You know, I had a bit of a panic attack because I suddenly had a flashback to my childhood while watching this documentary about churches in Australia.
First of all, I have to tell you that I had to watch the documentary with subtitles on because I have no idea what the fuck Aussies are saying with that accent. It’s totally wild. I’m sure other people have seen this documentary but, truthfully, I stopped watching most documentaries after I took my documentary class in university.
For some reason, this documentary appealed to me. The only ones I really watched are documentaries about religions. Seriously, I watched the one about Rajneeshpuram (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, find that documentary and watch it because that shit is absolutely wild) and I also watched the documentary about Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, which is the offshoot of Mormonism that lets the pastor marry multiple 14-year-old girls even though he’s 50-something (that is one of the most upsetting things I’ve ever seen in my life and I really do not recommend watching it, I actually vomited).
But I decided to watch the documentary about Hillsong.
Now I know all about Hillsong… well, kind of. I knew about Hillsong in the 90’s and 2000’s. I had no idea all the drama that had been happening, I was also totally confused when they talked about a Hillsong in New York City, but that’s why I was watching the documentary.
It’s funny because I recognized that whole environment, that was my life for a very huge chunk of my life. And as I watched these videos of these young guys preaching, one in the 1980s and the other in the 2000s, I had that panic attack because it reminded me of a lot of things.
My whole childhood was the church. But not as a volunteer, as a career. Everyone in my family was some kind of leader in the church. Those churches were not dissimilar to Hillsong, either. In fact, they were the exact same denomination. I was part of a church plant for 4 churches.
There are things that I was directed to do that a lot of people don’t really know about because, being that I was the grandchild being raised by two prominent members of the National Organization, I would be sent to churches even as a teenager. It happened twice. I remember one in particular because it happened to be the original church that my grandparents ministered at in the 1980’s, but now it was 1999 and I had been told beforehand that the youth pastor was about to be dismissed because he was having an “affair” with one of the high school girls.
I knew, they told me. And I was to go there, as a “newcomer” and provide focus for the group, someone for them to coalesce around while they quietly removed the youth pastor. I was essentially a teenage spy for the National Organization. I would go back and report to my grandparents and write emails to the headquarters in Texas or at the Capitol Christian Center (at one point, I shared an office with someone there when I was 18).
I was trained from the moment I could speak to be a minister. The reason I’m so good at public speaking is because that’s what they were training me to do since I was a very small child. They didn’t mind that I started getting into acting, it would help hone my skills for when I assumed the pulpit, and they thought my music interest in performing was natural, my grandmother was the first woman pastor ordained by the denomination and became a music pastor.
But at the time I was doing my Missionary Impossible spy work, I was already in a relationship with Joe. He was raised Catholic and found the politics of my religion really boring.
But that wasn’t abnormal. Every leader I’d seen since childhood had some kind of duality to them. It wasn’t until after Joe died that I really started to come to terms with reconciling who I was into a single, authentic, whole person. The man I loved had died and I still had no one to comfort me despite being considered an “institution” by many groups of people.
But I already knew that none of those people truly cared for me.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me that I was so successful at stand-up because of my lifelong training to assume the pulpit. Or why that has made me a semi-successful teacher now. This is quite literally what I was born to do…
But instead of scamming people out of their earnings (I remember I earned a “salary”, meaning part of those 10% tithes went to me when I worked at youth nights), I’m teaching young people.
I think I might have inadvertently gotten closer to my childhood goal than I thought.
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