Chapter 19 Revival

I was in my dorm room doing homework the second week of December, 1971. The guy at the front desk called on the intercom. “McLarty, you there?”
“Yea.”
“You have a phone call.”
“I’ll be right down.”

The first thing I noticed when I picked up the phone was the voice–cheery and British.
“Hey ole chap. Colin Cook here. Your brother said you might be interested in coming to help us here in New York.”
Arthur had talked to me about this guy when we met at a Bible conference a couple of weeks earlier in upstate New York.
The Bible conference was a student-organized event growing out of a revival sweeping Adventist campuses in the United States. On some campuses, the spark was preaching by Adventist Jesus Freaks. At Southern the preaching of Morris Venden was the catalyst.
Student organizers at SMC chartered a couple of buses for the trip north. Faculty at the school tried to dissuade the leaders, then tried to dissuade the rest of us. But it was a hopelessly lopsided contest. Revival, mission, preparing for the end of time and taking the gospel to the world on one side. On the other, normal class schedules, protocols for approving trips that took students out of classes, concerns about the credentials of the conference’s organizers.
We boarded the busses Thursday night with grudging faculty approval and pulled into Camp Berkshire about four o’clock Friday. The kids from the other three schools–Andrews U. in Michigan, Atlantic Union College near Boston and Columbia Union College near Washington, D. C.–were already there. I asked around for Arthur, but nobody knew anything about him.
Camp Berkshire had been built in the 1920s as a summer resort in the Taconic hills an hour or so north of New York City. Adventists bought it in the sixties long after the Catskill region ceased being a summer destination. There were still hints of the resort’s former glory. The porch of the “Lodge” was built around two massive red oaks. The broad front steps spilled down onto a paved patio that wrapped around another three or four grand oaks.
The Lodge housed the kitchen and dining room on the ground floor and had a few sleeping rooms on the second floor. Across the patio from the lodge was the “Hotel.” It had four floors of sleeping rooms. Both buildings were ancient wooden structures. The floors felt soft when you ran down the halls. If your room was not on the ground floor, it was wise to look out your window to see if you could find a way to climb down or a reasonably soft place to land in case of a fire in the night.
After supper that first night, we gathered in the hotel’s solarium, a large room on the south side of the second floor. It was jammed. There were no chairs. We all sat on the floor.
The music was folk songs accompanied by guitar. (This was 1971.) Elder Taylor, the youth director for the New York City Conference spoke. He was warm and fatherly, not particularly compelling as a speaker. But the kids who knew him all liked him. He was real, they said. So I listened.
At the end of his sermon, he invited kids to share their testimonies, to tell how God had been working in their lives. A girl told of growing up religious, going to church, going through the motions, but God never seemed real. He voice was low and almost apologetic. She seemed on the verge of tears as she talked. “The whole religious thing was just habit,” she said. “There was nothing about it that was real.
“Then one night I had a dream. In my dream I was walking downtown surrounded by all these people, strangers. They were hurrying somewhere. All of a sudden I heard someone call my name. I stopped and looked around but didn’t see anyone. I started walking again. And again I heard my name. I looked around. Then the crowd parted and I saw the kindest man in the world looking right at me. I realized it was Jesus. He smiled then disappeared.
“I went back to sleep. It was the sweetest sleep I’ve ever had. The next morning when I picked up my Bible, it was like God was right there talking to me. I can hardly wait open the Word now and see what God will tell me.”
Guys and girls talked. A few students told of playing with alcohol and drugs before God got through to them. One fellow told of struggling to come up with the money for college this year. His parents weren’t Christians. They wanted him to go to the local college at home, but he was sure God wanted him in a Christian school. He had gotten a good job at the beginning of the summer but had an accident on the job at the end of June. He spent a week in the hospital and two more weeks at home recuperating. There was no way he was going to pull together enough money for registration, never mind tuition.
He fretted and worried. Then in the middle of August he finally told God. “I can’t do it. I’ve done the best I can. I still owe $800 for last year. I can’t register until that is paid off, and I have to have a thousand for registration, books and first tuition payment by the time school starts. If you want me to go to college, you’re going to have to do it.
“After that, I had a real peace about it.” He said. “It was like God told me, ‘Don’t worry. I can handle it.’
“A week before school started my pastor called me and told me that a member of the church had offered to pay my back tuition and my registration and to give two hundred dollars a month toward my tuition.
“I was amazed. I shouldn’t have been. God keeps his word. He promises that if we put him first, he will make sure we have everything else.”
Another guy talked of growing up in a minister’s home. “My dad and mom are good people, but I just didn’t connect. God seemed so unreal. In high school, I became an atheist. My parents didn’t pressure me, they just prayed.
“I did the smoking and drinking routine, but mostly I read books. Belief in God seemed so naive. I went to University of Pittsburgh my freshman year as a philosophy major. My professor was brilliant, but the more convinced I became of atheism the more miserable I became.
“At home on Christmas break I told God I was going to give him one more chance. (It was kind of funny. Here I was, an atheist, telling God I was going to give him one more chance.)” A ripple of sympathetic laughter ran through the crowd. “I was going to read the New Testament. If he showed up, fine. It not, well he couldn’t say I didn’t try.
“I sat down and started reading Matthew. By the time I was reading the story in Luke about the shepherds going to search for the baby in the manger, I found myself hoping they would find him. I found myself wishing I could go find him.
“The next day as I was reading the gospel of John, I knew something was happening. I could hardly put it down. God was showing up. I was being born again.
“I finished out last year at the University. Nearly everyday I would find something new in the Bible. God gave me chances to talk with other students about faith. This fall I went to Columbia Union College. I love it. Sabbath afternoons, a group of us spend time with kids in a project, doing crafts with them, telling them stories, trying to share Jesus’ love with them. I’ve never been happier.”
A guy named Tim told of going back and forth for months over whether he should be a teacher or nurse. It was driving him crazy. Finally, one night he prayed, “God, I need you to show me. I don’t know what to do. I have to make a decision. You’ve promised to speak to your people through your word. Please show me what to do.”
“I took my Bible, set it on my desk and let it fall open. I plunked my finger down on the page, then looked to see what it said. My finger was on Jeremiah 30:17. Guess what it says. ‘For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the LORD.’”
“I figured that was pretty obvious. I’m trying to spend an hour every day reading my Bible, because I know that God speaks through his word. He talks to me, that’s for sure.”

I loved the stories. They made God real. But I also listened with envy. Why did God give everyone else experiences they could talk about? I read the Bible every day. I believed God was present when I read it. But God did not talk to me personally when I read it. I had memorized whole chapters. I was formidable in arguments about Bible doctrines because I knew so many passages by heart. But I never received personal guidance. I didn’t encounter texts that solved my great dilemmas. No Bible verse ever answered my question about whether or not I should be a minister. The Bible didn’t give me any particular guidance about dating or breaking up with a particular girl. The Bible gave no information about what summer job God wanted me to do.
The experiential part of my religious life felt like an uncertain quest for a God who could not be touched or pleased. I knew what theologians said about God. I could quote Bible verses about God’s love, about his promises to answer our prayers. I had mastered the language Morris Venden used to describe a relationship with God. But what I felt was inadequacy, incompleteness, unworthiness, existential loneliness.

It was 11:30 before the meeting broke up. Afterwards, I ran into Arthur and his friends. I had read about their work in a church paper. They had created a coffee house, The Catacombs, in a former coalery under the 11th Street Adventist Church in Greenwich Village. They were sharing Jesus with hippies and street people. They themselves looked the part–the guys with their great shaggy beards and long hair, the women with long dresses, long hair, sunny faces and gentle spirits. They were all so . . . so Bohemian, so carefree. The chemistry among them was electric. They offered a sirenic glimpse of real community, of belonging. I admired the rawness and directness of their ministry. They all looked poor. They had struggled to come up with gas money to make the drive up from NYC.
I gave Arthur twenty bucks. It was really Dad’s money since Dad was paying my way through college. Dad and Arthur were not on the best of terms at that point, but sharing Dad’s money with Arthur seemed right. It was a sweet moment for me. For the first time in my life, Arthur appeared genuinely pleased with something I had done. He invited me to share a room with him and a couple of other guys.
The next morning, we were back in the solarium for Sabbath School and church. The sun came out. When the hotel was built, the solarium had overlooked the lake. Since then the trees had grown up and the lake was invisible, but the sky and views of distant hills filled the glass walls. It was a perfect setting for worship.
After lunch I went for a walk with several other kids. It had snowed over a foot on Thursday and the ground was still covered with heavy slush, but the roads were mostly clear. We walked north. The road was bordered with the remnants of ancient stone walls, stones dragged from the fields over a hundred years ago by farmers trying to pull a living from the ground. On the right, the fields had been completely taken over by trees–not that long ago. Beyond the large trees along the road, the trees formed a dense thicket of small diameter trunks. On the left the fields were still open, pasture apparently. The barbed wire fence along the road strung haphazardly on fence posts and trees.
Later in the afternoon there was more music, testimony and preaching. Saturday night was supposed to be recreation–snowmobiling, snow shoeing, a bonfire. But too much snow had melted for any decent snow activities. It was kind of rainy.
Arthur and his Jesus Freak friends saw this as divine intervention. God had more spiritual work he wanted us to do. About half the students joined them in the solarium for an evening of Bible study and prayer, especially prayer, using a novel format.
They called it conversational prayer. A person prayed for a sentence or paragraph or two then stopped. Someone else would pick up and pray whatever was on his or her mind. Then someone else. There was no particular order. We didn’t pray around the circle. We didn’t kneel. We didn’t always keep our eyes shut. The idea was to spend time together in the presence of God. Prayers began and ended without the customary formalities of “Our father in heaven . . . in Jesus’ name, Amen.”
Kids prayed about what they thought God might be calling them to do back at their schools. They prayed about old habits they wanted to change. At some point Arthur prayed someone would be called to take to gospel back to our home church in Memphis.
As he prayed, I felt a call in my heart. I would be that person. I loved my home town. I liked the people in the church. I wanted them to experience some of the excitement and enthusiasm I saw people experiencing at this Bible conference. I wanted them to know the good news that God is not waiting for us to become “good enough” before he will accept us and pardon us. God accepts us the way we are.
I knew the misery of feeling unworthy and guilty. I figured many other people in my home church felt the same. Maybe I could help them understand God’s grace. I prayed out loud saying I accepted the call to go back to Memphis to preach the gospel.
Sunday morning we boarded the bus for the return trip to SMC. Two weeks later Colin called.


When I talked with my parents about taking a year off from school to work at The New York Center, they were not thrilled. My mother was the most vocal. Why did I have to go so far away? Why didn’t I finish college first? New York was a dangerous place full of muggers.
Dad offered a few vague comments questioning the wisdom of working with a thirty-five-year-old minister who was single and living in Times Square. I could tell he wasn’t excited, but I was determined to go. My dad was a libertarian parent regarding anything that was not explicitly prescribed or proscribed by our church. Outside the rules of our religion, we kids were free to make our own decisions, however haywire and cock-eyed they might be. Dad bought my plane ticket.