Name: John Clark
Age: was 52
Occupation: former pastor, West Side Community Church
Last Seen: click here
Bee-otched For: being a crook
-Age: was 52
Occupation: former pastor, West Side Community Church
Last Seen: click here
Bee-otched For: being a crook
On Sunday, the world observed the 39th anniversary of the tragic passing of the great John Lennon.
He was a man whom a lot of people could agree with. His songs were messages of peace and unity.
However, one thing I don't totally agree with is that Instant Karma's gonna get you. Sometimes, it takes too damn long for that to happen.
Eight days before my 12th birthday, my mom left my dad. She eventually remarried, but my dad was in a low spot in his life. He was a bus driver and one day a few years later, there were some new kids on his run. They lived in a big house in the middle of the woods on a dirt road. The father was out to pick them up and dad ended up in a conversation with him. Turned out the family went to New Hope Community Church in Williamsburg, Michigan - just outside Traverse City - and they had a singles ministry.
Well, we started attending, and dad instantly met the couple that ran the singles ministry. And there was John Clark, who at the time ran the youth ministry at New Hope. We both agreed to attend both Sunday service and our respective ministries during the week, with me attending youth ministry on Wednesday nights.
In the beginning, New Hope was a nice experience for the two of us. In Dad's case, he even met a woman there and the two dated. The youth ministry wasn't bad, either. Since New Hope's sanctuary doubled as a gym, Wednesday nights were loaded with activities and games, usually ending with Pastor John giving out a teen-friendly sermon. All was well for a while. But after a few years, Dad and I started having problems in our respective ministries. The leaders of the singles ministry were very controlling. They told everybody not to remarry and one time, they were at a nightclub that had dancing and they told everybody to sit. Um, ever hear of that little Bible verse about having a "time to dance"? Also, my Dad's girlfriend cheated on him with her boss, and ended up pregnant with his kid.
Well, the youth ministry was no walk in the park, either. About a year after I started attending, they split it into two: middle and high school. The middle schoolers still got to smack each other with dodgeballs. But since I now was in high school, the fun 'n games came to an end. The high school crowd was now forced into small groups. All of us were assigned to a classroom - about 10 or so per group - with a leader. Mine was some old grey-haired boomer. I remembered all of us being handed a sheet of paper that was a questionnaire and it was a one to ten answer for each question. One of the questions was: "how often do you think about sex?" Talk about fucking embarrassing. I was afraid that the old guy was going to shame me for, well, being human. During this time, every fucking week, it was a guilt trip. The lesson was always that thinking about pussy for one second will lead you into a pit of fire in the end.
One summer, I skipped on a lot of youth ministry meetings. I came to church one Sunday and John tracked me down. He asked me why I wasn't coming every week, and he was stern about it. He told me that he wanted me there this Wednesday. Wow. This schmuck wasn't my Dad nor my boss. And yet, he was playing the game of being a control freak.
Not a long time afterward, my Dad's foot finally came down. You see, the lead pastor, David Standfest asked the congregation to give him $1.7 million ON ONE SUNDAY so they could expand the church. Almost immediately, two of the church's followers sold their businesses. One owned a chain of hardware stores and another owned a popular restaurant in Kalkaska. Since Dad was a part-time bus driver and Standfest was a well-to-do pastor who put his kids in expensive schools and drove an expensive SUV, we mutually decided to stop attending New Hope.
Dad and I tried several churches after New Hope. We went to a Baptist church whose pastor was a fellow bus driver. Sadly, his sermon was about how porn was "bad for you". We tried a church in Traverse City that was nice, but too far of a drive for Dad and I. Most of the other churches in our highly-rural area were for old farts and way too traditional. So, we stopped attending.
I did go to one more church before I graduated high school, and it was a shitty Pentecostal church in a tiny hick town. The only reason why I went there was because there was a girl I hung out with and her white trash family attended. And yes, they screamed and spoke in tongues. It was a huge reason why I stopped talking to her, and for good reason. For a long, long time, I refused to even walk into a church, simply because I did my research. I looked at the televangelists on TV who preached the prosperity gospel. They're the ones who live in giant mansions and fly around in $60 million jet planes while their viewers all live in houses that once had wheels on them. Working for a religious asshole who paid his workers - especially me - a pittance of a wage didn't help matters much, either. Because of my experience with him, New Hope and others, I simply didn't want anything to do with religion, especially in my spare time. I even tried going to a left-leaning church here in Grand Rapids, but being a relatively young, straight white male in a crowd of geezers, gays and even a few transgenders made it a hard fir for me. The reason why I left was because of a poor black man who attended who constantly tried to hit me up for money and rides. The final straw with him was when he begged me for $500 to fix his car that wasn't even worth $500. That, and the lack of young females who attended made me quit.
For you longtime readers, this is why I'm no fan of organized religion. It's all about money and not enough of it goes to feed the poor or help people in need. It goes to selfish shit that goes against Jesus's teachings. I know that nobody's perfect, and neither am I.
Since I left New Hope, a lot has happened. David Standfest retired, only to start another New Hope Church in Rockford, just north of Grand Rapids. Once again, he retired some time ago. I'm not sure what happened with the couple that ran Dad's singles ministry. But John Clark, however...
Not a very long time after I left New Hope, John started his own church near Traverse City's west side, appropriately named West Side Community Church. Like New Hope, it's in the middle of nowhere, but designed to attract those who live in rural Leelanau County as well. Everything was hunky-dory for about 17 years until just a few short months ago when church staff noticed that $500,000 was missing. In August, Clark resigned from West Side. On Monday, his body was discovered on his property in Benzie County with a single gunshot wound to the head. John Clark was 52 and left behind a wife, three sons and a daughter, plus two grandkids on the way.
You know, when somebody who does good in their lives, they're the Hero of the Day. On Friday, I gave it to former Grand Rapids radio personality Aris Hampers for warning people about the dangers of smoking. Monday, it was Caroll Spinney who made us all better people with his longtime portrayal of Big Bird. And on Tuesday, it went to Marie Fredrikkson of Roxette, who lost her heroic battle with cancer.
Jesus helped the poor. Jesus cured the sick. Jesus walked with prostitutes. Jesus shamed the wealthy. And yet, John Clark used his religious authority to make teens in the 1990s feel bad every time they watched an R-rated movie or took a peek at Playboy. Basically put, he treated people like me like chewed-up gum because of an abbreviated verse from the New International Version of the Bible, which itself is a retelling of the King James Version, which itself is loaded with poorly-translated bullshit designed to hurt woman, blacks and the LGBTQ+ crowd.
Look at Jimmy Carter. In an interview with Playboy in 1976, he admitted that he had lust in his heart. And yet, because of this, I think the so-called Moral Majority did everything they could to dethrone him as president in 1980 and did so successfully. After he left the White House, Jimmy taught Sunday School and built houses with Habitat With Humanity. Reagan pretty much fucked over the middle class, which is what the Jerry Falwells and Jim Bakkers wanted.
Now, it's not nice to bash the recently-passed, but John Clark was a crook, plain and simple. What he spent the 500k on is anybody's guess, but I'll tell you what: he had more money than I do. As somebody who lives paycheck to paycheck with not a whole lot left over, I sure as hell don't want to give it to a judgmental pastor who uses God to make more money than I do. And I sure as hell don't want to walk out of a church service feeling guilty because of the pastor reading from a poor translation of The Bible. If people want to bash me, fine. But then again, it was Jesus who mentioned that ye who is without sin may cast the first stone.
If man is five, then the devil is six. If the devil is six, then God is seven. But is that monkey gone to Heaven? Only the big man up there can judge.
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Bee-otch of the Day Archives can be seen on http://beeotchoftheday.blogspot.com
Bee-otch of the Day is a production of Chuck69.com, Grand Rapids' site for Stern, politics and more!
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Just realized John left his own stage in bloody disdain and saw your article, and thought to comment.
ReplyDeleteA commercial system that grows like a corporation has one major problem. New Hope and John's church used the modern corporate system, which is the love of money, to grow their numbers. Once the Supreme Court said that corporations have rights like a human, the hybrid theory of wealth was born. Treat the body like a person whose work is motivated by a love of money, which by definition is the root of all evel. The church system of old, which is still here, has a hard time holding self important people accountable. I too was at New Hope during that era and saw the mess due to one man insisting his theology was an unsinkable ship that everyone would like to cruise on. In Ephesians it states that Christ is the head, not a man with a board of millionaires. A man who strikes his own brow shows what the wage of sin costs us. Where was the accountability system and the brother who who knew he was making a sucking sound on the church's tit? I've had friends who knew Jesus that killed themselves and it was evident that it solves nothing. I pray his family has made their way through this tragedy. Time heals most wounds, but blood spilt in vein leaves a bitter stain on the living.