View from the Back Pew

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Malone

1

Malone

2

Alanna

3

Malone

4

Alanna

5

Malone

6

Alanna

7

Malone

8

Alanna

9

Malone

10

Alanna

11

Malone

12

Alanna

13

Malone

14

Alanna

15

Malone

16

Alanna

17

Malone

Epilogue

Alanna

Malone

Honorable Mentions

About The Authors

Acknowledgements

Raquel’s

Is pleased and excited to be part of this new collaborative team and bringing you this title, the first in a new series! Sha is yet another gift sent to me, when I wasn’t looking, or expecting, to be blessed with a new writing partner. It’s not easy to mesh so easily with someone on ideas, points-of-view, passion, and drive, but it’s happened, again, and I’m joyfully looking forward to the future works Sha and I create for your reading pleasure. We flirted with this collaboration in late 2009, started to write it in January 2010, and finished it in January 2011…talk about working steadfastly in our destiny! Thanks, Sha, for helping me bring this story to life and giving it the zest of your voice!

To my family, friends (real and virtual), faithful fans and first-time readers, THANK YOU! Thank you for the support and the love, the emails and calls asking for more and giving great feedback. Thank you for embracing my gift and taking the time to submerse yourself in the pages of my imagination. To J.G. (I love you!) and T.F (hey, cousin!), I appreciate the way you spread the word, expanding my territory of reach, with each and every title.

Sha’s

I’d like to acknowledge God, first and foremost, my daughter and son, and my husband. I also want to spotlight my dad for being such a cool and inspirational father. I want to thank him for always giving me encouragement to stay on my path of completing my first book, this book and to keep pursuing my passion! Even when he was down, he knew he was destined for much greater and he taught me to believe the same about myself. It may sound corny, but he is the wind beneath my wings. And to my big little brother, thanks for being so cool and laid back. I love you, all!

I’d especially like to acknowledge myself for following my dreams…despite, and in spite of, the haters.

Prologue

MALONE

Most good Christian people believe a person can’t really be involved in church if they always sit in the back pew. Quite the contrary, I know all there is to know about a large portion of the multitude of members at The Shelter from the Storm Church in Christ.

The Shelter, as members affectionately called it, was situated right on the outskirts of a newly developed community inhabited by Buppies and Wannabes. It was formerly housed in the basement of the pastor’s brother’s furniture store. But, in due time, he’d amassed enough money to put down on a big loan to build the new, large, state-of-the-art sanctuary in its current location.

Every Sunday, without fail, I’d leave out of my house by nine a.m. to make the fifteen or so mile trek between my house and The Shelter. I had to arrive early enough before the ten o’clock service to secure my usual spot in the back pew of the spacious and ornately decorated sanctuary.

I missed very little from this vantage point and, Lord save us all, there are way more sanctified sinners in the world than the law should allow. The parishioners of our church were no different than common street-folk, but they sure cleaned up pretty and put on a good front for the average onlooker. All that glitters is not gold and all who shout Hallelujah are not saved.

Let me tell you how I even came to be a member of The Shelter. It was three years ago that I first stepped foot in the door and right next to me was my best friend, Alanna. She’d been invited by the charismatic pastor himself when she met him at a social networking function.

We were instantaneously taken with the glitz and the atmosphere of prosperity. We knew that big things were happening in this church and we knew we wanted to be a part of it.

It was the last Sunday of October, and every Sunday thereafter, we were up front and present during the energetic services as recurring visitors for the following two months. Alanna had been very vocal about her desire to be part of their stellar choir, but we knew mere visitors would not be allowed in. She’d have to become a member of the church.

So, on the night of the church’s New Year’s Eve Watch Night service, Alanna grabbed my hand when the preacher declared that the doors of the church were open for those who wanted to be saved. She was leading us up to give our lives to Christ.

I went along, not entirely sure of all that being saved stuff, but I knew that if Alanna was moved to the point of wanting to join; I trusted her opinion enough to know I wanted to join, too.

After we completed the mandatory orientation, Alanna signed up to become part of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Choir. She had grander plans to be a feature soloist in their mass choir, but she had to pay her dues and climb the ladder to such a high level through the auxiliary. I couldn’t sing a lick and only possessed one noteworthy skill and that was my power of acute observation. Otherwise, I was lost for what ministry I wanted to permanently involve myself in, so I dabbled a little here and there.

A year passed pretty swiftly and the church had grown in membership by leaps and bounds. The handsome, well-spoken pastor had a charm about him that was both calming and persuasive. It was easy to see why people clamored in to hear the word from his mouth.

In our second year of membership is when things started to go a little awry in Alanna’s and my friendship. I’d begun to suspect she was doing something she had no business doing, but without concrete proof and no leg to stand on in accusing her, I simply kept quiet.

It didn’t take long, six months to be exact, for me to discover that Alanna was having a secret affair with Pastor McKinney. It had only been going on for a few months, and for the longest time, against my own better judgment, I let Alanna convince me into believing it wasn’t sexual and was, instead, spiritual. She said he was offering her pastoral guidance and she was trying to become absorbed with a wifely spirit. She said he was helping her to become the kind of Godly woman a Godly man would want to make his wife.

Turns out the type of guidance he’d been offering her was led by his penis and the only person’s wife she was trying to become was Pastor McKinney’s.

Our friendship began to suffer after I confronted her about the affair. She tried to continue to lie about the two of them being intimately involved, but when I explained that I’d caught sight of her performing oral sex on him in the back seat of his Bentley one Wednesday evening before Bible Study, she knew the jig was up and she confessed.

She begged me not to say anything and said, with full assurance that she was telling the truth, that Pastor McKinney was planning to divorce the current Mrs. McKinney and marry her.

I told her it would be ignorant for her to even allow him to see her, explaining that if he would do such a thing with her behind his wife’s back, what made her so special that she thought he wouldn’t do the same things with another member behind her back. She wasn’t trying to hear that and she continued to secretly date our married pastor and have sex with him whenever his whims dictated.

The official end of our best-friendship happened the Sunday morning she missed church and called me emergently some time around the middle of the service to come to her house and take her to the hospital.

Panicked, I ran from the sanctuary and hit the highway to her house, making it there in record time. I found her doubled over on her sofa, surrounded by a bright crimson circle of fresh blood. Her jeans were wet with blood, her skin, ashen and pale. She was hemorrhaging…but I didn’t have even the foggiest idea why.

She would tell the paramedics that she’d had an abortion the evening before and I was left speechless with shock! An abortion? Hell, I hadn’t even known she was pregnant. And I thought I was observant. I didn’t have to guess who the father of the baby was, but I was curious to know just what kind of pastor condoned abortion?

It seems it’s the kind of pastor who has a doctor for a deacon, whose near-sole purpose in life is to perform back-room abortions on all of the preacher’s knocked-up-by-him mistresses. But that comes out of the closet later on in the story.

Alanna had been five weeks pregnant and had confronted the pastor one evening after service to tell him that he needed to hurry up and get his divorce because she was going to have their baby and she would not birth a bastard child for a man of God.

He told her, in no uncertain terms, he’d reconsidered his decision to divorce his wife and that she would not be birthing a baby at all. She needed to get an abortion as quickly as possible to save HERSELF from being scorned and seen as a Jezebel in the church.

She tried to stand her ground and reject his requirement that she terminate her pregnancy, but a week later, under the guise of attending a choir practice at the church, she’d really headed to some out-of-the-way clinic and had the life of her and Pastor McKinney’s unborn fetus sucked out of her body.

And while he stood at the helm of the church in the pulpit promising hellfire and damnation to the sea of sinners before him if they did not obey God’s word, his mistress lay near dying in her living room, and he wasn’t the least bit aware or concerned.

This, in and of itself, had not been enough to break our bond because I knew that even the strongest amongst us fall short of Grace at one point or another in our lives, but her actions, after she was discharged from the hospital, were the straw that broke the camel’s back and we haven’t been friends ever since.

I’d been the one to pick her up and when she got in the car and I drove away, she said with a deep breath, I’m just so blessed to have come away from that with not only my life but a still fully intact reproductive system.

I replied, Yeah, that is a blessing. You should show your thanks by leaving Pastor McKinney alone once and for all and you should shame the Devil by letting everyone know the truth about what type of character this man has.

She looked at me as if I’d just blasphemed the Lord himself. She got quiet and I said, You do know that he’ll just do this again to someone else?

He had one of his deacons to call up to the hospital for him to let me know he still loved me and still wanted to be with me. He said all I needed to do was be patient and he and I could get married.

I lost my religion and said, You have GOT to be fucking kidding me! You are not seriously putting stock into anything he has to say? What in the world would make you even want to be his wife?

And she said, I just know I’m supposed to live the life of a pastor’s wife. I’m supposed to be lavished and pampered like a First Lady and Pastor McKinney has promised me the life of my dreams. And I’m going to put it on him so much and so tough, he won’t have the time or energy to creep on me.

You’re out of your damn mind if you think ANY of that is going to come to pass. Plus, you’re even crazier if you think he won’t mess over you the first time he runs into another home-wrecking whore just like you.

Yes, that had been harsh wording, but we’d said uglier things to each other over the course of our one and a half decade friendship.

She grew visibly angry and our shouting match went back and forth the entire rest of the trip from the hospital to her apartment. She yelled things to me about how big of a hater I was and how I only wished I could find a man as good-looking, sexy, and wonderful as Wilson. I yelled things back to her about how easily it seems she’d forgotten that she’d almost died a couple days ago and how he was only placating her with a fresh batch of lies to keep her from telling the congregation about his actions.

When she got out the car, and slammed the door, it marked the end of our active friendship, but remarkably, not the end of my active membership at The Shelter.

Strangely, I still felt like I needed to stay to keep an eye on Alanna. I know she didn’t want my love or my help, but I cared about her and didn’t want her to suffer alone.

Up until five months ago, which was exactly how many months she was past her near-death experience, Pastor kept stringing her along with tales of matrimonial dissolution and she kept biting.

That is, of course, until another young, charismatic pastor in town came to guest-preach while McKinney and his wife went off on an all-expense-paid anniversary trip to Brazil. The new pastor was single and his mere existence seemed to spark in Alanna a clearer understanding to the fact there were more fish in the sea.

Waiting on Wilson to shit or get off the pot could take years and she didn’t have years to wait. Her desire propelled her to leave The Shelter and she had not returned since.

So, there I was, still a member of a church I truly no longer enjoyed and being pastored to by a man I had long ago stopped respecting. This left me with a whole lot of time on my hands and a healthy case of the inquisitives with which to observe the rest of the church’s behavior.

I ceased sitting near the front and took up residence in the very back pew. If all of the stuff that happened to Alanna unknowingly had occurred underneath the nose, and the radar, of all of the people who called The Shelter their home away from home, I got a funny suspicion a whole lot more was happening. And more people would know about if they just started to pay closer attention.

And, there, in the back pew of the church, that’s precisely what I started to do and this is some of the things I discovered about the goings on of The Shelter from the Storm Church of Christ.

1

MALONE

The typical Sunday at The Shelter, can easily be mistaken for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The gaudy and pretentious hat designs rival large, majestic floats and some of them even seem to take up the same amount of overhead space as one of the big cartoon balloons.

To the average onlooker, it’s merely a fashion statement, an accessory to the color-coordinated suit or something to make a woman feel regal on this day of King Celebration, but to the observant few, there is more than meets the eye.

Nine times out of ten, the hat is to a church woman what the colorful plumage is to a male peacock. It is a call for attention. It makes them more flamboyantly attractive to the opposite sex and they give the appearance of class (even when the wearer has absolutely none).

And this particular Sunday was no different. The front of the sanctuary was filled with a multitude of colorful head gear and as people settled into their seats, the mess was already brewing.

I’ve found in my time of being an observant interloper that the pastor’s sermon is usually a predecessor of something that is about to come. If his sermon is on being a cheerful giver, odds are, he is about to ask for an offering for something above and beyond the usual.

If he speaks on trust and having faith in the shepherd, he’s about to take a risk with either the church or the church’s funds.

If he speaks on lust, fornication and the horrible consequences of prostituting oneself out, (with or without any prostitution acts actually taking place), he’s probably been informed that a deacon or deaconess has recently been, or is currently in, some sort of lewd relationship.

And, if it is about forgiveness and the failure of man’s ability to abstain from the weakness of the flesh, and how a man of God is still simply a man, you can rest assured, one of his jump-offs is about to pull a coupe and will reveal, within the course of the next few Sunday services, his transgressions.

Pastor McKinney cleared his throat and began, Good Morning, Saints. I’m so blessed this morning to be able to come to you and deliver the message of the Lord. Today, we will focus a little on Ephesians 6:10-18. Please open up your Bibles to this passage and when you are ready say, ‘Amen.’

People flittered through the pages of their varying tomes of scripture. Some had the New International Version, the Amplified Bible, the old or the new King James Versions…but I knew he was reading from the Skeletons in My Closet version.

You see, I’d been watching over the past few weeks and I knew some chickens were about to come home to roost. But in his typical fashion, this scripture-based preemptive strike is done in hopes that when they get there, the flock will condemn the chicken for being a chicken, but will forgive the Chicken Hawk for tasting the flesh of its supple prey.

"Verse ten begins with, ‘Finally, be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.’ And saints, I’m telling you today that the devil is clever."

I knew that to be his way of saying that whatever comes to the light, the devil made him do it.

"God says, ‘…our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.’"

I knew that to mean that some evil trollop in the church had caused him to be tempted.

He continued, "’Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.’"

Here, he was asking us to understand that he’d done everything he could to fight the enemy, so he was able to put on his clothes, fasten his belt, and walk away knowing it was simply weakness for, and of, the flesh the devil had presented to him, that had led him astray. I fought with my own urge to burst out into loud, raucous laughter.

"Follow me now, believers; the word goes on to say, ‘In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.’"

What he was saying was, we needed to have faith that no matter what kind of accusations, or arrows in this example, were thrown at him, by this devil woman, he’s been delivered from his transgression through prayer. God had forgiven him and he hoped the congregation would pray for him, and to also pray for each other that they won’t be as weak to the Devil as he had been.

He said, "Let me close this reading out with these words, ‘Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given to me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.’"

Here, he was saying he wanted us to remember this sermon when the facts come to light and recognize that while he was a man of God, or an ambassador, he was merely a man who was as culpable to the ways of the world as anyone. He needed those within the range of his voice to recognize that his being stronger depended on their level of commitment to praying for him. All of this was his subtle way of confessing, while not really confessing.

A chorus of amens accompanied the visual sea of upraised hands and nodding heads.

For many people, this was a rote exercise…something they’ve heard him speak on many times, but folks felt like he may have been speaking to someone’s circumstance in the audience. But to me, I knew it was self-directed and a part of his way of enacting subliminal messaging onto his flock. It’s amazing what you can hear when you simply stop listening.

Yet, and still, even with all that being said, it came as a shock to everyone but me when two Sundays later, Janae Whitfield, a twenty-year old member, stood up in the middle of the ten-thirty service and claimed that Pastor McKinney had infected her with Syphilis.

The silence was almost eerie, then, a wave of gasps erupted across the sanctuary. While everyone cast judgmental eyes on the latest of their leader’s sexual concubines, I looked at the pastor. Barely visible to the uninformed, I saw the faintest of a smirk on his mouth. His head swayed subtly from side-to-side as if to say, Yeah, bitch, I already beat you to the punch.

She looked back at the faces casting damning looks at her and said, I already know you all think I’m lying, but God knows I’m not.

An anonymous and unseen voice yelled back, Girl, you don’t know the first thing about God!

Janae continued, I’m six months pregnant, even though I’m not showing all big.

Another voice spat, You’re a damn lie if you trying to say pastor is the father of your bastard child!

I never said he was the father. I was already pregnant and pastor began his affair with me when I sought him for counseling on how I was going to raise my baby now that his father was no longer in my life. I’d been infected for almost two months before I got diagnosed and I’ve been struggling with my responsibility to let this be publically known. His disease has put my baby’s health in danger. I just felt like it should be known to all the young women in this congregation because I know I am not alone. They should be checked and be treated.

Pastor sat on his throne surveying the faces of those he served. I saw the exchange between him and the church’s staff physician. Dr. Thomas smiled at him and gave a single nod.

Once being given this quiet assurance, and after feeling reasonably comfortable in his ability to escape from this situation relatively unscathed, he stood and moved to the pulpit.

He leaned forward into the microphone and said, Saints, be ye not fooled by the rantings of the unsaved. I assure you I am not infected with this worldly disease of the flesh. While this is an improper forum for the open discussion of such distasteful subject matter, I will use it as a time to remind you all that we must pray fervently for the lost amongst us. Try not to judge her because we can all fall victim to the Devil’s seductive ways.

Everyone turned in their seats and offered their complete attention to his words.

He looked directly at Janae and with a straight face said, Child, I understand you’ve been hurt by the absentee father of your child and being hurt makes people attempt to dispense hurt to others. I can say, without a doubt, I do not have Syphilis and because of this, and combined with the fact we have not been together in a sexual way, I am not the person who has given you this sexually transmitted disease.

Tears sprang to her eyes and I could tell she realized she was never going to get him to own up to his actions nor would he suffer any consequences for what he’d done to her. She said, Well, God knows you are an adulterer and a liar! You may have these people fooled, but He knows who you really are! It will all come to the light!

I can comfort all of your doubts, saints, by volunteering, right this very minute, to submit to medical testing. I have nothing to hide from you, I assure you.

You will rot in hell for this, Wilson! she said as she darted from the sanctuary.

She probably had not been swift enough to escape hearing someone say, You’re going to be there first, whore!

Charismatically as ever, he said with a smile, Settle down! Settle down! This is but a small example of what worldly living can do to a part-time believer. That young lady wasn’t all the way untruthful.

Others may have mistakenly thought he was about to take some sort of ownership of the part he really did play in this young lady’s situation, but instead he offered, She did visit with me in my office for counseling. We did speak on the subject matter of her child’s father, who is not being a man of honor to his responsibility to her and their baby. And she may have taken this interaction as something more than it was. Let’s not be too quick to condemnation for this woman’s soul because we have all fallen short of the glory of God. Followers, I beseech you to be of God and offer up your prayers for her. She must be delivered from the ways of sin. She could be any woman. She could be your daughter. She could be your sister.

Amen, Pastor! said one woman and that started a few others to offer forth words that let him