As I worked through my fruitless search yesterday for someone like me, someone who has left the Reformed church but is still a Calvinist, I found a whole lot of ex-Calvinists. I noticed they all had one thing in common, they sounded just like all the ex-Evangelicals around here. Angry. Hateful. Bitter.
They are angry at their Calvinist pastors for supposedly misleading them. They are hateful to anyone who still embraces Calvinism. They are bitter for the "wasted" years they spent as Calvinists. I shuddered. It was like listening to all the "ex-Baptists" around here talk about their former lives as Evangelicals. They hate people like Chuck Smith so much they've run him into the ground in our area and have cut off any possible communication between Calvinists and their families in Calvary Chapel. Angry ex-Evangelicals are what truly pushed Calvin out of CC Bible College. The bitterness they espouse from the pulpit, from the radio, etc., became so noxious that it helped no one, but drove a wedge between parties.
They all look like each other. A warning, to me. of what I have the potential to become. Will I be a hater or will I realize that the people in these churches just simply are as deceived as I was? It's hard when you keep hearing your friends bag on Evangelicals as if they are all the same. I'm so tired of reading their FB statuses that are puffed up with pride, lacking any sort of care for their brothers and sisters in Christ whom they accuse of either being deluded or being deceivers. Or, sadly, inferring that because those people don't believe the same as we, they are not even saved.
God have mercy on us for what we have allowed ourselves to become.
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