VICTORIA, B.C.
Karen Tarville is not one to fool around. Among her friends, her family and her fellow church members she is known as a "no nonsense" kind of person. But recently her attitude towards others has become disturbing and is beginning to deeply trouble many around her.
It all began about five weeks ago during Tarville's Sunday School at the United Baptist Church in Victoria. The small adult class had been studying through the book of 1 Corinthians when they came to 1:4,5 where the Apostle Paul says in reference to the Corinthian man who is involved in immorality,"In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus."
The class discussed the verses for several minutes and came to no conclusion, but members of the class reported to have noticed a "strange look" on Tarville's face.
"It almost looked as if Karen was smiling" said Crista Lindsey, a member of Tarville's Sunday School class. "She didn't say anything while we discussed the matter, which is strange, she just kept sitting there looking around the room with this strange smile on her face."
It was not until the following Sunday that a problem emerged.
"I was helping Karen get the coffee ready before Sunday School and everything was going fine" said Lindsey. "Then I told her that I had forgotten to bring the half-and-half from home. She suddenly just flew off the handle and started yelling at me. Then she got right up in my face and pointed her finger at me and said 'I'm delivering you over to Satan!'"
As the day progressed on, people began noticing Tarville's outbursts more and more as she one-by-one delivered people over to Satan.
"I don't have time to mess around" said Tarville. "I'm just following Scripture here. If I don't like what you're doing you can bet I'm going to deliver you over to Satan. It's the only way your spirit can be saved, so consider it an act of kindness."
Members of the congregation have become frustrated and angry over Tarville's attitude.
"I think she is grossly misinterpreting that passage" said member Jeff Parks. "She came up to my ten-year-old son after church and told him 'You really need to pray for your dad, because I had to turn him over to Satan this morning.' William came home crying."
The church's pastor and elders have made plans to confront Tarville, but knowing her personality they are less than confident that the confrontation will go well.
"We hope for the best, but chances are we're all going to end up being 'delivered over to Satan' by Karen" said the church's Pastor, Edgar Strum. "We've considered turning the tables and delivering her over, but I just don't know about that yet."
RIVERWOOD, PENNYSYLVANIA
At Riverwood Church of God the staff has "had enough." Six weeks ago the church's youth minster, Christopher Marcus bought himself a new MacBook, getting rid of his old Dell notebook computer, and since that time all of the rest of the staff have had nothing but grief.
"At first I find Christopher's enthusiasm quite amusing" said the church secretary, Darcie Long. "He was very proud of his new computer, and to be honest, I really thought it was neat. I had never seen a Mac before, but it looked nice, and did lots of interesting things. But day after blessed day he just kept telling me how awful my computer was. How 'Windows XP is the operating system of the antichrist.' It just got old."
"He talks about his new computer as if he's had some kind of second blessing" said Peter Sharpe, Riverwood's associate pastor. "When he talks about his new MacBook he says things like 'I've seen the light' and 'with my Mac I never stumble.' I'm just sick of him talking to us like we're idiots because we still use PCs."
Marcus' enthusiasm over his new computer has even made into lessons he teaches the church's youth.
"Christopher was telling us about all of the evil things that Bill Gates has done" said fifteen year-old Thomas Parker. "He showed us how Bill Gate's name can be converted to mean 666 and how the letters 'XP' are actually the two Greek letters that this guy Constantine saw in the clouds, making the Roman Empire Christian. It can only mean that Windows is evil."
As a result of Marcus' influence, many of the church's youth have refused to do their homework on their families' computers, thus angering many of the parents.
"I'm happy he likes his new computer, but it's been six weeks now, and something has got to give" said Jim Carville, the church's pastor. "I don't care what kind of computer he uses, he just needs to move on and quit annoying the fire out of the rest of us."
DISCLAIMER: I am a Mac user. I love my Mac. I personally think Mac is better than PC. I just thought it made a funny story. See, I can laugh at myself. So please don't send me any hate mail or start telling me how wonderful your Mac is. Believe me, I already know!
DENVER, COLORADO
They are becoming increasingly more frequent. With each passing week more and more pastors across America are receiving requests from their church's members asking them to pray for people in need. While this in and of itself is not unusual, the people for whom the prayers are being requested and the needs they have are because of one simple reason...they are not real.
"Yesterday I got a call from one of my members asking me to pray for Johnston Green" said Milton Lowe, pastor of New Life Christian Fellowship in Denver. "I didn't know who this was so I asked him, and he told me that he was the former mayor of the little town of Jericho, Kansas. He then went on to explain how the guy had been struggling to keep his little town together ever since the nuclear bombs went off. I listened intently while over the next 20 minutes he told me the details of how the people of the town had seen the bomb go off destroying Denver and how they were now having to fight against other towns just to survive."
Lowe listened patiently but nonetheless confused. After the conversation ended he immediately did some internet research only to discover that Jericho, Kansas was not real, and neither was Johnston Green. Everything he had been told was from the fictional television show Jericho which airs on CBS.
"I get at least one call a week asking me to pray for
either Jack or Kate or one of those people on Lost" said pastor Dean Harvey of Church of the Creator in Denver. "The most popular request I get is for Sawyer's salvation, but I also get requests to pray that Locke would come back to his senses and rejoin the survivors."
So frequent has the problem become that many pastors are becoming concerned that their members are "losing touch with reality."
"It seems that with the popularity of reality T.V. over the past few years that people are beginning to get fictional shows confused with reality shows" said Lowe. "As a result, they start praying for these people on these shows thinking that they're real. In just the past week alone I've been asked to pray for the President of the United States, but not George W. Bush. They ask me to pray for Wayne Palmer, the president on the television show 24."
In an effort to remedy the problem several pastors have banded together across denominational lines to sponsor "Turn Off The Tube Day" in which they will ask members of their congregations to turn off their televisions for one day, and spend that time doing something "constructive" like reading or spending time with their families. While the idea seems promising it is not being well-received by all members.
"I understand that there are positives to turning off the T.V." said Jeff Hollingsworth, a member of Lowe's congregation. "But those poor people in Jericho need us to know what they're going through. I keep their picture on my refrigerator and pray for them all they time. I sure hope they find out who destroyed all those cities with nuclear bombs."
LAWRENCE, MISSOURI
The aim of Lawrence Temple Bible College is to "teach young men to be preachers." For the past fifteen years the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist school has sought to train the men who attend to be "well rounded preachers" by focusing on two main aspects in their teaching; a firm understanding of the King James Bible and soul winning. But in the world of accredited institutions LTBC struggled to gain respect in the field of higher eduction over the years. As a result they began a campaign to expand their curriculum and hire new more "qualified" faculty.
The college's first addition came with the hiring of Dr. Robert Green. Green, a noted fundamentalist, KJV-only pastor, came to the college with an impressive list of credentials including a high school diploma from Northshore High School in Riverwood, Indiana and four honorary doctorate degrees with three being from Hyles-Anderson College in Hammond, Indiana and one from Texas Bible College in Longview, Texas. Dr. Green's primary responsiblities would be to teach courses in preaching and Bible translations with a specific emphasis upon the merits of the King James Bible and the Textus Receptus. With Green's resume stating that he had "extensive training in and knowledge of Biblical Greek" excitement was high among the members of the LTBC faculty, with hopes that the school had finally found someone who could show the errors of the other "Satanic translations" of the Bible on a scholarly level.
For Green's first semester at the college all went well. Students seemed to enjoy his class on Bible translations, and more than ever students were convinced of the merits of the Authorized Version and the superiority of the Textus Receptus. But as the second semester rolled around and a new batch of students entered Green's class a problem began to emerge. One student's "real" knowledge of Greek would soon prove that Dr. Green not only did not know Greek at all, but he consistently invented "Greek-sounding" words that he presented to the class as authentic Koine Greek.
The problem was discovered by Jack Cartwright, a first-year student at LTBC. Cartwright had studied Greek for three years during high school, expecting to go into the medical field. Instead he enrolled at LTBC believing he was called into the ministry.
"I was sitting there in Dr. Green's class on the first day thinking everything was alright" said Cartwright. "Dr. Green seemed like a pretty nice guy and all that. He started talking about how the King James Version was translated from the Textus Receptus, what he called a 'superior Greek text' and how all of these other translations were taken from corrupt texts which made them inferior. Well, that all sounded fine to me. But then he started giving examples of what he called 'corruptions' in the Greek. He started talking about 'Greek' words that weren't really Greek words at all."
Cartwright sat dumbfounded for the next two hours while Green lectured on why "charity" is a better translation than "love" in 1 Corinthians 13.
"Dr. Green told us that the word for 'love' in the Greek is 'kaiposoluptis'" said Cartwright. "Well, at first I thought he was just joking, then I realized that this guy was serious! Not only is "kaiposoluptis" not a Greek word, but as far as I know it's not a word in any language."
As Green's lecture continued he presented more and more "Greek" examples to the class that Cartwright caught.
"I started writing them down" he said. "They were downright funny. He said that the verb for 'to run' was 'hapalomelama.' I almost lost it when he told the class that the Greek word for 'Lord' was 'elohim.'"
After class Cartwright talked to some of his classmates about the situation only to find himself rebuked for his questioning of authority.
"I talked to some of the other guys in the class and they were all like 'Man, who do you think you are?'" he said. "They all told me that I have no right questioning 'God's man."
The problems for Cartwright did not stop there though. He soon took his complaint to LTBC's Academic Dean only to be told to "cease his spirit of rebellion." Cartwright soon dropped all his classes and withdrew from LTBC.
"I'm done with that school" he said. "They're absolutely ignorant and almost proud of it. I don't know what I'm going to do exactly, but I know I won't go back there."
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
In recent years cooperation between conservative and reformed evangelicals of various denominations has grown. Annual gatherings such as The Shepherd's Conference and Together for the Gospel have brought together names like C.J. Mahaney, John MacArthur, Ligon Duncan and Al Mohler just to name a few. While theological differences do exist between the respective denominations of these contemporary church leaders, the focus of a common bond in the faith has brought a newfound sense of unity to reformed churches across America.
But others outside the realm of conservative reformed Christianity have taken notice of the popularity of such conferences. Recently leaders of various liberal Christian churches from the United States and Canada gathered to discuss holding a conference in 2009 to be called Together for a Bunch of Other Stuff.
Liberal churches, which have seen their memberships dwindle over the past decade, have long searched for ways to slow their decreasing size. The conference in 2009 is designed to be a show of unity between liberal churches in North America with hopes of bringing about a "revival of reconciliation."
"It's a shame that we haven't moved faster on this" said Rev. Mark Anthony Tallis, Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in San Diego. "For the past ten years I've watched parishioner after parishioner leave our church for these so-called evangelical churches. It's high time that we put aside our differences with these other denominations and start standing together for what's important, that is 'other things.'"
"Gospel, gospel, gospel, that's all we ever hear about from the other side" said Rev. Peter Hawkes of First United Church of Christ in Newport Beach, Florida. "What we need now in the world is love, not all this gospel business about sin and salvation."
The conference will be held in May of 2009 in San Diego and will feature the Rev Canon Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire. Other noted speakers will include the Rev. Cecil Williams, pastor of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, and the Dali Lama. Representatives from various other denominations will also be present.
"Our goal is to show that we are united for what's really important out there in the world" said Rev. Williams. "We liberal Christians are out to show love, and spread harmony and reconciliation with tolerance towards all."
The cost of the conference is yet to be determined. Entertainment and "worship" music for the conference will be provided by Alanis Morissette.
Karen Tarville is not one to fool around. Among her friends, her family and her fellow church members she is known as a "no nonsense" kind of person. But recently her attitude towards others has become disturbing and is beginning to deeply trouble many around her.
