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.