I grew up in a very conservative Pentecostal home. We lived by many rules called “standards”. The hope was that these rules would instill some kind of deep spirituality in our children. As my generation grew up, many of the children who lived among so many rules could only see “the rules” and not the spirituality that the rules were meant to inspire. There were a small number that found the rules to to be a “fence of security” from a world they could not embrace but feared and they became the next generation of the modern day Pentecostal. There were also a group of survivors that fell victim to the “unyielding law” of the rules where injustice was found in the immediate forgiveness of the passive personalities that readily apologized and conformed while those who questioned for better understanding were never given a place of acceptance at all. Continue reading →