My Time in Purgatory
To see the church of Jesus Christ be staffed with such people and to see the church of Jesus Christ not care about who they were staffing the church with just ripped my heart out.
Rev. Bret McAtee has now for decades labored in the pastoral ministry in the face of serious opposition. We’ve invited him to tell some of his history, with the hope that younger men today may be encouraged in their present struggles against ecclesiastical corruption. The following has been adapted from a longer series on his blog, Iron Ink. This portion begins in 1998, after he took up full-time pulpit supply for a congregation of the Christian Reformed Church in Charlotte, Michigan.
I would occasionally attend District denominational meetings of the Clown Reformed Church (CRC), and would inevitably return home in a rage with my blood pressure in the stratosphere. These meetings were held twice annually. At one of the meetings, I remember the Anabaptist and so-pacifist John Howard Yoder being invoked as a guru on war theory with the whole floor adding their Amens. I finally couldn’t bear it any longer and stood up and said, “I get not agreeing with this war, but invoking an Anabaptist intellectual? What is wrong with you people? I thought you were Reformed.” A deep and spooky silence blanketed the floor.
Another time at the District denominational meeting a discussion was had on the floor about the necessity to extend to homosexual ministers insurance benefits. I sat there with my mouth agape because I had been persuaded that there was no such thing as homosexual ministers. I arose to object and that created its own fun firestorm until one of the tenured ministers realized that this discussion was not going well and was able to table it.
Over the years I witnessed many amazing things at these District meetings. Most commonly what shell-shocked me was the abysmally low standard for ordination. I saw a man ordained who couldn’t answer one question put to him (I kid you not—not one). I witnessed another chap get ordained who had no answer to the question; “What is Original Sin?” Another chap, when asked what books he enjoyed reading, responded with, “I don’t really like reading books.” Another chap I saw ordained explicitly denied justification by faith alone. More than one chap could not explain the meaning of infant Baptism. I saw one woman ordained who told us that as a chaplain she was not allowed to be explicit about the necessity of Jesus Christ for salvation with the dying patients she ministered to in the hospital per hospital policy, and that she abided by that rule. I saw another woman ordained whose husband was a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. It was so bad that I finally got to the point where I just checked out of the meetings. If I went I would sit in the back by myself and listen to lectures on my Zune or read a book. I can honestly say these were some of the most enraging, depressing, and discouraging moments in my life. To see the church of Jesus Christ be staffed with such people and to see the church of Jesus Christ not care about who they were staffing the church with just ripped my heart out.
Alan Chamberlain (a pseudonym), a former elder who attended several Classis meetings with me, once said of them,
They were little more than a gathering of effeminate social justice warriors speaking of all those things important to what could have well passed for a socially relevant meeting of the Democratic Club. And when I say effeminate that is reserved for the men. The women had more testosterone.
I’ve already mentioned a few of the incidents that occurred in the District meetings, but since Alan mentioned the effeminate social justice warrior aspect of it all, I thought I would go with more examples.
You will remember the chap I spoke of who, while undergoing an ordination exam, froze up and literally could not answer one question put to him from the floor. From that point forward in my life that chap became the living embodiment of the maxim, “Like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car.” Certainly, you have been part of something where what you were witnessing was so bad you could barely endure being embarrassed for the person who was being embarrassed. This was that. However, the humor in this situation was found in the fact that while the ordination candidate was unsure of anything theological, he sang like a bird when it came to how terrible “racism” was.
In yet another exam of yet another ordinate candidate in the area of “knowing one’s Bible,” the candidate was asked a series of questions of where in the Bible fairly well-known passages were located. Over 25 years in my time in the denomination I met one fellow minister who shared my convictions and it was this minister who was responsible for examining the candidate with this portion of his exam. For 20–30 minutes he peppered the candidate with different passages asking for the candidate to provide the book of the Bible they were found in and if possible what chapter. The candidate got something like 20% correct. A dismal performance by any standard. But you guessed it…he was ordained by a nearly unanimous count. (They always counted on me voting “no.” Indeed, I don’t think in all the time I was loosely connected with these meetings I ever voted for a candidate to be ordained.)
In another famous case, the candidate was asked “Was it possible for Jesus to have sinned?” Now, to be honest I was a bit shocked by this question because it was way out of the norm for the ministers of this District. Usually what one got from these ministers was questions like, “What is your favorite recipe?” or “If you were a piece of clothing, what piece of clothing would you be?” (OK… so I’m exaggerating, but only by a little bit.) The candidate answered the question about Jesus and his possible ability to sin with an “affirmative.” Now, I wanted to jump out of my seat, but by this point I was finally learning there was no upside to this, so I kept my place as I enjoyed the amusement by the subsequent discussion that these theological titans entered into on the question, “Could Jesus have sinned?” Oh…and he passed almost unanimously.
In another case, the District decided that they were going to have a “listening session” on the issue of sodomy. There were those who were pushing to mainstream the acceptance of sodomy in the denomination, and near my end in the denomination the wizards of smart decided that they were going to have breakout sessions and discussions on this issue. The wizards of smart found a large auditorium and placed us in groups of six to eight in order to discuss the issue. At this particular meeting, I had a deacon with me, and he was more adamantly opposed to sodomy than even I am. Poor Bob. By the time these discussions were finished, he was apoplectic. I thought the poor guy was going to stroke out on me.
Before the discussions even began I lodged a protest saying that the mere “conversation” on the matter by itself was part of the process of mainstreaming the vile idea of the Church accepting sodomy as a matter of course. The moderator couldn’t believe his ears. How could anyone object to “a conversation”? However, I knew and know that when these conversations begin, it is with the purpose of desensitizing people to the awfulness of what is going to be discussed. The best way to mainstream any perversion is to first start having conversations about it, as if there is any possibility said perversion could ever be mainstreamed. The first step of perversion coming out of the closet is conversations about perversion possibly coming out of the closet. They weren’t fooling me with this “conversation” nonsense.
A final instance was how I witnessed a conservative minister destroyed by a Cultural Marxist Church and District. I still can’t go into all the details of this episode but I can say that I witnessed the District try to bury exculpatory evidence that would have gone a long way towards restoring this minister to his post. I did not know and have never learned the details of what amounted to the crime of “jaywalking,” which was visited with the punishment of the electric chair by the church and denomination.
At the District meeting where the minister was finally thrown under the bus and removed from his position, I had in my possession something that nobody else knew I had. I had the exculpatory evidence that stated that the minister was ready to take up again his office. The denomination had required that my minister friend go see a counselor of his choosing. This he did, thus showing the virtue of submission to the denominational “authorities.” The professional and degreed counselor had given the minister a clean bill of health and had recommended that he be allowed to return to his responsibilities as minister of the church from which he was put on leave. Clearly, this counselor—a counselor assigned by the denomination itself—believed that this chap should not be tossed. Yet, in the District denominational meeting dealing with this issue, the wizards of smart decided to bury this report. They had intended not to make known this piece of information which had bearing on the decision making of whether this pastor should be essentially be removed from his job. They intended to bury this evidence. Except, as I said, I had this evidence.
Up to this point, I had made a stirring defense of this minister, but was told in no uncertain terms that I should not be calling into question the work of the Church and District in this matter, as they had been very punctilious in their going over the evidence. That is when I snapped and started waving around the document that I had that demonstrated that the very counselor that they had required the minister in question to go see had signed off a document saying he was fit and ready to go back to work. I started pointedly asking why this document had been conveniently not mentioned. At this point, the red-faced embarrassment was in full glow. They had been caught in their guilt of trying to bury exculpatory evidence. They had been caught red-handed in seeking to put their thumbs on the scale of justice. I was in a full-throated rage and everybody in the building knew it. How could they dare seek to destroy a man’s career by withholding exculpatory evidence? They sought to make flimsy excuses but they knew they were busted.
Despite being caught red-handed in what can only be called a kangaroo-court stunt, all that the dirty denominational chieftains wanted to have stamped with approval was stamped with approval, and the minister in question effectively had his career ended.
Later one of the delegates pulled me aside and said, “If I’m ever in a tight place, I want someone like you as a friend defending me.” I responded by saying it did precious little good today. And so the most qualified minister I ever met in the Clown Reformed Church (CRC) was cashiered, but I still have the privilege of calling him a friend yet today.
And do keep in mind these are only the most excessive of things I witnessed.
Following the labeling by the Southern Poverty Law Center (the mother of all euphemisms) of Charlotte Christ the King Reformed as an extremist hate group, the Clown Reformed Church rushed out with their own press release touching all that had happened in 2018. Clearly, the CRC was trying to get out in front of the SPLC story so it wouldn’t splash back on them if it was discovered that at one time the congregation I served for (at that time) almost thirty years thought about actually joining the CRC. The Clown Reformed Church press release was filled with the same slander and libel we have come to love and expect from the CRC.
According to Rev. Ben Kieber, my great Kinist crime, per his exhaustive in-depth research that was reported to the District denominational meeting, as reported by the regional and subscription-starved newspaper, was that;
According to his (Kieber’s) research, which Kieber shared with the State Journal, Randy Simone spoke at the Charlotte church in July 2017. Simone is the founder, promoter, and fundraiser for the white nationalist group Suidlanders of the Republic of South Africa.
That’s it. I was hounded by these Cultural Marxist Social Justice Warriors because we had a person reporting on the crimes of the Marxist African National Congress party in South Africa perpetrated against the South African Boers. We sat for thirty minutes listening to this person pleading for help in the atrocities being committed against White farmers in South Africa. And Rev. Ben Kieber presented this as evidence that I was a heretical Kinist? Can you say, idiot?
Second, Kieber identifies as Kinist what until just a few generations ago was considered just standard Christianity:
McAtee taught and wrote about Kinism, a theology that holds to a belief that races should be kept separate and that people should not marry outside their race.
Allow me to plead here for people to purchase the book, Who is My Neighbor? An Anthology in Natural Relations (updated 2nd edition here), so they can see for themselves what an idiotic thing Kieber offered above. In the book, the Cultural Marxism that Kieber and the CRC are trying to sell as normative Christian theology is forever seen as jejune. Christians have always believed that people have a natural and entirely normal love for their own people that results in people groups naturally associating with their own people groups. McAtee’s belief has not so much been that “races should be kept separate,” as it has been that the Cultural Marxists should not be successful in putting all races in a racial blender and hitting the high button. The kind of Marxism that Kieber and the CRC are advocating by attacking my beliefs is as old as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the boys:
Even the natural differences within species, like racial differences…, can and must be done away with historically.
—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology
What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and hereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property
—Engels, The Principles of Communism
The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together, but to merge them.
—Vladimir Lenin, The Socialist Revolution and the Rights of Nations to Self Determination
For those like Kieber whose reading comprehension skills are challenged, allow me to give you the easy version of these quotes: “Marxism has always advocated for the destruction of nations and races by means of amalgamation.”
My real offense against the Clown Reformed Church is that I was and remain opposed to the doctrine of demons that Kieber and the CRC is pushing. That doctrine of demons is the doctrine that would forever sink God’s racial diversity in a sea of monism in the name of “diversity.”
