Chapter 18. Morris Venden

Spring Week of Prayer came the second week of April. The speaker was someone named Morris Venden. He was the pastor at the La Sierra College Church. He had an unusual approach for a Week of Prayer. He had no drug experience or sexual adventures to spice up his “pre-conversion story.” In fact, he didn’t even tell a conversion story at all in his first sermon.

He began with Pascal’s wager. Give me a fifty-fifty chance that God is real, that the Bible is true. I’ll give you a fifty-fifty chance that it’s all a fairy tale.

If you’re right and I’m wrong, what have I lost? Maybe a few momentary pleasures that I avoided because I thought they were wrong. But in general, following Jesus, especially in the United States, does not take away from one’s quality of life. If you’re right and there is no God, no heaven, no hell, what have I lost? Not much.

But if I’m right and you’re wrong. What have you lost? Everything. Heaven. God. A billion years of joy and happiness. And that is just the beginning.



My cousin Ricky, who wasn’t particularly religious found Venden’s approach intriguing. He would have rejected the pushy revival approach. But Venden’s laid back, conversational style sneaked past his defenses. He actually found himself listening.

Another evening, Venden began with an imaginative story about an encounter with the Devil: You are riding the elevator in the Empire State Building. On the 33rd floor someone gets on the elevator with you. He looks vaguely familiar, but you try not to stare. He speaks to you. He has a proposition. He’ll give you ten million dollars on two conditions. One, you’ve got to spend it all in the next twelve months. And two, at the end of the twelve months you agree to return to the Empire State Building, take the elevator to the observation deck and jump off.

Venden wanted to know, would you do it? Again, Ricky found himself hooked. Venden engaged his imagination, his spirit of adventure. But I was troubled. Venden was interesting, but there was something wrong with his theology.

Venden told of getting a phone call while he was a young pastor. The woman on the phone wanted to know, do you know God?

Venden was a preacher. He knew all kinds of things about God. He could give Bible studies on multiple religious topics. But this woman was asking if he knew God? He was already struggling with his sense of disconnection with God. This phone call brought it into devastating focus. He realized he did not know God.

He decided to read the book Steps to Christ written by our prophet. Surely, this book would help him get to know God. He underlined everything that seemed important. When he was done, he had underlined nearly the entire book underlined. Which wasn’t very helpful. So he went back through the book. This time he underlined only those passages that offered concrete, understandable instructions. He skipped all the poetic stuff, phrases like “fall on the rock and be broken,” “look to the Lamb,” “be washed in the blood.” He had heard these all his life. Everyone used them, but he didn’t have the foggiest idea of what they really meant. How do you fall on the rock? How can you take a bath in blood?

He underlined only explicit, comprehensible commands. Do this. Do that. When he got all the way through he could summarize the entire book in three sentences: Read your Bible. Pray. Tell other people what you found in doing the first two.

Venden insisted if a person did these three things, they would be in relationship with God, i.e. saved. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. Read your Bible, pray and witness . . . and you are . . . saved.

This was the refrain of his sermons all week. The longer I listened the more uncomfortable I became. What about doing right? What about conquering bad habits like sexual fantasizing and masturbation and exaggerating and eating sweets?

He sounded like a Baptist. All you had to do to be saved was believe. You could sin all you wanted. You didn’t even have to make any particular effort. Just believe and everything would be all right. There was no way this could prepare a person to live through the time of trouble without a heavenly mediator. It was way too simple.

Venden kept preaching. I kept listening. I was drawn. He quoted from Ellen White and the apostles Paul and John. He argued the only real security we could have during the end of time was a good relationship with someone strong enough to save us. In fact, the best modern word for the ancient concept of faith was “relationship.”

As the week progressed, I found myself being convinced. His aphorisms made sense. We are saved by faith not by works, by relationship not by behavior, by who we know not what we know. Maybe. It was worth considering.

By late in the week, I had come far enough around that I wanted to ask this preacher about my great struggle with the call to ministry. I signed up for one of the time slots he had available on Friday.

I walked into the room and shut the door behind me.

“Elder Venden, how does a person know if they have been called to the ministry? I always planned to be a doctor, but now I’m a theology major. Still, I wonder. How you know if God is really calling you?”

Venden was slow answering, but there was no hesitancy in his voice, “My advice for anyone considering entering the ministry is go do something else. If God wants you to be a minister, he won’t let you be anything else. If God doesn’t want you to be a minister, you don’t want to be one either.”

The answer had a certain irresistible logic. It didn’t do much to calm my inner turmoil. Did it mean I should drop my theology major and go back to pre-med? How hard could one legitimately work at avoiding the ministry? Watching Venden enthrall a thousand students with his preaching gave me a new vision of what ministry could be. Here was a preacher who wasn’t boring, whose preaching was not rooted in a conversion story featuring drugs, alcohol and sex, who talked about spiritual life in a way that made sense.

I could see myself doing that. I could travel around the country to Adventist colleges telling students about God. And doing it in a way that was compelling and transforming. If ministry was like that, I could see myself doing it.


I spent the summer after my freshman year doing volunteer construction at two different Adventist schools. My cousin Jimmy came with me. I read Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis. I loved it. Jimmy asked questions I couldn't answer. Like, if Christians are supposed to be unselfish, why do Christian men look for pretty women? If you were to really follow Christ wouldn't you find the ugliest woman you could and marry her to give her happiness? I had never thought of that. Jimmy also talked about how a person who receives kindness benefits the giver of kindness by allowing them the pleasure of serving. I had never thought of that either. Jimmy's questions didn't destroy my faith. They did make me puzzle over the operation and limits of altruism.

The next fall, I was back at Southern Missionary College.