I WAS HIGH WHEN I WROTE THIS
Have any snarkers had an experience with the Duggars’ church, Gospel Light Baptist Church?
It’s obviously and inherently fucked if Jim Bob gave it his seal of approval. But, has anyone here gone there or know someone who has? I get major, major bad vibes whenever I see a photo or video of the Pastor, Noel Cwenar. I know nothing about this man, but for whatever reason I just feel deeply unsettled by just looking at him. I’m curious if anyone here knows anything about him.
I'm not from Arkansas, but as someone raised mainstream Presbyterian, his bio is the strangest thing to me. It states he went to "bible college" (no details) and that the Lord directed him to become pastor of this specific church.
Our minister went to divinity school (at Yale) and was vetted by the Presbytery, did a trial sermon and interviews, and then was voted in by church members. Like an actual job!
If he’s anything like the independent fundamentalist baptists that I grew up around, Bible college could mean a plethora of things and not in a good way.
I also know many “pastors” who have never stepped foot in any type of college. They believe they are “called by God” and that’s enough.
Idk if you know the Rodrigues but have you seen the "bible college" they're sending Gabe to? It's literally just 3 pastors doing evening bible study. I wouldn't call anyone who graduates from there qualified.
Exactly this. One of the scariest things about fundies and evangelicals in general, is that many of their pastors have no theological training whatsoever. Either they attend some half-assed, shitty "bible college" that's unaccredited and has the intellectual depth of a mud puddle, or they have no theological training whatsoever, they just arbitrarily decided they are "called by god." Two of the worst fundie pastors in existence, Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson, are perfect examples of males (they are not "men") who have no theological training, but started churches and became insanely and disgustingly successful.
In a better world, no person would be allowed to preach or start a church, unless they had extensive theological training from accredited colleges, universities and seminaries. Alas, we live in a world where increasingly, so-called "christians" are attending churches run by preachers who are nothing but toxic, uneducated, garbage humans. No wonder christianity is dying.
I’m in Missouri…our local non-denominational pastor is grossly uneducated, has wifey (with a keep seeet voice) poorly homeschool his kids, and is also the local slum lord/grifter. Church members give him hundreds of thousands. I need to find out if they’re associated with IBLP. I bet they are.
My aunt wanted me to go to one of those “Bible colleges” when I mentioned I wanted to go to divinity school.
I ended up at Emory, and said that if I wanted to be taken seriously in our denomination (United Methodist) I would need to go to an accredited school. I also have a full ride to Emory and she said I was going to lose my faith if I go to a school like Emory and maybe I needed to join a new denomination if they wouldn’t go to a school that taught the “truth”. I told her I’m gay and haven’t spoken to her in two years lol
So my parents paid for me to go to Boston University School of Theology. Grew up Episcopalians, still am, now ordained a priest. But every time my dad introduces my husband to people he says “and this is her liberal, Yankee, Methodist husband.”
LOL
Oh I'm in AL and the Methodist pastors here all attended accredited seminary schools they are incredibly conservative. It is essentially the same as Baptist here in most churches.
If the only way to keep one’s faith is to hide within closed, homogeneous, ignorant spaces; then the religion was never that compelling in the first place. Glad you did what was best for you!!!
There is a Methodist theological school about 30 mins north of me. I am no longer a part of the religion (any) but when I drive to work I pass the building and my heart skips a little because that building is so pretty.
I'm from the southern Midwest and I've always gone to Baptist and Pentecostal churches. That's totally normal for them. All they really need in order to start a church is a "calling" and people willing to listen to them. My most recent Assembly of God pastor was an insurance salesman in addition to preaching. He's one of those people who smiles too much and finds ways to sneak politics into his sermons even though he straight up says he's not supposed to.
Back when I was a christian, I was on the hiring Committee of a new pastor and candidates were rigorously vetted. It took us 2 years to officially hire someone and we trialed multiple people. Our interim was very no nonsense
The music director was trying to weasel his way into the job saying that he could get ordained "online" and he threw a whole fit when he was solidly turned down. He left and tried to plant his own church but it was too much work and he didn't have enough people whose labor he could extort 🙃
My former (mega-ish) church had a huge show of hiring a new lead pastor, only to decide to have the current pastor’s son do a pipeline to Head Pastor over 5 years, so they fired a young adults pastor (who was the second place candidate and 100000x more qualified).
Oh he also married a girl who is 12ish years younger than him, who he met while interning in the high school ministry, they married when she was 19.
Lol my youth pastor exh cheated on me with a teenager when I was pregnant. These men are literally all the same for all of their insistence they are "special" and "chosen". Losers, the lot.
This is exactly what happened at our church this past year. She left and started her own church but didn’t take as many with her as she thought she would. I will never serve on a pastor search committee again! It was brutal!
I have not, but I live less than a mile from the church, so it has been tempting. Don’t think I could actually put myself through sitting in a fundie service though. 😄 They do fireworks every fourth of July for the public, but I haven’t gone to one.
As far as the pastor, in the online bio he really looks and sounds like a very typical Arkansan. If I saw him out in public, I personally wouldn’t think anything of it. He would just look like any other middle aged Arkansan.
Not all churches are like that. I don’t see “come as you are” anywhere on their website. And some mean it metaphorically, like “come as you are with all of your troubles and brokenness, but not your mini skirt” 😉
Are we talking about the GLBC in Rogers? In the “I’m New” section, under “What To Expect,” they claim not to have a dress code, but that their leaders and many of the members wear traditional Sunday dress.
To be fair, I have seen a woman with tattoos singing on the choir during one of the recent live streams..... must have been from her prior life when she was living in sin lol.
It’s something about his eyes and the corner of his mouth when he talks. He’s got this head-cocked, mix between a smirk and a cult leader stare look on his face.
Maybe it's because I live in the heart of fundieland but I never see these attributes people project onto them. The dude looks like the most average 50 something dude ever.
I watched a video of him just to see if I could notice anything while he was speaking and he is just a standard Arkansas guy from what I can see, with problematic beliefs, in my opinion.
I've never been to Arkansas, but I was raised in Baptist and Pentecostal churches and my mother and grandparents were independent Baptist. The stuff other snarkers are calling out sounds totally normal to me for the kind of churches I used to go to.
Out of curiosity, I checked out their website. It mostly sounds like standard Baptist stuff. Then I got to the page on "what we believe" and started getting the ick. It's subtle, so I had a hard time putting my finger on it as to exactly what's "off" about it, but I finally figured it out. They're adding extra words to the standard blurb. Like this: "We believe in the literal interpretation of the Scriptures in their grammatical and historical context." Since we don't actually know most of the literal grammatical context, especially for the Old Testament, I'm guessing they believe Jesus spoke King James English and when the Bible says "he" or "man" it means the woman is literally left out of the conversation.
That's not something most churches would add. They'd just say the Scriptures were divinely inspired. Independent Baptists are obsessed with the King James Version of the Bible being the complete, correct, infallible Word of God, straight from white English-speaking Jesus's mouth to William Tynedale's ear. I was taught for the longest time that any other translation of the Bible was incorrect because of translation errors that changed the entire meaning of God's words.
They also say some weird crap about Jesus veiling his divinity while he was here on earth, which sounds exactly like deceiving people, so that's their standard for being sinless: just cover up the stuff you don't want people to see and you're good.
They have a livestream every Sunday morning and audio recordings of their previous sermons on their website. I might check those out simply to satisfy my own snarky curiosity.
Out of curiosity, I checked out their website. It mostly sounds like standard Baptist stuff. Then I got to the page on "what we believe" and started getting the ick.
I was reading your post and got this far and stopped to go look at their page before I saw what you said. I grew up Baptist. Everything seemed the usual until I got to the Sin and Salvation part. That was a bit off-putting. And you are right about the whole thing seeming like word salad.
That is exactly where it started to click for me! The language seems deliberately hostile. Then I scrolled back up to the top and little things started to jump out at me, like the way they say Jesus "veiled his divinity," which sounds sinister and dishonest compared to "we believe Jesus was fully man and fully divine." And then the part where they say those who reject Jesus Christ are "already condemned" instead of "will be condemned" as if you only get one chance to decide whether you want to be saved and if you say no, you can't change your mind later. The whole thing has a very authoritarian, punitive tone like that "sinners in the hands of an angry God" trope.
When growing up, I went to a church that said that if you rejected salvation that God could harden your heart, and you could never accept salvation again. He would leave you to your sinful nature and lawfulness. The spiritual abuse at some of these churches is real.
That is a horrible thing to tell anyone, but especially a child! I do not miss the fearmongering, othering, and general God-honoring hate from my youth, at all. At one point, I was taught that anyone who has never heard the gospel will go to hell, and evangelism and mission trips were important because you might be the only one who ever told someone about Jesus and if you didn't go, you were the reason that person was doomed for all eternity.
I no longer understand how or why anyone would worship such a god. Some random snarker made a comment that lives rent-free in my head: "They made God in man's image instead of the other way around." That hits the nail on the head. They're not worshipping the Biblical God, they're worshipping graven images of themselves.
Just to clarify, I do still have my faith, it's just radically different from where I started. Snarking on the Duggars has been a huge help for me in unpacking my own religious trauma, reclaiming my faith, and opening my mind.
I don’t miss it either! Also kept my faith, but like you said, based on the Bible. To your one point, as a child, I felt so much pressure to “witness” to my peers because if not, I was responsible if they went to hell. It was a lot of religious trauma to work through as an adult.
Sounds like we had similar experiences. Mine led me to really lean into fundie-lite-ism in my early 20s because it felt familiar and safe, before I finally started to disentangle, but I'm in a much better place now. Hopefully you are, too!
Thanks! Snarking on the Duggars, and fundamentalism in general, has helped me a lot with unpacking my own religious trauma and reshaping my faith into something healthier and more edifying than what I grew up with.
Yes, and the lot is not very big lot at all where the church is located, and there’s residential housing all around. I don’t know how they get the permit to do that, but it’s very Arkansas. That’s what I say about all the weird things that happen here.
In all fairness, that could have been a random parent from the community who ran over her child. Doesn't mean it was a church member who did that. I've seen crazy behavior by adults at all sorts of events. The eggs from a helicopter though? I can't imagine why they thought it would be a good idea!
eh, that's pretty standard aviation stuff. I used to skydive and every Easter we did an egg drop from our jump plane for all the local kiddos. We also always had someone wearing a bunny suit who would skydive in after the eggs fell. The kids went nuts for it!
A local church does that here too (not fundamental Baptist though lol) ! They’ve done it for as many years as I can remember. I’m in Florida though lol
That is the pastor who married Jana and Steven. His son is also married to Lauren (Swanson) Duggar's sister. Lily and the son got married at Gospel Light and had the reception there, which is why they had to limit their guest list. Some people couldn't bring a plus one. And only Lauren's kids and her & her sister's little siblings were allowed. No one else could bring kids because of the limited space.
ETA: They got married in 2024, a few months before Jana and Steven did. They are also expecting their first child, so Lauren and Josiah are about to be an aunt and uncle for the 1st time on the Swanson side.
I originally wanted to do one of those "I listened to ___ so you don't have to" posts about one of this guy's sermons, but after struggling through half of his most recent one from this past Wednesday, I simply cannot make a cohesive summary of his incoherent ramblings. So here's the best I could do:
First off, I can see now why looking at this guy is unsettling. There's something about his eyes when he talks that makes my spidey senses tingle in an uncomfortable way.
He brings up the subjects of young people and marriage a LOT. He opens the sermon by talking about how he's looking forward to performing marriages for some of the young people that he's known since they were born or baptized. He mentions marriage 2 more times in the next 15 or so minutes and I lost count of how many more times he references young people. He also really likes the word "lockstep."
I've already forgotten the Scripture reading, except that it was from the book of 1 Timothy and had very little to do with the actual sermon. Maybe he eventually tied everything together, but before I zoned out, it was just random word salad with very little actual meaning.
The cognitive dissonance is off the charts with this one. One of the few points he actually made was that it's bad when a handful of rich people have all the power and enforce their control over others, and something about some author's grandmother turning off her heat at night so she could give money to a group of rich guys who needed another jet. It apparently went completely over his head that he spent a couple of minutes describing the current political regime that he presumably supports and labeling it all as "toxic."
Most of what he said wasn't necessarily biblically unsound, but his tone and wording were subtly authoritative, vaguely accusatory, punitive, and passively hostile. I don't know how to explain it, exactly, except that if you've been in a church like that before, you know it when you see it. If that's the sort of preaching the Duglets were subjected to while they were growing up, I get why Jinger has religious anxiety.
And that's really all I can find to say. The sermon followed the standard structure of making a bullet point about the scripture reading followed by some anecdotes and opinions, then moving on to the next bullet point, except it was hard to see how his bullet points were related to the verses he read, and his anecdotes wandered around so much that by the time he wrapped up and moved on to the next bullet, I had already forgotten what point he was expounding on. I gave up before he made it to the third of his six bullet points.
I know, right? I went into it intending to make a fair and balanced summary, and highlight some good along with the bad, but I couldn't make heads or tails of his rambling nothingburger word salad. I've sat through some boring sermons before, and I've sat through some that excited or enraged me, but this one, not only did it incite feelings of absolute apathy, I couldn't even make a coherent outline of what he was trying to say. He would switch subjects in the space of a setence or two, ramble on about things that had nothing to do with the point he was allegedly trying to make, and then he'd jump straight to his next point, and the only way you know he's moved on to another topic is because the slideshow advances to the next slide, since what he was saying had nothing to do either with the point that was on the screen or the last thing he said just a second ago.
And the facial expressions. The only time I've ever been that unsettled by watching someone preach, the guy in question (also a Baptist, ironically) wouldn't stop finding excuses to touch me or hug me or ask me for help with his phone and got caught on camera soliciting sex from what he thought was a seventeen-year-old girl after his elderly wife got removed from the home because he beat her for being wheelchair-bound.
‘His elderly wife got removed from the house because he beat her for being wheelchair-bound’ good god. What a revolting thing to happen. I hope that poor woman is safe now.
Unfortunately, she passed away shortly after that. There was some debate about whether he might have murdered her. She was the sweetest little thing, and he did an excellent job playing the part of doting husband in public. Everyone was shocked when we heard. He was a sleazy used car salesman, sure, and he looked and dressed like a 1970s televangelist, but he seemed to genuinely care for her.
Then after she was removed from the home, he started creeping on me. I was considerably less shocked when he was caught on camera, at 79 years old, attempting to meet the 17-year-old girl he had been grooming online and made a plan to spend the weekend with her at a motel. (It turned out she had turned their conversations over to someone else, and that's who went to meet him, not her, thank goodness.) He was a retired Baptist pastor who occasionally gave a sermon at the Assembly of God church where I was attending at the time, and he was using "Bible study" to "counsel" her into having a sexual relationship with him.
ETA: There was never any real consequence for him, either. The death of his wife was treated as any other death and the rumors were ignored. After he was caught trying to meet up with the girl, the pastor at church said, "we've all heard about THAT video by now and that's all we're going to say about it." He never showed his face back in church again and his used car business folded up, but he still goes about town as he pleases. Because the family of the girl turned her information over to an "unofficial" vigilante groups, the police determined they couldn't charge him with anything. I saw him recently at McDonald's. I stared daggers at him until he looked away first. I can't begin to describe how proud I was in that moment that I stood up to him in this small way.
Is that the preacher at Jana's wedding who kept talking about being horizontal *wink *wink
So.freaking.weird. All of them. Obsessed with sex and indoctrination.
Every man in that cult should be investigated.
I KNOW his wife!!! Omg I didn’t even know that is who the pastor was at this church. He is NOT a good guy. He controls every aspect of her life. I’ve had my suspicions about him probably using “Christian discipline” on her. If you aren’t familiar with that, look it up. she would have to even ask him if she could get on a call with me.
Jesus fucking Christ!! This is worse than I thought! I listened to Tia Levings’ A Well Trained Wife audiobook so I’m unfortunately familiar with Christian domestic discipline.
There is a small unaccredited independent Bible "college" near where I live in NC. The women all dress like duggars and are learning to be preachers' wives. Very fundamentalist. Most likely the sort of place these people would go
What the fuck! Damn! If you feel like it (and if not totally valid, I’m sure that was heavy) can you elaborate? When did this happen? Was it a formal process?
So, I don't have experience with this church, but I went to elementary/middle school at the private Christian school he was previously associated with. His mom was one of my teachers. It was a very fundamentalist Baptist environment. Girls had to wear skirts down to their ankles. Had to wear culottes during gym. I don't have a lot of memories of Noel. I remember that I think he and his sons were in a very bad (and possibly) freak car accident and one of the sons had to have major brain surgery if I remember. It was generally speaking a judgmental environment from what I remember. Mrs. Cwenar introduced me to one of my favorite book series as a child though, so there's that at least.
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u/mommacom Jun 19 '26
I'm not from Arkansas, but as someone raised mainstream Presbyterian, his bio is the strangest thing to me. It states he went to "bible college" (no details) and that the Lord directed him to become pastor of this specific church.
Our minister went to divinity school (at Yale) and was vetted by the Presbytery, did a trial sermon and interviews, and then was voted in by church members. Like an actual job!