Category: ecclesiology

I wanted to take one more installment to tie up some loose ends and to give a peek into some of the Clown Reformed Church Characters I knew. I will change the names so that the average reader can see the person without knowing the name.

I.) Loose Ends

A.) In three or four places I’ve used some scatological language. I do not apologize for that because I do believe there is a time and a place for everything under the sun. The malfeasance, malevolence, and mendacity of the Clown Reformed Church deserves stiffer language than I tagged it with. When one considers their disregard for the sheep by ordaining women and by ordaining men who had no business being ordained the outrage over this assault on the Church of Jesus Christ should know no boundaries. When one considers how the CRC destroyed the career of a faithful minister of Jesus Christ for the ecclesiastical equivalent of jaywalking — and then had to bury the exculpatory evidence to get it done — one should be outraged. When one considers the dissembling, the chicanery, and the distortions, (only my inherent easy-going nature keeps me from saying “lies”) that the CRC invoked in order to sling mud at a doctrine (“Natural Relations” sometimes called “Kinism”) that the Church has embraced for 2000 years, as seen in a cursory examination of the historical record, (get the Dow & Achord book) it requires language that would make widow’s cringe and virgin’s blush. I probably haven’t been direct enough in these pieces.

B.) I said I would return to a couple of sentences in the letter recommending my honorable release from the supervising Council. Those sentences were;

“In recent times, however, Rev. McAtee’s writings have been appropriated by a movement within the Reformed community known as “Kinism.” Though Rev. McAtee claims no affiliation among them, because of appropriation of his intellectual property, he has over the past two years been linked by accusations with having common cause.”

a.) I need to say here I do not recall ever making this claim.

b.) If I did claim no affiliation among them it is because, as I said earlier in this piece, there is no organization for me to affiliate with. There are no Kinists who have membership cards that get them a discount on the cost of the next Klan meeting. (That’s a joke for the humor-impaired among us.)

c.) Clearly, if some people were appropriating my intellectual property, it would be because those people believed my ideas had an affiliation with their ideas.

d.) I have common cause with everybody who agrees with me.

C.) Touching the word “Kinism”

Many have opined that we need to dump the word because of how successful the enemy has been in slinging mud at it. For a time, I agreed with that and started using the word “Famialism.” Same content. Different word. One could also use words like, “oikaphilia,” “ethno-nationalists,” and “racial-realist.” However, I have resorted to using the word “Kinism” again because;

a.) it’s easier to spell

b.) I have determined that all because the enemy is successful in prejudicing the language I shouldn’t, therefore, give up on the language. There are many idiotic Christians that I don’t want anything to do with but on that basis, I don’t start using a different word besides “Christian” to self-identify. (But believe me I’ve considered it.) In the same way, there are some Kinists who are way over the top and so bring reproach on what I believe. However, I’m not going to quit using the word “Kinism” either because my enemies are purposefully distorting the meaning, or because there are some dopes out there who are mauling the word.

D.) Why I wrote all this

I probably would have never have returned to this if the Clown Reformed Church had not decided to continue its attack on me. I let it slide after the misrepresentations in their District meeting that dismissed me. I let it slide after the Synod that referred to the situation repeatedly going so far as to pass overtures against a strawmen’s caricature of “kinism.”  They essentially crushed something I never believed. They did all this without using my name or the Church’s name and yet one would have had to have been an imbecile to not know who they were going after. Still, I let it slide and did not respond. However, when the Clown Reformed Chruch decided to jump on the Southern Poverty Law Center comical denunciation of myself and the Church I serve I determined I had had enough. It is clear that they are never going to let this go and will trot it out whenever it is convenient for them to virtue signal. As such, I determined that even though I would never have the platform those people had, I had to set the record straight — if only for the people who were getting splashed with mud whom I served.

II.) Clown Reformed World Personalities

Those that I’ve already dealt with in some measure I won’t bring up again.

Brun Hilda — This woman was really the reason for the intensifying of much of what transpired in the last few years. She fancied herself an expert on theology and would even introduce herself in such a matter. “Hello, my name is Brun Hilda, and I’m an expert in theology.” The funny thing was that the woman didn’t even know the meaning of the word “propitiation.” Experts in theology know what “propitation” means. She attended some high brow Liberal University in the Low Countries and it showed. She was a social justice warrior and feminist beyond measure. She even lobbied for “Social Justice” sermons from her Pastor and when the man said “no,” his life soon became severely troubled.

Malcolm Z — Malcolm Z is an African-American and is perhaps the #1 Social Justice Warrior in the Clown Reformed Church. He is convinced that what the White Boer South African Farmers are facing in terms of attempted genocide is all lies. Like all SJW’s he walks around begging people to disturb the chip that is on his shoulder. He once visited the Church I serve and I witnessed many of the people invite him to stay for our fellowship meal. When he finally reported on the service all he could note is that he knew something awful was present because we prayed for the White Boer farmers during the long Pastoral prayer and how we would have accused him of heresy if he had brought his white wife and family to church. The chip on the shoulder doesn’t take much to disturb it.

Percy Blakeney — One of the few good guys in the story. Percy was conservative by way of instinct. Percy did all he could do to help me out when I was on the hot seat but he was in a tough situation himself. Trying to help out someone seen by everyone else as a dirty racist is not a good position to be in. However, he did the best he could in a tough situation short of sacrificing himself and his career. I counted him a friend though I have not seen him since the whole thing mercifully ended. He was a kind and jovial man. Quick with laughter and always ready for a good conversation. I owe him a debt of gratitude for alone fighting for me in a Kangaroo court situation.

Thomas Beckett — Thomas was another of the guys in a white hat. He is the minister who was executed for ecclesiastical jaywalking. Brun Hilda asked the question, “Who will deliver me of this meddlesome Priest?,” — and the Elder board and the District did the deed. Thomas spent some time in a Communist country as a missionary before going into the ministry and as such Thomas was one of the few guys who understood the dangers of Marxism in the Church. This is one reason why he refused to start preaching Social Justice sermons contra Brun Hilda’s demand. The main reason however was that Thomas understood that the pulpit needs to be reserved for the Gospel and he wasn’t going to muddle up the pulpit or the Gospel with Social Justice bilge. Thomas was in a difficult spot the moment he arrived at the flagship church because he was an orthodox man coming to serve a congregation that had been fed on Liberal Barthian Higher Critical preaching for decades by Dr. Rev. Dusty Lugnut.

A funny story here. Not long after Thomas arrived on the scene he asked me to serve as his mentor. I refused for several months reasoning that there was no way in Hades that a minister serving at that Liberal Church genuinely wanted me to mentor him. I mean would Karl Barth ask J. Gresham Machen to mentor him? I figured it was just not possible that Thomas could be anything but a raging liberal and I had had my belly full of them. Thomas finally won me over when at a meeting he mentioned something derisive about the Liberal nature of the Bannaner. Shortly, thereafter we started meeting. I can say in all honesty that Thomas was the only epistemologically self-conscious conservative minister that I met during my almost 25 years in the CRC. I still count him as a friend and we talk often. We’ve both been through the fires.

P. T. Barnum — P. T. was a very likable man who was conservative by impulse but woefully unable to defend his conservatism when pushed to the wall by even the most hackneyed liberal. P. T. was a businessman/salesman before he was anything else (like a minister) and he had the ability to put the meat in the seats. (Put people in pews.) And to be honest, he probably was able to give his people all they could handle in terms of food for their souls. I remember P. T. if only because I cringed when he reported he was going to have a traveling strongman troupe in to give the Gospel and they would do so while tearing in half, thick phone books and bending thick bars of steel around their necks.

P. T. provided a funny memory for me as one time his Church was responsible to host a District meeting. The host at these meetings was responsible to provide worship leaders. Well, P. T. on that Saturday provided an Evangelical lounge singer’s version of “Tony Orlando & Dawn.” I think it was the only time in 20 years that the liberal clowns and I shared a conviction and it was on not caring for the Evangelical version of “Tony Orlando & Dawn,” as worship leader. The libs would have preferred Meagan Thee Stallion and I would have preferred the Three Tenors.

Cyrano de Bergerac — Cyrano was a fresh Seminary grad who was unmarried. He got engaged after meeting a girl in an online chat room. I tried to warn him off said girl because she was not Reformed and had never heard of things like the Heidelberg catechism and other Reformed staples. He, of course, ignored me and was married. Only a few years later he was asking different ministers for counseling advice for a troubled marriage. I liked Cyrano. He had an inquisitive mind, even if he staked out some strange positions. He genuinely wanted to be God’s instrument in helping people in the Kingdom. I admired him because of his willingness to continue to work in a place that was small. Speaking from experience I knew those charges were sometimes discouraging.

There were more. Many more enemies but it would do little good to regale you will all the stories about their oddities and villainy. It was a terrible place to be in for over 20 years but I guess that is what purgatory is all about.

The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.  Proverbs 18:17

For 25 years I have turned the other cheek while I’ve been slandered and libeled by the Clown Reformed Church (hereinafter referred to as “CRC”) but in this document, I am telling, in the words of Paul Harvey, the rest of the story.

We showed up in 1995 after United Airlines (UA) decided to close operations in Columbia South Carolina. From 1989-1995 I Pastored the first Church I served while at the same time working part-time for the Airlines. With UA’s decision, there was no way that I could support my family on the small rural Church’s salary alone and so my wife and I decided we would take UA up on its offer to pay for our move to one of six cities of our choosing. Our #1 bid was Grand Rapids Michigan, primarily because my kin lived in and surrounding that area and also because there was a Seminary there where I could do my next level of degree work if we decided that was possible.

In our visits to Grand Rapids to set up shop one of the first things we did was to check out with the local Seminary if there were any area churches that needed pulpit supply. I had been preaching on Sundays for nearly 7 years and it seemed like a good idea to at least investigate the possibility of pulpit supply while living in Michigan. We contacted the appropriate person in the bowels of the bureaucracy of the CRC and he told us that there was indeed a Church that routinely needed pulpit supply and that it would be good for them to have someone who would be a constant for them in this regard. He went on to say, however, that we would have to talk to another person as well about this opportunity and immediately ushered down to another office to talk to yet another bureaucrat but not without first giving us a contact name for the small Church that needed the pulpit supply.

We waited in the waiting room of the office and soon an older rounded man asked us into his office. The first chap we spoke to popped in again and explained what was going on. Having explained the situation the first chap promptly left. The second chap just stared at the door that the first chap departed out of. He then stared at us for a moment and returned again to his staring at the door. This happened for some little while the 2^nd chap caught his bearings. Finally, in the first words he spoke to us, he said, “You can’t do this.” I simply responded by saying “OK.” For 5 minutes he kept repeating over and over in different ways, “You can’t do this,” and for 5 minutes I kept saying “OK.” I already had the local contact name and so I knew that once I finally was finished with the 2^nd chap saying, “You can’t do this,” I would make a beeline for the phone to call the contact number. I never saw the older rounded man again.

I contacted the number given to me by the first chap and the man on the other end of the line seemed genuinely excited to know that I was interested in not only filling their pulpit but also quite possibly living in their parsonage. They were a small congregation that could not, like the congregation I had been serving in South Carolina, afford a full-time man, though they could afford a “tentmaker.” That is what I was offering them. Long story short here, we met several times with the contact man and within a month I was filling the pulpit and within a month of that, the small Church received approval from the District denominational authorities that I would be allowed to be pulpit supply for this small struggling Church. The district authorities were gleeful for me likewise because I solved a problem that they had in trying to figure out what to do with this congregation For years the District was allotting a small percentage of their budget to keep the Church afloat but with my presence, the District no longer had to cut checks for this Church because the Church could make it by paying me a small salary ($ 300.00 a week) while I continued tent-making working for UA in Grand Rapids. Indeed, there had even been discussion among the District Denomination to close this Church before I arrived. I was a solution for many parties. I was a solution for the congregation itself. I was a solution for the Seminary guy always having to find pulpit supply for this Church every week. I was a solution to the District’s problem of spending money on a mission Church that they were convinced would never be self-supporting.

This worked for three years before my health began to burnout. I was working nearly full-time for UA while working full-time for the Church. At the end of 1998 UA made it nearly impossible, by their purposeful scheduling of me to work on Sundays, (Station Politics) for me to keep tent-making at UA in Grand Rapids while pastoring. At that point, Jane and I made a proposal to the local Church that if they could meet a very modest salary we would step out in faith and quit UA and pastor full time in Charlotte. The Church, to their credit, resolved to meet that modest salary and I quit UA and the tent-making I had done for nearly a decade.

One result was that I got to know my children who I had seen comparatively little of for those ten years. Eventually, another result was that I had to, once again, deal with denominational politics. For the most part, the Denomination left me and the Church alone. However, they had assigned me a “mentor,” by the name of Dr. Dusty Lugnut. Dr. Lugnut was the Pastor of the flagship Church in the District 40 miles up the road and had the endearing virtue of always thinking very well of himself as combined with letting you know that he thought very well of himself. The problem with Dr. Lugnut and me is that Dr. Lugnut was a full-on Barthian (Neo-Orthodox) while I had sworn my life to extinguishing Barthians. Putting the two of us together in a mentor-mentee relationship was like tying two polecats together at the tail and slinging them over a clothesline. I think we met twice before we both realized that we were not going to be best pals.

At that point, the condescending Dr. Lugnut just decided to ignore me and ignore the Church. Now, keep in mind he had been assigned by the District to shepherd me into an official capacity in the Denomination while at the same time working to make sure that the Church I was serving moved from a “mission church” to an “organized” church. However, Dr. Lugnut determined he was going to show me and us that he was in charge and so he just ignored us for nearly 14 years. Just try to imagine how disappointed I was.

Every so often during those 14 years (maybe three times), we would be contacted by either Dr. Lugnut or by some other District chieftain. I remember one time there was a Minister from Toledo who phoned me and told me about his big plans for the District now that he had been elected moderator and that he wanted me to be part of that and so he was going to bring me in. I just grunted agreement suspecting that like so many times before this was just so much talk. I was right. In six months he transferred to another Church and that was the end of his maniacal plan to shape the District in his image.

I would occasionally attend District denominational meetings of the Clown Reformed Church (CRC), and would inevitably return home in a rage with my blood pressure in the stratosphere. These meetings were held twice annually. At one of the meetings, I remember the Anabaptist and so Pacificst John Howard Yoder being invoked as a guru on war theory with the whole floor adding their Amens. I finally couldn’t bear it any longer and stood up and said, “It is amazing to me that a room full of putatively Reformed people are kissing the arse of an Anabaptist and Pacifist. I get not agreeing with this war, but invoking an Anabaptist intellectual? What is wrong with you people. I thought you were Reformed.” A deep and spooky silence blanketed the floor.

Another time at the District Denominational meeting a discussion was had on the floor about the necessity to extend to homosexual ministers insurance benefits. I sat there with my mouth agape because I had been persuaded that there was no such thing as homosexual ministers. I arose to object and that created its own fun firestorm until one of the tenured Ministers realized that this discussion was not going well and was able to table it.

Over the years I witnessed many amazing things at these District meetings and I will return to more of these shocking things in subsequent installments. Most commonly what shell-shocked me was the low snake-shit standard for ordination. I saw a man ordained who couldn’t answer one question put to them. (I kid you not –not one.) I witnessed another chap get ordained who had no answer to the question; “What is Original Sin.” Another chap, when asked “what books he enjoyed reading,” responded with, “I don’t really like reading books.” Another chap I saw ordained explicitly denied “Justification by Faith Alone.” More than one chap could not explain the meaning of infant-Baptism. I saw one woman ordained who told us that as a chaplain she was not allowed to be explicit about the necessity of Jesus Christ for salvation with the dying patients she ministered to in the hospital per hospital policy and that she abided by that rule. I saw another woman ordained whose husband was a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. It was so bad that I finally got to the point where I just checked out of the meetings. If I went I would sit in the back by myself and listen to lectures on my Zune or read a book. I can honestly say these were some of the most enraging, depressing, and discouraging moments in my life. To see the Church of Jesus Christ be staffed with such people and to see the Church of Jesus Christ not care about who they were staffing the Church with just ripped my heart out.

Finally, in 2009, fourteen years after serving as “stated supply” for this mission Church the denomination decided that they better push hard to make me official. After a great deal of wrangling characterized by my previous foot-dragging on these issues, the District finally corralled me into agreeing to take a one-week hermeneutics class at their Grand Rapids Seminary. I had angled for a Church history class dealing with the Continental Dutch Church but they insisted on hermeneutics.

And so I suffered through a week of hermeneutics as taught by someone who embraced higher criticism and subsequently stood for an ordination exam. The only person who gave me a hard time was Dr. Lugnut but it should be known that I gave as good as I got from Dr. Lugnut during his attempt at grilling me. I passed the ordination exam despite Dr. Lugnut’s fury with my position on women in office (I opposed it) without any problems though according to the denominations Book of Church Order it was not a legitimate ordination exam since there were only two representatives from Synod present as opposed to the required three. (The BCO used the language; “There shall be three officers from synod present.”) So, I passed the exam but not by the Denomination’s own standards.

Further, by the denomination’s own standards I was never finally ordained in the Denomination. I really wasn’t conversant with the Book of Church Order and only later had to become conversant with it and so I did not know that the BCO required ordained men in the denomination to be present at Ordination/Installation services in order to ordain and install me. I did not have any denominationally ordained men at my ordination/installation service and so according to the denomination’s own book of church order I was never officially ordained in the denomination. In point of fact, I did not have any ordained men from any denomination present at my ordination/installation service. So, per their own book of Church order, I never sustained a legitimate ordination exam and I was never legitimately ordained in their denomination. I learned this only when I was seeking to leave the denomination – which according to their own BCO I did not have to do since I was never in their denomination per their own standards, to begin with. It was the oddest thing. Here I was resigning from a denomination I was never a part of and requesting a release from a denomination in which I had never been accepted.

Jerry Seinfeld captured this situation perfectly,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU6m5UqLx9M