Bruce and Polly Gerencser, in front of first apartment in Pontiac, Michigan, Fall 1978 with Polly’s Grandfather and Parents
On the last Sunday of November 2008, my wife and I attended a Christian worship service for the last time. This series details how things have changed for us over the past eight years.
Polly and I will celebrate our thirty-ninth anniversary in July. We first met as college freshman at Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan. Polly was seventeen and I was nineteen. Both of us enrolled at Midwestern to pursue God’s calling on our lives. At the age of fifteen, I felt God calling me to be a preacher. Polly had a similar teenage experience — not to be a preacher, but to be a pastor’s wife. On July 15, 1978, Polly and I stood before family and friends at the Newark Baptist Temple and confessed that we would love each other unto death. In joining together as husband and wife, we were also saying to God and to the church that we were committed to fulfilling God’s calling upon our lives. This commitment of ours to the ministry would take us to seven churches in three states over the next twenty-five years. This post will begin to detail our marriage during our years in the ministry and how it has changed — dramatically so — since we left the ministry in 2005 and left Christianity altogether in 2008. Adequately telling our story will require several posts.
Bruce and Polly Gerencser, May 1978, Two Months Before Their Wedding
Both Polly and I were quite naïve about life and the ministry when we married. Our idea of being Pastor and Mrs. Bruce Gerencser proved to be a fantasy. We thought we would, after graduating college, move to a rural Midwestern community so I could either pastor a church or start one. I would be a long-tenured, adequately paid minister, while Polly would be the keeper of our two children — Jason and Bethany — and our white two-story home surrounded by a picket fence. The only thing that came of our fantasy? We have a son named Jason and a daughter named Bethany. Virtually everything we were told about how wonderful it was to be a pastor and a pastor’s wife proved to be a lie or, at the very least, gross distortions of reality. Much like selling Amway, with those at the top of pyramid getting all the accolades and money, so it was with the ministry. Big-name preachers pastoring churches with large attendances were well-paid and received the loving adoration of those who thronged to hear them preach. Believing that these preachers were the norm, young pastors and their wives would enter the ministry thinking that they too would one day be used mightily by God. The big-name preachers traveled the conference circuit, telling young pastors that if they would just work harder, sacrifice more, and follow their examples, that God would surely bless them and use them to build large, soulwinning churches. John R. Rice, famed Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) evangelist and editor of the Sword of the Lord, was fond of saying, There is nothing wrong with pastoring a small church — for a while. The message was clear: a sign of God’s blessing was a thriving church with an ever-increasing attendance. (In the 1960s and 1970s, most of the churches on the Top 100 Churches in America were IFB churches. Today? Only two or three IFB churches are on the list.)
In the spring of 1979, Polly and I left Midwestern and moved to the place of my birth, Bryan, Ohio. Polly became pregnant six weeks after our wedding, and several months later I was laid off from my machine shop job. With a child on the way, no insurance, and out of money, we decided to drop out of college and move to Bryan so I could find employment. I took a union job in the shipping and receiving department at ARO — a large manufacturing concern that years later was bought by Ingersoll-Rand and closed.
Bruce and Polly Gerencser, Somerset Baptist Church Sweetheart Banquet, 1985
Six weeks after moving to Bryan, I became the assistant pastor for nearby Montpelier Baptist Church. The church didn’t pay me a salary, so it was necessary for me to continue working at ARO while I took on near-full-time responsibilities at the church. Believing that God called us into the ministry, Polly and I were willing to make any and every sacrifice to fulfill our calling, even if it meant burning the candle at both ends and being forced to earn a living outside of the church. This thinking would permeate our thoughts and drive our behavior for most of the next twenty-five years.
Polly and I established our marital relationship according to what we believed the Bible taught about marriage and the family. Having a traditional marriage meant that I would be the breadwinner and Polly would care for the children, cook meals, and be the keeper of the home. Complementarian to the core, I expected Polly to submit to my God-given authority in the home. Wanting to be pleasing to God and her husband, Polly submitted herself to what can best be described as an authoritarian ruler. Passive by nature, Polly was fine with me running the show, making all the decisions, including taking care of the finances and disciplining the children. In many ways, we lived lives that were modeled to us by our parents and older ministers and their wives. Little did we know how corrosive and psychologically harmful such thinking was, and to this day we deal with the after-effects of patterning our lives after Evangelical beliefs concerning marriage and the family.
Polly and Bruce Gerencser, Our Father’s House, West Unity, Ohio Circa 2000
It was not until the late 1990s — twenty years into our marriage — that Polly and I began to question the foundation our marriage was built upon. As we looked at not only the people I pastored but many of our colleagues in the ministry, we noticed that many of them were building comfortable middle-class lifestyles, complete with all the trappings of American capitalistic culture. Here we were living in poverty, working day and night, and sacrificing our lives for the sake of the ministry while everyone else seemed to be enjoying the good life. Why weren’t these church members and preachers living according to the teachings of the Bible? Why did it seem they loved the things of the world in direct contradiction to what the Bible taught in 1 John 2:15,16:
Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
Where were the churches and pastors who were willing to sacrifice their lives for Jesus, even unto death? Polly and I had made the mistake of actually believing what we were taught in church and Bible college. We actually took to heart what we read in Evangelical books and heard at conferences. Silly us! we would learn.
In the next post in this series, I want to talk about the subtle marital and family changes we made while still in the ministry, and how these changes laid the groundwork for where our marriage is today.
The post Eight Years Later — Part Three appeared first on The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser.