Episode 005 – The Power of Christ Compels You
10 April 2021
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
T: Welcome to Episode 5 of I was a Teenage Fundamentalist. This Episode we have entitled The Power of Christ Compels you. Do you know where that line comes from?
B: Well, I didn’t to be quite honest, but you did tell me it comes from The Exorcist.
T: Yes, that’s when the demon is attempted to be cast out of Regan, and the priest is all the power of Christ compels you, the power of Christ compels you, so this one is going to be all about demons and exorcisms and the devil, and all that.
B: I had a slight shudder when you mentioned The Exorcist, because to date that is possibly the scariest movie I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve watched a lot of horror movies but that one – God it terrified me. I don’t think I could actually sit down and watch it again.
T: We didn’t talk about this when we were planning this show, but I think this is where my terror and fear and obsession with things demonic actually started, I think it was with The Exorcist. My parents went out to dinner one night, The Exorcist was on television and you’re not allowed to watch The Exorcist – so what did I do? Watched it. Seriously man, traumatised me. For about three months, I was about ten and I did not sleep in my own room – I was like, my bed’s shaking, which is how it starts for her, and I was sleeping on the floor of my brother’s room in true ten/eleven year old fashion as if that’s going to stop the devil from possessing me.
B: It does. It’s proven.
T: It’s the doona as well – pulling the doona up also protects you from bad things.
B: It was just terrifying. Linda Blair. Did you see the sequel?
T: I did yes.
B: It was shit. Less terrifying. Anyway, we digress.
T: Well no we don’t, because this is exactly what we’re talking about. One of the things we’ve made the point again and again is that we get primed by these things. I think that using the word primal instead of primed, there is something primal in our culture, and maybe even us as human beings about the idea of being possessed and controlled by the supernatural. So I think that’s a good segue way into you telling your story first.
B: It’s an interesting one with the whole demons – I found it was fascinating and as you say, probably primed for it, but coming into the church there was a lot of talk about demons and a lot of inferring that a lot of the issues we might be facing were controlled by demons, and that they would then become part of us.
T: Latch onto us.
B: Yeah, and possess us I guess in some sort of way.
T: But that was very different from the idea of possession like Linda Blair. That was like they would attach to us and influence us, not so much hardcore control us, whereas the idea of Linda Blair style Exorcist possession was more intense, although there was some of that that went on as well in our church.
B: Oh there absolutely was, I never went along to this but there was a guy that used to run a weekly thing at this big church we were involved with
T: Great Big AOG?
B: Great Big AOG, and it was essentially, from what I understand, casting out demons from people. People would go along to get the demon exorcised, and that’s what the nights were about.
T: Can I just say he used to get everybody singing a few songs, then you’d get to the last song which often times I think was a hymn, and he would stroll through the audience while they were singing the last song, and he’d shake people’s hands like he was some sort of super star grandad. It was really odd. Then of course later he would start casting demons out of people, but it was really weird he had this ritual, he’d walk up and shake everybody’s hands and look at everyone – he was proud of his little weekly exorcism sessions.
B: I’m gathering from that you went.
T: I did! I went a few times – the power of Christ compelled me.
(laughter)
B: That’s interesting, because I couldn’t bring myself to it. I thought most of that stuff was an absolute crock. You’d hear things – one that stands out was there was a bunch of people that used to meet at their home every week, that was very much about casting demons out of everything, and in an effort to try to get myself and another friend along there one week, they were telling us how they were on their way somewhere and a demon was under their brake pedal, and another one was on their accelerator, and it was preventing him from stopping the car and causing him to speed, which I would love.
T: Did the devil give them a ticket, do you know?
B: Well, I think the devil did give them a ticket. I’m not sure if they tried to convince the police officer of that, but if they did I would have loved to have been there. There was that sort of thing happening around me, but I was never really part of it. However, there was one stage when I thought even though it’s a load of rubbish, surely there’s something happening since there’s enough people doing it. I remember contacting you T, there was a famous witch who used to do clairvoyancy in the city where we lived, a lot of people used to go to her and seek her wisdom and her connection to the spiritual life, and we thought they were just seeking to connect with demons essentially, so I remember asking if you would like to go with us to pray over it and try cast some demons out.
T: There was a few of us I think. I think you rang, or maybe we happened to call into your place – this would have been 91 or 92 – and you said we’re going to go down to such and such’s shop, because she had a shop where she’d sell bits and pieces, and you said let’s go down and pray, and I said okay.
B: I remember this was in a fairly busy mall and there was quite a few people walking past, and here we all were essentially casting our own incantations in front of this shop, thinking we were casting out demons and saving the world, arresting the demons essentially. I also remember there was a bong shop next door – a shop where you could go buy drug paraphernalia, t-shirts and that sort of stuff.
T: Off your Tree or something.
B: Something like that. I can’t remember the name of this one, but I remember we stood out there and went ah well surely that’s connected to demons, it makes people smoke drugs.
T: We would probably have thought it’s no accident these share a wall.
B: Yes, well you know when demons set up shop they might as well set up next door.
T: That’s right, they’re friends.
B: There’s efficiency in scale. So for me it was a short lived foray into that, because I think I always thought it was a bit of a crock and a little bit of a cop out.
T: Well you know, I’m going to call you on that.
B: Really?
T: I can remember when we were there praying against it, we were praying in tongues and stuff, and when people would walk past we’d go a little bit quiet and everything right.
B: Yep.
T: But I remember I came up to you and you were standing there and you had your hands on your face and your eyes closed and you looked really troubled ,and I said are you ok B? And you said no I’m not, there’s a real spirit of whatever you said – I don’t know, Succubus or something, but you said there’s a real spirit of something and you were pretty serious about it.
B: Oh no, no I was at that time, but I’m saying it was a short foray into it. I think I remember that.
T: And you weren’t ok.
B: I was probably embarrassed.
T: No, you weren’t embarrassed, you were being assaulted by a demon. That’s the way I interpreted it.
B: Yeah I possibly was being assaulted by a demon.
T: I don’t mean to make you feel bad, this is what happened.
B: Oh no I don’t feel bad, I feel like going and praying in front of a shop, you’ve led me back there. No, but for me I did see it, I was exposed to it a lot, but I thought it was a bit of rubbish. Maybe some of it was that everything that was wrong with people was blamed on demons rather than going oh well I might have to take some responsibility, or there might be a past history in my life that’s caused the issues to date, it’s not some external force that if we speak an incantation it’s gone and we don’t have to worry about it anymore. Certainly we saw that in the churches I was involved with – people would say we’re covered by the blood of Christ, and we’ll just get on with getting on, and people don’t deal with their issues. Many churches are full of quite strange people and I think some of it is because they’re there looking for help, they’ve got issues in their life and there’s an acceptance there, but they don’t often get to the root cause of their issues because everything is externalised and it’s something else that’s influencing them.
T: I was talking to a friend probably a couple of years ago who’s still in a fundamentalist Pentecostal church and this person was telling me about how someone that they knew had found her own grandfather dead – nothing suspicious or anything, just went to the house and her grandpa had passed away. This had traumatised this girl, she was only in her 20s, and she went to see some friends who were pastors who were going to pray for her. She’s traumatised by the fact that she’s come across the dead body of her grandfather, and they start saying oh back in your past is this history of your ancestors sacrificing infants. And he’s telling me this story about this girl, and about how it was just so amazing that God had revealed this to them and they prayed for her, and I sat there thinking this is so sad. This girl is actually traumatised. You don’t need a demon – she found her dead grandfather in the house, she went to the pastors and instead of counselling or talking to her or even steering her towards professional counselling or grief counselling, they start going on about demons of child sacrifice in ancient times that have been handed on to her. What the hell?
B: That is bizarre. That is absolutely bizarre. It’s frightening, and it’s not as if the church isn’t full of self proclaimed counsellors – I mean, every corner I turned certainly there was someone that was offering counsel to someone but when people do hook onto the demons, it’s a frightening place. How about you?
T: In the Revival Centre there was a big no no around demons because they’d had a big split with what is now called the CRC church, it used to be called the Christian Revival Crusade, and they had a big split around demons. It had caused a big kerfuffle back in the 50s, so the Revival Centre was one of those split groups and they’d gone there are no demons, or at least nothing that we need to worry about and we’re all free in Christ. So when I left the Revival Centre – which is another whole podcast in itself, by the way – I didn’t right away, but later attached myself to a group of families that had left the Revival Centre and joined Great Big AOG.
B: As you do.
T: Yep. They had come into the AOG and started to hear about demons and all that kind of thing, so they were right into it. I’d been clubbing and doing some things that by societal standards were fine, but by church standards I was letting demons in my life, so the de facto leader of this little group said he wanted to pray over me and get all the demons out of my life. I said ok, so I went round to his house one night. I’d had a couple of scary experiences in my life making bad choice and stuff, and I was feeling pretty bad about myself so I went around there and said ok let’s pray. He was looking for every opportunity he could to cast demons out of people. It was like a parlour trick, an alpha male one-up I’m going to fight the devil, I’m going to show that I’m amazing kind of thing. But I stood there and he prayed for me, praying in tongues and all this and started to push me over a little bit so I went with it, slain in the spirt, fell down, and he started praying that sort of generic in the name of Jesus I bind all the demons in T, and I take authority in the name of Jesus, all that kind of talk. It was what it was, but in me there was a choice, where I have to let this happen. Part of me wanted to get up.
B: Did you think it was genuine, what was happening?
T: At the time I did. I wanted to believe it was because it comes back to what you were saying before – I don’t have to necessarily take responsibility for everything and all the issues I’m dealing with if I can just have someone pray over me and everything’s gone, like a magic prayer bullet that’s going to get everything out. So I lay there and went with it, the guy was calling this demon and that demon. I felt that part of the giving over was to start to shake and tremble – I gotta say in retrospect, it was a choice. Eventually though he said to me T, I’m going to pray that God will reveal to you the name of the demons that need to come out of you, and any sins you have committed you have to confess them so we can get these demons out. So it became a kind of confession, but I didn’t want to tell them everything I had done, especially through their judgemental eyes, but it was like this is what you had to do to be free of the demons. So I lay there and started saying stuff, drinking, smoking, all this kind of stuff. There had been some things that had happened to me in my life, I’m not going to go into huge detail because as much as we’re being anonymous, I also don’t want to make the podcast about this, but there were things that happened in my life when I was young that traumatised me. So I confessed those things – confession is the wrong word, because it wasn’t things I did, it was things that were done to me, put two and two together. But I confessed those things. They continued to pray, it went on for hours. Then it was all over it was like yes it’s all done, it’s all finished, I got up. What I didn’t realise is that I’d actually just given over all the intimate details of my life to these people in their living room and what happened was years later, when I was marrying somebody in the church, my future father-in-law was friends with this guy. I didn’t go into details about what had happened to me, I just said the name of this sin – this thing – and five or six years later, he came to my father-in-law and said you need to be careful of T, because once I was doing deliverance and he confessed to this.
B: Really. That is frightening.
T: Yep. And my fiancée came to me really upset, and said do you have a problem with this, and I was like what are you talking about? And she said oh Pastor such and such said – because by this stage this guy had become a pastor, but he wasn’t then – Pastor such and such said when he was praying for you, you confessed such and such. So I had to sit down with my then fiancée and have a big conversation about my childhood trauma because the spin was somehow that I was this terrible, horrible person. And of course it was all good, but what troubles me still to this day even telling you this story now, is this demon thing, this confession thing, this deliverance as they called it, while saying they were setting me free was actually bringing me under a further amount of control in this Great Big AOG.
B: That sounds horrendous.
T: Totally. I didn’t want to tell you this before we started, because I wanted to share with you that this is what happened. There was no back story, there was no explanation, it was just the name of a demon, and all of a sudden six years later this guy is interfering with my plans to marry.
B: It is that control which we saw over and over. That’s just another aspect of it. My theory is if there were demons there, after three hours they would have left out of boredom. I mean, you don’t have to cast them out. Geez. I can’t sit through a three hour movie, let alone that. That is horrendous.
T: What about you. That was heavy eh.
B: That was heavy.
T: I mean you can put two and two together about what was going on, but it was full on. Anyway, go on.
B: And this was done under the cover of grace and forgiveness, of course, which is possibly one of the greatest abuses – here they are caring for you, but all of a sudden they’re turning against you.
T: Five and six years later.
B: That’s right. Certainly some of my siblings have also been in this space, I can remember many nights when they would hold these prayer vigils to cast out demons out of other people, and again I didn’t get involved with it. I don’t know what it was, it was something – I gave it a crack, but it wasn’t something that ever hooked me in. I found it embarrassing.
T: I think deep down, underneath it all – we talked about the end times, we’ve talked about some of the stuff that happened about sexuality, we’re talking about this – you didn’t believe any of it, deep down. What were you doing there B? Why were you even there?
B: Every now and again there was good food.
T: If you like chips and coke.
B: There was some sharp dressers there too, you could get some good dress tips, but I am starting to wonder that myself, reflecting as we go along.
T: Again, I don’t know whether I was just vulnerable because I’d just come out of a cult but I just bought into it all. I was always of the feeling or belief that you needed to put your cognitive objections, your mental objections aside, because that was the barrier between you and God.
B: Yes.
T: I had the same thoughts you did but I was like oh no, I’ve got to put that down because otherwise I’m not going to get blessed, I’m not going to get set free, or I’m not going to get to the next stage of what God’s got for me.
B: It’s not like I didn’t deeply believe some of these things, there was a scepticism I held on to, but I probably tried to push that scepticism away as well, it was probably one thing that was seen as a hindrance to my faith, if I didn’t push it to the side.
T: That’s what I’m saying although I think I did it a lot easier.
B: Yeah, whereas I did resist, and I probably skated around the edge for a while, except for maybe three to four years when I dived in well over my head into leadership stuff, I think it was at that point I had to believe this stuff, I had to convince myself that I had to embrace some of it or I couldn’t be in that space as a leader, and everyone wants that recognition as a leader.
T: The demon thing though, officially within Great Big AOG it wasn’t a thing.
B: No.
T: It was on the fringes, but they tolerated it. They used to let that old guy have his meetings, people would have prayer, deliverance sessions at prayer meetings, but officially it wasn’t pedalled or preached.
B: That’s true, as much as they let it happen, it was part of them. They were letting them use that building – the old guy was using that building for that purpose, they were complicit in that. I do remember another occasion where someone very close to me was experiencing some shitty times in life, you could see they had issues, there was no doubt about it. A bunch of people decided they were going to get that person around under the guise of support, they got them around and said we just want to pray with you, we want to be with you and beside you and make sure you know you’re supported. Within about two minutes – and I was part of this, I thought yeah I support this person – they started to try and cast demons out of this person. This person didn’t react well, they got quite angry about it and they said see, see there’s demons and tried to hook it onto it.
T: Because you have to go with it. You can’t resist it, or that is the devil.
B: Yeah, 100%. One of the other people there, a female, struck this person in the face and scratched them.
T: So now who’s got the demon?
B: Yeah, they scratched them from head down to the neck, there were deep scratches and they said they had to do it, and were lead to do it by God to try and get the demon out.
T: Wow.
B: Yeah, and this person found it very difficult to be in the presence of the person who had struck them that night, for a very long time – again, it was just used to say they had a spirit of unforgiveness, a demon driving their behaviour, rather than going you know what, I did a shitty thing and hit this person across the face.
T: Isn’t that funny, the actual aggressor becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the aggressor – you’ve got the spirit of unforgiveness. I remember there was a prayer meeting I went to once – this is a bit funny. Do you remember the whole Toronto Blessing thing where the laughter came?
B: Yeah.
T: This was before that, so what happened was we were all praying for each other at this prayer meeting, and we get to this one person. She was a little bit odd, we start praying for her and she just started laughing. This is before Toronto Blessing and the whole laughing thing, so we were all like oh, what’s going on here, she’s laughing at God. And one of the guys who was there looks at everyone and goes Mocking Spirit and we were all like dah dah dah, I got my NIV study bible out and start reading God will not be mocked, whatever a man sows – you know, scripture keys right, you throw the sword of the Spirit at the thing, right. So we were all praying, this girl had fallen down by this stage – slain in the Spirit – and she was laughing and wetting herself. I remember when one of the guys goes to her mocking spirit come out of her, and the other goes what’s your name, spirit, what’s your name? And the girl looks, I can just see her face, she stops and goes um, I dunno, um, Satan? And then they go oh lying spirit because it can’t be the devil, the devil wouldn’t be at prayer meeting in our suburb, so she had a mocking spirit and a lying spirit and it was all cast out and all over, and later we weren’t hauled in, but we were all called in to have a meeting with the pastor – Pastor B at Great Big AOG, who explained to us that while we believe you can get rid of demons from non Christians, we don’t believe that Christians can have demons, and I guess that was the line of their belief. But again like you said, it still happens. But we were instructed – some of us were still like they’re just being hard hearted, that was real, she had this mocking spirit. But it was so funny when they said what’s your name, I could just see her. The whole thing sort of stopped, she rolled her eyes a little bit and said I dunno, Satan? Yeah that’s a good name for a demon isn’t it.
B: I mean, that was one of the things that never sat comfortably with me was all these Christians having demons – if God is so real and God is inhabiting this vessel, this person, then how can a demon also be in there? It just didn’t make sense to me. I remember asking that question several times to people of authority in leadership.
T: Wouldn’t the argument be that it was on the outside and it was influencing them – that was all that Kenneth Hagan stuff. That was the other thing I should have said, before my deliverance experience they had given me books, so I wasn’t fresh to this. That was more of that priming, that there’s little monkey like things attached to you and in your ear and all that kind of thing. That’s what they used to say – you’re not possessed, you’re oppressed.
B: I actually do remember that being bounced around. It still smells like a crock of shit to me, but yeah that’s ok, that’s Mr Cynical, that’s me.
T: Rightly so, you know.
B: Well, I carry that through my life and it doesn’t always do me favours, but it obviously did at that time. We are coming to the end of this one, you have been doing a swathe of online work, unlike me who has been definitely riding on your coattails, so did you want to speak to a couple of things?
T: Yes, I guess I just wanted to say that this podcast is available on all good podcast platforms, so please feel free to download. We are hosted on Podbean so you can get it there, but what I’ve done is set up a couple of Facebook pages, I was a Teenage Fundamentalist, but there’s also a Facebook group. We want to invite you to join the Facebook group, comment, say what you want to say, talk to each other, talk to us, we’ll do our best to respond, but we just want to build a little bit of community around this as well.
B: And don’t be afraid to be critical of anything we said, supportive of it, question it, whatever. Just engage because it’s all part of the conversation. No judgement here, we’ve been on both sides of the coin so happy for the conversation to flow.
T: Sounds good. Anyway, I’ll see you next week.
B: See you then.