From Other to Us, Part 1: The Testimony of Apostle Dr Lee Ann Marino

Testimonies provide essential information about Christian journeys, especially throughout a number of years. Join Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino as the tables turn and she's interviewed by Ministers Nik Lewis and Charlie Reep, and Brad Loggins, all of Sanctuary in Charlotte, North Carolina, for her testimony. In this first of two-part episode, learn about Dr. Marino's early years, formation into ministry, and how a Bible college religion project set her on a whole new course of faith. (Intro and Conclusion Track Fire ball" by Yvgeniy Sorokin, https://pixabay.com/users/eugenemyers-40510887/. Empire Transport Track "The Beauty of Green Legends" by DTXN1,https://pixabay.com/users/dtxn1-42017842/.)

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
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(00:51):
Welcome to Kingdom Now, the podcast featuring Faith with an Edge, as we recognize the
Kingdom of God within you.
I am your host, Dr. Lee Ann Marino, apostle, Overseer, author, podcaster, blogger, professor
and theologian, and founder of Safe Ministries and all the works that go along with it.

(01:12):
I am excited to share this program with you.
As we explore the ins and outs encounter culture Christianity, present as you live out the
Kingdom of God in your everyday life.
Want to learn more?
Visit KingdomPowerNow.org.
And now our program, which features a variety of formats, fear, just for you.

(01:33):
Interviews on a variety of relevant topics, teaching and preaching taught everywhere from
our ministry studios to sanctuary and beyond.
And powerful insights here for today as we turn the world upside down everywhere we go.
Well, good morning.

(02:00):
Good afternoon.
Good evening.
Happy whatever time of day it is wherever you are and to our listeners in where Brazil.
We say bom dia
We hope that whatever time of day it is when you are listening that you are having a good
one.
And I welcome you to this edition of the Kingdom Now podcast that we are restarting because
the audio was being weird.
And I am your host of Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino here, as the Spitfire serving as the voice of counter

(02:22):
culture Christianity where we feature the theme of faith with an edge.
And if you would like to learn more about the world of counter culture Christianity, feel
free to visit our website at kingdompowernow.org.
So I don't know what I'm calling this, but this is the update to my testimony that I did
seven years ago.
And this time I have three moderators instead of one.

(02:42):
And so we are going to play pass the microphone because it didn't seem to be picking us up
before.
I don't know what I'm calling it yet.
Last time we called it runnin on empty after the song by Jackson Browne, but that doesn't
really seem to fit anymore.
And so with that, I am going to play pass the microphone.
And we are all going to say something this time about who we are.

(03:02):
And we're going to introduce ourselves because you guys are moderating.
So let's start there.
Hey there.
This is minister Charlie Reep.
They/them pronoun user, minister of education at sanctuary and the owner of the website, beloved
not broken.
So that is beloved-not-broken.com.
It's basically a big old resource for a queer questioning and deconstructing Christians.

(03:26):
Hello, I am minister Nik and I am going next also they/them pronoun user.
I am the minister of music and the worship leader for sanctuary.
I also have a website that is nikfits.com that's N I K F I T S.com I do a lot of pop culture
and Christianity, but I also talk about more general nonfiction things.

(03:51):
And oh, yeah, you can visit my contact page, find my link tree on there and you can follow
me pretty much whenever I'm barely active on Twitter anymore and insta kind of pop on
and off, but pretty much anywhere else you can find and follow me and yeah.

(04:13):
Hello people, my name is Brad on the owner of Empire Transport.
I'm also Dr. Marino's husband and a member of the ministry.
Yeah, my website is empiretransport.co exactly as it sounds.
That's an interesting detail to add.

(04:38):
Okay, so shall I start at the beginning, which is a very good place to start?
Okay, so I was born in upstate New York in the year as I put it Charles and Diana got married
MTV launched and John Paul the second got shot.

(04:58):
I don't know if it was in that order.
I think they got married somewhere in the summer.
I don't remember, but I know MTV launched in August that part of it I do know.
And I was born later that year in the northernmost part of Appalachia, considered one of
the last cities of it actually in the caskills.
And there isn't much to say about it.

(05:19):
It's not very big.
It's a college town.
There's not really very much there.
I am the youngest of five.
I've often said that I had different parents than my siblings just simply because by the
time I came along, nobody was happy anymore.

(05:42):
So it's very interesting sometimes to look back at the pictures when they were younger and
look at where everybody was at, you know, at different points in time.
And I totally have no relation to it or connection to it or understanding for it in any one way.
My father was an alcoholic.
He never really admitted it.

(06:02):
My mom as she often put it, she said that she thinks he knew he had a problem at different
points in time because he would go dry for periods.
He died a couple of years ago.
We found that he had a form of dementia that is related to alcoholism and he also had Alzheimer's
and so that was kind of interesting.

(06:24):
And the form of dementia he had had an onset probably before I was even born.
Kind of remembering that's interesting.
I wonder in hindsight if my father was somewhere on the autism spectrum just simply because
he had no social skills whatsoever.
And we attributed a lot of that to the drinking, but some of that very well might have been

(06:45):
more than that.
I mean, it's like I say his interests were.
He was brilliant at math and he was interested at complicated math problems, but you know,
you threw something average in front of him and he really wasn't that interested in it all.
And as I say, youngest to five all girls, we also had a foster child for a while, which
I'll probably talk a little bit about later.

(07:05):
But long story short, that was way too much estrogen in one generation.
So I've got sisters now in their 60s.
My oldest sister I think was 22 or 23 years older than me and then closest to me was eight
years older, which is still a pretty, pretty decent gap.
So and if we did not have problems, as I say, we were Catholic.

(07:27):
We were probably nominally Catholic at that point in time.
We were more cultural.
My dad was a convert.
I'm not actually really sure from what my mom said that he was baptized as something as a
teenager.
But she doesn't really remember what and my mother was what they call a cradle Catholic, Italian,

(07:47):
you know, pretty much a born in the church.
You're baptized when you're an infant and you're raised in it.
And so we had what I would call middle class problems, particularly upper middle class problems,
which means we had all the same problems everybody else has.
It's just you didn't hear about them.
So we were on the way here today and we drove past this house and there were three

(08:08):
sheriff's cars out front and there was stuff all over the lawn and there was a couple fighting
and Brad, I said to Brad, what is all that?
And he said domestic violence.
And I said to him, but there's stuff all over the lawn and he says domestic violence.
And I said that that was not my experience with domestic violence.

(08:29):
My experience with domestic violence was it happened behind closed doors and you didn't
hear about it.
And so like that went along with the childhood that I had we had, my father was an electrical
engineer.
He made more money than, you know, probably most of our parents did at that particular point
in history.
And you know, when no one was there, he beat us and he drank and I had sisters with eating

(08:55):
disorders and they experimented with drugs and there's actually suspicions.
One of my siblings might have been an alcoholic.
I don't really know that for certain, but they were the problems everybody else had, but
instead of it being the poster child of poverty, we just didn't really deal with them
or talk about them.
And I often say my first three memories are the expanse between boredom and chaos, which

(09:19):
is what I would say my life was.
So the first memory was me standing in front of our picture tube TV that stood up and then
you had the box on top of it so the thing was always tipping over and you always ran into
the corners of it and I was watching the opening theme from the Jeffersons and the reason

(09:39):
why I mentioned that is because I thought I made it up like it was a false memory and then
as an adult, they were all smacking each other with these foam things.
I remember seeing the clip when I was older and I said so I didn't make that up and it
was from the 83-84 season.
So I was like 2 to 3 years old standing in front of the TV watching that and I remember that.

(10:02):
And we made this trip to Florida was the second one and I remember the woman's ceiling
fan where we stayed.
There were these French doors and I can still see some standing here, the ceiling fan and
there was an inlet behind the house and I was afraid of sharks and I was swimming into
water and I was about 2 and then the other one was my father.

(10:23):
I asked him to read me a book like read me a bedtime story and he was in his office and he
was probably drunk at the time and he wasn't really interested and I pushed him and he picked
me up and he threw me against the wall.
And so that's like I say it's from these really boring, benign, ordinary details to that and

(10:45):
so it's like I said I lived in boredom and I lived in chaos and that's pretty much the life
that we had and you know in saying that I'm going to save and when I was young I was different.
Like you put it next I was other and I kept trying all these years to not be other you know

(11:10):
to try and fit in.
I really didn't fit in with my siblings.
I mean when you've got siblings that much older you're not really going to fit in with them
and you can vouch for something like that but I didn't really favor anybody.
I didn't really look like anybody.
I was just always kind of this other kid and I was always perfectly fine being by myself.

(11:34):
There are recordings of me on cassette somewhere with a Fisher price tape recorder of my own radio
show and I used to do the clips from Saturday morning cartoons.
We'll be right back after these messages you can count on it and I would do that in between
and then I would make up a little commercial and I pretended to be a librarian.

(11:58):
I know this is the most boring crap ever.
I mean this is like this was my world I pretended to be a librarian.
I was a teacher.
It's not boring.
It's just it's very it's very you.
It's very you and didn't you also basically play church with your barbies?
Oh yeah.
So I did that young but yeah so when I was older every Sunday I would go play the piano

(12:26):
and I had a him book and I would record myself on the cassette playing the piano and then
I would go upstairs and I would play church with my barbie dolls.
I dressed them all up.
Do you have something you'd like to say?
I have a question.
Yes.
Yes, dear.
In this circumstance I'm assuming the barbies were your choir as well correct?

(12:49):
Yep.
Yep.
You had a barbie choir and I had an altar that was a closet from a dollhouse and I covered
it and with all the right colors the liturgical colors in the Catholic church.
I mean when I say I played church with my dolls I played church with my dolls okay.
They were a real church okay.
They all got dressed up and they all sat in there with the aisle and I would make the one

(13:13):
who was the priest walk down the aisle and I he would have the sermon and you know what
would be like my version of the Catholic sermons that didn't really make any sense and they
told a lot of stories and then everybody would laugh and you know I mean it was like
all the thing and I even had a little tiny chalice from a barbie dollhouse set and I would

(13:33):
put food coloring in the water so it would look like wine and my communion was neco
wafers
necco wafers the candy.
The thin candy not the wavered the real thin ones that looked like communion house that tastes
like flavors and chalk yeah pretty much so I played I did that young I did that later but

(14:00):
you know yeah that was a part of my life was I played church and what I did at this point
was I wanted to go to Sunday school when I was really young because Catholic church at
the time we didn't actually have a church in the town it was what they called a satellite
parish and we actually met in a Presbyterian church they did away with that a few

(14:23):
years later so we went to religious ed and religious education was
on Wednesday afternoons after school and we actually went with the instructor from the school
to the local place and she did the Catholic instruction you're allowed to do that anymore
they changed the laws a few years later but like we actually went with our religious education

(14:45):
instructor to go do that and that was boring is hell I'm not gonna lie was Sunday school
was cool okay and I'm such a church kid saying that but you know we got to like sing things
and clap and we made our own little bibles once I still have mine I still have mine in a in a scrapbook

(15:07):
and it was you know help others out and kind words and dice and you know was like our own
personal Bible and we did things with they gave us stickers and we had snacks and so I went
to press batary in Sunday school until I was about seven years old but I would say it was
kind of a counter I was kind of interested in that I was always kind of interested in God I was

(15:27):
kind of interested in church I remember making everybody turn out the lights for something and we had
to sing happy birthday to Jesus I think it was Christmas time or something like that and you know
they humor they they humored me for the most part and I do remember my mom went to mass by herself
on Saturday nights and she would take me with her and everybody else went on Sunday morning and so

(15:50):
we went to this tiny little church and you know I remember the priest I think he died I mean actually
everybody from my childhood probably died because they were not young even then most of them had
probably died but that was kind of a thing and you know I was somewhere around six years old and my

(16:12):
mom decided that we needed help and so the story was that she learned that she was a battered woman
watching Phil Donahue on TV and for those who are looking at me like they don't know who Phil
Donahue was Phil Donahue was Oprah before Oprah he was a talk show host and he probably from what I
understand he probably did a show on it and she learned that she was a battered woman from watching

(16:36):
that something was wrong from watching TV I say that's very much the testament to the power of TV and
she found herself a little group called Al-Anon which for those who don't know what Al-Anon is it is
the 12 step program for families of alcoholics and we abide by the same 12 steps that everybody else does
that that we do and for much of my life that probably shaped my childhood it shaped my understanding

(17:03):
of things 12 step really is very much of mechanism for coping through difficult times and so I still
very much embody 12 step I have been in and out of meetings over the years
I've been to a lot of different programs and what happened was she went to meetings for a while
while I was somewhere in kindergarten and I want to say kindergarten first grade around there

(17:27):
and when I was seven seven and a half years old three days before Halloween literally in the middle
of the night we became a lifetime movie and my mom was a part of a group they were called
aid to battered women and they literally came in and they moved us out and while my father was on a business trip
and we moved to Oneonta, we moved to the nearby town and it wasn't that long before he found us because

(17:52):
he was a town justice where we lived in Otego and the town justice system for those who don't
really know what I'm talking about it's not where you're an actual lawyer and you go to law school but
there it's a system where you're elected in these little towns and so everybody knew him everybody knew
us and that means that everybody in the entire world knew what was as far as I was concerned knew what

(18:15):
was going on and we were there he found us he really didn't let go very easily he was from that
generation because you know we were his bragging rights when he's in a meeting or the portrait photos
up on the wall in the office and my mom was a good cook and could give a good party and so he

(18:36):
didn't let go real easily and their divorce took much longer than a divorce took took two three
years because they just couldn't reach an negotiation and you would think hey you know we came from
something that really wasn't that good everything was behind closed doors one of the things with middle
class abuse is nobody ever believes you when you come out about it and so there are still people

(18:57):
who do not believe he was now call it or had a problem or many of them had their own issues to be
quite honest but we kind of came out of that and we came into this entirely different life now
that revolved around courts and court dates I had to testify in court when I was really really
young about stuff that happened and the story was I learned that my father had a problem at school

(19:22):
so to make that story we had something called LEAF which was the leatherstocking Education Council on alcoholism
and they came in and they did a program in fact the very day I started at the new school when
I went there was the first day I went to the new school center street school doesn't exist anymore

(19:42):
they had they were doing the puppet show when I came in the room and that was how I learned what
was going on because nobody ever really sat down and talked to me about it and later we would pretend to
be we had Al-akid it's not a thing a bunch of us got together and we pretended to do the meetings
like our parents did and our our sisters had Al-Ateen that they were all in we made Al-akid

(20:08):
it's not a real thing but we had our own little 12 step thing and that was how I learned that
stuff happened and so to kind of talk about the story in that vein you know when you're not your
parents favorite you don't know that but I might have been the youngest but I was not the favorite

(20:29):
and that would kind of shape the next several years so my oldest two sisters after my parents
separated I never heard from them again and that is to this day at 43 years old that I have not
heard from my oldest sister since I was seven and you know for a while you try you try to reach out you

(20:50):
send letters you try to contact people but after stuff keeps coming back unopened and you stop you
get the message and you kind of let it go and so there was that and my sister that lived with us I
had one who was in college at the time and then we had one the one who was eight years older than me
when she was 16 she moved out she emancipated and in the meantime she made accusations

(21:13):
against my father about a very specific type of abuse that to this day I have my doubts about
it's my podcast I can say that I don't doubt something happened but I don't know if it was him
and that caused a whole other thing sometimes looking back and hindsight I don't know how I was not
taken out of the house or put into foster care because things were so crazy for such a long time

(21:41):
and where I lived was not very big and my father was very well connected and then you have all this
other stuff is going on and we've got a foster child in the house of social services is involved
and to say that when you're in a classroom with 31 kids and half of the work in the school system

(22:03):
and the other half work for social services and one of them her father was a lawyer and he was
actually the law guardian for the foster child that lived with us everybody knew
everything all the time that was going on and I already feel other and I can't explain it we didn't
talk about neurodivergency back then I guess what I would call passing I was a kid that

(22:27):
my grades were good enough and whatever was fine but I never really fit in socially either led or I
just wasn't didn't fit and you know putting that all kind of together is that there's a huge thing
when you just don't want to be conspicuous and you feel conspicuous because you're red-headed and

(22:55):
you're white as polar bears drinking milk in the snow in a blizzard I mean you know because that's
how pale my skin was and I'm Italian and I don't look like anybody in my family and I didn't know
I had albinism back then I found that out later and I just didn't want to feel other and everybody
is knowing anything and all the time constantly in every situation I feel other and it's like I say

(23:20):
it was either benign things were totally uninteresting or I lived in this total and complete chaos and I
didn't really pick up on the chaos until I sat down and wrote out some stuff to talk about on here so
there were trials and there were visits with social workers and there were visits with siblings

(23:41):
and at a certain point I think I was about nine they gave me a law guardian who made it so I didn't
have to see my dad anymore and that was actually pretty much the last time of my life that I really
saw him there were a couple of instances where like I was out somewhere as an adult and he was there
like he was in the store and he might have nodded in my direction and he probably only knew who I was

(24:03):
because my mom was with me but he hadn't seen me in a long time and if he saw me walking down the street
he probably wouldn't know who I was and things just pretty much kind of started to peek out when
the foster child that we had had been with us since he was about four days old and he was kind of
in and out they were trying to reunite him with his biological mother who was schizophrenic and kept

(24:27):
abusing him and I'm going to say this he probably had something they didn't diagnose schizophrenia or
mental illness and children that young back then that's a kind of a newer thing he came after me with
a knife he ran over to the drawer the kitchen drawer he got the knife out he came after me he set
threat and killed me he said if you he said I'm gonna kill you and kind of did this thing I ran

(24:49):
outside I don't know how my mother defused that situation you know I kind of was running outside
screaming and what happened was very shortly after that he was acting up we were supposed to go
and have pictures taken like portrait photos somebody came to the church to do it and we were
supposed to go have pictures taken and he was acting up and I said to him you know something to

(25:10):
the extent that he wasn't really my brother and that I wish somebody would come and take care of him
well a week later that's exactly what happened was that because of the incident my mom went to work
and they knew him from nursery school there was a nursery school in the why that she worked at
and they basically told her you're either gonna call the center we are I don't know who did to

(25:31):
this day they basically build it as a break that we just all kind of needed a break which to be fair
we kind of did and he never came back but that then kind of set my mom on a whole course that I
would say it was for the next six or seven years she fought to try and get him back and so

(25:54):
that our lives very much revolved around that and the push to try and make him come home which in
hindsight as an adult I look over the situation it was not ever gonna happen it was just not happening
and as a result of that our life around that time and I mean I was somewhere probably around nine

(26:17):
nine or 10 years old my mom had had a group of friends who were very devoutly Christian they were not
Catholic one of them went to the local care smaddett church one of them was Baptist she her her husband
was an elder and they would come over with their kids every week and they had like a prayer thing they
would sit and they would pray and they I think kind of got tired of things obviously you know when

(26:41):
this kind of keeps dragging out my mom got interested in the new age movement and we were still Catholic
you know we still went on Sundays and that was still you know the narrative if we were asked but
she got very heavily involved in what I call white native American indigenous identity

(27:03):
and it's appropriated the reason I say that it's very very white yes I can't stand
colonel's respect for okay it's very very white it was based on a book called Way of the Shaman which was
a white version of native practices and indigenous religion and she got into stuff like what they

(27:23):
would call journeying which is basically a form of astral projection and they would do with drumming and
there was some other stuff that she got really really heavily involved with because
she was looking for something and she had been looking for something for a long time in the Catholic
church was obviously not it and she had looked in different places and this was kind of where she

(27:45):
landed and so the new age slant at that time was very native and was very environmentalism and
you had the men's new age movement which books like iron john and fire in the belly were based on
and probably best known the tv show home improvement came out of that movement and then you had the
feminist movement of that which the story of no eyes which is probably a merry summer reign was

(28:11):
probably mostly fiction and there was also stuff mixed in there one of her friends was really into
alien counters and had interviewed people who had had done and so I think that my mom got into that
because she thought she was a healer or wanted to wanted to somehow redeem whatever was going on in
our lives and so then you had that she kind of took on the role of an amateur therapist and

(28:34):
then we all knew everybody else's business on top of everybody knowing hours and to
make that incredibly long story short it caused a lot of animosity in the area and so this is an
area where it's not very big and you know people don't want to move forward with some of this weird
crazy crap you're into and it caused a lot of hard feelings and so that further isolated us and

(29:00):
that further isolated me and through all that I just kind of felt like I was getting other and other
and other and other and other and it was just like you know you don't really know how to deal with that
so where that kind of landed me you know I didn't really have much of very many friends I think in
seven or eight years I might have had people over maybe a total of three times because you don't want

(29:24):
people involved in all this you don't want people knowing everything that's going on even more
and as kind of an extension on this she got very into theories on attachment and bonding particularly
what they call attachment disorder which now I know a lot of the information she got was what they

(29:44):
would call pseudoscience it was not really accepted by general people but as a result of that you
know it always seemed like there was something wrong with me in the way I would put that was I really
didn't do anything and I didn't bother anybody and I was you know a decent kid I wasn't in trouble I
wasn't violent I wasn't throwing starting fights at school I was bullied but I wasn't you know

(30:06):
vandalizing or stealing or doing nothing but I always seemed to be a problem and I don't and I say
problem in air quotes because to this down I don't really know what I did and they were always trying
to fix me it's like I say nothing was ever enough it wasn't really good enough I never thought I was
particularly smart I you know we hit teenagers I never thought I was particularly good looking

(30:26):
you know I just kind of was there and I was passing and I was trying to get by and with the
attachment theories came attachment therapy which for those who really aren't familiar with it it
went out of vogue now because children died having a done where you're restrained by somebody until
basically you yell or scream about everything that you're angry about or stuff that bothers you and

(30:52):
you know I was not somebody that responded well to that kind of thing I remember you know them
trying to do this thing oh you know pretend this is your father and you know outlet your feelings
on it and hit the pillow or kick the pillow and I mean by the time they had me halfway through that I
was terrified and not to mention I was hysterical because that wasn't how I felt about it and it's

(31:15):
not how I expressed how I felt it wasn't I didn't put that physical thing to it that a lot of people
did and so pretending you're kicking somebody like that that and I never really thought about it that
might have had to do with being a abused kid that you know you didn't really want to do that to
somebody else and attachment therapy they restrained you and you can be restrained any number

(31:36):
of ways somebody might lay on top of you somebody might hold you down and you know basically you're supposed
to talk about all the stuff that you're upset about or bothers you or who's you're angry with and
it's exhausting not to mention it's really just something that is an invasion of your space and
doesn't really teach you how to process how you feel or anything like that and in the meantime I had

(31:59):
a sister come home the one who was in college and she was miserable about her life and so she took
that out on me and she was the one who she was definitely my mom's favorite and
everything just made me feel conspicuous and all you want to do is feel inconspicuous and so my
answer to that was I wanted a father I thought that everybody else had a father and the reason I'm

(32:23):
conspicuous is because I don't have one in the house and obviously in hindsight that wasn't the case
a lot of the kids I went to school with were had single parents but I wanted Danny Tanner to be my
father I loved full house and he was probably like the opposite of my father I wanted to have a father

(32:45):
and I also wanted to have a grandparent because I didn't have that you know when you're born to
parents that are that much older people are dead and my mom and her mom had a falling out before I
was even born and so I never knew her and you know I really thought that that was the answer and what
happened in time went on I went to Catholic school transferred to Catholic school at around 10 and

(33:10):
the church became a much bigger part of my life then so I was an altar server I was among the first
girls to do it in the church and the new age stuff kind of started to wane that that my mom had been
into and with that there was more of an interest in what I would call alternative Catholicism so
apparitions there was the people thought that the virgin Mary was appearing in Yugoslavia at the time

(33:34):
and that went on for like 10 years in Medjugorje and you know interesting some of that that's kind of
on the fringes of stuff and I was known for two things so I played the piano which I already kind of
mentioned and I'd done that most of my life and I was a theater kid so how I became a theater kid
is kind of interesting the friend of my mom's who was really interested in aliens she had a daughter

(34:00):
and her daughter wanted to go audition for Annie they were doing the musical Annie and they said
you want to come with me and I said sure I had no intention of doing it and I got the part in my mom's
friend's daughter didn't and I was an orphan in that I was July character I had a couple solos I
had a couple speaking parts I would go on to do that for four or five more years I liked it I was never

(34:25):
probably stellar at it like I never got the main part I was always kind of you know bit part or
something secondary and a few more years would go by and I kind of got tired of music theory
and I wasn't cute anymore I wasn't a little kid anymore so you don't get the same parts you can't
be a kid anymore and somewhere around 13 or so I kind of didn't know where I fit and what I took up at

(34:52):
that point was writing so somehow somebody asked me to be on the school paper and I said yeah
and I don't even know why I said you had to this day because I really wasn't interested and I would
become the editor by the end of that year and I started writing and started writing about stuff
and around that time my relationship with the church started to change interesting how stuff kind of

(35:14):
works like that it was the first of three times that I left the Catholic Church so this first time
was I my mom had to go to the earliest mass and you know what I'm talking about with that is I'm
looking at you because you know they had to drag us to 8 a.m. service right and a.m. and you know she

(35:35):
was wanted to walk it was hot and you know the church wasn't air conditioned and no we didn't have
air conditioning up there you can no then an air conditioning up there and you know I didn't want
to get up and it was the old people mass and everybody there was old and none of my friends went
to that mass they went to the other one and I didn't get up in time to go and so she said you

(36:00):
know I'm not going to keep having this argument with you if you don't want to go you don't go and
I said okay fine and that lasted like until I had to serve on the altar again
I'm gonna say she really AIS you with that yeah yeah she AIS which for those who don't know what
that's a reference to that's ass-in-seat which is from everybody loves Raymond so

(36:22):
so she AISed me and the next time was when I was in eighth grade and it was Christmas and we had
a encounter outside of the church with the priest who was a grouchy was an alcoholic and we all
walked that time my sister didn't go back to church and my mom didn't go back and we didn't go back

(36:42):
for about a year and a half you know so in that interim I graduated from eighth grade and there was
no more Catholic school because it only went to eighth grade and we didn't know what to do with me
and somehow I wound up in the local Christian school with abeca books which if anybody knows

(37:03):
being a Catholic in in there you know that didn't really wind up working out it seemed like I was
there a lot longer than I was it was only there about four months and we pulled me out and there was
a woman who went to the local parish who was you know like Catholic personified like her whole life
as a Catholic church and she was a homeschool mom and homeschooled all of her kids she had like four or

(37:30):
five kids and we went and we talked to her and we learned about homeschooling and I went from that
to homeschooling and the story of that was returning to the church kind of went to go on along with
that because when your homeschooled your isolated and I already didn't fit with nobody anywhere I was

(37:52):
going anyway and so that really didn't make that difference the thing I did get out of that was I learned
about peer leadership and that probably helped me even out but we didn't know what else to do with me
there really weren't a lot of options I could go to the public high school which we really didn't want
to do and there was another really small school that was off of another church there but there really

(38:13):
wasn't that many options and so we homeschooled and I pretty much did it all myself which is I don't
know if that's embarrassing or not or of me just playing with my dolls without playing with my dolls
I did my own lesson plans I graded my own papers I used the books myself and okay check once the

(38:34):
mic yet yeah it just it explains so much about you who you are as a person now because you you haven't
you really haven't changed since you were a kid like you're still doing all the things
that you were that you're doing now just on a smaller scale and it's funny how you keep saying all

(38:54):
this made you feel other but and I'm probably jumping ahead so sorry okay and you have to that but
it sounds like you found some other others to help it become us
okay that's gonna go into the title somehow but that's actually I mean you way ahead of the

(39:14):
start you're in the second part but I mean you know that's okay so in New York when you were homeschooled
you had to have standardized testing now you're listening to what I'm doing right I'm doing my own
lesson plans I'm basically self-taught and the funny part about that was I did terrible in math and
stuff when I was in school like in standard schooling and when I got at home I figured it all out

(39:37):
myself now I mean you know that sounds really really weird but I had no problem when
I'm standing there reading the steps in the book yes I was gonna say you keep saying all these
things were weird and like okay I'm refraining from calling you a nerd but anyway affectionately
it's hard but at the same time that's really cool that you were a kid and able to like teach

(40:00):
yourself basically fill in the gaps of the people couldn't right and so that was kind of cool
and what happened was you had to have testing every year because they had to be able to verify
what you were doing it's kind of I don't necessarily think it's bad and I say that because
we live in a in a world now where people are just kind of homeschooling to renegade because they

(40:24):
really don't want kids to be educated if you do homeschooling right it's a lot of work and what
happened was I was about 15 or so I went to go get the standardized testing and I still have the
test somewhere it's probably in the shed somewhere the schools came back PHS which meant post high school
which meant I was about 15 years old and I was testing at college level and my mom figured out

(40:51):
that she probably couldn't really keep up with that and that was probably fair and it was not
enough to challenge me with the homeschooling because basically I was my own little school I mean
you know pretty much and we had a couple of college town we had a couple of colleges but they were
really really big and I think you know that was concerned I was going to get swallowed up so

(41:11):
I didn't really know what I wanted to do with the time obviously I mean I still really don't know
what I want to do when I grow up but you know I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I grew up
and I was kind of around that time the way I would put it I was interested in communications I was
I wanted to be on the radio I grew up in an age where you know guys like Rush Limbaugh
pretty much saved AM radio and so I kind of wanted to be on radio you know that was a thing I

(41:35):
didn't know radio was going to die and we also had preachers you know on radio at that time that was
still a big thing and so my mom had a friend who came home and said Nina Nina you've got to hear
this woman you've got to hear this woman it was Joyce Meyer now it was Joyce Meyer before she was
Joyce Meyer and so this is like years and years and years ago and I kind of wanted to be on radio

(41:58):
like Joyce Meyer I mean I didn't like I say she wasn't Joyce Meyer yet but you know I wanted to kind of
do something like that I was Catholic I didn't know what that was and there was a local apostolic
church called House of Pentecost that no longer exists that was kind of collectives of house churches
and you know they met in a lot of different places over the years and they didn't wind up making it

(42:22):
much longer than my involvement with them I guess around 2004-2005 but they had a program called
Apostolic Preacher's College and if you know anything about apostolic churches and a lot of these
independent churches a lot of them have independent Bible colleges attached to them for their leaders
because they really don't want to send them to secular school and that type of thing and by some

(42:46):
coincidence maybe we would call it a God incidence they accepted me as a part of a homeschoolers
extension which a lot of Bible colleges do like I even think Indiana Bible College has that where
if you're homeschooling and you're at a certain level with it and you're testing at a certain level
you can start taking classes as a homeschooler through the program so I'm 15 and I'm going to Bible

(43:09):
College and there were a lot of challenges with that obviously I'm the youngest person everywhere I
go and it turned out to be kind of an interesting thing and it was a four year Bible college and I
started out with that and I would wind up finishing their entire program I would wind it with them
through doctorate and this obviously changed my relationship with Catholic Church again

(43:33):
and my relationship with them kept changing you see when we went back this last time I was like
damn determined to be the best Catholic ever and that just was not working out you know I'd try to
pray the rosary and I'd fall asleep and you know I mean I would I thought they should ordain women
to the priesthood and you know I mean I just was not good at it I mean you know I kept trying I would

(43:55):
say all right yes this is going to be the year for let I'm going to fast and abstain and
well you know I get hungry you know and you joke about fasting right you go your whole day not eating
but you're fasting and oh my God by nine in the morning you're dying and you know and so I was
just gonna try to do this stuff and I had done senior girl scouts I have Catholic at the time it was

(44:18):
the highest award you could get is Catholic Girl Scout and I mean all kinds of stuff I had to read
documents from Vatican II already was determined damn it and it just didn't happen and it just
wasn't working out and what happened was I was assigned to do a religion project and I had to
interview I think it was five people from different denominations and do a presentation I wound up

(44:40):
doing way more than that I wound up doing the project outside of the project because I found it so
interesting and that actually became my Faithful Conclusions Religious Encyclopedia many many years
later but I had to do that and I start with Judaism and I was kind of interested in Judaism at the time
I actually thought about becoming a Jew I mean the reason for that was because I love the idea of

(45:03):
chosen this I loved the idea that God chose or had a special relationship because when you're Catholic
you don't have a special relationship with anybody God hears you because you're part of this bigger
collective and there's this whole networking of people you have to go through like the saints and
even the angels and you know you're praying to all these beings and you know maybe if you're very good
one of them on that God and you'll get you know kind of your result but you kind of feel small and

(45:28):
you kind of feel invisible and you don't really I kind of would say that I loved God but kind of like
you love an extended relative you don't know very well you know like maybe you love your grandparents
that you only see once a year or you know you don't really know them know them and you know there was
no real kind of relationship with there and it intrigued me but something about it didn't really

(45:50):
feel right for me and then I considered Orthodox Christianity which was because it was old and I
I left remember I'm like about 17 years old at the time and the antiquity of that kind of took me in
the third choice which I know this one over here is going to laugh at me for actually you'll probably
all laugh was I considered Mormonism at one point now to you all hear the reason why are you just

(46:17):
going to judge me this more it's possible I'll still be judged but the foundations of it is
very mystical visions and people having visions and people saying that they know the church was
true for themselves and I didn't know very much about it when I looked about it it was a hell no
but and I'm probably going to do an episode or two on Mormonism for this season it was a hell no but

(46:42):
hell to the know but at the time it seemed really intriguing and you had the whole idea I'd had
in other gospel and a whole other revelation and so it was intriguing it didn't wind up becoming much
of anything but without belaboring the entire story I ran into a lot of trouble in the church
I wound up voluntarily excommunicating myself from the Catholic Church and within a couple of days

(47:07):
I'm still on this project for APC I go to a local charismatic church it was living water faith fellowship
in Oneonta to New York and I interviewed this woman her name was Roberta she has since gone
home to be with the Lord and Roberta had a daughter named Leanne and had a grand- you know

(47:28):
what are the odds of that right and had a granddaughter who had died who would have been about my
age had she lived and I was really impressed with her and they were really impressed with me you
know I'm sitting there and I'm wearing a blazer and I'm 17 right I'm wearing a skirt suit
and a blazer and I'm real professional and they were really really impressed with me and the church

(47:49):
was not they were not crazy they were not dancing around with snakes they were not a cult you know
all the stuff that we all kind of look at and she talked to me real plain and was real sensible and
I'm going what is this and she invited me to church and February 14th 1999 I was at that church

(48:15):
and I did the alter call and did the whole thing and I I accepted Jesus is my savior and I was
born again I say for the first time that my parents experiences with that and you know I guess you
could say I did the evangelical response and I never looked back I never wanted to be Catholic again

(48:36):
I never thought about it again no matter how difficult stuff got but that was kind of where at that
point in time I was but I still felt other and I'm thinking alright I'm going to be here now this
is going to be the place they're going to see something we're going to latch on but pretty much
what happened was no one knew what to do with me I had kind of aged out of their system and I really

(49:01):
probably in their mindset wasn't old enough to preach my mom picked up some new age stuff again and I
wound up actually the first message I ever preached was to a new age group that threw me out I was
about 18 years old I pretty much at that point in time had it set in my mind I had another year to go
I was going to go living in apartment in New York City and I was never ever ever going to get married

(49:24):
okay make one this thing okay I just love and then you look directly at your husband
that's you say that your second husband as you say that
and life life turned out to not be that simple so I want to move out but really didn't have any money

(49:46):
was still in school really was I was working but wasn't really able to move out on my own let
alone go live in New York City and pretend to be Friends I will say one thing from my history is my
friends were always very important to me I never really had very very many and you know the joke about
that was I was never ever going to get married I had not actually really dated much I had had one

(50:08):
boyfriend when I was like very young junior high age and then when we graduated we went to different
schools so that was the end of that story and I didn't date again until I didn't even go out on a
day again till I was like 18 or 19 years old and it was a disaster and I was I wasn't interested in it

(50:28):
and I mean the thing that I actually kind of remember most from that era is you know everybody
would rally around some guy and they don't be like oh he's so good looking at this or that and
they don't want me to join in and I wouldn't really know what the hell they were all talking about
I had even it's like I remember with my first boyfriend you know then my mother particular like
I was gonna answer her but you know my mother say no did I think he was cute and I said

(50:53):
I don't know because I really didn't think about him that way it wasn't what the relationship was about
and so I said I guess and I was accused of lying about that later on but you know I didn't once
again have any language and yes Nik has something to say as well so your response was basically like
you know he looked he had a face

(51:16):
that's not my first joke on her so that's it well it's not my first time when I was making a joke
but that's okay I mean that was just always kind of like they're okay you know I mean I
I really just didn't really process that up so I kept up with school and I you know
keept up with life and everybody keeps asking me when I'm gonna get married because we all know

(51:39):
that was the thing once you're out of school you're getting married and you know exactly what I'm
talking about and so what basically kind of happened with I grew a little bit of dissolution with
charismatic movement it was getting political this is around 2000 Y2k and they were trying to get
whoever the Republican must have been Bush Jr. they were trying to get Bush Jr. in office and

(52:02):
you know things were kind of starting to get who are you voting for and we didn't talk about a lot
of things in church at that time like I tell people people really didn't talk about being gay people
didn't really talk about being straight they were always people we wondered about I've sent you picture
sometimes of the people we wondered about but so we're starting to get confusing and I wanted a deeper

(52:24):
faith experience so I wound up running through a few of the local churches and once again really
didn't find anywhere and really didn't find it was a right fit and I actually wound up on an
interview at not house of pentacoste but the other I guess we could say it was the competing

(52:45):
one is church in the area the competing apostolic church in the area and they had a challenge
they would give anybody five thousand dollars if you could name somebody in the new testament who
was baptized in the father son holy spirit you had to find somebody who was not baptized in
in Jesus name so me being arrogant in apostolic bible college okay right you know I knew about baptism

(53:11):
in Jesus name me being arrogant I wouldn't if anybody could do this I could do it well I couldn't do it
and so that led me for the next several years to have kind of an interesting relationship with
the apostolic church I would be that will be baptized in Jesus name dated an apostolic sort of he
was kind of a nihilistic apostolic he was a weird guy but that's a lot of thing actually eventually my

(53:35):
first husband was apostolic so I actually went on married an apostolic used the king James Bible only
anyway I didn't see you yet okay I didn't know you yet the story yet anyway I married an
apostolic we'll talk about that in a little bit I didn't really wear pants very much I didn't really

(53:58):
cut my hair I did all didn't wear makeup didn't watch much TV king James only yes let us say your
husband is kind of giving you that Harpo, Who dis woman look and I would actually be ordained with
house of pentecost and would eventually start apostolic fellowship international which was the

(54:24):
church we had at the time and my ministry was revival ministries international and eventually I
merged the two and it became apostolic fellowship international ministries later in time and what
I guess I'm going to say here is that I tried really hard you know just like to try really hard to
be a good Catholic I tried really hard to be good apostolic and I used to watch a show that I don't

(54:49):
even know if it's on anymore on ewtn where they had people who converted from other things to Catholicism
and I was watching because I was going to get all the answers and was going to make sure nobody
went to that church right so one of them says you know you start about Catholics having traditions
and he says don't start telling me that other churches don't have traditions because we have churches

(55:11):
where you know they say you can't wear lipstick or you can't wear makeup or you can't cut your hair
and that's tradition too then I took my shoe off and I threw it at the tv because
I was so mad because he was right I was he was right and so I tried to be a good apostolic I tried

(55:36):
to follow all the rules I wasn't good at it and it kind of culminated with that you know we had
the church and we never had more than a handful of people come and like one of the last ones came
was we used ancient of days by Ron Kenoly one day the song and I look at you because he was really

(55:58):
really good African-American worship leader you would probably know the song if you heard it was
pretty popular and the guy didn't like black people and he's in church yes this is one of the members
of the church the guy who was coming to the church okay didn't like black people so well was he

(56:23):
coming to the church if he knew he was going to a black church well we weren't really a black church
at the time but we were using the song by the black worship leader by the artist so I will edit that
so that that all makes sense we were using the song and we were using a backing track because we
didn't you know have a choir or anything like that and he complained about doing a song by black

(56:45):
person and I said then we were not singing to you are we and he never came back he never came back
I'm very shortly thereafter other people would say they like the church and I mean you know what I'm
young and they're like in the preaching but they really just didn't stick around and there was

(57:08):
really no reason for it so I said maybe this just wasn't really for me maybe I shouldn't pastor maybe
I'm not cut out for this and I mean I'm not gonna lie I probably was too young for all that so in the
mean I'm gonna kind of had an encounter and we talked about being called and I'm not gonna get
into all the details of it because people are you know you know when you have an experience with God and

(57:28):
people can easily judge those and so I'm not gonna get in all to the details but I had this experience
with God and God called me a apostle and I'm gonna love it with you I didn't really know what one was
you know I was we didn't talk about them sometimes in apostolic churches like the founder of a church
they would call an apostle and I did find it that's more common among black churches for like maybe
the person who originated the church to be called that I really know what one was I mean you know what

(57:53):
Paul Peter who what you know somewhere and I went to the guy I was dating at the time who
was caught somewhere between apostolic and nilistic new age he was different and he was a part of
a movement where they were waiting for the next John the Baptist and based on some writing they

(58:16):
thought it was gonna be a woman and that he was gonna have that the person was gonna have red hair so
he somewhere got in his mind that it was gonna be me I never thought it was me I didn't want that
if for myself I'm trying not to be out there okay that's other under to the extreme women and
I'm to be them start right and he was the one he'd been baptized and he's the same three times to my

(58:41):
one so he thought he was better than me and I finally got to the point where I said to him well maybe
yours didn't take but mine took the first time and he flatly I told him I had this thing and I think
this is what God's calling me to do and he said to me you can't call yourself that not as flatly as I
just said that there he said pick another title and his argument was in apostolic churches they didn't

(59:06):
even know if they considered Paul an apostle that's an argument when you have nothing to do when
you're not watching TV and you're not reading any books except the King James version of the Bible
and I mean not not a book not an instruction manual not the phone book not anything but the King
James Version Bible you're gonna have a fight about that so I decided to call myself evangelist and in
all the years I called myself that nobody ever called me that to this day I don't think anybody

(59:29):
has ever called me that I called bishop I get called pastor I get called apostle I get called
you priest I've been called your holiness I said don't do that again I've been called all kinds of
stuff nobody has ever called me evangelist in all these years and that kind of is I guess you
know where we could say where stuff kind of started to change in that I had a newsletter I couldn't

(59:54):
give away in hindsight there was just too much where I lived there was just too much history it's like
I say we knew everybody's stuff people were uncomfortable with my mom nobody was gonna come but I
didn't really have the foresight or whatever that time to figure it out and in there I was finishing up
seminary and I did any thesis on sexual ethics and I'm gonna kind of leave that there and we can

(01:00:28):
pick this up with the next part of the testimony because at that particular point I kind of get into
the place where I am today but it kind of starts in there all the stuff kind of happened concurrently
and so we're gonna kind of leave that there and I'm gonna let everybody wonder until next time about
that and I thank you all for tuning in and we're gonna actually record part two in a few minutes

(01:00:54):
so we're gonna take a little break in record part two shortly but y'all stay tuned for the next time
because we're leaving off with my study on sexual ethics and where that kind of leads me down the line
and we thank you all for tuning in for listening to this episode of the podcast today and if you
would like the Religious Encyclopedia I mentioned earlier it is called Faithful Conclusions a Religious

(01:01:15):
Encyclopedia of belief and practice and it is written by Moi and yes I wrote the entire thing by
myself and it is based on the research and information of over about 25 years of work in religion
and belief and experience is therein and so that is Faithful Conclusions a Religious Encyclopedia
of belief and practice go and get it today on amazon.com or ever books or so look me up Dr. Lee ann

(01:01:40):
B. Marino and all of my titles will come up though probably be some more released after this episode
airs so definitely go and check that out today also check out my pathos column leadership on fire at
patheos.com/blogs/leadershiponfire that's patheos.com/blogs/leadershiponfire devoted to all things leadership

(01:02:02):
so if you're in leadership interested about it want to know more about it that's it connect with me
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(01:02:23):
a conversation let's hear about what you want to talk about give me feedback let's have that
conversation today also if you're more interested in learning more about the world of counterculture
Christianity feel free to visit my website at kingdompowernow.org that's kingdompowernow.org also if
you are interested in seminary that is entirely affordable because it is offering based check out

(01:02:47):
apostolic covenant theological seminary at acts176.org that's acts176.org and if you are interested in
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that check us out at welcomeinthisplace.org that's welcomeinthisplace.org and if you have a
question that's not answered on the site feel free to reach out we'll be happy to get back to you

(01:03:09):
and this is Apostle Dr. Lee Ann Marino reminding you stay tuned for part two because our testimonies
matter it says that we overcome by the blood of the lamb and our testimony so what God has done
for me he can do for you until next time be blessed. Thank you for joining us on Kingdom Now I

(01:03:29):
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(01:03:51):
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until next time this is dr. Lee Ann Marino reminding you that the kingdom of God is within

(01:04:17):
you and that means the kingdom is now.