An American Christian Chapter XI — Oklahoma
My move to Oklahoma may have released me from the grips of my home church, but it was just the beginning of a new chapter of abuse.
At the beginning of 2008, I moved to Oklahoma City for my first real job. It was for a modestly sized church, which was something I thought I wanted at the time. I had doubts, but I was groomed my entire life to believe that working for a church was the height of nobility. This church seemed much more relaxed than the one I grew up in, and it was even considered a ‘sister church.’ The only difference is that this one claimed to be non-denominational instead of still under the Assemblies of God.
I was excited. I was 24, and I was finally starting my life. I had just moved 2,000 miles from home, and despite it being Oklahoma City of all places, at least it wasn’t Centralia, Washington.
It was an election year, and churches all over the US firmly stated they weren’t allowed to talk about politics right before they talked about politics. I remember the lead Pastor and my new boss, Lyle Nelson*, giving a sermon where he weighed the pros and cons between Barack Obama and John McCain. Pros and Cons from a “Christian perspective.” This mainly involved him relaying skewed information in a neutral tone that he gleaned from Fox News to help us politically ignorant congregants make an informed (biased) decision. “Obama might very well be the Anti-Christ, but I’m not trying to sway your opinion.”
And yes, he said those words.
Lyle thought of himself as the cool pastor. He played the electric guitar. His screen name for everything included the word dude. He shopped at The Buckle, despite being in his mid-forties with hair that was well past thinning. He went to business school instead of seminary because he claimed the church should be run like a business. He used to have a two-tone mullet in his wild days and did a bunch of drugs. He never missed an opportunity to bring up this fact, nor did he miss an opportunity to show everyone pictures of how extreme he was.
He was radically saved when he was young, and he wanted everyone to know that they were not beyond redemption. Of course, he also pulled an enormous salary from the church and blamed his upper-middle-class lifestyle on his lawyer wife. He always neglected to mention that she was a probate lawyer who worked in an uninspiring office.
He also owned several dumpy rental homes throughout the Del City / Midwest City suburbs of Oklahoma City. He was the very definition of a slumlord, yet he bragged about how his income properties allowed him to be generous for the Lord.
I was paid $20,000 a year with no benefits, filling the previous video producer’s spot, who had quit months earlier because of a nervous breakdown. The workload was adequate at first, but it wasn’t long before I was putting in 10–12 hours a day, 6+ days a week, and feeling guilty for the time I spent outside the office.
When I first started, I was only paid $600 a month for the first 90 days and lived in the church’s Master’s Commission dormitories. This happened to be an insulated metal building owned by another church that used it for summer camps. Since members of the other church had access, occasionally, we would find people we didn’t know entering the building at odd times. Things often went missing until we called them enough times to have the locks changed.
I didn’t need much, and I was finally getting to do video production professionally. Pastor Lyle certainly didn’t mind that my most recent education was from Generation Training Center. He had visited us in Washington several times to speak to our class. He was also elated to have someone with such a fine background on his staff. I was very much the poster boy of post-MC success to all the Master’s Commission students at his church. Someone who had done it all right. It felt good for a while, but after eighteen grueling months of pressure, insane deadlines, and utterly embarrassing tasks, I was let go so the church could pave a new parking lot.
While working at the church, I contracted H1N1 from someone who had recently been on a missions trip to Mexico when it broke. Since I didn’t have insurance, I wracked up enormous hospital bills when I ended up in the emergency room. Like anyone else, I chose to put off seeing a doctor as long as possible because I simply couldn’t afford to.
I was let go a few months after I recovered and promptly filed for bankruptcy. I could only pay for it by doing freelance work for another church that Pastor Lyle had set up. I did this while sick with something else and worked through one of the worst fevers I’d ever had. I was practicing the “Crawl in don’t call in” policy that had been ingrained in me during my time in GTC.
Every church has its problems. There’s never going to be a perfect place. However, this does not excuse repetitive repugnant behavior. This church embodied it. Lyle led the church no different from the other churches he lambasted from the pulpit: Everything from oddly racist undertones in sermons to the constant pandering for money.
While I was on staff, we were required to tithe regularly. So, every pay period, I pulled out my 10% in cash and placed it in an unmarked envelope for the Sunday offering. Since it was unmarked, there was no way to tell whose offering it was. I didn’t care about taxes – I didn’t make enough for it to matter anyway – but apparently, Lyle cared that my name never seemed to show up. He recruited a co-worker to ensure I was indeed tithing. I brought home $1200 a month and gave $120 back to the very institution that employed me. The fact that he was watching the offering to see if and how much his staff was giving infuriated me. I was irate and told my co-worker precisely what I’d been doing. This answer seemed to satisfy Lyle enough not to ask again. I stopped tithing entirely after that.
Lyle insisted that his church was for everyone and did his best to court black families to add some much-needed diversity. Part of his plan in doing this was to have his all-white worship band play black gospel songs. They were not good. He also tokenized one of the only black families that attended the church as often as possible. This was primarily because of their wealth and status in the community. They eventually left the church because of this.
Lyle often brought in an evangelist named Dale Gentry, who he referred to as his “spiritual father” — A whole other subject — to speak and prophesy to the church. To put it as simply as I can, Dale is batshit crazy. He would give big, boisterous prophetic words, based on nothing, which led to more nothing. He often spoke words about the destruction of America by the liberals and the Obamas, invasion by foreign enemies, and the failure of US currency. His inane prophesies never came true, no matter what dates or conditions he attached to them.
Dale prophesied over me twice, both times involving unintelligible nonsense that, even in my time of belief, sounded insane. Once, without my consent, he spoke an embarrassing word over me in front of a room full of local pastors, many of whom I was trying to build rapport with. Yet, no matter what he said, Lyle continued to bring him back and encourage people to listen to him.
I could easily write an entire chapter just on Dale, but I don’t believe he is worth the time. He’s just another delusional preacher in a long line of delusional preachers who think they’re the true conduits for God on Earth. They scare people into patently false beliefs, based on whatever they concoct, and feed it into the ever-growing Christian-conservative paranoia that holds so many people hostage. People like Dale do not preach to bring hope or respite from a harsh world; they find a tiny spark of fear and dump as much gasoline on it as possible. These preachers are no different than — and often overlap with — the conspiracy-laden dredges dedicated to Qanon.
When I started, I was caught up to speed on the church’s 2020 Vision. This was a literal vision Pastor Lyle claimed he had about building a new church building by 2020. He had come up with this sometime prior to my employment there. After an ice storm annihilated the Church’s Christian school gym in 2007, he decided to speed up his plan. Earlier that year, former professional boxer, Evander Holyfield, came and spoke to the church. Lyle publicly embarrassed him by asking him to donate to his 2020 vision. After the ice storm, Lyle continued to pester Mr. Holyfield until he no longer accepted Lyle’s calls.
The church built a new gym for its Christian school with the money it received from insurance payouts. Since Lyle wanted to move quicker on his vision, he convinced the church board and the congregation that God wanted this. The ice storm was, of course, a sign.
After the gym construction was complete, Lyle barreled forward on building a new church building, claiming that the one we were currently in was bursting at capacity. He added a third service to Sunday mornings, making it even harder on volunteers and staff. The sanctuary was never full. To offset the look of emptiness, he had rows of chairs removed and often had tables and displays set up in the back to fill the extra space. This trick of the eyes helped convince people that we were indeed at capacity and therefore needed a new building.
As construction began, Lyle unveiled his incremental plan to pay for it. This included begging from the pulpit most Wednesdays and Sundays for people to give “above and beyond” just their tithes. He also took out loans to help push the progress.
I mentioned briefly that I was let go to pave a new parking lot. This was due to the fact that the church didn’t have the money to do so on its own because it was so stretched to get Lyle’s new building completed. The parking lot was not an exaggeration on my part; that actually happened. My position was never backfilled; all my work fell on my co-worker, who had to learn my responsibilities on the fly.
The building was eventually completed sometime after I moved out of the state, totaling approximately six to seven years of construction and millions of dollars in donations and loans.
Less than two weeks after joining the staff of Lyle’s church, he and his wife set me up with the resident single girl, Amy*, that all churches seem to have. This is usually a smart, pretty, and profoundly connected girl in the church who is inching closer to 30 and has no prospects for a husband. She was very kind, but I had absolutely no dating experience. As I mentioned in Chapter I, my home church pushed courtship, and dating was forbidden in GTC.
The first time we met was for a quick, out-of-town trip with Pastor Lyle and his family to see Dale Gentry speak at some small church in who-cares Oklahoma. Lyle encouraged us to both go up and be prayed over by Dale during the altar call, in which I received my first wildly inaccurate word from him. Dale also tried to bless us as a couple. I didn’t say much at dinner after or on the way home.
Lack of dating experience aside, Amy and I were entirely incompatible. Other than both of us enjoying the man candy in Zach Snyder’s ‘300’, we had nothing in common. On our first date, we had coffee at Starbucks and talked. It went well, so I asked if I could take her out to dinner, desperately trying to forget the weirdness of Dale’s prophetic words.
I took her to a restaurant recommended by the youth pastor, the same man who had a long-distance relationship with Lauren Jones. The restaurant was not the right choice. It was a small, overly romantic Italian place that included a man who played the violin at our table. I was hot with embarrassment the entire time, as I’m sure my date was as well. We decided to see a movie after dinner, which ended up being the 10 pm showing of There Will Be Blood.
Amy fell asleep within the first 30 minutes, and I watched the rest of the movie without saying a word.
After a bizarre double date at an overpriced steakhouse, where, to deal with the anxiety, I had gotten sufficiently sloshed, she headed home, and I, again, watched a movie by myself. The couple we went out with, too, had fallen asleep. Amy and I decided it would be best if we didn’t continue seeing each other after that.
In the church, it was chalked up as “sometimes things don’t work out” or “bad timing.” The reality was we were both pushed into an, albeit short, relationship without any consideration. This situation can occur within any small group of people, but churches especially push relationships that lead to marriage very forcefully.
Here in the story is when my now partner makes her appearance. For the sake of brevity, I’ll just be referring to her as “M.”
M also attended the church, and after carefully avoiding the pressure put on me by her parents, who were also on staff, we eventually began seeing each other. I’ll go deeper into how our relationship was affected by purity culture in a future post, but I want to wrap up this chapter with a final story.
M and I dated for about three years before we eloped. We had been planning a wedding, but we decided instead to have a private wedding officiated by one of our best friends due to a number of different circumstances.
Early in our dating relationship, Lyle asked if we could talk. He has always pushed Christian couples counseling, which we as a couple were admittedly against. When I declined Lyle’s offer to counsel us, he said he would instead cut to the chase: “I don’t think it’s God’s plan for you to be together” he said, “M is a great person, but I think you two are wrong for each other.” Lyle had been M’s Pastor for most of her life; he was so close that he was considered family. This was also long after I stopped working for him.
A few months later, a woman who attended this church intermittently — and was barely an acquaintance — messaged M and sternly warned her that “He will break your heart and financially ruin you; he’ll ruin your life.”
These unsolicited warnings are not uncommon within strict religious environments. Had either the woman who sent the message or Lyle been close friends, or those whose counsel we respected, we would have had more to consider. The woman who sent the message had her own troubles, along with a history of giving bizarre and utterly wrong “words.” Lyle, for whatever reason, tended to think he had more influence in people’s lives than he actually did. He managed to insert himself as a spiritual leader into most of his congregant’s affairs, whether they sought his opinion or not. He, too, was often grossly wrong about many of the “words” he gave.
This chapter may seem like a separate incident from my journey through Generation Training Center and my home church life. However, beyond the parallels of spiritual abuse and church overreach, these stories are connected. I mentioned that this was a sister church to the one I grew up in. Lyle would often visit the church in Washington to preach, and a few of our younger church members chose to attend the Master’s commission at Lyle’s church over ours.
After Devon and Janice left Washington state to work at a church in Texas, he and Lyle became close. Devon has often traveled to and spoken at Lyle’s church, and vice versa. Lyle, like Devon, thrives on the attention and praise of others, both within the church and out. They both sponsor large public events for the community, often collecting and giving resources to those in need. This certainly isn’t bad and is precisely what the church was created to do.
The intent behind it, however, is pure showmanship. It’s all a part of a long-term effort to continue building their brand and influencing their local communities to look upon them favorably. This comes in handy whenever the next boundary is pushed, the next scandal appears, or the next person finally calls them out on their toxic and abusive theology. Ben Jones did the same thing in Centralia by running for local offices.
They can then play the victims and go right back to hurting people for selfish gain, to build their empire of dirt.
It’s a cycle in church leadership, and they have no reason to stop.
- All names have been replaced with pseudonyms.
Click here to continue reading Monday Club — An American Christian Mini-Post VIII
