The year was 1998. I was saved just two years prior and in my freshman year of college playing baseball. I went to school two hours away from home and would come back every 2-3 weeks to visit my family (and get my clothes washed of course). The church I was saved and baptized in was a small, SBC church but soon after my conversion the pastor left for another church and it quickly went downhill. So in my freshman year my parents decided to church shop and they visited a small, IFB church next door to my dad’s work. The preacher was young, well spoken, and like many IFB pastors loud and opinionated. Well they quickly were taken by the small community and structure (which I would find out later is legalism). I remember one weekend when I came home from college going there with my family. It was different for sure but I was also enamored with the pastor’s charisma and preaching. As I would listen for several weekends what he started saying made sense. The KJV was God’s word and all these modern versions have clearly changed it to fit a liberal agenda.
I was in. Gail Riplinger and D.A. White were my new friends. And this was not run-of-the-mill IFB church. It was a Ruckmanite IFB. The pastor’s mother-in-law was a Catholic so he wanted nothing to do with her. I was two years in when the pastor brought a new little nugget to the pulpit…he was not going to celebrate Christmas or Resurrection Day because Satan was using those days to bring in pagan ideals. And if he’s not celebrating then of course the congregation wasn’t going to. This was the first time I had a pause in my brainwashing and so did my parents. That Christmas we got together with our extended family and I remember feeling weird and a little embarrassed. We didn’t participate in the gift exchange and Christmas Day wasn’t exciting. I think they did get us a couple of gifts but it wasn’t the same.
It was around the time that I transferred to another school and met an amazing girl who is now my wife. Once we were engaged the topic of the Bible would come up and I remember one night after work we were discussing it and she said what are we going to teach our kids. She was a member of an SBC church who used the NIV (gasp!) and so to her my beliefs on modern versions were ridiculous. Well I told her we would teach them what I believed. She didn’t like that and we had a big argument about it. A few days later we met for lunch and she had a book with her. She gave it to me and asked me to read it with an open mind. The book was The King James Only Controversy by Dr. White. Well needless to say this book blew my mind. The ability for Dr. White to clearly show how illogical the KJVO position was an eye-opener for me. I remember a few weeks later going into Lifeway and buying my first non-KJV bible, an NIV thin line. I felt weird but also freedom from the bondage of that legalism.
Fast forward several years and my wife and I are doing mission work in Tanzania. For the first time I encounter Muslims and the arguments they present for the corruption of the Bible are very similar to the things KJVO people say. Praise God I now had the knowledge to refute those arguments and defend the text of Scripture.