Chapter 37 German New York Seventh-day Adventist Church

When Ted Wilson hired me to work for Metropolitan Ministries, there was no open slot in the organization. He created a position just for me. It was a bold move on his part, but not utterly illogical. While I was at seminary I never met another Anglo student who had the slightest interest in going to New York City. In fact, I had never met any Adventist pastor anywhere outside New York who had any interest in moving to the City. So, while I was eccentric, atypical, a maverick as one of my professors put it, I did have this going for me: I had a demonstrated ability to draw people together in spiritual work, I had lived in the City before, so my dreams of ministry there had some anchor in reality, and I WANTED to live and work in New York.

It didn't hurt that my father was a generous supporter of the church and a long-time acquaintance of Ted’s father. I'm sure it didn’t hurt that my name was recommended to Ted by a woman I met at Andrews who gone to high school with Ted. (After getting the job, I married her!) Still, I think the decision to hire me evinced Ted's commitment to reaching New York City. He was himself pursuing a radical vision of institutional ministry. And he was willing to give another radical visionary a chance, even if that visionary did not fit the usual profile of Adventist clergy.

Our prophet had written specific prophecies about Adventist work in New York City. The church was to send its best workers there. She predicted the Adventist work in NYC would become a shining example of what God wanted to accomplish in the rest of the world. She offered detailed strategies—a network of retreat centers and medical facilities in rural areas outside the city linked with churches, vegetarian restaurants and treatment centers in the city. After a few early attempts to implement this vision, denominational leaders forgot the city.

It's not that there was no Adventist presence in the City. By the 1980s there were well over a hundred Adventist congregations in the City, some with over a thousand members. Most of these congregations had distinct ethnic identities. In the first half of the 20th Century, Italians, Germans, Swedes, Norwegians, French, Japanese Adventists all had their own congregations. Over the decades as immigration patterns changed, these congregations switched to English as the language of worship. New ethnic groups coalesced. In the second half of the 20th Century, the ethnic makeup of the Adventist Church in New York City shifted dramatically, becoming largely Black and Brown—West Indian and Hispanic. All of this happened without any significant structural adjustments by the denomination. Congregations developed as they usually do. Pastors preached and conducted evangelistic meetings. People invited their friends and co-workers and sent their children to Adventist schools.

Occasionally, someone (usually white, usually from the West Coast) would read Ellen White's comments and feel called to come to New York to implement the prophet’s vision. Over the years these dreamers had established vegetarian restaurants and holistic health centers. They didn’t last—neither the people nor the institutions. They never had much impact on the city. But the history of failure appeared to have no impact on subsequent efforts.

Ted was not from the West Coast. And he had something going for him other visionaries lacked. His father was president of the world-wide Adventist Church. And his father had ambitions for his son.


In the mid-twentieth century, church leaders began to give attention to the fact that Adventist work world-wide was largely a rural and suburban phenomenon while the global population was migrating to the cities. We had to do something to reach the cities if we were going to be obedient to God's call to take our message to all people. The denomination purchased buildings in the center of several large cities to serve as evangelistic centers. The New Gallery Centre in London and New York Center in Times Square were the most famous of these centers.

The buildings did not effectively alter the church's visibility or effectiveness in these cities. A director would arrive. Church papers would publish a glowing article detailing the director's plans for creative outreach to the city. A few years later, another set of articles would appear detailing another incoming director's dreams and plans. There were never any articles about the realization of any of these dreams. The failure of the New York Center to impact the work of the church there was especially painful. Times Square was only four hours by train from the denomination's international headquarters outside Washington, D.C. And our prophet had specifically called the church to do noteworthy work in New York.

Eventually, Ted’s father, the General Conference President, led in the formation of a completely new organization to do something about the challenge of the New York City metropolitan area. Its director would report directly to the General Conference, thus bypassing the territorial jealousies created by the denomination’s administrative lines that separated Newark and suburban New Jersey from New York City and Westchester County from suburban Connecticut. Ted was appointed head of this organization. He came to his position absolutely persuaded that the key to doing effective outreach in New York City was “the blue print” mapped out by Ellen White. If we would only implement her vision, the church would experience dramatic, sustained growth. It would become a movement recognized by civic and business leaders as a boon to the well-being of the City.

Ted was assisted by a vice-president and treasurer and the usual secretaries. I was the first non-administrative person hired. My job was to give Bible studies, to do outreach in the Hells Kitchen neighborhood east of the Center, to assist in the running of monthly smoking cessation programs and be available for any other assignment that might support the denomination's evangelistic work. Ted talked with the Greater New York president about placing me unofficially in a Manhattan congregation where I could assist the pastor and gain ministerial experience.
I was assigned to the German New York Adventist Church on East 87th Street.

My first Sabbath there, I counted the people. Forty two. The occupancy notice posted on the rear wall read 455. The place looked empty. The building was very plain. Very high ceiling. The walls consisted of painted concrete block punctuated by cheap, aluminum-frame windows. The pews were white-blond oak with red cushions on a few of them toward the front. (Why buy cushions for pews that no one will sit on?)

The five English-speaking people there had their own Sabbath School class. During the worship service we sat in the back and Kurt Paulien, the head elder, translated for us. Actually, it was a loose paraphrase. I had no way of knowing whether the preacher was as boring as the translation.

The two things the church had going for it were the warmth of the old Germans–they were delighted to have visitors and made their delight evident–and the warm light flooding through the east windows.

The pastor said hello to me and that was the extent of our interaction. He never talked with me about the church or my work. He never invited me to attend board meetings. “Good morning, how are you,” at church on Sabbath morning was as far as we got. After I had been there a few weeks, the head elder (the leading lay person in an Adventist congregation) asked me to preach once a month. He explained that the German pastor did not feel comfortable preaching in English. I presumed he was speaking on behalf of the pastor, but the pastor never spoke to me about my preaching.

The congregation was wrestling with reality. They could not continue as a German-speaking church. German immigration which had built the church in the 30s and 40s and filled it with members in the 1950s was over. The last German-speaking person to join their church was a Romanian. Most of the kids who had grown up in the church had moved away from New York. Those who remained in the city no longer considered themselves Adventists. The average age of the Germans was somewhere north of 65. The youngest German was a single woman in her fifties. Still they treasured their German identity. They prided themselves on their industry and organization, their financial generosity, their strictness in observing all the Adventist rules. How could they surrender their church to people who would lower the standard? Still, it had to happen. The German identity and culture of the church could not be maintained without Germans. The English-speaking Sabbath School class and the English translation of the German sermon and now an English sermon once a month were their first steps toward a transition they dreaded.

While the pastor completely ignored me, the members made me welcome, at church and in their homes. They loved to tell me about their children–adults older than I was. These children of the German Church were were engineers and lawyers, doctors and teachers. They were attentive and generous with their parents. Most of the children were significantly better off financially than their parents. And their parents loved to brag about the ways their children helped to ease the challenges they faced as they aged.

Ursala’s daughter, Brita, was a lawyer. She did a fair amount of pro-bono work for indigent clients. Ursala was a brittle diabetic with frequent medical needs. Brita took her to the doctor. Ursala could get around the city by herself. She even had a car, but Brita insisted on driving her mother the doctor.

Ursala protested she didn’t need Brita to play taxi. She wasn’t helpless. But Brita brushed her protests aside. Ursala’s husband had left her when Brita was only a year and a half old. Together, they had struggled through lean years. Ursala had sent her to the Adventist School in Jackson Heights, then to the Adventist high school in Flushing. There was never enough money, but somehow they made it through.
Now Brita was a lawyer. She was married and had two boys. They were the smartest boys in the whole world. One played the piano. The other liked to tinker with things. He won first prize in his school’s science fair. She thought he was going to be a scientist.

Brita was a good daughter. “I couldn’t ask for a better daughter.” Ursala said. “I pray for her every day. And for her boys and her husband. I pray that she will come back to church.

“I don’t understand. I sent her to Greater New York Academy and Atlantic Union College [both Adventist schools]. When she was young she learned all her memory verses. She used to sing in church. But once she got out of college she just seemed to lose interest. She used to go to church sometimes, ‘just for you’ she would say. I don’t know what I did wrong.”

What could I say? I had no children of my own. I wasn’t even married. What did I know about why people grow up in Adventist homes then decide to be good people who don’t go to church? In the world I grew up in, people who quit going to church were bad people. They were people with moral problems–liars, cheaters, adulterers, people who were selfish, greedy and disrespectful of parents. I didn’t have a category for people who were good and no longer interested in church.


Over the months other English-speaking people began attending. Vincent and Marilyn Gardner worked for the “Van Ministry.” This was the brain child of Juanita Kretschmar, the conference president’s wife. Pairs of volunteers drove remodeled RVs to neighborhoods all over the city to offer free blood pressure checks to passers-by. They visited Wall Street and midtown Manhattan and desperate neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx. They offered health information to everyone and urged people with elevated blood pressure to see their physicians. They looked for opportunities to pray with people and offered Bible study guides to those who seemed receptive.

It was the most effective outreach the church had ever done, touching far more people than the New York Center and the Adventist-owned vegetarian restaurants and book stores combined. Not that a lot of people joined the church through this ministry, though some did. The Van Ministry made friends for the church and helped the church turn its face outward.

Vincent Gardner was a physician who had left his comfortable practice in Colorado to serve God in New York. In New York he did not practice medicine, instead he acted as the medical adviser for the Van Ministry and gave health lectures in area churches and in health fairs and any other place that gave him an audience. He offered Christian counseling by appointment at the Van Center.

At the German Church, Vincent and his wife quietly welcomed visitors. She exuded a gentle graciousness that was magnetic. Vincent occasionally preached the English sermon. His sermons were thoughtful and ponderous. They had substantial content, but it was work listening to them.

Not long after I began attending, a young woman in her twenties showed up. In hind sight she was the first sign of the future of the German Church. We didn't know it then, of course. We were just thrilled to have young person among us.

Under Ted's leadership, Metro Ministries opened a lunch shop near Wall Street as the first institutional component of their master plan. Then, Ted and his vice-president began scouring the close-in upstate counties for a location for their country outpost, a compound where city workers could live while providing ministry in the City. It would provide an escape from the noise, filth and decadence of the city. At the same time he was working on a dissertation for a Ph. D. in religious education at New York University. His dissertation was a detailed business plan for doing evangelism in New York City based on the visions of Ellen White.
Ted finally found a defunct Catholic college for sale in New Paltz. I was invited along when the Metro board toured the place. Everyone was talking excitedly about how this could be remodeled into the perfect country refuge for church employees and for patients who would come to the health center they imagined. Setting it up would take millions of dollars, but that was God’s problem. All they had to do was to be faithful to vision God had given his people through the prophet.

Chapter 36 Bobby

In October, Mrs. Toby called me down from my office to visit with Bobby. He was looking for a handout. I did not invite him up to my office. We talked there in the lobby a while. I explained we didn’t give out money, but we’d really like to have him come and join us for a Bible study on Wednesday evenings. To my astonishment, he showed up. He came to the Bible studies for a number of weeks, and I learned a bit of his story.
He had flunked out of high school. Did odd jobs here and there and tried not to get drunk. But it was hard. He was living on the street. Surviving. But alcohol was winning the battle. His attendance at the Bible studies became infrequent. Usually, he would come by at odd hours and ask for me. Mrs. Toby would call me down and we would visit in the lobby. He always asked for money. Always told me stories of disasters and problems heartbreak.
In mid December I invited him to come and stay in my apartment. We would fight this monster together. There was just one condition: he had to stay with me 24/7. If he went back out on the street, he was on his own. He agreed.
I was thrilled and nervous. Would he steal from me? Would he be able to resist the allure of alcohol? I was motivated in part by a story I heard about some minister who was a conference Health and Temperance Director. He had read some statements by our prophet about the importance of “personal work.” It was not enough for us to [find a quotation]

In obedience to this divine command, this minister invited an alcoholic into his home. He took the alcoholic with him to the office. The alcoholic sat with him in committee meetings. Everywhere the minister went, his alcoholic friend went, too. After some months, the alcoholic was able to move back into the regular world of work and family. What a wonderful outcome. What a terrific story. What a challenge to put the principles of Jesus into actual practice.
I fixed up a bed for Bobby in the living room using blankets I had and a mattress I found in a storeroom. Trying not to be obvious I checked over the apartment for any times that might tempt him to steal. I put a few things out of sight. I slept very fitfully that first night. But in the morning Bobby was still there and nothing was missing as far as I could tell.
We ate breakfast and had worship together in my apartment. Then we attended staff worship together. Afterward, Miss Harding informed me she was not thrilled about the idea of having a bum staying in the Center. I assured her I would keep an eye on him. She protested I was putting other people at risk. We had single women who worked in the Center. There were a couple of families that lived there. The Center was their sanctuary from the dirty, dangerous world of Times Square and Eighth Avenue. We couldn't afford to spoil that by bringing bums into the private areas of the Center. I assured her Bobby would never be out of my sight. She relented, very reluctantly.
It lasted two and a half days. Midmorning on the third day, he told me he needed to leave. For just a little while, he said. He needed to see a friend, then he would be back.
“If you leave, you can’t come back.” I said. “You know and I know that what you really want is a drink. Why throw everything away for a lousy drink. You’ve got three days invested in being dry. You can make a new life. Get your GED. Get a job that actually pays something. You can have an apartment to live in instead of living on the street. You can be free of your addiction. Why don’t you stay?”
He wasn’t belligerent or loud, just hopeless and insistent. He had to leave. He couldn’t stay. As he talked his face spoke of hopelessness and resignation.
I talked and talked. He listened. Offered short responses to my long speeches. Finally, he got up. He was leaving. We walked to the elevator. Rode down to the lobby. I opened the door and watched him walk west toward Eighth Avenue.
Mrs. Toby was at her desk. “So you couldn’t get him to stay?”
“No. I tried everything I could think of. But he insisted he had to go. I know he’s going to go right out and get drunk.”
“Maybe not. Maybe he’ll come back.”
“No, I don’t think so. And even if he does, I’m not going to take him back into my apartment. That was our agreement. If he left, he couldn’t come back.”

Several times in January and February, Bobby came by the Center. He always smelled of alcohol. He’d ask for money, then visit awhile. He whined about life on the street. Protested I didn’t understand how hard it was. Promised he'd pay me back. Argued I wasn't being Christian. I argued he could change his life if he chose to. There were other ways to live. God could help him change. Maybe AA would help him. If he was hungry I would take him upstairs to my apartment and make him a sandwich. Usually he wasn’t interested in food. He was just depressed and wanted someone to talk to. And, of course, wanted money.
In late February he came by about five thirty one evening. It was a miserable day. Raining, in the low forties. Because of the overcast, it was already dark, the wet streets reflecting headlights and street lights. Bobby was depressed, said he was thinking of suicide.
I talked to him about God’s love and the possibility of a brighter future. I asked about his family, but he was alienated from them. Our talking did nothing to lift his spirits. If anything it seemed the longer he talked the worse he was. I tried every tack I could think of. His darkness was scary. He was insistent. He was going to commit suicide. There was no point in living..
After a half hour or so, he abruptly got up. “It’s no use. I can’t stand it any more.” He pushed open the glass door and stepped out onto the side walk. He stopped at the curb, a lost soul on a dark and rainy night. As I watched him standing there, I could hear a truck coming up the street. It was accelerating. Bobby glanced to his right toward the sound of the truck. He stepped into street and then, just as the truck can into view, leaped forward.
The truck hit him squarely and threw him forward. The driver slammed on his brakes and skidded to a stop just inches from Bobby’s limp body.
I raced out the door. The driver, climbed out of his truck, visibly shaken.
“He just came out of nowhere. I never saw him until I hit him.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw him jump. It wasn't your fault.”
I was sure Bobby was dying or dead. I ran into the Center to get Dr. Dunn who had an office on the sixth floor and to call an ambulance. Then went back outside. Mrs. Tobey brought a blanket and we covered him. Dr. Dunn arrived. Checked him over, didn't seem too worried. “He'll make it.”
The ambulance arrived and they hauled Bobby away.
I gave my name and phone number to the driver.
Some time later I got a calls from a couple of different lawyers. I told them what I had seen. I was never called to court. I presumed there was no trial. A couple of months later, Bobby came by the center. I asked him why he had sued the trucking company.
“It wasn't my idea. There was this lawyer visiting people in the hospital. He told me he could get me some money. Sounded like a pretty good idea to me.”
“Bobby! That's stealing! How could you sue the company when you deliberately jumped in front of the truck?”
“I don't know. The lawyer said it was a good idea.”

Five or six years later I ran into Bobby on the street. He had a job and an apartment. He looked good. Change happens.

Chapter 35 Deep, Dark Closet

My first Sabbath back in New York, I attended Crossroads Church. The reunion was sweet. The people were wonderfully warm and welcoming. And I was utterly captivated by the pastor. Jack Love was a biker who had spent years as a logger in the Northwest. He didn’t put his motorcycle or chainsaws on display in his sermons but you could see them in his body language. His preaching evinced an intense piety and passionate involvement with theology. He read books and it showed. His slouching posture and evident physical strength combined with scholarship contrasted sharply with my image of pastors as pudgy, blustery, intellectual lightweights.

The church still met in the same oppressive space–a windowless auditorium, the ceiling and upper walls painted black, cinema style. I couldn’t imagine voluntarily consigning myself to spending three hours every Sabbath morning in this environment. In addition, the congregation was by now almost one hundred percent West Indian. The outward form of their church life was a fossilized version of 1940s and 50s American Adventism brought to the West Indies by missionaries. I enjoyed a warm connection with several individuals in the congregation, but found the corporate culture of the church suffocating. It was very authoritarian.
Everything they did was “by the book.” They had no questions, only answers.

I visited the Greenwich Village Church where my brother had worked when I lived in NYC before. The entire time I worked with Colin Cook, I dreamed of being part of the Village Church. The sanctuary had been built by one of the Rockefellers for the Baptists and was bought later by the Adventists. It had immense stained-glass windows that filled with light on sunny mornings. The ceiling was high and airy. Nearly everything about the building was intriguing and attractive. The congregation had dwindled. There were just over a hundred in attendance. But the kaleidoscopic mix of people reflected the city.

After church I ran into Tim Miller, tall and emaciated-looking, impeccably dressed in a black suit. He didn’t have a British accent, but he looked like he should have. It was impossible to tell how old he was. He looked exactly the same as he had six years earlier when I met him as a friend of Colin Cook. Tim was very effeminate and very devout. I sat with him at potluck.

The food was meager, but it was enough. Tim was still working in the fashion industry, still single, and still praying, “that God will bring the right woman into my life.”
I doubted it.
“I don’t believe in dating.” He explained. “I believe God will bring just the right woman into my life. When he does, I’ll know. And she will know, too, because she will be that close to God. Why go through all the heartbreak of dating and breaking up? God can’t want us to go through all that. It can’t be his plan for men and women to chase each other and hurt each other. So, I’ll just wait until God brings the right person into my life. Then I’ll get married.”

“So you’re not going to do anything to find the right person? You’re not going to introduce yourself to attractive women. You’re not going to go to a concert or a museum with a woman unless you’re convinced she’s the one that God has picked out for you to marry?”

“Why should I? God doesn’t make mistakes; I do. So I’ll just wait until he brings the right person into my life. Besides, I’m not sure people should be getting married these days. We are so close to the end of time, I wonder if getting married isn’t just asking for trouble. Because when the time of trouble comes, you’ll be worried about your wife instead of focusing solely on doing God’s will. Your wife could become one more avenue through which Satan could attack you.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I was suspicious of people who tried to run their lives by the eschatological calendar. My dad didn’t think he would live to finish high school, then didn’t think time would last long enough for him to finish college and medical school. He got married in part because he wanted to make sure he got some time to enjoy conjugal pleasures before the return of Jesus and the end of marriage and sex. I used to wonder if hidden in this story was a thickly-veiled implication that if he hadn’t been in such a hurry he might have made a better match.

So Dad got married because time was short. Tim was remaining single “because time was short.” Though I was sure that the eschatological calendar actually had nothing to do with Tim's singleness. Tim wouldn’t recognize the “right woman” if she came and sat in his lap. That's what went through my mind. Then I scolded myself. Just because a man displayed effeminate mannerisms did not prove that he was gay. Who was I to question his self-professed interest in women and marriage?
As lunch was winding down. Tim invited me to go with him and Olivo to a park on the west side of the Hudson. I had no plans. I wasn’t looking forward to spending the afternoon alone, so I said, sure, I’d come along.

We piled into Tim’s car and drove toward the Holland Tunnel. I was getting out of the City! No matter how much I loved Manhattan, I always thrilled to get out. Manhattan is so intense. The energy and vitality are utterly absorbing when you’re there. But the sense of decompression, of release, of catching one’s breath when you leave the city is also intoxicating. I loved escaping, but already in the car, even before we reached the Tunnel, I wondered what I had gotten myself into.
Tim and Olivo were getting acquainted. At church, I had thought they were old friends. Turned out they had never seen each other before. Olivo was enthralled with Tim’s description of his life in the fashion world. Tim was equally taken with Olivo’s descriptions of his work as an aide in a kindergarten up in Spanish Harlem. They laughed and giggled.

At the park, the chemistry between the Tim and Olivo got hotter. They pushed each other on the swings. They chased each other around and over the jungle gym. They talked with rapt intensity, giggling with unrestrained mirth and excitement.
Philosophically, I was committed to compassion and tolerance for homosexual people. But finding myself the third person on a date thick with coquettish flirting and sexual energy felt really weird.

After an hour at the park, I suddenly remembered an evening appointment. “Tim, I’m really sorry, but I’m going to have to run. I need to get back to the city for a social this evening at the Crossroads Church.”

“Oh, do you have to go so early? It’s such a beautiful day. I’m afraid we won’t get too many more of these before winter really sets in. I can drop you off later right at the church.”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll just take a bus down to Union station and get the PATH train into the city. I really appreciate you’re including me this afternoon. I didn’t even know this park existed. Thanks, so much.”

“You sure you have to go now? It’s still a couple of hours till sundown?”

“Yes, I think I better head on back. I want to do a little reading this afternoon before I go to the social.”

I stared out the bus window, unseeing. What kind of life would it be? To be so committed to the church and to God, but to never be able to admit your sexual identity, maybe even to yourself? I knew what it was like to have people ask why you were single. I remembered in college being invited to a weekend gathering at a faculty member’s cabin in the Sierras. The invitation meant a lot to me. I knew relatively few people on campus. I was definitely not part of any of the cool groups.

But there I was on Saturday night eating popcorn and talking with ten or twelve cool students and one of the most popular teachers on campus who was a sought-after speaker across the country. It was light-hearted fun until the teacher turned to me and asked, “So John, why are you still unattached?”

I was startled. I was by this time utterly enthralled with Carol and interested in Linda as well. Carol was Asian, sophisticated, and sensual. She radiated a mesmerizing beckoning. She was surrounded constantly by guys who appeared to be good friends and nothing more—which drove me crazy. I couldn’t understand how any male could hang around her for any length of time without being hopelessly enmeshed in her seductive spell. I was jealous of their ease. Every time I got close to her

I felt a head-spinning charge. She was dazzling, spell casting.
Linda was a sturdy redhead who drove a pickup, enjoyed backpacking and dreamed of living on a farm. She was profoundly practical. I was impressed with her easy sense of competence to deal with machinery. She didn’t set my heart on fire the way Carol did, but I admired her, was drawn to her. I loved her red hair.

But I wasn’t about to talk about either woman in a group of cool students with a cool professor–none of whom I knew well. So I offered my standard speech about my philosophy of dating and marriage: I wasn’t going to get married until I had finished school and had a job. And what was the point of dating if it wasn’t going to go anywhere. And given the amount of school I had ahead of me, I couldn't really see a dating relationship lasting that long. So why start?

The professor wasn’t buying it. How could I know what kind of woman I would want to live with the rest of my life if I didn’t develop some significant relationships here and now? Didn’t I think that dating was an important part of preparation for marriage? Besides, if I didn’t date now, how would I really be sure about the woman I did marry? Maybe the only reason I married her would be because she was the only person available to me in the narrower social setting that would likely be my situation after graduating from medical school. School was where you had the largest pool of women eligible for marriage. If I didn’t find someone here, what were my chances of finding someone out there?

At the time, it felt like he was wondering if I was gay. But, of course, he couldn’t ask me that. Not in front of others, maybe not even in his office behind closed doors. Because if I were gay, what would he be able to say? He could not offer any realistic hope of change nor could he bless me as I was. If I had been homosexual, as an Adventist professor he would have been bound by the doctrine of the church. Don’t ask; don’t tell was the most compassionate of all imaginable policies. But I was amused by what felt like an awkward dance around a question he was dying to ask.

Then there was the time in seminary when I was interviewed by the president of the Iowa Conference. I was looking for a job as a pastor which was more difficult than swimming up a waterfall since I wasn’t married and didn’t wear a suit and tie and had long curly hair. Still he and his vice-president were on campus interviewing prospective pastors, and I was a prospective pastor. So I signed up for an interview slot. I could tell right away he was not interested in my candidacy. Still we through the motions. When he asked about my wife and found out I wasn’t married and didn’t have any immediate prospects, he came right out and asked, “Are you attracted to women?”

In the church, marriage was expected. If you were a guy over twenty-one and single, everyone wanted to know about your plans to remedy the situation. So I imagined myself in Tim's place. What if I were gay? It would be one thing to survive four years of interrogatory ambushes in college. But what if I faced an entire life of careful pretending?

What kind of inner dissonance must Tim live with in the church? He had absolute confidence in Adventist doctrine. He believed the Adventist teachings about the Mark of the Beast, the Time of Trouble and the Close of Probation. He confidently told others about the classic Adventist beliefs regarding the nature of the human soul and hell. He lived by the rules restricting entertainment and diet. He had internalized all the hundreds of details of Bible interpretation and life style that are the heritage of the Adventist community. The church was home for his heart. But he can never admit publicly his sexual identity. And while I believe there is much more to persons' identity than their sexuality, surely sexuality is a crucial element of who a person is. Tim had to be ready with an explanation for his singleness any time someone asked him. But if he was going to remain welcome in the church he could never hint at the real reason. When it came to sexuality, he could never tell the truth.

But what did I imagine was the right stance for the church? If I, after my close acquaintance with homosexual friends and roommates, found homosexual flirtation so repulsive, how could I condemn the negative reactions of others in the church? Bible interpretation is one thing, but gut reactions are not readily altered by footnotes and scientific studies.

The bus dropped me at the train station. I took the PATH train into Manhattan, glad to be alone.


Anachronistic Note: I ran into Tim off and on over the twelve years I was in the New York City area. Twenty-five years after the the events described in this chapter, I met him on the West Coast. He looked the same. Was as pleasant and devout and effeminate as ever. Still in the fashion industry. Without my asking, he told me he was happily single, but only until God brought the right woman into his life. But he would never want to repeat Abraham's error of running ahead of God in domestic affairs. Still pretending.

Chapter 34 New York Center Again

After graduation, I spent a couple of months back home in Memphis. Late in July, I bought a gold Volkswagen Beetle with a sunroof and stereo and drove north toward New York City. I thrilled as the New York skyline came into view beyond the tank farms and chemical plants of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Then it was down into the Lincoln Tunnel.
The tiled interior of Lincoln Tunnel goes forever. The high walkway along the side. The little green lights in the ceiling. The two men in the tiny observation cage at the halfway point. Then I was back in the light, in Manhattan. I felt instantly at home, but the streets were intimidating. I had never driven in the city before. I found Eighth Avenue and headed north. I passed Port Authority Bus Terminal then Forty-second Street. Home. The porn shops, electronics stores, pizza joints. Garbage on the sidewalks and in the gutters. The hardware store. A crazy man in the crosswalk at 43rd Street, gesticulating and cursing toward the sky.
People were out and about, but it was Sunday morning and the streets felt lazy. I turned onto 46th Street and pulled up in front of the glass doors of the Center and climbed out. Mrs. Toby was at her reception cubicle. Her face lit up. She ducked under the end of the counter and gave me a hug. She hadn’t gotten any taller. Her head came up barely to the middle of my chest.
“You’re here! I can’t believe it!” She held me at arms length grinning up at me. “We are all happy to have you back. Let me call Mrs. Harding.”
She ducked back under the counter to her phone. “Mrs. Harding, Johnny’s here. He’s going to need a key to his apartment.”
“So how've you been? What’s been happening with you since you left here?”
“Oh, you know. I finished college then went to seminary. Now I’m here.”
“I’m so glad. You know this Metro Ministries is working really hard to make this a real evangelistic center again. Since Colin left, we haven’t had much going on. You heard about Colin, right?”
As she asked about Colin her face clouded–more with a mother’s disappointment at lost potential than scorn or condemnation.
“Yeah, I heard. Where is Colin now?
“I think he’s somewhere in Pennsylvania, maybe in Reading where Dr. Jones lives.

My apartment was on the front west corner of the building. Three rooms–living room, kitchen, bedroom–plus a bath. The windows in the bedroom and living room looked down on 46nd street. There was no furniture. I borrowed four metal folding chairs from the basement, spread out my sleeping bag and was all set.
I headed out to check out the neighborhood. It was all there. The smell of urine in the subway entrances. The grids of purple glass blocks in sidewalks which I presumed provided light for underground utility rooms. The horns of taxis and the distinctive “thunk” they made when driving through potholes or across irregularities in the pavement. The prostitutes in their improbable dresses with hems just inches below their panties and necklines halfway to their navels. The tiny grocery stores in nearly every block along Eighth Avenue closely supervised by the owners.
On the streets (as opposed to the Avenues which ran north and south) were the theaters. On 47th Street, “O Calcutta” was playing. The posters in front vividly portrayed the nudity of the play while cleverly hiding nipples and genitalia.
The large parking lot at the corner of 48th and 8th Avenue was still there, much to my surprise. I thought it would have been turned into a high rise by now. West of Eighth Avenue, in the neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen, were the familiar brownstone stoops and the Catholic Church. The pocket park still held basketball hoops and benches. Mothers sat on benches in the sun with their strollers beside them. I was home.

Chapter 33 Seminary, Finally!

I headed to the seminary for spring quarter. Arriving when I did meant taking classes out of the usual order. I signed up for the classes I wanted without paying much attention to the prerequisites listed in the bulletin. Several weeks into the quarter, one of the deans called me and rather crossly scolded me for taking an exegesis class without having taken the Greek entrance exam. They gave the exam each fall and entering students were expected not to enroll for advanced exegesis classes until they had passed the exam or completed two quarters of Greek there at the seminary.
I apologized insincerely. He wanted me to drop the class. I asked if instead I could take the exam. If I failed, I would withdraw without protest. He grudgingly conceded. “When do you want to take the exam?” he asked.
“What about this afternoon?”
“No,” he said. “That wouldn't be fair. You should some time for review. Let's set it up for next week.”
I agreed. I couldn't understand why he was cross with me.
I took the test and continued going to class. A week later I still hadn't heard anything so I went to his office.
“Dr. Smith, I was wondering when the exam will be graded.”
“It's graded. Did you ever live in Greece?”
I laughed. He was jesting, of course, and grumpy as ever, but I knew there would be no more questions about my taking exegesis classes.

One of the most amazing things about life at Andrews University in those days was the lousy preaching at the University Church. The pastor had been there for more than a dozen years. He was generally regarded as a nice man and nearly universally regarded as a very poor preacher. I couldn't believe it. How could the denomination retain a man who was an incompetent preacher as the pastor at the church at the seminary? After a few visits I began attending other churches in the area.
The next fall I was asked to teach a Sabbath School class for college students. It met in a large lecture amphitheater and over a hundred students, mostly undergrads, attended. As I visited with the students, I discovered that most of them simply did not go to church. They could come to Sabbath School, then go back to their rooms and sleep or go to Lake Michigan beaches or go hiking or canoeing. When they complained about church at Pioneer Memorial Church, I challenged them: If you don't like what's happening there, make your own church. Don't whine when you can do something. After months of conversations like this, a couple of girls responded, “How do we do that?”
It was all I was waiting for. We looked around for a place to meet. The university would not allow us use of any space during church time. (After all, we were supposed to be attending the university church.) Finally, a faculty member offered us the use of his living room. We invited friends. Six of us were there for our first service. Within a few weeks the living room was packed to capacity. We looked around for another place and found another, much larger living room and within weeks packed it to capacity.
I had begun the church to serve undergraduate college students who were being ill-served by the university church. To my surprise, fairly quickly half the attendance was seminarians and doctoral students in theology. We wanted our gatherings to be guided by the spirit without the constraints of any human structure. Musicians came and we delighted in the contemporary music they provided. The sermon time consisted of free-flowing discussion in the pattern of Sabbath School classes. Given all the seminarians and graduate students, the conversations became more and more erudite and pompous. There was less and less room for comments or even questions from college students. My assessment was that spiritual concerns had been nearly completely displaced by a drive to display intelligence.
Because we had so deliberately avoided any structure there was no setting in which to appropriately address the drift away from our original mission to serve students with unmet spiritual needs. No one was in charge. No one was officially the leader. There was no committee, council or board. Sure, I made sure we had a place to meet, but my initial role as leader had been completely effaced by the gathering of strong personalities.
After praying and watching and pondering for a couple of months, I stood up one Sabbath and made a speech. “This past fall, we launched this church to serve students who were not being served by Pioneer Memorial Church. We have had a wonderful time together making music and talking about our faith, but recently our conversations have not had much of a spiritual focus. We need a leader to keep us focused on our mission. Since no one else is the leader, I'm announcing today that I'm going to take over as leader. I am going to make sure our church services are anchored in the Bible and serve spiritual life. Starting next week, I will make sure we have a sermon to give focus to our discussions.”
I had never asserted myself like this before. I had never taken over a group. I did not usually fight for control of a group. It felt wrong, egotistical. I kept asking myself whether this was simple self-centered ambition or genuine obedience to a divine call. The group calmly accepted my pronouncement. The next week I preached a sermon.
We continued to grow. We quickly filled to capacity any space we occupied. We finally moved into a basement that accommodated about a hundred people if they sat very cozily.

In December, that first fall, five of the seminarians who were involved in Home Church were summoned to a meeting with the university president and the pastor of the university church. I was not invited. The guys who were invited were all “sponsored”—that is they were already employed by the denomination as clergy and were attending the seminary on full scholarships. They insisted I come along. In fact, they insisted I take the lead in responding to the president and the pastor. Once we were seated in the president's office, one of the five made a little speech.
“You invited us because we attend Home Church. We invited John because he is the pastor.” It went from there.
The two men were courteous but emphatic: we had to quit. Home Church was not a legitimate Seventh-day Adventist Church.
I asked, “What makes a Seventh-day Adventist Church?”
“It is a group of believers organized according to the constitution and bylaws of a local Seventh-day Adventist Conference.”
It was a perfectly sensible answer coming from administrators who had spent a lifetime in the church bureaucracy. It may have offered plausible support for the veiled threat they were wanting to communicate to my five friends: Either you quit or we will talk to your presidents [their employers]. Your presidents would not want you involved with some offshoot movement, now, would they? However, since I was not receiving any financial aid from any denominational source, and since I was a young idealist, this bureaucratic definition of the church was almost laughable. It said nothing about faith, doctrine, theology, mission or people.
“We started this church,” I said, “to serve students who were not being served by the University Church. Most of the kids who attend our church would not attend any church if they weren't coming to Home Church. Closing down our services would mean abandoning our call to serve these students. You might remember Peter's words when the priests tried to shut down his ministry, 'we ought to obey God rather than man.'”
The president and the pastor were, of course, completely unpersuaded by my logic. They tried to explain to me the vital importance of ecclesiastical structure and respect for church authority. I wasn't buying it. The other seminarians wisely did not say a word.
I then switched tacks. “You might be interested to know that over the last six months we have turned into two thousand dollars of tithe to Pioneer Memorial Church.”
They were interested.
“You take offerings?” they asked, clearly surprised and disturbed. “Who authorized you to do that? How do you handle providing tax-deductible receipts for contributions?”
I laughed. “We don't provide tax receipts for money that is used in our own operations and our acts of benevolence. The tithe we just turn into the office at Pioneer, and your treasurer provides the tax receipts.”
The power balance had suddenly shifted. I was a mere student, a long-haired, unemployed one at that, with a reputation for being rather eccentric. But we were talking money, now. Two thousand dollars was a tiny blip in the church budget. But still, it was two thousand dollars. Quite possibly two thousand dollars they would never see if they shut us down. In addition, in contrast to my five confreres who were paying reduced tuition and were supported by denominational scholarships, I was paying full graduate tuition. (Well, actually my dad was paying most of it.)
The president and the pastor began to talk about ways to bring us at least functionally, if not officially, under the umbrella of Pioneer Memorial Church. Perhaps they could assign an elder to consult with us. Maybe the church treasurer could set up a separate line item to keep track of the money received from Home Church. The implied threat against my buddies evaporated. Home Church continued with the unofficial blessing of the university and church.
Given the large number of seminarians involved with Home Church, it was only natural that we spent hours and hours talking about what we were doing, about what we ought to be doing. Because we were running our own church, we had no one to blame but ourselves if church was not going the way we thought it should. As children of the sixties, most of us were radically anti-authoritarian. Hence our initial “no structure” approach. When that didn't work and I asserted my own role as leader, through more hours of conversation we came up with a triumvirate—three leaders, none of whom was regarded as “the leader.” This also proved unworkable. Eventually, we ended up—surprise, surprise—with a designated leader—me—and a board.
I rotated the preaching among the seminarians who attended, some of whom were excellent preachers. After months of this I was surprised when people, including some of the seminarians, insisted I do more preaching. I knew it was not because they were dissatisfied with the quality of the preaching others did. What they said was they wanted me to preach because I was their pastor.
It was my first introduction to the mysterious significance people invest in their pastors. They know pastors are regular people with the frailties and failings common to humanity. Their pastors may not be particularly effective public speakers. The parishioners may even dislike their pastors. Still, many people invest the role with a mysterious significance. A visit from a lay leader in the congregation may be appreciated, but he/she is not the pastor. Others in the congregation may be holier and smarter. They may be more highly educated in theology. They may be former preachers who have served larger congregations or in high positions in the denomination. But none of those things confers on the person the same mysterious significance carried by “the pastor.”
This dignity of the pastoral role gave a whole new meaning the significance of “the call.” A pastor was not “his own person.” Like a musician whose performance is empowered by an electrified audience, so a pastor carries the presence and grace of God not only because of his own spirituality, education and skills. Part of the “power” of the pastorate is the expectation of parishioners.


Home Church was the most influential element of my seminary experience. Certainly I learned in my classes and sharpened my thinking in hours and hours of conversation with other students. But the experience of Home Church has powerfully shaped all of my ministry.

The class on urban ministry by Benjamin Reeves awakened all my old zeal for city ministry. His lectures and the books he assigned painted a picture of ministry that was worthy of one's best energies. Urban ministry was where real humans and the power and call of God actually collided and interacted. I could feel the siren call of New York in every class period.
I took the required practicum in evangelism from Roy Naden. He was an excellent teacher. However, the “evangelistic process” felt artificial. Elder Naden did the preaching at the meetings. He was a skilled presenter. The content was interesting and understandable. We students were there to give personal attention to non-Adventists who came to the meetings. Over the course of the five-week series of meetings, we were supposed to move people from outsiders to insiders. The prospects my partner and I were assigned appreciated our attention. But the focus of the meetings—all the details of Adventist theology and prophetic interpretation—seemed to have almost no connection with their lives.
The seminary professor who most engaged me was Carsten Johnson, a Norwegian philosopher, who was the most boring lecturer in the world. However, once you got past his plodding prose, his ideas were relevant, insightful, compelling. He offered an intellectually rigorous defense of classic, conservative Adventist theology. He translated the ideas of Ellen White into coherent, systematic philosophy. His personal life was not nearly as tidy as his philosophy. His participation in church life appeared negligible. He seldom attended worship. But he provided a powerful framework for integrating Adventist (that is to say, Ellen White) theology. He then used that framework for a compelling analysis of both classic and contemporary philosophy.
Perhaps he is to be credited with my own commitment to go beyond merely affirming Adventist doctrine to finding language and metaphors that connect our theology with the culture outside the church.

Occasionally conference presidents visited the seminary to interview prospective pastors. Most seminarians were already under assignment. The minority of us who were not yet employed eagerly sought any chance for an interview. I was not a likely candidate. Many of the seminarians wore suits and ties to class. I wore Hawaiian shirts. Most ministerial students were married. I was single. In one interview, the president asked if I was interested in women. According to my friends, when I was absent from class, the most popular church history prof remarked to the class that McLarty would never get a job as a pastor. He was very nearly correct. I came to the end of the final quarter without a job offer. Three days before graduation, I received a call from Ted Wilson who was the head of something called Metro Ministries in New York City. He had heard I was interested in working in New York. He remarked it was rare to find young Adventists who had any interest in urban ministry and doubly rare to find anyone interested in coming to New York City. He didn't really have a specific job slot for me, but given my interest in the City, he wanted me to come. I was hired!

Chapter 32 Detour on the Way to Seminary

My plan was to start seminary the fall after graduating from college, but early in the summer the Berkeley Church invited me to serve as interim director of their health education center for a year. So in the fall I headed back to California.
I knew most of the people, of course, from attending church there the previous school year, but now I was immersed in the life of the church. It was a wonderfully eclectic bunch. An ancient Black couple who were revered as honorary grandparents to everyone. A UC Berkeley philosophy student disputed everything everyone said. He had grown up Catholic and sometimes argued for the superior intellectual quality of Catholic theology. He questioned God's existence and the reality of right and wrong. And he showed up every week for worship, utterly defying all my categories. What kind of label was appropriate for an agnostic who was baptized Catholic, attended an Adventist Church and studied philosophy?
There were Adventist grad students who brought a deep spiritual heritage and intense intellectualism. Filipino families. A doctor and his family from Pleasant Valley. New Adventists and people who had recently returned to the church after decades away. People who fondly remembered elements of their lives as hippies. A bum or two who who would have blessed the rest of us by taking a shower before coming to worship.
Karen was another person who created cognitive dissonance. Her face open and welcoming. She had reddish blond hair. She was magnetic. I avoided talking with her for fear of getting tongue-tied. She spoke of prayer and God's involvement in her life with sweet confidence. She brought more visitors to church than anyone else. But she wore earrings and attended church less than seventy-five percent of the time.
Good Adventists attended church every Sabbath and they did not wear jewelry. Wearing jewelry was a form of self-promotion incompatible with radical holiness. We are called to self-denial not the decoration of our bodies. Spending money on jewelry was a diversion of funds that could otherwise be contributed to help take the gospel to the world. A woman who wore jewelry was exhibiting a dangerous self-absorption. She was bringing a compromising, worldly spirit into the church. I believed all this. Without question. And I knew that Karen was sweet to co-workers and patients and neighbors. She prayed with a simple, straightforward faith. And she was more effective in evangelism than all the rest of us combined, if the yardstick was the number of non-members one brought to church. How could it be that a worldly person could be the best evangelist?
The pastor, Roger, continued to intrigue and trouble me with his crazy mix of creativity, energy, and heterodoxy. The congregation put major funding into the health education center where I was now the director. It was a quintessentially Adventist endeavor. Located on a busy center city street. Designed to be a “neutral” venue to which we could invite the public for all kinds of classes that would improve their health and build relationships that would ultimately serve as a basis for inviting them to church. We did vegetarian cooking classes and smoking cessation clinics. We advertised a Bible study. (One person came, an Indian who became my closest friend. He was always available for conversation when I was going out of my mind with frustration and discouragement, happy to introduce me to his world. I endlessly mused over the fact that while I was attempting to carry out my duties as the director of a better living center where Adventism put on its most intellectual, worldly-wise face, my deepest personal support came from an uneducated, unambitious, non-Adventist, quasi-Christian, Native American. David Navarrini, if you read this, I owe you a huge debt of gratitude.)
At the church, Roger led a mid-week study of the Book of Revelation, again, an Adventist specialty. He worked his way through the book verse by verse. He compelled us to pay attention to the actual words of each verse which inevitably on occasion did not appear to support traditional Adventist interpretations. I was troubled by the questions he raised. Even though he did not directly deny the validity of our traditional interpretations, I could feel the dissonance. When I challenged him, he insisted he was not contradicting the traditional Adventist interpretations. Rather he was employing a “different and also valid” interpretative approach. Classic Adventist interpretation of Revelation is “historicist.” That means we interpret all the imagery of Revelation—the churches, angels, monsters, disasters and plagues—as cryptic predictions of specific historical events. Revelation is the history of the world written in advance. Roger said he was employing a spiritual approach. He was looking for spiritual lessons that applied to our personal lives right now.
Because he worked so closely with the text it was hard to argue with him on without invoking tradition or the opinions of our prophet, but Adventists pride ourselves on our Bible and Bible Only method of Bible interpretation. Of course, we have traditions of interpretation and we revere our prophet and her voluminous writing, but when push comes to shove we are supposed to go back to the Bible itself as the final authority in all matters religious. And Roger's interpretations were as plausible as our classic historicist interpretations, given what the actual words of the text.
I remained suspicious. I figured there had to a worm in his approach somewhere even if I couldn't spot it. I was suspicious in part because of the vibe Roger gave off. He was brash and playfully impudent, an avid football fan, a natty dresser. He wasn't pious. Once when I asked about his devotional life he said he spent many hours a week studying the Bible in preparation for sermons and the midweek Bible study. He was fully engaged with the Bible using his mind and commentaries. What was the point of having a separate time for “devotional reading”? What would it accomplish? I did not have an answer, but his cavalier dismissal of the importance of daily devotions astonished me. I had heard multiple preachers emphatically assert the vital necessity for pastors to engage with the Bible deeply and personally quite apart from their professional study. I, myself, spent time every morning reading the Bible and praying. How could this man who was a pastor not see the vital necessity of personal, devotional reading?
Still, Roger was doing the very kind of ministry—maybe the only kind of ministry—I could imagine doing. The Berkeley Church under his leadership came closer to my dream of urban ministry than any other Adventist congregation I knew of. I admired his independence from tradition and church structure, his commitment to people and ministry in the heart of the city.
Late in January, Roger invited me to his office to talk about how things were going in my work as the director of the health education center. I tried to put a good face on it for Roger, but the truth was I was deeply discouraged. I put together a few programs, but I was not creating enough activity to justify the rent the church was paying for the center or my small salary. I didn't want to quit, didn't want to admit this was a job I couldn't do, didn't want to let the church down. But my sense of incompetence was killing me. In our conversation, I voiced a bit of my frustration and discouragement. Roger said I shouldn't feel obligated to stay for the whole year. The church would manage.
It was clear he was inviting me to move on. He did it so graciously, the pain of being “fired” was minimal. Mostly, it was a wonderful relief to be out from under the burden of a job I couldn't perform.