Cracks

My zeal elevated me to leadership roles. I became the president of our Christian college group. The summer of my sophomore year a big church in central Washington hired me to be their summer youth intern. 

I discovered this meant I was the slave of the pastor’s wife. The first day, she handed me a big stack of names—she called them “prospects”—and told me to call every one of them and invite them to church. I started at “A.” A week later, I arrived at “Z.” As far as I know, no one came because of these calls but the pastor’s wife packed the summer so full of fun that kids came out of the woodwork. We went on scavenger hunts and jumped on trampolines and had water balloon fights. We even put on a musical. I tried to squeeze messages about God in the cracks but no one was listening. 

This was the first time I got a glimpse behind scenes of a church. The pastor’s son was in his 20’s and loved to make crude sexual remarks and watch me squirm. People confided in me, telling me why they didn’t like the pastor. Some didn’t like his preaching. Some thought he was too rigid. His wife was a never-ending stream of complaints that no one cared enough about the church or was committed to the youth.
I made a special connection with a kid named John. He started showing up during the day to follow me around. In the mornings, I got up early to go jogging with him.

One Saturday, we went waterskiing on the Snake River. When it was time to go home, we couldn’t find John. The last time anyone could remember seeing him was when the kids were playing on the dock. John had jumped off to swim for shore. We feared the worst. I dove to the bottom and swam around, searching with my hands in the dark, murky water.

We called 9-1-1. The police sent a dive team which began to search systematically between the dock and the shore. About halfway out, a hand shot up. “Got him.” They pulled John’s lifeless body onto the bank. He was long past any hope of resuscitation. A young couple from a charismatic church approached me and offered to lay hands on John to raise him from the dead. 

“Let us do it,” they pleaded. “Think of the glory God will get.”

I wanted to believe them. What could be the harm? I looked at the anguished faces of John’s parents and decided they didn’t need any more drama. I thanked them for the offer and sent them on their way. For a long time I wondered if I had done the right thing. Did I lack faith?
The rest of the summer, I lived in the basement of John’s house with his parents and two siblings. Maybe the hope was that we would comfort each other. Maybe the idea was to avoid a lawsuit. In any case, I had a front row seat to pain beyond description. 

My first taste of church had left me with a lot of questions. I was eager to go to seminary and get some answers. After college, and a year playing horn in the Boise Philharmonic, I moved to Mill Valley, California to attend Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. 

I was surprised when my Old Testament professor explained that the Bible contained two different stories of creation, that Adam and Eve were not real people, that the Old Testament was not written by Moses, and that there were conflicting accounts of Israel’s history. All I was getting from seminary was more questions.

I attended church in downtown San Francisco where I was put in charge of the singles group. A man named Ray took special interest in me. I can still see his big brown eyes, staring at me in adoration. He gave me expensive gifts. One night, he invited me to his apartment for dinner. I knocked on his door nervously. He invited me in and sat me at a candlelit table where we ate a delicious meal. The longing in his eyes was unmistakable. I excused myself as quickly as possible.

This was the 1980’s in a Southern Baptist church. Not only did Ray make me uncomfortable. Homosexuality was considered a serious sin. I asked the pastor to meet with us. Ray slumped in his chair, looking hurt and misunderstood. The pastor didn’t have a single word of caution for him. I wondered if I was losing my mind. Had I misread the situation? Thankfully, I met my wife during this time. I paraded her around on my arm to make my sexual preference clear. 

My roommate, was starting a church among Laotian refugees in Santa Rosa. He invited me to work with the youth. I was broke and there was a small stipend so I gladly took the opportunity. He had a great sense of humor and was fun to work with. Around the dorm he loved to call me “his youth guy.” 

The pastor of the English congregation in Santa Rosa was more interested in his Christian rock band than his elderly congregation. His children regularly burst into the fellowship hall screaming bloody murder at each other. They used the church kitchen to prepare their meals and left the sink piled high with dirty dishes. The overflowing garbage was crawling with ants. 

Finally, in 1989, I graduated. I had a seminary degree and a wife. I had checked all the boxes. I waited for job offers to start pouring in. Crickets. For lack of something better to do, I enrolled in the Ph.D. program. Julie pursued her undergraduate degree at Dominican University where, for the first time in her life, she enjoyed education.

Two of my professors were starting a new church in Julie’s hometown of Novato. They asked us to lead the youth group there. The professors were charismatic and knew what they were doing. It was well organized and fun. 

We took the kids to a youth convention in Fresno where Josh McDowell was the featured speaker. The theme was chastity before marriage. McDowell blasted the kids with horrors of STDs and harrowing tales of emotional scars left by premarital sex. All the talk about sex had the opposite effect from what he intended, at least in our group. During one of the breaks, a couple snuck off and slept together. So much for scare tactics.

Finally, a tiny church in Yuba City, California invited me to be their pastor. I was elated. This is what I had worked my whole life for. Never mind that it was a group of rebels who had left other churches to start their own church, or that they met in a tiny rented cinderblock building, or that they couldn’t even pay me $2000 a month. Never mind that I was halfway through my Ph.D., or that I would uproot my wife from a setting where she was thriving. God was calling. That was all that mattered. My experience in churches and seminary education had shaken my faith but if I could just get a chance to be a pastor, I felt sure I could revive it. There was still a flame there. 

We dragged a U-Haul to our two-bedroom apartment in Yuba City. People might scoff at this inglorious beginning. I wasn’t worried. God would come through. It was time to lift the horn to my lips and blow.