Re: Struthers Memorial Independent Pentecostal Church
Date: February 07, 2025 06:32AM
My Struthers Experience [from Liz Duff]
Sorry this is so long but I’ve been reading all these posts for the past few weeks.
I was proud of my husband for using his own name here and have enjoyed seeing some others now reveal their identities. I understand why most don’t.
My experience of Struthers was of finding a deep spiritual experience there. That, I can never deny. That and the incredible singing that I have never found anywhere else.
But it was my belief that this could only be achieved by living a very extreme lifestyle with some decidedly odd behaviours. So that is what we did through all the best years of our lives. This cost me dearly in my professional life, in which God clearly placed me, not to mention my relationship with my sisters.
In later years, my husband mentioned to one of the Radical Alternative group that he wondered why they were marrying when our generation generally hadn’t. She said perfectly seriously, ‘it’s because we are more spiritual than you all were’ !!!
If a woman was beautiful, in our day, she was encouraged to read Madam Guyon, who lost her beauty to small pox. If a man was able, he most definitely was not spiritual. A man, anyway, was not as spiritual as a woman. Such were the teachings.
Make-up of course was banned, so for 10 years I didn’t wear the very small amount I’d until joining worn. Looking nice was frowned upon so that even my very unfashionable and unmaterialistic mother told me she was ashamed of how I looked when I stood up to give testimony one night. She made me throw the dowdy clothes I’d worn into the bin.
"Death to self" was the phrase we lived by. One example of my own: our choir leader asked me to sing solo (to lead the choir into the song) one Saturday night. I’d had a panic assault doing it the previous week at camp so he said I’d best go right back on to overcome that fear. We stood up to sing, opened our folders to the page and were told we’d be singing something different that night. The church leader had obviously decided I shouldn’t do it. If only she’d told me, I’d have accepted it, rather than her revealing it thus -but to challenge that would have been seen as "pride", so I had to "die to self" and accept it, which of course I did. But throughout my career I vowed never to treat my staff this way.
That is how issues were handled. No explanation. To question showed a pride equivalent to the worst sin and had to be dealt with, sometimes by direct preaching from the platform.
All I did from graduating and starting my first job, for many years , was spend all my money on taking people to and from church. I had no savings whatsoever. I was stuck in the bleakness of bedsitland while my professional colleagues were becoming engaged, married, having babies and moving up the property ladder.
To have a relationship with someone necessitated a clandestine approach. Though Miss Taylor had blessed ours, I didn’t tell any of my friends at all until we were engaged! How bizarre!
People presumed my husband had taken me away from the church. This was far from the truth. He kept me in it!
Particularly, once I had two sons, I did not like how men were treated. I’d already observed two nephews, now grown men of responsibility and kind natures, banned or challenged so clumsily as teenagers.
Sadly, Mary did not understand young men, or men period.
They were present when Mr Black grossly preached through the Millennium bells, indicating he’d no intention of stopping. I heard all the fireworks and horns outside and wondered at the teenagers sitting so meekly there as well as how my sons and my unborn baby would/ should deal with this kind of nonsense.
Then there was Miss Black’s advice when I was considering moving a bit away from the church: "couldn’t your husband go part-time and you full-time so you could stay in the area?"He had just set out on an a well-prepared academic pathway (following years of wrong moves as he tried to put church attendance first, instead of e.g. pursuing his Phd) and was feeling the huge responsibility of supporting a wife and family. We already had three children under 4 at this point, and me a huge commute and a very demanding part-time job.
So why did I eventually leave?
Probably burnout but mostly to do with odd behaviours observed and thrown at me. Ironically it was Alison Speirs to whom I wrote, asking if I could be spared taking a particular meeting for a time (the Friday night prayer meeting which I took after a day of getting three kids to nurseries and school , full day of demanding job then huge commute, back home and back 16 miles to church). Her reply letter was so severe and serious, she wrote. "I don’t understand how, after all these years, we could have come to this pass". I looked at the letter and thought "Good, I won’t be back".
I shut the door -sadly on many people I loved & still do. I shut the door and walked out. I have never regretted it.
Having detailed all of that. I will say it is not my intention to criticise the current people who have been left to pick up the pieces in Struthers and are trying so hard. I wish them God‘s blessing in it.