My Life, in a Nutshell
(I suppose that makes me some kind of a nut)
A Short Autobiography by
Steve Gregg
I don’t
know whether it seems egotistical for a man to write autobiographically, but I
have always thought that the unusual providence of God in my life makes a
rather interesting, and, I hope, edifying tale worth telling. There is truly no part of the story which,
rightly reported, would bring any credit to the reporter. I see, in my own
history, a somewhat typical (if not exceptional) number of human failures and
mistakes, accompanied by an unaccountably large measure of divine mercy. My
testimony might be instructive or even inspiring to that small segment of the
population whose curiosity has already been piqued by their prior familiarity with
some aspect of my life or teaching, and who have every right to inquire into
the character and background of any man who seeks to speak to God’s people
about God’s things.
I wish to
preface my story with one disclaimer.
This is, of necessity, a selective
narration. If I have seemed to record
primarily those events that flatter me, I have not intentionally done so. There
have been many occasions of failure and defects in my Christian life over the
past four decades that I have not cataloged here. I do not wish to conceal them, but I do not
consider them to be particularly edifying to recount. They do not really describe the general or
chosen course of my life, but rather illustrate the danger of assuming that a
Christian’s general success in walking with Christ somehow renders him
invulnerable to snares and to stumbling. I have actually written elsewhere of
most of my embarrassing blunders. Here I
would prefer to report the more characteristic and providential features of the
first 55 years of my life. Let the
reader not think that these are the only things, or the worst things, that I
could report.
I was
born in Southern California, in 1953, and had the incalculable advantage of
being raised by parents who were true Christians, and who succeeded in
imparting their faith to their three children. I have an older sister and a
younger brother. All three of us have attempted to serve the Lord from our
early years, and all three are doing so today.
When I was
two years old, I was found to be dying of starvation. Though I ate adequately,
my body could not absorb nutrients. I had a bloated belly and scrawny limbs,
like the starving children in the World Vision fund-raising ads. I was initially diagnosed, twice, as having cystic fibrosis, a deadly and incurable
childhood disease, and was expected to die.
My parents and many friends and relatives turned desperately to God,
praying for a miraculous healing. My father (as he told me many years later) prayed
at that time that I would not only be healed, but that I also would be called
to the ministry. Interestingly, a later diagnosis indicated that I did not have
cystic fibrosis, but a less-serious
and treatable condition that has similar symptoms, called celiac. This is a congenital
intolerance for gluten (a substance found in wheat, barley, rye and oats).
Accordingly, my diet was altered and I was restored to normal health. By the
grace of God, I have now enjoyed excellent health, with never a serious
sickness, a broken bone, nor even a cavity in my teeth, for over 50 years,
since then. Interestingly, I remained celiac-symptom-free, even when, on
occasion, I carelessly ate food containing gluten (which people with celiac
should never do). More recently, a doctor friend of mine, upon hearing that I
was asymptomatic, suggested that I be tested again for celiac. I did so, and
the results of the test were negative. Since celiac is a genetic condition, and
therefore not curable, this recent diagnosis adds to the mystery of my
childhood diagnosis. Was I misdiagnosed,
or was I miraculously cured? I may never
know.
Sometime
before I reached age four, I had a strange experience in my bedroom, which, as
I learned a dozen years later, my older sister also witnessed. On this occasion, I lay sleeping, facing the
wall and I heard a male voice speaking my name.
Without looking around, and thinking it to be my father, I said, “What,
Dad?” There was no answer, and out of
curiosity, I looked to see who had spoken. No one was there. I returned to my original position to go back
to sleep, but heard my name called again. I answered as before and turned to
see no one there. This also happened a third time. Seeing no one (and receiving no further
communication) I simply went to sleep.
The experience was just peculiar enough that I remembered it distinctly
well into my adult life. On a certain
day, when I was 17, my sister and I were recalling memories of our childhood. I
had never mentioned this experience to her, but out of nowhere she mentioned that
she remembered a night, when we were little, when she saw a man in white
standing by my bed across the room (we shared a bedroom). As I now recall, she said that she heard me
respond three times, saying, “What, Dad?” but she did not hear any words from
the person. After the third time (she recalled), the man walked out of our
darkened room into the lighted hallway, and it seemed to her that the light of
the hall could be seen right through his body and clothing as he left. Upon hearing this remarkable description, I
told her my memories of the event, and we concluded, naturally enough, that we
had both recalled the same incident.
What does it mean? I haven’t a
clue. It may have been the Lord
visiting, in response to my parents’ prayers, to heal my cystic fibrosis (if I
ever really had that disease), or my celiac (if I ever really had that disease)
or to call me into ministry. I may never know the significance of the event in
this lifetime. However, from my childhood
on, I remember myself as having an innate reverence for the Lord and a desire
to learn the Bible. I responded to my first “altar-call” at age four, and went
forward a second time, at age ten, at the Billy Graham Crusade in Los
Angeles. As a pre-teen, I had a desire
to read through the whole Bible, and
started doing so several times, but did not have the self-discipline ever to
finish.
When I was
a freshman in high school, I had already concluded that I wanted to preach the
gospel. Nothing else seemed more important to me than helping to direct lost
people toward heaven. On occasion, I went “witnessing” door-to-door, and
evangelized friends at my high school. I was chosen by my peers to lead the
youth group at the Baptist church that we attended. I took speech classes so
that I would have the opportunity to preach sermons to the others in the class.
I had given a speech in junior high against evolution, and took every
opportunity I could to improve my information and to give that talk wherever I
had an opening given to me. My hero was Billy Graham, and I occasionally wrote
sermons that were direct plagiarisms comprised of extracts from his sermons. At
age fifteen, I served as a counselor at the Billy Graham Crusade in Anaheim.
If I have
given the impression that I was a spiritual young man during these years, the
impression is partially misleading. I
did, in fact, care for the things of God and for the salvation of souls, and I
knew that nothing could be more important than these things. I desired more
reality in my Christian life. However, in our church, I had never really
understood discipleship. My parents were good people, and sincere Christians,
but no one had ever discipled them either.
I had no grasp of what being a disciple of Jesus in everyday life should
entail. The heroes in my life were
preachers and missionaries, but I was myself very carnally minded. I had no actual, compelling vision of the
kingdom of God (as I later came to understand it). My loyalty to Christ was sincere enough, but
my grasp of what it meant to really know and follow Him was fragmentary—and
shallow—in the extreme! I was
providentially kept from falling into the standard sins of the teens of the
sixties and seventies—not by any innate virtue of my own—but by the grace of
God (and by the fact that, as a card-carrying
“nerd,” I was not at all attractive to the hip people whose carnality
and popularity I secretly envied).
When I was
sixteen (1970), my family moved from Covina, California, to Orange County. I had lived in Covina as long as I could
remember, and I resisted moving away from my friends and familiar surroundings.
My sister had begun playing in an all-girl, secular rock band (we had never
heard of Christian rock at that time), and hanging-out with guys who were
long-haired musicians, just as the hippie movement was at its height. I was attracted to the hippie “look”, and was
intrigued by the idea that I might be able to conceal my nerdiness by such a
simple expedient as merely growing long hair!
To my chagrin, my father would not let me grow my hair long while living
at home. By the time we moved to Orange,
I was starting to feel a little bit of rebellion against my parents. In retrospect, I think I was probably in
danger of seriously compromising my Christian life, had not the Lord, in His
sovereign mercy, laid hold of me and thrust me into the midst of a movement
that marked me for life.
In 1970,
the Jesus Movement was in its early
stages in Orange County, where it would soon receive international attention in
the secular media. While living in
Covina, some 40 miles away from Orange County, we had not yet heard a thing
about that growing, young revival, which was centered at Calvary Chapel of
Costa Mesa. On my first day at Orange High School, I noticed another new guy at
the school named Michael Moore (no, not that
Michael Moore), because, as new students, we had not yet suited-up for P.E.
class, and we both wore wire-rimmed glasses (a rather rare style at the time,
usually associated with hippies). Michael and I eventually became close
friends—especially after I found out that he was a Christian. He invited me to
go with him to his church, which happened to be Calvary Chapel. The original draw was that he and I were
guitar-players seeking to start a band, and he told me there were lots of bands
that played at his church, and that we might be able to play there too. Being new to the area, this seemed to be a
good way to meet new Christian friends, so I agreed to go with him on a
Wednesday night.
I will always remember my first visit to
Calvary Chapel with fondness and awe.
This small church building was quite off the beaten path, surrounded by
many acres of farm land (the area is now all condominiums and shopping
malls). It was a rainy night, and the
church parking lot was not yet paved, so it was just a muddy mess, with cars
angled into undefined parking spaces. Having sometimes attended the not-so-full
midweek prayer meetings at our former Baptist church, I was surprised to see so
many cars out on a Wednesday night, in such inclement weather (I soon learned
that the situation at Calvary Chapel was the same six nights a week).
The church
was designed to accommodate, I would think, about 300 people, though perhaps
twice that number had somehow gotten crammed inside out of the rain. I think that a person looking down from the
rafters at the gathering below would not have been able to identify the color
of the carpeting because of the multitude of hippie-looking bodies sitting
wherever it was physically possible to shoe-horn themselves into what seemed
like a sea of humanity. The platform at
the front was also covered with kids, and the most captivating music I had ever
heard was being played by a band called “Love Song” with their acoustic guitars
and four-part vocals. Upon hearing this
amazing and anointed band, one of my first thoughts was, “If I had any
delusions about my playing music on that platform, I can now see that the
standards are much too high for me even to consider it” (as it turned out, the
professional standards did not turn out to be consistently high, so I later was
able to minister in music from that platform).
Entering
the church, I was fortunate to find a spot to sit on the carpet in the foyer,
amid perhaps fifty others. I happened to
sit by a guy, who, like everyone else, looked like a hippie. He had a radiant smile and said, “Hey, Bro!
Do you know the Lord?” I said,
“Yes.” He said, “Cool! How long have you
known Jesus?” I said, “Oh, about twelve
years, I guess.” “WOW!” he marveled. “I
just met the Lord two weeks ago!” And he
told me of how God has delivered him from his drug habits and had used him to
lead his parents to Christ.
Now I was the one marveling! From his enthusiasm, it seemed to me that he
had more of the reality of God in his life than I even knew was available to a
Christian. Then he asked a question that
perplexed me. He said, “What has the Lord
been doing in your life?” I will never forget this, because of the stunned
feeling I had when he asked. I felt
like a deer in the headlights. I could tell that he would have been able
to give a very good answer to that same question, had I asked him, but to me,
the question was incomprehensible. If he
had spoken the sentence in tongues (and I imagine he could have done so!) it
could not have been more unintelligible to me at my then state of spiritual
awareness. It had never occurred to me that the Lord works here and now in my
life. I had only been taught that, if a
person believes in Christ, he will go to heaven when he dies. The concept of
divine providence and intervention in daily affairs was completely foreign to
me. Yet I knew that it was an important
question, and it led me to realize that I had come to know a great deal about God, without really knowing Him
very well. I knew God, mostly (to use a
phrase from Tozer) “by hearsay.”
In my
youth, I had always been drawn to the occasional “revival weeks” at the Baptist
church, and had always been delighted when a few people would respond to the
“altar call.” However, nothing had
prepared me for what I was to see this night.
I heard a hippie preacher (Lonnie Frisbee), who was probably 90%
illiterate, give as simple and compelling a gospel message as I had ever heard,
and was thrilled to witness at least fifty people respond to the call to “come
forward.” I later learned that this
happened every night at Calvary Chapel, and that approximately a thousand young
converts were being baptized every month.
Being exposed to this revival made me aware of my own spiritual
dissatisfaction and I felt an inner drive to know God better, like these people
knew Him. So I returned to Calvary Chapel every night of the week for two
years.
After a
few visits to Calvary, I noticed a recurring theme in conversations with these
people. They often spoke of something
called “the baptism in the Holy Spirit”—a term with which I was not
familiar. I began to research the
subject at home in my Bible, discussing it with my sister and my parents, who
also had begun attending Calvary Chapel regularly. One night I went to church determined to
receive the baptism in the Spirit. After
the service, the same hippie who had been preaching the night of my first
visit, laid hands on my head and prayed for me to be filled with the
Spirit. I was initially disappointed.
From my studies in the Scripture, I had expected to speak in tongues, but I did
not. I almost concluded that the attempt
was a failure, but then my good ol’ Baptist upbringing (“God said it; I believe
it; that settles it!”) kicked in. I
thought, “God said that He would give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him
(Luke 11:13). I have asked. Therefore, I believe that He has given what He
promised.”
Even
though I did not speak with tongues that night, I did receive many other
confirmations that something had changed.
The first was an uncanny inner awareness of the presence of God, which
has remained with me now for more than 30 years. God was suddenly really REAL to me, not just
“a deduction from adequate evidence.” I
went home from church, and as soon as I walked in the door, my parents said,
“What happened to YOU?” I said, “I
received the baptism of the Holy Spirit tonight.” My mother said, “I thought so!”
Though I
have since spoken in tongues, I did not do so for months afterward. However, the immediate evidence for the
change in my life along other lines was unmistakable. God’s presence in my life became a reality
such as cannot even be adequately communicated to a person who is in the
condition I had been in formerly. Reading the Bible was suddenly like reading
an actual letter from a well-known acquaintance, and I wanted to read it all
the time, just so I could know Him better and learn His will for every
particular of my life. For the first time, my Bible reading yielded actual
insight and understanding. When I read
the Gospels or the book of Acts, instead of seeming like remote historical
data, the stories seemed entirely true-to-life, such as I could expect to
happen any given day in my own life.
Living just like Jesus or Paul seemed entirely realistic—and even
desirable—for the first time in my life. Prayer was natural, spontaneous and
very much like talking to someone who really is there.
I noticed
something else too. I had had something of an anger problem in my youth, but
that vanished completely the night I was prayed for. I now felt an abiding and unconditional love
and sympathy for all people, along with a complete sense of resignation to the
will of God, which made it impossible for me to become angry with anyone. With
very few interruptions, this temperament has continued to characterize my life
in the intervening decades since that night.
I
received, for the first time, a compelling vision of the Kingdom of God as a
dynamic, real, alternative society existing alongside this world’s culture,
having another King—one Jesus. From that day to this, I have never felt that
this world could ever be a real home to me, nor did I want it to be. So far as observations could ascertain, I
have generally been as content with my lot in life as is anyone I know, and
happier than most, but I have always also sensed that I am a pilgrim and a
stranger domiciled away from home—actually an agent of a foreign government,
representing the interests of an absentee Monarch, placed on earth solely to
advance His influence among men, and looking for a discharge from this life as
soon as He deems my work here to be completed. I was by no means unique in
adopting this attitude (actually, it seems more as if I was adopted by it), but
there were, even in our own church, at least “seven-thousand who have not bowed
the knee to Baal.” I believed that I saw this pilgrim character in the majority
of the “Jesus People” (also popularly called “Jesus Freaks”), and to this day I
regard such a mentality to be normative for Christianity of the biblical
variety.
It was
immediately evident to me that nothing could ever command my loyalty again like
the Kingdom of God, and that any vocation that did not directly promote the
interests of that kingdom seemed to me pointless and boring. I knew
instinctively that I could never again see myself as anything other than the
happy slave of Christ, having no agendas of my own, but obliged to seek and to
fulfill His wishes for me day by day. “If it please the king…” was the unspoken
but implied concern that conditioned every contemplated enterprise.
The Jesus
People were not superior or “advanced” Christians at all. They were, more
properly, primitive Christians. To
me, that is the most desirable kind of Christian to be, even if only from the
standpoint of advantage to the believer himself. I don’t see any grounds for thinking in terms
of “superiority” in the comparison of one kind of Christian with another. I
know that I am not now, and have never been, a better man than any other
sincere believer. I simply marvel with gratitude at the grace of God that
apprehended me for a deeper life than I would otherwise have had knowledge to
pursue!
I know
that the theology of some will incline them to suggest that what happened to me
at age sixteen was not some “second work of grace,” but, rather, my actual,
first-time, genuine conversion. A case
could well be made for this, and I would not care to argue the point. All that matters to me is what has been the
reality in my life ever since that day. Theories about whether I was really
saved or not, prior to that night, are of secondary interest to me, at best.
I knew
that I would serve God in some form of ministry (initially, I thought it would
be evangelism, and for a while, it was).
When I spoke to sinners about Christ, it was not like before. I am not sure that I had successfully led
even one person to Christ in all my evangelistic attempts previously, but after
that night, in 1970, there appeared to be an unction in my words that caused
sinners to come under conviction, and some were being saved. My sister and I
formed a Christian band, called “New Wine,” which eventually had some good
talent in it, though I was arguably the weakest link musically. Shortly after the band was formed, we were
invited to do a concert on a Sunday night at the Baptist church where we had
grown up. At the end of the concert, I gave a short, unpremeditated “sermon”
and an invitation for those present to receive Christ. The Spirit of revival seemed to fall and
forty-something people came forward, many of them weeping. We had never seen such a thing in that church
in the years we had been there before. I
had spoken there in my earlier teens, but had never seen anyone converted
through my efforts. In fact, one of the
guys who came forward was a former friend from Covina High School, to whom I
had often witnessed previously without success.
The following school year (my senior year), I was asked by the “Jesus People” in my high school to teach them the Bible daily at lunchtime. I had never “taught” the Bible, nor considered doing so. Being now just seventeen, I did not consider myself to be particularly knowledgeable, but the others were all newer inductees, whereas I had been reading the Bible all my life, so I thought I’d give it a go. I was personally amazed at how naturally this activity came to me…how readily supporting texts and appropriate illustrations seemed to present themselves to my mind as I was trying to elucidate a biblical concept. I would find myself getting new and clearer understanding of many texts, even as I was teaching them. My teaching was well-received, and I became one of two “Jesus People” leaders on campus (the other leader was Michael Moore, who had originally taken me with him to Calvary Chapel, and whom I personally looked up to as a leader and teacher). My Bible studies (like those of other teachers during the revival) came to be well-attended, and I was invited to teach in other venues as well— coffee houses, Christian communes, church youth groups and camps, home Bible studies, etc. This included occasional invitations to come back and speak to my old youth group at the Baptist church in Covina. On one such occasion, after listening to my teaching at the college group there, the overseer of the group, who had known me since childhood, asked me, “Steve, where did you get your knowledge of the Bible?” I frankly did not know how to account for it myself, and could only say, “Well, I grew up in this church from childhood.” He quipped, ironically, “You didn’t get it here!” I guess he was right. I had probably learned more of the Bible in one year of attending Calvary Chapel than I had acquired in all my previous years in the Baptist church. But even my sitting under the inspiring teachers at Calvary could not account for many of the more “original” kinds of insights or supporting Scripture passages that frequently came to me either while teaching or in private meditation, to which my thoughts were irresistibly drawn “day and night” (Psalm 1:2). I could only attribute the spontaneous presentation of biblical data to my mind to a spiritual “gift”, which apparently became obvious to others before it did to me.
Since I
had become known as a teacher even outside the high school, when I graduated, I
was invited to serve a Christian coffee house ministry in Orange County. My
first assignment was to conduct a weekly meeting at which I was to answer Bible
questions for new converts. At that same time, my sister and I were playing in
the band we had formed (along with Michael Moore). The band was called “New Wine,” and we were
playing on the Christian coffee house circuit about three times a week.
I read
through the Bible, and little else, several times over the following six
years. I never went anywhere without a
Bible, and read it several hours a day, meditating upon it day and night, until
I knew much of it by heart. In later years, though I continued my study of the
Bible, I also began to avail myself of some of many books by great Christian
authors: A.W. Tozer, William Law, C.S. Lewis, Thomas a Kempis, Hannah Whital
Smith, Watchman Nee, Richard Wurmbrandt, Elizabeth Elliott, George Mueller, and
many others.
I soon
found that my values and passions were quite different not only from the world,
but also from many of those in the evangelical churches.
I had two
consuming passions—the first was for the glory of God and the promotion of His
kingdom. I could not see any value in
devoting any of my gifts to anything so mundane and time-bound as merely
“making a living” or “making a name” for myself. I was gripped with a vision for eternity that
made all activities simply boring, unless I could see that they had a direct
impact upon the eternal destinies of people. To concern myself with anything
less simply seemed to me to be a poor investment of the few years I have been
given on earth to accomplish something. By an involuntary instinct, I tended to
look at Jesus and Paul as my principal mentors.
I was willing to work full-time at secular (even minimum-wage) jobs,
when it seemed as if this was what God was asking of me, and, during my first
twelve years of ministry I “made tents” in this way on various occasions for
brief periods. But whenever I was devoting most of my days to just making
money, I felt completely out of my element, like a restless, confined animal,
chomping at the bit and eager to exchange a predictable, but meaningless,
income for the greater and more meaningful adventure of preaching the gospel or
of having an eternal impact on my generation.
This became my one transcendent passion when I was sixteen. Thirtysomething
years later, I have not undergone much change in my attitude in this respect.
My passion
for an alternative society eventually tended to marginalize me from many in
normal society. During the Jesus
Movement revival, there were plenty of young zealots eager to hang around me, in
order to be discipled—but as years passed, the much-hyped rapture, which most
were looking for, was delayed and the revival faded. The number of those who seemed to share a
passion for simple, primitive Christianity seemed to diminish with each passing
year. The Jesus People were growing-up,
getting jobs, getting married, and getting rich (in Orange County, at
least). Observing this trend, I
determined that I would not become absorbed into what I saw as the trap of
investing my life in merely temporal pursuits.[1] Therefore, apart from my relationship with
Jesus, I often felt increasingly isolated in this world—except on those rare
occasions when I met similar God-obsessed brothers (and sisters), who usually
were experiencing similar marginalization and loneliness.
This
phenomenon presented special challenges for the obtaining of my second consuming interest, which was, of
course, to be joined to a godly and like-minded wife. I actually was more than willing to be a
eunuch for the kingdom of heaven, if God were to bestow that gift upon me, but
since He did not appear to have done so, I sought and prayed for His other
priceless gift—a godly mate. The ideals
of a Christ-honoring marriage and family were almost as compelling to me as was
my passion for my calling in ministry.
Having been raised in such a home, I considered that marriage, rightly
done, offered earth’s best prospect for spiritual fruitfulness and personal
fulfillment. I also had enough of a
normal male drive (which I was determined never to gratify outside of marriage)
to make me sometimes distracted in my work when attractive female disciples or
co-workers were at hand. It seemed as if
being married would be less distracting than remaining single.
My view
of marriage has always been very lofty.
The covenant bond, unbreakable by any legitimate means, is the
God-ordained picture of Christ and the church. I have always found irresistible
the prospect of portraying to the lost world around me the true love of Christ
for His bride, and her loving submission to Him, in the form of a family like
the one in which I was raised. To my
mind, divorce has always been an intolerable concept—an abominable word, which
should never be uttered by the Christian without revulsion. From the beginning of my ministry I
considered that a biblical marriage and family is the most stunning
evangelistic resource in our battle against the jaded culture—and that these
things can thus be expected to become the prime targets of the devil. I looked
forward to the privilege of having and heading such a home. In my eventual
realization of this state, my role as a Christian husband and father became
absolutely defining of my identity and my perceived mission. I consciously
adopted Christ’s love for the church as my model for the treatment of a wife,
and took the Father’s treatment of me, as a model for dealing with my children.
It would be absurd to suggest that I imitated these role models
flawlessly. I am flesh, and “in many
things we all stumble.” However, these
ideals were before my mind continually, and I never sought to address a problem
with my wife or children without consciously asking myself, “What is Christ’s
way of dealing with His church?” or “What is God’s practice toward me as His child?”
At age
nineteen (1972), I married a girl in the Jesus Movement who had been converted
from a very promiscuous hippie background.
Though I was a virgin, and our backgrounds were as diverse as night and
day, I mistakenly interpreted Paul’s statement, “Old things are passed away…all
things become new” to mean that conversion erases all of the effects of a
sinful past. Within two years, as a result of my wife’s early lapse into
repeated adulteries, the marriage was a seemingly hopeless disaster. Apart from
a daughter, born to us in first year of marriage, there was little semblance to
a marriage in our life together. Though I considered that her adulteries
provided me with biblical grounds for divorce, I also believed it to be more
Christ-like for me to remain in and work on the marriage in fulfillment of my
vows, even if my wife never were to repent, which she gave no evidence of
doing. She finally deserted and divorced
me—eventually marrying another (and then another)—and I was left to raise our
one-year-old daughter, which I did until she was in her late teens.
Six years
after the divorce (1980), when I was 27, I met and eventually married a very
like-minded and devout Christian girl, named June. She was taken the same year in a roadside accident
(as the result of which several people known to me came to the Lord). In the
six months that we were married before her death, her remarkably virtuous life
proved to me that women can be as good as they can be bad.
Before
June’s death, we had become close friends with Kristan’s (my third wife’s)
parents. They were enthusiastic, regular
attenders at a Bible study that I was teaching every weekday morning in a
restaurant in Santa Cruz, California.
Kristan herself went on the mission field overseas with Youth With A
Mission, and was intending to become a career missionary. Her parents played a
major role in getting Kristan and me together after June’s death—which I didn’t
mind in the least, since she was very attractive and vivacious, and seemed to
have a passion for the things of God. To make a long story short, Kristan and I
got married and subsequently had four wonderful children —two sons and two
daughters.
To my
chagrin, very early on in our married life, telltale difficulties manifested.
As in many marriages, conflicts arose because we were quite different from one
another in significant ways that we had failed thoroughly to explore before
marriage. I will omit the details of the causes of discord, as a report of them
might tend to reflect negatively on persons not present here to speak for
themselves. Our marriage lasted twenty years. Though the marriage was “rocky,”
I never had occasion to suspect that anything short of death would prevent us
from spending the rest of our lives together.
That Kristan was not happy in the marriage, or in life, was often
evident and was a great concern to me, but I always was optimistic that, in
time, she could grow happier, and that our mutual commitment to Christ and to
our family would keep us together long enough to work through these
challenges. This was a tragic
miscalculation on my part.
Without a
word of explanation, Kristan walked out on the children and me in November,
2001. This departure was abrupt and unexpected—at a time when our relationship
had recently taken an encouraging turn for the better—leaving me dazed and
devastated. Thankfully, my children (mostly in their teens at the time) chose
to remain with me, and, fortunately, their mother did not choose to require
them to be with her, nor to seek custody of them when she filed for divorce.
Such has
been my somewhat tragic marital history.
In my
last year of high school and in the years that immediately followed graduation,
I was playing guitar and piano and singing the lead vocals in a Christian rock
band that my sister and I had formed (she was the bass player, though she could
play several instruments). I enjoyed the music ministry and there were lots of
opportunities to play in coffee houses and concerts in the early seventies in
Southern California. When the band broke up, due to members getting married and
needing to “get a real job,” I
continued to play some solo concerts and formed a few small ad hoc bands for special concerts that I
was invited to do. Eventually, I
realized my limitations—that I was not an excellent musician, and could not
become such without giving a great deal of time to that goal. I was devoting a
lot of time to Bible teaching, for which I had more apparent native gifts. The choice between becoming the best musician
or the best Bible teacher I could be was an easy one for me. Bible teaching
seemed to promise greater potential for effecting beneficial change in people’s
lives than did performing music (though people were getting saved through the
latter as well). Sometime around 1981, I
left the music ministry to devote all of my energies to biblical study and
teaching. In the past two decades, I
have played very few concerts.
During
the years that followed high school, in addition to doing the music ministry, I
often worked full-time as a volunteer for a number of Christian organizations
and churches, and part-time for my support at various secular jobs. Through most of the seventies, like many of
the “Jesus People,” I was a long-haired radical Christian vagabond adventurer
for Jesus, traveling around the country (sometimes by Greyhound, sometimes “by
thumb”), playing music and teaching in churches, coffee houses and home
gatherings. At age 19, I went to Germany and planted a little church there.
Nine years later, this church merged with an existing Assemblies of God church
there. In 1982, after marrying Kristan,
I became an international lecturer for Youth With A Mission (an organization
that I never joined, but for whom I have traveled and taught for more than
twenty-five years now). Over the years, largely through the auspices of YWAM, I
have traveled and taught repeatedly on every continent.
From 1975
through 1978, I ran small, independent discipleship schools of my own in Santa
Cruz, California. I moved back to
Southern California and, in 1979, Keith Green invited me to become an elder at
his ministry-community in Woodland Hills (which I declined because I thought it
would conflict with my work of raising my five-year-old daughter as a single
dad).
After I
married June, in 1980, I was invited by Calvary Chapel of Santa Cruz to move
back to that city as the church’s worship leader, which I did. Within a month of our move back to Santa
Cruz, I was teaching nine times a week, as well as leading the worship for the
church. June was one of the remarkable,
saintly women of the church, and all who knew her admired and appreciated her
for her sincere and evident love for God and purity of heart. She seemed more like an angel than anyone I
had ever known, and most felt intuitively that she belonged more to another
world than to this one. With this assessment God apparently agreed. Her death a few months after our arrival
stunned the church and was publicized throughout the city and among
missionaries abroad. The fact that her dying act was the selfless one of
shoving my seven-year-old daughter (June’s step-daughter) out of the path of
the speeding truck that hit her inspired many, and some who had known her were
converted as a result. After her death,
unwarranted public honor was heaped upon me and my ministry, due to the evident
grace of God that sustained us through the tragedy. I was asked to serve as an
elder at Calvary Chapel, Santa Cruz, which I did for a couple of years before
moving to Oregon in 1983.
Over the
years, I have also had opportunity to lecture in universities and high schools,
and occasionally to debate. I have considered debate to be an excellent
educational and evangelistic tool, and I
have always been eager for more opportunities to engage in such on any topic of
significance. I have only rarely found
evolutionists who are willing to debate, but have, on many occasions,
participated in debates with Christian brothers of various theological
persuasions…Calvinists, cessationists, dispensationalists, advocates of eternal
security, etc. Such debates have always
been conducted in a friendly manner, and, to my mind, have been profitable.
In
1983, after marrying Kristan, I started the Great Commission School in Oregon,
which I led for 16 years. The Great
Commission School also conducted a branch school in Honduras for two
consecutive years (our family lived in the jungle compound of this school for
three months, when our kids were young). For some years, there was also a Great
Commission School in Ontario, Canada, planted by some of our former students.
That school has merged into a congregation called “Grassroots Church,” in
Thunder Bay.
Over the
years, I have done a considerable amount of writing—primarily in answer to
questions posted on our Internet Bible forum. Kristan and I formerly published
a modest magazine for Christian home-schoolers from 1996 to 1999. I’ve had two books (far from best-sellers!)
published by major publishers, and created over 50 comic-style tracts and
discipleship manuals (did I mention I was a cartoonist?), which have been
printed and distributed by three different publishers.
Radio
broadcasting became another ministry avenue of interest to me. I was on the air
as a live Bible-answer-man-type-guy, weekly, beginning in 1984. In 1997, I started doing the same thing daily
on a program called “The Narrow Path,” which I still host daily.
After
running the Great Commission School for 16 years, I decided to “change gears,”
due to approaching “burn-out,” and I closed down the school. Kristan and I had lived for several years on
a small farm acreage, which we had bought in Oregon. In 1999, we sold our Oregon homestead and
accepted an invitation to minister in a small community in Northern Idaho. We
purchased a log home on six rural acres and my wife continued living her dream
of homesteading for a couple more years there.
After
Kristan left, and while I was still in Idaho, some of our Great Commission
School alumni restarted the school in Oregon under a new name, The Berean
School of the Bible. In 2003, almost two
years after Kristan left, I was asked to return to the Berean School to direct
it as I had done in the past. I
declined, not wishing to be involved in organizational leadership, but agreed
to return as a full-time teacher there in exchange for accommodations for my
family. I did this for one year, but found that raising four kids without a
mother demanded more time than I could devote while teaching full-time at the
school. The children and I returned to
our previous home in Idaho for about a year. In 2005, I brought the kids back
to Santa Cruz, California, from which we had come 23 years earlier. I now teach
locally, in several churches and home venues. In 2006, I was able to teach at a
summer-length version of the Great Commission School, led by one of my former
students, in Jerusalem, and in 2007, I made my first ministry trip to Africa,
which had been a lifetime dream.
Theological Pilgrimage
I began my
ministry having the factory-installed theology of my Baptist upbringing, with
only the addition of the charismatic convictions that I picked-up through my
early association with the Jesus Movement and with Calvary Chapel, Costa
Mesa. These default views amounted,
primarily, to a quasi-Calvinistic approach to providence and salvation, mixed
with a thoroughly dispensational eschatology.
Initially, I was not even aware that there were names for these sets of
beliefs. I assumed that what I had been taught was simply “what the Bible
teaches.” I wasn’t really aware of there being much controversy among
Bible-believers over my beliefs.
I was (and
am) a firm believer in the divinely-inspired authority of scripture, so it was
always my commitment to believe whatever
the Bible teaches, regardless who, or how many, might disagree. Of course, I
assumed only heretics and liberals—people lacking an adequate respect for the
Bible—would disagree with anything that I had been taught.
I suppose
the first new ideas that I developed, from my personal study of the scriptures,
were what would best be termed “Anabaptist” convictions. I had never met a
Mennonite, nor Anabaptists of any other stripe, but I was in a radically
“hippie” culture, which probably contributed to my disposition toward taking a
radical approach to Christianity as well. By “radical” and “Anabaptist” I mean,
essentially, taking an uncompromising approach to compliance with the teachings
of Jesus (especially in the Sermon on the Mount), and seeing Jesus’ behavior
(with circumstantial modifications) as normative for His followers as
well. As a result, I became a convinced
pacifist, and, when I was required to sign-up for the Selective Service, I did
so as a conscientious objector. I would have been called-up, and forced to
defend my convictions before a draft board, had not the US ended the draft in
the year that I would have been inducted (1972).
I first
became aware of the baptism and gifts of the Holy Spirit, in 1970, and was very
open to hearing anything I could learn from people more experienced than myself
in these matters. As a result, through the first half of the seventies, I was a
sucker for [almost] every passing charismatic fad—especially, the Word of
Faith, deliverance ministries, and the shepherding/discipleship movement.
In 1971,
someone put into my hands some little books by Kenneth Hagen, and I became
(briefly) convinced of the “Word of Faith” teaching. I probably taught these
doctrines for nearly a year before I began, through my own Bible studies, to
see the fallacy of these interpretations of scripture. I abandoned these
teachings soon afterward. Fortunately, I had already been reading books like
those of Corrie ten-Boom, Richard Wurmbrandt, Watchman Nee, Brother Andrew,
Hannah Hurnard, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—so I had already imbibed a fairly
scriptural attitude toward suffering, which probably made it harder for the
Word of Faith ideas to take a permanent hold on my sympathies.
Around the
same time, I also became aware of the phenomena of demon-possession and the
Satan’s general activities. I was
briefly swayed by certain “deliverance ministries” that seemed to be getting
spectacular results in helping people with problems that were apparently caused
by demons. I had previously been taught, at Calvary Chapel, that Christians are
invulnerable to demonization, but I decided to do my own thorough study of the
scriptures on the topic, and emerged from the inquiry, two years later, with
the conclusion that the Bible says nothing for or against the possibility of
the demonization of Christians. Today, I still have an interest in helping
people whose problems may be demonically-induced, though I soon got over my
fascination with “deliverance ministries,” which seemed to see demons behind
every personality quirk, every sin, and every misfortune.
I also
spent about three or four months, in the mid-seventies, suckered into the
shepherding/discipleship movement. I had been listening to taped messages by Bob
Mumford for a couple of years before this time. I never heard any of his
teachings directly on this subject, and everything I heard from him was
excellent. In fact, I think I would
still agree with most of what I heard on those tapes. Unfortunately, Bob, and
four of his colleagues in Ft. Lauderdale, became the ring-leaders of an
oppressive authority-cult-network which included many of the newly-charismatic
churches. The Jesus-People fellowship in Santa Cruz, which I was then
attending, bought into this network, and I soon found myself disagreeing with
the concept of one Christian dominating the faith and life of other Christians.
I got myself kicked-out of the church for disagreeing with the movement, in
1975.
I suppose
my leaving the shepherding movement served to strengthen my determination never
again to let another man do my Christian thinking for me. I realized, of
course, that this would place the burden of scripturally thinking things
through squarely upon my own shoulders, and I took the responsibility
seriously. Over the next several years,
I came to own my own conclusions about many biblical doctrines and
practices—but my ideas changed very gradually, because of my essentially
conservative temperament (another way of saying “I am a slow learner”).
For
example, I had never heard that my views on “the end times” belonged to a
certain camp, called “dispensationalism.” I thought I “just believed the
Bible.” During the years 1974 and 1975,
I began to see weaknesses in my belief in pretribulationism, and finally
abandoned it altogether. Next, my views underwent a gradual change with
reference to the millennium, from 1978 to 1979. These changes happened in a
piecemeal fashion. At one moment, I would see a problem with one of my earlier
interpretations of a text. At another time, I would spot a correspondence
between two passages in different places, which allowed a less-clear passage to
be interpreted by a more-clear one. Eventually, after two years of
transitioning, I had become an amillennialist
—though I did not yet know the name for it, and had never, to my knowledge,
encountered anyone holding the view. I held this opinion secretly for many
months, thinking that I had become a heretic, and assuming that I could never
again publicly teach on eschatology. I came “out of the closet” with this view
only after meeting someone else who held the same view, and who was able to
assure me that it was a valid, historical option in Christian orthodoxy.
My preterism (as of today, only partial) was even slower in coming. It
is the first of my new views that required the influence of other authors to
bring me around. After becoming
amillennial, I still remained (somewhat inconsistently) a futurist in my approach to Revelation and the Olivet Discourse. I
knew no other options. In 1980, someone
lent me William Hendrickson’s book, “More Than Conquerors,” and it convinced me
that the idealist view (I did not yet
know this name for it) was more sound, biblically, than was futurism—and more consistent with the
amillennial outlook I had already adopted.
So, for a few years (roughly 1980 through 1983) I held the idealist view of Revelation, but still
knew only the futurist view of
Matthew 24.
In 1982,
I was given a copy of Jay Adams’s “The
Time is at Hand,” a small paperback, which presented the partial preterist view of both
Revelation and the Olivet Discourse. I had never heard of such a possibility
(i.e., that these prophecies had been fulfilled in AD 70), but the evidence was
impressive, and I was almost
persuaded.[2] As impressed as I was by Adam’s information,
I drifted back to the security of the familiar, which, by this time, was still
the idealist view.
After
founding the Great Commission School, in 1983, I acquired many more books for
my teaching prep, and these included books by Marcellus Kik, Gary DeMar,
Kenneth Gentry, and, especially, J. Stuart Russell. The information I got from
these authors overwhelmed my resistance, and I have ever since been a convinced
partial preterist. I never became a postmillennialist, like these authors,
but I did become a more-optimistic amillennialist (a position that Gary North
identifies with cowardly postmillennialism)!
Of course,
these gradual changes in my eschatology could not help but be accompanied by
associated changes in my understanding of such matters as “the kingdom of God,”
“the church,” and the status of the nation Israel—all of which had already been
morphed into views consistent with amillennialism, even prior to my adoption of
amillennialism, and, in fact, had helped to precipitate that transition.
Let’s
see…what next? In 1982, I was first asked by YWAM to teach in their DTS in
Honolulu. They requested that I come and teach for a week on “spiritual
warfare.” Prior to that time, I had only taught a few individual lectures, on
this topic—never a 15-hour lecture series.
During my preparation for this series, I had to search the scriptures
more thoroughly, and think more deeply about them, than I had ever previously
done with reference to this subject. I was amazed to learn how little of what I
had always been taught about these matters could actually be found in the
scriptures! This research resulted in my
shift from traditional views on the origin of Satan and of demons, as well as
the whole concept and conduct of what we generally call “spiritual warfare.” (I
still speak regularly on this subject—as well as many others—in YWAM schools.
They are accustomed to the traditional and charismatic teachings on these
matters, and are often shocked to learn that the Bible teaches nothing about
“Jericho marches,” “spiritual mapping,” “territorial spirits,” “pleading the
blood of Christ,” anointing doors and windows, rebuking the devil, etc.). The
actual biblical teaching takes this whole theme out of the realm of the
sensational, and into the realm of the truly helpful and encouraging!
I became
aware of the brewing controversy between Calvinism and Arminianism only in the
mid-eighties, when many of the Christians I knew began to read R.C. Sproul, and
were consequently inspired to pick fights with non-Calvinists. I was never a
Calvinist in my beliefs, but did not see it as a subject worthy of much
excitement or controversy. However, when Calvinists began visiting our campus
to proselytize our students, I was forced to address the errors of the
Calvinist proof-texting. This eventually brought me into more and more
conflicts with combative Calvinists (who became easier and easier to refute,
since they all parroted the same few standard arguments which became easy to
anticipate). Over the past 25 years, therefore, I have become much more
established in my rejection of Calvinism.
Along these
lines, I have not yet come to the place where I can embrace “Open Theism,”
though I have unashamedly softened in my opposition to it. Way back in 1980, I
publicly debated the issue of God’s foreknowledge against a man who held to
what was then called Moral Government
Theology (now called “Openness” or
“Open Theism”). When I first heard it,
it seemed to me that this view was an assault on the nature of God Himself
(some opponents of Openness still seem to think this to be the case). More
recently, having read the views of more gracious (and more intelligent) Openness advocates, I now understand
that the view does not posit any departure from orthodoxy in terms of God’s
omniscience. Rather, it merely asserts an alternative philosophical
understanding of time and the future—subjects upon which orthodoxy
need not take sides. Openness thinks
that future, undetermined choices of morally-free agents belong in the category
of those things which do not (yet) exist. If they do not exist, then they do
not exist to be known. Therefore,
they cannot be known, even by a Being who knows everything there is to know.
God does not know them, just as He does not know of any Martian cyclopses. Since they don’t exist, He cannot know them.
This suggests no deficiency in God’s omniscience. It is simply a different
philosophical approach to the nature of time and the future. Most other Christians
seem to think of the future as an existing component of an eternity, every part
of which is visible to God’s omniscience—though this is just another
philosophical position, not addressed in scripture.[3]
My most
recent theological shift seems to be concerning the nature and purpose of
“hell.” As long ago as the late
eighties, I became aware that two of my most-admired evangelical leaders, John
R.W. Stott and Clark Pinnock, had taken the surprising position that hell is a
place of annihilation, not eternal torment. I could not immediately
accept this (being fundamentally conservative by temperament), but it lodged in
my mind. Somewhere along the way, I also heard that certain evangelical
Christians, like Hannah Whitall Smith and George MacDonald, were Christian Universalists. This bothered
me, somewhat, but I had become much more open-minded to letting others reach
their own conclusions, by now, and was not as greatly alarmed as I would have
been a decade earlier.
It still
seemed to me, however, that the safest position to take is the traditional view
of a hell of eternal torment (might as well prepare people for the worst
possibility!). I found it fairly easy to remain dispassionate on the subject
while presenting all three options to callers on my radio program, but I still
felt that the evidence for the three views was about equally distributed,
allowing me to retain my default position (the traditional view) in good
conscience. In the last few years, however, I have become less and less impressed
with the nature of the biblical evidence for the traditional view, and more
concerned about its implications with reference to the character of God. Today,
I have been thoroughly moved from my former confidence in the view of endless
torment. I am currently in the process of deciding between the two options—both
of which seem to be superior, in terms of biblical evidence, to the traditional
view, though neither provides a thorough refutation of the other.
Some would,
no doubt, conclude (on the basis of all of these confessed changes in my
theology) that I am theologically unstable, “tossed to and fro by every wind of
doctrine.” Actually, since the mid-seventies, there has been no “to and
fro-ness” about it. I have not gone back-and-forth in my beliefs. Rather, each
change I have made has been precipitated by the previous ones, and has been a
necessary advance prodded-on by those that lie behind. Personally, of course, I
regard the sum of these shifts as “progress.” I do not expect all who read this
to agree with me in this assessment.
My story
is much longer (as I am now [2008] fifty-five years-old), but the fundamental
realities of my life and vocation have not changed. I have had a wild ride, characterized by
gratifying spiritual fruit mixed with great personal tragedies. I have also made lamentable mistakes. I wish I could say that I have served Jesus
flawlessly as a faithful slave, but this is would misrepresent the truth. While my zeal for God has been genuine, and
my intentions good, my judgment has not always been admirable, resulting in a
few monumental errors and a few disastrous stumbles. God has been unaccountably
merciful to me. I have sometimes been pummeled by the devil because of my
faithfulness, and at other times chastened by God because of my unfaithfulness.
On balance, I tend to assess my first fifty-four years in the words of another
(whose identity I have forgotten), who said, “I have received many mercies, and
few afflictions.”
My goal
now, as always, is to finish my course with joy, to quit myself like a man of
God, to fight the good fight, and seek to glorify God in all that I do. I have
been given five wonderful children, to whom I desire to be the best possible
father, and whom I desire, more than anything else, to be able to launch into
the world as faithful servants of Jesus Christ.
My goal in life has not been, and is not now, to seek my own
fulfillment, success or happiness, but to hear Him who called me say, at the
end of the day, “Well done, faithful slave!”
That will certainly be fulfillment and happiness enough, which will
never diminish or end.
[1] I should clarify that I do not consider “getting a job,” “getting rich” or “getting married” to be, necessarily, “merely temporal pursuits,” since they all may be the result of God’s leading and blessing in a person’s life, and all are capable of being used for the benefit of God’s kingdom. There is such a thing, though, as good seed being “choked-out” by “the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches,” and it was too often the case that I saw these things replacing zeal for God’s kingdom in the lives of people I knew—making me very reluctant to pursue such things unless God were to lead me to do so for His glory.
[2] Actually, Adams sees the first half of Revelation as being fulfilled in AD 70, and the second half fulfilled in the fall of the Roman Empire (Babylon).
[3] I still think that certain biblical prophecies demonstrate that God does know future, undetermined, moral choices, but I am not longer excited about the controversy. It seems like a non-issue.