Latest / Clear Path Christianity / When I KNEW Something Was WRONG || CPC Podcast Ep. 14
Transcript
- Cole Crone: So yeah, this one is when I knew something was wrong. So I'm gonna kinda go through the eleventh hour of my or kind of I don't know. I'm gonna go I'm going from strange beliefs to zero biblical continuity to mounting evidence, and that's when I'm gonna talk kind of about the history of the church and how that history was exposed to me anyways. So Stop me anytime. Good? Okay. Everyone I know, and I know a lot of people personally who have come out of some kind of counterfeit form of Christianity or or some other type of high control slash cultic religious group, we have we've all gone through the same or similar sort of process where in at first at first. you see the the things that make your group different are are also kind of what makes the group feel special in in some strange sense, right? Your your group either your group has been called or it's been set apart or it possesses some kind of secret knowledge. And and and that's that's pretty cool But but only to an extent. Because the more you investigate the the per the claims of your particular group, the less evidence you find to actually believe those claims. And and virtually everybody I know, without exception, we're talking about hundreds of people, have the same or a similar sort of trajectory. that their life, their awakening has taken. Now, in in in my experience, it w worked something like this. I I would repeatedly ask the following questions Why are we so isolated from everyone else? Why is there so much fear and almost no peace? Why do we have so many odd practices? The the more that I actually explored the faith that my community was claiming to be part of, I began to ask a more important question, perhaps the most important question is that why does my church look nothing like the depictions given in the Bible? of what real Christianity is supposed to be. And and that question is is one that I describe as ⁓ like a rock in your shoe. You you you're you're walking and you you feel that that very small pebble hop into your shoe and you can stop and and take that small rock out at any time. And but the longer you avo avoid it, the longer you ignore it. the more and more and more annoying it becomes. And the more difficult it becomes to avoid or ignore. And that was that was that question for me. So for the for the longest time I was able to rationalize the the differences by assuming that I was the problem, that it was my finite mind that simply couldn't comprehend the the the the the the transcendent realities of of the world. I I needed someone with an apostolic anointing to do that on my behalf. Now that was that was what I was told anyways. I I I didn't have enough faith or I was thinking about it too much. The the only thing that I believed myself to be able to do was to pray that things could change. Now eventually, what starts as sort of hairline cracks in the system turn into insurmountable chasms that just simply cannot be ignored any longer. And that was the case for me. So in this episode, I'm going to try to explain a little bit more about how I moved from minor doubts to near certainty that something was really wrong with the group that I was in. So point number one, I'm calling strange beliefs. Strange beliefs. So from an early age, I I noticed that that my church, my particular Christian tradition, was very, very, very strange. I'll I'm just gonna list a few points. amongst many that could be cited, but but one, ⁓ we didn't go to hospitals at all. Well, I say we didn't go to hospitals, I I I mean that l literally. That no one went to hospitals. And anyone who did was immediately a second class citizen in the community. So so the the teaching in James five about prayer you know praying and anointing with oil, ⁓ and and the the teaching from from First Timothy five where where Paul instructs Timothy to take a little wine for his frequent infirmities. Those those were not descriptive texts, right? Those were prescriptive texts. In other words, ⁓ those texts are not simply saying what what what happened, they were saying what was meant to happen in all cases throughout all of space and time, absolutely. Right? So that was that was all that we were allowed to do. If if you had an illness or an injury, you had two medical choices. One oil, the other a little wine. That's it. That's the entirety of my medical experience growing up. So for for s some unknowable reason, ⁓ I would say theological inconsistency, ⁓ but whatever, dentistry and optometry were decided to be okay. ⁓ but but it that was that wasn't always the case in the history of this particular group. But I didn't I didn't know that. A second oddity. I was never allowed to have friends outside of the church. So the the teaching in this particular group was that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. And so, which of course that's in the Bible twice. And so we had to keep ourselves ⁓ s sort of unspoiled from the world, right? I'm using error quotes when I say the world for those of you who are just listening, which just a term for anything outside of our community. That that's that's what I mean by the world. So that was that was one of the teachings. So the the more you spend time amongst those who are outside of our group, the more you begin to look like, act like, and most importantly, think like the people outside of our community. And so from the time you're born, all of your relationships are predetermined for you. You, your, your family is your family. That's fine. That's perfectly normal. Nobody chooses their family. Most people choose their other relationships, though, not where I came from. You were told these are going to be your friends because they happen to have been born in the same year as you. And then when you get a little bit older, maybe you can choose some people who aren't exactly your age, right? But but at every stage of life, your friends were the people who were also in that. stage of life. You couldn't make friends with the kids at, you know, your your classmates in school. You couldn't hang out with your coworkers on the weekends. These are just, you know, things that most of us do all the time without even really giving a second thought. I was not ever allowed to do. And so the the the third ⁓ so the the third piece of this is that I was taught that my church was the only true church, and thus we were the only ones who had any chance of being saved. So ⁓ Jesus says, I am the truth, the way, and the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me. ⁓ my church taught that it was the truth, the way, and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through it. And so if you wanted to have a chance of being reconciled to God, you had to do it through this community. This church was the gatekeeper of. between God and man, ⁓ rather than, as the Bible teaches, rather than ⁓ the man Christ Jesus as being the mediator between God and man. So the teaching was not that you had to be united to the body of Christ, right? That that would be a biblical teaching. Salvation is union with Christ. But it is that you had to be a member in good standing of this particular small community in suburban Oregon. So you s you see how those are very different. Those are very different exclusivity claims, right? one comes straight from the Bible, and the other one comes from some guy who called himself an apostle in the 19th century, you see. So these oddities began to create the hairline. fractures ⁓ in my world view. ⁓ but it it it didn't stop there, unfortunately, because ⁓ the second piece that I recognized about the group that I came up in is that there is there was zero, and I I do mean zero biblical continuity between what I was being raised and ⁓ what the Bible actually teaches. That's what I mean by biblical continuity. Now I didn't know this growing up, but I I got my own Bible when I was about sixteen and then began to read it. And in my community we were taught that you shouldn't read the Old Testament, you certainly shouldn't read Revelation. And so ⁓ that's where I started. ⁓ because I guess I I'm I'm a rebel at heart, but ⁓ so growing up, the s the sum total of my Christian experience and this is again, I know this is gonna sound a little bit weird to well all of you. The sum total of my Christian experience growing up was going to church, singing eight to ten hymns, depending on how tired the piano player was. ⁓ Twice per week. ⁓ Sunday mornings and then Thursday nights. And Thursday nights was normally when you wouldn't get all ten songs. But but everyone was wore out, so ⁓ you know, whatever. We would rather talk football and hunting afterwards. Now, of course, this is a c a completely unbiblical way of conducting a a worship service. Not that the singing aspect of it is unbiblical because I think there are many, many, many psalms that exhort us as worshipers of God to sing to the Lord. I have a small list of them here. You can look at Psalm 47:6, 68, 4, 95, 1 and 2, 104 33, 147, 1. And that's just ⁓ an an excerpt of psalms which exhort God's people to sing songs. In Acts sixteen, we see Paul and Silas who are singing hymns to God in their imprisonment. Now, Paul also encourages his readers to sing ⁓ well psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, and the like in Ephesians five and Colossians three. Now, again, this is just a small selection of what could be cited as biblical, biblical imperatives to sing songs. So the group that I came up in is perfectly fine at this point. But unfortunately, that is not all that the Bible teaches. are to be markers of regular liturgy or what would be considered ⁓ a biblical worship service, a biblical time of worship. Now, I just am looking at three key pieces here. Again, more could be cited. The first thing that was missing from the group that I came up in was teaching. Absolutely no teaching. ⁓ except for f third third generation removed hearsay about what your grandpa thought the apostles taught, who were all dead. 20 years before I was even born. I'm not talking about that kind of teaching. I'm not talking about, you know, handing down family traditions. I'm talking about teaching from the Bible, completely and totally non-existent. So we see that the the the Acts II church had teaching. We see in Acts 242 specifically. That the earliest disciples, quote, devoted themselves to the apostles' teachings. So, in other words, going all the way back to the foundation of Christianity, the foundation of the church, you had teaching as one of the foundational practices in the life of the Christian church. Likewise, we know this went beyond the apostolic age. Because Paul instructs Timothy on countless occasions to teach and to appoint elders who are, quote, able to teach. 1 Timothy 3:2. So the church is meant to fulfill the Great Commission by teaching the disciples to observe all that Jesus had commanded. That's from Matthew 28, 19 and 20. So It is it is no wonder that we see teaching immediately in the early church. So that's teaching. The second piece. The second piece is preaching. Again, we see that the Bible commands us to preach, preach the gospel. So the apostolic practice being passed down as Paul instructs Timothy. Paul tells Timothy to preach. Preach the word, second Timothy four, two. So we know that this is not just a you know a practice that was meant to be a part of that first generation apostolic tradition, but was supposed to transcend that because we see Paul passing it down. So again, a just a very cursory and very surface level reading of the book of Acts, and you will see that the earliest disciples preached, literally preached in every situation. From synagogues to homes to marketplaces to any and all types of gathered assemblies, right? So a church that never meaningfully ⁓ proclaims or explains the gospel is neglecting one of its clearest biblical responsibilities. So again, considering the the the the final commandment of our Lord, the Great Commission. Is is to go and make disciples. The implication being preach the gospel. It is through the preaching of the gospel that we make disciples. So again, it is no wonder that we see the early church in the book of Acts and beyond in the Pauline epistles, they the church preached. Now, The the the third piece of this, again, this was absent from my upbringing in a place that called itself a Christian church, is a is a two for one. I'm calling it just sacraments because where I came from, there were none. No sacraments. There was no baptism. There was no partaking of communion or the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper, or whatever you want to call it. Didn't matter what we called it, we didn't practice it. So that was Not not a thing. So why is that a problem? Well, the Bible says that again, going back to the Great Commission, we are supposed to go ⁓ to all the nations and baptize. So there are a lot of images that you could use from the Bible to to teach that the bot that the Bible wants us to baptize and take communion. I'm just gonna deal with the New Testament because I don't want this video to be or this podcast to be an hour and a half long. So I've limited myself to just that. But again, you could do a one-hour teaching on what the Old Testament teaches about baptism, and another one hour teaching on what the Bible says about communion or the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist or whatever you want call it. So again, I'm just focusing on the Great Commission forward. And again, we see that the great part of the Great Commission is to go and to to make disciples and to baptize them in the name of the Father and the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, etcetera. So again, it seems that that was that was commanded by our Lord prior to his ascension. So then it is no surprise that when we turn to the book the book of Acts, and Peter has in Acts chapter two, given his famous ⁓ sermon on the day of Pentecost, and his audience are are cut to the heart and they realize that they are condemned before God because they have crucified the Lord of glory. They they they respond in repentance and say, Well, what do we do now? Now now what? Right? We've we have we as a community have committed, we have killed God. Now what? And ⁓ Peter says that he he commands them to repent and let every one of you be baptized in Acts 238. So The their in response to their question, how do we right this grievous wrong that we have done? Part of that for Peter is to be baptized. So as all of us ⁓ are guilty of sin, all of us need forgiveness, all of us need to be baptized. It's just it's just that simple. It's not a complex ⁓ calculus equation. Now, the second bit of this is communion. Again, the Lord's Supper, Eucharist, whatever your tradition calls it. I'm I'm going to posit that it is essential for the Christian church to be administering this particular sacrament, and mine didn't growing up. And this was that that second piece that really started to open up those hairline fractures. So one of Jesus' famous hard sayings comes to us in John chapter six. And Jesus says this most assuredly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Seems pretty crazy for ⁓ first century Jews to hear a statement like that. ⁓ because, well, first century Jews didn't eat humans. So they were probably a little bit confused about what exactly this means. Well, thankfully, Jesus tells us at the Last Supper as he as he has that first ⁓ communion, that ⁓ that first Eucharistic community. ⁓ experience with his disciples. And he says this, and as they were eating, Jesus took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, and said, Take, eat, this is my body. Likewise he takes the cup, right? He gives thanks, he gives it to them, saying, Drink it, drink from it, all of you. Okay. So that's from Matthew. You can look at ⁓ other accounts that will say, This is my body, this is my blood. This is a big thing for Martin Luther, but that's another that's an aside. It should be a big thing for all Protestants. So my my point there is that it's it's crucial. That we partake of this if we take Jesus' word seriously in John 6 53. If we don't, we have no life in us. And I can tell you from firsthand my own experience that you have no life in you until you participate in this 2000 year. Communal tradition that has been taking place for 2,000 years. Because I had no life in me before I started doing this on a regular basis. I didn't even know I was dead until I came to life. You see. And so it and again, it's so it's it's no wonder that we that this practice continued beyond the apostolic age because Paul has a A teaching about it in 1 Corinthians 11. The Corinthians were mishandling the the supper, and there were all kinds of issues that were coming about. And so Paul calls them back to the very events of the Last Supper as as the sort of the example of how to do this rightly and what it means and and and all of that. So again, these two practices, all of these practices actually. Really matter because Christianity is not merely an internal belief, but it is a lived and embodied faith. Okay? So if if your particular church looks so unlike that the church of the New Testament that you're lacking these most basic rhythmic things in the life of the Christian church. then the hairline fractures that you might otherwise have should be opening up quite wide at this point. I wish I could say that was the end of the journey for me, but unfortunately that wasn't quite enough. The enemy had a a stranglehold on my heart and mind such that more evidence was needed. So this this third piece I need to ⁓ I need to give you a little bit of context, a little bit of the history of the group that I came up in. Because you might be wondering what kind of a Christian church doesn't have teaching, you know, Bible teaching or preaching or sacraments or any of those things. That seems really weird. And of course, that's the whole point of this episode is to show you how weird a place that I came from. And and so This this group, as I've said many times on this podcast, started in the nineteenth century by a group of men who were claiming to be apostles. Capital A. ⁓ and I mean apostles like on par with Peter and Paul and James and and like all the names that we would use from the New Testament itself. And what was unique about these particular men is that they all claim to have had some kind of Damascus Road experience, right? Look, Acts chapter 9. Paul has this waking visionary sort of experience, sort of encounter with the risen Lord. And so again, it was understood that was necessary for an apostolic calling. It was necessary to have an actual commission. From the Lord Himself. And so these men claimed to have all had that kind of experience. And so these met these men who had had all these experiences began to plant churches all over the United States, from ⁓ Oklahoma to Idaho to California to eventually where I live here in Oregon. And they selected elders and began setting up churches. Now, these churches began to fracture in at some point in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for for a variety of reasons. some of them because of varying disagreements, others because of very serious moral failure among these so-called apostles. But at any rate, they they began to fracture and to disassociate themselves from one another. Now The apostle, again, I'm using airquaus when I say apostle, because for those of you who are just listening, because I don't there's there's no evidence that's what this actually was. But this the apostle that founded the particular branch that I came up with died in 1969, which was the year my mother was born. So ⁓ almost 20 years before I was born. And unfortunately there were there was zero succession plan. and ⁓ only a few elders who were definitely a a second class of leadership in this particular ⁓ ecclesiological structure. Now, of course, this wasn't ⁓ necessarily ⁓ a problem for our particular community because our apostle had prophesied that that the world was going to come to an end in 1972, which was just a few short years after his death. Now, when that didn't take place, obviously that should have been a a a huge red flag. For the people who were still out there here, our apostle turns out to be a false prophet. Look at that. So that doesn't happen. There's no succession plan. Obviously, we're sitting here in 2026, so the world didn't end in 1972, and eventually all of the elders die out, and the church is left with no one who was qualified by its own teachings. To lead a church in any kind of biblical way. So the remaining elders who were left selected a group of men who were called board members. And those board members were responsible for things initially as mundane as paying bills, performing weddings, because there was only, you know, a couple elders. It's a lot of work for two guys who at the time were very, very, very old. And so they selected a few people just to kind of help them out with these administrative things. Again, we're ready any moment for the Lord to return. So setting up a long-term plan wasn't really in the purview of this kind of first generation of people who were carrying on the torch. So that is the long and short of why there's no teaching, no preaching, and no sacraments. And The reason why it remains to be the case to this day. Now, for many of you, you're probably thinking, This guy's an idiot, because I can imagine not having left that place behind me, ⁓ you know, decades before I actually did. But again, when you're indoctrinated into this, and this is just normal for you, you don't really think about it that much. You're kind of just like, well, this is just the way that it is. This is how God wants it to be. And so it's it's not really a problem. Until you decide to care about what the Bible actually says, which which I did. So I began to pray fervently. Well, all of my life really, I prayed fervently that God would allow someone within the church or someone from without to have this kind of Damascus Road calling sort of experience. Who someone who could come in and lead. And it turns out, in hindsight, upon doing my own research from within the group still, that was never ever ever going to happen. And there are a few reasons why I began to discover that this was never, ever, ever going to happen. The first is that we had a preacher, a pastor from a local Baptist church who came out. To our congregation and preached the gospel. A gospel that many of us had never, ever, ever heard before. And it didn't go well. ⁓ the reason that it didn't go well is because the people where I come from are so fixated on the only, the only qualification that matters to be able to teach or preach or administer sacraments is have you had this Damascus Road experience? Well, this particular preacher, of course, didn't have such an experience. And so nothing else that he said really mattered to the vast majority of the people that were in my community. Now, s the second big piece of this for me, again, which I lived these this experience, is when this same Baptist preacher, who had been getting some communications behind closed doors, some people from the community that I came from, maybe you should try and come back. Try it again and see what happens. Maybe you could get a few people to listen to you. So he did. Unfortunately, a ⁓ a small but very loud ⁓ posse of folks ⁓ changed the locks on the building and then ⁓ stationed themselves in the in the at the front door to basically prevent this person from speaking in our church again. Now This is obviously a community that doesn't want to change despite the fact that it very clearly needs some serious change. So Now it it was at it was at that point that I got a a second level of revelation ⁓ from several sources within the church. That the there had been for decades local pastors, preachers, Bible teachers who had called my church, my this cult that I came up in, and asked, Hey, we heard you guys don't have any kind of ministry. Would you be interested in us helping you to set up some kind of ministry? And these board members. Who were again just meant to pay the bills and keep the lights on and perform a wedding here and there, had been turning these potential preachers and teachers and pastors away for decades without consulting the rest of us. And so ⁓ the thing that many of us had always been praying for was actually being kept from us. By people that we'd never elected. We never we never allowed, I never voted for these guys. And yet they were gatekeeping the truth from me and from my family. And so again, you would have thought that would have been enough. And it almost was until this, until this third piece, kind of a fourth piece, came ⁓ to my mind. ⁓ just a few months before we decided to leave, I was informed that there was an audio recording, just one audio recording of this apostolic preaching from this this last of our apostles. And I thought, okay, finally I'm going to get to hear the voice of God speaking through this man. After after all of my life, over 30 years, I've been wanting to hear. real true voice of God apostolic preaching for the first time. And somebody sent me this recording again that I had no idea that it existed. And I listened to it and I was woefully unimpressed. Woefully unimpressed. I'll put it to you this way: if I blindfolded myself And randomly selected a person from my local Christian congregation, they would stand up and exposit the Word of God multiply times more effectively than this man did. And he apparently had had a Damascus Road encounter with Jesus Christ and had this apostolic anointing upon him. And from that point forward, there was literally no turning back. It it was just going to be a matter of time before I saw myself out the door. Okay. So I get that's a lot to take in. I'm sure if if you have any questions, I know s understand this is a strange story. And and this part of this podcast and the ongoing thing that I'm trying to do here is to try to tell in manageable chunks my story. Because there there are people out there who might be in a similar circumstance. Because when I look back I I realized that I was not my doubts did not arise because I was trying to rebel or because I am ⁓ I I want to be spiritually blind or I I just want to live according to ⁓ my own flesh and my own desires. No, I I simply wanted my religion to make sense. That's it. I I simply wanted my religion to be biblically and historically grounded. And that's it. I I wanted the church that I had read about in Scripture, ⁓ a church that was centered on truth, ⁓ a church that was grounded in the gospel, a church that that that made disciples, taught the Bible, proclaimed Christ, administered the sacraments, and so on, right? Doesn't seem like I was asking for a lot. And and if if if you're not getting those things, Don't let anybody tell you that you're asking for a lot because you're not. Just this is just basic biblical historical Christianity. So, again, unfortunately, the more that I studied the Bible, the more I discovered that there was a massive disconnect. And at the end of the day, the system could not survive honest examination. Now, One of the things that I say over and over and over again on here is that the truth does not fear scrutiny. Okay? The truth does not fear scrutiny. And it does not need people to be isolated. So real Christianity was never meant to depend on secrecy or conspiracy or information control. So if you're listening to this. If you're watching me right now and you're beginning to wrestle with things that don't add up. Don't dismiss that. In fact, lean into it even harder. Right? Rather look at the evidence for yourself and come to your own conclusions. Because when when I did that, I found everything that I was looking for. In my in my innermost being, the things that I had always longed for. I I found as I learned to follow Christ. And so my hope is that in hearing this crazy, probably slightly unbelievable story that I lived, maybe you will realize that you can come from whatever crazy background you might have come from and discover the real biblical, historical Christ and his church. Thoughts.