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My name is Gregory (most call me Greg). My story begins growing up in the Methodist, later United Methodist Church. My mom always took my sister and I to Sunday School and church when we were growing up; it was just what we did. My mother grew up in the Lutheran Church and was always a woman of faith, one of the church ladies upon whom people could depend in any kind of need or crisis.
I was in the youth group through at least Junior High. After that the church didn’t seem to have much to say to me, and I wandered off on my own path as I headed to college and fraternity life the first year, where alcohol and trying to get laid were the primary goals in life.
After a near scrape with the draft board, I ended up in the National Guard the summer after my freshman year at university, and took a year to work and do my military training, after which I headed off to a new college, an experimental school where almost anything was on the agenda. I enjoyed the marijuana and booze and spent a couple of years there amassing credits (mostly social science) from the college and its parent university. As I really had no idea what I wanted to do, I decided to take another year off of school to work.
That summer I encountered my former girlfriend from high school, and we rekindled our romance. The last I had seen her was the night her folks came home from camping a day early and caught us “in flagrante delecto” on the living room couch. As her dad was a big, mad, scary dude, I was gone out of the picture. She was really the black sheep of that evangelical family, the wild child. In reality, it was my first time!
Anyway, the romance lasted about 4-5 months when she decided to run off to work at a ski resort and broke off our relationship. To say I was despondent would be an understatement. . . I was depressed. Around February she came back to town for a day and visited me (I was hopeful we might get back together). But what she said was that she had had an experience with Jesus and had given her life to him and told me about her experience in the mountains.
Figuring “what have I got to lose” I got a new testament and sat in my bedroom the next couple of days reading and praying “God, if you are really there like Christine says, I want to know.” And then he showed up. It was so real. . . not a visible sighting or anything like that, but his presence was so real that I simply turned around and started following him from that minute.
It didn’t take long for me to connect up with other “believers” at a fundamentalist/Pentecostal church. I was hungry to know how this Christian thing went. I had read through the Bible several times since my encounter with Jesus, and with years of church behind me, was extremely precocious in my “spiritual growth.” I because a “Saturday Night Counselor” at our all-city youth meetings every week. I swallowed everything I learned and became (like Saul of Tarsus) “advanced beyond my peers.” I even led a mission trip team to Germany for a month in 1975, where I met my first wife (a US Air Force nurse), who was part of an Assemblies of God/Teen Challenge ministry in Germany. We got married a year later when I had graduated from university with a BA in Religion (Christian Theology) and she had finished her term in the Air Force.
A year later at the end of 1977, we were off to work with Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in Germany, where after a school and field trip, I went to work in the automotive shop and she worked in the clothing closet ministry. Again, I excelled and within a year had become the leader of the automotive shop with pastoral responsibility for the guys there and their families. Then I moved to helping lead the German language School of Discipleship for a year.
Then, as there had been many changes in leadership, suddenly the key leader of the YWAM base, with one other elder, told me and my wife that God was telling them that we should be going back to the states. We were involved in a nearby community and God was not telling US anything of the sort, and we said so and that we intended to stay on. At this time there was a great deal of unrest and “gnashing of teeth” among those elders. Others in the community backed us up and supported us in following what God was telling US. It was not a fun 6 months or so.
Finally, I took a day to fast and pray about what we should do, and it became clear to me that we were paying too high a cost to continue to fight the leadership over the issue. We told them that we would leave, but not until we had adequate time for closure in the relationships we had been building in the local community . . . another 6-7 months. They didn’t like that, but accepted it. Then we became invisible for that time in the eyes of the leaders.
After coming back to the states in February 1983, we had no idea whatsoever what we were to do so I took a job with a local company to put bread on the table. We’d had our first child a year before returning to the US, and the grandparents were glad to see us back, but no purpose other than that. We became quickly active in a local charismatic church that had other ex-YWAMers and others who had been out in para-church ministry and it was not long before I was involved with the mission board, and eventually the head of the mission board.
During this time, I lost my job at the local company, and decided to re-enlist in the National Guard as a reservist. Almost immediately, I was introduced to the Colonel running the Recruiting Command for Washington state, who encouraged me to apply for an active duty recruiting job, which I did and went on career active duty with the National Guard in the spring of 1986.
Our son was born in February 1987 and things were going well for us. A future in ministry was really just a memory by then. And then in the spring of 1990 the shit hit the fan. My wife one day said, “That’s it, this is not what I signed up for,” and from that time quit the marriage relationship. She did not leave; she stayed but the marriage was for all intents and purposes other than outward appearances over. Within a day, I ruptured a lumbar disk in my back; when the shit hits the fan, it’s a regular shit storm!!
After 5 years and burning out 4 sets of counselors who one by one gave up on us, a conservative, evangelical therapist with whom we’d been working for a year took me aside and said, “Greg, you need to get out of this marriage. She is going to try and take you down until you will be no good to your kids or anyone. I never thought I’d tell anyone this, but you need to get out.” It took me another 6 months of wrestling with God over why he was not fixing the situation, when I finally got it together and filed for divorce, at which time my local church extended to me “the left foot of fellowship.” You see, cooking pancakes for the congregation after church was considered too much “ministry” for me to be eligible if I was divorcing.
At that point, I was pretty much ready to be done with “Christian” stuff, “Christian” people. . . the whole enchilada. It was interesting though, that God seemed to keep hold of my hand when I let go. It was through the novels of Andrew Greeley that I had a tenuous connection with a loving God, one who would love enough to break his own rules to love us. I met my current wife a year later, and we were quickly married (10 weeks!). She had grown up in the United Church of Canada, so had a history much like mine as a child, and had always stayed close to the church, despite a family that was non-religious.
After a year, Colette and her 2 boys moved down to the states from British Columbia and we blended our families. My daughter came to live with us after she’d had a nose full of her mother’s constant over-controlling behavior, and my son spent as much time as possible with us, and considered our home his until he graduated university and established his own. This marriage has been a real healing one for me, a marriage of grace. The church we decided to join is also a congregation where grace is a major component, a PCUSA Presbyterian congregation, so I have not had to contend with the narrow minded evangelical mindset, at least most of the time.
However, over the last few years, I have been questioning more an more the things that I swallowed back in the 70s, especially as I was working to become a life coach and going through all the training and education for that. I spent a good deal of time really evaluating my life purpose, values and just who I was and wanted to be in the world. I’ve found as this process has gone on that I have grown away from some things which seem to be quite important to many Christians.
I think the whole common idea of heaven and hell is a construction that found its roots in Zoroastrian and Greek cultures, and its home in Christianity probably in the first and second century after Christ. The infallibility of the Bible as the “rule of faith and practice” is also something of fairly recent provenance; it was never a topic of discussion for many centuries (although I’m sure that if someone said that the scriptures were not true, they would have been burned at the stake, or some other gruesome thing until they repented).
It’s clear that the Old and New Testaments are the compilation of Jewish and early Christian writings that were gathered and codified in about the early 4th century by a church council, a political gathering of church leaders. Granting them some kind of divine discernment is a recent notion. The writings are some amongst many, including those of the Apocrypha, containing both Jewish and early common era writings that didn’t pass muster for whatever reason with the council back in the old days.
Although I disagree with many of the trappings of Christianity, and do not identify myself as a “Christian” because of many of these things, I do still consider myself a follower of Jesus. I question, however, exactly how much even of the four gospel accounts is accurate, as they were not written from the oral tradition for 4-6 generations (minimum) after the events happened. Based on what we know now about how the mind works, and how porous the memory of a human being is, a good bit may be more the opinions of the authors than an accurate account of what exactly happened.
And the notion that all revelation ceased after 100AD is ludicrous. Did the God of the Bible lose his voice? Please, let it not be! I think we are constantly learning more and more, e.g., the dead sea scrolls and other finds of archaeology that pop up on a more or less regular basis.
I do, however, want to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. I’m not ready to abandon my history with Jesus of Nazareth, or the Holy Spirit, or Creator/Father/Mother God. I believe that there is a loving God. I don’t think that God is there waiting to do things for us, but he IS a loving creator and sustainer of all that is.
And although I do believe that evolution has much to say for it, I can’t say I buy that all the immense variety and complexity of creation all came about by chance. It doesn’t quite all add up in my mind. So what do I believe? I’m not sure. . . I don’t know. . . but I’m ok not knowing all the answers. I’m willing to live in the mystery and paradox of the divine and the spirit.
So that’s the short version. There’s plenty more, but that’s what conversations are for! I hope to learn more about your stories as time goes on. I’ve been in TLS since the beginning, just not active on the site until recently, and especially in the Facebook group. You can often find me there. I’m retired from the military and work part time as an executive/life coach now.
AnonymousGreg – Thanks for sharing about your history and where you currently are with your spiritual journey. Very interesting! It’s nice to feel like I know you better now. I’ve been here almost since the beginning. It was still davidhayward.com when I joined. My story is somewhere in the TLS archives.
AnonymousGreg your story has a subtle 70’s tone to it. Thanks for sharing.
I’m going to jump right in!
Some of you know that I haven’t been feeling particularly comfortable on TLS and that I was reconsidering the wording of the introduction to my blog. I noticed on Facebook last night that Greg had posted this. I decided this morning to work on my own blog without first looking at what Greg had written. The first draft this morning took about 4 hours. I’ve now read Greg’s story a couple of times. At one point Greg says, “However, over the last few years, I have been questioning more an more the things that I swallowed back in the 70s, especially as I was working to become a life coach and going through all the training and education for that”. I found myself understanding and agreeing with almost everything Greg said. I started really questioning in the late 1960’s (although I had started questioning the teachings of the trinity in the 1940’s when I was 13). Then in 1996/7 I signed up for a Christian Counselling course. It should have been a course, one day a week, spanning two years, but it was crammed into 34 weeks. After 4 months I was expected to have my own clients (guinea pigs?) and I refused. I actually learned so much about myself, and how counselling should NOT be done. How could an INTJ ever become a counsellor?
I now know that there are others here who understand something of where I’m coming from and what I might have to offer. I’ve reached a point for today where I need to unwind by spending time in my garden. But here is my first draft of the new introduction to my blog http://outsidethegoldfishbowl.wordpress.com/draft-introduction
Welcome Greg. Fascinating journey. Several common elements with my own journey. Glad you joined us.
Thanks for sharing Greg. Look forward to hearing more
Great story greg! good read.
I really enjoyed reading your story Greg. Thanks for sharing.
AnonymousHI Greg, I”m glad to get to know you a bit better now! You seem to have such a wise, gentle spirit. I admire your persistence with all that you went through and I’m glad you are happily married now. I also love that you are a life coach– it’s still a ministry to me.
Thank you for sharing!
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