This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Episode 026 – A “Brother” from Keith Green’s Last Days Ministries Cult: Paul Part 2

October 18th, 2023

T: Hi, I’m Tracey.

S: And I’m Sharon. And we are Feet of Clay…

T: Confessions of the Cult Sisters! On our last episode we began our conversation with Paul Kellerman, who was one of the brothers at our cult commune, Last Days Ministries. If you haven’t listened to part one you really need to pull that up and listen to it first. Today we continue our discussion with Paul, and Sharon, this gets into the good parts of what it was like to be at Last Days Ministries.

S: Ohh, the juicy, juicy bits.

T: The juicy bits! So without further ado, here’s part two.

 

S: So Paul, I’ve got a vague memory that your final days, your last days at Last Days Ministries had something to do with an outside relationship, or something to do with leadership challenging you – I don’t really remember. Can you elaborate please?

PK: Yeah, it did have to do with an outside relationship with a woman from a nearby ministry, the Agape Force. There was a woman that worked in a little shop there, like a coffee shop, and we started a relationship. Her name was Rebecca, and we just started a relationship. What was interesting in the beginning was the rules were different for both ministries. They were allowed to do any communication with anybody at any level, until they got into a relationship and then they dropped down the rules. At Last Days it was the opposite; you couldn’t talk to anybody until you were in a relationship, and then the rules laxed a bit. So we had to navigate that a little bit. Basically things moved – I would say rather fast.

S: So did you get permission before you started this relationship? I mean, permission from Last Days leadership?

PK: Yeah, good question. I don’t think so. I don’t remember that. I only remember when it became serious and people somehow heard about it or learned about it. I didn’t hide it, but I don’t think there was any rule that said I couldn’t do this outside relationship. That wasn’t clear.

T: Hahaha. Okay.

S: Because the rules weren’t about the way you interpreted it. The rules were about the sisters inside the ministry, not applying to women outside the ministry.

PK: I guess technically that would be true. I didn’t really think about it, it just seemed like there was no reason not to start the relationship. I’m a rule follower; I think I have three PhDs in people pleasing by now – by then…

T&S: [laughing]

PK: Of course I had the time in the Marine Corps. I was really good at doing what I think you’re supposed to do. At this point I must have felt okay about it, but once it started getting serious then the ministry leaderships in both ministries got involved, because the Agape Force has a lifetime covenant.

T: Yes, so wait, wait. For our listeners, there was a café called Grublets which was based on a character from the Agape Force children’s series. They had the best brownies on the planet.

PK: Totally.

T: So many of us, that was like, our one chance to go somewhere close and splurge, usually on the limited free time we had. So I’m interested – I guess you had to check out a car to go, because you had to drive. It was called down the road in East Texas, but down the road was several miles, so you had to have a car – or a really good bicycle.

PK: Right.

T: So you were going to Grublets regularly? How did you see her enough to even get in a relationship with someone offsite with limited free time?

PK: Good question. So, how it got initiated was one of the brothers at Last Days Ministries informed me that there was this young lady that worked at Grublets at Agape Force that was interested in me, and I should go check her out.

T: Oooh. Yeah. Which we, for the sisters – I don’t think any of that kind of networking would ever have been allowed. Great that you had someone in your corner setting you up!

S: A wingman.

PK: But it was the opposite to me initially. It was like, you can’t say that. Don’t tell me that! At that moment it definitely felt like a break of protocol.

T: Okay.

PK: In that initial moment. But after he said oh just go, what does it take, what does it matter.

S: Okay, who was that. Tell me the first name.

T: We can cut it out, but we’re both wanting to know.

PK: Oh, ***.

S&T: Ohhhhhh.

S: Makes sense.

T: Makes total sense.

PK: We were close, because we swapped roles. He was the head of maintenance and then I took over and turned it into the operations. So we used to encourage each other in the Lord, we’d sit on a bed down at one of the houses where one of the couples lived – somehow he was able to live down there, at some point. So anyway, we had a relationship that made space for that, but it was out of the blue.

S: Right.

PK: It was out of the blue. So again, I said no initially and he said come on, just do it, so I did finally go down there. Truth be told, my first look was like, not interested.

S: Judging the book by its cover there Paul, were you?

PK: I did! I did. You have to do that initial scan…

S: Yes, you do.

PK: … because you only get one bite at the apple. So obviously I went back a second time. I had my own car Tracey, to answer your question.

T: Oh okay.

PK: So I went down a second time and I thought, okay, let’s just see where this goes. She waited on me because she recognized me of course, and we just started small talking, and started a relationship. I remember very little about what we might have done. I know at one point she was watching houses for some of the people in Silverwind – I think it was Patty or Patsy or something like that. So when she was over there she invited me to come over and we would spend time there. Actually, Rose and Dell came over once, because I have a picture of Rose in the kitchen of that house.

T&S: Ooohh.

PK: So, it wasn’t in secret, and Dell – I don’t think they were married, Dell wasn’t a leader yet, but Dell was – they were part of the ministry, so it wasn’t being hidden. Anyway things started moving along, it went really fast and we ended up having to had what I call the tribunal meetings where we were each grilled separately and apart by the different leadership of the ministries. I think it was only Wayne and Martin. I don’t think Melody was involved at that point. But it was Gabe Arosomina and Tony Salerno from their place.

S: Okay.

T: And Tony Salerno is the founder and the head of Agape Force.

S: The bigwig.

T: The bigwig, and for those of you, I think on one of our podcasts, I’m not sure in which order, we talk about the area and Silverwind, and the band that was part of Agape Force, Barry McGuire, he used to sing on a lot of the records. They were big movers and shakers in the area in the realm of especially children’s music.

S: Mmhmm.

PK: Right. Bullfrogs and butterflies.

T: Mmhmm.

S: That’s the one. Hey Paul, how many weeks or days or months was it, do you think, between when you first started dating, or whatever you want to call it – spending time together – and then this actual trial you had?

PK: I would be guessing, but I can’t imagine it would have been more than two months.

S: Two months. Okay.

PK: Because when you – again, the ministry style at Last Days was as soon as you meet and God says okay through everybody, then you’re almost instantly engaged and then planning the wedding within a couple of hours.

T: Correct.

S: Right.

PK: So I think that’s about the same speed that we were moving.

S: Okay.

PK: So the intention once they got involved was that we would indeed get engaged and get married.

S: So was the LDM leadership – were Martin and Wayne in favor and behind this for you?

PK: At the end of the day we got approval from both ministries. I don’t remember exactly how we heard that.

S: Okay.

PK: I don’t know how we got that feedback, but I do remember what we did. What was decided is that we could get married – get engaged and then she would come over to the ministry and go through ICT, and after the ICT then we could get married.

T: Oh wow. Okay.

S: So Tony Salerno agreed to release her from her lifetime promise and vow of slavery to Agape Force?

PK: Correct.

T: So as I started digging into the local ministries in the area, I did not know that that was a part of their covenant to Agape Force, and that just seems like such a step too far, that they had to sign.

S: A little culty? A little culty, perhaps??

T: Extremely culty! And ended up – again, the demise of Agape Force. I’ll post an article to our show notes that shows about when they were coming to an end. Of course it involved a scandal; of course it involved some unsavory rights to who had rights to the music, and of course it involved this lifetime covenant causing so much difficulty in how they were then dividing it up.

S: Was it sexual scandal there from the top, in that one?

PK: Financial.

T: I think it was financial scandal, from what I read, because no one supposedly had the rights to this music; this was God’s music, and I guess, from what I read, Tony Salerno did a deal where he ended up getting to leave with those rights, and it was a scandal. I did not know that you were impacted by if you met someone at another ministry, how that would play out. That’s crazy.

PK: Yeah, there wasn’t a plan. There wasn’t a mold.

T: Right.

PK: We were the trial balloon. Anyway, we got the blessing and somehow we were at the ministry – Last Days Ministries, and we went for a walk up the runway. I found a small spike of some sort, like a rod, and I found a stone, and on the right hand side of the runway, some few hundred feet down or whatever, I banged that into the ground as a stake to mark this minute, this hour, that God has approved what it is we’re about to do.

T&S: Wow.

T: And that to me, it sounds like it’s from that scripture where the children of Israel built these altars of rocks, these stones? Is that where you got that idea from?

PK: Right. I think they call them the remembrance stones, when you walk past here you’ll remember. But I think it was just more like putting that stake in the ground to solidify and recognize what had just happened, so that if we ever had any questions we could walk back to that and say no, at this moment, God said, so therefore that’s what we’re going to do.

S: Did you get written up and in trouble for damaging the runway property?

PK: No, I did it off to the side. I measured it, and it was like eight feet three inches was the right of way?

[laughter]

S: Okay.

PK: I didn’t think about getting a bigger plane at any point so anyway. So we had that, and then – I don’t know, a couple of days, maybe a week at the most passed, and I realized that in some way, I was afraid of this commitment and I was not sure I really loved this woman. I did not know that I really wanted to commit my life to her, and we had just gone through all of this. It just landed on me like a ton of bricks; it was like, oh my gosh, this is heavy.

S: Yeah well, it’s this heavy, and fast, and whirlwind, and there’s all this pressure that if you’re even going to start a relationship you need to have prayed, and you need to have heard from God, so yeah. This culture of quick, quick, make a decision, make it happen – and there’s not room for questioning or even giving weight to your own personal desires and preferences because it’s not about that Paul, it’s about the Kingdom of God.

T: It’s about the Kingdom of God, and you know, we cover that in our purity culture episodes. What are the two reasons to get married, Sharon?

S: For the Kingdom of God, or so that you don’t burn with sexual desire!

T: Right.

S: And sin.

T: And so there’s so much control around that, that you’ve completely cut out the ability to get to know someone.

PK: Yes!

T: So you’re saddled immediately with this very heavy, weighty decision, that someone you barely know, now you are making a commitment basically to walk down an aisle.

PK: Right.

T: Sadly, you’re feeling exactly how you should be feeling, but there’s no space at the ministry to feel that.

PK: Correct.

S: And Paul, you were one of the probably very few to have the courage to say, whoa, wait a second. That took a lot of courage.

T: It took a lot of courage, and both Sharon and I wish we had been in relationships where that element had taken place.

S: Yeah.

T: So we understand the pressure that is mounting around you. I guess I would ask – so you’re feeling that, which is completely understandable – but in this pressure cooker of a relationship, were you getting to know her at all? Because free time was limited.

PK: Yeah, very little. I mean, very little. It was only really Sundays and parts of Sundays, and she worked when they were there, so I knew her very little. We’re talking hours, as far as time together.

T: Yeah.

S: So crazy! It’s so crazy.

PK: Yeah it is. When you two shared your stories, when I listened to you on the I was a Teenage Fundamentalist broadcast, when you started talking about your stories I just felt so in line with what you guys were feeling and you guys kept it to yourselves. I realized that my story – I didn’t, like you’re pointing out. I took the step, which was to tell one of the brothers there, Matt, that I was having questions about whether or not I can go through with this. I don’t know why Matt – I mean, Matt had been my leader in ICT. He came over to run the school after the crash. I had some relationship with him, but this would probably have been a year after that.

T: But he was married, right? I think the rule was you had to share those things with a married group leader.

PK: That’s very possible. I don’t remember the detail, but Matt is the person I went to. The way I remember it, it felt like it was within a matter of hours that I was called into Martin’s office in the big building there, and he proceeded to basically strip me down. He told me that I was a sinner, that I wasn’t a Christian, that I was going to hell, that I can’t be part of the ministry, you can’t go and see Melody anymore, you can’t see Leonard Ravenhill anymore – you can’t even talk to anyone here. I don’t want you talking to anybody on this property. I want you just to go away.

S: Wow. I’m – I’m sitting here Paul, with my jaw dropped open and speechless. I’m like, I mean, I’ve heard some stuff, but I have never heard that before. How did it – based on what? Based on what was he making all these accusations?

PK: Whatever Matt would have said.

T: What we want to ask you is, because we are really trying to unpack the more toxic parts of this environment, but if you’re just questioning, and you’re called in, was there any part that you were perceiving that this was coming down on you, versus these things specifically spoken? I don’t know how good your memory is on that, but…

PK: Ohhh, no, those are moments that are seared in my soul. I had a dark night of the soul experience about a week or so after that, so it rocked my world. It was related – somehow I knew it was related to what I shared with Matt, because the framework would have been something about the relationship. That’s the only thing that changed, and I had very little interaction with Martin there, at all. There was no question there was a direct line from me saying something to Matt about questioning whether I can go through with this, and then this instant – I mean, shockingly instant stripped of all responsibility, of my Christianhood, of my manhood, so to speak – everything about me.

T: We’re gonna get specific, and we’re going to put you on the hotseat again.

PK: Go ahead.

T: Did you confess any sexual sin to Matt in that conversation that you had with him?

PK: No, there was hardly any contact. I don’t even know if we ever kissed.

T: Yeah – I just wanted to clarify that for the listeners, because that level of rebuke and being chastised in that environment would often come because somebody may have come forward with genuinely earnest admission – you were young people spending time with each other, so none of that was at play.

PK: Not a bit.

T: You weren’t confessing that you had crossed any of those boundaries. It was just I don’t know if this is God’s will for me, and that was the response. It’s hard to connect the dots on that, and I’m very, very sorry that you had to endure that.

S: Yeeas, but if you think of our extremist and elitist point of view – you know, we are the spiritual elite, we are hearing from God…

PK: Right.

S: …and I imagine in his tribunal with the leadership he would have been grilled and questioned, have you prayed, have you sought God, have you heard from God, and I would imagine there’s also this thought of oh my gosh, he has spiritually and emotionally deflowered this poor young woman, right, because there was so much weirdness in this whole betrothal thing.

PK: Right.

S: I would imagine that was some of the fucked up underpinnings of those kinds of outrageous statements.

T: I wonder how much was embarrassment from one leader in front of another leader. Like, we’ve made a special confession for this. I will have to say this; I would say that there could have been other leaders that would have handled that very differently. That does seem to be one of the more extreme stories that we have heard out of handling a situation like this.

S: Mmhmm.

T: That’s why it’s really hard to connect those dots, because how can you navigate that kind of lifelong decision that you’re trying to make and genuinely have questions and there’s no known sin that anyone can point to, and be treated with that degree, is pretty shocking.

PK: It was – again, I ended up having what I would call a dark night of the soul experience to follow that, so it was beyond shocking. But earlier in our conversation, we were talking about having relationships in the Last Days style. Remember I said that I knew I wouldn’t be good enough to hear from God, to know that it was you or her or them, and the worst part about that would be being understood as not hearing from God. Right? So this is that, I think. This is that coming back, where I said I heard from God to go through with this, the leaders of the ministry said they heard from God to go with this right, so how many of these situations within the ministry did you ever hear that got to that point and fell apart – besides Bobby and …

S: Of engagement?

PK: Yeah. We didn’t quite get engaged.

T: Or even a serious relationship.

PK: Right.

T: That’s what we would call them.

S: Tracey, we recently heard from Julie.

T: Yes. Hers was after Paul.

S: It was after Paul.

T: Mmhmm.

S: And they started their special relationship and within a few weeks, they were both like nope, this isn’t us, and I think she said that – I don’t even remember that.

T: I do. So after Paul there was that one, and then of course there was Melody Green.

PK: Right. With Bobby.

T: Who had a very public one within the ministry. This was another engagement within the ministry that did not go forward. So after Paul there were two that I know of, but prior to Paul you’re right. There were very few marriages, the relationships I would say – more weight was given to making sure that you hear from God so that you’re not deflowering – not deflowering but what’s the spiritual term used.

S: Defrauding.

T: Defrauding. Yes. But I will still contend that some of the stories that are coming out, that are more extreme stories of spiritual abuse, tend to involve Martin.

S: And Kathleen.

T: If another leader had dealt with that, I don’t know that it would have been to the level of that kind of dressing down. That is a really extreme version.

PK: Right.

S: Yeah.

PK: And the part that to me was the biggest, in a sense, sin of it all, was that in those instructions from Martin, I was never to contact that woman again. So again, here, this woman is going to bed one night knowing she’s going to be moving in ministries and doing all this and having a relationship and getting married, and the next day somebody tells her something, and nothing ever comes from me, and I never get closure with her. My heart wasn’t anything about her. This was about me. I would want to be able to say that right, because what could that do to somebody’s mind potentially, right?

T: Oh yeah.

PK: So that was horrible. I’ll tell you the life pattern that I see in that at times, especially in spiritual circles is that when I decide to tell my truth, I get canned. I get separated.

S: Let’s clarify that Paul.

PK: When I find the…

S: Paul, wait.

PK: Go ahead.

S: Not spiritual circles. Religious circles. Self-righteous religious circles.

PK: Thank you. Yes. Religious circles. That’s right. When you don’t fit in with the plan, or you question the plan or have an issue or even a question about it, if you raise it sometimes or if you flat out say you disagree, then when you finally get back in contact with yourself – that’s what most religious systems are about; some way of you sacrificing who you are for some other good, for something outside yourself, so you have to abandon yourself to be able to be a part of this. So when I reclaimed these little moments, when I reclaimed this moment of true fear and concern and question about can I go through with this, I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was going to get counsel, support, whatever. We could get together and we could work this out, but it was so immediate and so swift and so severe that I think that hurt more than any – it was a million times worse than any hurt I could ever have dreamed to do before we were married.

T: Yes.

S: It’s just devastating.

T: And cruel. Cruel to this woman who now you guys are in a situation where all those decisions have been taken away from you all, and are now being controlled and I know there’s been a lot of conversation which we won’t get into so far as cult versus high control group, but this is so high control and invasive and spiritually abusive and damaging, that there’s no question about it. This isn’t even biblical. This isn’t a biblical recipe; this has so many pitfalls.

S: I’m just also gonna say you’re right, it might have been deal with a little bit differently in terms of tone if someone else had been doing the talking to Paul, but I can guarantee you that Martin, Wayne and Melody were all united on this. It would not have happened otherwise, that way.

PK: I don’t know that experientially to be true.

S: Well, I know that the inner personnel stuff, the staff stuff, the big stuff like that, the marriages, the relationships, the who’s staying, who’s going – that was the three together. That would not have been a unilateral thing. It would not have been.

PK: You know, in telling the story as I have here, I think it’s important to share that some time after I left the ministry, Wayne Dillard came up to Daystar Ministry where I was, and apologized and repented on behalf of the leadership of the ministry.

S: Wow.

T: Oh, that’s great.

PK: Yeah, it was important. And again, in the process Wayne was always open towards me and loving towards me, and I towards him. It was more like a confirmation of who he was and who I was in the context of our relationship, that he would – from my perspective – even come up and do that.

S: Mmm.

PK: So let me finish the part of the story then. I think someone was about to ask how long was I there after that?

S: Yeah.

PK: I think it was only a couple of weeks. I got instantly demoted, but I was still – at some point I was still required to go to eat and go to the house meetings before the meal, and of course one of them was the one where I was made to confess my sin in front of everybody.

T: Okay, so before you were going to do that, were you clear on what that sin was? I know there was a dressing down as far as all those things that were said, but was there anything specific, like this is the sin that you’ve committed?

PK: No. And I believe that I was very unclear about it, because of a conversation we just had with someone who was there. I had a conversation with them about it a couple of days ago. They reminded me of what happened in the meeting where I was confessing. He remembered my words.

S: What were they?

T: So when you were getting ready to go in and confess, did you have a plan?

S: Wait, were you told ahead of time that you needed to confess in that meeting?

PK: Yes.

S: Okay, so now to Tracey’s question; did you have a plan what you were going to say?

PK: Only – well, no. Well, I must have had some plan, but what I said was all that I knew, and all I said was the leadership of the ministry has decided that I need to leave. At that point Martin stood up, stared at Wayne, and said are we going to let him keep talking? I instantly went numb at that moment. He was looking at Wayne, and I’m up there thinking what do I do? It was like, I’m stuck. I’m up here in front of these people doing what I think I’m supposed to do, there was no sin enunciated, I was never told what I did wrong, there was no lead up. I have no memory of that, other than – I’m out, because of this relationship.

S: I gotta say something here. Karma – she can be a bitch, man.

PK: Yes!

T: I was thinking of that.

S: Because, because when at the end of the Hawaii LTS that we were sent to along with Wayne and Kath and Melody, when YWAM was trying to come in and prop up this whole thing, at the end of 1986, at the end of that we thought nah, what’s happening here at Last Days is not right; we were told by Fran Paris on the International Leadership Team of Youth With A Mission – we were told that we were in sin and rebellion, and that we needed to confess our sin. Martin and I said what’s our sin? Tell us what our sin is, and what she said was, I don’t know what your sin is, but if you will admit that you are in sin and rebellion, then God will reveal what the sin is. Now, that’s a whole lot of mindfuckery and kind of sounds a little bit similar to what was done to you Paul, and I’m so sorry. Oh my god.

PK: And there’s even more overlap to that, too. I think I mentioned to one or both of you in a prior conversation that after I left the ministry and was trying to heal from what happened and move on with my life, I made it a point to pray that what happened to me specifically, would never happen to Martin, to Wayne and to Melody. So even though I was hurting from it, there was a thing – nobody should go through the hell I went through. Nobody should go through the hell I went through. I wish that on nobody. I lost all my friendships, I lost my job, I lost my church – everything’s so wrapped up in this ball called living in a fulltime ministry that’s kind of cultish, so the stakes are so high.

T: They’re so high.

PK: And the fall is so long and deep and treacherous, and painful. So I wished that on nobody. So when Melody – the first thing that happened was Melody having that broken relationship, I was like oh man, she’s probably going to have to leave the ministry.

[laughter]

PK: Right? That’s my simple thought. Then I heard about you guys. What I had heard was that all of the leadership was taken out of leadership center way, get your lives straight, come back and we’ll see what happens. That was kind of the word on the street from where I was living. But then I heard your story Sharon, and it was almost word for word. Don’t talk to anybody, leave, and it’s like you’re evil. Like you’re the devil incarnate.

T: Right, and that’s a practice that in organizations that we fundamentalists would have recognized as cults, like we used to say the Jehovah’s Witness were cults, the Mormons, I know the Amish practise a certain amount of shunning, so all of these organizations that do this shunning, and we would hear of this practice and go oh, that’s terrible. But we practised a form of this shunning ourselves.

PK: Oh, totally.

T: And it is crushing, when this is your community and you’re invested. You’re so invested, and it’s been great to hear your story from boyhood on, you get a picture of that young boy who just wants to please and do his part, and is all in, and to think that we took precious hearts like that and just stomped on them is really heartbreaking and obviously a reason why we are doing these podcasts, because people who want to go down the path and argue the semantics of cult or high control or whatever you want to call it – this is trauma and this is spiritual abuse, and this was precious people. You were not doing anything that you even knew to be doing wrong.

PK: Correct.

T: You only wanted to do right, and were so rejected for that. And it is crushing that this story is not isolated. There’s too many of you out there.

S: I’m so sorry Paul. It’s just – it’s horrible beyond words, and you did not deserve that. You did not.

PK: Thank you. Thank you.

T: You had shared a little bit about this house meeting, and I want to come back to that. For the listeners, we’ve made reference a few times that when we were eating dinner, still in the ranch house kitchen, and then in that living room, we would meet in that open kitchen area for a house meeting, where people would stand up and if you needed to confess or ask for prayer, you could do it at that time. So it wasn’t unusual that somebody would be standing up and sharing something from their life. When you had mentioned that a couple of days ago, it flashed into my brain that night, I think I told you before I don’t even remember you leaving, Paul. I just remember you in the tract department giving me a hard time, and then you were gone, but I didn’t know all the details, but when you said that Martin stopped you in the middle of it and looked at Wayne, I did remember that. I remember more my emotional feeling of uh oh.

PK: Right.

T: That of course made everybody uncomfortable; you could feel the tension in the room because in the way we were conditioned is, we’re going to side with leadership because we trust them, and they have details about people that we don’t have, and if Martin is stopping him then Paul must have committed a serious sin that he’s not willing to tell us, and this is what’s making Martin come in and say we have to stop him, because he’s blaming leadership. That’s how my brain – it took me right back to that mind, where I was at, and then to hear the details of the story is the other part of the terrible conditioning that everyone went to, because we didn’t get to go ask you, but I think you did share that some other people came up to you that night.

PK: Right. Just immediately after, a couple of the brothers came up and hugged me because the ones I went to ICT with, they were the ones I was closest with. They whispered in my ear and said, don’t believe a minute of any of this.

S: Wow.

T: Mmm.

PK: That only helped to a degree. It actually added confusion, because I had bought into how wicked how I was. I had bought into that I deserved to be kicked out, for whatever reason. There wasn’t actually any reason given, as we’re talking about here, but there was just what – this is has been my sentence and I accepted it, even though it drove me crazy and it violated me to the core. I felt that that’s what has to happen to you to – whatever. Be purified or sanctified or straightened out, or whatever you want to call it.

S: Well, we’ve internalized the message that the essence of who you are is sinful and wicked and bad, and so when there’s an accusation, you are primed to side with your accuser, not yourself.

PK: Mmhmm.

T: Oh, that’s so true. We were so conditioned in that, and then the ones of us watching on were also conditioned. There must be some wickedness.

PK: Right, and so what I walked away with was just a ton of shame. I felt the message from Martin was the official ministry message, and everybody would pick it up and think that I wasn’t a Christian. I was part of the ICT staff like you, Tracey, and there were people who had to leave during ICT, and the message was, they are not willing to follow God, so we had to ask them to leave. That was the message.

T: That was the message.

PK: You’re left as the listener to think oh, my god, how wicked could this person have been, to have to leave here, right?

S: Right.

T: And, to that point, there were many precious people through ICT that either weren’t allowed to stay because they failed, or we made them to leave, and it wasn’t any of that. It’s completely extra-biblical. It was really more about you’re not going to fit the model that we need, that will not question, that will toe the line, and will basically be broken and become what we need you to be. That was really the message.

S: Right. You’re not willing to be a quiet, mindless slave who will do as you’re told, who will work six days a week, 10-12 hours a day, and never question and never complain. So if you don’t fit that mold, you don’t fit.

T: Correct. And then we intertwine that with spiritual worth, which is the crime. That’s the huge crime.

PK: Right.

S: Mmhmm.

T: So awful, awful.

PK: Here’s where I think I wrote to both of you a while ago saying I’d like to pick this subject at some point, but these next two things I want to share are like, what do I do with those incidences now? I have to start again, I feel like I’m going crazy, there’s marbles spitting in my brain, I’m out at Dry Lake – we had a place up north at a property called Dry Lake. I’m there by myself, crying out to God – actually it was the first time I ever had a suicidal thought in my life. I said God, if it doesn’t get any better than this; if what I’ve done this whole time in my life isn’t worth anything, if this is what it’s come to, then take me now. I don’t want to live.

S: Mmm.

T: Oh.

PK: That’s what it came to.

T: Yes.

PK: I went for another walk at the end of the runway, and maybe where you rode the horses Sharon, where you tried to get out to the plane crash, out to the end of the runway, to the left – to the west – was like a wooded path.

S: Yep.

PK: So I walked up that wooded path one day, because I wasn’t allowed to be round people still at this point, and I’m walking and all of a sudden was transported to the woods directly behind my house on Long Island where I was raised, where as a kid we lived in these woods. The woods was our friends, it was our home. There was a spot that was identical; a little bit of a rise, trees covering, sun coming down, and I’m feeling like oh my gosh, this feels like home, and all of a sudden I feel like God put his hand in my hand and says, it’s gonna be okay. And in that moment, all of the craziness went away, all of the questioning went away, all of the trauma at the moment feelings went away, because all of a sudden I knew I was going to be okay. I didn’t know what life was going to be like after the ministry. I didn’t know. I didn’t have any money left, right, and I had a car that was not running the best, so what do I do? Where do I go? Almost like Dawn’s story, right. If I want to leave, what would I do? I was 26, almost 27 by then so I’d been around the block a couple of times. I knew how to do a lot of the practical things, but what was I going to do with my life? I’d committed it to the Lord, and now I’m kicked out of the Lord, right. So I have that moment that everything was going to be okay, and then a couple of nights later – I can’t imagine exactly where it was, there was a little hill behind Second Chapter of Acts’ property, like a little knoll there. I was sitting there, and it felt like God spoke to me and says something like son, you’re gonna be okay. I want you to go to Daystar. You’re going to go to Daystar. So I thought, okay. I mean, Daystar was the equivalent, back then, of going to hell.

[laughter]

S: It was! It was Christian counselling for the incorrigible and hopeless.

PK: Right? Called hell. I called it hell.

S: Yeah.

PK: It was the last thing I wanted. There was no sentence given to me. I wasn’t literally kicked off the property yet, but I knew that was coming up. I knew I was going to have to leave. I had all kinds of peace about that. I was upstairs, I’m somehow doing something on a speaker in the ceiling in the hallway, because I was now allowed to be working – for whatever reason – and Wayne comes up to me and looks up to me and says Paul, I need to speak to you, can you come to my office. I go in there, I sit with him, and he’s crying. He’s choked up. He can’t speak. He said – Paul, and he couldn’t speak. I said Wayne. Wayne, it’s okay. I know. You have to tell me I’m going to Daystar. It’s okay, I know I’m supposed to go. He just was flooded with relief and said I don’t want you to go. This is why I think the story is a little different Sharon, than what you perceived. He says I don’t want you to go, but it’s been decided you need to.

S: Mmm.

PK: That was my sentence. And at the same time he said I’m going to make sure that the ministry pays for your time up there, and they did. Whether Wayne did that with anybody else’s blessings I don’t know, but from his heart to mine, I know that he didn’t want me to go. He really liked me – again, I shared that a little bit earlier. We stayed in touch over the years, and of course we worked together the two years of his life.

T: Well, yeah, and it’s not just a matter of liking you – which is great. People who worked alongside of you could tell your heart, right? You’re there, we’re side by side, we’re in the trenches, you’re bringing a smile to people, and Wayne especially if he worked with you in the school – you can tell when there’s like, a hidden part of a dark heart that’s under the surface that we can’t seem to crack, and you didn’t have that, Paul.

S: No.

PK: Thank you.

T: That’s why this story has blown my mind from the beginning, because yes, I worked in the school, and yes I know we came across what we would call some hard cases that we were not equipped to handle. We were not equipped to handle what we were handling, but you had none of those qualities. That’s why it is a mind-blowing story to me.

S: I want to ask a question though. I’m curious about this, and I have some theories, perhaps. Paul, when you felt that God was speaking to you to go to Daystar, did you then tell that to anyone?

PK: Nope.

S: So when Wayne, when you’re meeting with Wayne, and he is getting there to talk to you, to tell you that you’re going to go to Daystar, he had not said that to you before, and you had not said anything to anyone?

PK: That is correct.

S: So, you know I’m not religious, and you know I don’t believe in the bible box, I don’t believe in the heaven, hell, redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus like I used to. I do not believe in that. But I have experienced enough things I don’t know how to describe it, other than connectedness, that sometimes transcends time and transcends verbal or physical communication, and things that would seem inexplicable, that we labelled well, this is God speaking to us, or this is the Holy Spirit, because it fit within the box of what we believed. The thing that’s been really interesting to me Paul, is that as I have shed and left behind those – I’m gonna say childish and foolish beliefs, that sense of occasional connectedness and knowing and transcendent – I don’t even know what to call it. But those instances have still occurred.

PK&T: Mmhmm.

S: And it’s led me to believe and conclude that there is this reality that we can be a part of, whether you want to call it the universe, or whatever, and we can be connected and in the flow of it, and it’s not the God that we used to label it, but it still is something.

PK: Correct.

S: So when you were telling me that story about this sense of hearing I’m going to go to Daystar, and then a couple of days later Wayne says to you, we want you to go to Daystar – of course, it could have just been innocence coincidence, because you know, that’s where we’re gonna ship people off to, but I don’t know. When you feel it that profoundly and strongly, I tend to think it’s something more, and something beyond.

T: Mmhmm.

PK: Oh, for real.

T: Yes. And many of our queer bothers and sisters have that same story as well. They come to the end of I’m awful, many can come to the point of suicidal ideation, and they hear what we would have called that still, small voice that we always attributed to the Holy Spirit, also reaching into them and saying no, you’re perfect the way you are. That’s how more and more are coming out and having that story to say. You fundies that want to take and shame; I’ve already heard a voice inside of me. Where is it – outside of us, or inside of us, I don’t know, but I have also experienced. It is not within the confines of that interpretation. When we have had some back and forth with some people still in that community, they use those experiences as proof text that what they believe is correct about everything, and I think one of the things that is so surprizing is hey, when you walk out of that box (Sharon, you’ve often talked about it as a cage) – when you walk out of that cage, it’s almost like it ramps up instead of goes away.

PK: Right, right. The cage and the box is this pre-defined set of rules and the way things are done, versus – it’s like the difference between knowing and unknowing. It’s like, there’s so much more we don’t know, but if we think we know it all, we’re going to lose out on most of the information that is ever available to us.

S: Well, to put it in Christianese terms, it’s the difference between the law, and love.

PK: Right. Well. Those moments, they’re really tender. Leaving, it was really interesting. I didn’t have money to get to Daystar, but somehow I found out that one of the brothers there, Brad, who worked in Operations, had a family member who was driving up, right through Indiana, so I got to ride up there for like, $10 worth of gas. And I got there on the eve of my birthday, which would have been my 27^th birthday. It was a new life, and my very first conversation there with my counsellor – I went to him and I said okay, tell me what the rules are. What are the rules of being here?

[laughter]

T: Smart.

PK: And he said this, and I’ll never forget it. He said, it’s simple here. Do whatever you know you can do, and don’t do what you know you shouldn’t. And I said ahahaha, you’re funny. You don’t strike me as someone who’s going to have a sense of humor, so come on, be serious. This is a serious conversation. I’m here to start my life over again. Tell me what the rules are. And he cackles. The guy cackled, it was so funny. And he says seriously, do whatever you feel you’re free to do, and don’t do what you know you’re not to. So I was lost. I was absolutely lost.

T: Yeah, as many of us would be, because when you’ve been so conditioned and indoctrinated and turned upside down inside, that’s really hard. It’s really hard to know what to do.

PK: Yeah. So anyway, I was at Daystar for almost seven years until it burned down in the middle of the night, 1989. Ironically enough, not too shortly after I was there, I started a relationship with a woman. This is another one of those moments, like my hearing God say that I’m going to Daystar. Again, I had the same mindset. I said God, I suck at this relationship thing. I suck at it, I can’t choose worth a damn. So my prayer was, do to me like you did with Adam. Put me to sleep – you don’t have to take a rib, but put me to sleep, and when I wake up, have her be standing there. And that, in essence, is what happened.

T: Wow.

PK: Because the woman that I ended up dating and marrying – well, we didn’t really date. We were in the same building, but I had a physical and emotional breakdown from everything that happened, and I went to the doctor a month or two after I’d been to Daystar, and so I was put to bed rest. This woman that was there in the ministry, she was a bit older than I was, had pity on me. She didn’t like me, I didn’t like her at first when we met. She thought I was cocky, and I thought she was arrogant. We just didn’t like each other at all, but she had pity on me, so she would come into my room. We had individual rooms there – it was 100,000 square foot building, it was a turn of the century mineral water spot that the rich and the famous used to come to in Indiana, because of the stinky sulphur water. They had a bunch of bathtubs lined up that they would sit in to get healed in. That’s what this building was; it was like a hotel, but the rooms were kind of small, it was just individual rooms, shared bathrooms down the hallway. So anyway, she had pity on me so she would come and bring food in. She would literally walk in, drop the food on the table, and say here you go and walk away. After a week or so of bed rest and that, it was in that bed rest when I said that prayer to God; I woke up one morning, she came in, gave me the meal. I looked at her, she looked at me, I looked at her, and I looked at her and said, oh no. And I said, you too? And she goes, yes. Because in that moment, I felt like God said, here she is. You asked for her, here she is. Again, we did not care so much for each other at that moment, so I said alright, we’re out of here, we’re going to take a walk. I took her to the city park, and I made it impossible for that to be true. This was my prayer of faith; I said, Donna (her name was Donna) we’re going to pray to God now; God, if this is really you, which we can’t imagine how it is, we’re going to go back to the ministry and talk to our counsellors (who just happened to be a husband and wife team), and we’re going to go back to them and tell them what just happened between us and what we felt, and what my prayer was, and what Donna felt. We’re going to say that to them, and they’re going to say hahaha, about time you figured it out, we knew it all along. That was my prayer. Impossible. Impossible to be true. So we walk back, we gather them, we go into what was called the small dining room. I say what I’m saying, while Peter cackles and says hahaha, about time you figured it out, we knew it all along, and we’re both sitting there stunned. It was like, oh wow. Oh my gosh. What do you do with that?

S: Yeah, what do you do with that?

PK: Well, we got married.

[laughter]

S: In retrospect, do you think that was the right thing for you?

PK: Oh boy. You put the right word on it now, it makes it tough.

S: Okay, good point, good point.

PK: So, I think it was the path for me.

S: The path. That’s so much better, Paul. You’re right.

PK: It was path. We were married almost 31 years. We have three amazing sons which now all of them have given me grandkids. I’ve got six now, the latest was coming this past Saturday, so yeah. I would say it was path. We both had the same wounds, even though we didn’t call it that then – the absent male, her father worked nights, her mother had to be the dad and the mom. My dad was legally blind and just never really paid attention to us, wasn’t part of things, except to deliver the punishment when my mom was mad. He delivered it because he was mad at us for making her mad, cos that made her life hard. So yeah, we had similar wounding and we were both just really kind and gentle people. When our marriage ended, and when we looked at it, when we were going through our struggles at the end, kind of unwinding that God moment in the beginning, because we both had started down a path away from fundamentalism and the beliefs that we had, and when I called it, our relationship had become what I called the demilitarized zone. If you’re familiar with Vietnam, it was the space between North and South, where there was almost like a war wasn’t happening. We never got emotionally honest and real with each other. Neither one of us did anything to poke the bear. We had a really kind relationship; it was not a bragging point, but we would both say to our kids that you’ve never heard us raise our voice to each other, have you. No. You’ve never seen us argue with each other, right, and they’re like yeah, we never saw it. Well, we didn’t even argue when you weren’t around. There was an emotional safety in where we both were coming from that worked.

S: I totally get that. That was a lot of what my first marriage was, for quite a while, and part of it was our personal brokenness. Our jagged pieces fit together well. We complemented one another in our woundedness.

PK: Mmm. So this is maybe where I’ll introduce – where I started moving away from my fundamental beliefs.

T: So up until this time you said you both were kind of moving away?

PK: Well, at the very end, when we decided to separate we separated for about a year. It was only supposed to be for a week, and then two weeks, and then four weeks. We were seeing three counsellors at the same time, because Tracey, it was so much like your story. I’m married, in essence, out of obedience.

T: Mmhmm.

PK: Did I love her? Yes, as much as knew how to, but was it from the core of my being? Uh uh, no, there was just some piece missing that was not what I think was possible. I think there could be more. So that’s what it felt like, and we both kind of felt that. What happened – we were attending I think the largest church in Eugene Oregon, actually Keith played there I think, in the late 70s or early 80s, in a place called Faith Center. I was on the church board, it was like a four or five thousand member church, and I was on leadership there, I had been on the worship team, I had been a day pastor where people come in and I’d help people out. I had a lot of responsibility and I was seen as a leader in the church, but we both just thought we gotta do something different. This isn’t working. The church was very broad. It got ostracized by the Christians because they allowed homosexuals and gay people in. They were welcomed into this church. It was a Jesus People church, is how it started. Come as you are, is what it was. Come as you are – but then they added years later, but just don’t stay that way.

T: Right.

PK: That got added on later. Within that framework, a friend of mine who’s actually one of my friends who lives in the same town I live in now, he started teaching a class called the Hebraic Roots of the Christian Faith. This was the first time I had ever listened or heard anything different about scripture than it was all theology. He started talking about how the people who were the early hearers, the first hearers of these words, would see this as poetry, as story, and not as theology. And he started breaking it all down. As the class ended – it was about four or five weeks – I looked at Donna and we both said the same words at the same time: We’ve been ripped off.

T: Mmm.

S: Wow.

PK: There was this sense that we missed, we’ve been living this deeply fundamental, fear-based life, we’re living this controlled life – what’s really underneath us, right?  What’s really within us? We have now this theological boost, so to speak, this biblical boost. This is a guy talking about the Old Testament and how the early hearers would have heard it. It’s like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. So it just blew up from there. This guy, he said Paul, do you really want to go down these rabbit holes, I got a lot of information for you but I don’t know if you’re ready for it, and I said well, bring it on, because I don’t want to stay where I am.

S: What year was this Paul?

PK: This would have been 2007-2008.

S: Okay.

PK: So I’ve been on this movement for about 15 years, away from fundamentalism. Everything from Rob Bell, who is very well known there, I got a Hebrew prayer book and started learning some Hebrew and reading it. It had the English next to it but I was trying to figure out the Hebrew. I was just really getting into a little bit of what was called Messianic Christianity, just because it seemed like more life to me than what I was reading. All of a sudden now the stories could come to life, as opposed to – what’s the theology there. Such a huge, huge difference. This pastor’s name was Steve. He introduced me to all kinds of things; the church fathers, he introduced me to other pastors, actually to a Rabbi in town, we went to a meeting with a Rabbi. So I’m having this amazing conversation and interaction with this guy. I walk away from this moment, and I said if there’s only two people on the planet, me and this guy, and only one of them knows God, when I walked into the building, I knew it was me and not him. He doesn’t know God, because he’s not a Christian, right? So, I’m thinking if only one of us knew God, it was him. I’m not who I think I am. It was moments like that that just exploded in my brain. Like, these little landmines went off inside of me just saying you don’t know what you think you know, and there’s a lot you don’t know. So I just begin doing an honest exploration of things. It was almost like the YWAM/ Last Days thing – the main thing was knowing God and making him known. That was one of the core tenets. I thought knowing God meant you had to figure God out. Up to this point, just before that I thought that I had God figured out. I looked at myself one day and went oh my gosh. If I have God figured out, that’s gotta mean that he’s just a little bit smaller than me, cos I’ve got my arms around him, so therefore that can’t be God either. As soon as all those things became unravelled – it wasn’t the teaching, there was like a circular teaching, I don’t know if it was Winkey Pratney or whatever, but in the middle it was God, and then around that was us, then our family and our children and community, blah, blah, blah. So with God being the core and that core now being blown up inside, bit by bit, everything in my life to that point was held together by that. Now that that’s blown up, everything in my life, I mean, everything in my life is now up for question, even that of my marriage. We got married because the story was God told us to get married.

T: Mmhmm.

S: Right. You know, that cracking of the door, that pinprick of light coming through is both terrifying, utterly terrifying, and the most liberating thing, simultaneously, I think.

PK: Mmhmm! Both are true. It doesn’t have to be either or. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. They can be both. And that’s not how we’re trained. We’re trained into binaries. We have to make enemies out of someone else to encourage or force people to stay with us, or else they’re going to become the enemy, and nobody wants to be the enemy. That’s kind of the psychology of it. We create the other, and there was no other. There is no other. Jesus’ whole message was come on guys, we’re one. It’s one. It’s one-ship, and there’s nothing about the theology that we learned that was about one-ship. It was about duality. It was about black/white, right/wrong, Christian/non-Christian.

T: The flesh and the spirit.

PK: Right.

S: So, if that was kind of the first pebble in this rockpile that you would build of significant stones, what were some of the others.

PK: Mmm. I think one of the most – I called it coming home. I ended up seeing an intimacy coach and I had some issues that we wanted to address. Those weren’t sexual issues at that moment, but there was issues I wanted to address, and the first thing they did with me was do a seated meditation, where they walked me through closing my eyes, feeling my feet on the floor. Feeling my thighs and my bottom on the chair. Feeling my back on the chair. You know, feeling my body, for God’s sake. We’ve been told to exit our bodies, to exit everything that was what we felt in touch within us – at least, that’s what I interpreted it as. You had to crucify all that.

S: Crucify the flesh! Crucify the flesh.

PK: Yes. I can’t tell you how other this was. I didn’t want to leave this space. We then got on the floor and spooned with each other – fully clothed, we were on the floor and she had me put my hand on her belly, and she said when my belly expands, breathe with me, when I release, breathe with me. We went back and forth, we did that in alternate places. So now I’m not only feeling my own body; now I’m feeling the presence of another. This was stunning. This was stunning. I walked out of this and said I don’t want to leave this place. This is home. It was the only word I could come up with. It felt like I’d come back home, and this was nothing more than being in contact with my body, alone, and then with another person, in contact with my body. I had never felt anything like that. We made three kids and we had a lot of sex. I’d never felt anything like that. There was nothing even close to that. Nothing even close to that.

S: Wow.

PK: So that was one of the situations. Another one was again a theological thing. I ended up talking to the pastor and I said you know, as I look at the bible, now through a different lens, I see what we practise in the church here, and in a lot of churches, what I call elimination theology. What I meant by that was who are you of? We’re of Jacob, no we’re of whatever. Everybody was trying to make it down to you could only be from this small lineage. It’s all about who could be eliminated, and the story of Jesus is like, we’re one! He didn’t hang out with the religious people. He went everywhere else. He went to the mountain, he went into where the demons were chained to a tree. He went all the wrong places. So somehow the theology that I had that I had taken as my own, was about everybody being other and different. Other and different. So I challenged myself. I said, what’s the most wild thing I could do? I could go to the Saturday market in Eugene Oregon. That is where the hippies are, everything’s tie dyed, they wear sandals; women don’t shave their underarms, everybody smells different. This is another world. I’d lived there for 27 years and never would go there because I couldn’t be around otherness. It wasn’t the church telling me that; I told me that. This is what I adopted. I made it a point to go there. I went there every Saturday for the whole summer, and I learned that like in Abigail’s story – when I got divorced, everybody in my church that was my friends and my neighbors, and we were there 27 years at that point, they all refused to talk to me. They all never spoke to me again.

S: Oh my god.

PK: So, when I divorced, I lost everything. I mean, everything. This group, the group of potters and people who tie dye toilet paper – you name it, they literally do that. They have tie dye toilet paper. These people embraced me. These people loved me. One of them, her name was Amy, I met her really early on and we’re still friends to this day. After the summer she came up to me and said well, did you figure it out yet? And I said, what’s that? And she goes, we’re all the same. We’re all human. We’re not less. We’re not more. We are just human, and we just love people. It was pretty incredible. Like the people who slept in the house with Abigail, this was a similar thing. This became my new friend group, because I’d lost all the other ones. It wasn’t my choice that they’d go away, but I guess I gotta be fair here. There was a part of me, just like when I left Last Days, when I left my position at the church, when we separated and divorced, I didn’t want to be around them anymore either. My theology had changed pretty much by then, because I lived what I called vow to vow. Everything we did was vow to vow. You make this commitment and it’s lifelong. We committed when we got married we would never use the word divorce. Never. We eliminated it from our vocabulary. It was actually Donna in a counselling session who said I need a divorce, and I broke down. I was like, you can’t ask for that. We don’t get an out. We don’t have an out. We don’t. We committed to this. I was so broken by that, but I finally realized you know what – my counsellor asked me Paul, forget about your vow to vow thing. What if today, what if just right now today, in your true heart, if I asked you if you would marry her today, would you do it? I said no, I wouldn’t. She said so why are you still holding on? I said because I don’t know how I’m going to feel tomorrow, so I lived in this funny space. Finally I agreed to the divorce, but again, it cost me everything. It was my second dark night of the soul through that process. My kids, my children – I was a worship leader in the church. One time when my boys were little, like six seven and eight, I was sitting on a stool and they were wrapped around me, all three of my boys, and I sang a song that was called I wanna be like you, cos they wanna be like me. When I divorced, they had the come to Jesus meeting with me – or when we’d separated and the divorce was coming up.

S: How old were they?

PK: They would have been in their mid-twenties.

S: Okay.

PK: They told me, you don’t understand what you’ve done. You were God to us. You were Jesus to us. Now you’re none of those things. My oldest son said I don’t even know if I can love you anymore.

S: Oh my gosh, Paul. Wow.

PK: It was unthinkable. To be fair, I did underestimate the impact. I think two of them were married, or one was married for sure, the other one was engaged and my other son wasn’t. He was still living in the area. But I did not know the impact it would have on them at that point. I just didn’t.

S: Did you and your wife – I mean, did you tell them together? They’re all adults. Was it just you?

PK: Oh no, we both – my oldest son was living in Seattle and my other two sons were in the area so we sat down in the house and told our two sons together, and then my oldest son, we made a trip and met with them and told them there.

S: So did the blame – it sounds like, did the blame…

PK: Yes, fell on me.

S: Fall on you?

PK: It did. Actually it was kind of ugly. My oldest son, who is the most like me – he actually called one of the pastors of the church and said that I had brainwashed Donna in the ways that we were going. Again, she was a willing participant in a lot of these different things that we were learning. She was starting her own journey, and we were both questioning what it was that we knew, and what it was we believed. So they didn’t know that we had moved that center, right, the center of God is holding it all together. They didn’t know that that had moved. So that left them where? That just broke them.

S: Yeah.

T: Yeah. Sharon and I did the purity culture episodes – I know that you listened to, but we haven’t really unpacked the divorce topic. I know that’s something we said we were going to do a deep dive, because even all the things that you’re referencing; that’s such a big topic in how you even arrive at that decision, and the impact on family. We have that on our list to do, so definitely want to invite you back at some point and kind of unpack some of that.

PK: Sure.

T: We won’t do it justice in this episode, but all that to say I think when your family is living vow to vow like you describe, it is – I love the visual of blowing up that center, and there is fallout. I take it that you’re still healing from some of that fallout. As I think Sharon said in a previous episode to someone, we’re all still healing.

S: Yep.

PK: For sure. One of the things my counsellors worked with me on is I have had this arrival mindset. If I do this, this and this – and I think we’re taught that. When you get to some point – then for me it was that I’ll be good enough, or accepted, or be good enough to be on staff, if it was Last Days Ministries. Or be good enough to be accepted into the school. Or be good enough to stay on to second term. Be good enough to be the leader in second term. Be good enough to whatever it is. There’s this thing that says if you do X, you’re almost guaranteed this, because you arrived. I’ve learned that that’s almost like putting the eternalness of our being-ness into this box, which is such a limiter. It’s such a limiter. So I’ve learned, and I’m learning still, to not have those arrival things, to take all of life as the next breath; the next step; the next thing you’ll learn. You’ll never learn it all. That’s a ridiculous thing to even think you could do.

S: Right.

PK: That’s why I love what you two are doing. I’m learning so much more about my experience, because I did it all under the cover of my own experience and didn’t share it with other people. I didn’t know anyone who’s gone through it. So hearing your stories and Abigail’s stories, and Dawn’s stories, because I know you – this is so helpful to know other people went through it and felt similar things, and it’s okay to feel those things. And it’s okay to feel things today that I didn’t feel yesterday. It’s this unfolding into the unknown. The unknown. We’re taught to know, and I think it’s incomparable with not knowing, is so healing. It’s okay. It’s okay not to know. It’s okay not to know if it was really God’s will. It’s okay to not know if I was supposed to do that. It’s okay. We just have so much weight put on it with this theology and this church structure, and this rightness and wrongness of it. It’s just damaging. It’s damaging.

S: Yeah. The finding the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty – it’s a super scary thing. You almost feel like you’re looking over the abyss, and you don’t know how far down it goes.

PK: Absolutely.

S: And you wonder are you going to fall and fall and fall, and never find the bottom. For me it was more like, you take a step out and you realize you actually start to fly. That’s what it felt like to me.

PK: Right. At first I called it jumping without a net. No guarantees. Everything about what we had before was guarantees. We didn’t talk about some theology things. I went through all kinds of different churches, and you have a choice. Do you want to believe in once saved always saved, but you can choose. I went through enough churches it’s like eh, you know, is it just my faith or is it faith and works, or once saved always saved – so this isn’t a system.

S: Right.

PK: This is life. This is breath. What do they say, that light casts out dark? One day I was laying down on the ground and it was nighttime, looking up at all the stars, you could see a couple of shooting stars and I realized, you know what? Darkness shows you things that the light could never show you!

T: Yes.

S: Wow.

T: Yes, it does.

PK: We only like it one way, and you miss the other. One of the most awe-inspiring moments of my life; we didn’t go on vacations as kids, we didn’t have much money, but we went to the Pokeno Mountains in Pennsylvania and my parents rented a cabin with another family. We went up there and there was a meteorite shower going on. We were above the tree line on top of the mountains, and we were in the middle of this meteor shower. It felt like they were falling around us. I never felt so disembodied and so awed. I’m like 14 years old, and I’m thinking I never want to leave this place, what is this. It was quiet, nobody is saying anything. The universe is putting on this incredible display, that if you were doing something else, you would miss it, so being silent, being open, going into the dark – who knows what you’re gonna see. Who knows what you’re gonna find?

S: What beautiful and powerful imagery, Paul. Like, a parable of what real life is.

T: Yes! Yes it is. I think this is a beautiful place to end this. I do want to say that this is not the last we’re going to hear from Paul. It’s been especially wonderful for Sharon and I to reconnect with him as a brother who has come out of the same commune setting that we’ve come out of, able to relate to some of the same lessons that we’ve all experienced. We have started a Facebook community page just to start more conversations, and I think Paul, you’ve been active on that already, I see.

PK: Very active. One of my gifts is to create community and comfort and belonging, so yeah, I’ve been reaching out to people and just say hi, welcome, or interact with them. This is the space I’ve been looking for, to be able to move into spaces like this.

T: Wonderful. Do you have any places that you are on social media, besides coming onto the community Facebook page, that you wanted to share or call out?

PK: I’m really not, but what I did – if somebody wants to connect with me through this, I created a separate email account calling daringtobme@gmail.com.

S: Cool!

PK: It’s spelled out like it sounds, except for there’s no “e” in the “be”. Cos that was already taken.

S: We’ll put it in our show notes Paul, so people can click on it if they’d like.

PK: Great.

S: And is there any final parting message or thought you’d like to share?

PK: Mmm. Yeah, I guess I would say that a lot of what we all went through is because one of the basic, core human needs is belonging. We all know and feel we need to belong. We join and are part of these things to try to meet that need. That need is presence, but it becomes polluted and distorted when it’s put into a religious setting that says you don’t belong until you do this, this and this. You are the outside. And that’s the only thing I directly repented to all my boys about. I said, I told you that you weren’t good as you were, that you needed something to come inside you to make you better. I was wrong. I am sorry. You were always good. You are always enough. You always belong.

S: Oh, Paul.

T: Oh, that is so beautiful.

S: It just gave me chills, because that is the essence of love. That is the essence of the message of love that we were all longing for. We found a counterfeit, but it’s beautiful to be finding the real thing.

T: Yes, and on the light-hearted side, I don’t know if you guys have seen the Barbie movie yet, but that’s the message of the Barbie movie, and all I’m seeing is you Paul, in a shirt that says I’m Kenough.

S: I’m Kenough!

PK: Kenough!

[laughter]

PK: I’m gonna change my email address. Hold on.

S: I think it’s probably already taken.

T: It’s probably already taken, but we – with the beauty of AI, I can put Paul in a shirt like that. So make sure you check on our Instagram account, FeetofClay.cultsisters, because we put up some fun and funny and heart warming messages as well, that follow these episodes, and I think we want to see Paul in an I Am Kenough shirt.

S: I’m with you on that.

PK:  Do me. Make it so.

S: She shall. Alright folks, well thank you so much for listening, and tell your friends about us, rate us, leave a review, that helps other people find our podcast. We appreciate all of you out there.

T: And jump over to the community page and talk more to Paul. Bye.