Most of us, Catholics included, are the children of the radical reformation in Europe. We’ve all had our fill of state churches. We believe that we are born American but choose to be Catholic or Presbyterian, or none of the above, because the church is a “voluntary association of believers.”   And we are, but our volunteering is human which means mysterious.

who volunteers for what?

Did I volunteer to be an evangelical?  No. I fell in love with Jesus, but not in a vacuum because Jesus works through flesh and blood.  That’s the whole Jesus thing–God in flesh appearing: in flesh, to flesh, for flesh.  And blood.

And none of us volunteers to be flesh and blood now do we?   It’s not as though I asked my father and mother to couple and conceive me because I was ready to be born.  Once the coupling commenced their choosing was done.  The little sperm that made it to the ovum–my guy–wasn’t taking any directions from either of them once released in that Great Iditarod.

I opened my eyes and saw through a glass darkly because my brain was in the process of wiring itself (and still is.)  Before I knew I was an I, the unaware I saw this unidentified flying object passing before what were my eyes from time to time, until my brain wired sufficiently to discern that this piece of flying flesh was my arm and it was me who had the capacity to wave it.   And I found myself to be flesh and blood though I was never consulted.

Identify is given as much as it’s chosen.

So I fell in love with Jesus but as Jesus was presented to me by some credible witnesses. The first was a guy named Brian Martin.  I liked him.  I could identify with him and he identified with Jesus, and I could imagine myself being the kind of Jesus follower that he aimed to be.  I read The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis because Brian suggested it and I liked his taste in books.

And he invited me to a backyard Bible study led by Haskell Stone, this Jewish believer I’ve mentioned.  Haskell is sitting in a lawn chair in a back yard in Detroit, smoking a cigarette in one of those FDR cigarette holders. And teaching a yard full of hippies and young Detroiters from one of the gospels.  And I identified with Haskell.

cut to reaction shot

It’s the “reaction shot” in the movie. The director doesn’t show us the thing itself to convey it at first. The director shows a character beholding the thing itself and that shot reveals the thing to us at first.  So I saw Jesus first in the reaction shots.  In Brian and Haskell. I got the itch to love Jesus because I saw love for Jesus in their faces.

The first time I heard Brian pray at our dinner table I was stunned.  Oh you can do that? Talk to Jesus like he’s at the table? Before I heard Jesus, I heard Brian talking to him like he was at the table with us.

Which gave me a share in Jesus but also gave me a share in this phenomenon or movement that we call evangelicalism. Because Brian was the son of Harry Martin who went to a Plymouth Brethren church in Detroit before he became one of the teachers in the Jesus movement happening at that time.  And because Haskell, though Jewish–he was born Jewish, lived Jewish, and died Jewish–attended Fuller Theological Seminary.  One of the flagship institutions of the American evangelical movement.

I first saw Jesus, in other words, reflected in those who were seeing him through an evangelical lens.  That wasn’t the only lens, but one of them that brought Jesus into focus for them.

I bet the same  kind of thing happening to me was happening to them and they didn’t exactly volunteer to see Jesus through the evangelical lens.

if it walks like a duck

In time I came to trust John Wimber, in part, because I saw something of Brian and Haskell in him. As it turns out–I didn’t know it at the time–Wimber was heavily influenced by a theologian named George Eldon Ladd, who also had a big influence on Haskell Stone (and through Haskell on Brian Martin.)    Ladd taught at Fuller and Haskell was one of his students.

So there you go.  I chose to see Jesus through an evangelical lens like a duckling chooses to be a duck by opening his little duckling eyes and seeing his mother duck peering back at him and what the biologists call “imprinting” happens. And ever after the duckling walks, swims, and quacks like a duck and feels himself to be one, rather than say, a cat.

can’t shake it though I try

Many times, believe me, I’ve tried to shake that label, evangelical.  I want to shake things off me that I want no part of.  Maybe you’ve picked that up in this blog. But I can’t shake off and don’t want to what I saw first in Brian, then in Haskell: people seeing Jesus through this lens.

No, it’s not the only lens I see him through.  Because part of the evangelical lens says, Jesus is Lord, meaning it.  Loyalty to Jesus trumps every other loyalty.  Including the loyalty to evangelicalism.  Ain’t that cool?

but batman’s just a guy

So I’m at a five day silent retreat several years back and for lack of anything else to do, I’m getting pickled in Jesus brand love.  And in that state these words come into my heart then my mind as though I owned them before I knew them.  “I am willing to offend the phantom projected from below over evangelicalism.”

Say what?  Phantom projected from below?  The image in my head was from the Batman movie where there’s a huge image of a bat in the clouds, projected from below.  A small image of a bat placed over one of those high beam spotlights shining into the night to draw the crowds to the car dealership or whatever.

I’m willing to offend that.  Because that willingness is part of the lens through which Brian and Haskell saw Jesus–the director’s reaction shot that got me to look in Jesus’ direction myself.

So I don’t really care whether anyone in the church I serve as pastor calls himself or herself an evangelical. Actually I’d rather not have a bunch of people putting on their evangelical flag pin to get noticed by the voters. I would be pleased if they were evangelical enough to be willing to offend the phantom projected from below over evangelicalism.  But I don’t think that’s for me to decide for anyone else because I barely decided it for myself.

So my name’s Ken.  I didn’t choose that name.  When I was a kid, I didn’t like it because Ken was Barbie’s boyfriend and girls were yucky for a while.  They got much better as I got older, I noticed.  I wanted my name to be something else for a while. Lance.  Yes, I liked the sound of Lance.  There’s a guy who can make his mark on the world. I suggested that my friends call me Lance. They laughed and called me Ken.  So I answer to it.

Jesusified

And the history that caught up with me and the people I identified with was evangelical history.  The history of religious awakenings, Jesus style in England and the United States–the great awakenings, first and second and whatever else came along.  These are the people swept into Jesus, so to speak.  Something happens TO them.  They get Jesusified.

I remember one night reading  Three Gospels, by Reynolds Price, and my eyes got hold of the word Jesus on the page in Times New Roman or whatever the font was and I got stuck there.  Just looking at his name.  Probably for ten minutes. Man, do I have a bad case, I thought to myself.  I’m stuck on Jesus. Is there a name for this in the Psychiatric Diagnosis Manual?  My brother-in-law, a skeptic at the time, said to me in the car, “You’re really into this Jesus thing aren’t you?”  I think he meant excessively, but my case was and is so bad that I took at as the ultimate compliment.

Oh how I wish Jesus freak were a more widely recognized tag.  Something you could claim as your own and people would nod knowingly.

all that baggage

But evangelical also fits.  Oh, I know there’s all that baggage. I came to faith at the age of 19 in 1971. If it were 2009 instead of 1971 and you said to my unbelieving self just before coming to faith, “You’re about to become an evangelical– watch it boy!” I think I’d go running and screaming in the opposite direction. I’d probably run to the local Buddhist temple to prevent the infection from setting in.  I’d put on a robe, sit on a pillow, light a candle, close my eyes and focus on Lord Jesus.  No other deities for me, thank you.  Just don’t call me that nasty word, please.

But here I am.  An evangelical.  And I can’t shake it.

People come along and they try to tell you what evangelical means. It means you need to use certain words to describe your “view of Scripture.”  You need to ascribe to the ten pillars of evangelicalism.  You need to give the right answers when quizzed on the political-theological wedge issues: “What do you think of this or that–yes or no? Say “shibboleth” correctly or we’ll assume you’re not from around here!”  As if “evangelical” means you’re part of the moral majority and if you don’t walk in lock step, you’re part of the immoral minority.

the beautiful thing about being evangelical

But that’s the beautiful thing about being an evangelical.  I don’t think anyone’s allowed to do that.  There’s no pope anyone has agreed to give the power of movement definition to.  Sure there are various organizations, but they are just that, organizations.  None of ‘em can put a fan on and get the evangelical wind blowing–that just happens when it happens and there’s no finding that switch here on earth.

I’m an evangelical because I listen to Billy Graham (the older, the better) and think to myself–whatever got hold of him, that’s what I trust too, for all the cultural differences between us.  Or I read “On the Religious Affections” by Jonathan Edwards and it floors me.  I read a Flannery O’Connor novel about the old South and the hero, always a literary Groteseque, is some mentally imbalanced religious nut of a Jesus variety and I feel like I get what it is they are afflicted with and am unwilling to give up mine too.

I realize I’m not doing a good job explaining this.

I want everyone to believe in Jesus.  That’s it.  I really do.  I feel as though he won’t disappoint anyone.  Call me naive.

It used to cow-tow me, this foreign thing that has weaseled it’s way into the American evangelical movement, where self appointed hall monitors check your orthodoxy like the Religious police checking for proper skirt length.

But then I just laughed at myself for ducking.  I know that my redeemer liveth and he will stand one day on the earth! If that ain’t good enough for you, brother, well accept my insincere apologies.

come back home to who you are

Evangel.  Good news bearer.  Blessed is the one who brings good news, tidings of peace, assurance that your time of suffering is enough. Enough already.  Come back home, the door’s open–back or front, either one.

That’s it for me, Evangelical.

Believe me when I say that I didn’t expect to hear anything of the sort when I heard this. Also believe me when I say that I’ve spent well over thirty years of my life listening for the voice of Jesus. And I was as sure as I’ve ever been that this was his voice. And that I had little idea what was meant by such a message.

At the time, I suppose I had been paying attention, if anything, to what God wasn’t doing among liberals, or maybe to what the devil was doing among liberals. So this was a message out of left field spoken into my right mind, so to speak. No, it wasn’t out of left field, center field, or right field. It was out of home field. But I’m allowing this lame metaphor to lead me from what I’m trying to explain.

So years have passed since then, and I notice that this voice that I have taken to be the voice of Jesus….actually that’s understating it and what I mean to say is this voice that I believe to have been the voice of Jesus, or maybe better said, what I cannot doubt despite efforts to the contrary to have been the voice of Jesus, has born out. That is to say, this voice has adjusted my perceptions.

Like when I was at a retreat with some of the top environmental scientists a few years back and I saw their flat out love of nature and their concern for what human beings are doing to disregard nature, I saw their love as something Jesus was doing among them and I paid attention. There have been other things as well. And whenever I mention these things, there’s often a little hornets nest gets agitated. Maybe you’ve noticed.

I understand the agitation, having occupied the social-cultural-spiritual space from whence it comes for many years. I’m entirely sympathetic to the agitation. It comes from the view that liberal is Christian unfriendly and conservative is Christian friendly. There’s plenty of evidence for the view if you’re looking for it. It’s just that this little vacation message was telling me to look for something else than what I had been looking for. Or more specifically, to pay attention to something that I had trained myself not to pay attention to. “Pay attention to what I am doing among liberals.” Sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it? Unless it doesn’t.

Just that, nothing else. No elaboration per se. Not, “Become a liberal rather than a conservative”–no, it wasn’t even in that ballpark of meaning. Not, “Pay attention to what I am doing among liberals and ignore what I am doing among others.” Certainly not, “Pay attention what I am doing among liberals and stop paying attention to your wife.”

But for all that wasn’t said, there was plenty that was said in that message. Pay attention. Pay attention to what I am doing. Pay attention to what I am doing among liberals.

But I’ve noticed that often when Jesus speaks, his speaking–as much as we say we want to hear him speak–is also a testing. We want the speaking more than the testing. Maybe this is why he doesn’t speak as often as we would like.

“Whose voice are we paying attention to rather than the his voice?” is a good test question. We come to faith in Jesus and quite properly we attach ourselves to others who also have faith in Jesus. That’s part of the Jesus faith in fact. We get him and we get his friends, whether or not we like them at the time.

Attaching ourselves to his friends, we sometimes–and who can blames us? it’s inevitable, we’re just humans, after all–confuse their voice for his. We hear warnings from his friends, warnings about the dangers lurking in various movements and groupings and political parties and cultural institutions. This happens without our even being aware of it happening–it’s that powerful and pervasive. It embeds itself in our assumptions, this warning. And then you, or at least in my case, I, hear something like, “Pay attention to what I’m doing among liberals.” And it becomes a kind of test.

Like Peter and John and James underwent up on that mountain. Jesus was praying and they were with him. His face got dazzled and they got sleepy. But then they become wide awake and alert and see Moses and Elijah–yes of “the Law and the Prophets” fame–standing with him and his glory. Moses and Elijah begin to depart and Peter says, “Lord, let’s not break up this party! It’s just getting interesting!” and then a cloud covers them all and scares them as such clouds do, and a voice comes from the cloud saying, “This is my son, my chosen. Listen to him!” After that, there is Jesus only.

No I’m not saying that what happened on vacation several years ago was as vivid as that. But I’m saying that if we believe Jesus to be living, not dead, then we believe he has a voice, and he is entitled to use it. And what’s the point of counting ourselves as his followers if we don’t at least have the hope of hearing his voice so that we can listen to him?

This transfiguration event is meant to shake us up like it shook them up. Listen to him. Pay attention to him. Moses was pointing to him. The prophets were pointing to him. I am now pointing to him. So listen to him. Don’t chase after Moses or Elijah when it’s time for them to go and he’s standing here before you.

We live in a time, like all times, when the religious enterprise is dominated by the party spirit. It’s in the nature of the party spirit to assume all of the truth is on it’s side and none of the truth is on the side of it’s opponent. Which is why presidential candidates don’t learn from each other.

The party spirit draws it’s lines with a fat magic marker. But sometimes life requires lines drawn with a .5 mm lead pencil. Sometimes it requires, dare I say it?, dotted lines.

A single mother calls you in distress, pastor. Her eleven year old daughter, already menstruating, has been raped, during a possibly fertile time in her cycle. The single mother is torn. She gave birth to this daughter even though all her friends and family had urged her to get an abortion after conceiving her daughter. This woman is passionately pro-life. And passionately pro-daughter. She says to you, “We are at the doctor’s office and he wants to give my daughter the morning after pill, something I’ve always opposed. Will God forgive me if I let my daughter take the morning after pill? Will God forgive if I don’t?”

You do a quick scan of your moral theology and come up with one answer. You do a quick scan of what you would do if it were your own daughter and come up with another. And the single mom on the other end of the line is waiting for your answer.

It seems to be wrapped around the proposition that truth is slippery and hard to get a hold of. And that the world is loaded with false truths that parade themselves as true ones and it’s easy, very easy, to be duped.  It’s so easy to be duped that one might wish to be like a bird at a feeder–darting down for an oilseed but then looking around constantly this way and that.  Have you ever watched a bird at a window feeder and just felt sorry that they have to be so alert, so on guard ALL THE TIME.  Has to be hard on the digestion, the poor birds!

I realize I’m not nailing this thing.  I’m just trying to convey the feel of the thing–this particular fear.

It’s a fear that seems to take comfort in warning of dangers.  All the time, from many different directions.  You say one thing, and this fear listens fearfully and sees a danger in that thought and offers a caution.  That’s it–this thing is a kind of dread that thoughts themselves are almost inherently dangerous.

Certain groups seem to breed this fear and others don’t.  I like the groups that don’t better.  When I was  a brand new Jesus follower, I am so thankful that the very first people I talked to about my coming into being Jesus faith didn’t seem to have this nervous fear of thoughts or questions.  Everything was pretty much fair game to discuss and ponder.  Not, of course, that there weren’t deep ends to be gone off of.  But they weren’t the preoccupation of the people I first engaged in the communal art of faith with.  I think if I had sensed that fear it would have flipped me out.  I would have been out of there.  Life’s too short.

I’m not talking about open disagreement either.  I enjoy a good open disagreement.  How do you figure some things out without first batting them around?  But how do you bat things around, or to shift metaphors, how do you toss ideas around if everyone thinks an idea is an egg that when dropped will surely make a mess?

Maybe it’s an aging thing.  I’m getting older, as I’m guessing you are as well.  But I’ve perhaps been getting older longer than some of you.  And I find that as I get older, something is happening.  I’m getting more and more certain but of fewer and fewer things. It’s really quite a humbling experience and it creeps up on you like age does: you find yourself so certain of certain things and then more light is shed on your certainty and you discover that it was prematurely granted.  So you take a step or two back from certain certainties.  But then other things bear the weight of your life and experience much better and with time, you find yourself trusting these other things much more deeply.  You’re leaning on these thing with a great deal of your weight such that if they were suddenly kicked out from under you like a cane, you’d be shocked and unsettled.

Like the Bible. I’m sorry, but I’ve had so much accumulated connection with God through the Bible that you’re just not going to be able to pry my fingers off the thing.   On the one hand.  But on the other, some of my convictions that I  was so sure of  a few decades ago  haven’t stood the test of time, and I had  chapter and verse for some of ‘em.

So I’ve got this theory: I’m wrong in my understanding of the Bible about 15% of the time.  I just don’t know which 15%.  It’ might be 10% (one can hope) or it might be 20%. I’m not willing to entertain the thought that it might be 90%.  Just for sanity’s sake.  But it’s some percent greater than zero, and it’s got to be double digits.

As a result, I find myself willing to entertain questions.

Like this question: does the rule always apply–”If your experience of God seems to contradict your best understanding of Scripture, always dismiss your experience and stick with your best understanding of Scripture.”  That seems like a really good rule.   It cuts out a lot of foolishness fast.

But then you’ve got Scripture itself, which seems to be leading us to the truth in person, Jesus.  And he has a, for lack of a better word, wild, side.  I mean he loves Scripture, treats Scripture as reliable, powerful and all that.  But he uses Scripture sometimes in different ways than anticipated.  He seems to use it, at times dangerously.  Like when he said, “Doesn’t Scripture say, ‘ye shall be as gods’ and the Scripture cannot be broken’” and then he doesn’t really explain himself.  He’s a monotheist talking like that. And he doesn’t say, “don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying YOU are actually gods….”  Except that this is exactly what he seems to be saying.  But if someone asserted that this is what he meant, I’d say, you’re crazy.

So here’s a case where Jesus is using Scripture but in a dangerous sort of way. You’d have to say he’s using Scripture in an unorthodox sort of way.  Fine. He’s Jesus.  But still.

But back to my question about that very sensible rule I mentioned.  It is a very sensible rule.  It’s just that I’m glad Peter didn’t rely on the rule to guide him when he had that vision at noon on the rooftop in Joppa. Where  a sheet came down and said, “Rise, Peter, kill and eat!”  He was shocked.  Because he was being told to do something forbidden by his best understanding of Scripture.  And I think it’s a cop out to say that Jesus had prepared him for this.  If so, he didn’t prepare him very well.

So there Peter is: he’s had this powerful experience of God speaking to him and it contradicts his best understanding of Scripture.  Because of his love of Scripture and his respect for Scripture it throws him into a tizzy.  He doesn’t just say, “Wow! What a fantastic experience!  Let’s go to Red Lobster!”  No, he seems to wrestle with God and with the vision.  He’s stuck for a while.  The vision repeats a couple of times for emphasis.  But eventually, he goes with the vision, against the rule.

And we Gentiles are like, “Thank God he didn’t take the rule to the limit! Thank God he made an exception!”

Sure, you can say, “But he was an apostle. That’s was his apostolic prerogative.”  I know.  But still.  Isn’t this in the Bible to encourage us?  To show us how God has what may appear to us to be a dangerous side?  That we can’t reduce the adventure of being faithful to God down to something manageable like a set of rules?  We can still use rules, but we can’t be ruled by them.  See what I mean? Try that with your ten year old!

I don’t mind entertaining these kinds of questions.  In fact, I think the Bible itself encourages me to entertain just such questions as these.  Even though it feels dicey to do so.

But partly, that’s because I’ve been around that climate of fear.  I’ve imbibed the nectar of that particular form of fear.  And while it seemed to promise safety and security, it turned out to be a kind of narcotic.  It dulled my mind and my spirit.  So I’ve developed a kind of caution about that ever present cautionary, warning, be careful, nervous, fearful thing.

All theology is biography ultimately–something we can’t shy away from if our study of God involves the knowing of a truth in person whose first-last-and deepest truth telling begins-ends-continues with the words, “I am.” All of biblical truth is carried on the back of a donkey called story–history, his story, the story that includes and redeems and transforms our story, because a plot likes nothing better than to thicken. And so I find myself struggling to tell my Jesus freak story to this generation that’s filling up the likes of Joshua House.

The times we’re in have a deja-vu quality for an old(er) Jesus freak like me. I came to follow Jesus in 1971, before the Religious Right had coalesced. My fellow Jesus freaks were left leaning, anti-war, pro-ecology types, if anything. Pollution was just another sign of impending apocalypse, driven by a growing global population whose graph looked like a hockey stick surging off the charts of the sustainable. This was before the clean air and clean water act, when pollution was a non-politically acknowledged phenomenon and we had the dirty rivers and the smog thick cities to prove it. And all of this was the tinder that was lit by a generational appearing of Jesus of Nazareth.

So I came in from the cold of an intentional atheism–an Ayn Rand in your face atheism–drawn in, not by the allure of Christianity per se, and certainly not by the allure of religion as I understood it. But drawn in by the allure of Jesus of Nazareth, the hero of the gospels. I’m of the generation that bought the notion that God is dead. And it was only Jesus of Nazareth–a haunting presence leaping off the witness of the gospels into my confused heart–who could convince me otherwise.

And so my loyalty shifted to him. Not so much to Christianity or to the idea of orthodoxy–though the him of which I speak is and was the Jesus of the canonical gospels–but to him. And since then, through decades of involvement in the shifting, messy landscape of renewal oriented religion of the Christian variety, he is the one thing, the one remaining, after all the disillusioning. If this sounds theological, it is, but only because all theology is biography. It’s the thing in my theology that has held my life together, the only center holding. And it’s intensely, and the farthest thing from dispassionately, personal.

See, what I think happened is that a bunch of us Jesus freaks, without realizing it, founds ourselves in a pot of tepid water on a stove. The pot being American evangelicalism. And the gas that was lit beneath the pot was not the fire, always, of the Holy Spirit. It was the fire of something else that aligned itself with the Holy Spirit but for it’s own purposes and with it’s own agenda. And we, in the pot, like frogs found ourselves warming with the water in the pot, but not noticing, being cold-blooded like frogs, and not discerning the nature of the flame beneath us, because we were in the pot and not the flame. Some kind of cultural-political-religious flame that was not pure Jesus.

And now a number of us old(er) Jesus freaks are hopping out of the water, remembering what it was that got us in the pot in the first place. Jesus of Nazareth and our imprinting on him like ducklings on a mother duck. That’s what we signed up for. That’s what we want back again. That’s what the world needs now, love, sweet love, of the Jesus-brand variety. Of the love your enemies variety. Of the thundering Hebrew prophet confronting the powers and principalities variety. Of the tender love toward the outsiders, the smoldering wick need not fear extinguishing variety.

The cultural tinder is there for another flaming forth revelation of Jesus of Nazareth. I can feel it, as though the air is ionized for a lightning strike. The tinder is outside the camp, not inside. Oh, there’s plenty of dry twigs and leaves inside the camp, but the real gathering of tinder is outside the camp. The people who see the storm clouds on the horizon of this world. The people dismayed by a war that didn’t live up to expectation from which we see no obvious exit. The people who want to live right but can’t buy a moralism that their heart deems mean. The people dismayed by a still surging global population using the stuff of creation up at a rate that’s not sustainable. The world that’s been watching our American dream from the sidelines now wants to live it, and who can blame them? But the demand is exceeding the supply and now we’re feeling the pinch. And isn’t that the pickle? Isn’t that the bind? But it’s dawning on us as reality does–the reality of food prices and fuel prices driven by this, undeniably (oh it may lighten up again for a season, but if it does, it will be back)–so where do we go from here? I’m stumped, how about you?

And so I’ve got my eyes peeled for another appearing of Jesus. Of Nazareth. Not of Rome. Not of Geneva. Not of Colorado Springs. But of Nazareth. So that he may gather us together and counsel us, that we may follow and find our way.

So this past week has conspired to get me listening to my life. A talk given at the Great Lakes Regional conference on the treasure buried in the field of Vineyard, one of those melt down experiences during a time of extended worship after one of the main sessions, some offspring and friends from afar coming in this weekend to celebrate the release of Jesus Brand Spirituality: He Wants His Religion Back.

All of which got me thinking about my earliest imprinting as a newbie on the Jesus path. Imprinting, like what happens to baby ducklings. There’s a short period after their birth when whatever they look at tells them what they are. More times than not, it’s their mommy duck and they get it straight: walk like a duck, talk like a duck, must be a duck. Species identity confirmed and secured.

I’m a Jesus freak. I got it from Brian Martin, a Jesus freak from my high school days in Detroit. One of the original Detroit Jesus freaks, back when the hippies and druggies and high schoolers of Detroit, city of, were discovering Jesus as if for the first time. Part of the Jesus movement in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Sandal wearing Jesus freaks with blue jean jackets and all that. He talked with me about Jesus of Nazareth, star of the gospels. Like he knew the man, which he did, if through a glass darkly. And I was moved to read one of those gospels and felt my first haunting from Jesus of Nazareth.

Brian put me on to a backyard Bible study happening in Detroit at the time. Nancy and I walk into this scene: maybe 75 or so young people sitting around on the grass in a smallish backyard, with a middle age Jewish guy named Haskell Stone, sitting in a lawn chair teaching from one of the gospels. While smoking a cigarette in one of those FDR plastic cigarette holders, I think, I remember, wondering now if I made that part up.

Listening to the guy, imprinting was happening without my knowing it. As follows: the center-piece of Christianity is Jesus of Nazareth, star of the gospels; the point is to find and follow him; the treasure buried in the field that Jesus wants us digging around in is the kingdom of God.

I thought at the time, it was the obvious center. But then as I mixed it up over the years with many other Christians, I realized it’s not so obvious. The Lutherans seemed centered on the book of Romans and Galatians and insisted that every sermon be structured around an explication of the law and the gospel. And the Presbyterians were centered, it seemed to me, and this may be unfair, on the sovereignty of God as demonstrated in their willingness to wade into the waters of predestination. And the Catholics seemed to be centered on the sacrifice of the mass. And all it was lovely in it’s way and good, properly understood, but I couldn’t properly understand it, because I had imprinted on this other center.

Through no fault of my own, I might add, and no credit either, but simply as a result of what happened during that window of time when a duckling imprints on her mother duck and forever after knows she is.

A Jesus freak, swept into a theological undercurrent called the kingdom of God. See, Haskell Stone, it turns out, after coming to faith in Jesus as his messiah–a step that cost him dearly, being Jewish, and remaining so, but unrecognized by his Jewish friends and family–went to Fuller Theological Seminary back in the day. And studied under George Eldon Ladd, who in turn was being influenced by Oscar Cullmann. Scholars who were dusting off the gospels and saying, “Hey! The organizing motif of the Bible is the theme of the coming kingdom of God! The “already and the not yet” kingdom of God. The treasure buried in the field that Jesus counseled us to sell all in order to purchase.”

Which is why a few decades into my following days, I heard John Wimber speak and said, “Oh my! This is what I’ve been missing!” Wimber was one of the first to popularize the work of George Eldon Ladd, and Wimber’s wake left a new association of churches called Vineyard. Something that feels a little different when it’s being itself. Because it has as it’s theological center, this theme: the kingdom of God.

And in time the church that started in Mark Kinzer’s dorm room (Kinzer was powerfully influenced by Haskell Stone) and moved to our living room, through a long circuitous route became a Vineyard church. And a seminary professor from the Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit came to my office one day and handed me a paper that he had written in his own seminary days. It was a paper about the kingdom of God using Oscar Cullmann as it’s primary source. With tears in his eyes, he told me that he had been looking for a church that was centered on this understanding of Christian faith, and he could feel it in this church, the one I also attended.

Which made me feel incredibly good, when he said that. Because you just never know if the scent is strong enough in any church. This treasure seems to be buried deep most of the time, and you wonder how findable it is, sometimes. The gap between the pulsating presence of Jesus himself and the community that forms around him being greater than one would hope most of the time. And then someone like Brown Kinnard comes along with dirt on his knees from digging and says he thinks he found something. And you say to yourself, I knew this was real.