Personal Account #2

The following post was originally shared in a Reddit thread and is being republished here with the author’s permission.

I spent part of my childhood at Johnson Chapel and have countless mind-blowing, heart-wrenching stories from those years.

One thing I remember is the many times my mother was “in trouble” with the church.

Whenever this happened, I would go to church with knots in my stomach. The preacher at the time, Herbert Hall, would often structure his entire sermon around her. From the pulpit, in a loud voice, he would call out my mother’s name and publicly condemn her.

As a child sitting in the pews, I was taught to believe that my mother had an evil spirit.

These “in trouble” periods could last for weeks—sometimes even months.

Eventually, when church leaders decided her heart had softened enough, my mother would be called down to the altar. Church leaders would gather around her while she prayed and cried, asking for forgiveness. When they believed she had repented enough, they would declare that she had “prayed through” and that God had forgiven her.

For a while, things would return to normal.

But months later, the same cycle would begin again.

Often, the exact same “sin” that had supposedly been forgiven would be brought up again and used against her.

I remember one instance where she was rebuked simply for speaking to her own mother—my grandmother—in a grocery store. Even after the church declared her forgiven for it, the same accusation resurfaced later.

As a child watching this happen, it was deeply confusing and frightening. Forgiveness, as it was preached, never seemed to truly exist. No matter how many times my mother repented, the accusations always came back.

Looking back now, I understand it wasn’t about forgiveness.

It was about control.

Another way control operated in the church was through dreams.

Church leaders—usually members of the Hall family or people approved by them—claimed that God communicated with them through dreams. If they believed someone should be “in trouble,” they would say they had a dream about that person.

The interpretation of these dreams was entirely up to them.

I remember one dream in particular that Doretha Hall, Herbert Hall’s wife, told. She said she had dreamed that the foundation of her own house was rotting. But according to her interpretation, the house in the dream did not represent her home—it represented the home of the church member who was currently “in trouble.”

I also witnessed church members having positive dreams about someone who was “in trouble.” Those dreams, according to the leaders, were from the devil.

Bottomline: the interpretation always had to fit the leaders’ narrative.

There was never any way to question these interpretations. The dreams were presented as messages from God, and whatever the leaders said they meant was accepted as truth.

I could go on and on.

This is only scratching the surface.