Skip to main content

Group Narcissism

I know that I haven’t posted for a while, and I assume nobody is really reading this, but I feel I should make this comment.

This past year or so has been a year of strong healing as I have discovered a LOT of things about myself. One of the very strong themes this year has been learning what happened to me—what people did to me. There’s a big list, but the one that fits the GFC history has to do with Collective Narcissism. This YouTube video explains things better than I can, but the point is essentially that a narcissistic system was working to destroy our “muchness” (to borrow a term from Johnny Depp’s Alice in Wonderland).

Thinking back, aside from the obvious markers such as the feeling that we alone on the entire planet had gotten Christianity right, one of my most vivid memories is that a largely invisible group of elders “sort of” ran everything and had opinions about all sorts of things in my life.

I say “sort of” because several other very shadowy entities had strong effects on my life. Hod Bolesky actually owned the houses where we lived, and we never talked with him, but he felt completely OK about walking into our house unannounced (and without knocking) to show it to a prospective buyer. Somehow we had to keep him happy. Steve Phillips had a strong opinion against modern music (probably something he got from Bill Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts training sessions—a very racist idea that strong bass in music was an African influence, therefore demonic), so our youth groups had to trim their sails to his wind. When I wanted to sell my van, Ray came to me with the announcement that “some people” thought I was asking too much for it. I never did learn who “some people” were, but they delivered opinions to me through Ray about a lot of things I did. They never had the guts to identify themselves.

It has taken years to finally turn my back on all that, especially on the internalized judgment that I was essentially a misfit who had something wrong with me. Doing much better now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A bit of background

What follows is a very personal history of Grace Fellowship Church in Mansfield, Ohio. It's not going to be chronological, and I expect others will pitch in their bits too. Two dangers face me/us in this project. One is that the product will look and sound something like a Hallmark greeting card, all sunny days and flowers in the meadow. The other extreme, of course, is that GFC will come out looking a lot like Jim Jones' terrible Jonestown experiment (which, ironically, was doing its thing at about the time my family first encountered GFC). Grace Fellowship is/was really neither, though the title of this blog does make the point that for many of us it was a church which one survived , not one in which we thrived. A few mechanical details This is, at the start anyhow, very much one person's memories, but the blog isn't private at the moment. Anyone who knows the URL can see it. I'm going to enable comments, but keep them moderated. There are a lot of other people...
Post a Comment
Read more

GFC History, volume 1

GFC went through several distinct phases, and I wasn't there for the first part, so it's possible I've missed (or fouled up) some of what follows. This is how I heard and remember it. My daughter Rebecca forwarded a link to this issue of Time magazine from 1971, which contains a great article on the beginning of the Jesus People (look on page 58). GFC fits very firmly into that history. To get the whole picture, though, we need to add in Francis Schaeffer , an American pastor who emigrated to Switzerland to start a residential study center to help the disaffected European intellectuals find the Christian faith. Mansfield industrialist Hod Bolesky, who made his money through Therm-O-Disc, visited Schaeffer's study center and decided we needed a similar center in Ohio. At L'Abri, Schaeffer's center, the plan was that the students would live on-site, work cooperatively to keep things going, and study—largely by listening to Schaeffer's lecture...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kingdom Kampers

The summer my family arrived at the Farm, Robin Rothaar and Debbie Ankney (now Debbie McKee) began their first session of Kingdom Kampers. Robin and Debbie were long-time friends who taught physically handicapped children in the Mansfield City Schools. Kids who must use wheelchairs or crutches don't get to go to ordinary summer camps, and the two women wanted to give them the camping experience. Inside their non-cooperating bodies, these are still kids. That's difficult for outsiders to see, especially if the affliction interferes with their ability to communicate (cerebral palsy, for example), but the aim was to give them a dose of good outdoor camping fun just like other kids could have. They played games, did arts and crafts projects, went swimming, and had water balloon fights. Of course, all this activity needs a lot of volunteers to help with such things as pushing wheelchairs, and that is how my family got involved. Almost as soon as we were unpacked from the move, my wi...
1 comment
Read more