Duties of a child missionary in Guatemala

As a young child, I was pressed into service and forced to build churches, evangelize the natives and recruit them to my father’s cult.

Towards the end of 1954, democracy in Guatemala had finally been turfed out the window and Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas had just been installed by the CIA as the new fascist president.

Settling into his new role as the Liberator, the Colonel was busy deporting dissidents, jailing and torturing protesters and assassinating hundreds on a hit list, provided by John Purifoy the American Ambassador .

© J. Russell December 20, 2015
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My parents had finished learning Spanish, survived their first coup d’etat whilst living in Guatemala City and my father Gray E. Russell, was preparing to begin his work for the Brethren, the fundamentalist cult responsible for inventing and propagating much of the malignancy in modern day Christianity.

Some months earlier, my father and fellow cult leader Carlos W. Kramer had split the country into two different territories and each one had appointed himself as a Vessel of the Lord, in their own fiefdom. The Brethren are not big into mentioning God and usually referred to their deity as the Lord, who’s involved in everything they do.

My father decided to base his fiefdom in the town of San Marcos in western Guatemala near the Mexican border, where he purchased a huge block of land and built a large three bedroom tongue and groove, wooden house.

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The locals had never seen anything like this before as they usually built in adobe and concrete blocks were still a novelty. The local carpenters were put to work building our house using all the tools he had brought from New Zealand in a huge crate and were soon shown how to build in the “proper manner”.

The most important component of our new home was the construction of an enormous garage which contained a number of special features that allowed it to be rapidly transformed into a church, for the eight services held each week.

On completion, our garage/church was consecrated with a number of primitive religious rituals that would have made the Catholic Opus Dei cult, blush with pride. Even I was extremely proud of this, as few children could say they had a sacred garage.

As I was being raised in the ways of a young missionary, it was natural that I be assigned the task of church assistant and told that I had to be extremely respectful whenever entering the garage, as it was now the Lord’s dwelling place.

As it turned out, my title as church assistant was a lot more grandiose than it sounded and I soon realized that I was no more than a lowly serf, exploited by my father for no pay, in the service of the Lord.

My church assistant duties were considerable. Before each garage/church service, I had to open the rear doors of the garage and push our 1948 Buick Roadster which weighed a ton, out onto the custom designed ramp behind the church.

Next, I had to assemble the Altar/Pulpit in it’s correct location and then place the 100 heavy wooden chairs in neat rows, 50 each side of a center passageway. Men sat on one side of the passage and women on the other.

On completion, my father inspected my work and naturally, there was always something I hadn’t done right. Subjected to a number of patronizing comments inspired by the Lord, I took it like a man.

After each church service, which I was required to attend, I had to stack all the chairs away again, dis-assemble the Altar/Pulpit for storage and push the Buick back into the garage. Exhausted, it made me sleep better and avoided my waking during the night to annoy my parents.  

Any carping I occasionally indulged in was nipped in the bud very quickly by my father, who simply denied me the privilege of eating my dinner, as also instructed by the Lord.

As I’ve never had a weight problem and have been quite slim all my life, I’ve always put this down to the number of dinners I was denied whilst growing up for refusing to co-operate with many of the Lord’s wishes.

I was just a small boy at the time, however all tasks I was assigned in the Lord’s work were a privilege and as my father often reminded me, if I had been a Catholic child with similar duties, I would have had to self-flagellate, wear a crown of thorns and make a pilgrimage, before and after each service.

Years later, I found out that Catholic church assistants had to do personal sexual favors for the priests if they were to assist in sacred rituals, however the Brethren weren’t into that so much, preferring to psychologically f**k all their children and followers.

Friday night Prayer Service was extra special as it was designed to be a mental and physical torture session, that lasted up to three hours. Living at thirteen thousand feet altitude, the nights was incredibly cold in the Lord’s garage/church.

All the faithful knelt on the humid and cold concrete floor, with their faces buried in the wooden chairs, trying to get closer and closer to the Lord.

The smell emanating from the seat of the wooden chair, where I often had my face buried, was foul. Numerous indians had sat on this chair previously and the cheap grey colored paint, had absorbed all of their foulest odors, as none of them wore underwear. It was like praying directly into the Lord’s smelly arse.

The Brethren had no fixed prayers you could learn or memorize and there was no logical sequence to their prayer meetings. They were into free-basing spiritually and it was more akin to checking into in a mental asylum run by the inmates for a 4 hour stint.

All the males took turns to rant incoherently to the Lord. The pray-er of the moment, incapable of organizing his thoughts, mumbled dis-jointedly in a loud voice, complaining to Jesus about anyone he disliked and repeated all sorts of juicy gossip about others.

Friday night prayer meetings were definitely the place to be if you wanted to know about all the sins committed during the week, although I never understood why we needed prayers, as the Lord knew everything, even before we did.

40 year later, still terrorized by my anti-Catholic conditioning, I attended my first Catholic service and to my amazement, everything was very civilized. The prayers were brief, there was elegant seating in the church and there were some neat little wooden prayer boards to kneel on.

The priest was obssesd with the cardiovascular well being of his flock, constantly standing, sitting and kneeling his congregation during mass. It was a like religious gym class controlled by God and different to the Brethren, everyone knew the words to the prayers and the songs and sang in tune.

I didn’t have much to do with the construction of our house, however three years later when my father decided to build his brand new church just up the road, things changed and I was required to front up and work like a black fella.

By now I was becoming a reticent missionary and told him that “the Lord hadn’t called me to be a missionary and there were plenty of lazy indians everywhere”.

Enraged, he went red in the face and screamed that “all our family had been called by the Lord, to be his servants in Guatemala”. For the first time, even at that young age, I began to suspect that I was being fed a lot of bullshit.

Digging my heels in and facing a thrashing with the discipline cane, brought all the way from New Zealand in anticipation of a likely child revolt, the matter was not settled until he promised to increase my monthly allowance and pay it in advance. This deal was negotiated by my mother, who always enjoyed seeing my father defeated in all monetary matters.

I was then put to work . . . measuring cement, weighing sand, carting water, mixing concrete, packing the block molds and stacking wet concrete blocks. Yes, we made our own concrete blocks.

My father didn’t trust the local block-makers and being in earthquake country, he didn’t want his church to collapse at the first tremor so he had concocted his own block mixture, which made them so heavy, I could hardly lift them.

As my home schooling was from 9am to 1pm, I had to report to the church construction site immediately after lunch, where I worked like a coolee til dark.

Regardless of how many times I sulked, screamed or threw a temper tantrum, nothing saved me from church construction duties and I began to further detest, all types of missionary work.

A few years ago, I ran into a lady in San Marcos who reminded me that when we were children I had pushed her over a 30 foot bank beside the church, when she and her friends had taunted me for working on the church like an indian. Nice lady, she still thought it was funny, as my wife and I sat in her humble home drinking coffee.

At other times my father would say in a jolly mood “Come with me this afternoon and let’s witness for the Lord”. Thinking he was bonding with me, he was completely oblivious to the fact that it distanced us further. Forcibly, I had to accompany him giving out religious propaganda, which he insisted was the duty of each missionary.

If there were no pilgrims in the street to harass or everyone had fled so as to not be assailed by the Lord’s Men, we would knock on the nearest door of a house and try and speak to someone. Many wouldn’t answer their doors.

On the other hand, if we were in a poverty area, the locals didn’t have any doors to knock on. Instead, we would make our way to their shacks along narrow tracks that doubled as open drains, whilst we tried to avoid stepping in the chicken shit, dog turds or pig squirts. The smell was often overwhelming.

My father didn’t care about such things and the more fetid the tracks to the shacks, the more he enjoyed them. Rescuing Catholic souls from eternal damnation was a blessing to him and he knew he would receive his reward when Secretly Raptured.

Hailing a shack with a “good morning/afternoon” (in Spanish), I would ask the dweller if they had heard of Jesus and gave them a religious pamphlet. As Guatemala is a Catholic country, everyone had already heard of Jesus so the question was just an ice breaker.

If someone wanted to chat, I would begin to witness for the Lord and explain that the Catholic Jesus the pilgrim had already heard of was the wrong Jesus and that the message I had that day was from the living Jesus (the Protestant Jesus), who was very different to the Jesus he was used to.

Some of the smarter pilgrims wouldn’t fall for my bullshit that easily and countered with “I believe in God, Jesus, the Saints and the Virgin”. Thoroughly trained by my father, I would patiently explain that my father’s church had an arrangement with Jesus that was very different to the Catholic arrangement.

I would then begin to recount how my father’s church had New Revelations from Jesus, whereas the Catholics kept using old and outdated Revelations. If they continued to suspect I was telling a pack of lies, I had a trick up my sleeve that always did the trick; “Do you know how to read?” I would ask.

The answer invariably was; “no, I never had the opportunity to learn” and with that, I immediately re-gained the upper hand and had something that would put me in the box seat again, evangelizing for the Lord.

“That’s the problem” I would say, “The Catholic Church only tells you what they want about Jesus. Come to our church, Jesus will help you learn to read and that way you can confirm that everything I am telling you is true”.

My closing masterpiece was; “At our church you don’t have to confess each time you do something wrong. You only confess once, and the Lord takes care of the rest”.

Standing nearby, my father would listen carefully to everything I said and would later congratulated me on what a great job I had done Saving Souls for the Lord. He had taught me well.

It always amazed me how many of these pilgrims trusted me and were so easily fooled, as many would later arrived at the church wanting to know more about the living Jesus.

The Brethren had perfected and utilized the two most powerful sales techniques know to mankind; Fear of Loss and the Two Option Close, concepts too complex and sofisticated to go into here.

Years later when working for IBM, I suspected they had stolen their sales manual from the Brethren, as many of their business clients in the 1970s were just as gullible as those that had bought the Eternal Life Program in the mountain highlands of Guatemala.

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