Not really my experience in sprit filled Advent Christian churches but I have seen this in Baptist and other local denominations.

Somehow I missed a lot of this expericence. Most of our outings circled around family activities.

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Of late I have come to realize how ’scared’ I have been from presentations like ones mentioned. For example, KISS, Knights in Satan’s Service, it was only till I saw old Gene Simmons in his television that I could take a real person and not some figurative dark rock star with satanic innuendos. This goes back to the seventies by the way.

Yes, music should glorify God. But rockers are people too! Just recently I have got to know a young man who is into death metal, like Cannibal Corpse and Deiocide.

Kissing, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes so-and-so pushing the baby carriage.

I was scared of opposite sex relationships. Yes, I avoided fornication but didn’t have many wholesome opposite sex relationships. I found it difficult to relate to girls. I’m not complaining. Let’s walk in faith instead of fear though.

You know, the Backwards Masking revelation ministry (part of the Satanic Panic) began about 40 miles from where I’m sitting right now? Pastor Gary of Eagle’s Nest Fellowhip, Long Beach, CA, mid-Eighties.

Followed by a brief exercise and jumping called ‘rapture practice’ (I kid you not)

I have heard of the phenomenon elsewhere.

In later years, this was also followed by a very quick one hour session of the famous book Turmoil In The Toybox…

Definitely the mid-Eighties.

I’d been active in SF fandom and playing D&D for about ten years by then, and got into one major knock-down drag-out at a Pro-Life rally when I told the RTCs at this one booth that the D&D Expose book they were hawking (The Fantasy Trip, a Turmoil in the Toybox knockoff) was total BS.

…followed by excerpts from The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke.

Who Cornerstone exposed as a total fraud sometime in the mid-Nineties, but by then the damage had already been done.

Then the most intriguing thing of the night would always take place: The Altar Call

i.e. the Reason for the Whole Exercise.

Someone snickered and caught the attention of the youth revivalist and we then had to hear the story…

This story was always about a young teenage boy…who did not listen to the youth revivalist…left the service without getting saved and how hours after the service was over, this young teenage boy with a very bright future was discovered down the street “dead and into eternal torment” from where he lost control of his freshly waxed Camaro…and wrapped the Camaro around the big oak tree at ‘dead man’s curve’.

Wrecked his Camaro? I thought the more common story was Got Run Over By A Steamroller. (Though there is this one Jack Chick tract version of the story that shows a screaming car going over a cliff “into a Christless Grave”.)

I don’t expect a ‘reparation’ nor do I want one for the nights when I awoke to the lightning in the sky and wondered if I forgot to confess something and missed the rapture…

Thanks to the Gospel According to Hal Lindsay, I kept having that kind of flashback regularly from 1974 to 1988. It’s no way to live. (If you can call “100% of time keeping yourself uncontaminated to pass God’s Litmus Test and not be Left Behind” living.)

This is a long ramble. I think I’ll close with some Jerry Garcia/The Grateful Dead:

“What a loooong, strange trip it’s been…”

I remember those canisters that had all the old shipping label residue all over them and those cheezy movies. Those cheezy movies were reserved for “lock-ins’ and not youth rallies.