A Link to the Past

Life | Autobiography | Quotations

The following (very long) quote is from this excerpt from the autobiography of John Williamson Nevin. The fellow who has posted these first four chapters looks like he’s going to be posting the entire autobiography in stages, which should make for excellent reading.

[Concerning the revivals during the Great Awakening:] God forbid that I should undervalue the significance of this momentous passage in my life; it was for me a true awakening and decision in the great concern of personal experimental religion, which went beyond all I had known before, and entered deeply into all my subsequent history. But God forbid also, on the other hand, that I should not, at the same time, speak freely of the vast error and fault there was in the whole movement. It was based throughout on the principle, that regeneration and conversion lay outside of the Church, had nothing to do with baptism and Christian education, required rather a looking away from all this as more a bar than a help to the process, and were to be sought only in the way of magical illapse or stroke from the Spirit of God (what Dr. Bushnell has named the ictic experience), as something precedent and preliminary to entering the true fold of the Shepherd and Bishop of souls To realize this, then, became the inward strain and effort of the anxious soul; and what was held to be saving faith in the end, consisted largely in believing that the realization was reached. And so afterwards also, all was made to turn, in the life of religion, on alternating frames and states, and introverted self-inspection, more or less–under the guidance of some such work as Edwards on the Affections. An intense subjectivity, in one word–which is something always impotent and poor- -took the place of a proper contemplation of the grand and glorious obiectivities of the Christian life, in which all the true power of the Gospel at last lies, My own “experience” in this way, at the time here under consideration was not wholesome, but very morbid rather and weak. Alas, where was my mother, the Church, at the very time I most needed her fostering arms? Where was she, I mean, with her true sacramental sympathy and care? How much better it had been for me, if I had only been properly drawn forth from myself by some right soul-communication with the mysteries of the old Christian Creed. As it was, I could not repeat the Creed, and as yet knew it only as one of the questionable relics of Popery. I had never heard it at Middle-Spring; and it was entirely foreign from the religious spirit of Union College.

What I find remarkable is that his experiences in 1830 are so remarkably similar to my own in the 1990’s. I can hardly deny the significance of my early charismatic experiences, nor the fact that they confirmed me as a lifelong Christian. But I also cannot deny that their entire foundation–the belief that true Christianity is inward and subjective–was wrong and ultimately destructive.

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Autobiography: The Rest of the Story

Autobiography

Previous: The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

After two turbulent years of depression, rebellion, and redemption, I was back where I started. Or so it seemed at the time.

After returning from Romania, I spent a delightful few weeks enjoying the last bit of summer with my parents, then undertook the long drive out to Seattle, Washington, where I would spend the next four years at the University of Washington. In that interim I went to church and enjoyed the services as before, and felt almost that things were unchanged. Some things were different: the emotional intensity that defined my earlier experiences with God was gone, and has never returned. But I didn’t miss it; on the contrary, I felt totally secure in the knowledge of forgiveness and the reborn life before me, and didn’t feel any need for the gut-twisting poles of ecstasy and agony that had marked my previous life. Aside from this new sense of equilibrium, I didn’t–at first–go in any new directions.

Three things would come into my life in the next few years that would change this.

The first was my church, Mars Hill. In my first month or two in Seattle, I didn’t have any church home. I visited one or two congregations, and eventually became a regular at the local Campus Crusade group. I even went on the Campus Crusade fall retreat, which was fun but rather unremarkable. Then an acquaintance from my dorm invited me to “the church that meets at the Paradox [a local concert venue]”, and I went on only the second or third invite.

The moment I came in, I knew it was the place for me. My thought when I entered was, “At last, a church for adults!” There were no crowd-participation games, silly skits, or ridiculous songs about fruit, like at Campus Crusade. Instead, the sanctuary was lit with candles, the worship leader led the audience in sincere, simple songs, and the preacher was meaty and serious. The audience, too, was different: they sported tatoos, piercings, and black makeup. My hair, which was at least five different colors over the next four years, did not create a stir. (The colors were blue, purple, green, red, and black, some of those multiple times, and oh, my natural dirty-blonde). I loved it. Mars Hill immediately became my permanent church, and within a few months I was regularly volunteering at services, working for the church-run Paradox Theater, and had become a member.

The teachings at Mars Hill were wonderful–direct, honest, expository. I learned more than I could have imagined. But ultimately more important than the content of what I learned was the fact that learning and study were taken seriously. Mars Hill was a place where theology was taken seriously. People at Mars Hill read famous theologians like John Calvin and Martin Luther, they cared about interpretation, and they loved a good argument. If my previous Charismatic life had revolved around experience, Mars Hill revolved around exegesis. I loved it, and soon entered the fray, developing a depth of Biblical appreciation and understanding that I had never had before. Having grown up in the Spirit, Mars Hill brought me the Word.

The second life-shaping event came in the form of a link posted on the Mars Hill website to this article about Christian parents ruining their children. I read the article and loved it–and identified with it. I hurried to see what other gems could be found on this site, and discovered a treasury. Over the next few weeks I read nearly every article at internetmonk.com and began reading the Boar’s Head Tavern, and a few weeks after that I asked to become a tavern fellow. I’ve been a poster there ever since.

What I got from Michael Spencer, aka the iMonk, was a critique of the evangelical and Charismatic churches that I had grown up in. Mars Hill was pretty far from the evangelical mainstream, and its distinctive style and attitudes had created a hazy chill in me regarding my former church. The iMonk, however, solidified all of this. In the iMonk archives I found a compelling, Biblical analysis of the bankruptcy of evangelicalism, told with style, wit, and grace, and backed by the same Scriptural rigour that I had come to expect from Mars Hill. Michael knew evangelicalism from the inside and knew what was wrong with it, and his articles diagnosed the disease with perfect accuracy. I didn’t always agree with him, but I always learned from him. Though he’s probably a bit chagrined to hear it, Michael helped turn me from an ill-defined former Charismatic into a strident antagonist of evangelicalism. For better or worse.

The third life-changer was Romania. After graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in Linguistics, I went to Romania for a year working with Christ Commission for Romania, a local branch of Christ for the Nations that runs a Bible school, a series of summer camps, and a variety of secondary programs. This was a fantastic, challenging year. I met something I loved, something I liked, and something I hated, so I will say a bit about each.

My love came in the form of Larisa Apetrei, an impish, sassy Romanian girl. I had no plans of getting married when I came to the country, but things developed quickly once I was there. Larisa was everything I wanted: fun, beautiful, spiritual, talented, but also my opposite in many ways: a needed counterbalance to my cynicism and criticalness. (Of course, the readers of this blog would never find me cynical or critical. Or sarcastic.) Our relationship was a struggle from the start, but a struggle that we always won and were glad we did. I asked her to be my wife in July, and we were legally married in December. Now I’m counting down the days to our real wedding in July. Te iubesc, Larisa.

The thing I liked was Orthodoxy. I had only a vague conception of Orthodoxy before I came, but I was quickly entranced by the beauty of their churches and the haunting, alien chanting I would hear wafting from their naves. Eventually I found an occasion to attend the Divine Liturgy, and it blew me away. I had never experienced anything like it. After that I attended liturgies like a junkie seeking a drug: I stayed away for months until the curiosity overtook me again, then I furtively darted in and out hoping that no one had seen me. I’m still not sure what this means. A lot of the fascination was simple reaction against the aesthetic poverty of evangelical worship; I’m still trying to see what else is there.

The thing I hated was legalism. This was one extreme my previous churches had never fallen into: both Rez and Mars Hill understood the meaning of grace. A great many Romanian Protestant churches do not, and they enforce their peculiar ethos with ugly, brutal cruelty. Seen up close, legalism turned out to be even worse than I had been told. (The Bible school that I worked with was a brilliant exception to this in its context, although it took me a while to see this.) This, too, fueled my interest with Orthodoxy, because the Romanian Protestants in their zeal to not be Orthodox had cut themselves off from almost everything that was beautiful in their cultural heritage. If there had been any question about legalism before my trip to Romania, my year immersed in it put the question out.

And that more or less brings us to today. There are a few sure things in the future: my wedding, life with Larisa, an eventual return to school. I’m definitely still in the middle of the journey, though. For now I’m a quasi-Reformed sacramental three-point Calvinist post-Charismatic Christian with Orthodox sympathies attending an Episcopalian church.

Someday I’ll sort that out.

(the end for now)

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Autobiography: The Gospel of Jesus Christ

Autobiography

Previous: Rebellion.

It was the summer of 2000, and I was set to go to Romania. Unfortunately, most of the rest of my life was in disarray: I was coming out of a year and a half of severe depression, self-injury, and rebellion. I had begun drinking, and I had a girlfriend that I was basically just using to corrupt myself. I knew that God had abandoned me, and I hated Him. Nonetheless, my plans to go to Romania were going through, despite my insistence that I didn’t want to participate in anything “spiritual” there.

A few days before I left, I had a meeting with an old friend and a teacher we had had together in the eighth grade. That teacher happened to give me the book Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. It so happens that I had read the book before, but I accepted it and packed it into my bags to be reading material in Romania.

And so, early on a Tuesday morning, my parents drove me to the airport and packed me on a plane to Bucharest. From Bucharest I went to Suceava, and from Suceava to Voroneţ, a mountain village where the summer youth camp was being held.

There are all sorts of things I could say about my time in Romania, but for this story the important thing was this: I began to read the book. And as I began to read the book, I found that I identified very strongly with its main character, an ugly girl named Orual. Allow me a few moments to give a very brief outline of the book, because it’s integral to what happened next. Till We Have Faces is the story of two sisters, the older one ugly beyond words, the younger astoundingly beautiful. Because of Orual’s ugliness, only her sister ever really loves her, and they are best friends in childhood. Then the younger sister is chosen to be a bride to the mountain god. She is taken away and Orual presumes her dead, until she finds her living on the mountainside. She appears to be healthy, but she insists that she really is married to the god and rejects Orual’s offer to come back to their home. Shortly afterwards she disappears entirely. This event defines Orual’s life, who grows to become bitter and hateful towards the god, whom she blames for her sister’s disappearance and for stealing her sister’s love. The final blow comes when she finds that her sister has been named a goddess, and she is cast as the villain in her sister’s new myth. Furious, she sets about to write a record of the god’s wrongdoing with her, to prove herself right and the god wrong.

I saw myself in this story. God had stolen my joy away from me, just as the mountain god had taken Orual’s sister from her. Everything that had been meaningful to me, from my church to my girlfriend, had been stripped away by God, and I was left with nothing. And when I rebelled and called God for the capricious liar that he was, I was rewarded with simple condemnation. Like Orual, I wanted to scream at God, blame Him for everything that had happened, and write my record of how God had lied to me and screwed me over.

The problem was that I had read the book before, and I knew how it ended. After writing her accusation, Orual has a series of visions in which she begins to see things from the spiritual perspective. Finally Orual is allowed to have her audience with the god, and she reads her accusation aloud to him before a tribunal of the dead. When she does this, she suddenly sees her accusation for what it is: a bitter, selfish rant, repetitive and monotonous, the writings of a madman. She reads out her book to the god, then stands in silence for a few minutes. “Are you answered?” the judge asks. She says yes and departs.

As I neared this climactic moment of the book, I became anxious. I saw myself in Orual, but I also knew what this meant. As I worked in the events of the camp around me, I was experiencing a private crisis. Was I Orual? Was my accusation just? Would I stand before God and accuse him? I felt as if the entire weight of the last two years was bearing down upon me, as if everything that had happened were pointing to this moment, balanced precariously on exactly this point. I would have to finally give way, one direction or another.

There came the night when I read the climactic scene described above. It was during some sermon, the content of which I don’t remember at all. I remember turning pages, with near-total identification with Orual, and finally coming to the crucial moment. “Are you answered?” The words sounded as if God Himself had spoken aloud when I read them. I closed the book and put it aside. I saw two ways before me, as clearly as if I actually stood at a crossroads: the way of bitterness, justification, and anger, and the way of forgiveness. I could choose to maintain my accusation against God, and He would not stop me. But I could also choose to repent and know forgiveness.

This second path required total repentance, in a way that I had never previously understood the word. There would be no more self-justification. No more accusation. I could not blame God for not doing what I thought He should do. I could not blame others for their indifference or incompetence in my pain. There would be no shred, not the smallest rag of defense. What I was offered was a totally unguarded free-fall into the hands of forgiveness.

I sat for ten minutes and contemplated my choice. Then I said yes.

Who can describe what happened next? I didn’t cry or laugh. I didn’t feel any of the emotional extremes that had marked my previous encounters with God. What I had was the utter confidence that I was forgiven. What an utter miracle! I was safe. I was at peace with God and with myself. And I was filled with joy: pure, quiet joy.

This encounter stands next to my time at Rock the Nations as bookends of these two crucial years in my life. This was in many ways the complete opposite of what I had felt two years ago: it was not a spiritual high or an ecstatic revelation. I did not emerge with a lock-jawed determination to live “on fire for God”, like I had so many times before. I had simply set out on a new path, the path of forgiveness, and all that remained was to keep walking.

The rest of my time in Romania was wonderful. I met my wife, although neither of us knew we would marry until four years later. I began to speak the language well, well enough to converse and think in it and enjoy some Romanian writers. Mostly I rested and wondered. When I got back, I immediately broke up with my girlfriend. I spoke to my parents, confessed a great many things, and apologized. My relationships were healed. My world was changed. Nothing has been the same since.

Last: The Rest of the Story.

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Autobiography: Rebellion

Autobiography

Previous: Crisis.

After my near-suicide and confession to my parents, I talked about my struggle with my youth group leaders and the discipleship group that I was a part of. I did lots of crying, received lots of prayer, and was the focus of a lot of spiritual warfare. This came at the very end of my Junior year in high school, and for a while things seemed to get a lot better. My depression didn’t actually lift, but I felt surrounded by people who cared for me, and I felt as though I could make it. I was together enough to go to Romania for the first time that summer on a missions trip with my youth group, a fun and rewarding experience that paved the way for much more important things to happen in Romania in the future.

However, by the end of the summer it was apparent that any improvement in my emotional state was illusory. I still felt totally disconnected from my church’s worship, and the old, dead feeling, the jaws gnawing at my insides, still persisted for weeks at a time. There were moments when I returned to near-normalcy, but they were fleeting. I didn’t know what to think about this, because I had done everything right by the standards that I knew: I had prayed, I had confessed, I had let people bind, prophecy, and worship around me. But I remained shut out of the presence of God and alienated from the youth around me. When others fell down and experienced the ecstatic heights of worship that I had known before, I could only look on bitterly, or hide in the back and sulk. Therefore there was something wrong with me: I was mot meant to be for God. I could not enjoy Him, but only wait to be damned.

In the beginning of the fall I began to practice self-mutilation. It was a release: while I felt disembodied and cut off from the world around me, a thin, deep razor cut on my upper arm was at least something I could feel. It was something real, when all of the Christian lies in my background were not. Plus, I deserved it. A monster like me needed to be hurt, and only a monster like me could enjoy it. My girlfriend was deeply distressed by this development, but that didn’t stop me. I started carrying a razor in my wallet for the moment when I would feel the urge to hurt myself. I hid my scars, but secretly relished them. This was something that no one else could understand, my joy in my own depravity.

Yet I couldn’t get away from my spiritual past. When I reread the poems I wrote during this period, I am surprised with how much I talk about God. It was clear that I still wanted to have a relationship with God and wanted to be happy, but the God I thought I knew wasn’t responding. My writing in this period is full of desperation, convinced that I was sick but beyond the reach of any healer.

This went on throughout the fall. I was disconnected from my family and most of my friends, and disappointed with my spiritual past. The final blow, though, came at the end of December when my girlfriend broke up with me. Throughout my whole struggle she had remained close to me, and as I said before, I was completely in love. It was the kind of love that hurt, sometimes like a physical ache. And when she left me–it was the end of the world. The last good thing in my life was gone.

There was only one conclusion. God had taken away every good thing in my life and I had become a monster. Now He had taken away the woman that I loved, God must hate me. And I was determined to return the favor. Or maybe he didn’t hate me, and this was all somehow part of his plan. In that case I would hate him all the more, because every joy in my life was gone because of Him. It was pretty clear that the Christian life I had believed in was a lie. I had been told that God loved me, and that He would take care of me if I remained faithful and walked in the presence of the Spirit. But I had done all that, I had climbed to the highest spiritual height of my life, and I was left with nothing. The joy of the Lord, the victorious life, the outpouring of God’s spirit had done jack shit for me. Christianity was bullshit. It was time to try something else.

My decision wasn’t quite this conscious or quite this sudden, but the outcome was the same. I immediately had a brief, desperate fling with another girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend. When that fell apart I got together with a punk rocker for the expressed purpose of corrupting myself. I started drinking, doing drugs, and more. We cut ourselves together. I would probably have done more of all of these, but ironically my new girlfriend was somewhat reluctant to corrupt someone that she saw as a good Christian boy. Our relationship was awful, anyway: I was depressed and rebelling, and she was bipolar. Plus, I was still in love with my ex, though I wouldn’t admit it. It was a turbulent, angry, and bitter time. I had consciously set out to destroy myself, and I was getting a good start on it.

The whole time I kept up a fairly convincing facade for my parents, although I dropped out of the youth discipleship group and cut my church activities back to the bare minimum. At one point my parents found out about my cutting and sent me to the church’s head counselor–the only time I ever get any professional help. But after two meetings I wouldn’t go back any more, because he was actually helping me and I didn’t want to be helped. I still managed to keep my grades up, somehow, I graduated valedictorian and got to make a speech at my graduation. These were definite high points for me, and as the summer of 2000 began a strange thing began to happen: my depression began to lift. I didn’t realize it at first, especially because I was making enough bad decisions to depress a normal person. But the signs were there: my appetite and energy returned, the urge to cut myself receded, and I began to experience days of happiness. I tried to deny this, because my goal of self-destruction depended on the assumption that I would be tormented forever. A few months ago that had appeared to be the case, but now what was I to do?

For the time being I stayed the course, remained with my girlfriend, and continued acting out. But I took slow steps towards patching things up with my parents and my ex-girlfriend, and most importantly, prepared to go to Romania.

After the last summer’s missions trip to Romania, I had made plans to come to the country again. I had already learned some of the language and wanted a chance to stay for a few weeks, and plans had already been made for this. As I rebelled in the months leading up to the trip, I got in contact with the leader of the Bible School and told him that I would still come, but I didn’t want to have anything to do with “spiritual stuff”. I would be a helping hand, but not a spiritual leader. He bravely agreed to let me come anyway, and thus opened the door for the rest of my life.

I don’t know what it is about Romania, but God has always seen fit to do strange and wonderful things to me there.

Next:The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

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Autobiography: Crisis

Autobiography

Previous: On Fire For God.

The summer after my sophomore year of high school I went to a summer youth retreat called Rock the Nations. Rock the Nations was hardcore: three days of total fast (nothing more substantial than V8 Juice), three worship services a day, and teaching workshops between the worship. The whole event was geared towards getting kids excited about prayer, fasting, and revival, and the combination of sleep deprivation, lack of food, and high-intensity worship music made for a mind-bending experience. That five-day seminar was doubtlessly the most extraordinary manifestation of God’s presence that I had seen up to that point, culminating in a meeting that looked like a cross between a rock concert and a war zone: thousands of kids sprawled across the stage and meeting room crying, laughing, shaking, and fainted, with alterna-rock worship music spewing from the speakers and members of the leadership wading through the bodies to impart more of God’s annointing.

I came back feeling like I had been in another world, and I carried that high through the last several weeks of summer and into the beginning of school. After a while, though, the feeling subsided and my enthusiasm waned. This was normal, though–there was always a “dry period” after a spiritual climax–and I was looking forward to a local Rock the Nations event to be held at my church for a booster.

Oddly, when Rock the Nations came to our church, the annointing seemed to pass over me. I tried to get involved alongside everybody else, but I found that I lacked either the energy or the ability to get caught up as I had hoped. Thus the weekend came and went, and I found myself in the same state I was before: not bad, but missing something of the energy that I had counted on before. This persisted throughout the fall and winter. The youth winter camp provided a brief spiritual high, but almost immediately after the camp I slid back down into the spiritual doldrums that had plagued me for the past months.

In and of itself, this would not have been a problem. But after winter camp, things began to deteriorate further, and other, apparently unrelated problems began to crop up. I was tired all the time. I had been rising every day to read my Bible and pray, but I abandoned this habit because I just couldn’t sleep enough. My appetite dwindled or fluctuated erratically. I found myself feeling persistently glum. Although I had always been a model student, my motivation to do schoolwork disappeared. I found myself constantly restless and dissatisfied with my life. I suddenly wanted to renounce my life up to that point and find something realer, less ordinary, and more satisfying. In this I was more than a little encouraged by my 11th-grade English and History teachers who were giving us Catcher in the Rye, The Graduate, and 60’s counterculture right at this time, opening up whole new vistas for this formerly cloistered Christian kid.

At the same time I was, paradoxically, falling in love in the blind, desperate way that only teenagers can fall in love. This turned my entire world upside-down, because I found everything around me turning gray except for the object of my affection. I successfully asked her to prom and we began going out, and she gradually became my major confidant in my growing alienation from the world around me. But I was never completely fulfilled by the relationship, partly because I never felt like she loved me the way I was in love with her, and partly because my conscience kept telling me that my priorities were somehow wrong in this mess.

The voice of conscience was dying anyway. My inability to feel the presence of God at first compelled me to seek His face with greater ardor, but the doors of Heaven remained shut. As I continued to be excluded from the action of the Spirit, my fervor turned to shame, and then to annoyance. Why was everyone else being touched by God, but not me? What was wrong with me? The few times I tried to ask questions about this, the responses were unhelpful or irrelevant. I got tired of people trying to tell me to seek God, because it was obvious that He didn’t want me to find Him. Nothing in my background prepared me for such an occurrence, or even gave me a way to talk about it.

My emotional state worsened. I went from being occasionally glum to consistently gloomy and irritable. I began to feel something that I could barely describe, that I can’t really even desribe now. Like being chewed by enormous jaws on the inside. Like having broken glass in your throat. Like being cold underneath your skin. Feeling your body as a mass of dead bone draped in tepid flesh. Like having your head underwater so you hear and see everything distorted. Feeling like a mistake, a monster, something wrong. I had formerly lived on the taste of Heaven, but my daily reality had become something else. This was Hell.

In the middle of the spring I happened to be taking our district’s Health requirement because of a scheduling fluke. One segment was about common teenage problems, and we devoted a day to depression. “If you have one or more of the following symptoms,” the page chirped,”you may have clinical depression and should seek help.” I checked every single one of the ten symptoms listed. I was rather surprised. I had considered my problem a spiritual malady, some sort of message from God, even if I didn’t know what it was trying to say. A psychological illness had never occurred to me. And while I accepted the diagnosis, I refused to seek help. The only person I told was my girlfriend, to whom I insisted that I was okay, and could handle it. Things were bad, but psychiatrists were for weird people, non-Christians and psychos. I would be fine.

I wasn’t fine. Things got steadily worse. My parents attributed my condition to stress and tried to encourage me to take things easy. I tried to tell them at one point, “I would like to stop and smell the roses, but I feel like I’ve lost my sense of smell.” They continued to pray for me and with me, and sometimes I would have a good, cathartic sob for a few hours. But nothing actually made it any better.

Finally there came a Sunday when our pastor taught on the love of God. I heard his words and drew a simple conclusion: Any God of love wouldn’t want me to live this way. Therefore it was time to die. The thought had crossed my mind before, but this time I was serious. I had the means, the plan, and the time. I just needed to put a few things in order. I called my girlfriend to say goodbye. She wasn’t home, so I decided to wait a few hours for her–she was, after all, the most important thing in my life by then. I laid down and took a nap, and probably saved my life. When I got up, the will to die was gone. I called her up and invited her over, this time not to say goodbye, but to confess everything.

A teenager at a kitchen table does not make the best counseling partener, but to her credit she did everything she could. We agreed to tell my parents when they came home. When they did come home they were upset at first simply because I had had a girl over while no one else was home–a big taboo in my house. In fact, we had to go to a softball game and they whisked me off with them before they really understood what was going on. When we got back that evening they confronted me about bringing my girlfriend over, and I–flabbergasted–told them what had really happened.

[I need to make it clear right here that I do not blame my parents for what happened next. They had no more experience or preparation in this area than I did, and they simply reacted to the best of their ability. The fact that they probably made things worse simply testifies to the fact that none of us had any idea what to do with this kind of situation. My parents love me and I’m sure that if they could do it again, they would do things differently. What follows should not be taken as an indictment of my parents, but a reflection of how messed up things were.]

My parents were furious. They reaction with shock and anger, and my mom began binding Satan and the spirit of depression right there. They sent my dad to sleep in my room for the next couple of nights, but aside from that they took no other action. They said that they loved me and that I could talk to them, but mostly they just kept an eye on me. Although their intentions were different, I could not help but get the message that there would be no aid for me, only punishment. In my darkest thoughts I said that they were mad at me for messing up their perfect, happy Christian life. Everyone else was happy and following God, while I had to go and try to kill myself. But with no other options, I submitted.

Part of my submission was coming out to the youth group leadership at the next meeting of our discipleship team. After telling the tearful story, we had a long prayer meeting in which the entire group huddled around me and I cried buckets. People gave me words from the Lord, proclaimed verses, and offered me everything they had. They all hugged me. I felt authentically touched by God, and I was sure that even if things weren’t completely rezolved yet, they were looking up.

Next: Rebellion.

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Autobiography: On Fire For God

Autobiography

Previous: Before I Can Remember.

So here I am, a pre-schooler growing up in a family where the parents are pastors at a Charismatic church. This meant that from a very young age I was brought up in the theological preoccupations of Charismaticism: the current work of the Holy Spirit, the reality of miracles, speaking in tongues, prophecies, faith healing, etc. And I embraced this wholly and sought from a very young age to be an exemplary Christian in every possible ay, which meant being “on fire for God”.

Thus, from gradeschool I was heavily involved in the activities of my church. I attended church Sunday mornings and evenings, and almost all Wednesday nights. I prayed (in tongues and in English) frequently. As a gradeschooler I was involved in our church’s Fresh Fire Ministry Teams, a group of grade-schoolers doing evangelistic drama, puppets, pantomimes, and dance. I loved church, and I was sure to get as much of God as I could.

My early spiritual life was heavily marked by Charismatic theology and approaches to God, and filled with manifestations of the Holy Spirit. I remember one particular camp at which the speaker specialized in getting gradeschoolers filled with the Holy Spirit and working in the gifts of the Spirit, and I remember prophesying over a friend of mine in such a chaotic, tear-filled service. I spoke in tongues regularly, and was encouraged to speak in tongues every day as a part of my “private prayer life”. I was “slain in the spirit” several times (i.e. knocked onto my back by the power of the Holy Spirit), and at least once was annointed to pray for people for healing and watched them fall over when I touched them. I believed strongly in spiritual warfare and would punch the air or jump up and down to hurt the devil. I would “plead the Blood of Jesus” over my room when I got scared. To me, this was normal, authentic Christianity. I was vaguely aware of the fact that people in other churches did things differently, but the explanation was simple: they didn’t have the Holy Spirit, and so were missing out on the better part of the Christian life.

Alongside this extremely Charismatic spiritual development, my parents protected me from the mainstream culture in lots of ways. The list of forbidden books and TV shows was enormous. Anything having to do with magic was taboo: this included Care Bears, The Smurfs, Teddy Ruxbin (remember him?), The Little Mermaid, He-Man, Ghost Busters, Madeline L’Engle, or pretty much anything else that involved the supernatural. I liked Star Trek, but had to skip episodes that involved any kind of telepathy or ESP. I thought that the Vulcan Mind Meld was sinful, or at least sinful to watch. Non-Christian music was forbidden. (I grew up in the 80’s, but had never heard a Michael Jackson song until about 5 years ago.) Then there were things that were forbidden for vaguer reasons having to do with “worldliness” or “Eastern religions”, like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Simpsons. At one point I managed to lead a neighbor boy in the sinner’s prayer, and afterwards was surprised and upset that he didn’t thereafter abstain from Jam, or some similar 80’s cartoon.

As I moved into middle school and high school the media restrictions eased up a little, but mostly I just started sneaking things behind my parents’ back. I secretly listened to the radio and enjoyed the Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. But I still felt guilty about it, and repented of listening to “secular music” several times after a particularly heavy worship service. Yes, those were still going on, and in fact intensified in my middle school years. I particularly remember one service with our Jr. High group where the Holy Spirit fell and we had a whole slew of manifestations: people weeping, laughing, passed out, changed by God. I got up afterwards and gave a dramatic testimony urging all of the recalcitrant kids who hadn’t been touched by the Holy Spirit to come up and get God, because it was better than sex or drugs or whatever they were doing. It was also at that meeting that my devotional life really got started: I began getting up an hour earlier every morning to read my Bible and pray, a habit that stuck with me all through high school and survives (albeit in much changed form) to this day.

As I moved out of elementary school and into the upper grades, the intensity and frequency of dramatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life also increased. At service on Sundays I expected to enter in to the presence of God and cry or laugh every Sunday, and I always made a vow to maintain this intimacy with God throughout the whole week. I never could, though, which required me to repent again the next week. If I couldn’t get into a heavy, weepy emotional state, I was sure that I hadn’t worshipped God, and that there was something wrong with me. I needed to repent more or get some sin out of my life. And for the most part, this worked: I grew spiritually and was considered a model Christian by most of the people that talked to me.

In my high school years, I got involved with our youth group’s leadership team, which focused heavily on discipleship and strict moral guidelines, and also placed heavy emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Our youth group was known for its fervor and power, and we regularly had meetings where all sorts of strange and exotic manifestations happened. Our summer and winter camps, in particular, were times to pull out all the stops. I saw people literally in piles, passed out under the Spirit’s power; I prophesied, spoke in tongues, and interpreted through the Spirit when others spoke in tongues; I prayed for miraculous healings and received prayer; I repented on the steps of the stage (called the “altar”, because there you sacrificed yourself) with my face covered in tears and snot streaming out of my mouth; I experienced exstatic trances and deep, gut-breaking sobs. I truly doubt that you have ever heard of a Charismatic manifestation that I have not either done or witnessed.

I was into it even deeper, now, and not just because of my parents. I was committed to the ideals and the goals of the Charismatic movement. I thought that anything less was missing out on God, and might not even be real Christianity. This was how it was supposed to be, and most importantly, this sort of life filled with the action of the Spirit was the way to happiness. Walking with God and being filled with the Spirit it was possible to be consistently joyful, to live the “victorious life”, to be close to God and to not fall away. As long as I stayed in the Spirit, I was guaranteed a joyous, victorious life, and nothing else could beat it.

It was all getting ready to crumble around me.

Next: Crisis.

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Autobiography: Before I Can Remember

Autobiography

Previous: Introduction.

My story, like all stories, does not begin with its main character. It begins with God, and probably ends there as well, but since that beginning is rather too much for me to handle I’m going to begin with my parents. They’ll forgive me if I get the details wrong.

My father grew up in a nominally Christian household, but one beset by a bad history. The story of his family is pretty much a long string of multiple divorces, children out of wedlock, alcoholism, and estrangement. He was baptized and confirmed into the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America at the age of 9 or so, but by his own words did not have any spiritual commitment or real faith at that time. He actually was a bit of a trouble-maker, and this lasted until the end of his high-school years, when he was “born again” (and rebaptized) through my mother’s church, and began an actual Christian life.

My mother spent her earliest years in the Roman Catholic church, but her parents (my grandparents) left the Catholic church when they moved and found that the priest in their new home opposed the Catholic Charismatic movement that they had been a part of. After that they made a home in the independent Charismatic movement, and my grandfather eventually founded the church that he pastored until a few years before his death. My mother, while not a perfect child, nonetheless had some kind of real faith throughout most of her life and was a fairly good representative of a “good Christian child”.

So it was that my parents met and married within the boundaries of the Charismatic church, and almost all of their spiritual formation came from that movement. They both felt a strong call to ministry, so just a few months after their wedding they moved to Tulsa, OK, where they attended Rhema Bible College for two years. Rhema, in case you don’t know, was founded and headed by noted Word of Faith teacher Kenneth Hagin.

This is where I come in. My mother got pregnant during their time there, and remained in school until I was born. After that she dropped out to take care of me, while my dad completed his degree. Thus, from the moment of my birth, I was deep in the the Charismatic and Word of Faith currents of Christianity. After my dad completed his degree they moved briefly back to their hometown, and thereafter were hired as the Childrens’ Pastors of a rapidly growing church called Resurrection Fellowship in Loveland, CO. Resurrection Fellowship (aka “Rez”) would thus be the venue for my spiritual growth until I left for college.

But even before coming to Rez, my Charismatic calling was remarkable. The following story has been related to me by my mother, and she swears by every detail of it. I was about 3 years old, and was alone in the house with my mother. She had put me down for a nap, and lay down herself. At some point she heard a violent wind blow open the door leading to our garage, then shut it again. There was no wind visible outside. Then she heard the door to my room blow open and shut. When she rose to check on me, she felt God tell her to stay put and let Him finish what he was doing. So she stayed, and a few hours later she found me in my room, standing on my bed and speaking fluently in tongues.

So I was “baptized in the Holy Spirit” at the age of three, according to my mother. I know only that I cannot remember a time when I did not know how to speak in tongues, and that I have been in the midst of Charismatic manifestations since my earliest days.

Next: On Fire for God.

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Autobiography: Introduction

Autobiography

I want to start something that is even more than usually self-indulgent: do a short blog series on my spiritual autobiography. Lately I have been feeling a lot of confusion regarding the future direction of my spiritual growth, and I think I may help myself by looking at where I have come from. So my purposes are mostly selfish: you, dear reader, are invited to watch, but are not required to be interested. The public benefit of this is that my journey so far has a lot in common with what I see and hear from other young people around me, and so I may help someone else find the way forward or see traps to avoid. (Tip one: do not, under any circumstances, read the Boar’s Head Tavern. It will make you angry, critical, and fond of obscure acronyms (JN), but strangely unable to look away. It’s a drug. Just say no, man.)

I’ve set up a new category called “Autobiography” for these posts. I don’t know how many there will be, but I’m guessing at least 6-7. I’ll be posting them as I have time over the next few weeks.

Next: Before I Can Remember.

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