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.”