Okay. Let me begin by saying that I’m a mystic. In modern psychological terms, this means that I’m a prime candidate for schizophrenia. I have delusions of grandeur all the time. It also seems that I am the envy of those who aspire to poetry and ecstatic religion. It is only with some great difficulty that I can distinguish between present reality and my imagination. I am constantly on the verge of either changing the world forever, or losing my mind. Again, it is only with some difficulty that I am able to make a distinction between the two.
Fortunately for me, having had my skills sharpened by reason of use, I am able to process this visionary impetus quite easily. Some revolutionary idea comes, I hash it out, check it for flaws, and keep it or toss it. As a result, it usually isn’t me who ends up going crazy. It’s everyone around me. I hash out these high falutin ideas by talking about them, and when any particular vision has me, I believe in it fanatically. To anyone who is an intimate part of my life, it looks like the world is perpetually crashing down around my shoulders.
It isn’t. It just looks that way. I do have a sense of perspective. I am confident that the truly God-sent ideas will have staying power. It is only that I am convinced that we must also process the bran if we are to retain the germ. There’s a lot of chaff out there for every grain of wheat.
There have been two visions for my life that have had particular staying power: one is a call to business. The other is a call to ministry. I tend to alternate between the two. I can trace this back at least to when I was fourteen. I had this really brilliant idea that I was going to open up a series of Olympic sized swimming pools in the town I was living in. Mostly I was frustrated to that the biggest pubic pool was about the size of what goes in somebody’s back yard. The only glitch in my plan was the part where my dad got a new job and we moved about 300 miles. The next thing I can remember is trying to manipulate God into calling me to be a pastor. It went something like this: “Don’t send me to Africa.” You know the saying, if you pray to God, “please don’t ever” that’s the one thing He’ll do. The obvious solution is to absolutely convince yourself that the one thing you never want to do is the actual calling God has on your life. I’m pretty sure there’s a flaw in my logic somewhere, but at the time I didn’t catch it. I just remember that I successfully put pastoral ministry completely out of my thoughts for nearly a decade.
When I was seventeen, the summer before my senior year in high school, I came up with a new grandiose vision for the ultimate Christian bookstore. I seriously approached my parents and asked for permission to drop out of high school, get my GED, and start this business immediately. I was also seriously appalled at my parents lack of vision when they insisted that I complete my schooling.
Having graduated from high school, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for me to be frustrated that they didn’t offer a bona fide degree in theology for undergraduates at the college that I chose, despite the fact that I never for a moment thought that a theology degree implied a calling to something like pastoral ministry. I don’t know what on earth I thought I was going to do with a theology degree, but I certainly knew I wasn’t going to pastor. I was so frustrated with my academic limitations that I dropped out of the school where I had an 80% scholarship and moved a thousand miles to attend a non-accredited ministry school (a move which, though I don’t understand it, I still believe was based on the genuine leading of God).
Having moved clear across the country, I discovered that I was ill equipped to fit into the mold that my new school had established for “ministry.” Even the stuff I’m good at became peremptory failures. I just sort of sat there for two years and generally looked stupid. Nevertheless, while I was sitting there looking stupid, I received the most astounding vision for a Christian bookstore. To this day I believe that the vision I received both needs to be done and will be done, in due time.
And with this long prelude, I come to the last few months. I’m not really sure why I majored in English. Oh, I have a few guesses, but they’re in the same category as guesses why I went to MorningStar school of ministry. The bottom line is God told me and I’m a mystic, so I can say that. So Nyeaah.
So I get out, and I’m just sitting here for about a month. And I get to praying. Remember, that I’ve completely abandoned the any pretensions to ministry since it all went up in smoke at the ministry school. So I say,
“God, I’ve graduated, and now that I’m through all that mess, what do you want me to do?” And He says.
“GO TO SEMINARY!” Well, okay, it was quieter than that, but it had the same effect. So I start laughing and I says, “After I am worn out… will I now have this pleasure?” and then it turned into this big argument about whether or not I actually laughed at God.
It took a couple of days, but I talked myself out of it. I had this big deal I wrote about putting out fleeces for God to manipulate around, a bunch of hoops for God to jump through… However, the only serious test I could think of was for God to give me a straight path. If I’m supposed to go to seminary, tell me how I’m going to get through it and what I’m supposed to be doing when I get done.
Then I started looking. I researched schools, I talked to people who had gone to seminary. I sought counsel from parents and pastors and chaplains and everybody else I thought might care. I got responses everywhere from my mom telling me that I was crazy, but that if it was God, I could do what I thought was best to my pastor telling me that, if I was going to be certain of getting a job at a respectable Baptist church, I had better go to school at a recognized conservative Southern Baptist seminary, such as his alma mater, some 300 miles away.
It was the “be a good Baptist” speech that scared me. I like my Baptist church. It’s a good church. I don’t know, though, that I’m ready to commit myself to “being a Baptist.” Being a member of a church of a particular denomination is one thing. Stamping myself neatly into the mold of a particular denomination is quite another. Basically, the line was something about, if I went to a non-Baptist seminary, then a lot of Baptist churches would be suspicious and unwilling to give me any position at their church. What I’m thinking is, “why would I even consider being associated with any church that had those kinds of sectarian issues?” But what I mumbled back was something about not being sure about the whole denominational thing. I’m not really sure about how all these large, supra-church structures work So he went into an explanation about how basically all denominations are like that, so I’d best figure out which one I wanted before I went to school. Then he went back into the push for a good Baptist seminary.
My brakes were officially braking. I don’t want to be a good little Baptist and preach the party line. I don’t want to concern myself with making sure I’ve jumped through the appropriate hoops to get a position that pays enough to do “God’s work” and still buy a nice house. If I preach, I want to preach the Truth that needs no accreditation. Seminary was officially on hold.
 
(to be continued…)
neumatikos 