Latest / Clear Path Christianity / Leaving a Counterfeit Christianity || CPC Podcast Ep. 1
Transcript
- Cole Crone: I've told many, many times in recent years that I have an story. ⁓ Maybe I do. Maybe it doesn't seem interesting to me because there are lots of people around me ⁓ who have a very similar story. But when I talk to people who don't share my background, universally, they tell me that my story is unique or our story is unique. Me and people who come from where I come from have a unique story. I don't typically share it. There are a lot of reasons. I don't want to be defined by it for one thing. I'm not as bad as it sounds like. I'm not always in the mood to explain everything to everybody that I meet. And it takes so much explanation. ⁓ It takes so much explanation to get to the heart of it, to what the heart of this really is. And so I just typically don't. I don't really divulge a whole lot about it. So a lot of what I'm gonna be sharing here, as this is my kind of official story, Much of what I'm gonna share here are things that most of the people around me don't know. Because like I said, I just haven't really taken the time to explain it. And it's a lot to explain, as you're about to find out. But ⁓ I was born and raised in a church. And those of you who are just listening, I'm using air quotes ⁓ anytime I use the church ⁓ for the first ⁓ large portion of this. ⁓ But it's a church that I describe now in hindsight as ⁓ a counterfeit Christianity. basically just what I mean by that is that a church that claimed to be ⁓ one of, if not the only, so we have this from the scale of like maybe this is one of the like a right church all the way to people in this community who believe that it was the only church. So you have everything in between. But that, there were very few, if any, that were actually in keeping with what Christianity has historically been. ⁓ And so that's why I I use that term, a counterfeit Christianity. The Christianity that was taught and practiced doesn't look anything like what mainline ⁓ historic biblical Christianity has always looked like for 2,000 years. There's a second piece of it. It was also a closed community, meaning you weren't coming in and out. You didn't have guests on Sunday that were, hey, this is my family from out of town. ⁓ Hey, I've invited my neighbor or my coworker to church. That didn't happen. You were born in and best case scenario, you stayed until you were dead. ⁓ There weren't people. coming in and out. it was, the teaching was in comparison to Noah's ark. Like once Noah and his family go into the ark and that puppy gets sealed up, like no one's getting on. Likewise, for the people who were already on to get off and to risk drowning in the floodwaters, I mean, you would have thought it was crazy. I mean, imagine if 20 days into this journey, Japheth just decides all of a sudden, I'm bored in here. gotta, let's bust open that door. I'll take the floodwaters. ⁓ We would think that was crazy. And likewise, people where I grew up thought that you were crazy if you ever considered. ever leaving. And so despite the fact that the teachings were very obviously unbiblical to anybody who was taking the time to explore the Bible, but despite that it was like there's this looming thing about, wow, if I get off the ark, I can't, it's very going to be very difficult if not impossible to get back on. And I'm, it's just, we're just surrounded by the flood. ⁓ Nothing but open water. I don't think I want to really risk that. And excommunication was something that was always on the table. I very few people left and came back. And the people who left and came back, you weren't really coming back. You couldn't really ever come back. You always carried that mark on you, no matter where you went. And so this is kind of the initial setting. So zoom in on me. I'm born ⁓ and ⁓ being here. ⁓ And personality ⁓ is very curious. I question everything. ⁓ I have a hard time, for example, just taking people's word for it. So you ask questions like, hey, what makes this the only church? And I would get very unsatisfactory answers. And so I would always be unsatisfied with those answers. That on top of the fact that I was kind of an odd kid, unlike Most of my peers, I didn't really like to play outside or get dirty or wasn't really interested in sports. Certainly wasn't interested in hunting, which was like the main hobby that everybody kind of had to have where we were coming up in our community. ⁓ So I didn't really want to do the things that the other boys wanted to do. I was, I was a dreamer. was somebody who, ⁓ I wanted to grow up and succeed in school and go to college and see the world and ⁓ get academic achievements. Basically, I wanted to be Indiana Jones. five to 10 year old, maybe 15 year old kid doesn't want to be Indiana Jones. But that was basically what I wanted. I wanted to escape this small town that I was raised in, break free from this confined community that I was in for as long as I can remember. So you can imagine that there's a great deal of conflict here, right? So despite my personal desire to seek and find truth for myself and to pave my own way in life, that was easier said than done as ⁓ conformity was king. and I wasn't someone who dispositionally conformed. Now, there were two problems with that. People who questioned the system were very quickly ostracized. And anybody who left, as I said before, was immediately excommunicated. You stop coming to church, your family stops having to do with you, you lose all your friends, shunning is a thing. And so there's that fear always. If I leave, how could, like, where am I gonna go? Who am I gonna talk to? I don't know anybody. I'm in this closed community. And what mattered most to this particular group was a total allegiance to the things that have been taught. And again, for people who are just listening, I'm using air quotes around that phrase. Anybody who comes from where I come from will recognize that phrase. To leave was to turn from those teachings and to merit. basically permanent X communication. So from an early age, whether I was conscious of it or it was something that was happening subconsciously, I basically began to play a role. I began to wear a mask because I couldn't really be me, who I am. This inquisitive... nerdy type person. But this wasn't a role that I had any desire to play necessarily. But as I grew up out of ⁓ fear and the various social pressures, I kind of went along and did what everybody else was doing, right? Or at least I tried. The ⁓ for born in this community was pretty much three steps. you stayed in the church, you got married in the church, and you had kids. That's basically those three steps. For girls, you were raised to grow up to be a mother. For boys, we were raised to grow up to be a provider. So I guess there's kind of a fourth step in there, whether you were male or female. But that was basically it. became my plan. mean, that was my future because it was the future of everybody around me. There were no other options. And so that's just what I went with. So step one of my plan was get married. For those of you who watching, you're seeing my face. So you're probably not imagining that ⁓ had much in the way of dating prospects. but I happened to catch the attention of ⁓ a younger girl who had ⁓ an unfortunate family situation. Now most places, this wouldn't be big deal at all, but where we come from, obviously as I've pointed out, people who left and came back never really got to come back. And my mother-in-law was someone who had left and come back. And worse than that, wow, she had done something super. edgy, she'd married somebody from the world. I'm using air quotes when I say the word world. So despite the fact that she's like, ⁓ several attractive classes, my senior, and I'm punching well above my weight, ⁓ I was able to court her and we got married. And I was like, all right, man, this is step one of my plan. Check, this is looking really good. By step two, things began to get off the rails. One of the aberrant teachings of this particular community, one of the fringe doctrines, was a very anti-science in general, but specifically anti-medicine, anti-modern medicine. It was very important that you never... take medication or go to the doctor, even in life-threatening situations. This was a faith-healing only kind of community. And so, as I'm sure I don't need to tell any of you listening, but... ⁓ the childbearing process can be rather dangerous. And that happened to be the case when we went to have our first child. was a couple years after we got married. We went to have our first child and there were complications. Things were not progressing like they are supposed to. And so I kind of had to make a choice. could do nothing ⁓ pray, and basically demand that God give me a miracle, which ⁓ in community was definitely something that was on the table. I mean, it was taught if you had faith, ⁓ enough ⁓ you mean, right, You can move a mountain. You can say to that mountain, be moved over there. And ⁓ would, it would happen. ⁓ mean, the birthing process is nothing compared to moving a mountain. So Initially I kind of thought, guess I don't have enough faith to make this work. And so, yeah, I was 20, I was barely 23 years old. I'm barely an adult and ⁓ I'm making this decision ⁓ to save ⁓ my wife and my unborn child. And I had to do what I had to do, knowing that I was never gonna be able to live that down. That would be a choice that would follow me for the rest of my life. I didn't want to lose my family. Really, before I really even had one. I mean, I barely had a family. I'd only been married for a couple of years. Well, things got even more complicated when we went to have our second child just a couple of years later. ⁓ For us at the time, it went really well because we were able to have our second child at home ⁓ under the supervision of church approved midwives. And so we were able to do things quote unquote the right way the second time around, but kind of against all odds. I mean, it's It's notoriously difficult for women who have had C-sections to do a natural birth. And yet the second time around, that's exactly what we were able to do. But there was a fly in the ointment for me. And it took me about 30 seconds to realize it. But our second child was born and I heard a terrifying phrase, it's a girl. And. It's hard to say that because it's like in hindsight. I should have been so happy, but I was terrified, man. I was like, what am I supposed to do? Someday, some kid is gonna have to make the decision that I had to make. Are they gonna make the right decision? Are they going to make the choice that saves my child? My baby girl or not? And the odds were that they wouldn't. The odds were that they were going to do nothing. And could I sit back, mean, I can't hardly sit back and watch anything that I disagree with unfold. And here's this thing, like someone else is gonna be putting my child on the line. just, couldn't do it, I was terrified. And like I said, it took me about 30 seconds to realize, man, I'm not gonna be able to stay here. I'm not like, eventually I'm going to have to get my family out of this community. I don't see another way. And so that was, that was the second really major conflict within me as to whether or not I could stay. And then shortly after that, a couple of years ⁓ that, ⁓ start to notice some ⁓ delay ⁓ our son, ⁓ first child. our second child was coming up, she was ⁓ really she advanced very quickly, in pretty much every way. And we were noticing our son, our child, actually ⁓ starting lag behind a little bit. Of course, as people who don't go to doctors or don't take medication or don't consult specialists or whatever it was like, we had no idea. We were like, I don't know. I'm not sure what's going on, but he's definitely not. Typical. And so then again, we're back here. We're making this difficult decision. ⁓ I mean, at the time, it wasn't really that difficult. I had no reputation to speak of as it was. mean, we'd made, you know, we'd kind of committed this unpardonable sin. And so there really wasn't much reputation for me to uphold. And so I just made the choice that I thought was best for my son. And so we... We took him to a doctor and had him diagnosed and he has autism spectrum disorder. And again, another ⁓ piece to this, he might not ever be ⁓ normal. And a place ⁓ to raise in a place where normal ⁓ is ⁓ most thing that you can be, he might not ever be that. ⁓ And ⁓ we basically made the choice ⁓ that we going to do whatever we could to help him. And so ⁓ my wife, basically made it her calling ⁓ him everything that he needed. I she was running him an hour from our house a times a week so that he could have this ⁓ specialized of therapy. anyway, ⁓ we just, we were doing everything that we could ⁓ despite fact that we were getting ⁓ a of, ⁓ we getting a lot of sideways looks because we ⁓ had that. Now, the worst part about this for me was that I had several people imply, if not outright suggest, that the reason that our son was the way that he was ⁓ because ⁓ allowed him to be born in a hospital. So you can imagine that was a difficult thing to hear as a young ⁓ father. And so for me, most of my adult life was just about doing everything in my power to be as distracted with excess and... ⁓ trying to do the things that. occupied my mind and my time and none of it was things that I should have been doing. All of it was ways that I was neglecting my family and my responsibilities. But, anything was better than admitting that I was somebody else's life and the life that I had wasn't causing any kind of flourishing for anybody around me. Certainly not my wife, certainly not my kids. yeah, I just kind spiraled ⁓ into ⁓ just wasting as much of my life as I possibly could. was going to take edge off, whatever was going to keep me from thinking about what could been or what could be, or ⁓ being that, that that person who was looking beyond horizon. And then shortly after our, this whole autism diagnosis thing came out, I was sent a YouTube video that was a person recording or person doing like a voiceover for an old Charles Spurgeon sermon. And I think that was the very first time that I heard the gospel. This thing that wasn't really talked about where I grew up. This was more about staying in the church and choosing one in the church and getting married and like I said, having kids and just don't leave. Whatever you do, just don't leave. But this wasn't the message that I'd grown up hearing. Maybe he's talking about salvation being by grace and you know, he's like using the Bible, which is like crazy where we came from, like nobody used the Bible. Nobody had ever told me so many of the key truths of Christianity. Nobody ever told me that God wanted to be known by His creatures. This might seem like such a rudimentary thing, but I didn't know that. I didn't believe that. mean, I was in this closed community that were like the only people who could possibly be saved. So the idea that God was like, knowable was crazy to me. You know, no one ever told me that God wasn't hiding behind some kind of secret knowledge, you know. Because where I came up, that was the name of the game. It was this secret knowledge. We had a true gospel. We were this restored movement. was all that stuff was talked about and mentioned while I was growing up. You know, nobody ever told me like the overarching story of the Bible about how God's rescuing people and restoring his broken world and all that like— all those churchy phrases, nobody ever said any of those. Nobody told me about what the transformed life can look like when somebody lives by faith in the finished work of Christ. These were all foreign concepts about preaching the gospel to all nations indiscriminately, right? Baptizing them and teaching them and all this stuff, this again, totally foreign. And I started hearing this type of thing. And so, though I knew that I kind of had to keep it quiet, because I couldn't really have much less reputation than I had at the time, but I didn't want to make it any worse on myself. So I was kind of hush-hush about this idea, like this gospel thing that I had heard that was never taught or preached or anything about where I came from. And so I was kind of just trying to forget about what I had heard, but like a rock in your shoe that you're consistently walking on doesn't go away. In fact, it gets more and more and more annoying. It's like one of these things that you try over and over and over again to ignore, like to forget that you know it, but you can't forget that you know it. You can't un-hear it. I couldn't un-hear the message that I'd heard. And it just, it didn't go away. No matter, I couldn't bury it with excess and with distractions. But as time went on, I started to realize where I was. I started to realize that I wasn't actually in a Christian community at all. But I couldn't leave. I didn't know where I would go. Where would I take my family? But by the grace of God, there were many, many, other people who were independently but simultaneously coming to the same realization that I had. That we were somewhere that we shouldn't be. We were in a place that we should have never been. We needed to get... We need to make some changes, some serious changes. people—our people were going to hell, right? They weren't believing the gospel. They weren't believing anything Christian for that matter. And so people began to slowly talk, obviously behind closed doors, about these new things that we were discovering. Like, you know what the Bible actually teaches? Like, have ever looked at it? Have you ever read it? Have you ever looked beyond our little community? And as people did, they began to become enlightened by the Spirit what this message actually is, what the Bible actually is, what Christianity actually is. There were people who, two types of people, there were people who heard that message and got out, jumped ship, and there were people like me who were still stupid enough at the time to believe that if enough of us came to these realizations, we could reform our community. Because leaving our family and friends behind, it wasn't that appealing to me. And so like an idiot, I... I stayed for way longer than I should have. It took me several years, in fact, to come to the realization that there really was no fixing this. Unfortunately, the enemy had a stranglehold on the hearts and minds of basically everybody that I grew up with, my family, my friends, all of the above. And so over the next few months and years, people began to leave and this mass exodus began to take place. Hundreds of people leaving and going and exploring and finding other churches and being baptized and becoming members and serving and all these other things. And eventually it wasn't quick. It wasn't easy. But eventually I just realized that we couldn't, there was never gonna be enough of us. ⁓ We weren't gonna be able to change it. And so ⁓ in 2019, my wife and I and our two young kids decided we were going to leave as well. And that was a ⁓ difficult, that was a very difficult decision and it was a very difficult time. Thankfully, my parents also, chose to leave. So I had my parents, much of my wife's family left as well. So we didn't lose everybody. But most of the people that we knew growing up would no longer have anything to do with us. And now, the time I'm recording this is six and a half years later, and they still haven't. I haven't spoken to my brother, my only sibling for that amount of time since the fall of 2019. But one thing made all of that worth it. And it was that we were able to experience the only freedom that comes from being reconciled to your Creator. And there's nothing better than that. There's nothing more freeing than that. When you're raised in a place that doesn't have that on offer, When you get it, ⁓ it doesn't really matter who you left behind. It doesn't really matter. Of course you love those people, but you want them to experience what you've experienced because it's such a radical thing. ⁓ And so we began to pursue God's call on our lives. We left our former church, we found a new church. My wife and I got baptized. We became members. We plugged in and began immediately serving. things were really great and comfortable for the very first time in our lives. we had begun to actually live as disciples of Christ, as true followers of Christ. Shortly thereafter, I was given an opportunity to teach. Our church was going through a study of the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel. And I was given this one-off kind of opportunity to teach a class. And from the time I began to prep to the time I was finished, I came to a realization and it's gonna sound a little bit crazy if you haven't been there. for the first time in my life, I knew what I was meant to do. I realized that I had a purpose. There was a purpose to my existence. There was something I could do, something I could be good at, something that I could, some way I could contribute to the world. Instead of just being hidden in a corner, there was something I had to give, something unique about me that I could give. I was able to live into my talents and the gifts that God has given me. And I just had to have more. I just couldn't get enough of this experience. think the Lord just rewarded everything that I was doing, everything that I was trying to do, because I had aligned myself with Him. And as I said, that was just over six years ago. And ⁓ since that time, I have been able to accomplish many of the things that I had dreamt of from the time I was a little boy. I was able to ⁓ a college degree. I was able to get my ⁓ degree ⁓ in psychology, ⁓ ⁓ makes a lot of sense ⁓ I came from. I am ⁓ just a months ⁓ away from finishing my training, ⁓ getting a master of divinity degree, which ⁓ wasn't even for me, ⁓ you know, years ago. ⁓ I'm increasingly getting more and more ⁓ to do what ⁓ I ⁓ was supposed to do. My wife and I have had two more kids. ⁓ Everything is going the right way. Our marriage has never been stronger. Our family has never been larger or happier. We've never been in a better place. Everything is aligning. And here now I'm starting this podcast and I'm in the hopes that I can help people who were or are looking at things the way that I was looking down this sort of tunnel of endless darkness. And I just, want people to know that you're not stuck there, that you're not alone, that there's people like me who have been where you are, who know what you're going through. And if this can help even one person to realize, wow, like, ⁓ I'm not a Christian. I'm not in a Christian group. I'm living a lie. I need to find the truth. If just one person can be helped by this, then it will be worth it. And so that's basically my story. I'm a person that I never believed that I could be. And you can be a person that you never thought you could be. You, watching this. You, listening to this. Jesus can do... All things, right? Jesus can do all things. And so if you will allow him, he will work things in your life that you never dreamed of. And I'm proof of that. My life is proof of that. My testimony is proof of that. I'm somebody who is uniquely positioned to hopefully speak truth into ⁓ life. And so I hope to do that.