I wasn't really planning to make a blog post, but since it seems like a lot of people know what you put on your hard disk right away anyway, I will. I was just talking to these street preachers, and I said, "If you're from the Assemblies of God, I looked on the Assemblies of God website and it says that they believe that God uses doctors to heal."
I said that I was once almost ordained as an Open Bible minister, in 1974, but they closed Mountain Heights Bible College in Colorado Springs just before we were supposed to graduate and be ordained. They said Open Bible was very similar to Assemblies of God, but stricter. Something about the Assemblies' hairstyles and hem lengths or something, so we were risking our souls by going there. Mike and Kathy McCarty ended up leaving Lighthouse Temple and moving to Assemblies of God. Mike said, "Pastor Dunbar was too authoritarian."
I used to rent a room during the winter where Mike lived and worked in his dad's motel in Manitou Springs, the next town, before he married Kathy. Once Sister Dunbar had an Assemblies of God booklet, a bunch of copies, she was using in the Sunday School. She usually told us not to read those. She made an excuse, "They have lots of money, lots more than us, they're a lot bigger than us, because they have the "greasy grace" doctrine, live any kind of way, so it attracts people, so they can afford to print all these religious textbooks, with the 4-color pictures. And the doctrine is close enough."
I had all five ministries, all five gifts, and all nine fruits of the spirit, or so I believed. I had actually prayed for people to be healed and felt the healing "virtue" pass through me. They told us I was supposed to marry Stephanie Winters, but her mother, a non-believer, had her committed to Pueblo State Hospital for two weeks because she didn't want her going to Lighthouse Temple and because she didn't want her to marry me because she didn't want to support us.
Bob Ford, who, besides the McCartys had the only other marriage in the church, lived with what's-her-name at her mother's house, and he said he got to do his favorite thing, which was driving around back alleys looking for junk parts to sell. Lots of people from that church got sent to Pueblo: the Sunshine elder Vance's brother, said he got committed for speed, strange since the church is totally drug-free, Payter, by her mother, Pastor Dunbar's housekeeper, and Vance's wife died at the age of forty-two from cancer.
My parents came out and committed me, and the psychiatrist convinced me to become a lifelong atheist. I don't believe in anything supernatural, like angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, or gods. I don't believe in God anymore. I just think that is the truth, like many scientists say.
