Godless (6 page)
One December I took about 20 college students all the way down to Mexico City, traveling by Tres Estrellas de Oro buses, to spread the “good news” that we were sure few had heard. Four of us young men formed a gospel quartet, and we used to trade off preaching. It was before one of our meetings, as we were preparing and praying, when Gary, who sang bass in the quartet and whose turn it was to preach that night, whispered to us that he had lost his voice and was unable to sing or talk. We gathered in a circle around Gary and laid our hands on his shoulders, and I prayed out loud for God to heal Gary’s voice, ending with the words: “Gary, in the name of Jesus, be healed!”
Gary looked up and yelled, “Praise the Lord!” in a strong voice. He went on to sing and preach that night. If experiences like that don’t cement your faith, nothing will! Gary is the same fellow who threw away his Coke-bottle-thick eyeglasses one day in Mexico, convinced that God had healed his vision. A few weeks later he stumbled into an optometrist’s office in California to buy a new pair. (He also wrote that song, “It’s a Happy Day,” which was a popular Christian chorus for a few years.)
I was in college, and getting decent grades, but I wasn’t sure why I was there, when there was so little time left to live on this late, great planet. I was dismissive of ordination or degrees. I figured I didn’t need a piece of paper bestowed by humans to tell me what I already knew: that God personally called me to the ministry of the Gospel. After four full-time years, I fell nine elective units short of graduation and never went back to finish. (In 1988, Azusa Pacific University allowed me to transfer some creative writing units from the University of Wisconsin and mailed me my degree in religion.)
I like languages and enjoyed the two years of New Testament (koine) Greek at Azusa, which I still find useful. It added a certain credibility to my sermons to be able to throw in an occasional word from the original text of the New Testament (so I thought), though I don’t think the listeners cared. “Paul called himself a slave of Christ,” I would preach, “and the word ‘slave’ in the Greek is
doulos
.” I would announce this with solemn authority, hesitating slightly before the final word. No one asked why it was important to point that out. They must have thought I was on to something.
doulos
.” I would announce this with solemn authority, hesitating slightly before the final word. No one asked why it was important to point that out. They must have thought I was on to something.
At Azusa Pacific I met a singer (again paralleling my dad’s life). The world had not ended yet, so Carol and I were married in 1970, when I was barely 21. We have four children: Becky (1973), Kristi (1975), Andrea (1977), and Danny (1979).
Over time, I was an associate pastor in three churches in California. My first full-time post was in 1972, right out of college, at Arcadia Friends Church in my wife’s denomination. (They didn’t care that I didn’t have a degree or wasn’t formally ordained.) The Friends are the modern Quakers, and in California they are more evangelical than their eastern forbears. (Richard Nixon was from that denomination.) I directed the choir, often preached from the pulpit and led Wednesday night bible study and worship. Joy Berry, who later became a well-known children’s author, was minister of Children’s Education at the same church at that time and also ran the Christian Day School there. (As a pleasant coincidence, Joy later came out as an agnostic, broke her ties with Christian publishers and today we remain freethinking friends with similar stories. More than 80 million copies of Joy’s books have sold worldwide.)
The Quaker/Friends tradition abjures the sacraments (except for marriage, I think, which they probably don’t call a sacrament), because of the Protestant break with the formalism of Catholicism. Worship is supposed to be directly with God, with no intermediaries, saints, priests or rituals. I remember how absurd this became one Wednesday evening during a social potluck, when Pastor Ted Cummins made a few remarks before praying for the meal and happened to mention some of the words from the Last Supper in the bible. A few days later he was called to task by the denomination for conducting the sacrament of Communion.
We are all heretics!
I have mixed memories of Pastor Ted, a genuinely friendly, gentle and approachable person with a smart and beautiful wife and four darling children. He was not a hell-fire preacher. He was a friend and a peer. One evening I happened to enter the sanctuary to find Ted alone, kneeling in prayer at the front pew. After a moment, with no words said, I walked over and placed my hand on his shoulder and silently prayed for God to bless him. He looked up and smiled. The following Sunday he told me that that was the first and only time during his entire Christian life that he ever felt anything. He said he had always taken things by faith alone, but until that moment he had never known that anyone could feel the spirit of God. Years later, an alcoholic, he left the ministry and went into seclusion, ruining his family and his life. He died too young in 2006, and although his final tragic years clouded the memorial, no one forgot the truly loving, vibrant man he used to be.
After more than a year at Arcadia Friends Church, I was “called by God” to move to Glengrove Assembly of God, in La Puente, California. The Assemblies of God are Pentecostal, more in line with my own Charismatic upbringing than my wife’s calmer Quaker heritage. I’m glad I worked at that church for a year and a half. It gave me a direct experience of that animated slice of Christian life. There was a lot of speaking in tongues, faith healing, fiery hanky-waving sermons by sweaty evangelists, women on their backs on the floor with arms raised in tearful prayer, hand-clapping gospel choirs and “Jesus movement” music. I even saw a few exorcisms, or “casting out of spirits” as we called it. I took the youth choir on tour around California and Mexico. I preached from the main pulpit at least once a month and led bible study and worked with the youth minister on evangelical outreach.
Directing the adult choir was more of a ministry than an art, since there was only a handful of truly good singers. I had to compensate for the quality of talent with an increase in rhythm and volume—we were worshipping after all, not performing at Carnegie Hall. One evening, as I was rehearsing the adult choir, I stumbled into one of those horribly embarrassing moments I wish I could forget. (So why am I telling it here?) In an amateur church choir you are apt to have members who are not very confident, sometimes waiting to join in after they hear everyone else start to sing, in order not to make a mistake. But as a director, I wanted the first note to be as strong as the rest of the line, with a solid, loud entrance. We were rehearsing “Happiness Is the Lord” but the first note was sounding weak and tentative because some of the men were not coming in with everyone else. Exasperated, I turned and said, “The first word of the song is ‘happiness,’ but I don’t hear the first syllable. You tenors are coming in with ‘piness’,” I emphasized loudly, not realizing what word I had just pronounced. Two older ladies gasped and others turned their red faces away, trying not to look shocked or laugh. When it dawned on me what had just happened, seeing the glaring looks from the men in the back row, I turned around and faced the sanctuary, making things worse. Today I would chuckle with everyone else at such a hilarious moment, but this was church, God’s work, a holy endeavor that was not to be sullied by profanity. My wife later told me that some of the women were having a good laugh behind my back, and I eventually took it in stride, although I did consider it odd for church members to be making fun of a “man of god.” (At least I did not call two bears from the forest to tear them to pieces. See II Kings 2:23-24.)
The people at Glengrove Assembly were sincere and sweet, but I quickly found them to be a bit noisy for my tastes. My wife must have been even more uncomfortable, coming from a non-Pentecostal background.
So I got another “call from God,” this time to the Standard Christian Center in the central California town of Standard, a former logging town near Sonora in the Gold Rush mother lode foothills north of Yosemite. (It’s interesting how God always seemed to “call” me exactly where I wanted to go.) That congregation was much more in line with the Charismatic Movement that I had experienced at Anaheim Christian Center where I was first called to the ministry. And what’s more, it was a renegade full-gospel split from the Christian Church (in the Disciples of Christ tradition that also spawned the Church of Christ), the same denomination that my dad grew up in and which founded Pacific Bible College where Dad had studied to be a minister. (Looking back on all the “coincidences” with my dad, I wonder how much free will I really have.) The motto of the Disciples tradition was, “Where the bible speaks, we speak; where the bible is silent, we are silent.” Of course, it is impossible to reconcile that principle with the Charismatic Movement, but we tried.
When I submitted my letter of resignation to Glengrove Assembly, the pastoral staff and deacons were not convinced that I had truly received a “call from God” to move on. We got along well and it seemed to them that I was abandoning a well-developed ministry. Dave Gustaveson, the youth pastor and a good friend, told me he had struggled in prayer to know if my decision was truly right for me and the church. One day in the men’s room, while he was “talking with the Lord,” he noticed the word “Standard” on the urinal. He took it as a sign and announced to the congregation that it was truly God’s will for me to move on to Standard, California, with their blessing. (Thanks, Dave.)
The pay at Standard Christian Center was not great, but it provided a minimum of financial security for a growing family. We lived in a small mobile home in the oak-dotted foothills south of Sonora. Although I did a lot of preaching to the congregation, filling in for the main pastor, calling on members, directing the choir, running Wednesday night bible study, organizing activities for the youth group and helping out in the church-affiliated Christian bookstore, I never was the senior pastor, and never wanted to be. I always considered myself first an evangelist. After a few years of working in local churches, directing choirs with admirable dedication and hopeful musicianship, counseling people with problems that I hadn’t the faintest idea how to approach (except with bible verses and prayer), and working on sermons that I fancied were insightful but bounced off the listeners like rain off an umbrella, I found myself getting restless to hit the road again. I could only stick it out in each church for about 18 months before feeling the “call” to move on.
I felt bad leaving the Standard Christian Center. The people were gracious and we had a good program going there, but it was a dead end for my evangelistic calling. I asked church leaders if they would consider being my home base, sending me out as their cross-country “missionary” to the world. They reluctantly agreed, but not before the main pastor, Bob Wright, convinced me that for my ministry to be more credible I would have to become ordained. I respected Bob and yielded to the pressure to make it official. One Sunday morning in May 1975, the church held an ordination service, directed by Pastor Bob, in which I was asked questions about my calling, the bible and theology, and then was unanimously ordained. The deacons and pastors stood around me in a circle, placing their hands on my shoulders and head, invoking God’s blessing on my ministry. They presented me with an ordination certificate, which no one ever asked to see during all my years of ministry (though I did have to show it to the State of California in 2002 when, as an atheist “minister,” I performed a secular wedding for a nonreligious couple).
For the next eight years my wife and I lived “by faith” as touring musical evangelists, still expecting Jesus to return at any moment, “like a thief in the night.” The expression “living by faith” is more than a profession of belief. It is an adventure and a risk, putting your life in the hands of God. Neither of us had a job. We had no regular income, no health insurance, and of course no retirement plan since we would never need it in the short time remaining before the rapture. All our belongings were in storage for the first year and we lived on the road, accepting housing from church members, friends and relatives. When Carol was pregnant with our second child, we booked a national evangelistic itinerary, hopped in our yellow Chevy Nova with about $100 cash, and bounced around the country from church to church, not charging for the ministry but accepting freewill “love offerings,” trusting that we would get enough money from each service to allow us to make it to the next. I remember many hopeful, prayerful moments sitting in the car after the service, opening the envelope to see if there was enough cash to make it to the next church. We normally got between $50 and $100 per meeting, sometimes nothing at all. It was easy to book Sunday meetings; it was difficult to keep busy the rest of the week.
In 1976, when my wife was pregnant with our third child, we rented a small house in Pomona, and she decided to stay home from the extended trips, tending to the family, joining me mainly when I ministered in the Southern California area. When that house was carted away in 1977 to make room for a Mormon temple, we moved to a house in Ontario, California.
Our ministry was a mix of music and message. We sang duets and solos, and I preached the gospel, varying the message to relate to each audience as I felt prompted by the Holy Spirit. It was all bible-based, stressing the importance of obedience to God and the joy of possessing a personal relationship with Jesus, and of course, the need to be a faithful servant who is ready and waiting for Christ’s return. We were sincere. I indeed felt that I was talking with God and that Jesus was my Lord and friend. During service, people would often come down to the altar to confess their sins and accept Jesus as their savior. It seemed so right to be doing something so powerful. My work and music was constantly affirmed by the testimony of others and by the testimony of the Spirit, or what I thought and sincerely believed was the Spirit giving witness to my heart and mind. I had no doubts that it was all real.
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