The Good News Club

Or at least that's what I think it was called...

There was this house in my hometown of Jackson, Tennessee. I spent most of my childhood growing up across the street from that house. It played a pivotal role in many vignettes in my memories from 1985 to 1997.

When I was a teenager, one of my few serious high school girlfriends would live there. It was a pretty awkward relationship at best, not least because I was pretty good friends with her older brother. As I recall, it didn’t last very long and ended on a less-than-friendly note.

There was a bizarre episode where her father (who I vaguely understood knew something about electronics professionally?) helped me install a new stereo in my shitty 1998 Nissan Sentra.

A car I would nearly lose my life in. But that’s another story.

Many years earlier, another family lived in that house. They were…different.

My family, for the most part, had always gone to church. We became a relatively central fixture in a small-ish Southern Baptist Church on the northwest side of town.

I honestly don’t recall if that had already happened by the time of this story.

At any rate, even at their most devout, my parents didn’t light a candle to these folks in their allegiance to the straight and narrow.

These people NEVER missed church.

On Halloween? When I walked out the front door in my vampire costume? Their house was DARK. Not because they weren’t home. Because they had gone to bed EARLY.

And regularly, they hosted The Good News Club.

Now, I remember very little about The Good News Club.

I remember there were a bunch of neighborhood kids.

And there was a lady who told a Bible story.

And there were games and treats and singing.

And there was … a fucking clown. A Bible clown. Named Jingles.

Now, I’m not scared of clowns. But Bible clowns can fuck off.

(If you are or were a part of a clown ministry, and you believe that to be a good thing…I love that for you. Just keep it the Hell out of my house. If you find that insulting, I’m sorry. Kind of.)

I don’t remember doing the work to memorize the verses, but I was a whiz kid at memorizing ANYTHING back then. And so I won the Bible Verse Memory Contest! Ironically, the prize was a “Bible” that wasn’t a Bible as much as a Bible storybook and did not contain the very verses I’d just been compelled to regurgitate along with book, chapter, and verse.

I won this for memorizing and regurgitating a shitload of verses!

Of course, all of this is set up for when it happened.

At the end of every edition of The Good News Club, we had a good old-fashioned altar call.

Except we were in the host family’s living room, there was no altar, and there was a Bible clown.

And in retrospect, the execution was rather creepy.

I can’t tell you exactly how it started, but in my mind’s eye, we’re all sitting crisscrossed. And it almost feels like the lights were dimmed - but maybe that’s just my vision. Or perhaps it’s because I sat through so many “every head bowed, and every eye closed” altar calls with the lights dimmed that this particular method of manipulation is permanently etched upon my memories of anything having to do with “praying the prayer.”

Anyway, one woman is talking. Again, I don’t recall if it was the woman who owned the house or someone else. But she gave some version of the eponymous Good News and then told everyone to…

Wait for it.

…close their eyes and bow their heads. And so we did.

(OK, everyone? I haven’t a clue. But mine were closed. I never cheated. Not in that house, anyway. And that’s the only way the terrifying reality of what happened is so vivid.)

And then she told us to quietly raise a hand if we wanted to “ask Jesus into our heart.”

And at that moment, unbeknownst to the crowd, one of the women would whisk the hand raisers away into one or more of the bedrooms.

And then it would be over. And if you had been paying attention to who was sitting where before the altar call started, you might have noticed one or more kids missing.

I’m glad I didn’t know anything about “The Rapture” at this point, or I probably would have lost my shit. That said, I was totally into the idea of being abducted by aliens to save me from the idiots on Earth. So I guess I was OK being raptured by aliens, just not by God.

So… what happened in that room?

Well, by this point, you’ve probably guessed that during one meeting of The Good News Club, in particular, Matt Stine lifted a hand.

And you’d be correct.

In retrospect, I’m unsure if it was to find out what the Hell happened in that room or if it was because I wanted to try this Jesus thing out and be “in the club.” I’m also pretty sure that I was already terrified of going to Hell and wanted my fire insurance.

It doesn’t matter.

We go into the bedroom: just me and a woman. I don’t know her name. I vaguely remember her having dark hair. She told me to sit down. She said that I should close my eyes and pray to Jesus. Tell him I’m sorry for my sins and list them off. And to ask him to forgive me and come into my heart. And to thank him.

And so I did. And all I can remember about the prayer part is that I confessed to saying lots of bad words. Because in my mind, at that time, the absolute worst thing a little boy could do was cuss.

And I had a mouth on me. Still do. I use the word FUCK in all nine parts of speech daily. I got in trouble for running around yelling FUCK at the top of my lungs in the First Grade. Yeah…I was that kid.

So, I made sure God knew exactly how sorry I was for that.

And sure enough, the crowd had dispersed when we walked out of that bedroom. I vaguely remember being given some cookies and lemonade and not feeling much of anything, good or bad. And then I went across the street to my house.

And at some point, I told my Mom. But that’s a story for another day.