All the Different Christians I Have Been

There was a bit of controversy during the first half of my kindergarten year at Emmanuel Christian School. I don’t recall very clearly, but I seem to remember a teacher showing an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles during school (or perhaps it was after hours for the kids who were still waiting for their parents to pick them up).

Upon hearing about this, several parents—including my own mom—decided to withdraw their kids from Emmanuel. Shortly thereafter I was enrolled at Parsippany Christian School, where I would attend from the second half of my kindergarten year until graduating from high school in 2003. During my first year as a student at PCS, my mom began working as a financial bookkeeper for the school, and my family started attending the church that the school was affiliated with, Parsippany Baptist Church. And with our joining those ministries in Parsippany, my family found ourselves linked to the Independent Fundamentalist Baptists, a branch of Evangelical Christianity that prided itself on separation from not only the secular world and non-Protestant Christian groups, but also from other Evangelicals (known at the time as the “New Evangelicals”).

My family joined Parsippany Baptist right as a pretty dramatic church split was taking place. My memory about all of this is pretty fuzzy, and there aren’t many details online (as these cults aren’t exactly the most transparent about their histories, and I haven’t been in contact with anyone who was attending the church back in the late 1980s through the turn of the decade into the 1990s). Here’s what I’ve been able to piece together, but please take all of this with a grain of salt as this is being recounted 32 years later through the lens of a 6-year-old kid. Also, if I come across more information (or if someone reaches out to me with more details), I’ll update this blog post to more accurately retell this story.

When we first started attending Parsippany, the church was a part of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches (GARBC), a loose network of independent Baptist churches and part of the historical lineage of what’s known as the Regular Baptists, all of which are very conservative Evangelical sects. The Regular Baptists are known for being moderately Calvinistic and divide into three main groups: the Old Regular Baptists, the Sovereign Grace Association of Old Regular Baptist Churches of Jesus Christ (which consider themselves more conservative than the Old Regular Baptists), and the GARBC (who think of themselves as even more conservative than the SGAORBC). I’m sure these groups were probably a whole lot of fun to be around.

Controversy arose at Parsippany Baptist when then-Senior Pastor L. Duane Brown decided that the GARBC was becoming too liberal and that he was going to pull his congregation out of fellowship with the GARBC. This move resulted in a massive church split, and since all PCS faculty and staff members were required to be active members of PBC, nearly the entire school faculty resigned. The organizations of Parsippany Christian School and Parsippany Baptist Church looked completely different in 1991 than they did just one year prior.

I was turning 6 years old in 1990, and I began the 1st grade at PCS in the fall of 1991. My primary school years are filled with mostly positive memories, but I do recall that my self-loathing began around this time. A combination of incidents that took place before I turned 10 set the stage for how I would see myself for nearly the rest of my life.

The first was on the school playground. I was one of three kids of East Asian heritage in my class. A few boys used to pull their eyelids back as a way to pretend to look like us. Occasionally they would ask if it was hard to see through such small eyes.

The second was at a gathering at a church family’s house. A handful of kids were there, and we were playing in the yard. One of the kids remarked that I had a flat face, and proceeded to turn that into my new nickname. He convinced the other kids to call me that as well, and for the rest of the day, my new name was “Flat Face.”

The third was during snack time in class. I think I might have been in either 1st or 2nd grade. My family had been shopping at the nearby Japanese store called Yaohan (now called Mitsuwa), and I had gotten a bag of roasted seaweed to bring with me for snack time at school. The day I brought it into class and took it out during snack time to eat it, I was immediately accosted with all sorts of strong reactions from my classmates, which ranged from fascinated and curious about trying some for themselves to completely disgusted and excitedly shouting out, “Ewww!” All of my classmates were so distracted by my snack that the teacher told me I was not permitted to bring those kinds of snacks again.

These incidents, along with others throughout the many years I spent in that world, instilled in me a strong desire to be White, to fit in with the majority racial group of the world I was being raised in, and to see my racial identity as somehow deficient or sinful.

I had no teachers of color. My pastors and leaders were all White. From the time my family left Bible Church International all the way through my university graduation and even during my years working in full-time ministry, every single person of influence or authority in my life outside my parents was a cisgender, heterosexual White person.

The world of Independent Baptists is an extremely White world, and as I’ll point out in a later post, they have doctrines designed to reinforce and justify their racism.

But I was just an elementary school kid. What could I have possibly needed to know about such doctrines?