Here's my rant

I attended a concert last night for a friend with a bunch of people from my church small group. It was highly enjoyable until after the concert one of the pastors of my church, Pastor X, came up to me and put his arm around me and asked me, speaking of singing, what God was telling me about the worship team. I tried to answer him, to tell him that I was so busy with other ministries and with trying to fit in some time for myself around it that it came down to 2 ministries: the youth group or the worship team, and I decided that working with people in ways that might help them was more important than being just another voice. Even if I do have a good voice. He wouldn’t let me answer him, just said something like, “Well, I don’t need to know what God is telling you, I just know what I’d be telling you if I were Him.” Which is such a horrible thing to say. When someone won’t let you give them your reasoning and just says, “well, what is God telling you?” then there’s this implication that if you knew what God was saying to you, you’d do whatever they think you should do. Since earlier that day I had been told by someone else what “God wants me to do” I was getting a little sick of everyone ELSE apparently having better knowledge than I about what God wants me to do with MY life. Then Jeremiah, knowing how upset I can get when people try to pressure me to do things with my voice, or only talk to me when they are talking to me about my voice (So hurtful. Imagine people NEVER taking the time to talk to you until after they hear you sing and then they come up and are all chatty. It’s like they’re saying “well, I guess you have enough value for me to talk to you now that I’ve heard you sing” Sorry, being valued only for my voice is not my idea of someone who actually cares about me.) decided to try to rescue me. He was my gallant knight and jokingly flourished a non-existent sword and cried, “Unhand my lady!” Good try to get the conversation stalled so I could escape, but then Pastor X said, “and who made her your lady?” and Jeremiah replied, “uh...God” and Pastor X stated, “Not yet, He hasn’t” and then started asking us a barrage of questions about who we’re talking to. Jeremiah was a tad confused, “what do you mean, who are we talking to?” I know the lingo though. Basically Pastor X was asking us whether we have a courtship, not a dating relationship. To which Jeremiah replied that he didn’t like to argue semantics (often the difference between dating and courtship) but then Pastor X started asking us who we speak to about our relationship, who is our authority, who are we accountable to etc. And it really started to irritate me. I know he’s concerned because I guess it’s easy for couples to be all hormonal and do inappropriate things physically before they’re married, but my parents have not questioned the way we’re handling the relationship, and I talk to them about it, I talk to various friends, including a little with another pastor at my church and his wife and Jeremiah talks to his dad and to his cousin (and we are usually with some member of his family or hanging out at his parents home with them there), but I felt condemned because we don’t have some specific, formalized system where we tell someone every single little detail about our romance, with that said person dispensing advice on what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong. And that pissed me off, because my church really isn’t legalistic usually and all of a sudden here I am feeling condemned for not doing something that is extra-biblical in the first place. And it was not by the pastor who has opened up his home to me and treats me like a second daughter and takes the time to get to know Jeremiah (who I would accept advice and constructive criticism from), but by someone who never takes the time to talk to me except to pressure me to join the worship team and usually ignores me. This is extremely aggravating to me. I probably do have an “authority problem” in that I don’t automatically accept someone as my authority. They have to earn enough respect from me to have me listen to advice they decide to give me without me specifically asking for it. That is a lot of respect usually for me to give someone, but there are people who have earned that much. It’s not like I only listen to myself. Also, I would not mind having a formalized system of one person Jeremiah and I go to advice etc for, in fact, I think it can be a very good decision for couples to make. However, I don’t like the implication that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to have a good, God-honoring relationship without that set system. I also don’t like it being implied that we are making some huge relationship mistake by not having that system in place that may be fatal to the health of our relationship and we’re just going to go out and screw like rabbits and make bad relationship decisions because without some specific person in control we can’t possibly make the correct choices with respect to our relationship or have enough self-control to stay sexually pure until marriage. It’s insulting, not only to us but to also to our parents who have not communicated with us any concern over how we are going about our relationship.