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Religiosity
Good Morning, Everyone! With a title like “Religiosity,” you know I’m headed into some touchy territory. That’s OK, though. It’s good for us once in awhile to get jolted out of our routines. If I offend anyone in the process, consider yourself blessed.
All right. With that intro over with, it’s time to grab the coffee pot. Better pour yourself one of those 16-ouncers for today. You just might need it. In fact, better add a couple shots of Expresso.
Ready?
Anybody who knows me or who has read the articles and books I’ve written during the past 15 or 20 years knows that my growing up was anything but “normal.” Of course, “normal” is subjective. Nevertheless, when you grow up as the oldest son of missionary parents, live in Eskimo villages or remote communities for most of your growing-up years, get most of your education through correspondence, and go to college without ever having graduated from a conventional high school – and finally burst out onto society – you are most likely going to be an odd duck when measured by society’s standards.
There really wasn’t anything conventional about my growing up years. It might as well have been a hundred and fifty years ago. When we moved to Nome, Alaska in 1944, we lived in a tar-paper prospector’s shack while Dad was building the church and attached parsonage. We got our drinking water out of nearby lakes for a long time until Dad finally put together a water tank that would hold a couple hundred gallons of water, and plumbed the house for running water with a self-contained pump. We never had a flush toilet. Our toilets were “honey buckets” that you emptied every few days into a fifty-gallon drum. That drum – when filled – would then get hauled away to some dump site.
It was even worse when we moved to Barrow in the mid-1950’s. For a long time, my brother and I took our dog team (yeah, we raised dogs) and dog sled out on the ocean to find fresh water ice, or traveled to nearby lakes in the fall where we would use a logging saw to cut blocks of ice generally weighing a couple hundred pounds each and haul them back to town. They would get stacked until we figured we had enough ice to last until spring. The pile of ice blocks would be covered with a tarp, and when we needed water, we hauled those blocks of ice into the house and chipped them into a fifty-gallon drum with a faucet attached at the bottom. The ice would melt by the room temperature, and that was our water for drinking, doing dishes and laundry, and taking baths.
Baths were another thing. It really was the Wild West. When my brother and I were kids, Mom would melt ice in a big tea kettle on the Coleman camp stove (and later on our propane stove), and put it into a large wash tub. We took turns as a family using the water to bathe, and adding water as needed. We took our baths once a week whether we needed them or not. (HoHoHoHoHoHo……)
We eventually went modern toward 1960 when Dad built another tank, and we put in our own plumbing. Howard (my brother) and I helped him make a form using plywood, and we poured concrete to make a bath tub. It sure took a lot of coats of enamel to make it smooth enough so’s you wouldn’t get scratched if you moved too much in the tub.
Electricity was non-existent for a long time until we went with Dad on a trip to North Dakota to an uncle’s farm. He had an old 32-volt Wincharger wind generator on a 100-foot tower that we dismantled and crated up. We hauled it on top of an extended Jeep to Seattle where it was put on a freighter and shipped north to Barrow. We reassembled it there and hooked it up to a fistful of batteries. When the wind blew, we had electricity. Dad purchased an adaptor that converted the 32 volt DC power to 110 volt AC, but that was only for the radio or the record player. Our lights were all on 32 volts. The batteries were enough to carry us through three or four days without wind, but when we went through a week or more of quiet days, it was back to the Coleman lanterns for light.
When we moved to Wainwright, and then Point Hope, to build churches and parsonages, the cycle was partially repeated except that we were able to get some diesel generators to provide electricity for a few hours a day. They were pretty expensive to run, though, because diesel had to be either flown in, or brought in once a year when the ocean ice opened up long enough for a freighter to get in. That meant we had to really be careful with our usage.
In the early days, there were no stores like Safeway or Albertson’s where you could go and shop for groceries. That meant that once a year, Dad and Mom sat down and planned their meals for a year in advance, calculated a little extra for the occasional guests and spoilage, and then placed an order with a supply house in Seattle. The food supplies – always canned and dried goods – would be delivered to docks in Seattle and await shipment on the once-a-year ship, the North Star, that made its way up the coast of Alaska to deliver food, building supplies, hardware, and anything else one might need in the remote communities.
Roads were non-existent in those days. Tracks would be a better description. We had an old Dodge 4X4 Weapons Carrier converted into a Hummer look-alike when we lived in Nome, and there were a few miles of roads there because of the World War II Army Air Force installation. When we got to Barrow, however, there were maybe a half-dozen people in town who owned jeeps or military track vehicles. Virtually everyone used dog teams as a primary mode of transportation, and with the tundra terrain, you wouldn’t have wanted to try anything else. It was years before we actually had navigable roads and someone actually brought a real automobile to town.
In Nome, we heated with diesel oil or some variant. In Barrow, we heated with coal. Howard and I had the periodic task of shoveling 42 tons of coal into a coal bin we helped Dad build. The 42 tons was what the coal sled would carry. Ed Burnell operated a coal mine at the Meade River (now the town of Atqasuk) about 65 miles away, and pulled a cat train using D-8 Caterpillars (or anything else he could get his hands on) into Barrow, selling it to the townspeople for heating.
Until I built the first radio station in each of Barrow, Wainwright and Point Hope, the only radio available was Armed Forces Radio; HCJB in Quito, Ecuador; Radio Moscow; the BBC or Radio Free Europe – all by shortwave radio. My first radio stations were hilarious. Operating with about 13 watts of power on the AM band (and maybe a total ERP of 50 watts), I regaled the communities with my wonderful (?) radio skills as an announcer, played records and tapes, and used the news from AFRS to broadcast far enough that hopefully the signal reached the edge of town.
You couldn’t get FCC licenses in those days for stations like that, so I invented call letters: KBRW for Barrow, KWRT for Wainwright, and KPHO for Point Hope. What is even funnier is that KBRW is on the air in Barrow today, operating as an FCC-licensed station with an output of 1,000 watts as a public broadcast station.
When I learned that my signal from KPHO was reaching Cape Lisburne, more than 40 miles away, and a bush pilot reported hearing me 140 miles away (in those days, I was tinkering with antenna technology, trying to develop an antenna that would take the 10 or 20 watts I was putting into it and really crank it up), I shut things down for fear I would be reported to the FCC. In much later years, when I had a good relationship with the FCC office in Anchorage and was serving as Chief Engineer for the FOX television station, they laughed at my adventures and said they would never have interfered with it had they known, or taken any adverse action because of the paucity of available programming in those remote areas.
Well, now that I’ve taken two and a half pages to give you a picture of my adventurous childhood, let me try to use the rest of the time to explain the title and theme of this piece.
Growing up like that, you don’t have time for fantasy. You spend more than 75% of your waking hours in efforts to just stay alive in the arctic. Your relationships with people are either real or nonexistent. For our family, being in the ministry was no different. We didn’t have time for pretend religion. Either the Gospel of Jesus Christ brought change to people’s lives for the better, or we were phoney.
Folks lived on the edge 24 hours a day. There was no room for very many mistakes. Many decisions were life or death decisions. When you have a mean temperature of perhaps 20 or 25 degrees below zero spanning five or six months at a stretch, with extremes near 50 below on an annual basis, life takes on a different perspective.
So does the Gospel. What you preach better be real, and it better produce results.
In 1957, we saw a display of the Holy Spirit being outpoured on Barrow that rivaled anything you will read about in the book of Acts. There was such power and authority on display that people began to travel to Barrow from villages and winter camps from all across the arctic slope stretching into the Northwest Territories in Canada. They traveled by dog team. They flew in bush planes. A couple of people even walked the 94 miles from Wainwright in winter. They got there however they could.
What they saw were people who had been lifetime mockers and scoffers at the Gospel receiving salvation, being baptized in the Holy Spirit and speaking in languages they’d never heard or learned. They saw healings taking place and people being delivered from a lifetime of bondage to witchcraft, shamanism and other demonic activity.
The excitement over what was taking place was so great that there wasn’t even standing room in the church. People were so anxious to see what was happening that they lined up 50-gallon oil drums outside the church, put 2x12 planks on top the drums and stood on them so they could see through the windows. For several weeks in succession, people reported seeing a shaft of light in the sky that rested on the top of the church building.
The outpouring of the Holy Spirit that took place changed lives from Greenland to Canada to northern Alaska to Siberia. It resulted in missionaries taking up residence and continuing the work of the Lord in communities that had never before had preachers.
And yet, history has a way of repeating itself.
Just as it happened during the first century following the day of Pentecost, thirty years later, people were still focused on 1957 and the outpouring that took place then, instead of realizing that the Holy Spirit never stands still. They got stuck in a rut. They became religious.
History tells us (and it certainly is clear in reading the epistles that Paul wrote) that the body of Christ was infiltrated with ex(?)-Pharisees and ex(?)-Sadducees who – theoretically, at least – acknowledged that Jesus Christ was the long-awaited Messiah, and they became professing Christians. The problem was that they didn’t let go of many of their religious traditions, including the trappings of their sects.
Gradually, many of the Ekklesias (the New Testament uses the word, “church,” but an ekklesia was a far cry from what we know today as a church) began to adopt traditions, and those traditions began to supplant the reality of the relationship (or at least portions of it) many had enjoyed with Jesus Christ. Callings became offices. With the offices came titles. With the titles came man-made authority. With the man-made authority came more traditions, rules, regulations, commandments and practices that were the polar opposite of what Jesus Christ has commanded of His disciples.
In essence, folks began becoming religious instead of “relational.” They began clinging to traditions instead of the living Word Himself, Jesus Christ.
Barrow was just like that. When I returned to Barrow for the third time in the late 1970’s to establish operations for the Christian Broadcasting Network, many of the folks who had seen and/or been a part of the outpouring in the late 1950’s had become “traditional.” Instead of moving on, they had tried to “can” everything the Lord had done 25 years before. Following my parents’ departure from Barrow, with the exception of one pastor – Paul Bills – who had continued the move of God, the church had gone through one pastor after another, shuttling them through like dominoes.
Pastors lasted no time at all. If they didn’t meet the measurement or yardstick some of the church leaders set for them, they were quickly ousted, sometimes having false accusations made against them. The problem was that some of those pastors had been called and sent by the Lord, and they had something to say the church needed to hear. Those die-hard church folks didn’t want to hear anything that differed from their set criteria and traditions.
When I came to Barrow and began to establish a different church fellowship than that my father had built, all of a sudden I was a heretic. I had “departed from the faith.” I became public enemy number one. Many of the folks who had seen and participated in the marvelous experiences of the 50’s with my parents now rose up against me en masse. It didn’t matter that I was preaching and teaching the same things my father had preached – and seeking to lead folks beyond their present spiritual state to greater intimacy with the Lord Jesus Christ. I had left the church denomination of my father. That was heresy!
It didn’t take long for opposition and persecution to arise. Some of the same folks who had been my friends twenty five years before now became my worst enemies. I began to receive unsigned hate mail. I posted one of the more humorous pieces (if you can call it that) on our bulletin board for awhile. It read, “Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Go straight to Hell!”
My oldest children began being attacked by hooded and masked men in the darkness. They started coming home with bloody noses, bruises on their bodies from being bodily picked up and thrown against the side of houses or vehicles, and sometimes pretty deep cuts on their legs or arms. My oldest daughter, Debbie, was shot at six times.
Then the death threats began toward me and my wife. The telephone would ring, and a muffled voice on the other end would say, “The next time you step out the door, you’re going to get a bullet through the face.” They did try to follow through on those threats at least twice.
One day, driving down the street in a church van, someone took a shot at me with a rifle. The bullet punctured the van just inches behind where I was sitting. A few weeks later, while standing in a construction shack on the property where we were preparing to build a new church, I was talking to one of the elders in our fellowship, a fellow by the name of Wilbur Livesay. We suddenly drew back from each other without realizing what was happening (the Lord deliberately caused us to move apart) and the window we were standing next to exploded with glass flying between us as a bullet pierced it. I saw a man standing on the roadway perhaps 500 feet away with a rifle and took off running towards him. It obviously was the last thing he expected. He panicked, jumped in a nearby vehicle and roared off.
Not long thereafter, I received a phone call from a man whose voice I recognized. He was trying to camouflage his voice, but I knew who he was. He was an elder and leader in the church my father had built. “We’re going to drive you out of Barrow,” he said. “We’re going to prevent you from preaching your heresy in this town.”
I laughed at him and said, “Charlie, you’ve got another think coming if you believe you can stand against the word and the work of God.” Obviously frightened that I had recognized him, he slammed the phone down. It was the end of the physical threats on my life and the attacks against my family, but the attacks continued in a more subtle way.
CBN-Alaska, Inc. was funded, not by the network in Virginia Beach, Virginia, but by the profits from a retail business I had built in Barrow: Arctic Slope Audio; and from the profits earned from a commercial two-way radio business, North Slope Communications. We also derived our family’s income from those businesses.
Over the course of six months or so in late 1980 and early 1981, the retail business was broken into and robbed to the bare walls not less than six times. No insurance company would cover us in Barrow, so the losses came directly out of our pocketbooks. The two men whom I had hired to run North Slope Communications for me absconded with a couple of checks for payment of services, fled to Anchorage, opened up a bank account in the name of my business, cashed the checks and disappeared. The cash loss exceeded $140,000.
In less than a year we were bankrupt, unable to pay our debts because of the loss of the cash and the merchandise. Ultimately, we moved our operations from Barrow to Fairbanks. The religious folks didn’t win, however. The Lord held them responsible, and within a relatively short time thereafter, those who had organized and inspired the opposition were either driven from Barrow in disgrace, or lost their lives in tragic accidents.
It was a perfect picture of religiosity taken to its ends. I’ve learned a lot of lessons through those experiences. We saw what happens when people try to can what God does in one era and preserve it. They desperately want to cling to the past instead of moving on to a future in God that transcends one’s wildest imaginations. It defines religion and the religiosity that develops in folks as a result. Religion excuses all kinds of extremes and trades for mental and emotional rationalizing in the place of true relationship. It trades reality and results for the comfort of traditions, doctrines, and the fear of change.
May the Lord deliver us all from religion, and keep us in a genuine relationship with Him.
Well, there you are, folks! Told you that you were going to need some Expresso! Have a wonderful day, and a blessed weekend. See you tomorrow.
--Regner
Regner A. Capener
EKKLESIA HOUSE
RR-15, Box 6180
Mission, TX 78574-9589
(956) 583-5355
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This article may be reprinted, reposted, copied and re-used – in whole or in part – with proper attribution.
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