Personal History
While I was raised
as a Christian, I believe God especially got me by the throat sometime
in late high-school. I remember getting very interested in the book of
Revelation, for some reason, and reading a few pages each night before
I went to bed. What caught my attention weren't the end-times details,
but the simple and dramatic picture of Christ. Here was a man, a
God-man, born as humble "lamb" but who will one day visibly gather-up
and reign over the whole cosmos. "If there really is a Jesus anything
like what this book describes," I thought, "then I and everybody else
ought to live differently.” If Jesus was just a myth or an elaborate
metaphor, then he could be safely ignored or studied as you would any
mythical figure. But if he was for real, then he would have to matter
more than anything else. So, in stumbling and very quiet ways, I began
to grow in the faith, mostly without other Christian friends.
When
I entered Cal Poly as a freshman, however, I hit a major faith crisis - how, really, could I be so sure that Jesus was for real and the Bible
was true? Many of my dorm-mates were enthusiastic hedonists who happily
lived in obvious disregard for most traditional morality. This didn't
surprise me; I'd seen all the movies that show the excesses of life in
a college dorm. What began to bother me was that I wasn't sure I could
make a case for why my moral preferences were any truer than theirs.
That my lifestyle was wiser they might have admitted themselves, but
what about truer? I tried to live by the Bible’s commands, but what
could I possibly say to my hall-mate who would reply, "That's great for
you, but I live my life according to the credo of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll." (OK, the rock ‘n roll part wasn’t so bad, for by now I was a
DJ at KCPR.) Frankly, this was a terrifying position – was Christianity
in any sense objectively true, or had I been just enculturated into it?
Is it merely a subjective preference? Was Freud right that my religious
beliefs were a sneaky creation of my subconscious, trying to compensate
for who-knows-what psychological deficiency?
The struggle to
find objective ground for my belief lasted most of a year. I can
completely sympathize with the early Existentialists who wrote about
the "angst" and "nausea" of fearing that the world was meaningless and
unknowable. But two things happened during that year that eventually
brought my crisis to an end: I discovered dead Christian apologists,
and I made friends with a handful of smart, living, Christians (most of
whom lived one floor up from my hedonist friends). On one hand, I
started reading everything I could get my hands on that argued either
for or against Christianity. I read Muslim theologians, rationalist
skeptics, even an English bishop who thought all traditional Christian
doctrine was old-fashioned and ridiculous. But I also discovered
writers like C.S. Lewis, Dostoevsky, and a few others who took all of
my questions and doubts seriously, and had reasons for belief that went
even deeper. To summarize a long journey, I came to realize that my
doubts were themselves based on a lot of unproven assumptions (to
specialists: my religious epistemology was put on trial and found to
be, well, blindly attached to Enlightenment rationalism), and, I came
to believe that it made much more sense to believe in the Jesus of the
New Testament than to reject him. The Christian faith is much more than
an intellectual assent to a list of beliefs, of course, but for me, I
couldn’t go further with Christianity unless I was certain I wasn’t
being hoodwinked. I do not now believe that Christianity is provable by
some criteria of "proof", but I do believe that it is far more
reasonable to be a Christian than not, that Christ is compelling to
those who come to him objectively, and that the Bible itself holds up
very well as historic testimony. I have also become convinced that
knowing and believing in Christ answers some of the most basic human
yearnings, and that doing so does not require turning off one's mind.
The
other factor that year was the group of Christians I met. Most of them
were smart, funny, compassionate, and basically lived as if Jesus
Christ was real and utterly important. It was from them that I learned
much about how to live as a Christian, how to worship, how to explain
Christianity to others, and how live with that mysterious combination
of humility and conviction that Christ asks of his people. They also
encouraged me to lead a dorm Bible-study, which I did, and by the end
of college I began to think that full-time work in some type of
ministry fit my gifts and interests more than working in industry.
After graduation, I packed the car and drove to Boston where I spent
the next several years at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and
eventually (skipping way ahead) finished doctoral work at the
University of Bristol (UK) in historical theology. If college was about
becoming gripped and convinced of basic Christianity, seminary and grad
school was about going deep into theology and biblical studies (which I
decided I'd better do before inflicting anyone with lectures or
sermons!) With some trepidation I accepted an invitation to plant a
church in San Luis Obispo. Trinity Presbyterian Church had its first
worship service in summer of 1995. My main work, since then, has been
as a pastor. In a part-time way I’ve also kept up with academics - I've
had the pleasure lecturing in Religious Studies and Cal Poly and in the
Philosophy department of Cuesta College, and I am also an adjunct
professor for a local extension of Fuller Theological Seminary.
More
importantly, along the way I met and married Sally, a
Southerner-without-an-accent, and we now have two children and live
near downtown San Luis Obispo. Sally can explain to you the ideals of "New Urbanism" and why everyone should do as we did by moving to the
town core, but I will just tell you than waking up to the smell of
bacon from the nearby diner and getting to walk to church, my office,
and scones, has a utopian ring to it.
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