Chapter 40. The South Side of the Tracks

After our visit with the conference president, Karin and I drove east to check out our parish. Instead of driving out the Long Island Expressway, we took Northern Boulevard so we could get a closer look at the communities of the area. The further we drove, the more impressed we were. I had no idea Long Island was so rich. The homes got larger and larger. It would be more descriptive to call them estates. Palatial homes set in expanses of lawn or nestled in forest. In places the highway skirted harbors filled with sail boats and yachts.

In Cold Spring Harbor, the last town before Huntington, we crossed a low spot where you could look north to Long Island Sound. On the right was a beautiful, small, Episcopal Church set next to an immense lawn and a lake populated with ducks and swans. The yard of the church was filled with people. A bride and groom were standing on the steps with the pastor in his robes.
It was an idyllic vision of quiet, long-term pastoral ministry. A shepherd and his flock. A ministry rooted in lasting, deep relationships. It was the polar opposite of the drama of urban ministry focused on a relentless drive to change neighborhoods, change political systems, rescue people from dramatically dysfunctional lives. But this, too, was ministry. The well-to-do and sophisticated needed Jesus, too. I could imagine becoming friends with these people, becoming part of the social fabric, being part of the life cycle of children, baptisms, weddings, marriage conflicts, funerals. Visiting people in the hospital, representing the face of Jesus in the ordinary patterns of life. Influencing through long-term relationships the shape of an entire community, not just a church.

We drove up the hill out of Cold Spring Harbor and, five miles later, into downtown Huntington. It was a real town. Main street was lined with shops. The sidewalks were filled with people. There were restaurants. We could see the harbor to the north filled with expensive boats. In the center of town we turned right on Highway 110 that ran south toward the Long Island Expressway and ultimately to the South Shore. As we drove, more shops, a book store, restaurants, then less glamorous businesses, an auto repair shop, a printer, a gas station. Then we came to the railroad station. It was surrounded by vast parking lots. We drove under the tracks. As the road came up on the other side, everything changed–drastically. Liquor stores, unkempt houses, a vacuum repair shop, a shoe repair shop, a convenience store. Weeds, trash.
At the corner of Ninth Street there was a bank. We turned right. Past the bank and a vacant lot. Then the church on the right. It was a simple white building with high steps that climbed steeply from the sidewalk. The parking lot was gravel and grass.
Across the street and down one lot was the parsonage. The house was squat and unattractive. It looked like the walls weren’t tall enough for the roof. The yard needed mowing. The bushes were overgrown. We drove around the immediate neighborhood. The parsonage blended right in. Some yards were well kept. Some were wrecks. The streets were filled with parked cars.
I was embarrassed by my disappointment. I had regarded myself as an enlightened liberal when it came to matters of class and race. I had dreamed of making a difference in the lives of poor people. Now here I was looking at a poor parish and dreaming of ministry a few blocks north.
I struggled to pull myself back down to earth. My parish was on this side of the tracks.

We drove to Babylon. Thirty-five minutes straight south. The church was one block south of the center of town and only two blocks from the water. The building looked run down. The gravel parking lot had huge potholes in it. My heart sank. This was not the ministry I had imagined. But it was my job starting January 1.

Chapter 39. Called to Babylon

I met Karin Lundstrom on the steps of the James White Library at Andrews in January, 1978. We got married in May, 1979. After the summer together in my apartment in Times Square, she returned to her parent’s house in Takoma Park for one more quarter of school to complete her B.S. in nursing. She came home every other weekend. Our absences and reunions gave me a dramatically enriched view of the meaning and experience of Sabbath.



The Center was closing. The denomination had found a buyer–the Church of Scientology. That hurt. How could we relinquish our light house in Times Square to cult? But selling was inevitable. The Greater New York Conference was pumping $25,000 a year into maintenance at the Center. The Atlantic Union Conference (the northeast regional body) was spending another fifty thousand for salaries and maintenance. And, as far as I could tell, the Center was making no impact on the city. It was not producing baptisms. It was not raising public awareness of the church and its mission. Even though I regretted losing my place in the heart of Manhattan, closing of the Center made sense for the denomination.
The Center had given me a job–in Manhattan! It had been good for my boss, Ted Wilson. It gave him an administrative position, putting him on a fast track escalator within the denomination. It paid for his Ph. D. at New York University. Over the years it had provided an opportunity for a wide variety of people to experiment with urban ministry. It had served as a center of Adventist hospitality for traveling school groups and missionaries passing through. But as an evangelistic center it was a flop–like every other evangelistic center the church had funded in cities around the world.
It seemed to me an “evangelistic center” was wrong-headed in its very conception. Evangelism is the movement of the church outward, away from itself. But the idea of a “center” was the ambition to draw people in. It was hoped that the public would come to us. Time had proven that what we offered was not sufficiently attractive for the Center to work.
Metro Ministries was going to continue their Wall Street restaurant. Ted was still dreaming of putting together a comprehensive urban ministry based on Ellen White's blueprint. But it was time for me to go. I had no idea where.

In November, I got a phone call from Elder Kretschmar, the president of the Greater New York Conference. Would I be willing to serve as pastor for the Huntington and Babylon Churches, two congregations in the suburbs of western Suffolk County on Long Island?
The first few times I had heard references to “the Babylon Church” I thought it was a joke. In the Book of Revelation, the mythic city of Babylon represents the Dark Force. It is the premier enemy of God and his people. Adventist evangelists preach that Babylon symbolizes apostate Christianity (that is, all denominations other than our own). Right wing Adventists sometimes identify the denomination itself as Babylon—an organized Christian body that has compromised the pure religion of Jesus. Babylon is the Adventist bogey man. So when I heard people refer to the Babylon Church, I figured there was some congregation in the conference that was so messed up people had nicknamed it Babylon. But the Babylon Church was no joke. The Babylon Seventh-day Adventist Church was located on Fire Island Avenue in Babylon on Long Island, New York. (And the head elder's phone number was 666-6696. No joke.)

A suburban pastorate had never been my dream. Memphis wasn’t Brooklyn, but where I grew up was still "city." We played Army and cowboys and Indians in the alleys, climbing fences and sneaking through backyards. When we got a bit older we played football and sometimes even baseball in the street. People in our neighborhood did not drive station wagons. They did not have large yards. They did not have new houses. Our sidewalks were not bright, white and uncracked.
The suburbs was an an alien world. My cousins lived there as did all of my classmates at the Adventist elementary school. I enjoyed visiting my cousins' homes, but I never envisioned living in that kind of environment. In grade school and high school, when I imagined my future it was always exotic—Africa (as a missionary doctor), at sea (with Ed Link or Jacques Cousteau), or in the wilderness of northern Minnesota (as described in books by Sam Campbell). Suburbs were clean, orderly, uninteresting.
Then during college I spent a year as a volunteer at the New York Center. The City captured my heart. The year nearly killed me. I lost thirty pounds. At times I hated the ugliness and the raw displays of human pain, frailty and degradation. I hated the ways life there hardened me. I hated the inescapable noise. But once I was away from it for awhile, I craved the intensity, the vitality and energy I felt walking the streets in Midtown Manhattan. The rawness of humanity made sense of ministry. You could see the needs ministry was supposed to address. And, though I would never have admitted it out loud, doing ministry in New York felt more significant just because of the City's status. Ministry performed in New York was grander and more important than the same ministry done somewhere in suburbia because it was being done at the center of the world. New York had seduced me.

Then I went to Seminary.

In seminary, the books that fired my imagination were written by urban pastors or about urban ministry. The most compelling, engaging professor, Benjamin Reeves, was a Black man with tales of ministry in hard neighborhoods. In the books I read and in conversations with other avant-garde seminarians, the suburbs were associated with racist, self-satisfied, narcissistic Christianity.
After seminary, wonder-of-wonders, God gave me the opportunity to return to Times Square. I was clearly on track toward an urban pastorate. Instead, the pastorate being offered was at the outer edge of the quintessential suburbs of Long Island, fifty miles from Manhattan. I had hoped to pastor the Greenwich Village Church or maybe a church in Brooklyn. But what could I do? No one else was offering me a job (nor were they likely to).


When Karin came home for Thanksgiving break, she and I drove east from Manhattan for a formal interview with the conference president at his office in Manhasset, a wealthy berg in the endless Long Island suburban sprawl. He was avuncular, asked about our backgrounds, talked about his wife’s ministry. He wanted to know about my sense of call to the ministry. I couldn't tell what he thought of me, but he was impressed with Karin.
There was a parsonage across the street from the Huntington Church, he said. That’s where we would live. The Huntington congregation was going to be our favorite. The head elder, John Dennis, was a prince, legendary for his kindness and generosity. A previous pastor, Nikolaus Satelmajer, had been very active in the community. The church was a warm, welcoming congregation. We would have a great time there.
The Babylon Church was different, the president said. Good people, but they had a history of being fractious and perhaps a bit snobbish. They sometimes quarreled with conference leadership. There had been problems with the previous pastor. The elementary school next door to the church was deeply in debt. The principal was a volunteer who had a full time job as a teacher in the public school system. Two of the teachers–the wife of the former pastor and the wife of the principal—donated their salaries back to the conference to pay on the debt the school owed to the conference. I could see Elder Kretschmar was tempted to say more. It was obvious he didn’t like either the principal or the previous pastor. But propriety required him not to say anything too explicitly negative.
He was done. “Let’s pray before you go,” he said. He walked around his desk and the three of us knelt on the circular Persian carpet he called his prayer rug.
After prayer we stood. “God bless.” He grinned and patted me on the shoulder. “Give me a call, if you need any help.”

Chapter 38. Gentry's Halos

On a Sabbath morning in June I drove about an hour and a half north of the city to Camp Berkshire for Campmeeting. The main auditorium was packed. The morning service in the gym program dragged on and on as campmeeting services usually do. After church, I wandered the grounds to see if I could find anyone I knew. I saw a few old friends from the Crossroads Church, and, of course, a few people from the German Church, but walking around in the damp, cool weather felt like moving through a sea of strangers.

After lunch I attended a presentation by Robert Gentry in the youth building. The audience filled the building and spilled out the doors. I was mesmerized.

Gentry had worked as a physicist at a U. S. government lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee where he investigated a phenomenon called pleochroic halos. These “halos” are little spheres are created by the radioactive decay in granite. They show up as haloes in cross section. Gentry explained how the halos were formed and where they were found.

Looking around at the audience, I wondered how much of his presentation they understood. Had they ever heard of alpha and beta decay? Did they comprehend the concept of “half life?” Whether they understood or not, they were captivated by the presentation. Biotite, zircons and thin sections might been just words to many of the people listening, but one thing they knew for sure: Mr. Gentry had found the silver bullet to kill the evolution monster. He was a scientist, and he was on their side. I was thrilled along with everyone else.

Gentry had not done his work at a Bible college. He worked at Oakridge National Laboratory. He had published articles about his research in these halos in Nature and Science. He was a bona fide scientist. I was impressed.

Listening to Gentry, I recalled an old preacher from North Carolina who came to Highland Academy when I was a high school student. He brought a car full of fossils and spread them out on tables at the rear of the chapel. In his speech, he regaled us with stories of finding fossils in places where they weren’t supposed to be. He told of finding mammal fossils in rock layers that were supposed to have only dinosaurs. He found trilobites in rock layers that were supposed to have been formed long after the trilobites went extinct. He would show his finds to scientists and they would be dumb-founded by his discoveries.

The point of his presentation was that the supposed order of the fossil record didn’t hold up to honest investigation. And, of course, belief in evolution was based precisely on that putative order. The preacher made fun of the scientists who dated rock layers. Rock layers were dated by fossils and fossils were dated by rock layers. It was completely circular reasoning.

After his lecture we were invited to examine his specimens. Trilobites, fossilized shark teeth, beautifully preserved fish and leaves, dinosaur tracks, a saber-toothed tiger skull. It was a mesmerizing collection. I dreamed of finding my own fossil treasures, of finding the final, decisive evidence in the rocks that would force the scientific establishment to change its understanding of earth history.

Still, I was troubled by the preacher’s cavalier dismissal of science as a discipline and scientists as a community. Surely not all scientists were as dogmatic and dishonest as he implied. And I was a little puzzled. Why couldn’t the thousands of scientists who were looking for fossils find any of the anomalies that he was finding everywhere?

On the other hand I couldn’t believe this preacher was making up his discoveries. He had them right here, spread out on tables for us to examine. And he wasn’t the only one making these kinds of discoveries. I had heard about the discovery of human footprints in a rock layer that also contained dinosaur footprints–exactly what you would expect if fossils were formed during the flood.

As encouraging as I found the presentation by the preacher and others like him, I could never quite escape my own skepticism about evidence that only creationists could find. If the evidence for a recent creation was really there, then surely some regular scientists would find it. And at least a few scientists would have the guts to publish it.

Listening to Gentry I thought, Finally! A real scientist, publishing in real scientific journals, has found hard evidence of creation.

After explaining the halos in layman’s language and detailing the determined refusal by the scientific establishment to investigate his findings, Gentry moved to the climax of his lecture. Since the halos were evenly distributed throughout blocks of granite, the original radioactive atoms must have been there from the beginning. They could not have been transported into the granite by the movement of atoms in solution. And since the mother atoms have a very short half life, the granite must have been formed miraculously in a very short time–in a matter of minutes–and not through an eons-long process as conventional geology taught.

Gentry insisted instantaneous creation was the only plausible explanation of the phenomenon. While other scientists had criticized his work on general principles—Gentry's work had to be wrong because it contradicted established theory—none had presented any research-based alternative to Gentry's explanations. The critics had suggested the mother atoms were transported into the granite, but Gentry said his research had ruled that out. He was eager for more scientists to examine the halos because the evidence right there in the rocks would eventually force a re-working of the orthodox understanding of the formation of granite and the age of the earth.

Once you recognized that granite did not form over millions of years of slow cooling, this would require rethinking all sorts of related questions in geochronology. It would create a revolution in geology, a paradigm shift. In this new world of geology, perhaps scientists would have the honesty and perspicaciousness to recognize the truth of the Bible account.

Because Gentry argued on the basis of physics and mineralogy, citing experimental evidence that could be replicated, his arguments seemed very strong. This was not speculative. This was not interpretation of once-upon-a-time events like the fossilization of dinosaurs or the creation of birds–events no one saw involving processes we have never observed producing effects that we cannot replicate. No, Gentry was making his case based on phenomena that could be studied in the lab. The decay rates of polonium were short enough that people could reasonably attempt to replicate the formation of the halos in the lab. Besides that, further study of a sufficient number of samples could determine if the halos were in fact evenly distributed in granite. The half-life of the mother products could be measured. Alternative decay paths could be ruled out. Even the formation of granite itself could be investigated. Scientists could make molten stews of the appropriate minerals and cool them at different rates and pressures to see if granite formed from the mixture.

Gentry cautioned us not to get our hopes up. He spent a fair amount of time detailing the animosity he had experienced from other scientists. As the implications of his research came to be more widely recognized, journals were refusing to publish his research. They were even refusing to publish his letters rebutting inaccurate references to his work. The bias in the scientific establishment was entrenched and apparently unassailable. But he vowed to continue his work as long as he could find the funds to do so. The quest for truth must go on.

Leaving the campground, I was elated. Finally, here was the silver bullet I had been dreaming of. Solid, non-speculative, non-theoretical, concrete evidence that countered the irresistible onslaught of conventional geochronology. The Bible was true. My church was right.

(The trickiest part of writing a memoir is remembering! I vividly remember listening to Gentry's presentation at Camp Berkshire. I am rather uncertain about what year this happened--1972, 1979 or 80. I'm sure there are other details equally susceptible to my "creative" memory.)