Through Fear To Faith

Introduction

This book got its start almost twenty years ago. A book, though, was the farthest thing from my mind when I sat at my desk that May Monday morning and began to write. All I knew was that I had to fashion some sort of response to a question one of Washington, D. C.’s more notable “talking heads” had asked on a local television news panel: “and just what is a Nazarene, anyway?”

The topic that Saturday night on “Agronsky and Company” was the presidential candidacy of Gary Hart. This was just days before Donna Rice became a household name, so Senator Hart was still a major player in the race for the Democratic nomination. Some non-sex character questions were already rumbling around: he had changed his name as well as his age, and had slightly altered the name of his college. It was this bit of past doctoring – making Bethany Nazarene College be, simply, Bethany College – that caused James J. Kilpatrick to ask the question that prompted me to put pen to paper.

I had heard of Gary Hart long before his name was in the news. He was one of us: us being a rather large group – spread out all over the country – of persons who had made the decision to leave the church that had nurtured them in the faith. The church in question was the Church of the Nazarene, a relatively small – but fast growing – conservative denomination. 

I had no idea of my audience that Monday morning; I just wrote. My opening line was a suggestion that it might well be that I was the only guy in town (I was pastor at Capitol Hill Methodist Church at the time) who could understand why Gary Hart might not want to dwell on his religious past, because I, like him, was a “backslidden” (their word) Nazarene.

What followed was a mini spiritual journey centering on what it was like growing up in a restrictive religious environment, the pain of not being able to go to movies or school dances, and always feeling a bit out of it socially. I also wrote of the joy in finding a church that gives one room to grow.

To this day, I find it hard to believe that I stuffed those words into an envelope addressed to the editor of the Washington Post. Who did I think I was just throwing something over the transom at the prestigious Post? I had visions of Meg Greenfield and her editorial compatriots splitting their sides over the audacity of this small time Methodist preacher presuming to think that they had time for such pious drivel.

Then, while that missile was en route, the flash bulbs went off behind the shrubs in front of Gary Hart’s Capitol Hill town house, and his presidential bid was toast. Not only was his candidacy out of the question, so also was any notion, however slight, I might have entertained that my piece would ever see the light of day. Or so I thought.

I was wrong. The article ran on Sunday, and the calls started coming. Wire services picked it up, it appeared in papers all over the country, and it was selected for “The Best of the Post.” It was pretty good writing, but not that good. What helped it along was Gary’s fall from grace. One southern paper ran it next to a cartoon that showed Gary’s pants down around his ankles, his boxer shorts had hearts on them, and a bimbo was clutching his ankles. They titled my piece, “What’s in Gary’s Hart.”

Notoriety aside, my best guess is that what grabbed a fair number of people was that little snippet of my faith journey that had me moving out of, what was, for me anyway, a restrictive religious environment, so that I might find a faith that was my own.  At least this is what most of the letters and calls indicated. 

Since that time, high on my “to do” list has been the stretching of that article into a more fully fleshed out recounting of my faith journey. The public response to my article had something to do with this desire of mine to tell a bit more of my faith story. But other factors have been at work egging me on.

One is the reaction I used to get from my congregations when I would go public with some of my wrestling matches with God. Even before it became good homiletical form for preachers to stick pieces of their story into their sermons, I would do so, and invariably these were the sermons that elicited the most positive feedback.

Another were the comments I was getting from those who, like me, left the church of our childhood, but who, like me, left the church altogether. And, to be honest, can’t understand how on earth I have managed to live out my life “feeding at the trough of organized religion,” as one of them has not so delicately put it. This is what one of my friends from those long ago years said in a recent e-mail.

“I would like to know about your journey from growing up a Nazarene and the moving into the Methodist Church. How did you keep from just throwing it all out? I certainly struggled for years over religious beliefs aft