A Journey Out of the UPC
By Lawrence “Buddy” Martin
I want it known up front that I deeply care for my Pentecostal kinsmen. It is not my desire to cast a bad reflection on any person of the Pentecostal faith. My earnest hope is simply that my testimony will serve to encourage others to take a closer look at how the United Pentecostal Church misrepresents the gospel of Jesus Christ.
My mother was born into a Oneness Pentecostal family in 1920. When she married at age 15, she left the world of the Pentecostal. Mom and dad moved from Louisiana to Portsmouth, Virginia during World War II, where they both worked in the Naval ship yards. (I was one month old when we moved.) Later mom and dad divorced, and she moved to California where some of her family had located. (My mom was from a family of twelve siblings.)
Mom carried in her heart a concern for the things of the Lord. She wanted me to know the Lord, but not in the form of Pentecostalism. My earliest childhood memory is of my mom teaching me to pray, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” In this childlike way I actually called upon the Lord. It would be years before I would come to know Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.
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And so my formative years in Virginia and California…
… were not under the influence of the Pentecostal religion. Several of mom’s siblings had also left Pentecostalism. (I was too young to remember Virginia. All my early memories are of California.) We returned to Louisiana in 1949.
I had my first encounter with Pentecostalism in 1949. I was nine years old. (I am 69 now.) It was mysterious and strange. People were falling out, and shouting, and dancing. The preaching and singing were filled with passion. Pentecostalism was an awesome world to me.
During the next ten years my exposure to religion would alternate between the United Pentecostal Church and the Church of God – Anderson. But like many young people my interest in religion began to lessen over time. I served in the Navy from 1959 to 1963. (Age 18 to 22.)
The short side of things is that after I got out of the Navy, I married into Pentecostalism. My wife’s father was a UPC pastor. In 1964 I began to pursue a call to the ministry. For the next seven years I would fill various roles in the ministry including that of a pastor and as an evangelist.
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Now for a crisis moment that set the stage.
It was in 1971. My wife Betty and I pastored a UPC Church and afterwards entered into a full-time evangelism ministry. We then decided to move to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to establish a UPC home mission work. Much of what would change my thinking about Pentecostalism would begin there.
In Los Alamos we became acquainted with some non-Pentecostal believers. Interestingly enough it was these non-Pentecostals who helped us get settled in our new mission town. While they did not attend any of our services, I took note of how these non-Pentecostal people were different. It was obvious that they loved the Lord. It was also obvious that they were living a Spirit-led life. There was just something about their spiritual demeanor that stirred my heart. They had such composure in their walk with the Lord. I wanted to know why. I thought to myself, How could these people who did not speak in tongues know Jesus?
The Lord knew I was being misguided in a system of religion that did not present the gospel message of salvation properly. He used these non-Pentecostals to put me on my knees.
Where were we missing it? The more I studied the Scriptures, the more I began to realize that the gospel we UPC ministers were preaching was not the gospel the apostles preached. The doctrine of having to speak in tongues to be saved was never preached by any apostle, by the early Christians, nor was it ever taught in the history or the Church. It is pure Pentecostalism. It arrived on the scene in the early 1900s.
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The Lord began to open my eyes.
Salvation was by faith in Jesus Christ alone. It all centers upon to a true heart relationship with Him. In salvation there is a life exchange.
Troubled in spirit, Betty and I and our two sons left the mission work and evangelized for a short time. Our last revival saw twenty-five people baptized. As the altars filled, I would go to a back room and weep before God. Seekers were begging God to save them. It wasn’t a situation where you could kneel by a seeker and explain how true salvation works. The seekers had largely been brought up under the influence of Pentecostal teachings.
In God’s providential care, the next three years found us in a local congregation. It was a UPC church, but the pastor was a gentle and compassionate man. (We only make one step at a time.) August 1971 through August 1974 became our season of healings. I still preached out from the local church but my major need was to get my thinking fully in accord with God’s word. God cannot use an angry man.
An interesting thing happened. The church we were attending had recently gone through a split. The pastor asked me to help him rebuild. When I told him of my beliefs, what he shared surprised me. He said that when the UPC was first formed, a great many ministers of one of the forming groups believed the way that I believe, that a person did not have to speak in tongues to be saved. Over time this belief disappeared under the stricter, ‘you-must-speak-in-tongues-to-be-saved’, teaching of the other forming group. This bit of history is unknown to most UPC members. We agreed to disagree. I worked with this godly man for three years.
[Note: I encourage any UPC person to secure the book, 'Christianity Without the Cross: A History of Salvation in Oneness Pentecostalism,' by Thomas A. Fudge. It is an eye opener for those who do not understand the real history of the UPC. - http://www.christianchallenge.org/bookstore/index.html -
During this time the Lord's love began to replace my anger. When it came time for my departure, I could do so with nothing but sorrow for my Pentecostal kinsmen, and a deeper love for them than I had ever felt. I formally left the UPC in 1974. [In heart in 1971]
This is also where truth needs to be understood. Truth is not a church, an organization, a movement, a revelation, a group, a denomination, or even a doctrine. While these things can contain truth, truth in its reality is a Person. Until we come to grips with this reality we will always drift about searching for truth in some religious setting. I am speaking to what Biblical Christianity is really about. Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me.” (John 14:6)
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Let me reach further back in time.
I need to share how I came to know Jesus personally.
It was 1963. I had just gotten out of the Navy. A cousin kept insisting that I go to church with her. So I did. It was in church that I first saw my wife to be. In short order I fell in love with this beautiful Pentecostal girl. We married that same year. (That was 46 plus years ago.)
Not many months afterwards I found myself in the world of the Pentecostal altar. Revival after revival saw me in the altar. The longer this went on the more discouraged I became. One Sunday afternoon I am sitting in our living room with my Bible in my hands, reading from the book of John. When I came to John 14. I saw that the questions being asked of Jesus were my very own questions.
Philip asked the Lord to show them the Father. It was at that very moment that the great Shepherd spoke to my heart. He said,
Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Buddy? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, ‘Shew us the Father?’ Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me…” (John 14:9,10 kjv)
Tears flowed down my cheeks. Jesus was talking to me. He spoke my name. I could not speak. I was so aware of the divine presence. It was like my childhood prayer of ‘Now I lay be down to sleep.’ had come alive. I now knew that Jesus was the very Lord that I prayed to as a child. And yes, it was at that very moment that I came to believe in Jesus Christ with all my heart. It was at that moment that I was birthed into God’s kingdom.
Paul said it this way:
For with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation. For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed.’” (Rom 10:10-11 NASB)
This accords with what God said through the prophet Ezekiel:
“Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My spirit within you…” (Eze36:26,27 nasb)
And this from the prophet Jeremiah:
But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days … They will not teach again, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them … for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” (Jer31:33,34)
I can truthfully say that from that moment on I have carried the presence of Jesus continually in my heart, and I have never been disappointed in Him. Nor have I ever doubted my salvation.
But there was a problem. I knew that Jesus was Lord and I believed and trusted in Him. Yet I did not have any words to work with. I wasn’t aware of how the confession of Jesus was to play out in my life. I was still under the power of the Pentecostal altar.
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Here is where I must speak to the world of the Pentecostal altar.
The UPC has such a strong stress on the necessity of speaking in tongues for salvation that an altar service can appear to be a total frenzy. (At least to an outsider.) It is not uncommon to hear seekers crying and begging God to save them. You can also hear people shouting, “Just say, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, over and over, real fast.’” Or, “Say ‘hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah over and over real fast.’” Some are saying, “Turn loose!” Still others are saying, “Hang on!” The person in the altar is being drawn into a highly emotionally charged atmosphere.
Sometimes a circle will form around the seeker. He finds himself being moved around. His eyes are often tightly closed. The very moment the seeker makes any sound that seems not to be English, someone will shout, “He’s got it! He’s got it! He’s got the Holy Ghost!” In turn he gives in to all his emotions. He is relieved! The battle is over. But is it really?
The seeker is often told something like this; “Tomorrow morning when you wake up, the devil is going to tell you that you did not get anything. You just tell him that he is a liar.” While this sounds like a good thing to tell a person, it is really another part of the Pentecostal pattern.
Why do they need tell the seeker this? The reason is because the next morning the emotions will have subsided. The questions will begin. Where is the excitement? Where is the joy? Why am I having such doubts? It was so real last night. Why is it not real now? Was I really saved? This isn’t something the devil is telling him. These doubts are coming from within him. This new Pentecostal has now entered into a strange religious world where doubt and fear are going to be pretty much the norm.
The point is that there is no need to tell a person who has truly received Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, that the next morning they’ll wake up feeling like nothing has happened. True salvation is not a worked up thing of the emotions. Salvation is the matter of a heart-exchange. When the Holy Spirit enters the heart of a believing one, the Spirit will be there tomorrow, and the next tomorrow, and the next tomorrow. This is called the testimony of the Spirit. Every true believer carries this testimony in his heart for his entire life.
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This is one reason you find so many UPC people still struggling.
Once again it all comes back to how the UPC preaches that a person must speak in tongues to be saved. And the ‘keep yourself saved’ will continue to play itself out with battles of the mind. Pentecostal people are never taught that salvation wraps itself around the confession of Jesus Christ. Paul said our walk of salvation is built around a simple devotion to Jesus.
Yet when you are brought up in a religious system such as the UPC, you don’t know anything else. Everything a Oneness Pentecostal person is taught revolves around a single Scripture, where Peter said, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.” (Acts 2:38 KJV. Of course they always tack on the end, ”…with the evidence of speaking in tongues.”)
This Scripture is always distorted beyond its setting. Many Pentecostals are surprised to find that the statement, ‘with the evidence of speaking in tongues’ is not part of Acts 2:38. In fact you will find it no where in the Bible. And this is what distorts the gospel message they they preach. Once again it should go without saying that no apostle ever preached that a person had to speak in tongues to be saved.
I’ve been able to help a goodly number of Pentecostals with the help that I received from the Lord. A great many Pentecostals contact me in regard to their struggles. Sometimes they are afraid of being found out. They ask that their conversations with me be kept secret. But one by one by one they lose their fears and enter into God’s true world of redemption. (By the way my mom went to be with the Lord, Easter Sunday morning, 2005.)
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I need to point out that those who leave the UPC …
… often enter a time of culture shock. The greater world of Christianity is unlike anything they are use to. Oneness Pentecostalism is a sub-culture with its own peculiar distinctive control factors, where fear itself is the primary control factor. Fear of leaving is deeply ingrained in them. Fear of losing their salvation is instilled. As a young preacher, I use to say to my wife, “Honey, I feel like I’m caught in a net and I don’t know what it is.” Yes, I knew the Lord personally and loved Him with all my heart. At the time I was unable to recognize that the net was the untrue salvation doctrines of the UPC.
Here is something to think about. According to statistics the Pentecostals have the highest rate of divorce, and the highest rate of emotional disturbances of any Protestant group. A few years back I did research on issues of mental health to better educate myself for the purpose of pastoral ministry. During my research I came across an article on mental patients in California. It stated that the largest religious groups of patients in mental institutions in California were from a Pentecostal background.
In picking up my research again I came across a major study by K. G. Meador and others. It was reported in ‘Hospital and Community Psychiatry,’ a monthly journal of the American Psychiatric Association. Having researched several thousand cases, Meador concluded that there was a greater rate of major depression in Pentecostals than in any other religious affiliation. Here is the quote: “[The] rate of major depression in Pentecostals was three times greater than for any other affiliations.”
[Note: The term Pentecostal is a broad term and takes in far more than the United Pentecostal Church. Pentecostalism includes a great many groupings.]
Let me mention one other item that is important. The ones who generally suffer the most under the UPC yoke are the women. The rules largely apply to them. Without naming all that is required of the women, let me simply say that much of what the UPC calls ’standards’ have little and often no real Bible base. Paul speaks of these rules as self-made religion.
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To anyone who is struggling over any of what I have shared…
… I can simply tell you that the Lord knows exactly where you are. He knows what you need to hear. He knows what your next step needs to be. God has a plan for your life. Don’t be afraid to trust Him with all the details. He will show you what to do at the proper time.
If any of this fits your world and you need someone to talk to on a personal basis, feel free to contact me by email: Buddy@ChristianChallenge.org. Our web site is: http://www.christianchallenge.org/.
Christian Challenge also has a support group for people with a United Pentecostal background who may be questioning certain UPC doctrines. Go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DepartingUPC/
Here are other sources you can draw from. The following web sites are provided by former United Pentecostal ministers or by a former adherent to Pentecostalism.
- Lois Gibson, former UPC minister: http://www.spiritualabuse.org/issues.html
- Bernie Gillespie, former UPC minister. http://inchristalone.org/
- Jason Pound: http://www.actseighteen.com/
- Thomas A. Fudge. former UPC minister. [Christianity Without the Cross]: http://thomasfudge.com/index.html
- Jenni Baier [Recovering Pentecostal]: http://www.renewed.net/
- Josh Spears: http://www.whyileft.org/
- Talking Pentecostalism http://talkingpentecostalism.blogspot.com/
The Lord bless you,
Buddy
