.

B: Well, I think what you said before was a large part of that, we didn’t need to. It was enormous. At its peak, that youth group was hundreds of people so there was enough to go round really. You were mixing with fairly large crowds, you obviously had your people you would hang around, and your tribe, but it was a very large group of people so there wasn’t really a need. I think also part of that was we were quite elitist. We were the best, we were the ultimate youth group.

T: We were the Great Big AOG, weren’t we.

B: Well that’s right. We drew people into the congregation, whether it was youth group or the broader church, people saw it as a very attractive place to come, so I think there was always fresh meat, for lack of a better phrase.

T: Tell me your story. Some of the girls you dated, or some of the situations you had, so let’s move onto Great Big AOG and the broader Pentecostal story. What happened for you?

B: I think I had a very unhealthy view of relationships coming into the church. It scared me a lot. I didn’t know expectations when I came in, I was 17, and I think there were rules I found quite difficult to navigate. When you were seeing someone, could you just see someone, could you just hang out, could you just be in a relationship with someone that wasn’t going to lead onto marriage? Probably, I surmised fairly quickly, you really couldn’t. There was a lot of pressure, even if you were hanging out with somebody and genuinely just hanging out as friends of the opposite sex, there was a lot of pressure to explain that, and to explain were you dating, what were your intentions? I was quite scared around that space, and really apprehensive because I felt judging eyes on me. So I didn’t prolifically date when I came into Great Big AOG. 

T: I remember there was a time when a preacher came from England. He came to our youth group and spoke, and said he wanted all the young men to stand up, so we all stood up, and he started to – not in a really bad way, but in a parental kind of way – he started to berate us young men, for not getting married. For not sweeping some of these young women off their feet. And he actually said if you are not dating someone and you are over this age, it is your business to be married, it is your business to be having families, etc. He sort of lifted the lid on the culture, because I felt that within Great Big AOG and the youth group at that time, in that early 90s time, there was a culture that said it’s not very spiritual to be thinking about wives and husbands and dating, you should just be pursuing the Lord. We were almost like a bunch of Catholic nuns and brothers. There was a couple of people that had relationships, and we certainly didn’t look down on them, but most of us that weren’t in one – it wasn’t the done thing.

B: No, I don’t think it was. If you look at the people that were caught up within that space, often relationships were fostered in a quite unhealthy environment.  You didn’t have a reference point – we’ve spoken about this many times before – your reference point was very insular. You also had dating advice from pastors who had never dated, but had dated the one person and then married them, because they’d been brought up in the church. So I think it was quite unhealthy. You do see a lot of those people that were together around that time when we were all dating or getting married – a lot of them aren’t together anymore. I think that reflects broader society; divorce rates are quite high, two in three marriages end in divorce in Australia. Shouldn’t it be a point of difference in the church, if it’s a healthier environment? Because it’s certainly not. I don’t think it’s reflective of any healthier relationships, that’s for sure.

T: There were very few people in the church that had married in the church and then divorced in the church, and then stayed in Great Big AOG. Certainly there were people who had divorced, then gotten saved and come in, but it was almost as if the people that divorced, they disappeared. There was no model of that, so all we saw was successful marriages. That was all we saw.

B: Yeah, it is interesting. Obviously I met my ex wife in Great Big AOG and we started dating. As I’ve said before, she sort of sat on the outer edge, she was quite alternative and didn’t really get that involved in the youth group. There was a lot of warnings for me from people, saying ooh this person’s not quite as dedicated as we’d hope for someone like you who’s on that trajectory to ministry. I know that I tried to force her to conform with that, and get more involved in the youth group, and get more involved in coming to church more regularly.

T: Was that coming from leadership?

B: Yep, from pastors, definitely three particular ones come to mind that spoke to me, and a pastor’s wife. I remember a pastor’s wife baling me up once and saying what are your intentions, what are you going to do, what are you waiting for, essentially, and is this the right person. So I felt a real pressure to fast track it. From the time we were dating to when we were married was maybe 18 to 20 months, so it wasn’t actually that long. In the real world you wouldn’t get married that fast, but you’re trying to abstain, you’re trying to make sure you do the right thing in the eyes of God, so you fast track that marriage. You don’t work through that stuff that you should. We did this pre-marriage course. I think it might have been attached to Bill Hybels.

T: Willow Creek?

B: Yeah, I think it was Willow Creek. I’m pretty sure it was a six or ten week marriage course. You’d go through pre-marriage counselling with your pastor. We did that and it asked all those hard hitting questions like are you spiritually on the same track, what do you think about kids, when should you have kids, what’s your life course, is your life course aligned. Absolutely you want to get married to someone whose life course has some sort of alignment, but you know what? Two individuals can come together and still be two individuals as well, and you weren’t taught that. You had to be one. I think it was some of that doctrine around you become one in Christ, so you should become one in purpose. I think that infiltrated and became really unhealthy in your mindset for relationships – it certainly did for me, anyway.

T: Were there any trick questions in there? Like does she have one boob bigger than the other, or does B’s knob have a bend in it, something like that just to spring it on you and next thing you know you’re answering it and the pastor goes how did you know that?

B: I feel that there should be an addendum to that test to put that in, but no. You couldn’t ever talk about that. 

T: Were there any questions about sex, or sexual compatibility? 

B: No, because the expectation was you wouldn’t know if you were sexually compatible because you hadn’t had sex. I don’t remember any questions around sex. It really was quite taboo, wasn’t it. It was referred to, but it was generally referred to in such an incredibly holy sense that you couldn’t think about the fact that we’re two humans, we have sex, that’s what we do. So I think it was quite an unhealthy mindset within the space. How about you? What was your experience in Great Big AOG?

T: One of the thing that I remember was there was a couple of couples that got knocked up, and I remember saying to one of the guys, why didn’t you use a condom? And he said because if I’d carried a condom, that’s like premeditating. That’s like saying you’re going to do it, before you’re doing it. So they didn’t carry condoms or do any sort of protection, or anything like that, because that was admitting defeat. Instead, in the heat of the moment, two young people, lights are off, Barry White’s playing – whatever’s going on, in our case DC Talk was playing, and next thing you know, it’s happening, so there was teenage pregnancy. Or there was young, unwanted pregnancy. There was no preparation for that. To plan would be to premeditate. I remember saying to a guy why didn’t you wear a dinger? And he said a dinger? You’re not going to stop! If you could stop you’d stop. You’re not going to stop and go to 7 Eleven. So she ended up with a baby, and they got married much younger.

B: Yep, and you can’t carry a condom – I agree with that guy’s logic. There’s no way you could do that and pretend all was ok. I remember a mate once, it only just came to mind then – his car had broken down near my house. He lived about 20 kilometres away. Anyway he had called me and said dude, my car’s broken down here, I’ve just realised I left my wallet in there, can you go and get it. We were catching up later that day or the next day, whatever, and he goes I’ll grab it from you then. I went and grabbed it, I remember I picked it up out of the car, and a condom fell out.

T: Did you go through his wallet, was that actually happening, or did it just happen to fall out? 

B: No I promise you I did not go through it, I picked it up and whether I dropped it or not, whatever, but the condom fell out. I remember confronting him on it, going what is this? You’ve got a condom in there? He was unapologetic, surprisingly. He goes yeah, yeah, I carry it in there, you just never know what’s going to come up. And he was in church, and I thought well, you know what’s going to come up if you’re going to use that. But yeah I just remembered that and how shocked I was, because I was so incredibly self-righteous. I was like dude, how can you do this and call yourself a Christian. 

T: See, that’s exactly what I’m saying. On the one hand, it was smart, it was wise, it was the right thing to do to prepare in that way, but from our belief system it was premeditation, it was basically saying I’m going to do this. It doesn’t have to be either. You could have carried a condom, knowing your weakness, rather than carrying a condom thinking I’m just going to fuck around.

B: Yep.

T: But we would never have dared to allow ourselves to think that way.

B: No, you couldn’t. You’d be purely evil, and you’d be preying on girls. But all those things I remember, like lots of words being delivered. I remember a specific one being delivered to me and my now ex-wife from one of the pastors, talking about how God wanted us to get married, and how we were going to do great things…

T: Great things for God! Of course, that was the word wasn’t it. It was the word for everyone. You’re going to do great things for God, and you’re going to do great things together.

B: Absolutely. It was very generic, like reading your star signs, but of course we fell for it hook, line and sinker and though well there’s confirmation. It was around a time we went through a lot of shit, and I was probably trying to manipulate her into getting married also, because you had to. It was the thing you had to do. We got that word and went okay, that one’s confirmed, I guess we’ve got to get married. It would have fed in – I can’t remember exactly, it was a long time ago, but it would have fed into the logic of why we had to get married when we got married. We weren’t super young, I was 23, she was 21, but it we were definitely young maturity wise, and quite sheltered given our relationship was under the umbrella of the church.

T: I can remember coming into Great Big AOG and still being new to this idea of God will speak to you. I remember I went to a supper – remember we’d go to youth on Sunday night, and then you’d go back to someone’s house or some place, usually it was someone’s house, and you’d have supper. People would bring warm bottles of Coke, because they couldn’t afford going to 7 Eleven and buying one for twice the price, so we’d drink warm Coke, chips, there was so much MSG, chocolate – it was full on. But anyway we’d go back to these suppers, and a lot of flirting would happen there. I remember going back to this house one night, and meeting this girl there. I’m going to call her L. I remember talking to her, and she had these piercing blue eyes. She wasn’t that gorgeous, it wasn’t like you’d look at her and go oh she’s really pretty, but there was something about her – and also I didn’t have a girlfriend and I was probably pining. I got hooked that night, I went home and started praying – about her. That was the night I believed that God spoke to me, it was like thoughts in my mind. It wasn’t like I heard a word outside of me – it was just that feeling where I thought she’s your wife. That girl, the one you just met with the really nice eyes, not too pretty, she’s your wife. And I was like, okay, she’s my wife. I obsessed over that girl – I don’t know now long. I don’t know if it was months or years, but it was a long time, because I was like well she’s my wife. I told her sister, I’m going to marry your sister. I didn’t tell her, just told her sister, knowing full well she was going to tell her sister. I’ve seen in the Facebook group people have talked about men trying to manipulate women by saying God’s spoken to them, etc, I get that. I get that happens, and possibly you’re going to hear this story and go that’s exactly what I was doing, but I swear to God, I swear to the gods, I swear to Zeus or whoever you need me to swear to – I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I wasn’t intentionally trying to force this girl to marry me. I actually liked her. something had switched on in me, I went home and prayed, part of myself spoke to another part of myself and said I’m God, and she’s the one for you. And I was convinced of this. It wasn’t like that other story I told you where she didn’t want a bar of me and I was going to manipulate – not at all. She didn’t know. And I dared not speak to her for months! I’d be in the same room as her and I’d walk away, because this was all so serious and intense. Eventually we did end up dating, and we even got engaged, and then her parents stepped in and split us up. She’s in her mid-20s, I’m in my low-20s, and her parents split us up. That’s a whole ‘nother conversation right, a whole other episode. But nevertheless, it wasn’t God. Obviously. And then her mother got a word from God that we were to split up, so she came back to me one day and said we have to pray for my mum, my mum is going through some things, wouldn’t tell me what it was, and then a few months later it was oh by the way, mum got a word from God and we have to split up. Now, I think this girl was ready to split up, because she was like yeah okay, fine, we’re splitting up, bye. Then I found out later on, what we had to pray about mum for, which I wasn’t being told, was that mum was going in and out of the psych ward because of mental health problems. So looking at this story and wondering what the hell was going on here – I get a word from God saying I’m going to marry this girl, I don’t tell her, I tell her sister, I stay away from her for a really long time, we finally get together, we date for a little while, then I tell her that God’s told me, then mum’s in and out of the psych ward, she’s getting words from God saying we shouldn’t be married and we end up splitting up. I had a whole crisis of faith, am I hearing God, am I not hearing God – what a fucking mess.

B: Sounds like you dodged a bullet though. I think this is another episode that we need to bring up, but I work quite closely with the mental health system, and have done for years. There’s a lot of ex-fundamentalist, Pentecostals, evangelicals, that pass through the mental health system, specifically into mental health units and psych wards. A significant amount. I don’t know statistically what it is, and how high the numbers are, but anecdotally, quite high numbers. 

T: No doubt. Did you hear of Domestic Violence, or any conversations about Domestic Violence within Great Big AOG? 

B: Not one single one. My take on it is it’s a very unhealthy environment that I think marriage was seen as ownership. Particularly if you’re a male, you had ownership of your wife when you got married. I think there was a lot of manipulation and twisting of scriptures within that space, and women were seen as inferior. It was an incredibly patriarchal community and society.

T: Intensely so!

B: Absolutely. I think it did breed a contempt or disrespect towards women, so I don’t think it would have even been named as an issue.

T: When I was the youth pastor, assistant pastor, whatever you want to call it, I remember the pastor then not being too keen on my then girlfriend, who later became my wife. But he actually said to me one day, I don’t think you should be with her. You need a woman that’s going to darn your socks. 

B: Oh God.

T: Because my ex-wife is quite a successful woman in industry and business. She was showing all the signs of that, right, she was well educated, she had a great job. I was wanting to be in ministry, and she was wanting to go that way. There’s a whole conversation around were we going in different directions, etc, but I still thought it was funny that basically what that minister said to me that day was you need a woman like mine, who is small, diminished, is not really good for much except the housework. That’s what you need.

B: Yeah. I had a similar experience with a pastor, not the one you’re talking about, because like you I was pegged for full time ministry, to be a full time pastor, and the question put to my ex-wife before we got married was have you got what it takes to become a pastor’s wife. It was all about that servanthood, serving your husband and serving your husband’s purpose. I had a problem with that, because I remember she was quite a creative soul, and someone who I think would be submissive, but someone who had their own thing to contribute to the space. And I think that was slightly discouraged.

T: Oh definitely, but you and I were already products of the broader society, which even in the 80s and 90s was much more feminised, in the sense of feminism, so we didn’t have a problem with a woman being successful in her job, we didn’t have a problem with a woman being strong in the house – well I didn’t anyway, and I’m sure you didn’t. So I didn’t think it made sense to me that I needed a diminished woman. I would have been bored! I wanted a woman that was going to challenge me, who was going to be a partner. There’s a whole other episode around divorce, and what really went wrong with that marriage, but it wasn’t because she was strong. It wasn’t because she had so much potential as a person. That was never an issue.

B: Yeah. I probably bought into it a bit more, and my ego probably got the better of me and I thought I do need someone who’s going to serve the ministry, and if the ministry is headed up by me, then I need someone who’s going to serve that, so I probably bought into it more than I should have, because that was really sown into me that that’s what I needed. Like you said, I needed someone who would darn the socks, it was very similar, you’ll need someone who will serve you because you’ll be out the front, you’ll be the one who is the star of the show.

T: I’m in love with this moment, that for once T was the more progressive thinker in the AOG, than B. That hasn’t happened before, I don’t think. I’m quite excited about this moment! No, I wanted her to be in ministry with me, but I wanted us to be together. I didn’t want it to be the T show, and she tagged along. I actually wanted her to be a big part of it, but she didn’t want that. She was a pastor’s daughter, she’d seen it her whole life, and she didn’t want a bar of it. That’s a different conversation to have, but it certainly was nothing to do with her being powerful. I had no problem with women pastors or leaders, I still to this day obviously have no problem working for women, working under women – I think it’s brilliant. So I think I brought that value with me into Great Big AOG, but that certainly wasn’t there in the Revival Centre. As a matter of fact, I know a story where there was one woman who was being physically abused, violence wise, even sexually abused, by her husband. When she reported it to the church, they did nothing about it, and eventually she had to leave the church to leave her marriage, and he was allowed to stay in, because he hadn’t done the leaving. That’s why I asked you in Great Big AOG was there any experience of Domestic Violence or conversations around Domestic Violence, because like you, I never heard one and there was no way it wasn’t going on. There’s no way it wasn’t being reported to pastors. Matter of fact, B, I can also remember there was one story where a girl accused her boyfriend of rape, and it became public knowledge amongst the youth group that she had accused him of rape, he was put out of the church for a time, then he came back. I don’t know if this was the days before mandatory reporting, but nothing was done at a criminal level.

B: Nothing was done for him either. This is what we did, didn’t we. We would put people out of the church, out of the fold, essentially excommunicate them for a time – it was generally three months from memory, it seemed to be a magical timeframe, but supporting him to be able to get help for his behaviour, as well, if  not for any other reason than to protect other people from being harmed by his behaviour. But no, we just chuck him out and go there you go, we’re going to pray for you. The old, we’ll pray for you.

T: Yeah. Well mate, I think this leads us onto our divorce episode, looking at relationship problems, people that shouldn’t get married and do, and people who do get married then don’t get the support for working through things – I think we could have a whole other episode on divorce.

B: Yeah, I think we could. And also some of the stuff that brings up, and the taboo of it, and the baggage that gets attached to you as a result.

T: Well, I know this has been a heavy one people, it’s been a heavy topic and I don’t feel like we came up with a lot of answers other than to say gee that was shit. 

B: Yeah. Quite often we don’t come up with answers, we put it out there and again, leaning on the Facebook group, this is where the discussions happen. So have discussions, reach out to each other, but also, I don’t think we have the answers either. 

T: Indeed. All right, so I’m going to queue the music. I want to remind people that next week our episode is on – are you ready for this, this is a nice light and fluffy one again – it’s on sexual predators within church.

B: Hmmm. Yeah. That should be a fun discussion.

T: All right, I’ll see you next week.

B: Bye.