Soft Life Dreams (More accurately called “Yet another church rant”!)

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Let me firstly start off with a funny story which is 100% true. To verify this story I will need to dig through my emails going back over a decade – I just remembered why that might be challenging. Hmm!

So I used to attend a church which I have previously ranted about on my various blogs. Ultimately the Pastor treated me carelessly blah blah blah what a surprise!

However this humorous incident happened while I was at the church and each time I remember it, I just start laughing! 😂

So basically the church was tiny. While I was going there, it probably had fewer than 10 regular members. Additionally no-one, apparently, had any money, including me! Now while a church is so small, to me it would make sense to just meet in the Pastor’s house or someone else’s house, to save money on renting out a space. However this type of thinking never seems to make sense to Pastors in the same way. So no matter how small their church is, invariably they will insist on renting out a hall, eg a school hall, and buying audio visual equipment for their church. Because of the rent that they pay for their hall, this means that they have regular overheads that they need to cover no matter how few people attend their church.

So what is funny is this: one day this Pastor was complaining about how little money was coming in to the church, versus the overheads that the church had to pay. But remember that no-one had any money. So he sent me this spreadsheet which he kept updated about the financial offerings that people had been giving in the church. And oh my goodness, there was one particular entry where the total financial offerings contributed by all attendees altogether on a particular Sunday morning…amounted to less than 50p. Yes, that’s 50 pence, not 50 pounds. This is where I need to dig through my emails to verify the correct amount. It was certainly less than a pound. And by the way, that is not an average of 50p from each person, but everyone’s total contribution taken together amounted to less than 50p. I know for a fact (because the Pastor told me) that the room rent was super-affordable at £15 per hour. Even if the financial contribution had been £50, even at the super-affordable rate of £15, that would barely have been enough to break even. Each time I remember that particular incident then I literally just burst out laughing at the fact that between all of us adults we were not able to make even up to 50p in offering. Talk about completely unsustainable. It was in thinking of that incident a few hours ago in preparation for writing this post that I coined a name for that church, that is, “The 50p Church”.

And to be clear, back then the Pastor himself did not have any money either. I pray that this man is no longer reading this blog because what I am about to say is extremely candid. He was a highly qualified professional, extremely bright. Since then he has completed a PhD. He is one of the few people I’ve ever met who can quote the Bible chapter and verse. To be fair, I don’t know the details of his work, ie why he was not working in his professional career. Due to his profession, I would have expected him to have had a guaranteed, well-paid albeit stressful job. But oh no he felt “called” to the ministry. He felt “called” to do it full-time. So instead of being able to use his own earnings to fund the church while it took off, all the financial burden was put squarely on his wife, who was also a relatively well-paid professional, but not on the level of his financial potential, and was apparently needing to fund their entire household, plus this church dream, on her single salary. So unsurprisingly she was working quite a lot. [I wasn’t actually going to touch on that at all, but on reflection it is actually relevant to the main point I am making in this post].

So anyway, this man presented this spreadsheet of weekly financial contributions to me. At the time I was one of the most committed members of the church. And I thought to myself [and this is relevant for so many churches – please listen up Pastors!] – Sorry, but it is not my problem! I had only been in that church for less than a year, in fact I left shortly after that incident, so to be honest I was still checking out the church. Since then I have developed a mantra that I will not give serious money to a church until I have had a chance to thoroughly check them out, and if I am to be perfectly candid I sincerely did not have any money back then anyway. I think that on the Sunday morning in question I was in the service, but I literally gave a few copper coins. That is how skint I was back then.

So this is the way that I look at it: dear Pastors, if you insist that God has called you into the ministry, AND you also refuse to simply hold the church service in your home or someone else’s home, go and harass God, not your members, to financially uphold your dreams. After all He is the One who has called you, right?! I was still so brand new to the church, I had not made a long term commitment to the church yet and he was already expecting me to take responsibility for something that should have been resolved before I ever stepped through the door.

So let’s make this relevant to “Huggie-Wuggie” then: on discussion, this man expected me both to be giving more money to the church, that is, significantly more money AND to also be giving more time. How on earth did he expect that I would have more time if I started working in a job that would enable me to give more money to the church? The amount of commitment I gave to that church was already extremely high. This shows how someone can be intellectually brilliant and yet clueless when it comes to common sense. And there were other things which I have already previously ranted about. One new rant that I remembered just today was this: I offered to create a free website for the church, bearing in mind that they did not have any money, and neither did I, but this was a way of helping out the church. And this Pastor said “Oh no, he did not want a site to be created using the common established frameworks like WordPress or Joomla, rather he wanted this website to be created from scratch!” So this man was both entitled and clueless. So someone is offering you a premium service for free. And yet you insist that you want them to spend possibly hundreds or thousands of hours creating a bespoke thing for your church when your church is not in a position to give any money for this service? And remember that the church was tiny. Could they not have managed with a super-simple website to start with, until they had grown a bit? Not that I was offering a simple website, by the way. Using the common frameworks means that a sophisticated website can be created quite easily with minimal effort. To be fair, I’m sure that if I had a chance to sit down and explain the practicalities to him he would have understood and accepted. I left before it got to that. At that point of discussion though, I thought to myself: “Well, you’ll clearly have to make it yourself!” (After I left the church, apparently another woman came along and helped out by creating a free website. Well the resulting website was firstly, about a fifth as sophisticated as the one I might have created, and secondly, definitely made with an existing framework, likely not WordPress but something less sophisticated, like Blogspot. In short, it was that super-simple site that I thought his church should have been satisfied with all along.)

This then, is why all this is relevant. I sat down and realised today that if I was to get married, I would need to work harder both on maintaining my house AND on bringing in money. People often make it sound like it’s an “either-or” thing for a woman: either you are a housewife OR you are going out to make money. For most women these days, realistically it’s both. And this would be true even if I was merely to get married. If there were children, the thing would be compounded even more. I would have to spend exponentially more time on housework and chores and childrearing while simultaneously spending exponentially more time on ensuring financial stability for my family. At the moment, I already squeeze about 26 hours of living into each 24 hour period. So it is already impossible in terms of time. So someone please explain how on earth it could possibly be possible if I was married, or if I was married with children?!

I’m guessing that this is why women and mothers are so often burntout. I talk a lot on this blog about my various Afro-Korean dramas and other YouTube adventures. These represent a luxury in terms of time. On one hand, yes I make it clear that I tend to watch these while otherwise engaged, but still, to have time to watch and focus on them at all is still a luxury of time, instead of having my concentration simultaneously taken up by twenty more pressing things at once.

And then following on from that, and also another YouTube video I watched today, the following occurred to me: for a man, a “soft life” is attained by getting married. But for a woman, a soft life is attained by remaining single and childfree (a là my current situation) or by marrying a very rich, truly generous man who inexplicably falls crazily for a woman not in his socio-economic class and commits to her with lifelong fidelity – ie, exactly like an Afro-Korean romance. This YouTube video I watched today was not an AfroKorean drama or other drama, for once, but rather a video about how even good husbands drain wives. And a man was complaining that they as men could be “perfect”, and yet women would never be satisfied. And what this man was describing as “perfect” was literally the bare minimum. Provide for the family. Don’t cheat. Don’t abuse your wife or hit her. “So there’s no point getting married lads!” Honestly, I agree with him. If you think that you are doing anyone a favour by doing these simple, basic things, then please do stay away from marriage and spare your future wife the inevitable pain of having to deal with you.

(Thankfully, there were other male voices on that video contradicting his mindset.) And then it occurred to me that many men of course want to do the minimum possible in marriage to secure a soft life earned from their wives’ labour. So of course they are resistant to having to fairly pull their own weight. The whole point of the enterprise as far as they are concerned is to get away with doing as little as possible. So of course they are going to pretend that they don’t know what to do around the house. Of course they are going to insist that you spell it out to them or give them a list. They know that pragmatically speaking after a number of times you are likely to give up asking them or simply do it yourself, which is what they are hoping for. So now as ladies we need to make sure that we look out for men who genuinely want to invest a lot of work and effort into marriage. Otherwise, why would we do it?! We may as well just enjoy our own soft lives and remain single, happily watching Afro-Korean dramas all day! To be clear I do not do that. At least, not quite all day, not any longer!!!

To go back to that Pastor, please know that where I am now, if I was a wife, I would never accept that from a husband. There is no way I would allow that half-baked quarter-baked tenth-baked and frankly ludicrous dream of running a non-self-sustaining church to be wholly dependent on my salary. I am not saying that running a church is inherently ludicrous. But when you literally have nothing, no salary, no savings, no nothing, and yet you’re looking at me, and you are saying “God said”, I would tell you to go back to God. It is not my problem. As a church member it was not my problem, and as a wife it would not be my problem either. So then, having to support this church, single-handedly, essentially, became her responsibility too. And they did have a child. To be fair, I think the Pastor was doing a lot of childcare.
This is the kind of thing that needs to be clearly discussed before marriage. And this is the kind of thing that the wife clearly needs to agree to. If being a Pastor is a calling, then in candour being a Pastor’s wife is if anything even more of a calling because of all the quiet supportive work that she would usually do behind the scenes, and all the more so if she is the one financially bankrolling the whole enterprise. And if the Pastor receives his (or her!) calling to ministry during the marriage, then the spouse needs to have the power of veto, or to otherwise be able to walk away without blame. Otherwise in this particular case, the wife may have been looking forward to a life of financial comfort and stability, only to find herself supporting a struggling husband and ministry. That said, even if a spouse agrees to it before marriage, I think that they should still have the right to change their mind after marriage, once they actually realise how hard it is.

After leaving the church, I did my best to cut off contact with this Pastor. But then he inexplicably became more committed to a fellowship to which I too am strongly committed. Which is why I am now unavoidably in regular contact with him. And in this ministry they talk about people’s spouses and children all the time. While they have mentioned his child, they have not mentioned his wife in years (ie since I myself reconnected with the fellowship).

Now mind you, this man could have married a woman from the same professional career as he was, with the same earning potential as his. This way she could have comfortably carried everything financially, even when he felt “called” to the ministry. But he deliberately married someone with a lower earning potential so that he would feel more powerful in the marriage. I don’t think he explicitly articulated this but all the same it was so clear to me. So in the event his wife’s salary was not enough to comfortably carry everything without her stretching herself. Now this wife that he married may not have had his dazzling intellect. All the same she she had her head firmly on her shoulders. Furthermore, the fact that she was the one actually earning obviously gave her considerable power in their marriage. During the year I attended their church I watched her play him from start to finish. Honestly, it would not surprise me if, after a few years, she got fed up, and spoke to her tired legs and took herself out of that situation.

Here is another, perhaps surprising aspect to what I observed about their marriage. (That is another thing about being a Pastor’s family, especially in such a small church. Your marriage is front and centre for everyone to observe and draw conclusions about, possibly wrong conclusions…) This Pastor treated his wife like a queen, at least in public. He was always speaking highly about her, publicly honouring her. I have no doubt that part of the reason for that was that she was the one earning the money, and he needed to keep her happy. Truth be told, from his behaviour towards me and other women, he clearly did not respect women in general very highly. Actually, it was not just women. And because of his behaviour, he routinely drove away people who could have helped the church. For instance, there was this one lady who visited the church and played a particular instrument. I got talking to her, asked her whether she was a Christian. She said that she wasn’t. Well guess what, that Pastor took me up on that, and accused me of driving her away simply because I asked her whether or not she was a Christian. Apparently that was the most insensitive and stupid question to ask anyone who attends a church, ever! Well later, I came across her again, and she told me that the real reason she had not come back was because he had aggressively hounded her about her faith. So it turns out that he was unquestionably the one who had truly driven her away. Comparing his actions to my own, there is no way anyone could reasonably have thought that my own question of friendly curiosity could actually have been responsible for keeping someone away, compared to his own behaviour. So he must have known that he was lying even as he was leveling the accusations at me.
And believe me, there were other times that he lied. And this was a man who was supposed to be a Pastor and by implication walking in strong Christ-like character.
So by his actions he drove away both her and me – and believe me, there were others. If some of those people stayed, might we not have been able to work together to promote the church until it became more stable? So even though he treated his wife as a queen, he still created the circumstances in which the church remained small and therefore she needed to keep working excessively to support it, that is, the circumstances which kept making life difficult for her.

So this is one reason why you should evaluate potential spouses beyond the way that they treat you personally. You need to also watch the way they treat other people, whether they routinely offer kindness, respect and understanding to others around them. Otherwise, the way that they treat others still has the way to affect your life and burn you, even if they unfailingly treat you with undeniable respect throughout the marriage.

Actually, I have since remembered something else: it may not, actually be true that his wife has left. When I first met him and considered joining the church, I did not know whether or not he was married. He never mentioned his wife. On reflection, I am now thinking that that may have been deliberate, a ruse to encourage female volunteers to help out with the church. And sure enough, many of the people who attended and helped out the church were female. Note how both I and the eventual webdesigner were female. And yet, despite that, it apparently never occurred to him to learn how to treat these women with respect. So as quickly as they came in they would leave. So it might be the same now in the small online fellowship that I attend, that he is still (deliberately) hiding the fact of his marriage.

Finally, to go back to his wife: would she not have been justified in thinking before marriage that she had won an incredible catch?
A brilliant, highly educated man, qualified in a globally prestigious and well-paid profession, a good Christian and (at the point of marriage) a quasi-Pastor who knew the Bible inside out, a strong man of prayer, who (possibly) promised her a life in the UK? (I do not know the details of how they came to live in the UK, for all I know they might have met here.) And yet, with all that, think of the experiences that she eventually had in marriage. This is why I encourage people, especially women, not to trust things like seeming Christian strength or commitment. You need to understand how poor character or lack of good judgement can still so easily be lurking in wait behind a seemingly “perfect” exterior. If I, or someone else, had encouraged her to be “very careful” before saying yes to hm, might she not have thought that I was a hater, or openly accused me of that? Might she not have suspected me of trying to prevent her happiness “just because no-one wants to marry you, Tosin!” Make no mistake that men have been interested in me. I have been as careful with these men as I encourage others to be careful so honestly, that is why it never got as far as engagement, because I did not allow it to. Please believe me that there are very, very few men with truly outstanding character in the church or outside it, even though the Bible is right there, easily available to each one of us (in the West).
So ladies, please take the time to peer behind these things to have a long, critical look at the man himself. Look to see his character and despite what else you know or assume about him, insist on outstanding! Does he lie casually? Does he deliberately manipulate appearances or act deceptively to get what he wants? Does he walk in rigorous down-to-earth common-sense? Does he treat everyone around him with care, respect and courtesy? I am just remembering how I shouted at people, and about people, and critically evaluate people on my blog. I think that I am completely justified. However, who knows, others might see this as a bright red burning flag. Perhaps this might mean that I am a red flag to some potential husbands, but not to others. You’ve got to learn to respect your own red flags, that is, the red flags that you identify in someone else’s behaviour.

To go back to the Pastor, if a woman sees a whole list of seemingly positive attributes in a man, then for that reason it might be easy to discount the negative attributes and think that they are more than “balanced out” by the positives. But you need to weigh out the character by itself and decide whether or not that balances before introducing considerations like his career etc.

A final point I want to make about this man: I have explained above how he blamed me for a certain woman leaving the church. Now, he apparently needed someone to blame for the lack of growth of the church, and he had apparently decided that I was the one he was going to to blame. So alongside this particular woman he also blamed me regarding two other people. Out of those three accusations, one had a little merit, not nearly as much as he claimed. And I was stupendously committed at this church, as I used to be in churches before I had to teach myself to tone it down and eventually left churches altogether.

So I thought to myself (among other negative considerations) “If indeed I am the one driving people away from your church, I know, I’ll just leave, and take my “driving-people-away” behaviour with me, and I am sure that in no time your church will be filled with all those people whom I would otherwise have driven away!” (I did not actually say this out.) As I say, there were other negative considerations regarding this church which altogether drove me to decide to leave the church.

And then, despite the fact that I had apparently been “driving people away”, this Pastor spent at least a full year trying to get me back.
I’ll finally finish with what I have spontaneously decided to call the “Can you hear me?” incident.

So I had left the church, and I systematically ignored calls from this Pastor and his mentor Pastor (who, by the way, had cheated me in a webdesign contract – but that is another story). I did not know how to block calls back then – seriously!
And this Pastor had taken to calling me from unknown numbers showing both his integrity and how deeply he respected my wishes not to speak to him. I had taken to avoiding these unknown numbers but on this particular day I was apparently caught off guard. This call came a full year after I had left.

So I picked up the phone from this unknown number. It was not even fully unknown, I vague recognised it as one of his extra numbers that he had previously tried to get me on.
So I picked up the phone and answered. “Hello, who is this?”
And as soon as he answered, I recognised his voice.
“Can you hear me?”
“Who is this?”
“Can you hear me?”
“Who is this?” (I may have said “Yes, I can hear you.” or something else. What I clearly remember is that instead of answering my question he asked “Can you hear me?” at least twice.)
“This is Pastor …”

At which point I abruptly ended the call. In a way, it is such a shame that mobile phones only give us a chance to “end” calls. How satisfying it would have been to have been able to slam down the phone.

And so it is now approx 12 years after I left that church. And I am sure that by now the church will have grown a little (surely) but I am quite sure that it is still very small. And I bet that from then to now he still has not learned to put the blame where it belongs – squarely on his own shoulders. And this is far from the only church I went to where I gave a thousand percent, then the Pastor and his silly ego and/or sense of entitlement/or lack of good judgement drove me away, and then subsequently spent years trying to get me back. The end of October will mark 9 years since I left another church, this time much bigger, and despite the fact that they were much bigger than that other church, this time with hundreds of members, such was my commitment, even compared to the hundreds of other members, apparently, that they still spent years trying to get me back.

I will never understand why Pastors in particular themselves fail to understand that the words of Jesus and the character commands in the Bible are not just platitudes to nod along to. You are actually supposed to live them! You are actually supposed to routinely, systematically deal with your own heart. I don’t understand how these people feel free or justified to stand in front of a church and then teach these things that they themselves are not living by. What should qualify someone as a Pastor is that they have a deep and sincere commitment to living the words of Jesus, that you are actually doing it, not just that they mentally understand or want to be seen as “the boss”!

Now this was not a romantic situation (although there were a few dodgy elements regarding this – yes, despite the fact that this man was married. There was an incident after I had left the first church when we were back in that small fellowship I have mentioned above where he was publicly stroking my arms – can you actually imagine?! I almost threw up. He seemed to grow a lot more committed to that fellowship when he apparently realised that I was going there regularly. Furthermore, despite the fact that this man was constantly surrounded by female volunteers he did not seem to have any policy against being along with women, even after I explained to him my own policy against being alone with men and diplomatically suggested that he might take up such a policy himself. That sounded to me like an adultery incident or a sexual accusation waiting to happen.Not only do you as a Pastor need to have such a policy, but you need to strictly abide by it and talk about it endlessly, so that everyone knows, so that no-one thinks that they can try to invent any silly lies about you. These days, to be fair, you need to have careful policies about being alone with anyone). However it was still so instructive to me about men and their character. These and other church nightmares are why I feel so qualified to speak on the subject of relationships. You don’t need to date men to still have experience in how they act and what they are capable of doing, how entitled and full of self-important, inflated ego they often are and how that might translate to a relationship or marriage.