A commenter pointed out that my first entry made it sound like I had gone from a liberal church to a conservative one.  Yes, that's how it started out.  Actually, the Presbyterian church I belonged to was moderate.  It was after my charismatic experience there that I became unwelcome in mainstream churches.  It was a close Christian friend who pronounced the Presbyterians "dead."  He said, "Why not try out the Baptist church I attend?"

And so I did.  It was a Southern Baptist Church.  I joined the youth group there, and the first thing they did was declare my Presbyterian baptism by pouring invalid.  Although I didn't really believe it, I had to get dunked in the Atlantic Ocean to be a part of that church.  So, that was two baptisms I had endured so far.  When I told the youth leader about the charismatic experience, which drove my Christian life for many years, he told me that "Tongues have ceased," and showed me the Love chapter in 1 Corinthians.  It reads, "As for tongues, they shall cease."  It also says, "Knowledge will pass away"  So I figured since knowledge was still with us, these passages referred to the second advent, but I kept quiet.  I was a new Christian and figured they knew a lot more than I did.  But Paul also wrote, "I thank my God that I speak in tongues more than all of you," and, "Don't forbid speaking in tongues."

So I moved on, to a small church in south Florida that was involved with the leaders of the Shepherding, or Discipleship movement.  I became premillineal, but always had a hard time with the idea of the secret Rapture of the church.  I kept quiet about that, too.  It was already beginning - although I believed, and still believe in the charismata, premillenial dispensationalism made no sense to me, and I was beginning to doubt the theology behind Shepherding as well.  From my intense study of the Bible, I couldn't find precedence for these things.  I didn't say anything about it because of my youth.  How could they be wrong?  They had a huge following, and the leaders of the movement, Bob Mumford, Derek Prince, Charles Simpson, Don Basham, and Ern Baxter - they all shared a sense of humor, which made for easy listening.  How could so many Christian leaders be wrong in their thinking?  

It was in the Shepherding movement that I first started hearing "suggestions" about what kind of movies or television I should watch, and stopped going for a couple of years.  They also had things to say about how we should handle our finances, and emphasised tithing.  But then, they started in on what a married couple was allowed to do in the privacy of their bedroom.  My first wife and I rejected this out of hand.  We kept it to ourselves.  

The Shepherding Movement consisted mostly of churches pastored by men with no theological degrees at all - my new pastor had a degree in English.  However, we were allowed and encouraged to freely express the gifts of the Holy Spirit.  I was happy about that, because I experienced many gifts of the Spirit.  I felt that was a theological change for the better, and my belief in Holy Spirit baptism was accepted there, and so was I.  I suppose I was looking for a spiritual family that would have me.  

During this time I was exposed to a lot of teaching from the Shepherding movement.  Their primary doctrine: committed relationships within a hierarchical framework.  The men in Ft. Lauderdale were at the top, and my own church was two levels down from there, ultimately under the discipleship of Charles Simpson.  It was like Amway goes to church.  Our church tithed to a pastor who tithed to Charles Simpson.

On the side, I had been listening to this guy urging me to quit my church and attend a United Pentecostal Church - the "Jesus Only" people.  He asked about my baptism.  I told him I had been immersed, but he pressed me further.  He asked me what words the pastor used when he baptized me.  I told him: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  He told me I was not a monotheist.  He showed me the verse in which Jesus says, "I and the Father are one," then, a verse that referred to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ.  He said, "See?  Jesus is the Father; is the Son, is the Holy Spirit."  Then, he took me to Revelation and showed me the verse that talks about the throne of God.  It reads, "One sat on the throne."  He said, that's Jesus on the throne.  Next came baptism.  He showed me a number of scriptures in Acts that portrayed the Apostles baptizing in the name of the Lord Jesus.  So, I was baptized in this guy's swimming pool in the name of the Lord Jesus.  Hey, I wasn't taking any chances with eternal salvation.  Baptism #3.

The Shepherding concept was invasive.  Leaving the movement was equivalent to divorce.  If you left one shepherd because you didn't like the guy, the new shepherd was ordered to send you back to your original shepherd.  We were required to open our lives completely to our shepherd.  When we made a major life decision, we were required to ask permission and wisdom from our pastors.

By this time, I was 21, still very young and naive - we were all young.  The oldest member of that church was 25.  Our shepherd was 35.  I didn't know much about theology.  I followed orders like everyone else.  The local shepherd was the central figure in discipleship.  He was, in some ways, infallible.

At that time, there was a growing emphasis on demonic possession and oppression: possession for the unsaved, oppression for the Christian.  If there was sin in your life that you could not overcome through prayer, fasting and reading the Scriptures, it was most likely a demon, and it needed exorcising, so I was involved in a lot of Christian exorcisms.  After all, we had dominion over Satan.  We always cast out demons by the name of the besetting sin.  There were evil spirits of fornication, envy, greed, lust, masturbation, rebellion, heresy, you name it.  We would say the words, "spirit of fornication, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus Christ and order you to come out!"

A dear friend of mine in another Shepherding church was subjected to three hours of deliverance.  When the guy who was performing the exorcism shouted,  "Spirit of stupidity..."  My friend said, "That's it.  I'm outta here."  The whole thing was embarrassing because if you asked someone to pray for you, you never knew what kind of spirit might be cast out of you, right in front of everybody.

The culmination of my experience in Shepherding was attending the National Men's Shepherds Conference in Kansas City, MO.  There, a bunch of us went out for lunch with our shepherd's shepherd.  We were all wearing name tags.  While we were waiting for a table, a waitress commented, "What kind of farmers are you?  You don't look like shepherds, and you don't smell like sheep."  Apparently, folks in Kansas City knew something about sheep ranchers.

I took a job that required a lot of driving, and I listened to a lot of AM radio preachers.  These guys taught mostly from the Old Testament, spiritualizing its stories into Christian thought.  They talked about miracles at their crusades, and their message was the Dominion of the believer over sin and finances.  You have the power over these things, they said, but you must accept it by faith.  I listened to Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Hagin, R.W. Shambach, a bunch of guys who came and went, and then a man named Kenneth Copeland began broadcasting a show called the Voice of Victory.

Copeland told people, "If you want that Cadillac, it's yours.  All you need is faith."  So, even if you felt faithless in getting that Cadillac, you could have more faith by acting like you have faith.  He instructed people to go down to the Cadillac dealership, find a car you like, and march around it three times saying, "I claim this Cadillac for myself in the name of Jesus."  If you believed enough, that car would be yours, because as a believer, you had dominion over all things, including that Cadillac.  If you didn't get the car, either you didn't have enough faith, or you weren't following the principle of God's hundredfold blessing: if you want to receive, you must give enough to plant a seed of faith for financial success.  Just write that check out to Kenneth Copeland Ministries.  What?  You don't have any money?  It's because you're not giving, so give whatever you've got, and do it fast, or we won't be able to continue broadcasting on this station.

As I drove, it occurred to me what kind of people would be home during the day to listen to these shows: those on fixed incomes like the elderly and disabled, the unemployed, and the unemployable.  That turned out to be true.  They were fleecing some of our country's poorest people so that they could drive their own Cadillacs.

The Faith movement, or "name it and claim it," as we called it, (now, it's "blab it and grab it") was based on the same premises as Reconstructionism - that through salvation in Christ, we are no longer under the curse of Adam.  We now had the right to exercise dominion over all things.  Anything can be yours if you have enough faith - but this is blind faith, a kind of faith that was often required of Christians by their leaders.  The problem is, this is not the kind of faith taught in the Scriptures.

Forgive me if I bounce around a little.  This stuff happened to me almost 40 years ago.