Endorsements

If you are expecting a text on apologetics, this book is not for you. If you are researching the fine points of theology, this book will not meet your needs. If you thrive on academic discussions of Scripture, you should consider other authors. However, if you are hungry to experience a greater sense of God’s presence in the day-to-day challenges of your personal life, Richard Colby’s account will grip your heart. He demonstrates that God gladly invades our personal routines when we invite Him to do so and that Jesus IS the “friend that sticks closer than a brother.” Richard’s colorful account of God’s delightful intervention in the life of his household will stir you, encourage you, and infuse you with hope. Because of Jesus’ work on the cross, the Holy Spirit enables us to know the Father in a personal way that boggles our imagination! If your appetite for change has increased of late, plunge into this book and allow God to stir your heart for what He longs to touch in YOU!

Christine Ege

President, Houston Northeast Aglow

The Recycled Pharisee is a delightful and thought provoking journey through the life of a man who had a destiny and a purpose in sharing the love of God with those who might never hear it - inside the church walls! The unmistakable plan of God is revealed in each chapter as He takes the author on a journey, setting him free from the chains of religion into a glorious relationship with His Father! Come along with an open heart and learn more about how much God loves you!

Lee Maynard

Spring Rain Ministries

Kingwood, TX

The moment I picked up “The Recycled Pharisee” I could not stop reading it! What an amazing story; what a tangible way to see what God can do in a life when He chooses to. May this book be a blessing and an eye opener for anyone who reads it, because that’s what it was for me.

Gabriela Romano Maldonado

Translator

Painted Post, NY

Richard Colby’s new book, The Recycled Pharisee, is a tour de force. As travelers in a modern-day Pilgrims’ Progress, we journey with Richard and his wife Janet (they become inseparable to the reader) from Maine to Chile to Texas. Wherever they go, they are always open and faithful to God’s call…well, almost always; the truth is, Richard repeatedly drags his feet. All of this makes for much hilarity and humanity; after all, who amongst us would not question and resist? The fact that they ultimately, repeatedly accept God’s call makes them both heroic. A charismatic’s delight, starting with Janet’s cure from Bell’s palsy, they are blessed again and again by the Holy Spirit. We also delight in Richard’s victories over sinful pride. We root for them both all along the way. It is not often that great men so publicly confess their sins – in this sense, Richard’s self-confessed pharisaical nature is like Saint Augustine’s Confessions. I have known Richard and Janet for years, and they had me fooled – indeed, they were, and as this book confirms, they both truly are, “fools for Christ” in the best sense. In this, their Christian adventure story, we come to know them both well. Of course, the real irony, which the reader gradually perceives, is that Richard, in confessing his pharisaical nature, is anything but a hypocrite; rather, this “Recycled Pharisee” calls us all to lose ourselves to Christ and thus be open to the Kingdom. Matthew 23:2-9.

S. Mason Pratt

Attorney, Pierce Atwood, LLP,

Portland, Maine

It is commonly known that several meanings of the term recycle are to “convert (waste) into reusable material” and “return (material) to a previous stage in a cyclic process.” However, what does the term “recycled pharisee” mean? Some people, who know what a real pharisee is would probably answer something like this: a hypocritical self-righteous person who thinks he knows everything but who is being radically changed!

Over ten years ago, at a Vineyard Values class, that was precisely what the Holy Spirit was speaking and then initiating into Richard’s life. God was taking reusable material (his heart, his mind, his whole being), taking off the rough edges and slowly transforming him into what he was always called to be, first and foremost, a worshipper of God. I believe the Holy Spirit was saying in those days (in good Vineyard tradition), “Richard, I’ve seen your ministry, now I want to show you mine!” The transformation in his life has been inspiring to others who have come to know and love Richard. His passion for the word of God and His Son, Jesus, are magnetic and powerful.

It is an honor and blessing to know both Richard and his wife Janet. It has been a joy to be a part of their lives for the advancement of the Kingdom of God on the earth. I suppose, there’s a little pharisee in all of us. Maybe this book can take off those rough edges and draw us closer to the heart of God.

Jim Gaunder,

Worship/Ministry Leader

Greater Portland Vineyard Church,

Portland, Maine

The Recycled

Pharisee

How God Changed The Heart

of a One-Time Jerk

Richard E. Colby

Copyright © 2012 Richard E. Colby

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6455-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6456-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-6454-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012915548

WestBow Press rev. date: 8/31/2012

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One  Caught Off Guard

Chapter Two  The Full Gospel Birthday

Chapter Three  City Hall Exposure

Chapter Four  Holy Laughter In Hollis

Chapter Five  Two Psychiatrists, One Bishop And Me

Chapter Six  Tongues With Terry

Chapter Seven  A Believing Bishop

Chapter Eight  Here Comes Wimber

Chapter Nine  The Dame, The Dance And The Dream

Chapter Ten  The Japanese Artist

Chapter Eleven  Home Again, Home Again!

Chapter 12  Another Conference, Another Miracle

Chapter Thirteen  Catching More Fire

Chapter Fourteen  Chiseling Kingdom Style

Chapter Fifteen  Great Expectations And Great Experiences

Chapter Sixteen  One Incredible Dream

Chapter 17  Going Vineyard

Chapter 18  A Major Transition

Chapter 19  There Is Always More

Chapter 20  Drawing Closer

Chapter 21  His Plans Unfold

Epilogue

Author’s Biography

For my wife

Janet,

whom God has used

in many “grace-full” ways

as He has “recycled” me

over the forty-seven years

of our married life. She has withstood

the many traumas of being a

clergyman’s wife without ever attending

Clergy Wives School!

FOREWORD

Religion has often been defined as man’s attempt to get to God. The Bible defines it as “having the form of godliness but denying its power.” (II Timothy 3:5) It is not only deceiving and deadly, but also very blinding.

This book contains a great testimony of God’s love. It’s quite like the story of Saul of Tarsus, who, while riding on his “high horse” of doctrinal jealousy (basically religion), was suddenly struck by the revelation of the Son of God.

One of my seminary professors once said, “The greatest miracle is not opening the eyes of the blind, but of those who don’t want to see.” It’s not arrogance on our part to say as the Apostle Paul said after his Damascus Road experience, “I can now see!” The glorious part is that the Father can make Himself known to us even when we are so blind.

Richard’s amazingly transparent and courageous story is all about a journey from religion about God to a relationship with the Father, from priesthood to son-ship, from concepts to experience and reality, from being a hireling to a joint heir. At one moment, he has us laughing at how ridiculous it is to see the pharisee appear in him, then, suddenly we become keenly aware of how some of those traits still linger in our own life.

This most definitely is not a book to condemn pharisees, but a book of how God opens the eyes of our heart to see Him. Job said, “My ears have heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you.” (Job 42:5)

In the end, this book is not just about Richard though I am positive that you will enjoy and be blessed by his story. The book is all about Him, and His amazing power and determination to reveal Himself to us. It’s my prayer that through the words of this book our eyes will be opened, every chain of religion will be cut off and we will become more like Him.

“We know that when He appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” (I John 3:2b)

Thank you, Richard, for being so honest and obeying the Lord to write this book.

With great affection and appreciation,

Roger Cunningham

Senior Pastor of the Las Condes Vineyard Church

Santiago, Chile

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Trying to acknowledge everyone who has helped me in the process of bringing this book into print would take more pages than the book itself, so I will trust that each one of them will remember their impact and influence as they read these pages. I do have to identify some specific people, without whose love and constant encouragement, this book would still be just a collection of memories in my own mind, told on the spur of the moment on various haphazard occasions.

My wife, Janet, has lovingly reminded me over the years that I need to tell the story of how God changed our lives and created from our individual brokenness a wonderful and beautiful collage with so many strange pieces. She believed I could and should “paint this picture” in print long before I dared to try. Along the way, she has often prayed that I would not give up, knowing my tendency to be easily discouraged with a less than perfect product!

Our friends, Gerry and Barbara Lachance, pressed me to actually begin the book when they offered me their home in Mystic, CT for three weeks in June of 2011 so that I could have a “quiet space near the ocean” to be inspired. They were away, and the first eleven chapters were written in those weeks, in between daily walks along the river and great visits with friends in Westbrook, CT, the Slade family.

I owe a great debt to several persons who have helped edit these pages! Elseline Verkerk, a young missionary friend who shares a deep love for Chile, tackled the project with enthusiasm and exceptional skill. I wasn’t sure I liked what she was doing at first, but she helped me realize the importance of creating a manuscript that others would be able to read! A long-time friend, Mason Pratt, helped me create a more readable document with his legal eyes and grammatical skills. Finally, Christine Ege, another new friend since our move to Texas, pored over these pages with “a fine-toothed comb” to avoid any remaining pitfalls.

One of the first people to read the original draft document was Gabriela Romano Maldonado who is currently translating the book into Spanish. Her enthusiasm and encouragement for the project (along with that of her husband, Tony) bolstered my determination to continue the hard work of revision when I would have rather left everything just the way it was!

During the past two years, Gregg and Lee Maynard, whom God brought into our lives through His perfect timing, have motivated us with their own testimonies, wisdom and generous hearts. Their inspiration and friendship has consistently moved me over some of the biggest hurdles, especially when I didn’t want to make the sacrificial effort needed to take the next step.

Our three sons — Jonathan, Christopher, and Stephen — and their families have been sources of challenge and comfort in ways that has brought me much pleasure as this project unfolded. Christopher, our middle son, has encouraged me to create an audio book which will be forthcoming when time allows.

Finally, I want to thank Ashley Sims, a family friend, who offered to create the cover and produced the beautiful result which many of us have enjoyed watching unfold over the past six months. Her excitement from the beginning has contributed to the thrill of seeing this project to completion.

To many dear friends who have touched our lives over the years, I am deeply grateful, because without them this testimony would be much less exciting and God would get much less glory! For any errors and all the content, I bear full responsibility.

PROLOGUE

This book is the result of years of prayer and experiences with God which have radically changed my life and ministry. However, the title of this book came very quickly and it did not originate with me. It was spoken by a friend of mine in just a matter of seconds! We were teaching a class on Vineyard Values at our home church in Portland, Maine over ten years ago. As part of the first session, we decided to share briefly our testimonies of how we came to know Jesus as our personal Savior. We both felt this was important because we came from such diverse backgrounds: he was a born-again, hippie, musician surfer-dude (that is how I referred to him because of his long hair and constant talk about surfing) from California. I was a retired Episcopal priest who had come into the Kingdom when the Holy Spirit showed up at a cocktail party and healed my wife of a physical ailment. Could there be any two more unlikely instructors for an evening class at a church except at the local Vineyard?

As I was sharing how God healed my wife of Bell’s palsy when a housewife prayed for her, and my sanctimonious response of anger to the healing, my friend looked at me and said, “Richard, you’re just a recycled pharisee!” He wasn’t being mean or judgmental. He was simply making a truthful statement that I am convinced the Holy Spirit put in his mind and brought forth from his lips in that very moment. I say that because every time I have reminded him of the incident, (most recently just months ago), he says he has no recollection of ever making the statement!

I, on the other hand, have never forgotten it, mostly because what he said hurt my pride. First of all, my wife and I were new in the Vineyard, and I wanted to make a positive impression on the leadership. When I retired from active ministry in the Episcopal Church, we moved to a different community and started attending this Vineyard fellowship. The class was the first official task that I had undertaken in the congregation. My co-leader was one of the worship leaders, as well as an elder, so his opinion was important to me, even though I’m sure I felt a bit superior to him because of my clerical background. After all, wasn’t it the job of the clergy to evaluate the status of the lay folks in a congregation and not the other way around? I was beginning to learn first-hand some basics about life in this movement we had joined called the Vineyard! I had been to several Wimber conferences (John Wimber was the founder of the Vineyard in California in the 1970’s) and read some of his books, but now we were members of a real congregation. This was a whole new experience altogether.

Also, who wants to be called a pharisee, recycled or not? I was a born again believer now, a true friend of Jesus, and the Pharisees were anything but his friends. They were the ones who constantly wanted to kill him! I always wanted to be as far away as possible from their club even before I was saved. I am reminded of an elderly woman at the cathedral in Portland where I had my first job after graduating from Berkeley Divinity School (now part of Yale Divinity School) in New Haven, Connecticut. She was in a class I was teaching, and we were exploring the General Confession from the communion service in the Book of Common Prayer. At one point in the confession, the reference is made to each of us as miserable sinners, and I was just about to share my wealth of knowledge about that condition (after all, I was twenty-six years old and had a seminary degree). In that moment, this dear lady stood up at the other end of the folding table and informed me of her experience in this matter. “Mr. Colby,” she said firmly as she began to raise her finger, “I am not, never have been and God willing, never intend to be, a miserable sinner!” Feeling like she had made the definitive statement about the matter, she sat back down. (I can’t remember what my response was to her but I’m sure it was not nearly as articulate as her comment to me).

However, that is precisely how I always felt about being a pharisee! I never wanted to be one, never felt that I was one and God willing, was never going to be one. (After all, I didn’t want to kill Jesus; I was on his team!) To me, pharisees were mean people who always thought too much of themselves. In their minds, they were always right and had all the answers for every situation. They also gladly shared with the ordinary people just to keep them in line with their traditions. They liked to be given special attention in the streets and in the temple during religious celebrations. That wasn’t me! Yet, when this lady at the cathedral referred to me as “Mr. Colby” rather than using any clerical title such as “reverend” or “father”, (which were all “unbiblical” in her opinion), I do remember feeling somewhat offended. Oops! Maybe there is something more to being a pharisee than just wanting to get rid of Jesus.

In fact, I imagine that I began to discover the truth of what it means to be a real pharisee that evening when my friend made his prophetic observation. Since then, I have come face to face, so to speak, with numerous aspects of my pharisaical nature as the Lord has shined the light of his truth on various broken areas of my wounded soul. The experiences in this book reveal that story.

For the moment, I will simply say that I now know I always have been, and probably always will be, a pharisee in my flesh. However, with enough recycling by the Holy Spirit, I have discovered what I believe Nicodemus, the pharisee, discovered when he had his night visit with the Messiah, Jesus! (Gospel of John, Ch 3, verses 1-21) In my opinion, Nicodemus got his first recycling experience that night; he went from simply having head knowledge about God to experiencing some heart knowledge of the Father’s love. I like to imagine that after Jesus explained to him the simple truth of being born again (“Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives new life from heaven.” John 3:6, the New Living Translation) that Nicodemus couldn’t resist seeking Jesus out to pursue that new relationship. Can anyone be in the presence of Jesus and not feel the love of God in a personal way? That may be pure speculation on my part but after the way I have been recycled over the past thirty years, I believe it is a reasonable educated guess.

And, isn’t “spiritual recycling” an important part of the life of any believer? Check out the number of times that the scripture speaks of being made new by the Father’s loving care in the Old Testament or becoming a new creature through our relationship with Jesus in the New Testament. The problem for many people is this: just because we can be born again and made a new creature does not mean we become perfect in that moment. Actually, I must confess that I really thought that was going to happen to me when I accepted Jesus! I was thrilled at the thought of getting rid of my “old man” as the scripture calls our fleshly nature. I was sure that now I would not have the temptations and desires that had created so many problems in my life for so many years. However, I soon found out that this was unrealistic and naive.

People do not change overnight; any realistic change is more of a process. I have come to refer to this type of change as our personal recycling process. Paul had experienced such a process himself and reminded the believers in the city of Philippi what they should expect. “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” he encouraged them, “for it is God who works in you to will and act according to his good purpose”. (Philippians 2:12-13, emphasis added).

I can still remember the first time, more than thirty years ago, shortly after I was saved, when I sat in a pew at St. Paul’s church in Darien, Connecticut on a Tuesday morning and listened to Terry Fulham, the pastor, teaching in the aisle with the Bible in his hands. The prophetic words of Jeremiah and Ezekiel jumped off the pages into my thirsty soul as if I had never heard them before. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts; I will be their God and they will be my people…they will all know me, from the least to the greatest” (Jer. 31:33 NIV, emphasis mine). What joy I felt when I heard Ezekiel say, “I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” Ezek. 36:25-26 NIV (emphasis mine). It was as if I had never heard those promises of God before! The power of those words, spoken by someone who I knew believed them, resonated new hope in my heart for what God could and would do in me regardless of my personal brokenness and dysfunctional past.

My purpose in this book is simply to share some of the ways the heavenly Father has recycled me over the last thirty years so that others might be encouraged to let Him do the same in their lives. Each experience has strengthened me in my personal faith as well as shown me how God can creatively draw even the hardest and most resistant of us, his children, into a deeper knowledge of his love. I know that there is more to come because I am still expecting him to “draw me closer” and “never let me go”, as an early Vineyard song says so powerfully. At times I have been hesitant about sharing some of these experiences (my bishop took me to a psychiatrist after I first shared my salvation experience with my congregation)! However, I have come to realize that what Peter and John said about their experiences with God is still the best way to proceed. When ordered by some local officials not to speak or teach in the name of Jesus, they simply said, “we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:20 NIV) This same thing is true for believers today. The things we have seen and heard in our experiences with God are the basis of our testimony about who God really is and our testimonies are what inspire other people to seek to know Him for themselves.

In his recent book, Face to Face with God, the author Bill Johnson from Bethel Church in Redding, California says the following: “I don’t have answers to all the questions about the differences in the portrait of God throughout Scriptures. But I have found a wonderful key for life: it’s best to live from what you know to be true in spite of the mysteries that you can’t explain”(pg.107, emphasis mine). Jesus came into this world so that each of us might know how much the heavenly Father really loves us. (Matt. 3:17, Romans 5:8). Do you ever wonder why so many people today do not seem to get that simple message? Might it be that in our current western civilization we have put too much emphasis on head knowledge and turned away from the experiences of the heart? The “new heart” Ezekiel prophesied that God would give us is meant to be used to respond to the Father as Jesus showed us. No one has ever loved another person with his or her head! Jesus set the example and sent the Holy Spirit to always be with us to help us grow in our personal relationship with the Father who loves us more than anyone else ever can or will. My prayer is that by sharing these experiences of how I came to know the Father’s love more personally, I may encourage many who read them to believe that “with God all things are possible” even though many mysteries of His love still remain.

Richard E. Colby, Houston, TX May 2012

CHAPTER ONE

Caught Off Guard

When you stop and think about it, we should not be surprised that God often ‘surprises’ us with his presence. There are countless incidents in the scriptures where God shows up in someone’s life without giving them any advance notice. Some obvious ones from the New Testament come to my mind very quickly.

Joseph had a dream and God told him through an angel not to forsake his intended, Mary, just because she was pregnant. What a surprise for that young man!

Mary was shocked when God told her she was going to have a baby who would actually be His Son! The gospel account says she was “greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be” (Luke 1:29). Can you imagine the surprise for Zechariah when he came out of the temple that day after doing his regular duty as a priest and couldn’t say a word because he had seen a vision (see Luke 1:22)? What pastor or rabbi wants to be speechless before his congregation at anytime, in or out of the church building?

And yet, not only in scripture but even today, the surprise element is present in many encounters people have with God. How many times have you heard a person say something like the following when they begin to tell you about a recent experience of faith: “You will not believe what happened to me this morning”, they say, and then proceed to share something which ends with these words, “I was so surprised!” Or another classic response goes something like this. “Can you imagine, I wasn’t even in church or thinking about God and I had this strong sensation that there was someone right there with me; I couldn’t believe it!” At a conference recently, I heard a person say that God “loves to show up and show off” in the lives of His people. I like that because it is just a more contemporary way of describing how the living God of the Christian faith often reveals Himself to his children.

This air of surprise was also present the day the Lord chose to heal my wife, Janet, of Bell’s palsy. I was not only surprised by what happened (even though I had been an ordained Episcopal priest for fifteen years), but more notably I felt a depth of anger as powerful as any I had experienced before that moment.

Some people find it hard to imagine that a pastor could get angry with God doing a miracle, especially when the blessing is for his own wife! The only way I can explain it to you is to remind you of how angry the Pharisees became when Jesus did a miracle before their very eyes. The incident is recorded in John’s gospel of Jesus healing a man who was born blind (John 9:1-34). The Pharisees got angry because they were the official representatives of God. They became indignant because someone else did what they were supposed to be able to do! Their recorded words in verse 34 illustrate their depth of anger. As the man who received his sight rejoiced and attempted to explain how the miracle happened, they ridiculed him and said, “You were steeped in sin at birth; how dare you lecture us!” That is the kind of anger I felt that day when my wife was healed. After all, I was the priest in whose very presence God had demonstrated His power and He hadn’t even asked for my permission! To help you understand such strange behavior in a “man of God” and why I had adopted such a pharisaical way of thinking, let me share some of the details of our lives before the healing.

I am, or was, not the typical Episcopal priest; that is I never considered myself as such. For example, many of my seminary classmates went right into the parish ministry after graduation and remained there; I did not. (In fact, the seminary I went to was known for producing “good pastors”, and that tradition has probably continued over the years). It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a pastor (if you ask most of my friends they would say that I fit the role of pastor quite well). I have just always wanted to be different, and so even before becoming a priest, I did many things differently indeed!

When my high school principal suggested to my father that I was good in math and that I should consider studying math in college to become a math teacher, I rebelled. Even after he assured me that he could get me a scholarship to one of the best liberal arts colleges in New England (from which he had graduated), I wasn’t interested. The scholarship issue was critical because my father made it clear there was no money for the expenses of college. I was also the first in our family to consider such an endeavor. So, when the college promotional folks came to my high school, I made the decision, all by myself, that I wanted to go to Boston University and study art instead!

My father didn’t know how to deal with such belligerence except to tell me that I was “on my own”. Why would anyone want to go all the way to Boston and study art in the first place? He grew up on a small farm just three miles from where he had lived and worked all his life. He had made a decent living, owned his home and was even one of the town fathers. In fact, my father left the state of Maine only two or three times in his life - one of which was to go across the bridge in Kittery to visit my older brother when he was in the naval hospital in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Going to Boston was just not “on his radar screen”, not even to see the Red Sox play at Fenway Park! Neither was studying art, which to him was simply a waste of time.

So I went on my own. I took the money I had saved from my summer employment, about $1,000, and proudly made my way to the bursar’s office. The man behind the desk attempted to explain to me that what I had was not enough even to cover the expenses for the first semester. He suggested I go home and come back when I had saved up enough money for at least a year. I can still remember walking back down Commonwealth Avenue fighting back the tears and saying to myself, “No one is going to tell me what I can and can’t do”. In my typical ‘I will do it myself’ attitude, I worked three jobs that first year; then two years later transferred to Indiana University because I wanted a different art program. My father must have thought I was completely out of my mind, since to him Indiana seemed like it was half-way around the world, and I mostly travelled back and forth from Maine to Indiana by bus! At that point in my life I didn’t drive a car, and the bus was the only type of transportation I could afford.

When I decided to go to seminary after graduating from Indiana, my father and some of our family friends were concerned about the sudden drastic change in my professional direction. I met a neighbor on the street of our small town one day that summer and proudly shared with him my new decision. I can still remember the disappointment I felt when he started laughing out loud…on Main Street! There was no one else around, but that was not the point! I was not the worse kid in my town, but my neighbor knew enough of my misdeeds to raise some questions. He just couldn’t visualize me being a minister!. I can still hear him say rather loudly between the snorts of laughter, “You…want…to be…a… minister”! I walked away shortly thereafter rather irritated and he probably laughed most of the way home. Again, I didn’t care what people thought or whether they understood because I had decided what I wanted to do and I was going to do it. At the time I was ordained in 1962 at the church I grew up in (St. Philip’s Church in Wiscasset, Maine), I was the first and only native son of that congregation who had “gone into the ministry!”

The three years of seminary training at Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven were a similar experience of financial and personal independence. I worked in summer resorts to pay most of the tuition bills and gratefully received some scholarship aid from various sources to make up the difference. I went home on most holidays but felt that I was very much on my own and confident that I was going to be able to make it by myself. I am not trying to imply that my parents were mean people. Both of them shared themselves abundantly with the community and were well respected and loved by the people in our town. The simple reality was that they had little ability to relate to my desire for a professional career. In spite of that fact, they both drove all the way to New Haven for my seminary graduation, because they knew it was especially important to me for them to be there. The significance of their presence for that ceremony became even greater when my father passed away of a massive heart attack in his sleep three months later at the age of fifty-two and my mother, at age fifty, had to learn to drive a car.

I share some of these details to shed some light on the early beginnings of my pharisaical personality. At this point in my life, as I look back on those early years, I realize that my compulsion to “always be right” was based on the fact that I had to make many decisions by myself. I was determined to be right, whether or not this was actually the case, or I felt I wasn’t going to succeed. Even if I made a wrong choice, I would just pick myself up and decide to do things better the next time. I am not trying to be simplistic or explain this issue psychologically. I just want to acknowledge at this point in my story what I believe to be some early influences that helped to produce this modern day pharisee!

During the summer between my last two years of seminary, I met a representative from the Overseas Department of the Episcopal Church during a volunteer program in England. When he discovered that I was interested in becoming a missionary, he gave me his card and suggested I contact him when I was ready to explore the possibility further. Several years later, we reconnected when he was a supply priest at one of the summer chapels in Maine. Through his assistance, I signed up and applied to go overseas, hopefully to Africa. However, since the greatest need at that time was in Latin America, I set my sights on that part of the world instead. I was single and willing to go wherever I was most needed.

As I was preparing to leave however, God gave me one of the greatest surprises of my life. He introduced me to a young woman, Janet, who within six months became my wife and is still my wife after forty-six years of marriage. Then began another big test of my “I can do it all by myself” attitude as we spent six years as missionaries in Costa Rica and Mexico. I was now confronted with someone whom I had chosen to love who was questioning some of my basic decisions as if that was a normal thing to do! This didn’t seem right at all and even though I tried to see the positive benefit of honest criticism from my new spouse, my behavior was often not pleasant! Much of what we both realized later were major issues which needed our attention, we passed off in those days as minor early marriage adjustment and issues of the added stress of living in another culture. Since both of those factors were real, it was easy to ignore the bigger underlying issue. I was beginning to be faced with a basic question: Does a man who has chosen to be a servant of God behave so erratically when anyone questions his authority or disagrees with him?

Janet and I returned to Maine in the summer of 1971, with three small children and no source of income. I was not sure what I wanted to do in ministry, even after having some career development testing leaving the mission field. I knew there was one thing I didn’t want to do, however, and that was go into full-time parish ministry. Consequently, I found a secular job with the University of Maine and worked part-time in a congregation, concentrating mainly on education for young people and adults. We bought our first home through an estate sale with ten rooms full of furniture. Since our only personal possessions were a coffee table and a rocking chair we knew someone was looking out for us! We still have some remnants from that old house even though my wife claims I sold most of the “best things” in yard sales. I can’t deny that fact but in those days I would have tried. It was during those years that I began to realize that being right all the time was not the most important thing in life!

Over the next five years we struggled with our marriage and our individual vocations. As the old saying goes, “there were some good times and some bad times”. One of the good times was the opportunity to become the part-time vicar of a small mission church that for many years had been just a summer chapel in the town of Waterboro. We bought a small farm and our boys were ecstatic to have a barn where they could have numerous animals. We had a garden and my therapy became pulling weeds and processing home grown food. It was obvious, though, that I needed some therapy other than pulling weeds to deal with some personality issues associated with my “I have to be right” syndrome. With the help of a Jewish psychiatrist and the prayers of many friends, we progressed to the next level of family togetherness.

It was on a trip to Disney World with our children in 1977 that my wife came down with Bell’s palsy, which is a paralysis of the face. She could not close her eye on one side or make her mouth work normally. We had to tape her eye shut each night using scotch tape so she could sleep. We really did not know what the problem was in the beginning and assumed it would go away as quickly as it came upon her. When we returned from the vacation two weeks later, she still had the problem so she went to a doctor who diagnosed the condition. He said he would have to do some surgery but could not operate on her until Monday. Since it was Friday we had no choice but to continue the scotch tape routine over the weekend and wait for some relief after the surgery.

On Saturday we attended the ordination of a woman I had worked with doing parish development counseling in the diocese. The woman being ordained was also a sister-in-law to a good friend of my wife from the years before we moved to the country. Janet had not seen this friend for some time because she had “gotten saved” which meant she was off the friendship chart! At a conference, the woman had given her life to Jesus and when my wife heard the news she quietly terminated the relationship. These were the early days of the charismatic renewal when the Holy Spirit was moving upon many people in mainline denominations. Yet in our minds, we were good Episcopalians who didn’t need any of that emotional stuff! We were content to leave such experiences to the Baptists and the Pentecostals.

During the ordination service, we were both so concerned about Janet’s facial condition that we did not even notice that Linda (the “former friend”) was at the ceremony also. When we got to the house where the reception was held, Linda was one of the first persons to meet us. “What happened to your face?” she asked Janet with genuine compassion even though they hadn’t spoken for months. As my wife began to explain the situation, Linda quickly said, “Has anyone prayed for you?” I distinctly remember two things at that moment. I remember that Linda proceeded to say without taking another breath, “Jesus can heal that!” Secondly, I remember the absolute discomfort I felt at what she said! At that time of my life, I could not say the name of Jesus out loud except in the context of a formal prayer or, sadly to say, in a profane manner. Janet acknowledged that no one had prayed for her and I stood beside her like a true pharisee wondering why anyone should! Linda then asked if she could pray for her and I began to have another shockwave of radical discomfort as my wife graciously complied to the request.

Fortunately, Linda suggested that they go upstairs to one of the children’s bedrooms to pray and I heaved a huge sigh of relief. My priestly training had taught me that the only proper place to pray for anyone was in church on a Sunday morning when God was present! After all, people were drinking, smoking and having a good time at the reception. Surely nothing “good” was going to happen in that environment in someone’s home! I wish I could tell you that I was so concerned about my wife being healed that I was hoping for a miracle, but I was just glad not to have to deal with any more embarrassing conversation among my friends, who probably were not even aware of what was happening at all.

Within minutes, literally no more than fifteen at the most, my wife and her friend came back down the stairs laughing together like the old days. I knew something had happened that was not normal. Then I noticed my wife’s face. Her eye was fluttering and her mouth was not distorted. Every muscle was moving perfectly like it had before the Bell’s palsy attack two weeks before. My wife was healed! But as I told you earlier, and it is the truth, the only emotion I remember at that specific moment was pure anger. All I could think was, “What is going on here?” This woman who prayed for her was just a housewife. She had never been to seminary. Who gave her permission to pray for people who were sick? In my mind, she had no real credentials; she just proclaimed to know Jesus! I was the priest and God had not told me that he was going to do something incredible to light up the party! I was furious but being a good pharisee, I certainly didn’t want anyone to see that aspect of my personality. So I pushed those emotions down into my gut and pretended to be excited about what God had done.

As my wife tells the story, Linda did not even touch her. When they got into the bedroom, she simply lifted up her hand towards her and started praying in the name of Jesus. My wife went over backwards in the power of the Holy Spirit, who gently rested her on the bedroom floor. In a vision, she saw many things she had done in her life as well as things done to her, flashing by before her eyes. As each clip passed her vision she heard Jesus quoting some familiar words from Psalm 103:12, “as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” She was not only healed as she lay there that afternoon but saved and set free from various works of the enemy, in less time than it has taken me to tell you how it all happened! When she came to, she saw Linda clapping her hands and saying with great joy, “It works! It works!” The Bell’s palsy has never returned and our lives took a new direction that day which I did not accept with any degree of enthusiasm. I was now the educated priest who no longer was the source for all the answers. The Lord showed up that afternoon in an unexpected way, and because of my pharisaical attitude, I was left feeling very vulnerable and certainly with more questions than answers.

CHAPTER TWO

The Full Gospel Birthday

In the aftermath of my wife’s healing, I tried to process why God had chosen to show up in such an unexpected way in such an unusual environment! None of the details of this glorious event made sense to my pharisaical mindset. Janet’s healing occurred in late spring and even though I had been on the scene when it happened, I was not as excited as some other people were. You would think that just not having to tape her eye down every night before bed would have brought me some degree of pleasure and I’m sure it did. Even more exciting her face, which was always extremely beautiful, was now back to normal! There was no more twisted mouth with people exclaiming, “What happened to you wife?” numerous times a day. Those two things alone would have stirred the average husband to great joy! I was excited for her. And yet I was in the midst of a huge paradigm shift for which I had had no preparation.

Obviously, I knew God could do miracles (I had a seminary degree!) and that He had done miracles even in our own generation. There were people in the Episcopal Church, both clergy and lay people, who were having experiences with God and beginning to talk about their experiences openly. One Episcopal clergyman even made the cover of Time magazine in the sixties when his congregation fired him because he shared his experiences with the Holy Spirit on a Sunday morning! However, if you want me to be completely honest, in my mind at that time, those people were just a “lunatic fringe”. They really didn’t have any direct impact on my world living on a small farm in rural Maine serving a mission church by the side of a lake. When I went to clergy meetings such events certainly were not the hot topic of conversation! Those who did share such happenings, which were precious few, were ignored or gently rebuked by the more sophisticated older clergy as being naive. So as the summer approached I busied myself with the regular chores on the farm and tried to think as little as possible about how to respond to God’s breakthrough in our lives.

As I think back on that event now, I’m sure part of my lack of enthusiasm was that I felt left out of the whole process. After all, for someone who had always wanted to do everything for himself, even when it came to the work of God, this was a dramatic change. I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t have anything to do with the healing. This was my wife and God didn’t have the courtesy of allowing me to be present when He showed forth His power! That statement may sound silly and rather immature to many people but that was the simple truth. I felt passed over and not in a good way, like the Israelites, when God led them out of Egypt! When I went to seminary, clergy were trained to do everything in the church. That may be the main reason I chose to study for ordination. Not only were we trained to do everything, the people in the pews expected us to do everything. The era of lay ministers was just beginning, and many people were not comfortable with anyone praying for them but the pastor. This obviously gave many clergy, myself included, an undeserved sense of importance.

On the other hand, considering my work experience and training, I should have been more excited about my wife’s healing than I was. I had previously been involved in several programs to develop lay ministry training in the diocese. I had been part of a group who sponsored the former bishop of Alaska, William Gordon, to come to Maine and share a program that he developed called Teach Each A Ministry (TEAM), which was pivotal to his providing effective ministry to all the small outposts in his large diocese. We were interested in this program because of the number of small congregations in our state in both rural and urban areas. Bishop Gordon was also instrumental in opening the doors in the Episcopal Church for older people to become ordained which allowed more people to take advantage of training outside of the traditional three-year seminary program. These ideas were in their infancy in those days, and not all clergy were excited about them. I was excited and I even co-authored (with a laywoman from Maine) an experimental program funded by the Hartford Seminary Foundation to develop programs for small congregations so ministry could take place whether or not there were full-time clergy in these locations. Obviously, as my wife’s healing indicated, I was more interested in these ideas intellectually rather than seeing them come to fruition.

At that point, I was in the midst of a basic pharisaical dilemma. Put simply, one can describe the matter this way: Pharisees often like to affirm the right things to do but then do not follow through with any appropriate action. Jesus recognized this trait clearly in the Pharisees of his day. In chapter 23 of the gospel of Matthew he says to his disciples, “Do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach…everything they do is done for men to see” (v. 3 & 5, my emphasis). Later in the same chapter, he speaks directly to the Pharisees, referring to them as “hypocrites” and says, “You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to” (v. 13). This was my reality as well. I talked about doing the right thing and encouraged others to do the same. However, I didn’t always do the right thing myself or help others accomplish the same. Consequently, I was a great advocate of every person being “involved” in the ministry of the church but I had my limits! It was one thing for people to be trained, men and women alike, to serve in the services of the church. However, if there was any infringement on my power and authority, I was not so enthusiastic.

While I was wrestling with some of the fallout of my paradigm shift, my wife was enjoying the blessings of being saved! She had a job that summer working for a family who sold oriental rugs. Their showroom was in the converted barn of their home in the next community. Janet was their only non-family employee, and most days she was in charge of the showroom by herself while she repaired rugs. The owners would take their rugs to people’s homes so they could display them and often were gone all day. Few customers came to the showroom when the owners were gone, so my wife’s companion was the radio, and she had discovered several Christian stations. She would come home at night and serenade me with songs of God’s grace and mercy, which were new to me and often strange to my more traditional religious lifestyle. I must say though, even in those early days, God was beginning to pierce my hardened heart with these more simple worship songs about His love.

As the summer progressed, I asked my wife one evening what she wanted for her birthday in September. Without a moment’s hesitation and with great enthusiasm she said, “I heard a wonderful thing on the radio today; the Full Gospel Businessmen are having their convention at the Holiday Inn in Portland this year at the same time as my birthday. Can we go?” Now, every husband wants to try and please his wife on her birthday and if he can, he will usually fulfill her requests, within reason. However, my first reaction was NO, NO, NO! Of course, I didn’t say those words out loud because as a Pharisee I had to pretend that I was at least willing to try to satisfy her request! So, in my best loving tone of voice I said, “Well, we can certainly pray about it.” Over the years my wife has learned to hold me accountable for those words because promising to pray for something or someone was often my way of avoiding situations. Sometimes when a person asked for prayer, I would say, “Of course, I’ll pray about that”, and then go off and never pray at all! The promise of prayer was often, for me, just a way of getting out of dealing with the matter. This time was no different because I had no desire to go to such an event!

My distress was not about having to do something unusual for my wife on her birthday; it was because I had heard rumors of how strange the folks were who went to the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Meetings (FGBM). I knew one Episcopal clergyman, and a few lay people, who attended their meetings. This particular clergy man had long been written off by most clergy, including myself, as being out of step with the main stream. He was known to have prayer meetings during the week, which to the average Episcopalian, in those days, was totally unnecessary!

One of my other big hang-ups with the FGBM was that they met in public places such as restaurants and hotels and did religious stuff where people could see them! The only time we Episcopalians went to a hotel or a large meeting place, as a group, was usually for our yearly convention. Most of the time, these meetings didn’t include worship, people praying out loud for each other and testimonies about the power of God by just ordinary people who had no official credentials. At that point in my life, I was a firm believer that if you wanted to “have church” you should “go to church”, which was the only place that you would find God anyway because that was His house! (Eventually I came to admire the FGBM folks and enjoyed their fellowship many times. In fact, some of the most powerful testimonies that I have heard over the years came from men in that organization including the founder, Demos Shakarian himself.) The bottom line, however, was that I had no desire to go to the Full Gospel convention and now I had to discover a way out!

So the more my wife brought up the possibility of going to the convention the more I tried to figure out how I could get out of going and still save face. One day the light bulb went off just like when the Grinch had his brilliant idea of how he was going to ruin the Christmas festivities in Whoville! I would go to the convention the first day and register as if we were going to stay for the whole afternoon. However, then I would suggest that we might call her friend, Linda (you know the one who prayed over her when she was healed) who lived across the bay and whom my wife did not get to see very often. I would suggest that we go spend the afternoon at her house which I was sure would be a special birthday treat; maybe even as good as going to the meetings. Pharisees can be rather devious at times and can create incredible ways to cover up their devious actions.

With my plan set, I told my wife that I would go, and she was very happy. She then proceeded to show me the brochure and I discovered, to my surprise that the convention went on for the whole weekend! The opening events were on Friday afternoon but the festivities continued right through Sunday. I knew I wouldn’t have to worry about going on Sunday because I had services at our own church but now I was faced with the need for more additional alternative plans. I figured I had time to come up with something special for Saturday and prayed that her friend would invite us for dinner once we got to her house on Friday afternoon. So we both kept our own agendas for the birthday weekend! Mine, of course, included a visit to her parents, who also lived in Portland, which would take a healthy chunk of time as well. As the weekend drew near, I felt certain I would only have to show up at the Holiday Inn at three o’clock on Friday and pay the registration fee.

When we arrived that afternoon my confidence was suddenly shaken. The first person I met was the clergyman who I referred to earlier; yes, the only priest in the diocese of Maine who attended these events and was always excited about them, even on a Friday afternoon. He was thrilled to see me and wanted to know how it happened that we were attending the convention. Of course, with my wife beside me, I told him proudly about the birthday treat and then left her talking to him while I registered. He was gone when I returned so I proposed my devious scheme. Just as I hoped, my wife agreed and we proceeded to make the short drive across the bridge to South Portland. I felt rather smug and enjoyed the fact that my plan was working until we got to Linda’s house. After ringing the doorbell several times, it was obvious that the worst had happened. Linda wasn’t home and as smart as I thought I was, I had no backup plan! So obviously we went back to the hotel for the first meeting.

I was not completely uncomfortable at the beginning because we met some people we knew who had heard about my wife’s healing. Even when you not sure how to describe the incredible works of God, it is always enjoyable to bask in the blessing of such events and I was more than willing to enjoy the overflow of my wife’s praise party! Also, I didn’t feel out of place mingling informally with people in a large room with folding chairs and very few religious decorations. The congregation I grew up in was known to be less ceremonial than most with little symbolism to distract the worshippers. As the session began, I even enjoyed the more casual worship because it was easy to sing and my wife had prepared me with her summer serenades.

After the worship, several men gave their personal testimonies of how they knew that Jesus was still alive. I was beginning to become more familiar with some of the salvation terminology and I still remember one of the testimonies given that afternoon. The man was a donut maker from Connecticut. His name was Luke and he was the skinniest donut maker I had ever seen. There was no profound healing involved in his testimony, nothing dramatic like what happened to my wife. However, when I heard this ordinary man tell about how he had experienced God’s love in a personal way, I thought to myself that I would like to be as sure as he was that God really loved me. Later on you will discover why I have remembered his testimony more than any other from that day, and for so many years since.

After the testimonies numerous men lined up at the front and invited anyone to come forward who wanted prayer. I began to feel the whole meeting had become very un-Episcopal and grabbed the folding chair in front of me in case anyone tried to gently encourage me to go forward. I do not remember what my wife did, but I knew that I wasn’t going anywhere. After all, I was a clergyman; why would I need someone else to pray for me? Also, these men were just “ordinary” folks who in my mind had no training. How could they know how to pray right? They may end up saying the wrong words or something. This type of thinking sounds strange to my ears as I write it now, but many years ago these were real thoughts and feelings flowing through my head as I watched people go forward. I eventually sat down, and we left soon after because of the commotion up front which made me feel very uncomfortable.

As we were leaving the hotel that Friday afternoon, my wife suggested we stop by and see her grandmother on our way out of the city. This was her mother’s mother who came to know the Lord when she was a girl and she was not shy about sharing her faith. She was a strong woman who knew that I didn’t know Jesus the way she did, but she never made me feel uncomfortable in her home or in her presence. In fact, I loved to go to her house because she would invite me to sit on her piano bench and we would sing hymns together. Most of the hymns we sang I had never sung in the Episcopal Church, but the more I heard them the more I enjoyed them. I have said many times that the seeds of my salvation experience were planted in my heart on her piano bench. So I was more than happy to stop for a visit, and when we got there she asked us to stay for dinner. That decision was also easy because she was a great cook.

During dinner she asked us what we were doing “in town” (we lived almost an hour away and usually we didn’t go to the big city unless we had a reason!). My wife began to tell her all about the FGBM convention which we had attended in the afternoon. The next question caused me to sit up quickly and take my focus off the enjoyment of the wonderful meal before me! “Are they still meeting tonight?” she asked in her sweet grandmotherly voice. “Oh yes”, my wife said, and before I could interject that we really had to go home right after dinner, her grandmother asked another question. “Can we go back?” she said with the excitement of a child in her voice. “Well, of course”, my wife said, announcing at the same time that this was her birthday present and we had a babysitter for the evening. So, we went back! Who wants to disappoint a sweet grandmother who has just made you a wonderful meal and a wife who is celebrating her birthday? I’m not even sure we finished dinner since “the girls” were so excited to get back to the Holiday Inn in order to get a good seat.

The evening session was very similar to the afternoon: pleasant fellowship, simple (in the best sense of that word) worship, honest testimonies about the goodness of God and his love for us. Actually, I remember little about the evening except what happened when the men up front stood and invited people to come forward for prayer. As much as I had wanted to hang onto the chair in the afternoon, I now wanted to go forward! Without exaggeration, I felt like a big finger touched a button at the base of my spine and started propelling me towards the men standing at the front of the room. When I got to the front, the man who was standing directly before me was from an Episcopal Church that I had worked in previously. I knew he was a true believer and I felt like he was waiting just for me. He didn’t say a word. He just smiled as he lifted up his hands and started to pray. I do not remember hearing anything he said. I simply fell gently backwards in the power of the Holy Spirit and rested on the red carpet of the Holiday Inn convention center.

I do remember what happened as I lay there on the floor. I had an incredible experience of God’s grace which I now know my Heavenly Father planned from the beginning of time! I heard God speak to me in the following audible words: “Let his face take the place of your fear.” I knew it was God speaking. I knew he was talking about Jesus when he said “his face” and I also knew what my fear was. I was afraid that His love, the love of the Heavenly Father that many people talked about was just a figment of their imagination. I have no idea how long I laid on the floor. I may have gotten up rather quickly because that was my first experience with the Holy Spirit. Also, because of my pharisaical nature, I was probably rather self-conscious. As I got up, all I knew was that I was not in control of what had just happened.

When I made my way back to where my wife was sitting, I realized we had to take her grandmother home and get back to the country. As we talked about the experience over the next few days, one important thing became evident that I have never wanted to deny. That night, on the red carpet of an ordinary hotel, the hard shell of my broken heart had been cracked by the power of the living God. I really could not explain what had happened except to say simply, “God spoke to me”, which to many people sounded like I was bragging. I didn’t care what it sounded like to anyone; I had heard his voice and felt the power of his love for the first time in my life and that was all that really mattered.

CHAPTER THREE

City Hall Exposure

Many people ask me when I share my testimony if I gave my heart to Jesus that night on the floor in the Holiday Inn. I did not. The truth is that there was no opportunity given, as strange as that may sound. I didn’t have any encounter with Jesus in those moments either. I just heard those nine words: “Let his face take the place of your fear”. I have tried to remember if there was any conversation in the car after we left the meeting with either my wife or her grandmother about making a commitment, and nothing comes to my memory. I really believe that I wasn’t ready to take that step in the aftermath of such an experience with God. Let me explain what I mean. In the best sense of the word, I was in the “afterglow” of hearing my Heavenly Father’s voice for the first time. The dictionary defines the word afterglow as “good feelings remaining after a pleasurable or successful experience”. My time on the floor that night was not only pleasurable, but very successful in relation to my need for a jumpstart in faith in God. No one had to convince me that what I heard was the Father’s voice or that the words were meant for me. I didn’t understand all that happened but I knew what had happened was real whether I could explain it or not.

Pharisees can be rather stubborn much of the time. Some of this comes from years of training yourself always to have the right answer in every situation, or at least pretend that you do. For one of the first times in my life, I had no answers. Also, I didn’t want anyone else trying to explain to me what happened! That is another common characteristic of Pharisees. Remember how they all responded when Jesus healed the blind man? They wanted to know how it happened but they really didn’t want anyone to tell them, because then it would be obvious that they didn’t know how it happened on their own (see the Gospel of John Ch. 9). Since a Pharisee acts as if he knows everything, it is always embarrassing to have someone else explain something to you so you are better off to stop them before they try.

Last year I watched a video of Loren Cunningham (the founder of Youth with a Mission) speaking to a large youth rally at IHOP (the International House of Prayer) in Kansas City. What struck me powerfully in the video was that I was listening to a man who was in his senior years but he had such enthusiasm for the Lord. No wonder he was invited him to speak to several thousand young adults. I was so moved by the man and what he had to say that I got one of his books and read it within days. In the beginning of the book, Is that Really You God?, Loren states the following: “Hearing the voice of the Heavenly Father is the basic right of every child of God.” If I had read those words thirty years ago it might have helped me in my response to my Heavenly Father and what He said to me. Neither in my years of upbringing in the church nor in my years of seminary training had I been encouraged to expect God to speak to me in such a way. I have written those words of Loren’s in the front of my Bible so I can remind myself of that truth often.

I did not tell a lot of people about my experience at the Holiday Inn, even though I wanted to. Remember, I still had a reputation to maintain as the pastor of a local congregation whose denomination for the most part did not believe such things still happened! Also, the only other pastor I knew who talked about having experiences with God, other than the Pentecostals who were supposed to do that sort of thing, was, by my choice, in the category of the “lunatic fringe”. For years our denomination, at least in New England, had been referred to as the “Frozen Chosen” because of the lack of any degree of emotion in or out of the church buildings. I was caught between two real emotions; one of pure excitement in the best sense of that word and the other scared out of my wits. The only blessing was that I could talk to my wife and she didn’t think I had lost my marbles; I felt many others would.

In fact, I began to realize that my wife had talked to numerous people about what happened to me, including her friend, Linda, who prayed for her when she was healed. I learned years later that they both were praying for me during that time because they knew that I was still searching and trying to make sense out of what had taken place. The both knew that God, through the Holy Spirit, was certainly able to help me put the pieces together when I was ready. Janet even confessed to me that she used to lay her hands on my head after I had gone to sleep at night and pray that God would continue to reveal to me what all of this meant.

Obviously, her prayers were effective because within a few weeks my wife asked me to go with her to hear a healing evangelist speak at City Hall in Portland. Just like the first event, she heard about this meeting on the Christian radio and was equally excited about attending. At the very beginning, I felt solid resistance rising up in my whole body! The men at the convention didn’t prove to be such a threat but this healing evangelist was a woman who in my mind was going to be just “putting on a show” in a public arena. Again my solid clerical education told me that healing should be done in the church by people who were properly trained and under the oversight of someone who had the right credentials like myself! I was not at all interested in being in a public place again where someone might see me taking part in such an event. As the saying goes, “Been there; done that.” You might be wondering if this incredible experience with God had really made any impact on my stubborn pharisaical heart! “I am not against healing”, I kept insisting, as my wife pursued her request. We had been to numerous healing services, and I had led some myself, but they were usually in a church building. Janet could see by my reactions and hear in my voice my less-than-enthusiastic response to her request. It was obvious she needed help if I was going to be moved on this matter so she sought some outside resources.

Soon after our initial conversation about going to the City Hall event, I was informed that Linda, the prayer warrior, had called and invited her to go to the meeting with her. “Of course”, my wife said in her most encouraging tone of voice, “we would both really like to have you come with us.” Whether she knew it or not, at that moment, she was plugging into another pharisaical weakness! A true Pharisee never wants to be put on the spot and be made to look like a fool in front of anyone. Surely, Linda would wonder why I would want to miss such an evening of blessing after the wonderful experience I just recently had with God. What would she think of me if I refused such an invitation to enjoy more of His blessings? Whether she actually had any such thoughts in her head or not, I was sure in my head that she would and the result would be my humiliation. So, without even “blinking an eye”, as the expression goes, I said yes to do something which I really didn’t want to do just to save face with my wife and her friend.

The evening of the city hall event was just over a month after my unusual experience at the Holiday Inn. This time I was quite sure I would not run into any people that I knew, for which I was grateful, since I was still rather uncomfortable attending religious events of this nature in such public environments. I told myself that the people going to such a program would probably be mostly from Pentecostal churches with whom we had little connection. Just to be safe, I decided not to wear my clerical collar. When we arrived, the auditorium was already quite full so we found some seats in the back which was perfectly fine with me.

At this point, I have to give you some background to this particular event which adds a bit of humor, especially to understanding more of my pharisaical nature. During our first years back in Portland after six years on the mission field in Costa Rica, I got a job as the coordinator of a federally funded program for inner city youth. The main goal of the project was to provide healthy role models for young people by using older youth as coaches and directing their energies towards doing work projects in their neighborhoods. The program was written and supervised by people from the University of Maine but we had our office in the inner city where most of the participants lived. The office was just down the street from the City Hall.

As well as the young people and their coaches in the program, there were several other people employed to work in the office with me. One of these persons was a feisty older woman who, after raising her family and divorcing her alcoholic husband, returned to the work force and was bettering herself with various continuing education experiences. In her pursuit of gaining more skills, she was constantly “on my case” with questions or challenges to each decision being made. Having grown up in the city, she felt that her “street knowledge” was equally as valuable as any information I might have gained from books over the years. She was a constant challenge to my leadership skills and I grew to dislike her without ever having the courage to confront her with that fact. To add to my dilemma, she came from a legalistic religious background and was often raising questions about the faith!

So now let’s return to the event at City Hall. Again, the evening started with simple praise songs some of which by now I was beginning to recognize. After the worship, the speaker was introduced and she explained how the Lord was going to use her to minister to the people in the audience during the evening. God had healed her of various throat problems she had in the past and now when she ministered to others, God would reveal to her what He was going to do for some in the audience before her. She would then sing out the healings God revealed to her, one by one. She explained that God knew whom He desired to heal that night and as she sang out each healing, she expected the person receiving the healing to come forward and join her on the stage. In fact, she told us she would not proceed to the next healing until the previous person had come forward claiming the healing God was doing in the moment.

My naturally skeptical mind told me that this woman was a “scam” but her description of her own healing, in such a strong sincere voice, began to break down my negative attitude. Obviously God had healed her or she wouldn’t be talking or singing, so I found myself in the midst of a Nicodemus moment. (Nicodemus was the Pharisee who went to see Jesus at night because he knew something was going on that was from God but he couldn’t figure it out. See the Gospel of John Ch. 3) I wanted to doubt but as each person went forward and joined her on the stage I was more convinced that God was doing something before my eyes as powerful as what he had done for me at the Holiday Inn. At the end of the prophetic healing time, with about a dozen people on the stage with her, she shared more of her personal testimony. As she drew to the close, she said something very simple. “I’m sure there are some of you here tonight who want to give your lives to Jesus, so why don’t you come up here and stand in front of the stage with me”. If you had asked me at dinner that evening if I was going to consider doing such a thing that night, I would have strongly denied the possibility! I wasn’t even sure God was going to be at the City Hall, because of my rigid concept of who He was and how He worked. My liberal theology training was still guiding my behavior most of the time, and that kind of conditioning doesn’t change overnight.

Yet, all of a sudden I stood up and started moving out of the row towards the aisle. My wife and Linda both gaped in disbelief. I didn’t even stop to think about what I was doing, much like when I went forward at the Holiday Inn a month before. I just knew in my heart that I wanted what she had experienced and that somehow it was connected to the words God had spoken to me on the red carpet! I can’t say I ran down the aisle but I do remember being so excited that I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on up on the stage. As I approached the front I heard a rather high-pitched female voice screaming my name! “Father Colby”, I heard the woman say, as if she were yelling out the name of her favorite movie star or some other dignitary. I had been so caught up by what God was doing through the woman ministering that I hadn’t even noticed who was on the stage with her. You guessed it! There was the grandmother from my former office, and neither one of us had seen each other until that moment when I approached the stage. In fact, I hadn’t seen her since the program we worked in together ended, several years before that night. She had been one of the people healed and was thrilled to see me joining in the celebration. Her over enthusiasm for many things had often pushed my pharisaical buttons when we worked together and I realized later that it was no accident that we were in the same place that evening. God does have a sense of humor and often uses it to teach us simply things. Even my wife heard the announcement from the back of the auditorium, but by that time I was on my way to meet Jesus and didn’t care who knew it.

After she led us in a prayer of faith, we were all invited to go behind the stage to a rehearsal room where some other leaders of her ministry were going to talk to us. I was not sure I wanted to go with the crowd at first (all of a sudden my Nicodemus moment turned into a Nicodemus nightmare with such thoughts as “why did I come here in the first place?” racing through my head), but by that time I was caught in the flow of the crowd and decided I might as well see what was behind the curtain, so to speak! We were led into this large music rehearsal room without any chairs. The lot of us were standing shoulder to shoulder listening to several people describe what happens when you are born again and the Holy Spirit begins to live in you.

Another wave of panic began to set in when the woman beside me fell backwards for no apparent reason and crashed to the marble floor. I heard a sound reminiscent of opening coconuts on the cement sidewalks in Costa Rica and I was sure there was going to be blood all around my feet. I wanted to shut my eyes, but at the same time I wanted to see what was happening. However, since the sight of blood makes me pass out, and since I didn’t want to be beside the lady on the floor, I resisted. But slowly, I opened my eyes and started turning my head sideways. I couldn’t believe what I saw! The woman was back on her feet with her hands raised high to the ornate ceiling, and there was no blood on her or on the floor! Obviously, God, the Holy Spirit, was doing something in her as amazing as what happened to me at the Holiday Inn, but I was still a novice in His presence and could only stand there dumbfounded.

The only other thing I remember about that evening backstage was that the instructors explained that since we were now born again in the Holy Spirit, we might find ourselves speaking a strange language at times which would not sound familiar. They reminded us of what happened to the disciples on the first day of Pentecost and told us that this “heavenly language” was available to any of us. All we had to do was open our mouths and start praising God BUT not in English. At that point they encouraged all of us to start praising God in our new languages. I thought the circuits in my brain were going into overload and my only thought was to find the exit. I had heard people talk about speaking in tongues before and studied the scripture passages. However, in the midst of so many people pressing together, praying in the Spirit was more than this pharisee could deal with, so I headed for the door. When I found Janet and Linda, they couldn’t stop asking me questions about what had happened back stage! At the same time they wanted me to know they were really glad I had gone forward. All I wanted to tell them was about the lady who I was sure had split her head open when she fell backwards on the marble floor!

As thrilling as every experience with the Lord is, one always has to deal with the less thrilling more ordinary days that follow. This is especially true when you are a clergyman and only have a few people with whom you feel comfortable talking about such things. My wife was, and still is, an encouragement about the recycling God began doing in me in those months at the end of 1977. She and I have shared many of the experiences in this book together. However, in the beginning, I had constant doubts about whether what had happened to me was true or not and I didn’t want to drag her down with my discouragements. Did I make everything up just to feel better? Was I just getting carried away with what was happening to other people? I didn’t want to share what had happened with most Episcopal clergy friends because I knew how many of them felt about the current charismatic movement. So I began to look closer to home for clergy of other denominations who might be sympathetic to what I was going through.

I was not completely comfortable doing this even though I considered myself an ecumenical person who participated in combined church activities as often as possible. This situation though, was much different and I would be exposing some sensitive personal issues. After all, I was from a small liturgical church which had only a handful of people. Most of the Baptist pastors in my area were from larger congregations and had their own clergy support group. There were numerous Pentecostal clergy in the area but being new to the activity of the Holy Spirit, I felt intimidated by those guys. I was sure they would know just by looking at me if I had really had “a genuine experience with God!” I was in desperate need of affirmation by people who might be able to help me understand what was going on in my life but very timid about asking for help. Not a good position for a pharisee to be in. Why would someone who thinks he knows everything want to expose any area of professional deficiency, especially to a peer? Over the years I have come up with a theory. Here’s how it goes. When we are desperate enough, after running out of all of our own options, and have “our backs to the wall”, so to speak, we are then willing to reach out to someone for help. Those times of desperation are often the times when God comes to our aid with the next piece of His plan of action to help us.

CHAPTER FOUR

Holy Laughter in Hollis

I was the vicar in a small mission by the lake in the small community of Waterboro, Maine. As I struggled, trying to make sense out of the strange things that were happening to me, God opened a door for me to meet one of the local Baptist ministers personally. He became like an angel to me even though in those days I wouldn’t have called him an angel because I didn’t believe angels were real. I hadn’t really believed in real miracles before God did what He did for my wife! I was still in that place where many people are today who say they believe that the Bible is true but when you push them about some of the basic events documented in the Bible they are not so sure. I felt that way about angels even though they appear throughout the scriptures as messengers of God who help God’s people in special ways at special times. This minister was only another man but the impact that he had on my life at that time was as critical as any angelic visitation in the scriptures.

Even though I have tried, I cannot remember the first time I met this pastor but I have several pictures in my mind of the first weeks and months we knew each other. I believe that our paths crossed one day while I was out walking. We both lived in the town of Hollis but we lived five miles apart because the town was spread out over many miles as most rural communities in Maine are. His house was on the other end of town from where I lived but where the post office was located. We had a box at the post office but his mail was delivered to a mail box in front of his house even though he lived just around the corner from the post office. I never figured that one out since he lived so much closer to the post office than I did but I gave up trying many years ago.

I often went for a walk around the block when I went to get the mail because the roads in that area of town had fewer hills. (I like to walk but within reason!) On one of my walks I happened to pass his house as he was coming out to get his mail. I was in front of his driveway just as he was turning to go back into his house and we said “hello”. He invited me in for a cup of coffee and we had the normal introductory dialog most people do when they first meet. When he discovered that I was a pastor, he wanted to know how long we had been in the area since he had not met me before. As we talked, we realized that one of the reasons that we hadn’t met was that our churches were not in the same community. I felt very comfortable with him from the beginning and we made arrangements to get together for coffee on another occasion.

Two things stand out in my mind that happened that day. First, I remember that I shared my testimony with him. He was very supportive of what God had done and didn’t seem overly concerned about my excitement regarding the Holy Spirit. I have always been somewhat “over the top”, as a friend of mine in Chile describes it, regarding the joy that comes when witnessing the work of the Holy Spirit. Even before I was saved, I had above average enthusiastic movements in church causing some people to be concerned. One evening during worship at a language school in Cuernavaca, Mexico, (this was in 1965 at a school run by Roman Catholics), a precious nun standing beside me turned to me during the singing of a joyous song and said in a frustrating tone of voice, “Will you stop jumping!” That evening the service was being led by a mariachi band and I couldn’t imagine anyone not wanting to jump a bit.

The other thing I remember about that second visit was that he told me word had gotten around about my “conversion experience.” It is true that bad news always travels fast but good news travels even faster, especially in small rural communities. I was rather pleased at first and I enjoyed having another pastor to talk with about what God had done in my life. At one point, however, he shared something with me that caused me some real sadness. He said that one of the other pastors in his bible study group did not believe that an Episcopal priest could have a real conversion experience. At first, all I wanted to say was, “Of course he can; I did!” However, as he shared more with me about the man’s position, I began to realize that I had little understanding of the various approaches to the salvation experience in different churches. I wasn’t at all concerned about trying to explain what happened to me theologically. I just knew what God had done! I felt his presence and his love like never before in my life. I had responded to his invitation to follow Him and now I was saved! Somehow, that wasn’t enough for one Baptist fellow and that caused me to wonder anew if what had happened to me was real.

So at some point, I remember asking my new friend the following question: “How can I be sure that these experiences are from God?” I was a bit surprised at the answer he gave me: “If you want to know if this is God, then just ask him.” I thought to myself, “Is that all? Just ask Him?” As we talked that day, I realized that he was talking about praying, but praying in a way in which I had little experience. Most of the time when I prayed I used a book which was written hundreds of years ago. The prayers are very beautiful and express most every need that anyone would want to bring before God. I used the book on Sundays during our worship and at other times during the week in the course of my regular duties. However, the more we shared I realized that, to him, prayer was “talking” to God rather than “speaking” to God or “addressing” God about your needs or someone else’s. “Just ask him every day,” I remember him saying. “Ask Him every day to show you that what He has done is real, so that you can be certain that He loves you.” I’m sure it may sound strange to some people that a person who was trained to be a clergyman didn’t know how to talk to God. Strange or not, it was true! At the age of forty, after fifteen years of being in the ministry, I realized I felt uncomfortable and uneasy when I thought about “talking” to God in such a personal way.

Part of my problem came from my relationship with my earthly father, who all of a sudden became mute when he came home after work. He hardly spoke to anyone even his wife. Part of the reason for his silence may have been that he talked to people all day at the small business he ran with my mother. They operated a grocery store, a gas station, a restaurant and numerous tourist cabins in the summer. It is quite probable that both of my parents came home from a long day exhausted and just needing some peace and quiet. However, I suspect that more of my father’s desire for solitude came from growing up as an only child on a small farm several miles outside of town. My siblings and I had wonderful memories of spending the summers on the farm with my father’s parents. They milked their own cows and peddled milk in glass bottles in the days when you could still sell raw milk and make a living. They had one horse, Dolly, who drew the hay wagon which grandmother drove as grandfather threw the hay up for us children to tread down. There were no bales, just mounds of hay in the field, in the wagon and eventually in the barn! There was also no in-door plumbing, just cold running water in the kitchen sink. But we loved it, at least for the summer! My father however rarely talked about his life as a child on the farm. Back then people didn’t talk so openly with their children about personal issues or their lives growing up. I remember learning later in life that my father had another sibling who died either at birth or very young which could well have affected his willingness to share about his childhood.

Whatever the reasons, one result of my father’s solitude was that I grew up believing that he didn’t love me. I never heard him say that he loved me to my face. I would describe my father this way: he was a good man in that he provided for his family whatever we needed and he was most always home at night, but emotionally he was “never there”. One of my worst memories is standing by his big overstuffed chair in the living room as he read his newspaper in the evening waiting for the right moment to ask him a question. Usually it was quite a simple request like “May I go over to the high school tonight to the basketball game?” The high school was on the next piece of property so it was five minutes away. I do not remember a time when he answered on the first request. So I would stand there for several minutes and ask again with the same result. Eventually he would say, “Go ask your mother”. Of course, my mother had already said, “Go ask your father”, which left me standing somewhere between the living room and the kitchen feeling rather worthless. There was hardly ever any conversation initiated by my father about our day. He rarely asked us about our school work, friends or the like. When he was mad, he spoke loudly and often with a variety of cuss words. I grew up hearing the name of Jesus a great deal but not in the way I use it now.

I later received some powerful healing regarding our relationship. But the simple truth at that time is that my father and I did not talk or share our lives either verbally or emotionally, so when I came to think about my Heavenly Father, I didn’t expect anything different. The God of the universe was distant and too busy to love us intimately, just like the father who raised me. I was fairly comfortable with that kind of a relationship, because my religious environment in the Episcopal church was formal with little emotion. My wife’s comment when she saw the picture taken on my ordination day as a deacon with numerous other dignitaries standing in a row on the front steps of my home congregation was, “That is the saddest bunch of people I have seen in my whole life!” I was determined that I didn’t need anyone to love me, nor could that love make me happy. I was responsible for making myself happy just like I had done in every other aspect of my life.

Since I really wanted an answer from God about the validity of these experiences, I decided to take the Baptist pastor’s advice. I won’t say I talked to God every day during those months but I made a serious effort to ask him to show me something that would prove without a doubt that what had happened was real. I wanted proof! Some people would say that my two previous experiences, especially the clear words at the Holiday Inn, should have been enough proof already, and for most people that might have been true. In my case I would say that my “love deficiency” was such that I needed much more affirmation than the average person. I heard someone describe such a deficiency once at a conference much like a vitamin deficiency: when a person is lacking in any vitamin source the best way to help them is to give them extra doses of that vitamin until their deficiency is overcome.

I had begun to read some scripture in those days and especially enjoyed the psalms where David poured out his heart to the Lord seeking confirmation of his favor. One of my favorite verses became Psalm 34:4, “I sought the Lord and he answered me; he delivered me from all my fears.” I sought the Lord during those months; I prayed and I was expectant!

Months went by before there was a breakthrough. It was in the late spring of the next year when I got a phone call one morning from some members of our congregation who owned a greenhouse. They had to go into the city to pick up some supplies and needed someone to come over and man the store while they were gone. They assured me they would be back in a few hours. Fortunately, I was free for the day and had little planned so I agreed to go help them out.

Now there were two parallel roads from our farm to their greenhouse several miles apart. The so-called high road went over a series of small hills, while the low road ran through some farmland. That day I went over on the high road because it was shorter and I knew they were anxious to leave. It was a warm sunny spring day and, as I came over a small rise, I was conscious that someone was sitting in the passenger seat beside me. I turned to the right expecting to see a real figure, but there was no one there. However, I knew that if I extended my hand in that direction, I would have touched the person there because the sense of physical presence was that strong!

When I got to the greenhouse I couldn’t wait to share what had happened with my friends, but they were in a hurry to get on the road so I took my place in the chair by the door of the greenhouse and waited for the first customer. All I could think of was what had happened in the car. Was that the Holy Spirit? Didn’t Jesus say that he would ask the Father to send us “another counselor to be with you forever?” (John 14:15) And wasn’t this Holy Spirit supposed to teach us all truth and remind us of everything Jesus taught us? My mind was racing like that of a child who just discovered he was going to receive a present he had wanted for years! My friends came back in about two hours with plenty of plants and other supplies to put away. By that time, I just wanted to get home quickly to tell my wife what happened on the way over, so we shared a quick hug and I was off.

Instinctively when I pulled out of their driveway, I took the low road on the way home traveling past the post office. I stopped to get the mail and started off again towards the farm. About halfway between the post office and home, I heard a loud rumbling noise in the sky that sounded like thunder. Yet, I realized the sun was out as bright as it had been all day long. Within seconds, I knew that the noise was not thunder but laughter; some of the loudest, most raucous laughter I had ever heard in my life. It sounded like the whole heavens were shaking with laughter. In that very moment, I heard the Lord say to me, “You fool, I have always loved you!” I was stunned at first because it was as if a good friend was chiding me for not knowing something so simple. Even today, I could take you to the exact spot on that road in Hollis where the Lord surprised me with His laughter! I chuckled to myself all the rest of the way up the road to the farm. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife who laughed as hard as I had. By now she was beginning to think that she might have prayed too hard for me.

Sometime shortly after this experience, the Lord led me to a portion of scripture which brought me as much joy as the experience itself. I was reading in the book of Deuteronomy where Moses reminded the people of Israel what happened when they received the Law at the foot of Mount Horeb. “You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain while it blazed with fire…the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice” (Dt. 4:12, emphasis mine). Later in chapter 5, the following words of the people of Israel are recorded in reaction to that experience. “The Lord our God has shown us His glory and His majesty, and we have heard His voice from the fire. Today we have seen that a man can live even if God speaks with him” (Dt. 5:24, emphasis mine).

Part of my problem for years was that I did not read the bible with any regularity, except on Sunday mornings in church, so I missed discovering such simple truths earlier. If this had happened to someone like me in the days of Jesus, the Jerusalem Post may have had the following headline: Radical Pharisee Comes Alive to God. Nothing builds faith more powerfully, in my experience, than reading how God has worked in the lives of people before us, and then seeing Him do the same thing in our lives today. That is why reading the Bible brings such blessings to Christians. One can see clearly, over and over again, how God works in the lives of His people to bless them which proves how much He loves them. Another plus of such experiences is realizing that the way God works in the lives of His people in each generation never changes.

After that day of laughter, there was no doubt in my mind or my heart that God really loved me, and I just needed to get on with my job. So naturally, I began sharing what He had done in my life with the folks at the mission on Sunday mornings. The sermons got longer because now I really had someone and something to talk about. You can imagine that there were a variety of responses to my new style of preaching. Some people were not at all happy that the service now went more than an hour! It was naive of me to think that long time church people would get excited about the simple truth that God loved them. They assured me that they already knew that God loved them and were somewhat surprised that I hadn’t! Since most of them were much older than I and had been members at the mission longer than I had been their pastor, I was at a loss to argue with them. Yet what concerned them more was that some of the things I was sharing with them seemed a bit “unorthodox” to their experience over the years. When I spoke so emphatically about God “speaking to me” the way He did, they felt I was putting them down if they had not had such an experience. The good news which I thought would cause people to be joyful ended up causing considerable conflict; not only with me but between various members of the congregation.

Invariably, since we were part of the Episcopal Church, it wasn’t long before the bishop got involved. We may have been out in the country but the people who wanted answers to their questions knew where to go to get them. The phones began to ring off the hook (no cell phones in those days) and soon it was common knowledge that some strange and unusual things were happening at the mission by the lake in Waterboro. In my excitement about “hearing God speak to me” and wanting to proclaim that fact from the pulpit, I had overlooked the fact that sometimes when people say that sort of thing, it can raise questions about their sanity. Not only were a few of the leaders in the congregation questioning my sanity but I also realized rather quickly that the bishop was thinking similar thoughts. He was still in charge of the congregation (I was just the Vicar) so he decided he had to do something to intervene.

CHAPTER FIVE

Two Psychiatrists, One Bishop and Me

The mission church by the lake where I served as the “vicar” had an interesting history. Before I tell you about the history, however, let me explain to those who are not familiar with the term vicar what a vicar is! An Episcopal congregation is a mission until it can afford to support itself financially. While the congregation is a mission, the bishop is officially the head of the congregation. The clergyman that he appoints to serve in the mission is called the vicar because he serves vicariously as the bishop’s representative.

For many years, St. Stephen the Martyr was one of many summer missions started by people who came from “out of state” to spend time in Maine on their summer holidays. There were numerous family connections in the history of our mission. One family had given the land for the building, which was situated by the side of the lake. Other families had given generously so the building could be constructed. The clergy were often friends of the same families who came to the area for summer relaxation and took the church services while on vacation. Consequently, there was not a consistency of the same clergy person throughout the whole summer season. In most of these mission churches, consistency was not the main issue, except in the sense that the same clergy often came year after year. The important issue was to have services in the Episcopal tradition, which often included an occasional wedding.

Even when our congregation became a year-round mission there were numerous clergy who came for different time periods from outside the area. Sometimes, they came from a neighboring congregation, or even from the bishop’s office but they did not live in the community. The priest would only be there on Sunday for the services or at other selected times during the week. When I came to the mission, we had just moved to the area and planned to stay. However, the congregation had been accustomed to having clergy around only on Sundays, and most of the decisions had been made by the laypeople. Since I was the first year-round resident priest, even though part-time, I realized very quickly that there was a sharp learning curve for me in our new relationship. I was the new guy on the block in the midst of folks who had been there most of their lives, and some of them were quick to remind me of that fact.

The issue over the length of the sermon was the first bump in the road. Some folks were concerned that the length of the service had increased to significantly more than an hour. It is an interesting fact of Protestant church history, especially in this country, that a one-hour service has become a locked-in tradition. Some people are sure that it must be mentioned in the Bible! In the minds of many, in practically every denomination, to proceed past the sixty minute mark is not only inconsiderate to the folks in the pews but a direct offense to the Lord. I realize this can all sound comical and unreal but many clergy function on this principle for fear of losing their jobs! Once I had discovered that God really loved me, that Jesus was really still alive and that the Holy Spirit was present to do mighty works in us, I wanted to share those truths I had discovered. The best opportunity I had was in the Sunday morning service. The difficulty was that I couldn’t tell all that I wanted to tell in the fifteen minutes! Being a liturgical church, we had an order of service or specific program to follow as well.

In some ways I realize it wasn’t fair to the people, because I had been a regular preacher before these events happened. Actually, I didn’t really like to preach because I always felt that I was responsible to tell the people something about life and how to live it. I realized in later years that the best preaching is just sharing something (the good news about Jesus, for example) that you can’t stop talking about because of how it has changed your life. I have become convinced that too many clergy confuse preaching with teaching, which I enjoy doing also, but not on Sunday mornings. When I started proclaiming what God had done in my life, which is what many of the first preachers did in the New Testament, the time frame of the service took on a new dimension. Of course, it wasn’t just the sermon that took more time. There was an extended time for new worship songs, as well as time to pray for people who wanted God to touch their lives as He had touched mine. One of my clearest memories of those days happened one evening at a bishop’s committee meeting. A retired gentleman who had been a church member all his life leaned over the table and said to me, “If you would just stop talking about all this Jesus stuff, everything would be OK around here!” The sad thing is that he was serious and soon it became obvious that there were other people who felt the same way.

I didn’t take such a comment personally because I knew the background that many of the people in the mission came from. I was from the same church background and may well have said the same thing one year before. However, that’s part of the problem with the Holy Spirit. When He shows up and begins working miracles in our lives we are not in control. Too many of us, individuals and congregations, want to keep control of our lives thinking we are doing God a favor by making sure everything is in order! If that was the way God wanted his people to function, He would not have done what He did on the first day of Pentecost, which is often called the birthday of the church. Look up the account in the Acts of the Apostles and see if what Luke describes there happens in most churches on Sunday morning, or at any other time (see Acts 2:1-24).

Speaking of a birthday party, it was obvious that the word was spreading around the communities that something different and exciting was going on at the mission by the lake. Each Sunday there were more people coming, and most of them were not Episcopalians! Former Roman Catholics, Baptists, and Pentecostals were joining us, which caused some of the old timers to be as concerned about the newcomers as they were about the vicar’s longer messages. Many of these people joined us looking for “more of the Holy Spirit,” as they described the reason for their coming.

One Sunday a rather unusual new family came to our morning service. You could hear the gasps and flutters as they walked into the parish hall, which was attached to the back of the small church structure. They were all dressed in black t-shirts and blue jeans — father, mother, and the two children. The parents both had various tattoos on their arms and other parts of their bodies. The father’s head was shaved and he had a long beard. The frosting on the cake, so to speak, was that they had parked their motorcycles just outside by the door. Our little Episcopal mission by the lake, with many people dressed up for church, was not quite ready with a welcoming committee. The fun part for me was that I knew they were coming! They had come by the church during the week because they were new in the area and needed food. They had been to numerous other churches and had been turned away, probably because of their appearance. We had a food pantry, which was part of our outreach in the community, so I told them they were welcome to whatever they needed under one condition. The only thing I asked was that they come back on Sunday morning and thank the congregation. They said they were more than willing to do that and they kept their word! When all the commotion settled down, we had an incredible service, tattoos and all.

Over the next few months, we found them a place to live and they started coming regularly to the services, most of the time still in their black t-shirts. One Sunday after the service, the father asked me to come to his house some morning to explain this Holy Spirit stuff. I was more than happy to accommodate him and actually preferred to talk to people around their kitchen table about such issues. When I arrived that morning about eight o’clock, he came to the door with “fire in his eyes” and told me he had been up all night in the basement praising God! I knew I didn’t need to tell him anything right then about the Holy Spirit. We had a cup of coffee and I listened as he told me how he met the Holy Spirit himself in the basement of his rented house! Several years later the family moved to the next state and they sent regular donations back to the church to support the work of the food pantry.

Even though many good things were happening, at least from my perspective, there was still an undercurrent of unhappy people who decided that it was time to invite the bishop to evaluate what they considered to be some confusion. Since the bishop only made yearly visits, there was a group of leaders called the bishop’s committee responsible for the daily life of the congregation. In an ordinary situation, these people work with the clergy person to organize the events of the congregation as well as take care of the finances and matters concerning the property. However, we were not an ordinary situation. Because of the number of years when there had been no consistent clerical leadership, the major decisions were obviously made by the leaders who had been there for some time. I was considered the outsider. I do not say these things to discredit the folks who gave years of their lives to keep the mission going before I came to join them. I only want you to appreciate more clearly what transpired in this time of crisis.

Whether the folks who called the bishop said they thought I was crazy, or he came to that conclusion on his own after hearing some of the details of the recent events, the end result was that I received a call from the bishop. He informed me that he had made an appointment for the two of us to sit down with a psychiatrist. He gave me the date, the time and the name of the person we were going to see in Portland. When I heard the person’s name, I was not only relieved, I was rather excited! This was the same psychiatrist I had seen several years before when my wife and I were struggling in our marriage. He was the one who helped me understand that I didn’t always have to be in control of every situation and that I didn’t always have to be right. Every Pharisee could benefit from spending time with a good psychiatrist! He didn’t solve all of my problems, but he helped me see some of the major ones. He was also a most loving, caring man, which for me was critical considering the relationship I had with my own father. So, I had no problem at all thinking of spending an hour with him and the bishop.

The day of the appointment came and we met in the psychiatrist’s office, which felt like an old friend’s living room to me. The psychiatrist began by saying, “Richard, the bishop tells me that you heard God speak to you. Tell me how that happened.” I began recounting both events where I knew I had heard the voice of God specifically. As I told my stories, an interesting thing happened which made a great impact on me. I knew that the psychiatrist did not doubt that what I was saying really happened! Then, after listening patiently for a half hour, he asked me a question I will never forget. “Is there anything like this going on in the Jewish faith?” The question surprised me but I quickly responded with great enthusiasm, “Oh yes!” I told him about Sid Roth, a Messianic Jew from Washington, D.C. who wrote a book about his own experiences entitled Something For Nothing. Again, he listened with sincere emotion on his face, as I told him there were people all over the world who were having such experiences with God. I even told him I would send him a copy of Sid Roth’s book, and I did.

Then the psychiatrist looked at the bishop, whom he also knew well because of their professional relationship and said, “Fred, what do you think of all this?” Neither my ears nor my heart were prepared for the words that came from the bishop’s mouth. “Very dubious,” he said, in his professional clerical voice while shaking his head, “very dubious.” Yes, I clearly heard him say those two words twice! I don’t remember what the psychiatrist said at that moment but I was so stunned I couldn’t say a word. I felt a deep sense of sadness in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t believe that the man whom the church called a “defender of the faith” could be so insensitive to such basic experiences of the faith. I’m sure I was being completely naive at that moment, but it seemed impossible to me that the bishop would not be excited about something that God had done. I felt like I was back in the old family living room with my father, although the bishop did manage to utter two words! Interestingly enough, several weeks later the bishop and I went to see another psychiatrist who was also an ordained Episcopal priest. He was less enthusiastic than the Jewish psychiatrist about hearing my testimony but this time I remember the bishop saying before we left his office, “I wish I could be as sure as you are about your faith.” It was a small step but I remembered thinking the same thing once and I prayed that some day he would have that assurance.

Another positive result of the visits with the two psychiatrists was that the bishop didn’t remove me from my post. He even agreed to come for the regular confirmation visit the following year, which of course was his job. Confirmation in the Episcopal Church is the time when young people make a public confession of their faith, which some of our children were now excited about doing. The children were actually looking forward to meeting the bishop and several of them who were not bashful asked him questions about what he believed. We all had some concern when he told us he wasn’t sure he was going to heaven! At least, we knew how to pray for him specifically and many of them did. These experiences had a major impact upon our children. Our oldest son, who was eleven when his mother and I had our first encounters with the Holy Spirit, said an interesting thing to me one day in the car. We were riding over to the church for some reason and he was “sent along with dad” as a matter of discipline. All of a sudden he turned to me and said, “You know, Dad, this whole thing would have been a lot easier if you had done this when we were just little!” I couldn’t have agreed more but at that point there was no turning back and we both knew it.

I heard feedback from various sources regarding the results of the two psychiatric visits. My main concern was that the people in the congregation knew the facts. I carried the scars of the Bishop’s “very dubious” remark for many years, but those were washed away by another experience of the Father’s grace and mercy some years later. I tried not to feel boastful when it all was over, but I did confess to my wife that I felt that I was the victor, something like David’s situation with Goliath, even though no one ended up dead. I began to realize that this type of experience was part of being a Christian in a world that is increasing more secular and inclusive. Jesus gave his own disciples the following advice, “On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles…do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you” (Matthew 10:18-19, emphasis mine). Just like those first disciples, we experienced another simple truth about our Heavenly Father. He not only speaks to us, but He speaks through us, and He wants to do that more and more as we are willing to let Him use us.

CHAPTER SIX

Tongues with Terry

I’m sure that a whole book could be written about our lives at the mission by the lake. We began to see miracles in so many people’s lives that we expected God to show up whenever we had any need. We saw our first healing of cancer in the life of a young boy who didn’t even come to the church, but his mother was a friend of someone who did, so of course we wanted to pray for him. As people in the community began to hear about what God was doing down by the lake, more people came to find out for themselves if what they heard was really true. Many who came chose to stay. The blessing of that growth was that over the years, I became the first full time pastor of the congregation. We were still a mission, because we were receiving some financial help from the diocese, but there was enough activity to keep me and many other folks busy doing the work of the Kingdom of God.

Another result of the growth was the obvious mixture of people from different religious backgrounds. This was a stretch for many of the folks who had been in the congregation before all this “Jesus stuff” began happening. For instance, when more people came who had a Pentecostal church background, you could hear a few people praying in tongues at a prayer meeting or even on Sunday morning. At that point I had never spoken in tongues myself, and I just assumed that when the Lord wanted me to do so He would enable me to have that experience. However, the basic question arose in the congregation: “Shouldn’t everyone speak in tongues?” Now it wasn’t just the length of the sermon that produced conversation during the coffee hour. (For the clearest explanation of speaking in tongues or praying in the Spirit, see Ch. 14 of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in the New Testament.)

The whole issue of tongues came to the forefront when I was asked to be an advisor for a newly formed chapter of the Women’s Aglow organization, which was a sister organization to the Full Gospel Business Men. My wife and I had met the woman who asked me to be an advisor shortly after we were saved. She and her husband held a prayer meeting once a week at their house, and we were hungry for fellowship, so, we got to know one another quite well. At some point the question was raised if I would be willing to consider being one of the advisors for the new group. In those days the advisors had to be men who were pastors (today the organization has become Aglow International and it encourages men to be members as well).

I agreed to take the official application home and pray about the matter with my wife. One section on the application asked if you “spoke in tongues” and of course I said no. When the woman got my application back, she called me on the phone and said we needed to talk about the matter of tongues. According to the policy of the organization at that time, speaking in tongues was the sign of being baptized in the Holy Spirit. Since the advisors needed to advise the members about the basics of the faith, they obviously needed to have experience in these matters. Because I did not speak in tongues, there was a question as to the validity of my baptism in the Holy Spirit.

At that point, I figured it was God’s problem. I left the matter up to him! I knew that I was saved, and I was quite sure I had the Holy Spirit in me. This is what Peter said (speaking to people listening to his first sermon) would happen to each of us when we gave our lives to Jesus (Acts 2:38). I also knew that I had experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in my own life over the past year or so and had seen Him work in the lives of others. So in my mind I had been “baptized” into the Holy Spirit from the beginning when I first heard the Lord speak to me. After all, didn’t the word baptize mean “to immerse in” completely? I had even joined in a mass baptism in the river near our church proclaiming my personal faith in Jesus openly to the world. Our friend eventually agreed that my being an advisor was more important than this one technical issue. We also agreed that when Paul said to the people in the church in Corinth “I would like every one of you to speak in tongues” (1 Cor. 14:5), he was believing God would eventually make that happen and that I could trust him to do so for me as well.

Part of my trusting had to do with coming to know another clergyman, Terry Fulham, who was very instrumental in my recycling process over the next few years. He was my first true mentor in the faith. Through my relationship with Terry, I came to understand many of the basic teachings of the Christian faith as they are revealed in the word of God. I had never met a clergyman who unfolded and explained the truth of God’s word so simply and with such clarity. When I listened to Terry teach or preach, I was drawn into the experience of believing what he was sharing as he spoke. I sensed that the truths of the scriptures were being “revealed anew” in a way that made me eager to understand these truths like never before in my life.

My introduction to Terry came through a teaching on a cassette tape! Yes, thirty years ago, before the rise of the computer generation, we still listened to cassette tapes because we had cassette players in our cars! The husband of the woman who had prayed for my wife’s healing, Linda, went to a conference and came back with some cassettes which he then lent me. The teaching was so refreshing; I couldn’t believe that this preacher was the rector of an Episcopalian congregation! I was like a dry sponge soaking up cool, clear water. So when I heard about a conference at Terry’s church in Connecticut for clergy and their wives, we were quick to sign up. My wife has often said that as a pastor’s wife this was the first time she was invited, along with her husband, to anything other than an annual church meeting! It was not like any meetings we had attended before in church; we spent two days with several hundred people who really enjoyed their Christian faith and no one doubted our sanity!

I don’t want to overhype the experiences we had at St. Paul’s, Darien, in those days when Terry was the rector, but I do want you to get a sense of what a radical effect his teaching and ministry had on us. First of all, we were in a church full of people at ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning listening to an Episcopal minister teaching the basic scriptural truths about knowing Jesus as your Savior. That fact alone still amazes me to this day! Half of the people in the church were businessmen who were taking Tuesday as their day off. After the service, everyone was invited to stay for lunch and discuss the morning teaching. It was in one of those Tuesday morning services that I heard Terry teach about speaking in tongues. He laid out the references in the New Testament, pointing especially to what Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians. “For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit” (I Cor. 14:2). At the end of the teaching he said, “Now we are going to have a time to practice.” All of a sudden I thought to myself, “Practice speaking in tongues, right now, in an Episcopal church?” At the same moment, I can still remember hearing Terry say, “Now don’t worry about the person next to you because they are not talking to you anyway! Just open up your mouth and start praising God BUT not in English!” Before I knew what was happening, I was in the midst of a surround sound experience of many tongues speaking different languages, but on that day I was not one of them. As much as I tried, nothing but English came out of my mouth!

We came back with many more cassettes of Terry’s teachings. I deliberately bought the one from the Tuesday morning service, because I was determined that I was going to conquer this issue of speaking in tongues. I was still of the mindset that I could do most things for myself, and my logic was that if I tried to help God, He would see my sincerity and respond. I listened to the cassette numerous times in my car, and when it came to the “class participation” portion, I made the same fruitless efforts I had made that morning in Darien. I was so frustrated because by that time others in the congregation had discovered the joy and blessing of their prayer language. I was convinced that I needed to confess some thoughts I had had over the years about speaking in tongues before God was going to give me mine! I went through the litany of my negative judgments about people who spoke in tongues and confessed each one. I was sure that these languages were not languages at all; people were just babbling sounds to satisfy their own need to be spiritual. I confessed that my biggest hang-up with the whole process was that it was just repetitive sounds. I would listen carefully to people at prayer meetings and knew that they were saying the very same sounds over and over again. “How can that kind of irrational gibberish be of any value to our lives as serious Christians?” I often said to myself. I went back to the cassette and checked the scripture passages, which only made the situation more frustrating. It was obvious that what Paul taught the Corinthians and what Terry was teaching people not only sounded logical, but was clearly useful to others who were enjoying this “gift of the Spirit”, as the New Testament describes the experience.

We made another pilgrimage to St. Paul’s later that year, this time with a group from the congregation over Labor Day. The trip wasn’t just because I was struggling with speaking in tongues but because we saw the value of sharing with our people the joy of being in the midst of ordinary folks where the Spirit of God was not only welcome but expected. At that time, St. Paul’s had a Sunday night service in a high school gym because there wasn’t enough room in the church for the large crowd. After our Sunday morning service by the lake we piled into a school bus and drove for six hours to get to Darien for the evening service. That was another novelty: Episcopalians in church on Sunday evening singing and enjoying themselves. I always thought that only the Baptists and the Pentecostals did such things. We even stayed overnight! We went on a weekend when Monday was a holiday so we could take advantage of another day off. Most of us slept on the pews in the church in sleeping bags and someone from the church prepared breakfast for us in the church kitchen. Often when anyone mentions the phrase the good old days, my mind goes to just one place, and I remember those early blessings with the saints in Darien.

However, in the midst of all this exciting evangelistic activity, I still did not speak in tongues. The whole issue had become a sore spot for me with the Lord, and I was not happy about accepting the fact that I had little ability to control the issue. This pharisee was right in the midst of another major recycling experience.

The annual convention for the diocese of Maine took place in the fall and that year was in the city of Portland. One of the guests of the convention was a priest from Nigeria who was studying at the Episcopal seminary in Virginia. During one of the breaks in the meetings, a couple from our mission introduced me to him. They had discovered that he was not going to be able to go home for Christmas to visit his wife and family, and also that he had never seen snow in his life. In the midst of these discoveries, they came up with a wonderful idea. They would invite him to spend Christmas with their family and enjoy the holiday season with our church family as well. He, of course, was delighted with the thought of not being alone at such a joyful time of the year. We even assured him that we would find the appropriate winter clothing since he had none and was going to be with us for almost two weeks.

The whole congregation got into the act of welcoming this man from a foreign country to our small corner of the world. In our naive way, we felt like we were taking part in a reverse missionary experience of evangelism! We were going to have someone come from halfway around the world to our little mission church in Maine rather than sending someone to his country. It would certainly be a cultural experience for all of us! I was especially looking forward to his visit because at my seminary years ago there two African students who had made quite an impression on me because they always carried their Bibles with them to class. I remember being impressed by that fact, because at that time of my life I would never have carried a Bible with me anywhere! Yet they were not in the least bit intimidated by us sophisticated American seminarians; they knew the basis of their faith came from the truth in that book. I eventually learned that basic truth also and still remember those two men of God whose names I have never forgotten: Joseph Arulefella and Yustasi Ruhindi.

The Sunday after Christmas Day was selected for a special celebration. Our visiting friend would preach after which we would have a reception in the parish hall. Although I’m sure the service was glorious with many old favorite Christmas carols sung by a full house of family and friends visiting for the holidays, the only thing I remember about that service was the end. We were singing the final carol, and as I made room for our African visitor in the space where I had been standing entering the sacristy, I heard strange sounds coming from his lips. He was singing in his native African language which not only sounded a bit foolish to me but somewhat repetitious! The Holy Spirit spoke to my heart in that moment and said, “Even real languages at times can sound foolish to you and often they seem like the same sounds are being repeated over and over again”! I knew what He meant! Those were the two issues I struggled with regarding speaking in tongues; the strange sounds were often repetitious and I couldn’t imagine them being real or meaningful.

Several days after the visitor went back to Virginia, I was driving my car down the road to the next village when it happened! I was listening to a favorite recording of worship songs and singing along at the top of my voice. My wife often said I used to worship more in the car than anywhere else and that day, all of a sudden, the “more” was a new kind of heavenly worship. Without even realizing that I was no longer singing in English, I was singing in a different tongue! God had broken through my judgmental spirit by using a humble African pastor singing God’s praise in his native language. The Lord showed me that my real opposition was a matter of disbelief and once I confessed that to him, which I had done that day in the church service, my heart and my mind were open to receive what He wanted to give me all along. My tongue became a babbling brook! I sang in the Spirit; I prayed in the Spirit; I couldn’t seem to turn off the spigot! At the same time, I laughed at my pharisaical stubbornness to think that I had to understand everything about God and how He works before accepting His ways and truths in my life.

Of course, one of my first sermons in the New Year was about speaking in tongues. By now, many people were beginning to get the message, so to speak. Once the Vicar had experienced it, they were going to hear about it! Actually, I think that is the way it happened in the New Testament. Those first Christians couldn’t stop telling (proclaiming/preaching) what they had experienced about the amazing things God was doing in their lives. Some people who heard them thought they were crazy; some thought they were drunk but many believed and joined their ranks as their fellowship grew. (Read the Acts of the Apostles 2:1-34)

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Believing Bishop

At some point within the first half of the new year, some friends told me that the South American Missionary Society (SAMS) was looking for a new director. They suggested that, since we had lived in Mexico and Costa Rica during the early years of our marriage, I might be interested in applying for the job. We often said we would like to go back to the mission field now that we knew Jesus in a personal way and see what the difference might be. We felt we would be able to have an impact on many people which was not possible previously. Over the years, many people have asked me the same question when they heard my testimony. “Why did you become a missionary if you didn’t know Jesus?” My standard response has been two-fold; 1) in my denomination that wasn’t a requirement and 2) I wanted to help people. Of course both of these reasons sound strange to many people from evangelical backgrounds since the motivating force for most missionaries is knowing Jesus as the Savior and sharing that truth with others. As we talked and prayed about the prospect with SAMS, we confronted several obstacles. Our children were now at a stage in school where being in a foreign country might be more of a challenge than they would want to undertake. Also, we were still enjoying the rural life of the farm with a variety of animals, a big garden and our screened-in porch overlooking the field by the side of a peaceful stream. Our oldest son had just bought his first motorcycle, and I got my permit thinking I would learn to drive it as well. Making home visits on a motorcycle sounded much easier now that we had people coming to the mission from many surrounding communities.

However, as we talked with various friends, the desire to contact the folks at SAMS came back strongly, and I found myself writing to get an application for the job. Furthermore, we both had the desire to travel and see more of South America since our early days there. When people wondered why we would want to leave Maine, we reminded them that our three sons were all born in foreign countries so we were an international family! I filled out the application and within weeks had an answer back that they would be interested in bringing me to North Carolina for an interview. (Within a few years, SAMS moved their headquarters to Ambridge, Pennsylvania near Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, which was becoming a leading seminary in training both clergy and lay people.) Before the interview, the people in North Carolina requested that I meet personally with two people who were on their board, one who lived just outside of Boston and a bishop who had a summer residence on the coast of Maine. My wife and I drove to Boston to have lunch with the first person, a delightful Christian author. She and her husband had been missionaries in South America when they were newly married, so we were excited to meet her. We were not disappointed and came home looking forward to the next step.

Several weeks later I drove up the coast of Maine by myself on a clear summer day to meet with the bishop in Northeast Harbor on Mt. Desert Island. We had camped in Acadia National Park with our children several years before but I had never been to Northeast Harbor, which is on the other end of the island. We had agreed to meet at a restaurant just above the town dock area. As I drove along enjoying the beauty of God’s creation that the island displays, I couldn’t help wondering what this bishop was going to be like. I knew he was from Pittsburgh and he had a pleasant voice on the phone. After all, I thought, if he is on the board of SAMS, he must be open to hearing about some of the experiences I’ve had. The only other bishop I had known personally (other than the one who took me to the psychiatrist) was the bishop in Costa Rica when we were missionaries there. He was a pleasant man and very helpful to us during our early missionary adventures. He was also instrumental in helping us change language schools when we wanted some freedom from a rather legalistic environment, which we felt was crushing our missionary spirits. Those were the days when I thought I knew everything about how God worked even before I knew him personally! I kept thinking about how this next bishop would react to what God was doing in our lives now. I even wondered if maybe he had checked up on me and knew about the visits to the psychiatrists! No doubt I was having some moments of pharisaical paranoia.

I arrived at our agreed meeting place and didn’t see anyone in a clerical collar — I thought he might be wearing one as a sign of recognition even while on his summer vacation. As I was looking around, a pleasant man approached me asking if I was Richard Colby. When I said I was, he introduced himself as the bishop I was looking for. We found a place to sit down and after some light conversation about the beauty of the summer in Maine, he wanted to know how I came to know the Lord. I wasn’t sure I had heard the man correctly at first! However, as we talked, it was obvious that he wanted to know how I came to know Jesus personally as my Savior. I thought I had died and gone to heaven right there on the coast of Maine. We shared our testimonies and various faith experiences, which raised my hope that there might be more bishops in the church like this man. We talked more about the job and I realized that we would not be living in another country but in North Carolina, which was a disappointment. I had only been to the south of the United States for several vacations in Florida and had never thought about living there, even in a beautiful place like North Carolina. Since I had to drive back home that afternoon, the interview was not long, but the time factor was less important to me than the fact that I met a bishop in the Episcopal Church who knew Jesus!

I made the trip to North Carolina later in the fall for the interview at the SAMS offices. The director at that time was an English priest who had taken the job on a temporary basis. He was returning from the mission field and was on his way back to England to retire. The people I met during the interview process seemed pleasant and I returned home with excitement. I felt I had a good chance of getting the job. I also felt positive about the fact that they wanted to fill the position sooner than later which meant that we would be able to make the move before winter set in. I had visions of being in a warmer climate after some hard winters in Maine and so did our children. When we had returned from Costa Rica on the first day of April in 1971, the boys had gotten their first glimpse of snow as we arrived from Miami in a seven inch snow storm. More than ten years later, they had become used to the white stuff and sometimes even enjoyed clearing out the long driveway at the farm with the snow blower, but the thoughts of a warmer climate caused excitement for us all.

When the news came that the temporary director was going to stay for another year, I was not prepared for the disappointment I felt. I was sure I was the right person for the job and had already started packing my bags, as well as some of our household possessions. As far as I knew, I was the only applicant for the job, and I had not even speculated about the fact that the English fellow might extend his stay. Whatever the reasons, the Lord knew them and He knew that His plans for me did not include being the director of SAMS. That didn’t help my sense of despair, even when I got a call from the bishop in Pittsburgh expressing his condolences. He said he thought I would have been good for the job as well but maybe God had another plan for us at this point in our lives. I was trying to think of something positive to say in return when I heard him say, “Maybe God is calling you to Pittsburgh, Richard; there are several congregations here which are currently open and I would enjoy having you join us.” As much as I felt the comfort of his words and appreciated his invitation to work in his diocese, I was too occupied licking my wounds (pharisees rarely take rejection easily) to hear the exciting potential he was offering. However, the bishop sensed my need for a pastor, so he continued to call me throughout the winter months. By the springtime, my pride was somewhat restored, and I agreed that he could submit my name to any congregation where he felt I would be effective.

Over the next six months my name was submitted to three congregations, two of which sent people from their search committees to interview me and hear me preach at the mission by the lake. One group went back and reported to their congregation that the Colbys actually slept with their animals! Our farmhouse was connected to the barn by an el, which we learned later was not a common fixture on farmhouses in Pennsylvania where there is much less snow in the winters. Our sons had a good laugh when they heard that comment because our youngest son actually did bring his prize goat into the bathroom off the kitchen to freshen her up before showing her at the county fairs!

I suffered another major disappointment when the first place where I interviewed did not offer me the job as their next pastor. Again, I was sure that I had just the right skills and gifts that these people needed. The congregation had a contemporary building and the previous pastor had introduced them to the work of the Holy Spirit. But, again, it was obvious that I had my heart set on things of the flesh and the Lord knew that this was not the place he had chosen for us. Some months later, after several trips to Pittsburgh, I was called to be the rector of a congregation on the west side of the city, in the borough of Avalon, which became our home for the next six years. We arrived there in December 1984 and the next month we celebrated the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6th), for which the parish church was named. In England, and some other parts of the world, this day is called Twelfth Night, because it is twelve days after the celebration of the birth of Jesus and traditionally the time that the Wise Men arrived from their journey to Bethlehem. For years, since our days in Costa Rica, this particular celebration had been one of our favorites and we sensed that God had led us to just the right place!

Along with being in a diocese where the bishop was a believer, we were just down the river from Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge. This seminary was founded in the middle of the 1970‘s by various church leaders who were frustrated by the liberal directions of the leadership in the Episcopal Church. They wanted to see a seminary where the basic biblical faith would be taught and students prepared to defend this faith when they graduated and became the pastors of local congregations. There was a story, told by many, which may have been apocryphal, but which illustrated the basic philosophy of the school. A young man was sent by his bishop for an interview to become a student. During the meeting it was discovered that the prospective student did not know Jesus personally. Since that was one of the requirements for admission, he was sent home. Several days later his bishop called the dean and complained saying that the dean had no right to reject the candidate on that basis. “That is what the seminary is for,” said the bishop, “to teach him about Jesus.” According to the story, the dean then said to the bishop, “No, sir, that is your job to teach your people to know Jesus. When you have done that,” said the dean, ”send them to us and we will teach them how to serve Him.” Several of the professors from the seminary were members of the congregation when I became the rector of the Church of the Epiphany. We had a parish intern from the seminary as well, which added to our sense of being in the midst of the activity that was going on there.

One of my favorite things to do at the seminary was to take part in what was called January Term. The whole month of January was a series of different classes each week open to anyone, to students as well as people from outside the seminary community. Many church leaders were invited to the seminary during those weeks to conduct seminars in their particular areas of expertise. The second year we were in Pittsburgh, Rita and Dennis Bennett were invited to be part of the program. The ministry of the Bennetts was well known throughout the country and I was excited to meet them. They led parish renewal weekends and, since our congregation was celebrating our centennial soon, I wanted to invite them to come and be part of our celebration. Rita was conducting a seminar on inner healing, which had become an area of interest for me because of my broken relationship with my father. I was beginning to realize there was a connection between that relationship and some of my pharisaical behavior. With the help of my wife, I could see how some of these character traits had a negative effect on our family as well as my work. I signed up for the seminar and prayed I would get a chance during the week to place my request before the Bennetts regarding the conference.

As I remember, there were only about a dozen of us in Rita’s class, which sort of surprised me. The seminary was still relatively small but the January Term had become a popular offering for many people in the area. In a way, though, I was glad there were so few because we ended up in a smaller classroom where the atmosphere was more intimate. Every day after some teaching we had a time for the ministry of the Holy Spirit. After a prayer she would encourage us to wait quietly with our eyes closed and see what the Holy Spirit wanted to do in our midst. I was familiar with praying for people individually for inner healing, but I had never experienced something like this in a group. I was a little uncomfortable that people, including myself, might end up in to tears before a whole group of strangers. However, I was there to learn, and I knew she was not a novice in matters of the Holy Spirit. Also, her husband was one of the main leaders of the charismatic movement in the Episcopal Church. He had been asked to leave his church when he shared with the congregation on a Sunday morning his experiences with the Holy Spirit! He made the cover of Time magazine back in the early sixties. As a pharisee, this man and his credentials impressed me.

One of the days in the week, during the ministry time, I had a vision! I had never had a vision before! As Rita asked us to close our eyes and wait on the Holy Spirit, I immediately saw myself sitting on the bank of the river on the property where I grew up in the small town of Wiscasset, Maine. I was looking across the river to the other side but instead of my eyes just focusing on the far bank of the river, they began to move upward into the sky. As they did, I saw this beautiful mansion in the sky and I heard the Lord say to me, “You do not need a house on this earth because I have prepared for you a mansion in heaven.” I knew immediately what the vision meant and what I needed to do. For years I had held a grudge against my father for selling the house where I grew up. I dreamed that one day the house would be mine, even though I was not the only sibling. The house was rather unusual; it was built in the shape of an octagon and made out of brick. In my mind it was one of a kind and very special. As I sat in the field of that house in the vision, I knew that I had to forgive my father for selling it and let the Lord cleanse me of my anger towards him. In that moment, sitting there with my eyes closed, without a second thought, I forgave him. I felt such joy and peace that my heavenly Father brought me to that powerful moment with such tender mercy towards me. He didn’t chastise me, even though I had held this anger in my heart towards my earthly father for so many years. He just showed me the blessing he had for me in heaven, which overshadowed my selfish earthly desire as well as reinforcing His love for me!

I did get to talk to the Bennetts about the conference and we eventually made a date for them to be with us in October of 1987, our centennial year. In the spring of that same year we made another pilgrimage to Israel with Terry Fulham and his wife, Ruth, along with a dozen people from our new parish family including our youngest son who was in his senior year in high school. I also celebrated my fiftieth birthday in June of that year and the twenty-fifth anniversary of my ordination as a priest. However, I’m getting ahead of myself and need to save this excitement for the next chapter. We used to sing a simple praise song with our Pentecostal friends when we were first saved up in Maine, which went like this:

“If he keeps on blessing and blessing, if he keeps on pouring it on,

If his love just keeps on getting richer, if he keeps on giving a song;

If my cup gets fuller and fuller, if my prayers keep on getting through,

If it keeps getting better and better,

O Lord, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

(Author Unknown)

We were beginning to feel that way more and more. Unknown to us, as is often the case in the Kingdom of God, there was a big bump coming in the road ahead, as well as another major change of direction in our ministry.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Here Comes Wimber

Our centennial year at the Church of the Epiphany was even more joyful and exciting than we could have imagined. At some point before the year began, we decided we wanted to read the Bible through from cover to cover, starting on the first day of the year. We had never heard of anyone doing this before, and many of us got excited about the venture. The big question was how long it might take us to complete the task.

The plan was to read from Genesis to Revelation without stopping, including reading through the night hours. We made a signup sheet for people to take blocks of time in fifteen minute intervals. We specifically asked for people to read at night who could also serve as watchmen so that women and young people could participate in those hours as well. Coffee and other refreshments were provided in the parish hall, and as a result many people also enjoyed the fellowship before and after their appointed time to read. Our purpose was to declare publicly as a church that we were thankful to God for 100 years of life as His people. We also wanted to encourage the congregation to think seriously about reading the Bible on a regular basis. We invited other churches in the community to join us and some did. There was an article in the local newspaper with a picture of several folks standing at the lectern ready to read the first passages of the book of Genesis.

With this event planned, as well as the upcoming pilgrimage to Israel and the conference with the Bennetts, I was not expecting another major event outside of our regular parish activities. However, shortly after we returned from Israel, we heard about a conference being held in New Orleans that summer called the World Congress of the Holy Spirit. People were going to gather from many denominations to celebrate the work of the Holy Spirit in the whole church. There were over one hundred workshops planned during the day and our bishop was invited to be one of the main speakers for the evening sessions. My wife and I decided we wanted to be there.

We filled out the official registration forms, which included a section where you were asked to choose the workshops in which you were going to participate each day. We spent numerous hours looking over the many options. One person we had not met previously was John Wimber, who was from a group called the Vineyard. My wife was especially interested in going to his workshop, because she had heard about his ministry of power evangelism and healing. I was not, and I made that very clear to her.

At this point another aspect of my pharisaical personality became very evident. I was a priest in the church who was still “proud of my priestly vocation”, which to me meant holding up the tradition of being somewhat reserved and set apart. I enjoyed identifying with priests who were being saved and leading their congregations into new experiences of the faith, and I was especially delighted to have a bishop who had become a true man of faith as well. When I gave my testimony, I took great pleasure in sharing a passage from the book of the Acts of the Apostles, which referred to “a large number of priests (who) became obedient to the faith” when the early disciples shared the truth about Jesus (Acts 6:7). But, my problem was this: in my pharisaical mindset, I still expected that any priest, minister, or rabbi would look like what I envisioned a “man of the cloth” would look like! Of course this image had little to do with what most other people, including my wife, imagined clergy to be like, but that was not the point.

When my wife said she wanted to go to Wimber’s workshop, I remember saying in a rather condescending tone of voice, “I couldn’t be bothered; what do you think a man who wears a flowered shirt could teach me about God?” I was not kidding; that was exactly how I felt! In my mind, at that time, a man in a flowered shirt couldn’t be serious about anything, let alone something as important as the Christian faith! Pharisees can often be judgmental, especially when someone or something doesn’t line up to their particular rules and standards. The Pharisees in the New Testament constantly questioned Jesus about where He came from because in their rigid understanding of God they could not conceive of Jesus being God’s Son. (Read the Gospel of John 8:12-20)

The Pharisees also complained about Jesus’ disciples constantly. In his gospel, Mark records that they asked Jesus this question: “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with “unclean’ hands?” (Mark 7:5) On other occasions, they put people down who didn’t agree with them. When the blind man that Jesus healed reminded them that if Jesus was not from God He couldn’t have healed him, they were indignant. ‘“You were steeped in sin at birth,” they replied, “how dare you lecture us!” and they threw him out’ (John 9:34). An attitude of superiority can easily develop in people who attain positions of authority in the church and society, and this was the way I reacted to John Wimber. I was a priest who wore a collar, and, in my mind, this gave me a status to make decisions regarding religious ideas and behavior. Therefore, I felt I had the right to pass judgment on others who didn’t, especially those in flowered shirts! That was my attitude; simple and quite pharisaical!

In the end, I do not recall which workshops I chose but we both sent in our registrations and went off to Maine for our annual summer vacation. While in Maine, we visited some friends who belonged to a charismatic community. Various members of this community were involved in our early days of faith at the mission by the lake. They led retreats for our young people, encouraged us to grow in the Spirit through speakers who came from across the country and invited us to join them for fellowship nights at their retreat center. We hadn’t seen these folks for some time and agreed to stop by their house one afternoon before we returned to Pittsburgh. As we sat in their backyard reminiscing, the husband turned to me and said, “Are you folks going to the Holy Spirit conference in New Orleans?” I responded with great enthusiasm and told him we had already sent in our registrations. “Oh, you must go hear John Wimber,” he said and continued to tell us about a recent time he had heard him speak which impacted him greatly. “Well, I’ll certainly pray about that,” I said in my most serious clerical voice, knowing full well I had already chosen to do otherwise! When we drove away from their home that afternoon, my wife was furious with me. “You are such a hypocrite,” she said, “you know you have no intention of going to his workshop!” She was absolutely right and I didn’t have the courage to admit it. My pharisaical pride wouldn’t let me be honest with either one of them.

Fortunately, even though my wife learned about some of these character flaws early in our relationship, she chose to love me anyway. By the time we were on the plane to New Orleans she had accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to change my mind about the workshops even in light of our friend’s suggestion. Almost as a consolation prize, during the flight she met a woman who was a member of Women’s Aglow who asked her if she was going to their luncheon on the first day of the conference. Janet said she hadn’t seen that option on the registration form but the woman assured her she could attend anyway. Consequently, the next morning my wife and I made plans to meet that afternoon at the main entrance of the Superdome where many of the workshops were being held. She was quite confident that she would be there at two o’clock, which was the time the workshops began, because the luncheon was scheduled for noon. I arrived a bit early and noticed that one of workshops in the main section of the building was already full of people. I checked my registration information and discovered that my workshop was in another part of the building, so I continued to mill around the entrance waiting for my wife. Being of a curious nature, I moved back and forth from the entrance to the inside, wondering which workshop had attracted so many people.

Without any announcement that I heard, the most beautiful worship music began flowing through the Superdome on the voices of the thousands inside. (I learned later that over 6,000 people had signed up for this workshop!) I couldn’t resist drawing closer to the sound, and soon I forgot all about waiting for my wife at the main entrance. I just wanted to be inside and share the joy that was coming from their voices as they sang. I found a seat and joined in. After about a half-hour, this man stood before the crowd and identified himself as John Wimber. I had no problem believing that fact because he looked exactly like the picture in the conference brochure, flowered shirt and all! He proceeded to make an announcement about the workshop schedule. He said that there had been a misprint in the conference brochure and that his workshop was not only that afternoon but would continue every afternoon throughout the week. Then he said the following: “Some of you will want to stay for the whole week which means you will miss the other workshops.” At that moment the Holy Spirit said to me, “You are one of those people.” As strange as it may sound to you, I had no desire to do anything else but to stay there in the Lord’s presence, which I felt so strongly. Believe it or not, all of my pharisaical opposition to the man with the flowered shirt was wiped away by that one touch of the Holy Spirit! I did find my wife later that afternoon. She had not left the luncheon until four o’clock because the Aglow ladies also had a touch of the Holy Spirit’s power during the luncheon!

During that week I observed and learned more about the work of the Holy Spirit than I had seen or experienced ever before. Many ordinary people spoke out words inspired by God which brought healing into the lives of other people whom they had never met. They just happened to be in the same place at the same time, but God knew their need and chose to bless them. Other people spoke prophetic words, some in tongues, which were received by those who came to the front with enthusiasm. People were healed physically, others were healed emotionally, and many were filled up with joy overflowing. I will never forget the sound or the experience of waves of holy laughter erupting from the thousands gathered there those afternoons. Each day began with some worship (simple worship songs, some of which I discovered later were written by Wimber himself), a brief teaching and then the illustration of the teaching as the Holy Spirit did His work in the lives of the people. Before the week was over, we all learned that, in the words of the workshop leader, this was just God “doing the stuff,” the same stuff that He has always done and will continue to do when people in any generation believe that He can and will. I learned that week what Peter learned in Cornelius’ house in Caesarea after being led there by the Lord through a vision. “I now realize,” Peter said, “how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts men from every nation who fear him and do what is right” (Acts 10: 1-34). Cornelius’ house was full of non-Jews, whom Peter would not have spoken to just the day before because of their race! In the same way, through the work of the Holy Spirit, God chose to break down my wall of prejudice against one of his servants, even when it only concerned something as silly as a flowered shirt.

There were other highlights during that week in New Orleans. The evening sessions began with worship and powerful testimonies given by Christian leaders from all over the country and the world. The main speakers challenged us to seek more of the Holy Spirit’s power in our ministries and personal lives. Those of us from Pittsburgh were proud of our bishop, Alden Hathaway, who was one of the four evening speakers, along with Reinhard Bonnke, who told of his evangelistic work in Africa, and a pastor from a large urban church in Los Angeles. There were over 40,000 people in attendance that week and the largest denominational group present were the Roman Catholic Church. I discovered years later that one of my closest friends in ministry today from Chile was in the same workshop that I attended that week. He was one of the many who chose the workshop when he registered!

Before we left New Orleans, we decided to get some more information about this growing movement of Christians called the Vineyard. We signed up on several mailing lists and I bought some books by Wimber which were called “must reads” by people at the conference who were more familiar with the man and his ministry than we were. Shortly after returning home we received a brochure about a conference at a Vineyard congregation in West Virginia. The speakers were John and Paula Sandford, who both my wife and I had heard of previously. We had read some of their books on inner healing and found their material extremely helpful, not only in our ministry but also in our own lives. Without hesitation, we registered for the conference. The location of the church was not far from Pittsburgh so we drove back and forth to the sessions each day, listening to the new Vineyard music tapes all the way!

By this time we were talking about our Vineyard experiences so often that some of the folks in our congregation thought we were going on wine tours in the area. The truth was that we had discovered some “new wine”, (which is how Jesus once referred to His teachings in Matthew’s Gospel, Ch. 9:16-17) and we wanted to share these experiences with others. We were eager to learn how to do the same things we had witnessed in these conferences and wanted to help the folks in our congregation discover this “new wine” as well.

Needless to say, introducing some of these new ideas to the regular activities inside our beautiful stone, stained-glass-windowed structure was not as easy as I assumed it would be. I had forgotten that the early Vineyard congregations didn’t meet in typical church buildings; they met wherever they could rent space, which was often a plain store-front type of structure. My first mentor, Terry Fulham, used to say that the ordinary Christian church “has existed for so many years in a sub-normal way (compared to the New Testament reality) that when you try to raise the level to something normal, many people feel that what is happening is abnormal.” It wasn’t long before I began to see his words demonstrated before my eyes in the lives of people in our congregation. It wasn’t that the folks at Epiphany were not in favor of change; our congregation was well known as a place where the gospel was proclaimed and a vibrant Christian lifestyle encouraged. However, I began to realize that for some people in the congregation there was a difference between the word evangelical and the word charismatic. Since I was saved in such a radical way, in my mind, the two words were synonymous. However, the more I shared some of my most recent experiences, the more I discovered how many people did not agree with me. I was grateful that there were several seminary professors in the congregation to help us all understand the basic meaning of the two words and how they were connected in the normal Christian experience.

After the Vineyard conference with the Sandfords, I began to feel that the structure of our Episcopal services was becoming a hindrance to our growth in the faith and our development as a congregation. I sensed a desire to break free from the specific forms in the liturgy that I had known all of my adult life. My wife and I discussed ways we might try to modify the regular Sunday morning service so that there would be more openness to the moving of the Holy Spirit. Fortunately, I had a music director who was not only a gifted organist but regularly brought into our worship many newer songs of praise. We also had a talented group of musicians who helped to make Sunday morning a truly joyful time. We hosted workshops with the Community of Celebration, who had moved to the small community of Aliquippa, just across the river from the seminary in Ambridge, and were blessed with the talents of their worship group called the Fisherfolk. All in all, you would think that I would have been satisfied with a congregation of people who were eager to search for more of the Lord in their lives. However, at times I had this feeling of being bound by so much tradition that I wanted to just cry out for the freedom of a Quaker meeting! I often sang to myself the old Shaker hymn, “‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free, ‘tis the gift to come round where we ought to be.” Janet often reminded me that I grew up in what she called “a liturgically malnourished congregation” and I just needed to appreciate the finer things in life. What she meant, of course, was that I needed to appreciate the beauty of the regular Sunday morning liturgy and I sensed that she was right. I tried to take her advice but my uneasiness and frustration continued until the Lord shook us once again with some radical interventions into our rather normal everyday Christian life.

CHAPTER NINE

The Dame, The Dance and the Dream

I am by nature a sentimental person. This may sound contrary to my pharisaical personality, but most pharisees do have emotions even if they try to hide them much of the time. Of course, we can often hide our emotions from others around us but not from God. During this time when I was wrestling with some of my basic attitudes about church on an intellectual basis, God surprised me again with some emotional experiences, which deeply affected my own personal faith experience. The three incidents that make up this chapter happened over a period of about a year and a half but they are forever linked in my mind because of the three women God used during that time, as He continued His recycling process in me.

By now you may be wondering what I mean when I speak about this recycling process in my life. The dictionary defines the word recycle using three distinct words: convert (speaking of waste), return (speaking also of bringing material to a previous stage) and use again (where there is no reference to waste or materials of any kind). Regarding what God has been doing in my life through the work of the Holy Spirit, the third definition, “to use again”, is obviously the most applicable. Hopefully, you may begin to recognize a similar process in your own lives as more of my story continues to unfold.

Our recycling process with God is based on learning to let Him love us in the midst of our weaknesses so that we can learn to obey Him more effectively. Jesus, speaking to his disciples the last night they were all together before he died, said the following: “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father” (John 14:12-13). Within twenty-four hours each one of those men, who said repeatedly they would follow Him to the end, had deserted Him! Jesus was left to die alone. Was Jesus just naive in thinking that He had picked a great group of guys who could accomplish anything regardless of their personal failings? Or did He think they would just step up to the plate with sheer will power at some point and do incredible things after He was gone?

Neither scenario is true, of course. Jesus knew that His Father’s plan for the disciples’ weaknesses was to give them forgiving love and the empowering of the Holy Spirit. The whole plan was based on love — His love for them and their love for him. Several verses later in the same gospel, Jesus says to those close friends, “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth…you know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you” (John 14:15-17).

When we fail in doing what God asks us to do, He forgives us and reveals more of His power to us so that we will not be discouraged and give up. Look again at those first disciples. They no doubt felt worthless and discouraged after Jesus was crucified. (Most of us can relate to the feeling of having disappointed someone we love because of our selfish decisions.) Then in the midst of their discouragement, two days later they received the news that Jesus was no longer dead! God had shown his power to raise His Son to life again! The power of God in that moment dispelled the darkness of their sin so that they experienced anew the joy of His forgiving love. Then Jesus appeared to them over and over again for forty days. Did they “understand” in their minds or in their hearts what was happening to them? Of course not, BUT they knew He was there with them and that He still loved them regardless of how they had failed him. Knowing His love gave them the courage and the hope to go forward with what He was asking them to do. That is God’s recycling process! He uses us again, even when we know we are not worthy to be used, because his love revives us and restores us in the midst of our failure.

The first woman God used during this time at the Church of the Epiphany in Pittsburgh, I call the Dame. She was one of the most elegant women I have ever met, but you would not have know that just from her outward appearance. She spoke in a husky voice, and wore rather large and distinct reddish brown wigs. Her first husband, an artist, had died tragically when he was just over the age of thirty; he drowned while swimming in a pond. She and her second husband led tours for professional secretaries, of which she was one, to Hawaii and other exotic places when planes were not nearly as comfortable as they are today. After he died she lived by herself in a three-story house that was full (you could hardly walk through some of the rooms because of the boxes) of memories she had brought back from her many journeys. Every time we went to visit this woman was another adventure to somewhere in the world and we delighted in listening to the stories she told in abundance! She was the first person in Pittsburgh to tell me personal stories about Kathryn Kuhlman, one of my heroes! I still have a program of worship songs she gave me from one of Miss Kuhlman’s crusades.

You can imagine our shock when we heard that she had been taken to the hospital after a massive stroke. She was found on the floor of her kitchen, and, according to the paramedics, had been there for several days. She was still alive when they found her, but when I first saw her in the ICU at the hospital, she was in a coma and there was little sign of life. My biggest shock, however, was to see her without a wig! Gone was the wonderful head of red hair (which I knew was not real but it made her look so young), and before me was a frail elderly person clinging to life. I remember crying out, “O God, please do not let her die!” Every day, for many days, I went to the hospital and said one simple prayer. I laid one hand on her head and the other one on her limp hand before me and said, “Jesus, heal her.” I was beginning to learn that simple prayers were best, so I decided to be as simple as possible. I’m not sure how many days went by, but I do remember the day when, as I prayed, she began to squeeze my hand, and her eyelids slightly opened! I practically shouted her name out loud as I realized something was happening. The next day she was fully awake, and I knew God was healing her. When she could talk, she told me she knew that He was healing her also, each day as we prayed.

The day she came to church for the first time after her recovery, the whole congregation was buzzing. Not only was she almost back to normal physically but she was not wearing a wig anymore. She had the most beautiful head of naturally curly silver grey hair hanging in flowing locks. To quote a line from an old comedienne, “I’m not making this up you know!” The greatest joy came when she gave her testimony of how the healing happened. She said she knew I was there every day I came, and each time I said the name of Jesus there was a quickening in her spirit. She said that even though she could not move a muscle, her spirit leaped for joy within her when she heard the name of Jesus. She lived for some time after being healed and was an inspiration to us all, but especially to me, as she was the first person I saw healed through faithful prayers. (I didn’t see my wife’s healing happen; I only witnessed the results after the fact.)

The second woman was as young and beautiful as the first one was old and still beautiful, if you know what I mean. They were both beautiful women but at different ends of the age spectrum. Alice, the younger woman, was a friend of my wife’s who, when they met, did not come to our church. Their acquaintance began at the newly formed local chapter of the Women’s Aglow where both of them were officers. Janet invited her to come to church, even though she was from a Pentecostal background, because she was looking for a place to fellowship. Much to my surprise, she enjoyed the whole experience and said with some enthusiasm that she would like to come back. I think she enjoyed the worship the most. As I said previously, we had an excellent organist who used many different worship styles that blended well in our old stone church with stained glass windows.

One Sunday morning in the middle of the opening hymn, my wife’s new friend from Aglow, stepped into the aisle and began dancing before the Lord. I was as shocked as anyone but I tried to appear composed even when she began moving up the aisle, through the choir stalls, and into the altar area. Anyone who has been raised in a liturgical church knows that once you go into the altar area you are on sacred ground, where only those people who “have been approved” may enter. At that moment, though, I was so touched by what God was doing, that I wasn’t focusing on anything else except Alice as she gracefully danced before the altar several times and then returned to her pew down the main aisle.

I heard my mentor, Terry Fulham, say once that the best time to explain what the Holy Spirit is doing is immediately right after He has done it! So, I stepped out from my seat in the choir area and began to share what I felt God had done and why He would want to do “such a thing on a Sunday morning,” as some people later referred to the unusual event. I probably quoted the scripture text where David danced before the Lord (2 Samuel 6:14) with all his might when he brought the ark back to Jerusalem. I probably also referred to the response he got from his wife, Saul’s daughter, as she observed him from her window leaping and dancing before the Lord. She was not happy at all! The scripture says, “she despised him in her heart” (2 Samuel 6:16).

If I thought my mini-sermon was going to calm the waves of discontent or help people accept the possibility that such activity might become a regular part of the Sunday morning worship, I was quite mistaken. Actually I wasn’t expecting an overwhelmingly positive response from our congregation; I was only trying to do what I had been taught would be helpful in that situation. However, as days went by, it was obvious that I was going to have to treat the dancing issue in a more serious manner than with just a few words from the Word of God. I decided to approach the problem in the most clerical way I knew. I announced the next Sunday that I was going to preach a series of three sermons on dancing in the scriptures, including the place dancing might have in our worship. I remember little of what I said in those three sermons, but I do remember most clearly an experience that I had during the preparation of the last one.

The night before I was to preach the third and final sermon on dancing, I had a dream that my mother died. (Now you know the identity of the third woman in this series of events.) My mother was a lifelong Episcopalian who was not the most regular churchgoer, but she was known for her generosity and willingness to help people anytime and anywhere. In a small town that is sometimes even more significant than just going to church. Many times I heard people say of my mother, “If anyone deserves to go to heaven, she certainly does!” Before I knew the Lord personally, I would have agreed with their assessment of my mother’s potential heavenly status. However, once I came to believe the simple gospel message of Jesus that salvation comes to us by faith alone and not by any works of our own, I longed for my mother to come to know that same truth. For years after we were converted, my wife and I prayed for the right opportunity to share our faith with her. Every time we thought we might have an opportunity, either we lost our nerve or she changed the subject. Consequently, many years went by without us having any assurance of my mother’s salvation.

Yet when I awoke from the dream in which she had died, I was not upset. I only sensed, deep in my spirit that God wanted me to pray for her. A Christian comedian we heard speak one time in Pittsburgh said his grandmother prayed a specific prayer for him for years until he was saved. Since that prayer worked for him, I decided to use it for all the unsaved people I knew, and I still do to this day. The prayer goes like this: “Father, just let _________(insert the name of the person) know that you love her/him. Thank you in Jesus name.” It is a very simple prayer and the truth of the prayer is very simple also. When anyone comes to know how much God really loves them, no one can resist responding to such love. Nothing breaks down the walls we build up, regardless of how or why we build them, like experiencing the true love of our Heavenly Father. I know because I have been the recipient of such love many times over. So I prayed that prayer for my mother that morning when I awoke from the dream and then went back to the task of finishing the final sermon about dancing.

That Sunday I didn’t think about the dream all day. Obviously, I had other things on my mind like helping the congregation appreciate the value of joyfully dancing in the presence of the Lord! I didn’t even tell my wife about the dream. On Monday morning when we were getting ready to leave the house for work, the phone rang. My wife answered the phone and passed it to me, saying, “Your brother is on the phone.” The moment she said the word “brother”, the dream flashed through my mind and before I could say a word, I knew two things. I knew my mother had really died, and I knew that she was in heaven with Jesus! As much as I was sure early Sunday morning that she was not saved, I was equally as certain, in that moment, that somehow God’s love had penetrated her heart and she was with Him! When I took the phone, my older brother told me that our mother had died that morning of a massive stroke. Being an early riser, she had gotten up and was dressed sitting on the edge of her bed when she collapsed. She still had her knitting in her hands when my younger brother, who lived with her at the time, found her on the floor after she didn’t respond to his calling her to come for breakfast.

Later that day I was on a flight to Maine, not so much feeling the sadness of death but with a cheerful heart. As the writer of Proverbs says, a cheerful heart is “good medicine” (Prov. 17:22). There was no room for sadness, because the prayer I had prayed for many years had been answered. I’ve said numerous times that when I get to heaven I’m going to ask Him how He did it! There was some good sharing with my brothers and my sister during the days before the funeral, and I was pleased that the rector of my home parish asked me to take part in the burial service. (I wasn’t sure what he had heard from the diocesan officials about my status since a new bishop had come on the scene after we left Maine). He didn’t question my credentials, so I decided that I was going to give my mother a proper sendoff. During the sermon, I told the congregation how I knew my mother was in heaven. I told the whole story of how so many of her friends always told me that she would be there because she was a good person. I shared the dream, the prayer and what happened on Monday morning with the phone call. I stopped short of giving an altar call because in those days I wasn’t recycled to that point of freedom. However, when we said our goodbyes to my mother that chilly November day, there was no doubt in my mind that she had gone to be with Jesus.

God used each one of these women to challenge something basic about my faith and in the process He exposed some of my weaknesses. He drew me away from various pharisaical tendencies that were blocking the recycling He wanted to do in me. I was never so vulnerable to the possibility of failure as when I stood by Jill’s bedside in the ICU unit pleading for her life. For maybe the first time ever, I knew that nothing I could do would matter but in the end the simplest prayer, in the name of Jesus, was enough to move the Father’s heart. The dancer, Alice, was responding to the earnest desire of each of us to let nothing hinder us from expressing our gratitude to God for all that He has given us. I often said I wanted to do that but, more often than not, I let the comments of others keep me from freely expressing myself before the Lord. When my mother, Madeline, died I stood before many people who had known me from my childhood and confessed for the first time, to them at least, that even though I wasn’t certain about everything, I knew one thing for sure. That day, I realized that knowing one thing is much more important than knowing everything, at least in the Kingdom of God.

Slowly, God was sowing into my heart the basics of how He wanted to use me again in ways that were according to His plan and not just my own clever ideas. Each time this recycling was happening now, I was beginning to see that if I was willing to trust Him and let Him use me, even in ways that often made me somewhat uncomfortable, incredible things were beginning to happen before my very eyes. This whole process was radically new for me and I confess I was not always excited about going where He was leading me.

CHAPTER TEN

The Japanese Artist

Several months prior to my mother’s death, we had an interesting visitor show up at the Wednesday morning healing service in the chapel at Epiphany. I had never seen the woman before, so I made a special effort to invite her back after the service for coffee. As we talked, she told me she had come to Pittsburgh to see her father who was dying of cancer just several blocks down the street from our church. On her way to the grocery store one day, she saw our sign out front noting the healing service on Wednesdays and decided to come. Later in the conversation, to my great surprise, I discovered that the woman was a member of John Wimber’s congregation in California. With the excitement that only a pharisee being recycled could muster, I told her about meeting Wimber several years before in New Orleans. I also told her that my wife and I had just received a brochure in the mail about a conference at their church and that we were praying about going. When she suggested that we should register as soon as possible because of the high demand for spaces, I simply mentioned that we had not registered yet because our resources were somewhat limited. As we said goodbye that morning, the visitor told me she would probably see us in a couple of weeks as she was planning to see her father again after some vacation time with her husband in Florida.

I had forgotten about her previous visit until I saw her several weeks later in the chapel for the Wednesday morning service. After the service she asked if she could speak privately with me in my office. She told me that during their time in Florida, she and her husband had discussed our desire to go to the conference the following January in Anaheim. As a result of their conversation, they had decided to treat us to an all-expense paid trip to the conference. I could hardly believe what I was hearing! Not only would they pay for our airfare and the conference registration but they wanted us to stay in their home as well and one of their cars would be available to us during the time we were in California. I was so excited I could hardly wait to tell my wife! We exchanged the basic details of names and phone numbers. She invited us to stay with them before and after the meetings and said that as soon as we had our dates arranged, we should let her know so they could buy the plane tickets. It wasn’t until later when my wife and I were rejoicing at the good news that we realized the following year, the year of the conference, was our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary!

Planning the trip took up much of our spare time for several months. We decided to take some extra time before and after the conference to do some things we might never have a chance to do again. My mother’s only sister lived in southern California, and Janet had never met her or any of my cousins. They all left Maine when I was still in college and had not been back to the east coast for years. Also, there was an Episcopal church in the area whose priest had become a leader in the renewal movement, so we wanted to go there during one of the weekends we were going to be gone. In the end we planned a ten-day trip, which allowed us time to accomplish everything. Our hosts were as excited as we were, and soon after the dates were selected the tickets came in the mail. Later, in January, when we arrived for the conference, they came to pick us up at the airport.

The Anaheim Vineyard was in a large rental space that appeared to have been a massive warehouse. There were so many people at the conference that when you got your registration packet you were given special tickets for seating which you had to use for the different days. These tickets allowed everyone to have an equal opportunity to sit in the main auditorium as well as taking turns sitting in the overflow rooms. The overflow rooms were much smaller than the main section. There was a massive screen that projected the guest speakers but there was no live interaction with the musicians or others on the main stage. The plan was that each person would only have to sit in the overflow rooms one day during the week.

However, my sense of importance as a pastor (old habits die hard) and my natural pharisaical tendency to want “the best seats in the synagogue” (as Jesus noted regarding the Pharisees of His day) caused me to rebel when I first heard this unpleasant news. As the week wore on I became more irritated at the seating issue, while to my wife it was nothing but a simply matter of being fair to several thousand people all wanting to be in the best place. When the day arrived that we were supposed to be in the overflow room, I announced to my wife in the bathroom that morning that I was not going to attend the sessions that day. I would make up some excuse so our host would not question my decision. My wife was furious! She was as upset with me for that decision as the day I hypocritically told our friends in Maine that I would “pray about going to see Wimber” at the conference in New Orleans.

Then the unexpected happened and my plan was aborted! Our host announced at the breakfast table that she was going to be able to go with us that day and hoped we wouldn’t mind her coming along. My wife paused just long enough to force me to have to speak first, and of course I said that we would be delighted if she came with us. Pharisees often are very quick to say anything to keep from looking foolish! So we all went together, and we all sat together in the overflow room on folding chairs! I was not happy and made sure my wife knew it (she often got the brunt of my nasty behavior) even though it was difficult to keep from exposing my negative attitude to our host.

The highlight of the morning session was a renowned English evangelist. He was so old he had to be helped up to the podium, but when he got there his preaching was riveting. He spoke for over an hour, and we were all captivated by his clear gospel message. There was even a note of humor when he chided the Vineyard leadership for “never singing enough of the good old hymns.” At the end of his message, he had all of us get down on our knees and ask God to forgive us for any way that we were hindering Him from working in our lives. I remember that moment because I wondered how he knew about the miserable attitude I had been nursing all week long, especially that morning! As people often say, I was sure he had been reading my mail!

During this time of confession, there was a rather loud commotion right behind us that sounded like numerous folding chairs being smashed together. I really didn’t pay much attention at the time, because the Lord was dealing with my rotten attitude and I was glad that He did. However, when we all stood up and turned around ready to leave, I noticed that there was a man lying on the floor shaking rather violently. There were numerous people around him who were beginning to pray for him. Our host said, “Oh, let’s join them and see what God is doing.” I figured that, since she was from the home team, so to speak, she must have some idea about what she was doing. My wife and I were still new at this on-the-spot emergency prayer activity. We turned our folding chairs around and sat across from the other folks with the man in the middle on the floor still shaking. At this point I could see that he was a rather young person of Asian descent but I had no idea what was happening to him. My host said that we should just ask the Holy Spirit what was happening and what He wanted us to do. She had just spoken those words when I heard two words in my head, ancestral worship. I had never heard those words in my life before, and since they meant nothing to me I simply ignored them. However, the Holy Spirit was persistent, and the words kept flashing in my mind like a neon sign.

So I turned to my host and said, “I think I may have a word from the Lord.” She immediately responded by saying, “What is it?” I repeated the words to her and she said, “Get down there right by his ear and ask him if there has ever been any ancestral worship in his family.” I couldn’t believe what she was saying, but within seconds I was on the floor beside this man I had never met in my life, whispering into his ear. “Has there ever been any ancestral worship in your family?” I said, almost hoping that he would not be able to respond since his eyes were closed and he was still shaking. Immediately his head began to nod forward almost as fast as his whole body was shaking in other directions. At that moment, his wife, who was on the other side of him on the floor, introduced herself and began to share what happened before we turned around. When he started to kneel down, he collapsed on the floor and started shaking. He had said nothing to her and she was as stymied by the words “ancestral worship” as the rest of us. Our host, who I was beginning to realize was not a novice at praying in such situations, took the lead again and suggested that his wife ask him what the phase “ancestral worship” meant to him. She told us afterwards she did that because he would recognize the voice of his wife and that would make him more at ease.

Over the next half hour, the Holy Spirit revealed to the man’s wife through very clear visions three incidents in his childhood where he had been involved in the worship of other gods. There is no purpose at this time going into the details of these incidents except to tell you that the Holy Spirit set him free from the demonic spirits associated with each one of them as he acknowledged them and renounced them. By this time most of the rest of the onlookers had dispersed, and there was just the “home team” and the man’s wife remaining on the floor. As he renounced each of these evil spirits, his body became more relaxed and eventually he opened his eyes to see numerous strangers joining his wife on the floor around him. When our host sensed that the Lord was through with His work, we helped the man up, and he started rejoicing like a child at his birthday party! Our host had to leave, but we asked the couple if they would like to have lunch with us and they accepted. At that point we were all hungry so we found a restaurant in the area where we located a quiet space to talk.

We spent several hours talking that afternoon and discovered some interesting things about our new friends. This was the first time they had been to any kind of charismatic meeting! They were not against the work of the Holy Spirit but had little experience in their own church. They were members of another church in the area and heard about this conference because they had some friends who were going to the Vineyard. They also wanted to hear several of the main speakers, including the man who spoke that morning. As we talked, I sat in amazement, realizing how personal our Heavenly Father is toward each of us. He took the time to make sure that I didn’t ruin the day and the miracles He had planned for several of His children, two of whom we had never met before. He brought our host with us that day, which was the only day she could go to the conference so that we wouldn’t freak out when things began to happen that were out of our “comfort zone.” On top of all that, He got me on my knees to confess my selfish attitude and receive his forgiveness so that He could use me again as He continued His recycling process in me. That is always how the Father works; the blessings are never just for one person. That day He brought together five people from different backgrounds and cultures to do something for one of His children who needed to be set free from the hands of the Enemy. Only the Lord can work such “good deeds” through His power and love, but He has great joy in letting us all help him! As John Wimber taught and demonstrated so often through his life, in the Kingdom of God “everyone gets to play.”

We also discovered that the young Japanese man was an artist. I enjoyed knowing that fact because I received my undergraduate degree in fine arts. He shared with us that he knew that he would be much more effective in his secular work because of the work of deliverance that the Lord had done in him that afternoon. I acknowledged that I had never had a “word of knowledge” before that day and without the help of our host, I may well have missed what God was doing. We reviewed the whole experience (laughing at how awkward and scared we felt at some moments) from the beginning to the end and talked about similar incidents we could recall from the life of Jesus and His disciples. It was amazing how comfortable we all felt together, mainly because we experienced something powerful with the Lord.

Several years later we went back to another Vineyard conference and were pleasantly surprised to learn that the Japanese artist and his wife were there also. We made a date and went out one evening after the meeting to catch up on the things God was doing in our lives since we last saw each other. After that first encounter with the Holy Spirit, they came back to other conferences. The same is true today as was the case during the time of Jesus and His disciples. Once anyone experiences the power of God in their lives, the normal reaction is to want more and tell others where they can find the source of the blessings. The first few chapters of both the gospels of Mark and John bear testimony to this fact.

We did get to see my aunt and several of my cousins when we were in California along with checking out the Episcopal Church in renewal I mentioned previously. Without the generosity of our host couple, we could never have enjoyed such an incredible celebration of twenty-five years of marriage. Also, I would not have had another critical experience of being recycled by the Holy Spirit! Even now, when I tell of these events in my testimony, I am humbled that God loves me so much that He overlooked my indignant attitude of self-importance and exaggerated pride to use me for His glory! When we got back to Pittsburgh, we were refreshed and felt ready for whatever God had in store for us. However, once again, we were not expecting what He had planned.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Home Again, Home Again!

Several weeks before we made the trip to California, a clergyman friend of mine from Maine came to the seminary in Ambridge for the January term program. One Sunday he came to our church to worship with us. Not having seen him for some time, we invited him to join us for lunch after the service. We went to one of the neighborhood restaurants, and during the meal he looked at me and said, “Let me ask you a question, ‘Would you ever consider coming back to Maine?’” Interestingly enough, my wife and I had been talking about moving back to Maine just a few weeks before his visit. Her mother had multiple sclerosis (MS) and we were discussing the possibility of being closer to her parents during the later years of their lives. He probably was surprised at my response, because I looked at him and said, “As a matter of fact, we were just talking about that a few weeks ago.” For the next half hour the conversation sounded like a script that had been written by someone who knew what was on all of our hearts. He shared with us how his congregation in Lisbon Falls was growing and he needed to have some help, but they couldn’t really afford a second priest so they were considering a part-time position. I wasn’t so excited about going back to working part-time since I was at the age when one has to build up pension benefits with the best salaries! At the same time, the more we all talked together over lunch, the more the thought of moving back to Maine at this point in our lives gripped our hearts. So we suggested that he send us a specific proposal, and we would get back to him after the conference in California.

Another reason I was interested in this specific opportunity was that his congregation was one of several in Maine who were open to the move of the Holy Spirit. In fact, the man who prayed over me at the Holiday Inn years before, as well as numerous other people we came to know during our early charismatic wanderings before we moved to Pittsburgh, had been from this congregation. My friend also told us during lunch that they were in the process of constructing a new building with an open floor plan. The building was designed like a big square with the worship center in the middle surrounded by the classrooms, offices and a chapel incorporating various decorative aspects of their old church. I remember being especially excited when he said that the worship area would have chairs instead of pews!

Also, the thought of being back in Maine working with another priest helping people come to know Jesus and live in the power of the Holy Spirit was more attractive every day. We were hungry to see more Episcopal churches involved in this work of renewal. As we prayed, the Lord seemed to guide us to the knowledge that this congregation would present that possibility! However, the main problem was working part-time. So every time we got excited, thinking about the opportunity, the money piece would drag us back to reality and we would remind ourselves that God still had many things for us to do right where we were!

Eventually, we did what we had done numerous times before when we needed God to give us clear direction regarding His will for us in a specific situation. We decided to fast and pray for a three-day period asking God for a sign to direct us. Some Christians refer to this as “putting out a fleece” (just as Gideon did in Judges 6 when he needed to know for sure if God was going to be with him during a major battle). Seeking God’s will by praying and fasting had worked for us before, especially when we were down to the wire about an issue. Granted our need was not as urgent or desperate as Gideon’s, but it certainly felt that way to us.

So we started the fast on Monday morning and were to end on Wednesday evening. On Wednesday morning after the healing service and the traditional cup of coffee, I went into the church office to do something, thinking everyone else had left the building. All of a sudden I heard someone call my name from the hall. One of our dearest friends from the church said she couldn’t go home without speaking with me. She proceeded to ask me if she had done something to offend me. I was amazed at her question, because she of all people in the congregation would have been the last person to do anything to offend me. When I assured her she hadn’t, she went on to tell me that the previous night she had a dream that upset her greatly. In the dream, my wife and I came up to her waving good-bye and then just went off laughing as she stood there. “Why would you do such a thing if I hadn’t offended you?” she asked with tears running down her cheeks. I knew in that moment that we had our answer about the move but I didn’t want to say anything to her without talking to my wife first. I reassured her that she had not offended me in any way and that I would pray about the meaning of the dream and get back to her.

After I told my wife about the dream, we agreed that we needed to call our friend and take her out for a cup of coffee that afternoon if she was available. We explained to her about the time of fasting and what we had been praying about specifically. We told her that we felt the dream was a sign that we were to take the job in Maine and asked her not to share anything until the appropriate time. Being the Senior Warden of the congregation (the head lay person) at that time, she understood the sensitivity of the situation. We had not told anyone in the church we were thinking about moving back to Maine and didn’t want to tell people before the actual job was confirmed.

We also wanted to share the news with everyone together, which is always important in a small church family with close relationships. We had built some wonderful friendships at Epiphany and knew that leaving this congregation was not going to be easy. Many people in the church called me by my first name, which in those days was Dick. Of course, this upset some of the older folks in the church who were not comfortable with people being so familiar with the priest. I can still recall the stir that was caused one Sunday morning when the youth leader arrived after the service had begun, carrying her two-year-old son across the back section of the church so as not to be seen and disturb anyone. As I stood at the altar after the opening hymn ready to begin the service, I heard this clear cherubic voice say, “Hi, Dick,” and of course I greeted him back by saying, “Hi, Aslan”, before I went on with the service. For most of us, such tender moments produced a smile and at times a real laugh, even in church. We had become a close family in just over five years and enjoyed sharing our lives in intimate ways both on Sundays and during the week.

Also, we had many close friends around Pittsburgh outside of our own congregation. The Cursillo movement (a retreat weekend common in many mainline churches which began in the Roman Catholic Church in the middle of the 20th century) was well developed in the diocese and strongly supported by the bishop and his staff. One main emphasis of the weekend is to assist people in growing in their relationship with God. My wife and I participated in several Cursillo weekends as leaders as well as in the quarterly area celebrations that drew several hundred people on a Sunday evening. The strong bonds that we made on these weekends carried over into our daily lives, especially when people discovered our willingness to go anywhere at anytime to pray for someone. We saw one of the most dramatic experiences of inner healing after such a request from a person we had met through Cursillo.

A woman who was not a member of our congregation had taken in a teen-age girl who had left her family home. For several years, the girl had tried to commit suicide around a particular time of the year. The day the woman called us the girl was quite upset, but she was willing that we come and pray with her. Without sharing many details for the sake of her privacy, we discovered, after talking with the girl, that she regularly tried to take her life each year because a family member had tried to take her life once when she was a child. We shared with her our belief that Jesus loved her and obviously was not happy with what had happened to her. She found that hard to believe at first and asked us why Jesus would let something like that happen if He really loved her! We shared with her the simple truth that Jesus doesn’t stop anyone from doing bad things because we all have free will. After some further sharing about how much God loves each one of us, we prayed with her. In the midst of the praying, she had a personal encounter with Jesus. She felt His presence, saw Him in a vision, and He set her free from the pain she had carried for years from that traumatic experience. I will never forget the joy in her voice and the smile on her face when she said to us, “I know that Jesus loves me now and I will never try to take my life again because I do not want to make him sad like I was.” We still pray for the girl and the woman who reached out to her in the midst of her turmoil. Hopefully, at some point she was able to be reconciled with her own family.

We had numerous friends from other churches as well as the folks from Cursillo, since there were several churches of different denominations within blocks from our church building on the main street of the community of Avalon. We came to know people in these churches just by being neighbors and co-operating with them in various programs. Then there was one pastor, a Presbyterian colleague, whose church was in the next community who made a deep impression upon my life. I still call him on occasion when I need some advice about the scriptures because he knows them well. He taught a Bible study for pastors helping us understand many biblical words from their original Hebrew and Greek meanings. He has the rare combination of intellectual aptitude and sincere humility that each pastor needs to have to keep from falling into the pharisaical ditch. Let me explain what I mean by that phrase.

One of Jesus’ main criticisms of the Pharisees was documented in these words to his disciples and the general public in Matthew’s gospel: “They crush you with impossible religious demands and never lift a finger to help ease the burden” (Mt. 23:4). And to the Pharisees themselves he leveled this charge, “You won’t let others enter the Kingdom of Heaven and you won’t go in yourselves” (Mt. 23:13). If you put these two statements of Jesus together, you come up with a simple problem that I call “too much ritual, not enough life.” I have a basic appreciation of the value of ritual because of my background in the Episcopal Church. However, when the ritual becomes more important than the life for which the ritual was created, you slide very easily into what I call the pharisaical ditch. The image of a ditch is helpful for this problem because the deeper you “dig the ditch”, the more you get yourself into an abyss from which it is difficult to get out. Also, as Jesus said to the Pharisees, the deeper you get into the ditch, the more you tend to drag other people into the ditch with you. This heavy attachment to rules and rituals can become a great obstacle for the average person seeking to experience the power and love of God in their lives.

It is important to note that Jesus did not say that what the Pharisees taught was wrong. In fact, he encouraged his disciples to obey their teachings because “they sit in Moses’ seat” (Mt 23:1-3). The problem was not what they were teaching but the fact that the Pharisees did not follow the teachings themselves! As a friend of mine in Maine use to say, “they put the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle”. (You really have to say that out loud to get the impact!) We all need rules, but the more rules there are in any religious system, the more time we spend trying to obey the rules rather than seeking the One from whom the first rules came. More and more rules do not produce a relationship! The Father’s plan was, and is, simple. He sent His Son, in person, so that each one of us can have a “personal relationship” with our true Father (John 3:16). Once Jesus had announced that plan, He said to his first followers, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Mt. 4:19). Shortly afterwards, He said to the same folks, “I have not come to abolish them (the Law and the rules) but to fulfill them” (Mt. 5:17).

The Pharisees made many extra rules over and above the basic teachings of the Law. Their insistence on keeping these extra rules kept people focused on the rules rather than seeking to know God as He desired them to know him. That is why Jesus quoted the words of the prophet Isaiah to the Pharisees when they were upset that his disciples weren’t following their rules. “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: ‘These people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men’” (Mark 7:6-7). Jesus then levels the final charge at them with these words, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men” (Mark 7:8). The clarity of Jesus’ statement is convicting. Stated another way, you could say that they were allowing man’s rituals to keep them, and others, from discovering the simple truths about enjoying a personal relationship with God.

My pastor friend and his wife were clear examples of how to keep from falling into the pharisaical ditch. They lived the truths of the gospel in their daily lives without getting hung up on the rules. They were very disciplined people in their personal Christian lives but they always had time to share their faith practically with others. They demonstrated constantly what it means to love your neighbor without being pretentious or irritating in the process. I often wondered how they managed to be such “consistent Christians” without looking fake or sanctimonious! My manner of living as a Christian was often much more like the Pharisees’ than like theirs; I wanted others to respect me because of who I was regardless of what I did.

After knowing them for several years, I realized their secret was two-fold. First, they regularly feasted on the word of God (which means they read the Bible daily), because they knew the true nourishment they would receive for their own lives. Secondly, they were never boastful about their actions. They didn’t need to boast, because their actions produced spontaneous results of blessing which many recognized. There is an interesting scripture passage that relates to this basic Christian lifestyle. One day, while speaking to the Sadducees (who were the elite priestly cousins to the Pharisees), Jesus pinpoints the root of both of their problems when he says, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matt. 22:29). From my friend and his wife I learned the value of being so familiar with the word of God that the Spirit of God can use you to share the truth of God in natural loving ways. In the Vineyard churches this is called “living naturally supernatural,” which is the type of behavior that attracted so many people to Jesus in the first place.

The congregation in Maine invited us for an interview the first weekend in April. We were excited about meeting this new family, which actually included some old acquaintances. The man who prayed for me at the Full Gospel meeting had gone to be with Jesus but his widow was alive and well along with his son. We also saw the progress on the new church building. This was like a sign for us that God was doing something new in our lives as well. The time we spent with the people at St. Matthew’s convinced us even more that God was in the midst of this part-time position, and we could trust Him to provide the other half of our financial needs. When we returned to Pittsburgh after that weekend, we felt certain that the dream our friend had during our days of fasting would come true, but we still had to wait for the official invitation. The hardest thing at that point was the knowledge we would have to say goodbye to another group of people who had become our family. This was not our first experience with this kind of separation but that fact didn’t ease the pain of thinking about going through the process once again.

One of the amazing things about being a Christian is the way sorrow and joy often get mixed together so that the first emotion doesn’t overpower the second. There are numerous references to this truth in the scriptures, but one of my favorites is from Psalm 30 verse 5 where David exclaims, “weeping may remain for a night but rejoicing comes in the morning.” Not only were we sad about leaving our friends in Pittsburgh, but we were also sad about leaving another house that we felt God had provided for us. Over a twenty year period, we had lived in three incredible homes, none of which we really wanted to leave when the time came. To complicate the issue this time, we had to sell the house within two months if we were going to be in Maine by the first week in June. We checked with several real estate people who told us that if we wanted to sell the house quickly we needed to make some specific repairs. We didn’t have the money to make repairs they suggested, so we went to the prayer closet (which means we prayed hard and asked others to do the same)! Also, we put the word out to many friends around the diocese, including the bishop’s office that we needed to sell a beautiful old brick house in a lovely residential neighborhood!

One morning in May (the same year we had been to the conference in California), I went to my office and found a message on my answering machine. The man introduced himself as an Episcopalian from Michigan who was re-locating to Pittsburgh because of his work. He was also a deacon in the church and decided he would just check with the bishop’s office to see if they knew of anyone in the diocese who was selling a house! He had been given my name and wanted to know if he could come and see the house during lunchtime, that same day. Of course I said “yes” and then quickly ran home and told Janet that we had to get the place cleaned up in an hour. The man came right at noon and shortly after he walked through the front he said, “Can my wife come and see it this weekend?” She did, and as she walked through the front door she said, “I’m so glad you haven’t made a lot of changes. We just sold our home in Michigan and I know exactly what I want to do here. This is just the type of house I have been praying for!” The bishop’s lawyer drew up the contract and the house was sold without a realtor the very next week. We had two weeks to move, and leaders of the new congregation in Maine agreed to send us a two-man crew to help us pack up a moving truck so we could save some money. Then the crew would leave us their vehicle to drive back to Maine while they drove the moving truck. We were sure, by now, that we had found another group of people who were into sharing the love of God as fully as the one we were leaving.

Two interesting events occurred during the moving process. Several weeks before we were to leave Pittsburgh I got a letter from the new bishop of Maine who had taken office since we left six years before. The letter laid out a list of expectations the bishop had of me if I was going to become a clergy person in “his” diocese. (He obviously had heard some rumors about the activities at the mission by the lake!) A number of his requirements were rather standard ones with which I had no problem. However, there was one that had the potential to disrupt the new relationship we had just created with the folks in Lisbon Falls. The bishop required that in any situation where I would be praying for someone, I had to agree to use the written prayers of the Book of Common Prayer (which is the printed book of services for the Episcopal Church). I would not be allowed to pray “spontaneously” with anyone in my official duties as a clergyman in “his” diocese. (I still have the letter!) Needless to say, I got on the phone right away and asked my new boss why he hadn’t warned me that such a situation might arise. He laughed because he got a copy of the letter as well. He assured me that, since I would be working with him, under his guidance, there would be no problem with the bishop. In fact, he said he wouldn’t go along with such a ridiculous request either. For a moment, I thought I was back in the days of the Protestant Reformation!

The second event occurred when we were leaving Pennsylvania on our way to Maine in the borrowed truck. On a rather lengthy stretch of country road I decided to make up some time and was driving slightly over the speed limit. My wife had just reminded me of that fact, which she often did, when over the next rise was a state policeman just waiting for someone like me. Of course, he pulled me over and wanted to see my documents. Well, I had my license, but I was driving someone else’s vehicle. The situation was complicated when I referred to the owner of the borrowed vehicle, using his nickname, which I thought was his real name. That was not his name on the documents, however, which caused some concern for the officer. After trying to explain what looked like a rather questionable situation, I said several prayers silently and assured the policeman that the odd set of circumstances really were true! Since I had no evidence of alcohol on my breath and my wife testified that I was telling the truth (she has an honest face and beautiful blues eyes), he only gave me a notice. He did give me a reminder that “the situation could have been much worse.” I assured him I would take his advice to slow down, which I did, for a while.

As we made the twelve hour trip across the long state of Pennsylvania and up into New England we both felt grateful that God was taking us “back to our roots” after some of the most powerful experiences of His grace and power during the years we spent at the Church of the Epiphany. We had grown in ways that we could never had imagined when we arrived that first Christmas in 1984. We had also come to realize, more than ever, that the battle for our souls and the souls of those around was far from over. In fact, the warning from the state trooper seemed as applicable to our spiritual journey as it did to my driving skills. Slowing down is often a way to see more clearly what is up ahead as well as a way to avoid some pitfalls in the road.

CHAPTER 12

Another Conference, Another Miracle

The first year in Lisbon Falls was an interesting mixture of getting back in touch with many old friends and being caught up in the exciting move into the new church building. We spent the summer months in the old church on Main Street, which felt very comfortable to both of us, because of our numerous visits in past years. When we came back from the six years in Central America, I had worked in several diocesan programs for small churches (before I got saved and was still considered respectable by the diocesan leadership) and St. Matthew’s was one of those congregations. Consequently, there was a feeling of being home again even though there were many new faces.

The old church was a typical New England style white wooden structure located beside the local funeral home. The church we left in Pittsburgh was also located beside a funeral home! Just going “next door” certainly was easier for both the clergy person and the funeral director, not to mention all the family and friends. Incidentally, even though this is quite different, I know of a Vineyard congregation in England that has a bar at the back of their meeting room, which is only open after the services! The rationale for this is that when the leaders attended the Anglican Church previously, they went across the street to a pub after the evening service. It was there, in the pub, that they relaxed and had their fellowship. They decided that when they planted a congregation they would create a space where they could have the same kind of fellowship. I haven’t heard of another church with a bar, but I like the reasoning behind this one. Possibly, the fellowship in many congregations might improve if there was a conscious effort made to create similar casual environments where people can gather and relax informally. I wonder if that is why Jesus spent most of His time interacting with people outside of the religious buildings of His day - on the road, in the marketplace, in a boat; it didn’t seem to matter to Him as long as He was talking with people about His Father and His love for His children.

I preached regularly during those first months, and being back in a small church strolling down the aisle felt much like our days at the mission by the lake. I enjoy the opportunity of making eye contact with people when I am proclaiming the power of God’s word. I find the expressions on people’s faces motivating when I share how God has touched my life. I actually remember a series of sermons that I preached that summer. It was rare that I preached a series of sermons. The series about dancing before the Lord may have been the first! To me, spontaneity is better than too much planning. I realize that for some people there are pitfalls in that lifestyle, but I would not change this approach to preaching or life in general, because it allows me to communicate simple truths with people more effectively.

However, that summer I preached four sermons focusing on four basic themes of the Christian faith from Paul’s letter to the Romans. During those sermons, the Holy Spirit began to reveal to me the roots of yet another critical pharisaical attitude, one that I continue to struggle with to this day. The New International Webster’s Pocket Dictionary defines pride with three words: self-esteem, haughtiness or disdain. Healthy self-esteem is necessary for each one of us to grow up without being crushed by the world around us. If I hadn’t had some self-esteem I would never have been able to work my way through seven years of college and seminary! However, being haughty (proud, arrogant and contemptuous of others) was one of the sharpest criticisms that Jesus leveled against the Pharisees. He openly brought the issue up at dinner in the house of one Pharisee who had personally invited Him there. “You clean the outside of the cup and dish but inside you are full of greed and wickedness,” Jesus said when His host noticed He didn’t wash His hands. “You love the most important seats in the synagogues and greetings in the marketplaces,” Jesus continued. Even after another guest spoke up and reminded Jesus that these things were insulting to most of them present, Jesus continued make his basic point about pride. “You load people down with burdens they can hardly carry,” he said, “and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them” (Luke 11:39, 43, and 46).

Pride causes us to look down on others as well as make critical judgments about people’s personalities and their behavior. The saddest thing about pride is that many people justify their observations as something beneficial and/or necessary for the person to whom the remarks are made. With that attitude, I lived for many years believing that much of my prideful behavior was a strength that God had given me to use for His purposes and a benefit to others. After all, I was a man of the cloth in a position of authority and had been trained to use such authority. My judgments were not always the best, but neither were they as bad as the decisions of others I observed around me. However, while preparing this series of sermons the Holy Spirit began to reveal to me something basic about the word righteousness in the Scriptures. In one commentary I read on Paul’s letter to the people in Rome, the word righteousness was translated as “God putting men right with Himself.” The writer was referring to what God did for each one of us when He allowed His only Son to die on a cross for our sins. The impact of those few words was huge! I kept saying them over and over again for several days: “God putting men right with Himself!”

In the midst of that process, the reality of what a real pharisee I was came down upon me like never in the past. I began to realize how I had excused much of my pharisaical behavior over the years just as the Pharisees did in the days of Jesus. My excuse, as was theirs, was simply that I was “upholding the Law” and making sure that people lived as the Bible taught them to live. You may think the previous sentence sounds naive and simplistic, but there is more of that behavior in churches today than you might imagine. For many pastors one big concern is to teach their people to do the right thing according to their definition of what is right. This means that the clergy become the final authority of right behavior. What I began to realize during those sermons was that God is more concerned about each one of us being in “a right relationship with Him” rather than each of us just always being right! When the emphasis is placed on our relationship with God in light of what He has done for us, rather than each action of our behavior, there is less need for people to oversee the behavior of others. Also, each one of us is forced then to look at our own behavior in light of our relationship with God, rather than comparing ourselves to others, which creates the problem the Bible identifies as self-righteousness.

I wish I could say that I stopped being a judgmental person that summer on the basis of that revelation about righteousness and self-righteousness! Of course, as we all know, human beings do not normally function that way! Radical personality changes are as miraculous as my wife’s physical healing. Most of us change more slowly over a period of time as we are willing to trust God with our broken hearts and relationships. That is why the title of this book is The Recycled Pharisee. One meaning of the word recycle is to convert. Often recycled waste products are converted into some other reusable material or function. During that first summer back in Maine, God showed me that He is in the “people recycling” business, and like any other recycling program, this is a process. He alone can convert our hearts and change our sinful behavior that has developed over years from our emotional brokenness and turmoil. As Jesus said to a group of people one day, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him”(John 6:43, my emphasis). This process of being drawn to the Father happens when we open our hearts to him and experience His love in a personal way. I wrote down a quote in the front of my Bible some years ago from Philips Brooks, the man who wrote the words to the famous Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” “God does not waste anything,” the wise pastor said, “the only way to get rid of your past is to make a future out of it.” That is precisely what God does for each one of us; the mistakes of our past are worked into His plans for our future through the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through us.

At the beginning of October that year, we left the wooden church on Main Street and moved into a temporary location, because the new church was not completed. We “recycled” a commercial building that had been vacated in the community. Some of the people in the congregation had actually worked for the company who last occupied the building. Any transition of place, especially for a large group of people such as a church family, involves major upheavals both physically and emotionally. We did our best to convert the large cement- walled rooms into joyful spaces with new paint and enthusiastic smiles, as well as contemporary praise songs and old familiar hymns. Most of us managed to find the fellowship of others more important than the physical space, although at times, especially in the winter months, the colder rooms and various dreary areas did challenge our bodies as well as our spirits. The bishop called the place “St. Rockwell’s” after the last company that occupied the building, which caused many in the congregation as well as those in the community to laugh.

One thing that didn’t change during the time we were in the temporary location was our enthusiasm for the move of the Holy Spirit. In fact, there was more excitement about the Holy Spirit because the building had such a plain appearance, inside and out. During the early part of our temporary stay at St. Rockwell’s, I heard about a conference with John Wimber being held in St. John’s, New Brunswick, the following spring. After my experience at the previous Wimber conference, I knew that I wanted to go and take many people from our congregation with me! I also decided to invite someone who was not from our congregation. He was a friend of mine from the mission on the lake who had experienced a powerful touch of God some years before during a weekend conference. He was interested in meeting John Wimber so I encouraged him to come with us. Richard, my friend, had an interesting way of describing how he felt when he experienced God’s love for the first time. He said it was just like as if someone had poured a bucket of paint over the top of your head and it dribbled down over your whole body. In the same way, he was covered all over in God’s forgiving love, from the top of his head to the tips of his toes! I have always remembered his testimony, because the first time I ever met him at his house for dinner he was adamant that he had no desire to talk about Jesus! Yet, when this conference came around several years later, he didn’t want to talk about anyone else. He was a welcome addition to our group when we drove up to New Brunswick the following April.

The first night of the conference was a typical Vineyard festival of worship and praise, along with ample time for personal ministry. The large convention center was electric with excitement and the expectation of what God would do during the days we were there. I wasn’t conscious of who else was going to be teaching during the conference — I came to hear Wimber and he spoke during the opening session, so I was content. However, when we arrived for the first session the following morning, it was announced that the main speaker for this conference was someone other than John Wimber. How did I miss that on the conference promotional materials? I can still remember the sense of betrayal I felt after having come such a long distance, only to discover I wasn’t going to get what I had expected! Not only was I irritated by the change of speakers but this man was not nearly as charismatic as Wimber. Then, to make matters worse, the speaker announced at the beginning of his first presentation that he was going to be teaching about the spirit of Pharisaism and its effect on the Church today! God was obviously “reading my mail”, again, and now I knew why I was attending this conference even though I wasn’t happy about it! I had numerous “light bulb” experiences that week which continued to reveal aspects of this personality condition that I had been trying to ignore for years.

It had been almost four years since I met John Wimber at the Superdome in New Orleans and had my first introduction to the Vineyard. From the beginning I was moved by the simple songs of praise and intimacy with the Father. Those “love songs to Jesus,” as we often called them, are still my favorites when I want to enjoy His presence in quiet meditation. At this conference though, there was a seismic shift in the worship environment. Everything seemed to go up a notch both in style and in volume. At first, I didn’t like this change; this was not what I expected at a Vineyard conference. I felt like my bubble of intimacy with God was being popped in mid-air. I rebelled in my spirit regarding this change almost as much as I did when the speaker was introduced for the first time! At some point, I began to realize that such an emotional shakeup is just another part of God’s recycling process. You might call this type of experience “the surprise element” of the Kingdom of God! Jesus was constantly surprising people in the midst of everyday activities wherever He went. The gospels record numerous occasions where people were amazed and surprised at the miracles He did (Matthew 9:33; Mark 2:12), the way He taught (Mark 5:20; Matt. 7:28) and His calm reaction to the death threats of people in His own hometown (Luke 4:28-30), as well as those of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law (John 11:53). My greatest surprise of the whole week, however, was yet to come.

Mid-week at the evening session, John Wimber was speaking when he said he sensed the strong presence of the Holy Spirit. He stopped his message and said that he believed that God wanted to heal people with back problems right then, so he asked anyone who had any back problem to step out into the aisles. Between 50-100 people responded to his invitation. I was sitting at the very back of the auditorium, where there was a row of seats up against the back wall with a large space between that row and the beginning of the regular rows. Several folks from our church were sitting there, together with a woman who had a severe back injury caused by a fall numerous years before. She had seen doctors and received extensive medical treatment since the accident, but nothing had eliminated the pain or the effects of the injury. Her insurance company had even paid for a whirlpool to be installed in the basement of her home as part of her rehab therapy. Because of her pain, she found it easier to sit in this row of seats against the wall where she could stretch her legs out in front of her.

I was gazing around the room to see what God might be doing after such a dramatic invitation for healing. Even with all that God had done in my life, I was still more skeptical at times than full of expectant faith! All of a sudden I heard John say in a loud voice, “That woman at the very back of the auditorium; the Lord is healing you right now! The Holy Spirit is all over you.” Instinctively, I turned to my left just in time to see the supernatural intervention! The lady from our church was radiant as if someone had just turned a spotlight on her! I had not even seen her stand up! She was healed instantly. She knew it and so did those of us around her. After years of pain and constriction of body movement, our friend was restored physically to her normal self. The swelling in her feet went down so much she was walking out of her shoes after the evening session was over. She was bending over to show all of us what she could do now that had been impossible when she arrived at the convention center earlier.

The next morning when John asked for some people to give testimony to what the Holy Spirit had done the night before, the lady from our congregation was one of the first up on the stage. He asked her how she knew that she was healed. With the same simplicity that people responded to such questions in the Bible, she told him she had put her own pantyhose on that morning for the first time in years. Many people still refer to her as “the pantyhose lady” because of her testimony that day of the Lord’s mercy. Sometimes, even now, when my skeptical pharisaical nature erupts and beats down my desire to seek more of the Lord’s presence, I find myself going back to those spring days in New Brunswick. I remind myself of how God gently challenged one of my deepest personality struggles that week, that of my pride, and shook up my judgmental attitude regarding whom He can use for His purposes and when! God is no respecter of persons and He doesn’t let our negative attitudes hinder Him from working wonderful miracles in our midst.

Another incredible thing about that week in Canada was that we all went home with a new sense of joy which made us want “more of what God had to give us”, even though most of us probably had no idea at that time what that more was!

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Catching More Fire

There is nothing like a physical healing to cause some excitement in the midst of any group of people, both positive and negative. You may remember the strong emotions that my wife’s healing stirred up in me! This time around however, fifteen years later and having encountered the power of God in other ways in my life, I was in a different frame of mind. A phrase soon developed in our congregation and others where people were beginning to experience the Holy Spirit: “More, Lord, more!” Many of us couldn’t get enough of what the Lord was doing. One way to describe the experience is to imagine you were extremely thirsty after a walk on a hot summer day and someone gave you a glass of cold water. Once you have consumed that glass, it is not uncommon to say, “Can I have some more?” Many of us were so thirsty that after having had a drink of the “living water” that Jesus spoke about to the Samaritan woman (John 4:10), we couldn’t seem to get enough once the spigot was open and the water was flowing. We went wherever we heard that God was showing up, so to speak, and discovered anew the truth of what Jesus said to the woman at the well. “Whoever drinks the water I give him,” He said, “will never thirst […it] will become to him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

We not only went where others had discovered the living water, but we also decided to “dig the well deeper” right at home. By this time the congregation had moved into the new building, so we had room to open the doors and invite others to enjoy the space as well. Someone in the congregation heard of an English bishop and his wife who were visiting the United States yearly doing renewal conferences. In those days, many people in Episcopal churches were skeptical of the “charismatic movement” but they were open to having some kind of “renewal” which somehow seemed different and less threatening. The fact that a bishop was leading the activity offered some credibility as well. As we explored the possibility of hosting such a conference, we discovered that we would have to wait for a year, as the bishop and his wife had become rather popular on this side of the Atlantic. We decided the wait was worth it and that we needed time to pull together the details of such an event, not the least of which would be the financial cost. We were a relatively small congregation, and our new building, although impressive, had stretched our pocketbooks.

The conference with David and Mary Pytches was held in September of 1994. At the time of planning the conference, most of us did not know the personal connection between the Pytches and John Wimber. Their long friendship had begun the first time Wimber took a group of young people to England in 1981 to share the incredible experiences they were having with God at his Vineyard congregation in California. The point I want to make here is that the English Anglican bishop and the American Evangelical pastor first met under rather unusual circumstances. Some people would refer to what brought them together the first time as a co-incidence. However, this chance meeting at the bishop’s parish church in Chorleywood, England, on a Saturday evening began a wave of renewal with the Holy Spirit that not only came across the Atlantic but continued around the world. My wife and I years ago began referring to such events as “God-incidents”, because when they happen you know that only God could have orchestrated such an event. You can read more details of the growth of the Vineyard movement in Carol Wimber’s book on her husband’s life and ministry which I still find exciting after having read it several times. (John Wimber, The Way It Was by Carol Wimber, Hodder & Stoughton, 1999).

We were thirsty and knew that we wanted more of what we had begun to experience through others who had discovered that God was still impacting the lives of His children. The conference was exciting to plan, especially when we began to get inquires from other people in the Episcopal Church who knew of the ministry of the Pytches. Every new testimony about how God was renewing the faith of others gave us encouragement about stepping onto this “charismatic playing field”, so to speak. You must remember that only ten years before my bishop at the time had taken me to a psychiatrist for saying that I “heard God speak to me.” Now there was an entire congregation of Episcopalians who were inviting others to seek such experiences and a bishop was directing the whole event. Granted, our congregation was only one of a few in Maine that would have gotten so excited about such an opportunity, but to us it was a great way to celebrate new life in a new building.

I remember very little about what happened during those few days of the conference but I can still remember that many people were ministered to by the power of the Holy Spirit, and I was one of them. Another person was a young man whom my wife and I had just gotten to know during the summer and who is still one of our closest personal friends. He had grown up a Roman Catholic and hadn’t been to church for many years, as so often happens to young people in our overly secular society. Basically, without sharing his testimony, let me just say that he had a radical encounter with his heavenly Father. He was touched powerfully by the Holy Spirit and understood for the first time in his life that God really loved him. This was another real life situation like the healing of the woman at the conference in New Brunswick. For years, in seminary and in my church experience, I was told not to expect such miracles today, and so I didn’t. I was told that God no longer “needed to do miracles” because we had the Bible and that to encourage people to believe otherwise would lead to disappointment. So, for years, I just kept gaining more knowledge, like a good pharisee, so I could try to explain away such unusual experiences when they happened!

Then, as I mentioned earlier, my wife got healed when an ordinary church member who was “just a housewife” had the faith to trust Jesus to be faithful, and my pharisaical theological house of cards began to crumble. My problem was the same one Jesus had pointed out to the Pharisees of His day. When they thought they could trick him with a bogus question about marriage in heaven, He pinpointed their true dilemma. “You are in error,” Jesus said, “because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matt.22:29). The reason many people struggle with issues of faith today is the same as in Jesus’ day 2,000 years ago. The basic problem is twofold: 1) lack of knowledge about how God interacts with His people (which we see in the Scriptures, the writings of the Old and New Testaments) and 2) lack of experience of God’s power in our lives.

As for the first problem, I was not encouraged to read the Bible to really know God or how He interacted with His people. I studied the Bible, in seminary and afterwards, in order to prepare a sermon or clarify and defend my denominational lifestyle so that the average person on a Sunday morning would feel comfortable. I was more concerned about sound doctrine as well as the structure and flow of the service, the ritual, and who might be upset if there were any changes. One of the blessings of the Book of Common Prayer, which I was taught in seminary, was that any member of our church could go anywhere in the world and expect the same service on a Sunday morning. Granted there might be variations of styles and traditions but the same book would be used so that people would feel at home. Reading the Bible was part of the regular church services, but I rarely read the Bible for my own personal edification until after my wife’s healing and my first encounters with the Holy Spirit.

The second issue about which the Pharisees were ignorant was the power of God to act in their own lives. Some pharisees of today might well forgive the Pharisees of Jesus’ day because there had been a span of several hundred years since the last powerful prophetic events of the Old Testament and Jesus’ arrival on the Galilean scene. Consequently, the traditions of men, as Jesus referred to many of their laws, had become more important than what God had spoken through His prophets regarding His plans for a savior! You could say that the Pharisees and many of their followers had gotten tired of waiting for the “mighty acts of God” so they filled in the blank spaces of their religious experience with less powerful rules and regulations. I went to church for many years before, during, and after seminary, neither seeing nor experiencing the powerful actions of the Holy Spirit to change people’s lives spiritually or physically. I had not been taught to expect God to invade my space or the lives of people around me. I expected very little, in the sense of unusual powerful actions, from my Heavenly Father, so consequently, I saw and received very little.

Once I began experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit in my own life, I began expecting him to be “powerfully present” more and more. In his book, Breakthrough, Derek Morphew explains how the Hebrew word that God used to describe Himself to Moses (Exodus 6:6) was not just His name, “I Am,” but refers to His character as well. “When the word of God came to the prophets,” Morphew goes on to explain, “it meant that what they said unleashed events. Their words were deeds or event-words. One could say that the word carries the idea of being dynamically present or ‘coming’ to be present. It signifies that God has entered the situation. He has invaded history. He is manifestly present. He is now present.” (page 17, emphasis mine) Because the religious leaders for years had not seen such action from the Lord, they decided that He must have changed His mind and stopped acting! Because their faith was weakened by their lack of seeing or experiencing God’s power, they changed their belief system and what they taught their people. When this goes on for several hundred years as it did in the time before Jesus or any other period of time in history, the expectation of what God can do and will do diminishes significantly.

Like the Pharisees in Jesus’ day, when I first saw God “in action” again, I was offended! I was the religious leader who was supposed to know all of His actions, and no pharisee (old or modern-day) likes to be surprised by His boss! That type of activity doesn’t make you look good in the eyes of the people, especially when you can’t explain what has happened. For that reason, the Pharisees often accused Jesus of working in league with the Devil (Luke 11:15, John 7:20) or pretending to be someone he wasn’t, that is God himself (Matt. 9:3). It is not uncommon, even today, for some well-grounded church leaders to make such accusations against people who respond positively to the work of the Holy Spirit. Every generation of Christians has lived with this tension. In my experience, the more I have been open and thirsty for the possibility of God acting in my life and on my behalf, the more I have experienced His real presence. Jesus said the following when the Pharisees sent some temple guards to arrest Him because of His actions: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him” (John 7:37-38). The gospel writer went on in the next verse to explain what Jesus meant. “By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive” (John 7:39a).

By the end of the conference with the Pytches, not only had we experienced more of the Holy Spirit but we had drunk in so much that many were wanting to experience “the streams of living water” flowing on a regular basis. At a men’s retreat in October of that year, the young man I mentioned previously, myself and another friend were taking a break from the outside activities. As we relaxed in the open room of the hunting camp, the third fellow was reading a brochure about a conference that week up in Toronto. The name of the conference was Catch the Fire! This was the first of many conferences held every October at the church that became known as the Toronto Blessing, where the Holy Spirit took over the life of the congregation. These folks were rejoicing in the Lord’s blessings and they invited others to celebrate with them in order to catch some of the fire of the Holy Spirit to share with others.

The man reading the brochure tossed it to my friend, who was half asleep on the couch and said, “You two ought to consider going to this conference!” My friend, who had only given his heart to Jesus a month before, looked quickly at the brochure and said “Why not?” At that point, he tossed the brochure to me and all I saw was some red and orange flames on the front of the brochure as it landed in my lap. I realized as I started to read the information that the conference began the following day and was to continue through the whole week! As we laughed about making such a quick decision, we both realized that it wasn’t beyond possibility! He was in between jobs, and I was working two part-time jobs so what at first seemed somewhat crazy began to become a reality. We left early the next morning in his car and drove from Maine to Toronto that day.

Needless to say, our expectation levels for what God was going to do were above normal, and we were not disappointed. From the very first night we enjoyed the presence of the Lord with several thousand people from around the world who joyfully stood up and identified their country of origin while telling how God had spoken to them about coming to join the celebration. We stayed at a hotel right across the street from the hotel where the conference was held, and each night made our way across the street well after midnight overflowing with more of His presence. During those days we watched God manifest His love and power in the lives of many whom came to Toronto “hungry and thirsty” and we experienced that same power in ways that I remember vividly to this day. The only way I could summarize the week when we came back was that “I felt like I had been shot into another orbit with the Holy Spirit” and that I would never be the same. Without sounding overly dramatic, neither one of us was the same but unfortunately not everyone in the congregation was excited about some of the changes. As Jesus himself said to Nicodemus when speaking about the experience of being born again, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). I often wonder if smaller groups of believers, like the house churches in oppressive countries around the world, have less conflict welcoming the Holy Spirit in their midst on a regular basis.

After the experiences in Toronto, I began to be frustrated again with the regular routine of our services on Sunday morning. The praise and worship at the beginning was as inspiring for me as before but the remainder of the service seemed to squeeze out the opportunity for the Holy Spirit to do anything. We had meaningful prayer with people after the communion time but somehow my thirsty soul was not being satisfied. Maybe it was just my normal tendency to compare different situations and sense that I was missing something but I couldn’t help but wonder if others were feeling the same way. An air of restlessness seemed to grip me as if I knew that Papa (this is what I began calling my Heavenly Father after realizing that the word Abba in the scriptures can also be translated “daddy”) had so much more to give me. At the same time, I became aware that others in the congregation were not as comfortable, as I was, with more of the Holy Spirit’s presence which raised some concerns, not only for me but for them.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Chiseling Kingdom Style

Several months later, on the first Sunday of the year, I was reading one of the appointed lessons for the day at our early service. In the Episcopal Church there are three scripture lessons read at a communion service: one from the Old Testament, one from the general portions of the New Testament and a third from one of the gospels. As I read the Old Testament lesson, I had an experience that I had never had before, especially when reading the Bible in public. I was reading from Exodus 34:1 where God told Moses to “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablet that you broke.” As I spoke the word chisel out loud, I felt that God was doing in me the same physical process as that of a stone being chiseled by a stonemason. In that moment, that one word conveyed in me a powerful experience that later I would have to use many words to describe. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, but I knew that God was showing me something, actually communicating something to me, which would have a deeper effect on my life than just in that moment. I spent considerable time over the next days and weeks praying about what the word chisel and what the experience meant. By this time, I was seasoned enough in my faith to know that when such supernatural events occur God is doing something more than just making you aware of a word! Also, I discovered as I checked other Bibles we had in the house that the word chisel is only used in one recent translation (the New International Version), which was the one I was reading from in the service that morning.

After several weeks when I heard nothing more from the Lord, the excitement of the whole experience wore off, and I was left wondering why God would do something like that in the first place. After all, being chiseled, as the stone tablets were chiseled to make the Ten Commandments, sounded like a painful process to me. The image I had as I tried to make sense out of what had happened was that God wanted to chip away some of my personality that wasn’t very useful for His purposes. Being a person who had spent many years developing what I thought was a rather healthy personality I wasn’t very excited about God doing away with what I had worked so hard to produce! Also, since the time I had given my heart to him, the Holy Spirit had been transforming some specific things that were brought to my attention by my wife and several close friends. The more I thought about it all, I decided I really didn’t like thinking about this “chiseling” process. In fact, I remember that eventually I got rather discouraged thinking about what was originally a rather exciting experience.

My wife has always been good at helping me out of my emotional pits so when she noticed I was somewhat down, she suggested we go to the monthly praise meeting at the Vineyard in the next community. However, it was Saturday night and I wasn’t interested in going anywhere. (That’s another aspect of the pharisaical personality; when one is “out of sorts” as my great-grandmother used to refer to negative behavior, we do not want help from anyone! Part of the problem is that often we really do not want to feel better; we just want to wallow in our self-imposed misery!) I politely refused and she persisted. Eventually, she won out but I made it clear that I was going out of protest and I determined in my own mind that nothing good was going to happen to me that evening. When we arrived, the worship had already begun. The congregation met in a large room at a strip mall and I insisted on sitting in the very back to avoid everyone just in case someone noticed my disgruntled state and wanted to pray for me.

When the worship ended, there was an announcement that there would be a guest speaker that night, as the regular pastor was ill. I couldn’t believe it! I knew the local pastor and was actually looking forward to hearing him speak. I also felt comfortable with his rather low-key style of leadership I had observed in previous meetings and didn’t know what to expect from the substitute. I was irritated; I had made a special effort to come out that evening and now I had to listen to someone I didn’t even know! I complained to my wife but she failed to be sympathetic to my distress. Pharisees do not like surprises and I was in no mood for one that evening. So, I decided that I would not listen to anything the visiting pastor had to say - and I didn’t! I spent the whole time he was speaking looking around the room, taking note of who might be there whom I knew, just to make myself feel better! Pharisees often enjoy being seen in public places, as well as hearing people acknowledge them officially!

When the pastor finished his message and invited folks to the front for prayer, I sat firmly in my seat. My wife went forward, but I was determined that I was not going anywhere except home! I can clearly remember sitting by myself, two seats off the aisle, impatiently waiting for Janet to return so we could leave. Then, before I was aware of what was happening, the visiting pastor was standing beside me and asked, “Can I pray for you?” If I had been honest, I would have said, “Certainly not!” But pharisees are not always honest when they are caught off guard in public situations. So, in my hypocritical manner I said, “Sure, I’d like that,” while at the same time saying to myself, “I dare you to try and make me feel better.” The pastor stepped past me in the row and another man who was with him sat down beside me. As the pastor started to pray I was determined to ignore him and pay no attention to what he was saying. However, within the first seconds, I heard the word chisel come from his lips and my angry countenance melted instantly. Only God himself knew how I had wrestled with that word in the past month. I had been praying for Him to tell me more, and, in the midst of my rotten mood, He did, but not in a way I could ever have imagined.

What Papa spoke to me that night through the visiting pastor (who several years later became my pastor when I retired from the Episcopal church) began a spiritual process in me, which I have come to describe as chiseling. The Heavenly Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit, chips away portions of my hardened heart, which are not useful for the work He has planned for me as His servant. Paul says to the people in Ephesus that we all “are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10,emphasis mine). Many people get confused about this verse thinking Paul is referring to doing good things each day for others around us. There are even people who are convinced that getting to heaven is dependent on doing as many good deeds as you can while you are on this earth. As you may recall, this line of reasoning was used in my mother’s case as well. However, if you read the two verses just before verse 10, you will see plainly what Paul means by the phrase “good works.” The former pharisee says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9,emphasis mine). Clearly when Paul speaks of the good works that we are going to do in Christ Jesus, these are not our own works; otherwise we would be boasting too much! No, these are the works that God “has prepared in advance” for us to do once we are saved as the Holy Spirit directs us. These are works, which God has for us to do to advance His Kingdom, not our own self-interests.

Pharisees are great “doers” who want to “do” everything by themselves. That is the way they control situations and make sure everything will be done right. In doing enough good things the right way (which of course is your way of doing them) one creates a system of operating that the scriptures call self-righteousness. This type of behavior keeps many people from experiencing a healthy relationship with God, because they never need anyone but themselves! In this process, the person ends up trusting no one, not even God. That is why Jesus said to His followers, “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). The righteousness of the Pharisees was their self-righteousness. Jesus’ point was simple and clear: self-righteousness is of no value in the Kingdom of God. The apostle Paul discovered the same truth. “I consider them (his Pharisaical credentials) rubbish,” he said to the people in Philippi, “that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but that which is through faith in Christ - the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith” (Philippians 3:8-9).

I was years learning this scriptural truth as God chiseled away at my stubborn self-righteous behavior that began many years before in my childhood. Because I came from an abusive background where I did not have the support and defense of adults around me, I developed my own system of self-defense. My motto was “trust no one but yourself.” Since I was unwilling to trust anyone to help me, I always needed to be right, whether I was really right or not. The people who agreed with me became my friends, and those who didn’t were eventually cast aside as unhelpful. I became a very judgmental person who looked at others through the eyes of brokenness and pain, even though I was “successful” in accomplishing most of what I set out to do. I completed seven years of higher education and very proudly wore the title of clergy person, thinking all along that my sins were not like those of others who were not privileged to be in that category. Somehow, I convinced myself that God looked on my sins differently because I had decided to serve Him as a member of the priesthood. The more good I did for others, the more I could ignore my own sins! In truth, I never really faced the issue of my sins until after God confronted me with the miracle of my wife’s healing from Bell’s palsy. I had confessed my sins many times in the context of church services and privately by myself. I truly felt sorry for my sinful behavior but rarely dealt with the consequences of my sin either in my relationship with God or with those around me.

The first recorded statement of Jesus’ public ministry in Mark’s Gospel has to do with sin! “The time has come, “Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15). The “good news” is the same today as it was then. The way to deal with sin is to repent (honestly say you are sorry for it) and turn away from it. As we experience the freedom that comes with our heavenly Father’s forgiveness, we are able to accept the fact that God has a better plan for our life. A few verses later Jesus reveals the Father’s plan when He says to several fishermen by the Sea of Galilee, “Come, follow me!” (vs. 17). What most of us realize after the excitement of accepting Him fades a bit, is that “following Him” is not as easy as it sounds when we first read those three words.

Part of the process invariably has to do with changing some of our behavior. The prophet Isaiah said it simply when he said, “we all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way” (Is. 53:6). There are times when we say we want to follow Jesus but we still try to follow Him in our own way. If we choose to go our own way and fail to make necessary changes, so that He can use us according to His purposes, we find ourselves being chiseled. Another passage in the Old Testament where the word chisel is used helped me understand this process even more realistically. In the first book of Kings, the author is speaking about the stones that were prepared for the construction of the temple. He says, “In building the temple, only blocks dressed at the quarry were used, and no hammer, chisel or any other iron tool was heard at the temple site while it was being built” (I Kings 6:7 emphasis mine). In this passage the word chisel describes one of the tools that were used to prepare the stones that would eventually be brought from the quarry to the location where the temple was being built. The chiseling was done on the blocks of stones at the quarry. In other words, when the blocks were brought to the temple site they had already been prepared for the purpose for which they were intended. In this way, each block would fit together easily without having to have any further alterations or markings.

Just recently, a friend of mine, who is one of the leaders in our local house group, used the following words to describe this process in a way that I found helpful. She spoke of “the Father using the chisel of the cross to chip away at the hard shell lining around our hearts.” Part of the hard shell lining around my heart is stubbornness. I do not like to change my way of doing things. Fortunately, our God is patient, kind and persistent! My wife often says, “God loves us so much that He accepts us the way we are, BUT He loves us too much to let us stay that way.” So our Father chisels away those character traits that are not useful in doing the work of the Kingdom. Often, He chips away the undesirable hardness behind closed doors, “in the quarry”, so to speak. How grateful each of us can be that our greatest sins are not just openly exposed to the world in such a way that shame forces us to make the necessary changes in our behavior. Contrary to that process of shame and discouragement, the Father works on us by quietly exposing our sins through the work of the Holy Spirit. Our broken hearts are mended with His forgiving love assuring us that He is more concerned about using us than destroying us. The words of an old hymn have often provided me with comfort during the chiseling process:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in his wonderful face;

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,

In the light of His glory and grace.

(Helen H. Lemmel, 1863-1961, “Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus”)

For several years after the chiseling process first began, my wife and I went through one of the most difficult times of our marriage. There was a period when the common bonds that previously had brought us through many crisis situations were not able to help us maintain our relationship without some serious challenges that neither one of us expected. Between being tested by my Father in Heaven and walking through new places of emotional distance with my wife, I came to one of the lowest points of my faith experience. I was at that place of wondering if it was really worth trying to make this whole “faith in God” thing work. I felt like God had left me to flounder on my own and that probably He was tired of my defective personality, which wasn’t showing many positive results. In the midst of such a moment, early one morning sitting on the couch in our living room, I heard Papa speak to me with some of the clearest words I have ever heard in almost thirty-five years of knowing Him. He said with sweet simplicity, “Richard, your sin will never overshadow my love for you.” The peace that came into my heart that morning when I heard those words was overwhelming. I still remind myself of that truth when I am tempted to think the work of the Kingdom is too hard or that Papa has left me alone. I also remind others of the same truth because Satan delights in robbing us of our joy, especially when we are being chiseled!

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Great Expectations and Great Experiences

After the trip to Toronto and the revelations about the word chisel, I was even more eager to be open to what the Lord wanted to do with me. I was beginning to realize, finally, that I wasn’t the one who made the difference in what the Lord did in me or through me. The Holy Spirit was slowly teaching me that my power was nothing in comparison to what He could do, and would do, if I would only step out of the way! As King David once said, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). I liked the taste of what was happening and was beginning to feel a deeper intimacy with Him, so I was even more eager for some opportunities to grow in this relationship. These were the days of the Winds of Worship conferences for which the Vineyard movement became famous around the world. I remember one specifically that I attended in Lowell, Massachusetts. One of the worship leaders was a woman who sat on a stool playing the guitar as she led us in simple worship songs like this one:

“Nothing satisfies me, nothing soothes me,

Nothing can embrace me like your presence,

You draw me with your love and the hope of your promise,

You will never leave me, you will never leave me,

I love your presence.”

(Cindy Rethmeier, Mercy Vineyard Publishing)

The words and the tunes were so easy to sing, you could start singing along practically on the first note, even if you had never heard the song before. I can still close my eyes and re-live those moments with child-like ecstasy. Through songs such as these, I learned the simple goodness of our Heavenly Father towards me in the midst of moments of great disappointment in my own shortcomings. Another one began:

“I am yours because you have chosen me;

I’m your child because you called my name;

And your steadfast love will never change,

I will always be your precious child”.

( Andy Park, Mercy Vineyard Publishing)

These songs transformed my hardened heart and began to change my pharisaical mind with the simple truth of God’s word! The more I sang them, the more I could feel the broken places of my wounded soul being mended and I knew that as He “restored my soul” (read Psalm 23), the more useful I would be to Him to do the work of the Kingdom.

At the same time, I was feeling less and less satisfied in the Episcopal Church. I was constantly frustrated with what seemed to me to be “too much form and too little substance” especially on Sunday mornings. Please note that I said this was the way it seemed to me. My wife has always had a deeper appreciation for the liturgy of the church and still enjoyed the beauty of the communion service we celebrated every Sunday. As far as ceremony goes, I have always been more in the “less is best” camp. I was very happy when the revised Book of Common Prayer (for the Episcopal Church which came out in 1979), featured an option for the communion service which was just an outline, allowing the celebrant to speak the words of the service spontaneously from the heart. Consequently, I began to feel more and more that the regular services with their routine liturgy were not allowing me the freedom I needed to encounter the Holy Spirit.

During this time, also, both my wife and I were learning more about how God heals people emotionally from past hurts and broken relationships. We were also experiencing this kind of healing ourselves, individually and together. We began to see in our lives that ALL the incredible works of the Kingdom that Jesus did in His day were still meant to happen today. The words that Jesus first read out to his friends in the synagogue in Nazareth from the prophet Isaiah began to come alive in our everyday relationships as well. “God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the message of good news to the poor, sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the burdened and battered free.” (Luke 4:18, The Message) What better place to share what we were learning than with our friends on Sunday mornings! I wanted people to have the opportunity to see firsthand the goodness of the Father working in the lives of his children. Like any people, Christians are more open to the powerful works of God when they witness what God is doing with their very eyes. I wanted people to see more of “the stuff” (as John Wimber called the actions of God) when they came together on Sunday morning. But, allowing for the Holy Spirit to do His work takes time, and time on Sunday morning is at a premium in most churches.

In the long run, it was a combination of factors that influenced my decision to leave the work at St. Matthew’s and concentrate more on my other part-time job I had at L.L. Bean. After working on the phones for several years in their customer service area, I was being trained through the Health Department in the field of ergonomics. I enjoyed this new opportunity, as it was very people-focused and soon there was an opening for full time employment in their Portland call center. I resigned from the church job and we moved to Portland where Janet was employed with L.L. Bean as well. We both decided that this transition period was the right time to look for a new church family. The Vineyard in Portland was just beginning as a church plant from the congregation where I received the word regarding chiseling and the man who spoke those words over me that night was the planting pastor! God does have a sense of humor, and I’m convinced that He delights in making it known on a regular basis, especially when He wants to get our attention! As you might have suspected, we started attending the new church plant, which at that time was meeting in a school cafeteria.

The first year was somewhat strange for us because I had been a pastor most of my adult life, and now we were just members of the congregation. I’m sure that was more difficult for me than anyone else! We had numerous friends attending there whom we knew from other social settings, so the transition was less difficult than either Janet or I suspected it would be. Eventually, after being in several locations for some years, the congregation settled into the building where they still reside. We also settled in as regular members, which was a joy for my wife because she no longer was sitting in church alone as she had done for years when I was a pastor. Then, as if Papa wanted to show us how much He blessed what was happening, the opportunity came for us to purchase a home within walking distance from the new church facility. The finances came through miraculously within the limited time frame needed, and we were once again humbled by the goodness of our God for His people.

In our early Vineyard years, two specific incidents happened which I want to share with you, because they were critical to the recycling God was continuing to do in me. The first one involved my only sister. For most of her adult life my sister delighted in referring to herself as the family atheist. She would often introduce me as her brother, “the minister”, and then quickly say that she was the only one in the family who believed in nothing. I would remind her that she wasn’t really an atheist but an agnostic who wasn’t sure of what she believed. I never felt she was doing this to be mean to me, but rather that she was uncomfortable talking about religion. I do not remember her attending any church in her adult life, but she would sometimes say when asked that she was a Congregationalist like our father. When we grew up, there were only two churches in our town. Since my father never went to the Episcopal Church with my mother and us children, we would say that he was a Congregationalist. Actually, he never went to the Congregational church either, but my sister would sometimes claim that he did just to take his side.

Once we moved back to Maine from Pittsburgh, Janet and I began to feel a sincere conviction to share the gospel with my sister. I found this hard to do for two reasons. First, she was my sister who for years had taken this deliberate negative stance against anything regarding religion. Secondly, she was not a timid person when it came to expressing her views about anything and like our mother she often did so using some colorful language.

Shortly after we moved to Portland my sister came down with lung cancer. She had never smoked, but her husband had worked at the naval shipyard in Portsmouth and had died of mesothelioma some years before. The doctor believed she contracted the same disease just from handling her husband’s clothes during the regular routine of washing them. The asbestos fibers had gotten into her lungs and were beginning to suffocate her. We visited her numerous times, and each time before we went I made the commitment that I would ask her if I could pray for her but each time we came home and I hadn’t done it. I felt like the enemy had won the battle every time and I had allowed my feelings of intimidation to rob her of a blessing that God could give her. My sister went downhill rapidly and started losing considerable weight week by week. She was not a large person to begin with so the weight loss caused a dramatic change in her person.

We visited her one Saturday on our way back to Portland when she was noticeably weaker and losing ground. I was so discouraged when we left her house that day, because yet again I had allowed myself to be inhibited by our previously combative relationship and had not offered to pray with her. During worship the next morning at church, I heard the Lord say to me that I was to go and pray with her directly after the service. I was so sure that I had heard Him tell me to go that I could hardly wait until the end of the service! So, when the service was over, we got into our car and drove the hour down the turnpike to her house in Kittery. As we approached the door of her house overlooking the Piscataqua River, I felt the same rush of weakness and sensed my courage slipping away. She opened the door and said in her weakened gruff manner, “What are you doing here? You were just here yesterday!” I said, as boldly as I could, “We want to pray for you.” Without a moment’s hesitation she said, “Well, it’s about time! Come on in.” We sat on her couch, and it was apparent that in just twenty-four hours she had lost ground. I told her how sorry I was that I had been so stupid on previous visits not to share my faith and pray for her. We talked about Jesus and she accepted Him in heart as we led her in the sinner’s prayer and prayed for healing.

At the time, we all knew that unless Papa healed her miraculously, she would not live much longer. Within weeks we laid her to rest beside her husband in the same cemetery where our parents are buried. I felt a sweet peace that the two women in my life, whom I knew before I met my wife, were rejoicing in heaven with Jesus. I also said a prayer of thanksgiving that my fear of rejection hadn’t kept my sister from hearing the truth of how much the Lord loved her! That day, I realized once again how Papa delights in giving us new opportunities, no matter how many times we mess up!

The second event unfolded when our pastor had a very serious heart attack in the summer of 2000. He was scheduled to attend a Vineyard conference in Costa Rica in the fall of that year but the doctor told him that he would not be able to make the trip. As we were talking about his disappointment during a picnic on Labor Day, I just happened to mention that Janet and I were thinking about the possibility of going to Costa Rica to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary. We spent our first six years of married life there and had never been back for a visit. “Why don’t you go to the conference and celebrate your anniversary at the same time?” he said, which seemed like a great idea to us as well.

His simple suggestion led to some quick decisions regarding passports and time off from our jobs, so that by the end of October we were on a plane to San José. We also made plans to spend the weekend before the conference with the congregation where we had served in Puerto Limón in the late sixties. The main service was held at 6 a.m. to beat the tropical heat of the day. I was invited to preach and did so in full robes for the occasion and most of the members, who were from the West-Indian background, were garbed in their nice dresses, hats, suits and ties! It was a glorious weekend and a joyous time with some dear friends, most of whom we hadn’t seen in all those years.

We had rented a car for the visit mainly because we wanted to drive to Puerto Limón now that there was a road between the capital city and the coastal communities on the Atlantic side of the country. When we lived there, you either flew to San José in an old DC-3 that skimmed the jungle forest and slipped in through the valleys between the mountains or you rode the train for six hours! Our kids loved to ride the train, because at every stop along the way old Jamaican ladies would get on with baskets of good things to eat - sweet things made out of various vegetables and fried yucca filled with meat which looked like corn dogs without the stick. We ate breakfast and lunch on the train, since it left Limón at 6 a.m. and arrived in San José at noon.

We were excited to be able to drive to Puerto Limon and on Sunday found it hard to leave again. Due to the possibility of rain, our friends advised us to leave so we could arrive back in the capital before dark. However, by the time we finally said our goodbyes, it was later than we had planned. So, I decided it would be good to “take advantage” of the new road, so to speak. I’ve always had a heavy foot on the gas pedal, and my wife has often reminded me of the peril of such behavior. (Remember the encounter with the policeman leaving Pittsburgh in another man’s truck?) Of course, being a true pharisee, I would respond that I knew what I was doing which of course she knew was just a lot of hot air!

As we left Limón, were still on the flat coastal plains, so I chose that stretch of road to try to make up some time. The traffic was light for a Sunday afternoon, so I sped along and decided to pass just one more car ahead of us. Unfortunately, I had not noticed that the car was approaching a bridge and that there was a double line on the bridge. I quickly reasoned to myself, with clear pharisaical thinking, that since there was no one else around, who was going to notice? Besides, to try to slow down might be dangerous! I passed the car just as we both entered the bridge, and as I pulled back into the right lane, a policeman stepped out from behind the bushes at the end of the bridge right into the road! It was as if my car had triggered an ejection button where he was sitting the minute we hit the bridge. Of course, my wife reminded me that she had asked me to slow down before the bridge knowing that one should not pass on a bridge, even in the midst of a jungle.

In my humiliation, I rolled downed my window and tried to explain that we were “just trying to get back to the capitol before the rain came since the roads could be closed with mudslides!” (Good pharisees always have excuses for bad behavior.) The policeman was not impressed and explained to me, in Spanish, that he could charge me $200 (US) on the spot and take away my license! At that moment, from the passenger seat, my wife decided it was time to help me out. She always was able to speak Spanish more naturally than I and carefully explained our dilemma with just the right amount of sincerity to satisfy him. He decided to let us go and reminded me to drive more responsibly. As we drove off, my wife “reminded” me that I owed her $200! Not pesos, dollars! We did arrive back in the capital before the rain and the mudslides, for which we were both grateful.

The conference started the next day. It was held at a retreat center outside the city of San José with plenty of open spaces and mountain views. People had gathered from many countries in Latin America, as well as Europe and the United States. We were excited to see some people from Chile who had stayed in our home the year before when they visited our congregation in Portland. They brought a friend with them who was the pastor of the oldest Evangelical church on the west coast of Latin America. This church had been an English- speaking congregation for over 150 years and was started by people from England and Scotland who came to Chile for the shipping trade and other commercial endeavors. Their first pastor was a young man from the state of Connecticut who spent four months traveling to Chile on a ship at the age of twenty-six to answer a missionary call. I was fascinated by the history of this church and their first pastor who spent his whole life in that one congregation during the later part of the nineteenth century. I was even more fascinated by what the tall Englishman, their current pastor, told us next.

Over lunch on the first day, he explained how he was returning to England the following year, and his congregation had sent him to the conference to look for a suitable replacement. He said the people had made two decisions. The first was that they wanted to become a Spanish-speaking congregation. The second decision was that they wanted to join forces with a movement that was alive with the gospel. A friend of the congregation (a former Anglican bishop of Chile whose name was David Pytches) had suggested they check out the Vineyard, so the congregation sent him to the conference. As we talked about the history of this church and their recent growth, my friend from Chile (the Vineyard pastor) looked at me from across the table. As he pointed his finger at me he said, “Well, Richard, they are looking for someone just like you!” It was a Holy Spirit moment, a God-incident not a co-incidence. In that one moment, as he spoke those words, I knew God was up to something. Without sounding overly dramatic, there was an excitement in the air for each one of us from that moment on throughout the rest of the week.

The four of us got together every spare moment we had to share our current reactions to such an outrageous possibility! We had scriptures for one another and various dreams that we were sure meant something. We talked on the bus, in the swimming pool, walking to worship and lectures. The more we talked, the more my wife and I were excited about the fact that God might be doing something! However, we had just bought a house that we believed God provided for our retirement years. Why would He want to take us 5,000 miles from our home in Maine to a country we had never visited and knew very little about? We had such dramatic emotional ups and downs during the week that we knew the only solution was to get on our faces and ask for divine intervention. So, we agreed that when we went back to the States we would pray for the month of November with some friends who were close friends and true prayer warriors. Little did we realize when we first talked about going back to Costa Rica on Labor Day weekend around a picnic table on a beautiful lake in Maine that two months later such excitement would be stirring in our hearts about another country we knew very little about.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

One Incredible Dream

Our excitement when we returned from the conference in Costa Rica was contagious. The people in our home group wanted to know all the details, and we were more than happy to share them over and over. We decided to ask a small group from the church, most of them members of our house-group, to join us in three weeks of prayer to discern what the Lord wanted us to do. Should we respond positively and send our résumé to the leaders of this interesting congregation, or was this just something we were getting overly excited about because some friends wanted to see us in Chile? We called the group together and explained our need. “Just intercede for us,” we said, “ask God to speak to you regarding this one issue.” We shared what we felt God had put on our hearts and that we were willing to go wherever He chose to send us, but only if He was sending us.

Each week we got the group together after the Sunday service to see if there were any results. Each week the answer was the same; no one had received anything that they could definitely say was from the Lord. We had a good time discussing our prayer times, but the Lord had not spoken specifically about Chile. Janet and I were somewhat disappointed as we were convinced that we were to have this specific group of people pray with us. Even though we had only been with them at the Vineyard for several years, there was a deep bond of trust between us. Consequently, as the last week started, my wife and I decided to fast for three days along with our regular praying. We did not ask anybody else to fast unless they felt moved to do so by the Lord. We wanted all the help we could get, but each person was to make his or her own decision. The first day was dry, as was the second, which was not an encouraging sign for this impatient pharisee. My wife knows that when I am fasting my tolerance level sinks below normal. I’m sure she was not looking forward to the third day.

Then, a breakthrough came on the second night. I had such a vivid dream that I can still recall the details with incredible accuracy over ten years later. I could hardly wait to get my wife up to tell her about it. In the dream there were three couples in the kitchen of the first house we had ever owned. We bought this house full of furniture from an estate in 1971 when we returned from Costa Rica. There was a cast iron cook stove in the kitchen where I was preparing a large roasting pan of macaroni and cheese. In fact, the roasting pan was the same one that belonged to my wife’s grandmother, which she used for her Thanksgiving Day turkey. I opened the door of the oven on the stove and put in the pan of macaroni and cheese, which was enough to feed at least fifty people. As I closed the door of the oven, I turned up the temperature dial to make the oven hotter. Of course, on a wood cook stove there is no temperature dial to regulate the heat! You increase the heat by putting more wood in the stove and the gauge on the front door just tells you how hot the oven is. (Later, as I was telling Janet the dream she said, “You always want to turn the heat up on any situation.”)

As I closed the oven door, there was a woman standing to my right by the window that looked out onto the yard. She said to me, “We’re moving also. We can’t work with those people anymore. They are all in league with the Devil.” The woman was one of the worship leaders at our church. I knew that she was still single and had never been married. However, when she said in the dream “we’re moving”, I knew that she was referring to both she and her husband! I also knew in the dream that her husband was standing right behind me, and if I had turned around I would have seen him. She continued speaking. “We are starting our own business; the ABC Realty company.” At that moment, I could see flames coming out of the oven so I quickly opened the door fearing that I had ruined my wonderful creation. I was surprised that there was only a slight bit of burned crust on the top, even though the oven had been full of flames.

I took the large roasting pan out of the oven and turned to my left to put it on the counter behind me. As I did, another woman, who was a friend of ours from a church where we had worked previously, began to speak. “We are moving also,” she said, “just down the hill to the back of the property.” I thought this was very strange, because this couple had just built a new home and to go down the hill on the same property and start over again seemed like a silly thing to do. As I set the pan down on the counter, I was again conscious that the first woman’s husband was just off to my left, but I never saw his face at any time in the dream. I turned back to the stove, and my eyes drifted out the kitchen window onto a large village common that was not the real view out that window. I remember looking at all the houses built around the common with streets leading off in different directions, and then I woke up. The images and the people were clear and distinct; I couldn’t wait to tell my wife, so I woke her up!

After several cups of coffee we both decided to share the dream as soon as possible with our team. They were as excited as we were, even though none of them were in the dream. We all felt that Papa was saying that we should at least send our résumé to the church in Chile and take the first step in this adventure. I felt one more thing about the dream very strongly. I had such a real sense that the worship leader in the dream was there with her husband that I wanted to tell her I was sure God had a husband for her in the near future! My wife said, “Absolutely not! You can’t tell a single woman who has been single as long as she has that type of thing. Can you imagine how many people have done something like that over the years and how discouraging that can be?” She was adamant, and I was disappointed. I had never had a prophetic dream before, but I was sure this was one, not only for us but for her as well. No one agreed with me, but the more I prayed about the matter, the more I felt I would be disobedient to the Lord if I didn’t tell her what I believed He had shown me. So, I told her the dream and why I felt she should be encouraged. I can only remember one other time in my life when I did something like that with such assurance. That was the day I married my wife! I proposed to her three weeks after our first serious date. Six weeks later we got married, flew to Jamaica for our honeymoon and then on to Costa Rica for language school. That was forty-seven years ago, and we are still enjoying being married to this day.

We did submit our résumé to the leadership of Union Church in Viña del Mar, Chile, and they sent us back an invitation to come for an interview at our convenience in the early part of the next year. They also sent us a questionnaire to answer so they could get to know us. We were more than happy to fill it out. Our children had a good laugh when we shared with them the part in the letter that said the leadership of the church had been looking for someone younger! However, because of the recommendations of both their current pastor and our Vineyard pastor friend, Roger Cunningham, they were confident enough to invite us down for an interview. The date was finally set for mid March of 2001, and the tickets were purchased for the 5,000 mile flight from Portland, Maine to Santiago, Chile.

At that time there was a direct flight from Portland to Atlanta on Delta Airlines, as well as a connecting overnight flight to Santiago. I can still remember a conversation we had while sitting in the international terminal in Atlanta, where we had several hours to wait between flights. We got something to eat and were reviewing the answers we had written on the questionnaire from Union Church. I looked at my wife and said, “Can you imagine God taking someone our age all the way from Maine to Chile to do some work He has been planning since the beginning of time?” We were both amazed at such a unique plan by our incredible God. (We didn’t know at that time that the first pastor of Union Church, David Trumbull, was also from New England. He graduated from Princeton Seminary in 1845 and left New York that fall, spending four months at sea to make the journey. He arrived in Valparaiso harbor across the bay from Viña del Mar on Christmas Day of that year and had celebrated his 26th birthday during the voyage.) I was sixty-two that year and just glad that at my age it was an overnight flight, so that after dinner we could sleep.

We spent ten days in Chile and knew from the first day that we would be coming back. In fact, we thought several times that we just ought to stay and save the airfare of another trip, but we had to go home and quit our jobs as well as find someone to live in our house! Quitting the jobs was relatively easy. By this time I had left L.L. Bean and was working for the friend who went to Toronto with me. He had his own business and said that when I came back he would give me my job back! He also knew how much we loved our house, since he had lived with us before he got married and helped us finish numerous projects, including the deck which he and my wife designed while sitting on the grass in the back lawn. There was a swift response to the house rental also. Some friends from the church (the worship leader who first called me a “recycled pharisee”) needed a place to live for a couple of years. He and his wife were familiar with our house, as she had helped us while my wife recuperated from a fall down our stairs the year before.

We bought our tickets right away so that we could be in Viña del Mar on my birthday, June 3rd, which just happened to be a Sunday that year! We reminded our friends that Viña del Mar means “vineyard by the sea” and the thought of this historic church becoming part of the Vineyard family thrilled us no end. Off we went, back to Chile!

During the first few months there, we lived in the apartment of some missionaries who were on furlough in New Zealand. They attended Union Church when they were in the city and were leaving town shortly after our arrival. The leadership of the congregation had decided to renovate the manse (which is the English term for the house where the pastor lives) with new paint and furnishings. This was most generous, so for that summer (which was really winter in Chile) while the renovations were taking place, we live in a furnished apartment with a view overlooking the sea just blocks from the center of town. The church had a car, and on cooler days we made our way up the coast to discover the small villages that reminded us of Maine, without the pine trees! The differences between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were hardly noticeable, except when we realized where the sun was rising and setting. As we explored our new surroundings, we often quoted the words of King David to each other: “Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits… who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (Psalm 105:3 & 5). We not only felt like our Father was satisfying a basic desire to be serving Him in another country, but we also both felt younger than we had in years.

Another exciting part of our first few months in Chile was getting to know some of the history of this special congregation. We knew from reading several short histories written to commemorate various occasions over the years that the original members were people who had come from Scotland and England to set up business endeavors. One of these men had a friend in the shipping business in New York, to whom he had sent a request regarding their desire to establish an English-speaking Protestant congregation (This was a bold request in the mid-nineteenth century, since it was illegal to worship publicly in Chile in those days other than in a Roman Catholic Church). The gentleman in New York had a friend whose son was about to graduate from seminary, and he accepted the missionary challenge. This newly ordained pastor was from a highly respected New England family whose ancestors had served in leadership with George Washington. His strong Evangelical faith was obvious over the years as he founded several churches, various schools and bible societies, as well as homes for young and old alike.

Part of my pleasure in reading the history came from knowing that we were also from New England, even though our roots were from different denominations. He was a Congregationalist whose background through his family and seminary training was strongly rooted in the Bible. I was an Episcopalian whose knowledge of the scripture as well as my faith experience came later in life. The young believer from Connecticut came to Chile to plant the basics of the Evangelical Christian faith, and the Lord through His mercy brought an older believer from the same part of the United States to build upon his solid foundations. Also, as far as I know, we are the only two Americans who have served this congregation during its long history of almost one hundred and seventy years.

Our agreement with the leaders of Union Church when we came in 2001 was that we would stay for three years to work on two specific goals. Our first goal was to assist the congregation in making the transition from an English-speaking congregation (which it had been from the beginning) to a Spanish-speaking congregation with the specific intention of reaching out to the community. This was a bold vision but the leaders were determined that it was necessary if they were going to continue to be an effective evangelical presence in Chile, as they had been in the beginning. The second goal was to assist the congregation in getting to know the Vineyard movement. The man who founded the first Vineyard congregation in California, John Wimber, used to say to folks who wanted to join the movement, “Well, let’s have a few dates and see how things go.”

The implication, of course, was that through spending time together, each group would get to know each other’s families, so to speak, and then be able to make an effective decision. My task was to oversee the “dating process” so that the folks at Union Church could decide if they wanted to “join this tribe.” They had made various connections with Vineyard folks in Chile, England and the United States, so many people already felt positive about exploring the relationship when we arrived. That certainly made the dating process more enjoyable even though we had our share of bumps in the road!

In wasn’t long into our first year together when I realized something that gave me a stronger sense of God’s hand on what was happening. In the dream I had before coming to Chile, there were some words spoken that related to both of the original goals we established with the leaders of the congregation. The first woman in the dream said “they were moving” to start their own business, “the ABC Realty.” They were starting over again in a different place. With our goals we were also going back to the basics and literally starting over again both in reference to the language and the church culture. My wife and I had spent the first year of our married life learning the Spanish language in Costa Rica and Mexico, but we hadn’t used the language for years. The members of the congregation could all speak Spanish, because they were born and raised in Chile, but English was their language in church. They had always worshipped in English and many still spoke English at home. On our first Sunday at Union Church, there were about fifty people in a beautiful church which seats 200, and only two families were not from the English cultural background. They had been part of a Spanish-speaking congregation that had used the church building previously, but these two families decided they wanted to stay and join the new adventure.

We knew that when beginning any new work one needs to start off with small steps. Since the worship was already in both languages, singing simple praise songs and even old hymns in Spanish as well as English, was an easy transition for all of us. We didn’t try to change the other parts of the service into Spanish right away due to my own need for a greater level of fluency and the fact that there were people who came to Union Church because it was in English. Many younger people told us over the years that they learned much of their English by attending services at the church and taking part in the life of the congregation. I was also timid about trying to preach in Spanish and dragged my feet on that issue throughout the first three years.

Another small step that seemed very natural to the Americans was an open house at the renovated manse after we moved in that first September. We were excited about our new surroundings, both inside and the gardens outside. My wife’s birthday is in September so we wanted to extend an open invitation to everyone in the congregation to celebrate with us. We chose a date and put an announcement in the bulletin inviting everyone to come to tea on a Sunday afternoon. By that time there were a few more Spanish-speaking people coming to the services who had been connected to the congregation over the years. They had heard about the new pastor and the new direction toward what some called “the Spanish immersion”.

I was not prepared for the variety of reactions we received to what we thought was a rather simple gesture of hospitality. I learned some lessons that week about cultural differences, of which I was rather naïve. I had wondered why there was no church directory listing everyone’s addresses. I discovered there was no need for a directory, because any personal invitations were extended personally on the phone or you already had the address of people you wanted to come to your house. Open invitations to anything, like the one I had put in the bulletin, were not a part of either culture, especially the English one. I had stirred up a “hornet’s nest” of social issues without even knowing what was happening. I made an assumption that just being in the same church environment would mean that everyone would enjoy being in a social environment together as well. After the confusion settled, we had a delightful afternoon celebrating more than just my wife’s birthday. I knew that we had taken the first step with the first ABC of this new ministry. Let’s just say that if A stands for “acceptance”, that afternoon at the manse, many of us discovered something about acceptance which would affect us all in different ways as we began to build a new relationship together.

I learned one thing when I was first converted; our God delights in doing new things especially in the midst of old circumstances. He gave my wife a new face in seconds the day she was healed. He gave us both a new heart to show forth His love even in the midst of difficult situations. I learned eventually that what the Bible says is really true. Ezekiel told the people of Israel what God promised several thousand years ago. “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ez. 36:26, emphasis mine). Luke, the physician who wrote the Acts of the Apostles, says that when people heard Peter telling about Jesus on the first day of Pentecost, “they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?‘” (Acts 2:37, emphasis mine). Becoming a Christian involves making a decision to be in a new relationship with God, His son Jesus and others around us. That decision causes a change in one’s heart. Some people have even referred to the experience as having “a spiritual heart transplant.” A change of heart will always produce some change of actions, even in the hardened hearts of true pharisees like me!

CHAPTER 17

Going Vineyard

Another one of the first steps of the transition was that in those first few months, as I read over the historical documents of the congregation, I was amazed at the similarity of the statement of faith of Union Church (written over one-hundred years before), and the values of the Vineyard movement. I realized that both groups were rooted in the Evangelical faith of the scriptures, or stated another way, they both held firm to the historical tenets of the Christian church. To continue the ABC analogy, the B stands for the Bible! Although Union Church had gone through a period of over twenty-five years of having part-time clergy (before my predecessor who was full time), all of these missionaries were from denominations whose teachings were biblically based. Consequently, the gospel had been shared both from the pulpit and during the daily interactions of congregational life such as Bible studies and fellowship meetings.

One thing piqued my interest, though, which for some time didn’t seem to make sense to my American church background. In the Episcopal Church, as well as other mainline denominations, it was common to speak of the members as Protestants as opposed to being Catholic meaning members of the Roman Catholic Church. We knew that the word “catholic” actually means “universal” and that in the basic creeds of the church the reference is made to “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” which applied to all Protestants as well as Catholics. However, in Chile, which is predominately a Roman Catholic nation, it was not common to refer to all non-Catholics as being Protestants. There were different meanings of the word “protestant” in Chile.

Many of these differences had to do with the cultural backgrounds of the protestant missionary groups that came to evangelize the country, including the first pastor of Union Church. I am not able to explain this matter from a historical viewpoint nor is that my interest. I was simply amazed that some people in the congregation felt the word protestant was not appropriate to describe who “we” were. They were more comfortable with calling ourselves Evangelicals, which was fine with me since that was the word, by then, I used more often. However, there were also some problems with the word Evangelical for some of our people because some Evangelical groups took the gospel to the streets, which was not part of our practice. Most of the English folks knew what they believed but didn’t feel so compelled to tell others about their faith, especially not on the street corner. I was not accustomed to the street evangelism experience, either, although we had been involved with evangelistic outreaches in what the Vineyard calls “sharing the love of God in a practical way.” For Vineyard people that phrase means doing simple things out in the community to demonstrate the love of God to others. One favorite of ours was wrapping Christmas presents at a shopping mall as people left the stores. Little unexpected blessings often make a big impact! Consequently, in the Vineyard, many people use the term “empowered Evangelicals” which implies that God empowers us through the Holy Spirit to share our faith out in the community. I like that because the emphasis is on the Holy Spirit’s power and the simple truth of the gospel (evangel is the Greek word meaning good news) working in and through God’s people.

The third and final step of our transitional period involved, as you might have guessed, the letter C. One of the names for the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is the Counselor. Jesus said to the disciples in John’s gospel, just before his death, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever - the Spirit of truth” (John 14:16). Shortly thereafter, as if to reassure them of this commitment in the midst of their fear about his leaving them, he repeats the promise. “The Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26). We had experienced the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives for over twenty years; we often spoke of hearing God speak to us as well as knowing He was in the midst of a situation. We didn’t do this to impress people or to give an air of super- spirituality. We just knew from past experiences that He was present with us and that He was actually doing things in our lives. We became aware over the first year that many people in the congregation were not as comfortable with this way of operating as we were. In fact, for some, it was rather preposterous to speak this way about God’s actions as if we were trying to direct him to do things. However, we also knew from our transition into the Vineyard movement over the previous years that the more you experience God working in this way, the more you expect Him to do so. The Holy Spirit had become our constant counselor, a real friend!

Something that I liked about the Vineyard from the beginning was their stated list of values. The first value is “We value the PURSUIT OF GOD. We are hungry to know God’s presence, hear his voice and follow hard after him.” Each value is supported by a scripture verse, and the one quoted for this first value is Psalm 63:1-3. These verses in the Good News Bible read as follows:

“O God, you are my God, and I long for you. My whole being desires you; like a dry, worn-out, and waterless land; my soul is thirsty for you. Let me see you in the sanctuary; let me see how mighty and glorious you are. Your constant love is better than life itself, and so I will praise you.” (Psalm 63:1-3)

These words of King David written several thousand years ago had become one of our favorite prayers. We wanted the congregation to catch the enthusiasm we had for this kind of intimacy with the Father. I was introduced to a more intimate relationship with God through the simple worship songs we learned at Vineyard conferences, which we then enjoyed in our regular worship on Sunday mornings. The words of one of my early favorites go like this:

“I want to know you, I want to hear your voice, I want to know you more! I want to touch you, I want to see your face, I want to know you more.”

(In the Secret, Andy Park, Words and Music)

I sang that song over and over for years as the Father began to soften my heart and draw me into a more personal relationship with Him. I knew that, as the people in the congregation began to experience this kind of relationship, they would want more much as I did, but that such transitions do not happen overnight.

We had begun to sing these songs in the Sunday worship, but I sensed we had to start in a smaller environment. We began a weekly prayer meeting on Wednesday mornings for two hours for anyone who could come. It didn’t matter if you stayed for part of the time or all of the time. We just wanted some people to begin spending some time each week developing more intimacy with Jesus! There were people who came to those meetings who played the guitar. Other Vineyard worship leaders in Chile had translated some worship songs into Spanish. Our friends, the Cunninghams, who were with us at the conference in Costa Rica, shared music CDs that helped us all get started. Some Wednesday mornings we just shared passages from the scripture spontaneously and allowed time to pray for any who had a need.

Soon we began to see things happen! There were no major healings, but people were definitely being “touched by the Holy Spirit” and often one person would have a word from the Lord for someone else in the group, which brought tears and responses of affirmation. From these simple beginnings, we set up several training courses to teach the members about the gifts of the Spirit as Paul did with the people at Corinth, Rome and others places where he had planted churches. We all need instruction about anything new in order to feel comfortable in that environment and grow in our understanding. I often told people that for the first forty years of my life I didn’t even know there was a Holy Spirit, much less expecting Him to do anything! Most of the time in my early years as a pastor, we referred to the Holy Spirit as the Holy Ghost which made me think that, like most ghosts, this heavenly being was not real at all. I did not believe that God spoke to people, either, before my wife heard Him speak to her. So we were sensitive to helping people get to know the basics when you begin to believe that He is a real person! We realized that we were at the ABC level of normal New Testament activity and that some in the congregation were beginning to enjoy what was happening.

Something that helped us greatly in our early years at Union Church was a program for people seeking to know more about the Christian faith called Alpha. This program was developed in an Anglican church in London called Holy Trinity, Brompton and was finding acceptance in churches of many denominations around the world. Through various people in the congregation who knew of the program, we were able to obtain the materials both in English and Spanish. Having the materials in both languages helped span cultural divisions and allowed the people to study the same material in their preferred language. The Alpha program not only raises tough questions about the Christian faith, but right in the middle of the program introduces material about the person of the Holy Spirit in a retreat environment. Consequently, if people haven’t had much exposure to the work of the Holy Spirit or even acknowledged His presence in their own lives, they can ask questions in a more relaxed setting. Another major point of success for the Alpha program is that each session begins around a simple meal. Sharing food together is relaxing and breaks down barriers of many kinds.

As well as training people to pray with each other as part of the weekly prayer meetings, we also trained people in leading small group discussions. This was an integral component of the Alpha program where young and old alike relate in a more casual setting. Many new folks coming to Union Church had grown up in the Roman Catholic Church where the small group experience led by lay people was not common. However, the Alpha program was catching on with Roman Catholics in Latin America as well. We took some leaders to an Alpha conference in Lima, Peru, in 2004 and of the nearly 1,000 people in attendance over 75% were Roman Catholics including many priests and members of religious orders. This openness to the basic issues of the Christian faith breaks down religious barriers and is the breeding ground for new relationships built on basic gospel truths. One day when Jesus was talking with a woman from Samaria by a well where they both were enjoying a drink of water (not the normal cultural or social custom of His day), He said to her, “Believe me, woman, the time will come when people will not worship the Father either on this mountain or in Jerusalem…but the time is coming and is already here, when by the power of God’s Spirit people will worship the Father as he really is” (John 4:21 & 23, the Good News Bible). The Holy Spirit can and does break down barriers in any cultural situation when people focus their attention on Jesus, as the Samaritan woman did that day at the well.

With regard to breaking down cultural barriers, I was determined when we started at Union Church to preach in Spanish as soon as possible. It had been thirty years since we had lived in a Spanish-speaking country, but we were convinced that we could pick up the basics again without too much difficulty. My wife always had a more natural ability to speak Spanish and wanted to get her touch back by just having casual conversations with people. However, I had to do the more disciplined approach, being the Pharisee that I am, so I found someone to give me lessons. A young woman in the congregation was my first translator in the services and her mother was willing to take me on. I think she let me slip through the cracks on my homework many times, but I learned as much about the history of the church and Chile as I did the Spanish language. She was completely bi-lingual, as were most of the people in the church with an English background, so this meant that I would slip back into English on a regular basis.

As much as we enjoyed speaking English in this transition time, this tendency became a drawback for the new folks who were coming that only spoke Spanish. The more time that went by without a sermon in Spanish, the more pressure I felt to make it happen. People were very encouraging and assured me that no one would mind if I made a few mistakes! But pharisees do not like to make mistakes, especially in public before people who know them and can then see their weaknesses. Consequently, many months went by, and still there was no sermon in Spanish! There were other public events, such as weddings and funerals, where I demonstrated my ability in Spanish, but no sermon on Sunday morning!

At about the same time, I was beginning to get pressure from the church leadership to get my Chilean driver’s license since I was driving their car on an international driver’s license that was valid only for one year. The problem was again the language! I had to take a written exam, even though I had had a driver’s license in the United States for forty years, and I had to take the exam in Spanish! Now it so happened that my translator got engaged to a young man she met in an Alpha class. At her engagement party I met her younger brother, who was still a student at the university. So, I asked the brother (whose mother was still my Spanish teacher) if he would like to take on a special student for the summer and help me study the questions for the test. He agreed and was happy to have some extra spending money. There were over 300 questions, for which you had to know the answers, but the test only had about 25 actual questions. My problem was that many of the words were not the ordinary words you would use in everyday speech, so I had to memorize this special “vehicle vocabulary list.” I had a few favorites like the word for pedestrians (peatones) or the word for the shoulder of the road (berma) but most were just too difficult for my sixty-five-year- old brain!

I flunked the test the first time around, by no fault of my instructor. My long-held passion to do everything right the first time was publicly shattered! You could only miss so many questions, and I went over the limit. My new teacher took me patiently back to the manual, and I wrestled with some of the most confusing words in the Spanish language I have ever encountered! In the midst of this process, the word got around that the pastor had not passed the test! There was great sympathy, especially among some of the older English ladies. One of them, shortly after my disaster, happened to be at a funeral with a friend of hers who was a judge in the traffic court. My parishioner voiced her displeasure to her friend regarding the fact that even though I had been driving all these years I still had to be exposed to this torture of taking the test in Spanish! A few days later I was invited back to take the test again. I still had to take the test in Spanish, but a special tutor had been arranged to help me talk out the questions that I did not understand before I just checked the box in frustration. I passed the test the second time around, and there was much joy in the congregation. There were also many prayers of thanks for “the granny” who had interceded.

Another Vineyard Value I enjoyed from my early days in the Vineyard is about the kingdom of God. “We value THE KINGDOM OF GOD. We aim to move in the signs of the present fulfillment of the kingdom, invoking the Spirit’s powerful presence, ministering through the Spirit’s gifts and seeing God heal and work wonders.” In the classes we had for the leaders and others we also discussed the spiritual gifts identified in the New Testament. It is one thing to talk about these matters and still another to experience the work of the Holy Spirit in your own life. John Wimber, the founding pastor of the Vineyard movement, taught from the beginning that “the words and the works” have to go together. The problem for many Christians today is that they hear words spoken by leaders about the work of the Holy Spirit but have few opportunities to “experience the works.” Jesus himself said that His Father would do through us the same things He did through Him when He was alive. Speaking to His disciples just before He died, He said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing” (John 14:12). Most people get more excited about doing the things that Jesus did when they see results from their prayerful actions. These results (miracles, signs and wonders as well as healings) always build up our faith so that we are more willing to step out and let God use us to do the works of the Kingdom. So one goal of the training was to encourage the people to pray openly so that they could see results.

One illustration will prove my point. My wife and I went back to Maine every year in January for our vacation with our family. The month of January is the middle of summer in Chile and the middle of winter in New England. Many people thought we were crazy to leave the warm weather and beaches for the cold weather and snow, but grandchildren always have an influence on the decisions of grandparents! In January of 2003 while on our vacation we went to the pastor’s conference at the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship. While there we saw God doing some things we had never experienced before. Every day and night, people in the conference were receiving gold teeth during the ministry time. Evidently, this had been going on for some time at the regular meetings of the congregation before the conference began. We both had various reactions both positive and negative. Even with all I had seen God do in my life and the lives of others, I couldn’t help but have doubts. Then when I saw several people right near us opening their mouths with joyful excitement, I began to feel somewhat jealous! Why would God want to do such a thing? We left the conference somewhat confused about the gold teeth issue even though the overall experience had been very positive. After enjoying our family time with the grandchildren, we made our way back to Chile for another year.

I do not remember the actual sequence of events, but I do remember that we were beginning a new year of activities after having been at Union Church for almost two years. My wife and I were getting ready to go down to the church for a meeting. She was in the bathroom brushing her teeth when I heard her say “Come look at this!” I went to see what caused the commotion and saw her standing there in front of the bathroom mirror with her mouth wide open. “Back there,” she said, hardly able to contain her excitement. “Does that tooth look gold?” I didn’t have to look very hard to see a shiny gold tooth in her back section of molars! We both just started laughing! We had not been praying for gold teeth since we had been at the conference and had actually forgotten about the matter but obviously God hadn’t. We realized that He wanted to give us an experience to share with the people as a demonstration of what we were teaching them from His Word. The meeting that night was electric as everyone wanted my wife to open her mouth so they could see the miraculous evidence! Such news travels fast, and within the first week after she got the gold tooth her mouth was constantly open except when she was asleep!

A good friend of ours in the congregation went with my wife to a respectable dentist in the community to verify that the tooth was actually gold. The dentist took x-rays and confirmed that fact as well as revealing another miracle. The gold was only a shell-like casing around the tooth, which was in perfect condition! “Why would anyone put a gold shell on a good tooth?” the dentist exclaimed in wonder. The dentist also observed one other interesting fact. The gold around the tooth was not like the gold used by dentists, at least according to his experience. So when people would say to my wife, “Why would God do something like that?” she would simply reply, “Because He can!” There were people who asked the same question to the man Jesus healed who was born blind. The New Testament records that not only did the Pharisees ask the young man who got his sight back the “WHO did it?” question, but they also wanted to know HOW it happened (John 9:10). We were all excited about how God had demonstrated again in another generation that His Word is still true, and His Kingdom is still coming!

You might think that by now this pharisee (I still call myself a pharisee because that is part of my personality makeup) would have seen enough to be completely renewed. Even though God is recycling me daily, I’m sure He will not run out of issues to work on for years to come. The apostle Paul encouraged the people in Philippi to “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who works in you to will and act according to his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13, emphasis mine). For years I read those words and wondered why Christians, in any place, would have “fear and trembling” in their everyday life with Jesus! After all, isn’t being a Christian supposed to be an enjoyable experience? Papa was showing us that to fear Him is not to be afraid of Him but to be in awe of His great power and tremble at the thought that He can do anything He desires to draw each one of us to Himself! Fearing the Lord is acknowledging who He really is and we tremble at the thought of living without His love to redeem us and restore us.

CHAPTER 18

A Major Transition

Chile is in the southern hemisphere, and it was always hard for me to think of the summer months as being winter. What finally made the reality click in was the cold rainy weather, even though it wasn’t as cold as anything we lived through in Maine. It just seemed like the cold, wet rain got into your bones more than any dry cold air ever did. Also, there was no snow, at least not in Viña del Mar where we lived. We used to take a day off and drive to Santiago just to see the snow on the Andes even though there wasn’t any snow on the ground! We had never seen such a continuous range of snow-capped peaks so beautifully stretched out in one straight line. At least the maps indicate that they are in a straight line, more or less, and the eyes seem to confirm that fact, especially on a clear day. We also went to Santiago sometimes on my day off to visit our friends, Roger and Gloria Cunningham, who had introduced us to Chile and Union Church in the first place. Our standard day off was where the men got to cook a big meal for the women (and of course at the same time talk about the amazing things God was doing) while the women went out to explore the city. Santiago is a large modern city where almost half of the population of the country currently lives. Even with such size there are still intimate neighborhoods to explore and most of the time the women came back with some treasure that they had found along the way.

One special task during the winter season was planning for the annual church retreat that was held in the late spring (November in Chile) just before the school year ended. The seeds of interest in the Vineyard movement had been planted at these retreats in the past by numerous pastors who had come from within and outside the country to serve as retreat leaders. One of these leaders was Bishop David Pytches (whose name you will recognize from previous chapters) who was the Anglican bishop of Chile some years before and at one time had taken services at Union Church for a period of time. This long-time friend of Union Church came back to Chile each year and was still watering the seeds that had been planted earlier about life in the Vineyard. Another previous retreat leader was Roger Cunningham who was the Overseer at that time of the Vineyards in Chile.

With the growth of the congregation, each year we needed to look for a place with more space when we started planning the retreat. The regular places we had used in the past were no longer adequate, especially with more young families coming with more children. Incidentally, one of my favorite memories of Union Church retreats was one pictured in an old photograph that hung on the wall in the Guild Room in the parish hall. Actually this event was just a day picnic back in the early days of the 20th century, but the large number of children in the picture had always amazed me. There were still members in the church who were children when the picture was taken, and to hear them talk about those experiences was priceless. Some of us started a project of trying to identify as many of the people in the picture as possible. We succeeded in identifying over half of them before one of the original enthusiasts passed away, and the rest of us decided that what we had accomplished was enough.

This particular year, 2003, we found a spot right on the ocean, which pleased many of us, not the least of whom were the pastor and his wife from Maine. The cabins were a good size, and there were plenty of them for all the adults and children. There was also excitement about the retreat leader who was coming to be with us. He and his family lived in Bolivia, where he ran a missions training school for young people. Some of the young adults at Union had been to the summer training course at this school, and he had preached at our church every year when he came to Chile to raise funds for the school. He was a Chilean who originally trained as a lawyer in Santiago, but through the work of an organization called Youth With A Mission he had met his wife (a young Dutch gal) and made a career change. The school they started in Bolivia was located in the same community where her parents had founded an orphanage years before. I had heard him preach several times now and saw the results of growth in our young people when they returned from the school. I also saw their enthusiasm for sharing their faith with others both in our area and in other parts of the country. This was one of the desired results of making the transition from English into Spanish in the church. We wanted to see the gospel being shared in the community, and this was happening more and more by especially the younger members of the congregation.

We were all even more excited when we discovered that the speaker was going to bring his wife and children with him. Often when he came to Chile for fundraising, he came by himself, but this year the whole family was coming. From the first day of the retreat there was a special excitement about this family from Bolivia. You may remember that my wife and I had agreed to go to Chile for three years to help Union Church begin a new phase of their life. Up to that point we hadn’t talked openly about the fact that we were into our third year together, even though some folks had asked us privately about who would take our place when the three years were up. All of a sudden, as the first day of the retreat moved into the second there was one question on the lips of practically everyone. Do you think the mission’s school director might be the person God wants for our new pastor? After all, he is a Chilean, and his wife speaks perfect English! Those two issues may not sound like important criteria for a new pastor to some, but they were like sparks creating a wild fire for many folks in Union Church.

Everyone agreed at the end of the retreat that we had an exceptional time of worship, teaching and wonderful fellowship. Also, many people had one question on their mind: “Is someone going to ask the retreat leader if he would be interested in becoming our next pastor?” There was an agreement among many of us that we had to raise the question before the retreat was over. I don’t remember who finally asked him, but it must have been one of the leaders, since I didn’t feel I should be the one to do it. All I can remember is that when the question was asked, the door was not completely closed. The official word was that “he said he would pray and we would know before Christmas” if he was interested. That was more than enough for most of us, as we knew he was a man of prayer, and that gave God a month to work on him! Many folks were already convinced that another miracle was unfolding right before our eyes. I was ecstatic, because the more I heard about him, there seemed to be no doubt that God had another young missionary for this old congregation. What an answer to our prayers!

Consequently, when the news came just before Christmas that he did not get the release from God to leave the mission school in Bolivia, we all felt a deep sense of disappointment. Some of us even felt that God had tricked us with great excitement about such a possibility, only to have the rug pulled out from under our feet. I was angry with God, because what seemed like such a perfect plan to accomplish the goals we had established with His guidance was no longer possible. As a pharisee, I was once again offended! This was not the first time in my life that I had to confess that my plan of action wasn’t what God had in mind. Isaiah the prophet reminded the people of Israel of this truth generations before I was born. “ ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ ” (Isaiah 55:8-9). Now we had to go back to the drawing board, and we only had six months to come up with another option! The real difficulty was that none of us wanted another option. What seemed like the best plan had just dissolved before our very eyes.

We took a serious look at the existing Vineyard pastors in Chile and even interviewed two of them who came to preach but no one moved us like the man from Bolivia. Soon it was the month of February and we called another meeting of the leadership before the new school year began and people became too busy. As we gathered in the Guild Room at the parish hall an interesting phenomenon happened. One of our women elders said that God had been pressing something on her heart for several days. “I believe God wants us to call the man in Bolivia,” she said, with a strong clear voice, “and ask him if his ‘no’ is really ‘no’.” It was such a clear statement of conviction that each person in the room automatically agreed, and before any other conversation, the board chairman of the congregation said he would call him the next day. That was a Tuesday evening and we spent the rest of the evening talking about various other options, including the possibility of the Colbys staying longer.

The phone call was made the next morning as scheduled. According to the report from the chairman, when he asked the question to the school director, there was dead silence for some time on the other end of the line. What none of us knew, except the Lord and the director, was that on the previous Sunday during their communion service at the school, our friend had had a clear vision of being on a ship sailing into a harbor. When he shared the vision with his wife after the service, he said he felt that God was answering his desire to go to India, which he had been praying about for sometime. His wife did not agree. “I believe the Lord is telling us to go to Viña,” she said, “but the confirmation will be if the leadership calls us again. We are not to call them!” When he got the call on Wednesday morning, he was speechless because of what his wife had said. My wife often reminds me that God can, and will, use the people around you who love and support you to reveal His will. For many of us, especially pastors and leaders with pharisaical natures who are convinced that we know what we should do all the time, this is often a hard word to receive with any degree of humility.

Of course, when the news of the phone conversation was shared with the rest of the leadership, there was great joy in the Union Church camp! However, there was a slight hiccup in the good news. The director did not feel that he could leave the missions school right away because of the need to train someone to take his place. In the end, he decided he would need a year for this process to happen, which seemed reasonable to most of the leaders at the church. After all, they would just ask me to stay on for another year, which would solve everyone’s problem – well, everyone’s except mine! I had made a three-year commitment and felt strongly that I should stick to that commitment. I wasn’t trying to be difficult; I honestly didn’t sense I should change that decision. There were many reasons to stay, not the least of which was that we had grown to love the people and what God was doing in our midst. We had made some of the closest friends we had in almost forty years of marriage and ministry. We loved Chile, a country we had hardly heard of before we went to Costa Rica several years before. Still, there was this clear sense I had, which would not go away, that to stay was against God’s will.

My wife and I had scheduled a mini-vacation some months before in one of the most famous wine areas in Chile. This area had some of the best wine tour packages, which some of our friends had enjoyed, and they encouraged us to go to before leaving Chile. We had been looking forward to the whole experience and decided this was the perfect time for some rest. It was also a good time to pray together about the issue before us regarding the church. We stayed in an old colonial hotel right on the village square, which reminded us of earlier days in Cuernavaca, Mexico, when we were in language school during the first year of our marriage. We visited three different vineyards, including one where the tour was in a horse-drawn carriage. The days were sunny, cool and very conducive to outdoor dining. The last day as we had lunch on the hotel patio, my wife look across the table at me and said, “I think the Lord wants us to fast as we pray about this decision.” Thinking she was talking about one of our regular three-day fasting experiences, I said, “Ok; that sounds like a good idea.” Then, without pausing, she said, “He told me this morning that we should fast for forty days.” I was shocked! I had never even considered a forty-day fast in my life! I knew people who had done it and survived, but I wasn’t interested. “Did He tell you that we needed to start right now?” I asked, as I took another bite of my lunch. “No,” she said, and I gave a huge sigh of relief. I at least wanted to enjoy the last day of this wonderful vacation and a few more glasses of Chilean wine!

We talked about the forty-day fast all the way back to Viña and by the time we got home, we agreed that we were going to do it. We knew we would need some prayer support so we called several close friends, including the Cunninghams in Santiago. I think most people in the congregation had the same initial reaction that I did. The common question was, “Why such a heavy-duty approach? Can’t God give you an answer in an easier way?” I had asked the same thing, so I knew where they were coming from with the question. It did seem a bit extreme, but we assured the folks that we had peace about the matter, and we knew that at the end of the fast we would have the answer as to whether we were going to stay another year. Since that was what we all were most concerned about, the question of “why” became less important. There were only two months left before the end of our three years, so having an answer was critical. There was also another question that none of us wanted to deal with at that time. “Who are we going to get for one year if the Lord tells the Colbys to leave?” I tried not to think about that one, and instead just concentrated on how I was going to get through forty days with no solid food.

My wife was much more stoic about the whole matter. She heard God say to fast for forty days, and if He said to do it, she knew He was going to help her accomplish the task. Her approach was quite methodical, and she had plans from the very beginning. In the past, she often made a rich broth from mixed vegetables when we were trying to eat healthier, so she suggested that we do that and just give the cooked vegetables to the woman who worked for us. She certainly could take them home to her family or give them to her neighbors. I agreed with the sharing principle, but I must say that I got tired of the broth long before Janet did! I kept a journal, because I wanted proof that I really stayed the course, and I also wanted to record accurately what the Lord spoke to us and when. The first three to five days were the most difficult. Hunger pains and visions of my favorite foods just would not go away. I drank my favorite juices and pretended they were my favorite food just liquefied, which someone suggested had worked for them when they couldn’t eat solid food after an operation. This didn’t work for me, nor did the herbal teas someone else suggested. The blessing for both of us was that after the first week or so, neither one of us had any desire for solid food anymore. We just wanted our favorite liquids. Prayer times were more peaceful, and so were our dispositions! One of the hardest parts of the whole experience for me was not being able to chew, especially when mealtime approached. I tried chewing gum but that didn’t do it!

From the beginning, I asked the Lord to make it clear during this time of fasting if I was supposed to remain one more year as the pastor of Union Church. Actually, we had joined forces with the Vineyard by that time and were officially called “La Viña en Viña” which was the completion of our second goal. I knew that if it was God’s will for us to stay that He could and would speak clearly to me either in outright words, some kind of vision, or a dream. I knew that He could also speak to me through my wife or another person, but if that happened then He would confirm the decision to me as well. Some of you reading this analysis of how God communicates to His people may find this process hard to believe. I can appreciate your skepticism, because I had the same attitude for half of my life. However, after many years of such experiences, I can only say what a teenager said to me once in my first church assignment when I gave him a hard time as he snuggled up to his girlfriend. “Don’t knock it until you have tried it,” he said with a smile on his face, knowing that I was a rather uptight single priest! God does still speak to His children today, in a variety of ways, because He wants us to have a real personal relationship with Him.

That said, in the whole forty days, I heard nothing from the Lord that gave me any sense that we were to stay for another year. My wife was convinced that the Lord had given her various indications that we were supposed to stay and felt that I was just being stubborn. After almost forty years of marriage, she knew how stubborn I could be at times, but I assured her this was not one of my pharisaical moments for which I was famous. Many others had sensed something from the Lord, which they shared with us enthusiastically. I was not trying to ignore their sincerity, but I knew the decision was in my hands. I also had had enough experiences with the Lord to feel confident, even in the midst of the open disagreement of many around me, that if we were to stay He would have told me. Eventually, the date was set for our departure around the first of June, just three years from our arrival. We made contact with another pastoral couple at our home congregation in Maine who had lived in Chile some years earlier when the Vineyard movement was in its infancy. They agreed to pray about the possibility of coming to serve the congregation during the interim period.

We left knowing that we had accomplished what we came for in the beginning. The congregation was looking forward to the arrival, in another year, of the first Spanish-speaking pastor in their long history. They knew he was a man of strong faith and solid Christian character, just like the first pastor who had assisted their forefathers in establishing an Evangelical presence in the Chilean culture. In fact, David Trumbull, the founding pastor, is a hero in Chile today because he fought for and saw the creation of the social register law, which allows all citizens the same rights, including the right to worship freely. Also, the congregation was now operating under the Vineyard umbrella seeking to serve God openly through the empowering of the Holy Spirit so that Jesus might be known and worshipped for years to come. There was much to grateful for even in the midst of our own personal sadness which we had no desire to hide.

CHAPTER 19

There Is Always More

Even though we felt we had accomplished our mission, so to speak, in Chile, we were both dealing with intense personal grief as we left our “adopted” country. We knew that God had called us there originally and that He was leading us back home again for his own purposes. We arrived in Maine the first part of June just in time for a special wedding. You may remember the dream that opened the door for us to send our résumé to the folks at the church in Chile in the first place. In that dream there were several people that I knew personally. One of them was a worship leader from our Vineyard congregation who was single. However, in the dream when she spoke about the fact that she was moving, I knew she was talking about moving with her husband even though she was not married at the time. I also knew in the dream that her husband was standing right behind me! I mentioned earlier that this was the first prophetic dream I ever had; it was prophetic in that God revealed something in the dream that was going to happen in the future. After having the dream, I wanted to tell our friend that I was sure that God had already chosen a husband for her. My wife and others who were praying with us at that time did not agree. However, I was convinced that, if I did not tell her what God had revealed to me, I was being unfaithful to God. Obviously, one comes to this conclusion only after serious prayer!

The first year we came home from Chile for our vacation in January 2002, our friend, Lois, introduced us to her new friend, Richard, whom she had recently met. We were overjoyed for them both and I was especially excited that his name was the same as mine! The second year we came home for our vacation, in January of 2003, they shared with us that he had been baptized and they were praying about marriage. By the end of our third year in Chile, we came home and attended their wedding! Neither of them had been married before, and they were both about the same age. Obviously, not every dream is prophetic, and I know that only the Holy Spirit can rightfully interpret our dreams. But God can, and does, give us direction in dreams for our daily lives, just as He did for people in the scriptures and down through the ages. Many of us, myself included, do not take our dreams seriously enough, especially when there are vivid images that can confuse or upset us. It is easy to ignore a dream as being the result of eating too much rich food the night before or having had a bad experience with another person rather than a message from our Heavenly Father that could influence our lives.

Now that we were home again, I took my old friend up on his offer of a job and went to work as the safety manager at his company. My wife enjoyed having one of our sons and his future wife with us; they had been living in our house the last year we were away. They were preparing to move to Florida in a mobile home that had been converted from a bus before they purchased it. Fortunately, we had a large front yard and open driveway where the bus had been parked as they made their final preparations for the move. We never had a problem giving people directions to our house as people would say, “Oh yes, that’s the house with a large blue bus in the yard!” They did finally make the trip to Florida, but came back before the winter was over because our son had an automobile accident that nearly robbed him of his life. In fact, he was declared dead on the side of the road, and the life flight had been cancelled when one of the paramedics noticed that his heart was beating again “all on its own” as the medical report documented. After a miraculous recovery in the hospital, he and his family, which now included a special granddaughter, came back to Maine and spent six months with us during his recuperation. My wife has said many times since then that those six months were the main reason God brought us back to Maine after our three-year assignment in Chile. I often agree and remind myself that the forty-day fast was worth the joy of being in the right place at the right time. Many times we do not see the reasons why God asks us to do something; when we do, it is a blessing.

We had been home for almost two years when we decided to go back to Chile for a visit. Most years at Easter time there is a worship conference in Santiago sponsored by the Chilean Vineyards. We made plans to go for the conference and to stay for a week afterwards. We wanted to see how things were progressing at La Viña in Viña. Our friends from the Greater Portland Vineyard, Tom and Cynthia Weston, had gone down for one year and came back with many stories to tell us about what God was doing there. The new pastor, Waldo Yañez, had also arrived with his family; they had been in place for a year, and their presence was producing new growth and excitement.

We flew in the morning after the conference began. Most flights from the States are overnight and arrive early the next morning, so we went from the airport to the Cunninghams’ apartment to freshen up and then straight to the hotel. As I walked into the lobby, the first person I saw was the new pastor from Viña! Waldo gave me a big Chilean hug and said, “You must come back and help me. The church is growing fast!” We both had a good laugh, but I knew he was serious by the tone of his voice, and I felt the power of the Holy Spirit upon us as we embraced. That joyful reception was just the beginning of a weekend of events that stirred in the hearts of many of us a desire to be back together again.

We walked into the main conference hall and were greeted like royal visitors from afar! There were many hugs and kisses from the delegation from Viña, which included some of the older members. We were so excited to see how God was meshing together the cultures into His family. We were ushered up front to sit with the clergy, and the next thing I knew there was an announcement about a prophetic word that had been given the night before regarding a woman who was being healed of cancer. No one had responded to the word the previous evening, but the speaker from Colombia who gave the word was sure it was from the Lord. So were some of the folks from Viña, because they were certain that the word was for a woman from their congregation when it was given. The word was quite distinctive as God’s prophetic words often are. It was a woman’s name that the Spanish man who received it had never heard before! In fact, he had a hard time pronouncing the name because it was not of Spanish origin. God had shown him that the woman had white hair. Overnight, several folks from Viña had spoken to the person for whom they felt the word was given and also to the speaker. He announced as we began that morning that he was going to give the word again, and, if the person would stand up and receive it, the blessing would come. I turned around just in time to see one of the dearest people we had come to know in Viña rise to her feet and I couldn’t contain myself. I ran up the aisle and gave her a massive hug!

This was Good Friday and this wonderful moment was just the beginning of more miracles before the weekend was over. Another man from Viña was healed of a painful leg problem, and a couple without children after fifteen years of marriage received a word that they would conceive naturally. They had started considering the adoption route because she was approaching the age after which you cannot adopt newborns in Chile. After this word was received, they decided to trust the Lord to be faithful and gave up the idea of adopting.

In the midst of the two days at the conference, there were also more conversations about the possibility of us coming back to Chile to work with the new pastor. The more we talked with various people about the possibility, the more we got excited. We agreed to pray about it and knew that we were going to be in Viña for another week after the conference, so we had time to both pray and talk to people in Chile and back home. One of our considerations was my wife’s father, who was now a widower and approaching ninety years of age. He was still living in his own home and driving his own car, as well as experiencing good health! We were a critical lifeline for him, though, as we lived in the next community. Also, I usually spent every Saturday morning enjoying a cup of coffee around his kitchen table listening to many stories about his family history, which of course was now my family history as well.

On Easter Sunday morning after the conference, the service at La Viña en Viña was glorious! The church was full to overflowing and the pastor had invited the people who had experiences at the conference to come forward and share. There in the midst of this stately church building, with stained glass windows and blue organ pipes, we heard the testimonies. The English woman with the unusual name, Moira, who had stood up to claim her healing told everyone in Spanish what God had done! Then Oscar, the Chilean man from the new generation of church members came forward and told of the healing in his leg. There was a joyous response to both testimonies with cheers and clapping, which five years earlier would not have been appropriate in that building. Then the frosting on the cake came when the pastor from Columbia who was at the conference and had come to Viña to preach that day, shared the word for the couple God wanted to bless with a child! The bi-lingual couple came forward for prayer and many came forward to pray over them. Never in my wildest dreams on my first Sunday at Union Church in 2001, could I have imagined all that God was going to do in five short years as what I witnessed unfold that Easter morning. These are the times that teach us all, just as the disciples learned on the first Easter morning, that the Kingdom of God is amongst us, and God is still working in the lives of His children.

We had an incredible week with old friends and new acquaintances. In the midst of many celebrations, we prayed and talked seriously about what coming back would look like. I was now approaching seventy, and we were comfortably settled in our retirement home just down the road from our Vineyard church family. None of our children had been able to make the trip to Chile the first time we were there. Would it be any easier this time around? Our grandchildren were getting older and we would miss so much of their growing up years. Then there was also the question of finances. When we first went to Chile, we were the first pastoral couple the church had fully supported in many years. Even if we were to come now only part-time, which was all I was interested in talking about, that was still a considerable additional expense for this congregation with many new and younger people. This was a bigger commitment for both sides than the one we had made five years earlier, almost to the day. When we left at the end of the week, however, we both sensed that if the congregation invited us, then we would be back in Chile before the year was over.

There were no dreams this time; just a great deal of hard decisions and Holy Spirit conviction. Within a month, I had quit my job again and told my friend that this time we were going back to Chile for good! He knew our hearts were there and he had been one of the few people who had come to visit us the first time around. We put our retirement house on the market and began to sort out the things we had collected in over forty years of marriage. My father-in-law turned ninety that summer and all of our sons came for his birthday. We had a lobster feast on our huge deck, which had been built large enough for “fifty grapes.” My wife’s father always humorously referred to the people who went to the Vineyard as “grapes”– like the fruit that comes from a vineyard, you know! With his rather conservative Episcopal background, he just couldn’t take seriously people who worshipped in a strip mall! I had a similar problem in the beginning, along with the pastors in flowered shirts who seemed all too casual for my more proper pharisaical personality. We both got past those hang-ups in time, and at the end of his life some of our Vineyard friends became his closest friends and ministered to him in our absence.

During the course of the summer, our plans to return to Chile were finalized. I would be an associate pastor working part-time with three specific functions. One was to co-ordinate a program that my wife had started in the congregation during the first time around called Living Waters. She had worked with the same young woman who was my first translator to produce one portion of this material in Spanish. The two of them then did a pilot program in the congregation with young people in their late teens and early twenties. The success was immediate, and we knew that the whole program would be helpful to many others in our congregation and in the community. In order to implement the program, leaders are required to go through a weeklong training event, which my wife had done several years previously. She was now emphatic that I needed to do the same if we were going to work together on this project. So, our return to Chile was scheduled around my attending the national training event of Desert Stream Ministries in Kansas City that September. She would fly to Houston, where one of our sons lived, and I would join her there after the training.

My wife and I had been through a pilot program for Living Waters when we began to use the material at our Vineyard church in Portland. The leaders were some close friends of ours who had helped us work through numerous struggles in our marriage caused by our own brokenness and need for inner healing. With pharisaical stubbornness, I questioned the need to spend the money to do the training week in Kansas City. My wife was adamant, however, that if we were going to be able to water the seeds we had planted in Chile, then I should have the official qualifications. I have learned over the years that when she has such strong opinions, they are usually based on solid discernment. So, after my usual time of inner sulking, which of course was not displayed to anyone except her, I filled out the appropriate forms. My wife added one requirement to my week of training. She was well acquainted with my ability to avoid situations especially when I make up my mind that they are not helpful or worth my time (you may remember my reaction to the night of worship when the Lord sneaked up on me with the word “chisel”). As if she had been given some preliminary warning, she presented her request: “Whenever prayer is offered, promise me you will go forward to receive whatever the Lord has to give you.” I thought that was easy enough, so I agreed!

The training was held at a rural conference center outside Kansas City. I was especially glad to have some down time after the weeks of packing, and because there was no one there I knew personally, I could fade into the crowd with little need to be involved. As I said previously, we had just finished a long pilot program using the same material so I felt comfortable and more relaxed than I might have otherwise been at such an event. Mid-way through the week, as the morning session was finishing, there was an invitation for people to come forward to receive prayer. I thought to myself, “I don’t really need to do that today; there are too many people up there already.” As I said those words, I heard my wife’s words come to mind as well. So, since I had promised, I started up the aisle. As I got to the front, there was a man reading the following words from Luke’s gospel, “And a voice came from heaven: You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). As those words hit my ears, they went straight to my heart. I started weeping uncontrollably as I collapsed on the floor in the middle of the aisle. No one had prayed a word over me, but my Heavenly Father had spoken some words to me that I had longed to hear for years as a child and as an adult.

I’m not sure how long I sobbed and breathed in His presence as He comforted the broken place in my soul that only He knew how to heal. I had never heard my earthly father say such words to me. He never told me that he loved me. He never told me that he was proud of me. He never told me that he was pleased with me. In fact, most of my life before he died when I was twenty-six years old, I felt nothing but rejection from him on an emotional level. He provided what we needed physically but he was emotionally distant from all of us in the family. This was one reason I convinced myself that the need for such parental love and acceptance was not important. I told myself that it really didn’t matter if my father was pleased with me; I would make out just fine all on my own. I had lived that way for years without trusting anyone to help me, not even my wife. The only one I could trust who wouldn’t disappoint me was myself; I even lived this way after I gave my heart to Jesus! I said I trusted him, but when I was in a tight spot, I had a hard time believing even He was going to be there for me so I fell back into my old habits. From that day when Papa spoke those words into my heart from His word I have felt a worth that only comes from knowing His love. He is the One who created us and will love us for eternity. The room was practically empty when I pulled myself off the floor and began to realize what had happened in those moments while I rested in the Father’s presence.

We took some time to rest in Houston with our youngest son and his family before arriving in Chile the first few days of October of 2006. Due to the generosity of some American friends who own a house just around the corner from the manse where the new pastor, Waldo, now resided, we had a place to live while we were looking for an apartment. There are many new apartment buildings in Viña del Mar because the city is a very popular tourist destination in South America. Unfortunately, many of the newer buildings have very small rooms and we wanted something that would feel more like a home than an apartment. After searching for several weeks, time was running out as our friends were due to arrive for their annual hiatus. They come to Chile for six months each year with their dogs in tow and have helped us over the years to get acclimated and adjusted in many special ways. They have also become some of our closest friends in either country! One afternoon, after more frustrating visits to small spaces, we received a call that a woman in the church had heard of a wonderful option. It was an older apartment with good-sized rooms that would be available soon, but we had to look at it that night at 7:00 p.m. as there was another person coming at 7:30! We were there before 7:00 and as we walked in the door we immediately felt we were home. I could spend a whole chapter describing the spacious rooms, as well as the three terraces loaded with flowering plants, the stained glass window just inside the entrance (which we discovered later was the only one in the whole building) and the peaceful views of the city, including a bit of the ocean! Suffice it to say that we felt God had answered yet another prayer regarding our return to this country where we believed we would spend the rest of our lives.

CHAPTER 20

Drawing Closer

Before our friends arrived in Chile and we moved to the apartment, we had the pleasure of hosting some people who came to Chile on a mission trip with the Chilean/US Partnership. The partnership was formed by a group of Vineyard churches in the southwestern part of the United States to encourage and support the planting and development of Vineyard congregations in Chile. This was a special time of fellowship for us because some of the same people had been on another missions trip when we lived in Viña previously. In some ways, we felt like a welcoming committee who had come just to greet them. We were still living in a rather surreal environment having just left our country of birth for this beautiful part of God’s creation where we now planned to spend the rest of our lives. Some of our friends in the States thought we were crazy to sell everything and make such a move at our age but that wasn’t the first time they had made that observation about some of our actions during the years we had been married. We knew we had done what God told us to do and we had peace with that decision.

Shortly after hosting the team, we moved to our apartment, which from the beginning felt like home. We even had two parking spaces, so when our friends came down to visit from Santiago they had a place to park their car. Parking anywhere in Viña was often a problem. We had views from each balcony overlooking the city and soon developed the habit of eating breakfast on one and sitting on another in the afternoon. As the old expression goes, “we felt like we had died and gone to heaven,” even though we knew it was only Viña del Mar! There were times when we would just sit and look at each other feeling like we were God’s special children and wondered aloud what we had done to deserve this treatment. We felt close to Waldo, the pastor, and Annemiek, his wife, from the beginning and marveled at how God had brought us together at this particular time. Our gifts and skills were complimentary and encouraging to each other, which made us all realize that God had more things in store for each of us and the people than we could imagine or pray for. This may sound rather melodramatic to some people’s ears, but it was true! We felt God’s power and presence in our midst each time we met together during those first months we were back.

We started planning the several adult education programs that were going to be our responsibility, even though the summer months were upon us. We felt certain that with so many new young leaders in the church, these educational experiences would build faith as well as strengthen the bonds of fellowship. I was especially excited to see the weekly Wednesday morning prayer times still going strong. Another of the Vineyard Values reads as follows: “We value Being Spirit-Led. We honor Jesus as our Head and the Holy Spirit as our Counselor and the Administrator of our churches. We seek to be actively responsive to the Holy Spirit’s daily leading of our personal lives and ministries and of the local church.” As Paul said in his letter to the people in Rome, “those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons (and daughters) of God” (Romans 8:14). As we had more interaction with the Holy Spirit over the years, my wife and I tried to model an openness to the Holy Spirit’s moving upon us, so that others could see the results of His power in the lives of ordinary people. Jesus told His first disciples the following (and we believe the words still apply to his disciples today), “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have done. He(she) will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12) Once people in the congregation saw the Holy Spirit “doing the stuff” (as Wimber called the work of the Holy Spirit) in our lives, they were more open to what He might do in and through their lives.

The Alpha and Living Waters programs became the center of our attention and still continue to be a vital part of the life of La Viña en Viña. Both of these programs present the basic New Testament teachings of salvation that Jesus first announced in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth (see Luke 4:16-21). He was quoting from the prophet Isaiah about the workings of the Holy Spirit that God would bring forth through Him and those who follow Him. We referred to these verses many times trying to help folks see the powerful things the Holy Spirit could and would do in our midst. As more people participated in these programs, we could see more openness growing between the two cultures. Getting to know people in the context of a small group breaks down many barriers. Jesus himself modeled this same format with His focus on a small group of disciples and spending time with small groups in someone’s home or out in the open. We often forget how many powerful encounters with God happen in simple ways with just a few people in attendance! Our temptation is to want to make a big splash, whereas He is often more interested in touching people one at a time.

During our first year back in Chile, Roger, (my pastor friend from Santiago) and I decided to try an experiment that we hoped would help us hear afresh from God how He wanted to use us, each in our own individual congregations as well as together. We agreed to get up early each morning, sometime between four and five o’clock, and just wait in the Lord’s presence so He could speak to us. I have always been an early riser since my high school days when I delivered newspapers door to door, so I was fairly confident that I could do this. Roger was equally confident that he was up to the task. We both enjoyed the experiment from the beginning and every so often would just call each other to share what was happening. We felt our faith revived in the quiet of those early morning hours, even though either one of us might go for some time without hearing any word from the Lord.

One morning the Lord surprised me with His presence! I was sitting in my favorite chair (which my wife claims is her chair because her father gave it to us) when I heard the Lord say, very clearly, “Get down on your knees!” I’m not uncomfortable with getting on my knees to pray, since I grew up in a church with pews and kneelers. However, at that moment, I felt myself resisting like a child in rebellion. Again I heard him say, “Get down on your knees,” so reluctantly I did. There was a small couch next to my chair so I knelt on the floor and put my head in my hands on the couch almost like I was repenting for being stubborn. At that moment, I realized that my head and hands were in Papa’s lap! His presence was so real I did not want to get up so I just stayed there with Him. When I did move, I went to the living room and sat down on the floor in front of the big couch. He was there again, behind me, with His arms around me. As I was telling Roger about this incident later, I realized that this was just another experience to soften the hardness of my pharisaical heart. This whole experience may sound strange to some but to a person who has a love deficiency, as I do, such real moments of experiencing the Father’s love are crucial. Any one of us is only able to love others when we know we are truly loved ourselves. One important aspect of my friendship with Roger is that we both share such experiences with the Lord without any embarrassment, knowing the other one understands completely.

Another source of joy for us during that first year back at La Viña en Viña was the response of the newer Chilean members to their new pastor. I still called him the new pastor because he was new to me and when we came back he had been their pastor for just over a year. Their enthusiasm for one of their own as their leader literally brought tears to my eyes at times. Not only is Waldo Yañez an excellent teacher and preacher, but he also is a sincere communicator who cares deeply about people. It was so enjoyable to see the spontaneous reactions to both him and his wife, Annemiek, as the Alpha program began drawing more people from the community who had not been with us in services on Sunday mornings. The enthusiasm of the Alpha leaders played a big part in new folks being invited into a different church environment where at first they may have felt rather uncomfortable.

My wife took special pride in seeing some of the original participants who had taken part in the pilot program with Living Waters now involved in training and overseeing new leaders who had matured in their faith during the two years we were away. These people were making an impact in the community as well; several of the new leaders were people who had been invited to participate in the program from other churches. We had the joy of seeing the first national training event for the Living Waters program held just outside Viña with people from various countries in Latin America, as well as folks from the United States attending. As grandparents in the natural, seeing such progress with some of the people we had trained made us feel like grandparents in the spiritual, because these leaders had known little about the program just several years before. What we realized was that there are people suffering from broken relationships in every culture regardless of the language they speak and only the love of our Heavenly Father can heal the wounds from such brokenness. Papa speaks to our hearts through any language and of course, He speaks them all!

The third area of responsibility for my wife and me was a much smaller program as far as numbers were concerned, but it was equally important. We enrolled the congregation in the Vineyard Leadership Institute, a program for training leaders and potential pastors coordinated through the Vineyard USA. Since all the material was in English, we had just one couple, but this happened to be the husband and wife who had received the prophetic word about the birth of a child the previous Easter. She is an American and they met while he was getting his PhD in the United States. My wife says that he is the only person she has ever met who has a PhD in fish! I believe the degree was actually in Marine Biology but his good sense of humor allowed her to carry on her story. During this weekly study program, we became close friends as we helped them walk through months of dealing with the questions people constantly asked about when this miracle was going to happen. Waiting on God to fulfill promises is difficult for us humans who live counting days and months rather than the years of eternity. Finally, after some weeks of the wife not feeling well and numerous prayers for her health, they came to our apartment one Friday morning for a cup of coffee. They were jubilant because the day before, they had discovered the source of her sickness. A simple pregnancy test from the pharmacy had revealed the good news that they were expecting the child who had been prophesied! The news blew through the church like wildfire!

Such fulfilled promises of God encouraged many of us to become more expectant of what God would do when we asked. However, we were also beginning to discover an important aspect of the faith experience, which is the discouragement that comes from disappointment. I have met many Christians who have been discouraged when God does something in another person’s life while at the same time they have been asking God for something in their own life which has yet to happen. Many believers do not like to admit this, but seeds of unbelief are often sown in those moments of discouragement. Part of the reason for keeping intimate relationships with others in the fellowship is to help each of us walk through the times of crisis. I am certain that one reason many Christians have stopped believing in God’s desire to do miracles (and therefore have stopped asking for the same) is because they have been disappointed too many times when they have asked for something specific which has not happened. I remember John Wimber being quoted as saying that he would rather pray for 100 people and see only one healed than to not pray for anyone and see no one healed!

Every year we looked forward to having a visit from David and Mary Pytches, the English bishop and his wife who had helped plant the early seeds of the Vineyard movement in Union Church. When they came to visit they would usually lead a special night of teaching and ministry or speak to a group during the day. One year at the end of the evening service where they spoke, they introduced us to a phenomenon they had experienced during their travels called a fire tunnel. Basically, the concept is that the people who are going to pray over others form two rows through which people pass. The people praying do not need to know what each person needs; you simply ask God to bless the people with His Holy Spirit as they pass by. I happened to be standing beside the bishop’s wife in the line that evening and every so often I began to have rather loud outbursts of laughter. In fact, I realized as I tried to control myself that the outbursts came when people passed who looked the most serious or seemed particularly sad. It was a strange experience, but I could not control the laughter and trusted that God must be doing something beyond my understanding. I had experienced holy laughter previously, even once during a sermon! But this was different. In each case, I knew the laughter was not of my own doing and I couldn’t stop it.

So, early the next morning during my time with the Lord, I simply said, “Papa, please show me what was happening last night.” The response came immediately! He said that He wanted to bless some people with His joy who had spent “too much time in their own sorrow!” I was overwhelmed. He immediately brought to my mind the passage in Luke’s gospel where the angel said to the shepherds, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people” (Luke 2:10, emphasis mine). As those words flowed through my mind, I knew why the laughter had come the night before, because when we know Jesus, we have a joy that is not just of our own making; we have great joy! In the same moment, the phrase “mega gozo” (great joy in Spanish) came flashing across my mind’s eye like a huge neon sign! I decided to preach a sermon on that one phrase. In fact, I made a card for each person in the congregation with the words that the Holy Spirit spoke to me that morning, because I wanted people to have a reminder of what God had done. One of the joys of being a pastor is when people remember something that is said in a sermon! To this day, I love to hear people shout the words “mega gozo” every so often because I know God is still blessing them with His words and giving them a joy far beyond the simple words of a sermon.

In the midst of such joyous moments there were some growing pains between the older and newer leaders in the congregation that were difficult for us to observe. We were not involved in the regular leadership meetings anymore, at our request, mainly because they were in Spanish and our command of the language was still lacking. I did make one bold attempt to preach in Spanish that year and almost had a nervous breakdown, even though one of my dearest friends worked with me for hours to get it all written out correctly. Even though we were not at the meetings, we often heard about the issues that arose and prayed that God would soften the hearts of those involved, each one toward the other. As a true pharisee (my wife says I should stop referring to myself that way but I believe I am still being recycled), I know the turmoil that a hardened heart causes in any relationship. Part of the blessing of writing this book has been the chance to explore the many verses in scripture that speak to that issue and how God can transform each one of us as He draws us with His mercy and love. Anyway, we were saddened by the growing pains in the leadership. Obviously, we knew that such growing issues were only a natural part of any human organization, but it was still difficult to observe from the sidelines. We began to feel much like we had felt when we watched our children go through struggles growing up and we wanted to intervene.

In the midst of this sadness, during the last week of April of 2009, the Lord began to do some radical things in our lives for which we had no preparation. My wife had a dream that we had a baby girl. This was something different for us, since we had had only sons naturally. In the dream she gave the baby to me and asked me to change her diaper. When I brought the baby back, I had put seven pairs of pants on her. My wife asked me why I did this and I responded, “I just wanted to.” The following night, Janet dreamt about the baby girl again. The Lord told her in the dream to baptize the baby on the 21st of May. We had grown up baptizing babies in the Episcopal Church but no longer followed the practice. Consequently, at the time, neither one of us thought too much about the dreams, even though they were very clear with specific information including the date of the baptism!

The day after the second dream, I went to visit an elderly gentleman from the church with another person from the congregation. She and her husband had gone with me before to visit this man, who was now like part of their family. On the way to the nursing home, she said to me, “I had a dream about you last night; I dreamt that you died!” She then proceeded to tell me her dream of how I had died in Canada while talking part in an extreme sports event. The details were amazing with other people from the congregation in the dream as well. After the visit with the elderly gentleman, I gave another person from the church a ride back to Viña. I mentioned the dream about me dying, as I knew this other person was sensitive to the meaning of dreams. She said immediately, “There is going to be a big change in your life! That’s what it means when you die in a dream.” I wasn’t sure what to think at that point, but now there were three dreams in three days and I couldn’t wait to tell my wife about the third one when I got home.

The next morning while we were having a cup of coffee at our breakfast table, we looked at each other and at the very same moment said, “It’s time to leave Viña!” We were both in a state of shock for several moments, because we knew we had come to Chile to stay for the rest of our lives! An incredible sadness came over the both of us as we sat there and looked at each other. We were preparing to go to Santiago that day for the yearly worship conference. As we drove up to the capital city that afternoon, we talked at length about what this all meant. Were we supposed to move up to Santiago? Was the Lord going to use us somewhere else in the country? We certainly had no desire to leave Chile altogether.

The pastors and wives were meeting that evening for dinner at one of the churches before the conference began the next day. We gathered for some worship and a short message from one of the speakers, who had come in from Canada. During the final minutes of his talk, the other speaker had arrived from the airport and had joined the group. After the talk, my friend Roger, whose church we were meeting in for the dinner, said, “Let’s just turn to one another, in twos or threes and bless each other before we go in to eat.” At this moment, my wife burst into heavy sobbing with her face in her hands and collapsed in her chair. I saw out of the corner of my eye the second speaker coming across the room towards her, and as he laid his hands on her head, he began to prophesy. “Do not be worried about what is happening,” he said. “I heard the decision you made just this morning!” At this point, I collapsed in my chair beside my wife. “I am doing a new thing”, he continued to prophesy, “I have plans for you that no man or other spirit can interrupt. Do not be afraid for I will provide for you. These things will happen within six months, before the end of the year!” The man prophesying was Doug Addison who had been to one of our worship conferences before but whom we only knew by name. As the others left for the meal, we sat there together as Janet continued to weep.

People have asked me how I remembered those words so clearly. I can only say that in my experience, when God is speaking directly to you, the heart listens and receives with clarity.

Eventually, we both composed ourselves and went in for dinner. We didn’t talk to anyone about what had just happened, and neither one of us can remember anyone asking. The conference was Friday and Saturday, after which we went back to Viña for the Sunday services. We still had not talked with anyone about the experiences of the week, but realized at some point that I was leaving Sunday afternoon for the States with my friend, Roger, from Santiago. We were going to the National Vineyard Leaders conference in Galveston, Texas, after which we were going to visit several churches in the States, with plans to return to Chile on the 21st of May. The date of our return had been set long before the dream about the baptism of the baby. As that information dawned on us, all we could do was pray that God would walk us through these events in his perfect timing so that we could be faithful to what He was doing in our lives.

As we flew overnight to Dallas, I shared the events of the week with Roger. We were both in awe at the prophetic words and what they might mean. When we arrived, we met his son, Isaac, who was living in Dallas, for breakfast before driving down to Galveston for the conference. We talked during the four-hour drive about how clearly God had been speaking, but still there was no specific indication of what Papa was going to do with us regarding Chile. I was glad at least to be able to share what was happening with someone that I trusted deeply as a friend. My wife has reminded me numerous times over the years as I recount this story that she was in the difficult position of not being able to share with anyone for the two and a half weeks I was gone. She prayed and simply trusted the Holy Spirit to help her have some peace until my return. Yet, it was a difficult time for her, because she knew God was doing something that had brought deep sadness to us both but at the same time an element of great joy because He had spoken so clearly.

CHAPTER 21

His Plans Unfold

Roger and I arrived in Galveston later that day, and after checking into our motel (which a friend had graciously booked for us ahead of time), we went to the conference site to pick up our registration packets. As we were leaving to look for a place to have dinner, a couple came through the main entrance who were friends of Roger’s. We stopped to chat a bit and when the woman saw me she said, “I’m so glad you are here; I had a vision about you just last week!” I thought to myself, this has to be the frosting on the cake! Dreams and prophetic words in Chile, and now a vision in the United States; hopefully they all go together. She proceeded to tell me that she saw me driving in a car from Houston to Baton Rouge. There was rain coming into the car; a lot of rain and I was trying to get out of the way of the rain. She explained that the rain was good and that the Lord wanted me to know that I should just enjoy it! I had not actually seen this woman in several years. She is from Chile (where we had met previously), but she currently lives in Baton Rouge where her husband is a professor. She didn’t know that I was planning to drive from Houston to Baton Rouge on Monday after the conference to meet Roger who was going there for a speaking engagement over the weekend. Without getting into the details, I told her that it had been a week of many exciting experiences and thanked her for being faithful to share what the Lord had shown her.

The conference was interesting with numerous speakers I had not heard before, since we were new to the national US Vineyard scene. I saw some folks from our home congregation in Maine as well as Phil Strout, who was our pastor when we made the original decision to go to Chile. We had several meals with various people that Roger knew which made me feel more connected to this “tribe” as John Wimber used to call the Vineyard. I was particularly excited about hearing one speaker whom we had heard previously on the DVDs from the Vineyard Leadership Institute, the study program we were doing with the now-pregnant couple! The speaker’s father was a respected theologian, and she was a theologian in her own right. However, with the judgmental attitude of a cynical pharisee, I had developed a dislike for her purely from her looks and her voice when we listened to her teachings on the DVDs. I knew at the time that this response was irrational (which my wife confirmed as well), but I couldn’t seem to get past this stumbling block when she spoke. Consequently, my attitude kept me from hearing much of her teaching originally in Chile, even though the others in the group were quite excited. I knew it was no accident that she was one of the speakers and that the Lord wanted me to give her another try.

Interestingly enough, I only remember one thing she said that morning at the conference, but that one thing caused a radical change of heart to happen in me. She was talking about how our Heavenly Father doesn’t always do things as we might expect Him to do. With a bit of a smile, she said, “Our God loves to show up and show off!” That simple statement removed the judgmental screen that had been over my heart and my mind against this woman for months. Pharisees are so hard-nosed about letting go of judgmental attitudes that God has to slap us in the face with something silly occasionally to break through the barriers! My response to that statement also caused me to want to hear more of what she had to say later in the day. She was conducting a workshop after lunch, so I decided to get there early and found a seat in the front row. I knew after hearing her speak the first time that I was going to be blessed by listening to more of what she had to say. I was not disappointed, and I couldn’t wait to tell my wife how that unhealthy attitude had been recycled, because she knew how intense my original feelings had been against one of the Lord’s servants!

We made some contacts during the week about programs we were hoping to get off the ground in Chile, but when Friday came Roger and I were both ready to relax. I discovered that he was riding to Baton Rouge with the woman who had the vision about me. I had agreed to return the rental car to the airport in Houston where my daughter-in-law was going to pick me up. Our youngest son and his family live just minutes from the airport, and I was spending Mother’s Day weekend with them. After the weekend, my son had agreed to drive me to Baton Rouge on Monday and spend the day fishing with Roger, myself and another pastor. My son and his wife knew nothing about what God had been doing in his parent’s lives over the past two weeks. I had decided to wait and share with them all the details over the weekend and ask them to pray for us. The Lord had another surprise for me that evening.

While sitting on their patio, our son explained that he was considering a move with his company to Florida, but that he and his wife did not want to sell their house because eventually they hoped to come back to Houston. He then looked at me and said, “Do you think that you and Mom could consider moving back to the states and living in our house while we are gone?” That was a bombshell! Yet, the more we talked about what they wanted to do, the more it seemed that God was in the midst of everything, even though we were only getting pieces at a time.

After we had talked more about the details of his situation, I said to him, “How do we tell your mother about all of this?” We had gone to Chile with the intent to live there for the rest of our lives. We spent most of our savings to take a few family possessions with us that we felt we couldn’t part with when we left the house in Maine that God had given us. Now, we were talking about moving several thousand miles again, with the same belongings, to a state that we never dreamed we would ever live in! Not that we didn’t like visiting Texas, but Viña del Mar, Chile was the second best thing to Maine we had ever experienced. The thought of leaving was difficult enough, without adding Texas to the mix! I knew that I had to wait and talk about this with my wife when I got home, but we continued to discuss the possibility around the pool all weekend. My son heard during the weekend that he was going to have to go to Florida for an interview on Tuesday, so he was not going to be able to go fishing. However, he agreed to drive me to Baton Rouge anyway and come back the same day. I was disappointed that he was going to miss getting to know my pastor friends, but at least he would have a chance to say hello to them when he dropped me off.

The drive to Baton Rouge was a special time of fellowship for the both of us. We had not spent that much time together, just the two of us, in a long time. We talked further about the possibility of us coming to help them keep their house. I shared more about the dreams, the prophetic words and the vision about riding through the rain to Baton Rouge. Stephen has always been a strong believer since his days as a camp counselor at a Christian boys camp in Maine, where he spent many summers. However, we had not spent much time talking about the Holy Spirit experiences that his mother and I had been having in recent years. At one point when I was telling him about the dreams of the baby with the seven pair of pants, he looked at me and said, “Maybe it’s your real baby that is going to make this all happen!” I had a strong sense from the Holy Spirit that another prophetic word had just been spoken regarding the Lord’s plans for us. His mother still called him “her baby,” even though he was almost forty years old, and she will probably continue to do so for the rest of her life! There was even some rain on the ride over that day. It didn’t come into the car but I felt it was a sign from Papa that caused me to realize that, even though I didn’t understand all that was happening, I knew that my Heavenly Father did. One small joy of that day was riding in my son’s new car. He had just bought it used after searching for months for one on the Internet. I thought as we enjoyed the ride together how much the Father loves to bless His children as we walk in faith anticipating His plans for us!

After a day of fishing that ended with a great movie, Roger and I spent the next ten days traveling to several churches in Mississippi and Alabama that supported his work in Chile. We talked about what God might be doing but neither one of us really wanted to talk about the fact that Janet and I would perhaps be leaving Chile to come back to the States. Our last stop was in Indiana for his father’s 80th birthday celebration. I had not been back to Indiana since I graduated from Indiana University and headed off to seminary in 1959. At some point in the weekend, I realized that this was the fiftieth year anniversary of my college graduation! Since it was the month of May, I thought about checking the graduation schedule to see if there was a 50-year class reunion for my class. I resisted the temptation, however, and bought myself an IU baseball cap instead to add to my collection of jockeys, which is what Chileans call baseball caps, interestingly enough.

We had a powerful service that Sunday before returning to Chile at a church on the Purdue University campus (the big IU rival) whose pastors were former professors. The congregation was a mixture of students and their family members who came from many parts of the world since it was graduation weekend. Roger and I did a tandem sermon: I shared some of my testimony first and then he continued with some teaching which concluded with a simple altar call. We ministered to many at the end of the service and discovered one woman who had come all the way from China to see her child graduate, and that morning had given her life to Jesus! The work of the Holy Spirit constantly surprises me and motivates me to keep going regardless of whether I see the path ahead clearly or not.

We arrived in Santiago on the morning of May 21st, and as I was sharing with my wife the events of the last two weeks, I realized that the baby from her dream was about to be baptized! A baby represents new life, and baptism is the public announcement for the Christian of that new life in Jesus. I was announcing to her, and then we would announce to others the new thing that God was doing in our lives. She was much more open to the news of a possible move back to the States than I thought she would be, but still hesitant about leaving too quickly. After all, the prophetic word had said this was going to happen “within six months, before the end of the year,” so we didn’t have to hurry to leave this place we had come to love so much.

We soon heard from our son that the first job hadn’t materialized, but there was another opening, which might come, even quicker than the first possibility. We talked with them on Skype several times in those weeks after I got home, and we realized that we had to make some decisions soon. During the early part of June, we found out that our son had gotten the second job and was due in Florida the first of August. He was going to be able to come home on the weekends, but they wanted to move in time for the children to start school at the end of August. So, with this news, my wife agreed to put out another fleece, this time looking for a good deal on airline tickets on the Internet. Our son and I put some pressure on her to choose a date, so it was agreed we would look for tickets around our anniversary, which is the 14th of August. Within fifteen minutes from the time she started looking, she had located one-way tickets to Houston on Air Mexico for the 12th of August, and for less than $500 apiece! The same tickets for the same day with another airline were over $2000 each! My wife had her answer, and we decided to move to Texas.

Now, we had the sad task of sharing what God was doing with the pastors and the people of La Viña en Viña, who had become some of our dearest and closest friends. The task was made even more difficult because we had said, so many times, that we were never going to leave Chile again! Many people had a hard time accepting “Richard’s decision” (as they liked to call it) when we went back to the States the first time in 2004. This time they knew it was the Lord’s decision, but that didn’t make it any easier for any of us. Some folks just couldn’t believe that God would separate us again after the blessings we had shared together. During those days we sensed a deep sadness much like what Paul described in the Book of Acts as he was leaving the people from the church in Ephesus to make his way to Rome (Acts 21:36-38). It was not the thought that we would never see these folks again, but rather the knowledge that our lives would not have the daily contact that had brought us all so close together as a family. We shall always be grateful that God chose us, in our senior years, to make the long journey from New England to Chile to accomplish some critical work for His Kingdom. Now they, along with many others we have ministered to over the years, will be our friends into eternity.

During those weeks of saying good-bye, the constant question that was asked of us was “What are you going to do there?” The constant answer was, “We really do not know,” and that was the truth! We were somewhat concerned about what we were going to do because our expenses would be higher in Houston than in Viña. Also, I had a job in Chile to supplement my retirement income and that made a big difference. We were not surprised when people looked at us as if we might be doing something foolish, but we didn’t have any answers to some of their questions. We constantly went back to the prophetic words we had received and reminded the people that as believers we have to be obedient to what God calls us to do. The hardest part was when people would say, “But how do you really know it is God telling you to go?” All I could do was fall back on a phrase that I first heard from Larry Lea, a pastor we heard speak at a conference just after we were saved. When people asked him the question about how he knew that it was really God speaking to him about an issue, he would say, “I know in my knower, wherever that is!” We knew in our knower that God wanted us in Houston and that He had told us not to worry because He would provide for us!

The bottom line was this: in all of the years of walking with the Lord, we have never had the multitude of interventions from the Holy Spirit that we had during that last week of April in 2009. From my wife’s first dream about the baby to the vision about the rain in the car, our lives were powerfully interrupted in ways that we had not experienced before in any seven-day period. It was that kind of Holy Spirit activity which not only caught our attention but gave us the confidence to trust God with the overwhelming decisions we had to make. We all talk about having faith to go where God leads us, but as my wife often says, “It is easy for me to say ‘yes’ to God about many things BUT it is the walking out of those things that is difficult.” One thing that helped us was memorizing some specific scriptures. We had done this on previous occasions as well. One of my favorites was Hebrews 11:1, which reads as follows: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” None of us can see what the future holds for us but when we have faith in Him we can be certain that God is going to be with us wherever He leads us.

There were many “despedidas” — going away parties — as they say in Spanish, and many more intimate times with friends over coffee, wine and the delicacies of Chile too numerous to mention. When we left on the 12th of August, we left a huge part of our hearts with the people there in Chile. On the 13th, we arrived in Houston after passing through Mexico City. Momma’s baby, our son Stephen, was there to meet us at George Bush Intercontinental airport with his wife, Belinda, and their children who were soon to leave us for Florida. We settled in quickly, had a great anniversary and then spent the next week helping our daughter-in-law pack their things for the move. Our son was already on the job so we saw him only on the weekends. Two weeks later, they drove off and we stayed behind to assist their movers. Our goods would not arrive from Chile for some time so we were grateful for the furnishings that they left behind, not the least of which was the 34” TV attached to the wall in the living room! We felt spoiled, and we were! We had a large house all to ourselves with air conditioning (which to us northerners was a novelty), as well as a swimming pool (which to us missionaries was a great luxury)! We knew some of the neighbors from visiting our son and his family over the years, and we also knew there were various Vineyard churches in the Houston area which we planned to go visit in the coming weeks.

I can’t say that we felt like fish out of water being back in the States but we were not where we thought we would be at this point in our lives. We had much more enthusiasm for new experiences when we left Maine for Costa Rica on the day we got married in 1965, and we certainly had much more energy back then! However, this time we knew our Heavenly Father more intimately and we knew His promise was that He would never forsake us. We could also say that we trusted Him more than we did in those early days of studying Spanish at the language school in San José almost forty-five years ago. We trusted more in ourselves in those days, at least I did. Back then, I didn’t know Him personally but I thought I knew everything. I made fun of those who said they knew Him as if they had spoken to Him that very morning. Now I speak to Him every morning myself and feel at a loss when my life gets so busy that I forget He is always waiting for me, waiting to tell me how much He loves me.

As I have said previously in this book, one of the meanings of the word recycle is to use again. I am thankful to God each day that He did not turn His back on me years ago, when I was less useful to Him – the years when I didn’t known Him personally – when I didn’t acknowledge Him for who He really is, the mighty God who created everything and sent His only Son, Jesus, to save us. I am grateful every day that our God, our Papa, is in the recycling business and can take the mess we make of our lives, whether we are pharisees, murderers, gossips, thieves, liars or any other broken portion of humanity, and reuse us for His glory. I hope our story has shed some light on how faithful and able God is to recycle each one of us, no matter how stubborn, judgmental or useless we think we are. His only concern is that we believe He is who He says He is and trust Him to use us, regardless of who we are, for His glory!

EPILOGUE

Several months ago when I was nearing the final chapters of this book, I felt an urging from the Holy Spirit to look through some of my journals to see if there was any significant incident that I might have left out. I realized that I had written the book rather quickly over the summer months last year and that I was talking about a time span of more than thirty years of my life. So I set aside one whole day just to scan through a few journals, some of which I had looked through previously because I wanting to check the dates of various events. The first journal I picked up was one that I started just after we came to Houston in the fall of 2009. I began to read the entries and discovered that the second one was an incredible revelation I had early one morning in September of that year. Not only had the Lord shown me something critical about the book but he had confirmed what he told me that morning by giving my wife a dream during the night! I want to tell you about those two experiences as another testimony to the basic truth that we serve a living God who loves us each personally.

In my journal entry I began by sharing how Papa, (I guess by now you know that I use that term of endearment for my Heaven Father without any sense of disrespect) was showing me what the book should be about as I was reading portions of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. By the way, I have know all along that this is not just my book but that the Holy Spirit has been writing it with me. There were many times when I would get to a place in a chapter and not have the next words in my head to write. I knew in those moments I simply needed to say “Holy Spirit, what’s next?” and within seconds the words would flow. The more that happened, I realized that Papa was not only helping me write this book but that is how He wants us to live our lives everyday — such a simple thought, but yet so scriptural and obvious that many of us miss it. What a different world we would live in if each one of us, who call ourselves followers of Jesus, stopped to ask for the wisdom of the Holy Spirit before we made any decision each day. I’m not talking about the WWJD (what would Jesus do) mindset although I have nothing against that idea. I’m talking about regularly asking for the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit so that our decisions are based more on the will of the Father and not just our own will “with a bit of the Father’s blessing”, as if we were adding “His special dressing” to a salad we already made! I think that was what Jesus was talking about when his disciples were worried about His leaving them. “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever - the Spirit of truth,” he said to them. And then, as if he saw the sad looks on their faces, he said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:16-18).

As I was saying, Papa was “showing me” what he wanted the book to be about. I noticed as I read portions of these two gospels (Matthew 23 and Luke 11) that there were some character issues that Jesus pointed out to the Pharisees, Sadducees and other legal experts of his day. At the same time, I began to notice two things about these character issues. The Pharisees and others didn’t like it when Jesus pointed out these defects in their self-proclaimed righteous behavior of which they were very proud. In fact, it was often at these moments that they got upset at Jesus and then began accusing him of numerous things that were not true. Eventually, they were so distraught by his pointing out these “issues” that they were determined they had to get rid of him. The second thing I began to realize was that these character issues (flaws you might even call them) were very evident in my own personality. I was no happier than the original Pharisees to have the Holy Spirit bring this matter to my attention. However, I knew that the Lord wouldn’t be showing me these “issues” unless he had a plan of action to help me with them.

On this particular morning I am speaking of, I made this entry in my journal: “This morning everything went up a notch! The revelations burst wide open as I was reading Luke 11:37ff about the woes that Jesus had concerning the Pharisees.” The heading in my Bible (the New International Version, NIV) says “Six Woes” but as I read those verses again that morning I realized that there are really seven issues because the Pharisees had an issue with Jesus and his disciples because they didn’t wash their hands, especially when they were getting ready to eat! (In Matthew’s gospel there are Seven Woes identified; see Ch. 23) All of a sudden I remembered the first dream my wife had when we were being led out of Chile a few months before. She dreamt that we had a baby, a little girl, (which was interesting to us because we had three sons naturally) and she gave me the baby to change her diaper. When I brought the baby back to her I had put seven pairs of pants on the baby. She asked me why I did that and I simply said, “I don’t know, I just wanted to.” The baby and the seven pairs of pants have been a mystery for us although as we shared the dream with others, including our youngest son who my wife still calls “her baby”, we knew that mystery would some day be revealed.

As I was praying that morning, I heard Papa say simply and clearly, “the seven issues relate to the seven pair of pants because the baby represents the book!” It was as clear as day in that moment! I continued in my journal with the following words: “The seven character issues that Jesus pointed out to the Pharisees are going to form the main themes of the book.” I was so excited that I wanted to wake my wife up right at that moment and share with her what the Lord had shown me. However, after many years of marriage, I knew better than to do that even when I have had a “word from the Lord!”

So I waited as patiently as I could, just as children wait on Christmas morning for their parents to get up to open presents, moving in and out of their bedroom. When she woke up, I was right there and before I could say anything she said, “I just had the weirdest dream,” and proceeded to tell me all about it. “I saw seven men on a raft-like thing with a cardboard top crossing the ocean. Actually, it wasn’t a raft,” she continued, “it was more like a wooden pallet and the seven men were huddled together speaking to the people in the church which was not like a church building but like a indoor arena! All the people there were listening to them and everyone had a glass of wine!” Of course at that point we both just laughed and rejoiced at the incredible way our heavenly Father comes to us so personally.

However anyone else may interpret those two revelations, they spoke to Janet and I about how the Holy Spirit was going to get me jump-started on this project which I had been pushing aside for numerous years. The end of that entry in my journal two years ago reads like this: “The connection between the number seven in her dream with what the Lord revealed to me as she slept was a great delight. I’m sure that Papa is going to continue to guide me in writing our book since there really wouldn’t be a book if he had not drawn me to himself in the first place.” I wish I could say that I started writing this book soon after that morning BUT I did not. Some dear friends had to give me another jumpstart later when they came to visit us in Houston. They offered me the use of their house on the ocean in New England for three weeks where the Holy Spirit and I got back together and seriously began to document the events in the previous chapters. I wrote the first half of the book in those three weeks and was determined to have the rest completed before my wife’s birthday. Papa helped me accomplish that task also.

The most interesting thing about the completion of the book is that when I re-read the words I had written two years ago in the journal, I had no recollection of having written down those words previously. Neither did I have any recollection of my wife’s dream with the seven men “preaching to the church” from a raft in the middle of the ocean! She didn’t remember the dream either but obviously Papa did and He took me back to the pages in that journal because He wanted to show me how the book is connected to the rest of our lives. I am praying about developing a study guide that will explore the seven woes that Jesus pointed out to the Pharisees in his day and the obstacles these woes create as we try to live a serious Christian life today. I am convinced that there are many people, both men and women, in this day and age who could benefit from discussing, sharing and praying about these issues in order to live more creatively as children of the King.

Another reason I believe He took me back to “the mighty seven on the raft” was that He wanted to remind me of how much we need one another to do the work of the Kingdom today. I have often said that I have never met a Christian who isn’t somewhat broken; as Paul reminded the people in Corinth, “we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” (2 Cor. 4:7) Regardless of our imperfections and personal struggles, however, He has called us to follow His Son and live together as His Body. He recycles each one of us through the power of His Holy Spirit, and He never throws away anyone for any reason!

Houston, Texas

June 3, 2012

AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Richard Everett Colby was born in Bath, Maine on June 3, 1937 and grew up in the small Maine coastal town of Wiscasset. He attended Boston University for two years as a theatre design major before transferring to Indiana University where he received his B.A. with a major in Fine Arts in 1959. Influenced by several campus ministry pastors while at Indiana, he began theological studies at Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven, CT (now part of Yale Divinity School) in the fall of 1959 and received his MDiv degree in 1962. In the summer of 1961, he served as a Winant Volunteer in London, England. After thirty-five years of pastoral ministry in the United States and Costa Rica, he retired from the Episcopal Church. He and his wife Janet have served for over ten years as missionaries with the Vineyard USA in Chile where he was pastor of a bi-lingual congregation in Viña del Mar for six years. He is currently the Coordinator of the Chile/US Partnership for the Vineyard and Director of Foundations For Glory, a teaching ministry he began with his wife last year. The Colbys have three sons, seven grandchildren and live in Houston, Texas.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter One

Caught Off Guard

Chapter Two

The Full Gospel Birthday

Chapter Three

City Hall Exposure

Chapter Four

Holy Laughter In Hollis

Chapter Five

Two Psychiatrists, One Bishop And Me

Chapter Six

Tongues With Terry

Chapter Seven

A Believing Bishop

Chapter Eight

Here Comes Wimber

Chapter Nine

The Dame, The Dance And The Dream

Chapter Ten

The Japanese Artist

Chapter Eleven

Home Again, Home Again!

Chapter 12

Another Conference, Another Miracle

Chapter Thirteen

Catching More Fire

Chapter Fourteen

Chiseling Kingdom Style

Chapter Fifteen

Great Expectations And Great Experiences

Chapter Sixteen

One Incredible Dream

Chapter 17

Going Vineyard

Chapter 18

A Major Transition

Chapter 19

There Is Always More

Chapter 20

Drawing Closer

Chapter 21

His Plans Unfold

Epilogue

Author’s Biography