Fields of Grace Page 2

  —CHARLES GRANDISON FINNEY, NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHRISTIAN EVANGELIST, LECTURES ON REVIVALS OF RELIGION

  When I was younger, every morning as I went off to school, my father would pat me on the head and say, “Hannah, now go get someone saved today.” Not “Get an A!” or “Do you have your homework?” What did any of that matter if we were all going to Hell? And that’s where we were headed if we didn’t follow God’s orders and, first and foremost, spread the Gospel. The first thing Papa did when I got home from school was ask how many more of my classmates were “on fire for Jesus” because of the witnessing I had done. Sometimes I lied. “Five or six,” I’d say, when the real answer was none. None, because I wasn’t very popular. In fact, I was socially awkward, and drumming up conversations about Jesus wasn’t the best way to make friends, not even in Bible-soaked northeast Texas.

  I only started attending school when I was thirteen years old, and I didn’t fit in, not even with the Christian kids, not in the beginning. I didn’t know how to dress or how to be. Before that, I was home-schooled by my mom, and most of my associations were through Papa’s ministry. To say I was sheltered would be a gross understatement. My primary education was spent traveling the country with my parents in a converted school bus as they built their fledgling ministry. Once we settled down, they kept me at home for as long as they could to protect me from the wicked ways of the world. Papa said that even in our cloistered evangelical community we had real Christians and fake Christians, and it was up to me to learn how to distinguish between the two. The world looked like a pretty scary place from inside my straitlaced evangelical home. Everyone out there was fighting and fornicating and indulging in every other capital sin under the sun. The only safe place was within my own righteous circle. But when I was old enough for high school, my parents agreed that they had built a strong enough foundation that I could be trusted to ward off the evil influences I was certain to encounter even in a Christian school environment. It was time for me to have the experience of a formal education, and I was both terrified and thrilled at the prospect.

  My first year of high school was at the Grace Community Christian School, whose stated mission is “to assist Christian parents in educating, equipping, and encouraging their children to influence the world for Christ.” Grace Community was the largest school of its kind in Tyler, Texas, the closest city to my rural hometown of Garden Valley, and it was fertile ground for Papa’s youth ministry, which he encouraged me to promote to my classmates. I was already an outcast, having started so late, and being a bit of a nerd I didn’t earn any additional popularity points when, soon after I got there, I turned over the school directory to Papa, who, in turn, instructed one of his staff to call everyone in it to try to enlist them for one of his missions. Pretty much the whole school knew I was Ron Luce’s kid, so they suspected I was behind the conscription campaign. A few of my classmates were bold enough to ask me if I was. Did you give some mission rep my number? They won’t stop calling our house! Thanks a lot! I’d look down at my feet, gulp, and grit my teeth, knowing I was busted. Still, the next semester I did the same thing all over again. Because it was for God.

  Everything was.

  Papa was fifteen when he ran away from his mother’s home to live with his father and found his way to drugs and alcohol for a spell before a friend took him to church one Sunday, where the preacher’s words really resonated with him. Three weeks later, he committed his life to Jesus, and, ironically, when he returned home to his father’s house, all of his belongings were piled up on the front porch like a great big “No Trespassing” warning. His stepmother had given his father an ultimatum—Papa or her—and it apparently hadn’t been much of an argument. Papa was a teenager and officially homeless. He says he drove away from the house heartbroken, rejected, and talking to God. But as lost as he felt at that moment, he somehow knew he was headed in the right direction. Sure enough, when his pastor found out what had happened, he invited Papa to come and live with him. Papa said that for the first time in his life, he saw what a real family looked like, and he knew that’s what he wanted for himself one day.

  My parents met while both were attending Oral Roberts University, the Christian college in Tulsa that was founded by the famous charismatic evangelist, the college I would attend after high school, where every class still begins with a prayer. Mom was an art major and Papa was double-majoring in psychology and theology and a year ahead of her. They married in 1984, after Mom got her degree, in a big, formal ceremony with 150 guests in Mom’s hometown of Denver. After that, my parents set out to live what they both agreed would be an unconventional life. They had little money and no real plans for the future, but they were both committed to doing something meaningful, something that would help make the world a godlier place.

  After living and working in Tulsa for a year, they embarked on a seven-month mission trip to twenty-five Third World countries and discovered what would become their life’s work. Papa said they were in Indonesia, in the middle of the largest Muslim nation in the world, when the Lord spoke to their hearts about ministering to the young generation of Americans who needed to know Jesus.

  In the summer of 1986, with no regular income and no real idea about how to recruit a following, my parents established Teen Mania Ministries out of a tiny, spare bedroom in their Tulsa apartment. Today, teen ministries are a dime a dozen, and most are struggling for membership because so many young people are abandoning their Christian faith. But back then just about no one was ministering to teens. Papa was a trailblazer in the Christian youth movement. He and my mom traveled all over the country recruiting teens for Christ.

  It took some time for the ministry to really get off the ground. Because my parents hadn’t yet established themselves, many of the pastors they solicited for support turned them away at first, others canceled appointments, or forgot they had made appointments until the knock at the door. Mom and Papa were living on a wing and a prayer and, on many a night, didn’t even know where they would be sleeping. When they were in luck, they’d be put in a Christian host home, but those kinds of accommodations were sporadic and unpredictable. Papa remembers one time, sharing someone’s basement with a couple of Great Danes and their litter of yipping puppies. Once, he and Mom drove from Tulsa to upstate New York, where a blizzard had shut down roads and pretty much everything else. When they finally reached the town where they were supposed to speak, Papa found a phone booth and called the youth pastor to announce their arrival. The pastor said he was sorry, but the event had been canceled. No one offered a host home, and my parents didn’t have enough money to get a hotel room. They sat all night in their frigid car in the middle of a blinding snowstorm, and they held each other and cried.

  I like to think of my parents back then as a couple of idealistic Bohemian lovers on a mission of goodness. Papa gets a kick out of the description, but he says it wasn’t quite so romantic. The rejection was dispiriting, and there were many occasions when they weren’t offered a church meal and could barely scrape together enough money to eat. Even when they managed to get an audience at a church or a congregant’s home, they weren’t always asked back. Papa said, back then, he was far from the magnetic speaker he is today. His nerves would get the best of him, and he’d stammer and stutter and sweat so that his whole shirt would be soaked through. He was apparently loud, too. Mom told me they’d go from living room to living room, trying to recruit followers, and Papa preached as if a thousand people were listening, not the ten or twelve who were there.

  I was born in 1989, and Papa had gotten a lot better by then. By the time I was five, my sister, Charity, and brother, Cameron, had been born, and the ministry had grown so much that my parents were looking for a permanent place to settle down. As it turned out, the place in Garden Valley, Texas, found us. My parents were friends with someone named Melody Green, who, with her husband, Keith Green, founded the well-known Last Days Ministry in Garden Valley. Melody contacted them to say she was planning to
move away and she’d heard they were looking for a place for their ministry. Keith Green had died in a plane crash several years earlier, along with two of their children and a family of eight who had been visiting from California. (Coincidentally, in 1991, when I was two years old, Papa crashed the small plane he was flying to one of his Christian rallies. He and the two Teen Mania employees who were with him were injured but all of them recovered. It was only a fluke that I wasn’t on the plane that day, but twenty-one years later, I wouldn’t be so fortunate.)

  Anyway, it was an unimaginable tragedy for the Greens, and no one expected Melody to keep the ministry going. She had, though, for more than a decade. But then, during a prayer session, God told her that her work in Texas was done and it was time to take her two remaining children back to her California roots and turn her Garden Valley home and nearby four-hundred-acre church property over to someone who would continue to use it for ministering. My parents had outgrown their space in Tulsa, and the Greens’ church campus was everything they needed to take Teen Mania to the next step. It had office space as well as classrooms and dorms, which would allow them to hold summer camp and internship programs. And Melody’s house was just down the road, close enough to walk to. Papa and Mom couldn’t come close to paying what the property was worth, but they told Melody they would pray over it, which they did, day and night. Their answer came when Melody called again to say that the asking price had been reduced to whatever my parents thought they could afford to pay. It wasn’t long after that that we packed up our belongings and drove five hours from Tulsa to northeast Texas to settle into the rural community of Garden Valley, as well known for its thriving Christian culture as for its lucrative rose crop.

  I was turning six when we moved. We didn’t know it yet, but Teen Mania was on the cusp of becoming a mega force in the evangelical Christian world. Papa was consumed with the ministry. He was in a different city every weekend soliciting people for God. “The devil hates us, and we gotta be ready to fight and not be these passive little lukewarm, namby-pamby, kum-ba-yah, thumb-sucking babies that call themselves Christians!” While he was on the road, Mom led prayer groups and Bible classes on the Texas campus. My siblings and I were expected to do our part, and although we were all of tender age, we had our work cut out for us. Our parents taught that everything we did was in service to God. We were His warriors, and His wish was our command. Everything was a test, Papa said. If we chose to do what we wanted, rather than what God wanted us to do, we would be living in sin. At that point, even if God still wanted to get through to us, we, as sinners, wouldn’t be able to hear his voice. “If you aren’t constantly opening yourself up to hear what God has to say then you’ll miss people that need to be witnessed to or saved,” Papa said.

  I’m not saying that we didn’t have the kinds of family moments that others do, because we did. Papa loved being with us kids and there were many times when he’d come home from work and we’d do fun things together, whether it was singing or reading or building a tree house out back. But witnessing was our priority. It took precedence over everything else, household chores, studies, music lessons, and the needs of family and friends. As warriors of Christ, we had to spread His word to try to get unchurched people saved from the hellfire and wrath they had coming in the afterlife, and, in doing so, we would convert even more warriors for the fight. Eventually the entire world would have heard about salvation, and the Rapture would happen. If we, as the messengers of God, didn’t do our best before then, the nonbelievers we didn’t reach would be doomed to eternal suffering, and we would be denied some of the rewards of Heaven. That was a heavy burden to lay on a kid, but Papa said it, so I believed it to be true.

  I took my job seriously. I woke up every morning at 5:00 a.m. to read Bible verses, and I memorized the Roman Road, a series of verses from the Book of Romans showing the way to salvation. Meanwhile, Papa was fast becoming a Christian teen’s Michael Jackson. He was packing arenas from Pontiac, Michigan, to Denver, Sacramento, Houston, and Baton Rouge. Some of his followers were already disciples of Jesus. Others were lost and searching. When he stepped onstage, the audience went wild. He always gave them a show they’d never forget. He’d pace from one side of the stage to the other, with his dog-eared Bible clutched in his hand, getting the audience “on fire for Jesus.” When you really fall in love with Jesus, you fall out of love with the world! I am praying that you fall so head over heels, freak of nature in love with the Son of God that you don’t care what ANYBODY else thinks! JESUS! Use us to dream your dreams. Use us to show a very dark world how GREAT YOU ARE! All over the stadium, young people would be shedding tears, or falling on their knees, giving glory to Papa and to God. It was pretty heady stuff to see your father as the subject of that kind of hero worship.

  My first “save” was during one of those events. While Papa was onstage, I went into one of the public bathrooms and found a girl crying there. She was probably twice my age, I’d guess fifteen or sixteen, but I had no qualms about reaching out to her. I stepped right up and asked her what was wrong, and she told me she was crying over a family problem she was having. I took her hand in mine and looked into her swollen eyes. “If you’ll give your heart to Jesus and trust Him, He will help you,” I said. “I can pray with you if you’d like.” So we stood right there, blocking the bathroom stalls, and I led that teenage girl to a relationship with God. When it was over, I could hardly wait to tell Papa what I’d done. He was so proud of me for witnessing to that girl. He said I was a natural to follow in his footsteps one day. For a long time, I thought so, too.

  Papa took turns taking Charity, Cameron, and me with him on his travels, but I went the most often, probably because I was the oldest and the assumed heir apparent to the ministry. I saw more of the country before I turned ten than most people see in their lifetime. By the time I was eleven or twelve I was flying by myself to meet Papa at the venues where he was ministering.

  I loved being in airports, and I learned early on that they’re great places for witnessing. I picked my subjects randomly. One way we were taught was to close our eyes and choose a color—mine was usually yellow—then open our eyes and witness to the first person we saw who was wearing it. Most people were nice enough, or at least they tolerated me for a couple of minutes before rushing off to catch a plane (or so they said).

  Then I learned from Papa that the best time for evangelizing wasn’t in the airport, but on the plane, because people couldn’t get away from me there, at least not for however long we were in the air. I usually took advantage of those first moments after the plane reaches altitude and everyone sighs a breath of relief and settles in. I knew the drill, because Papa had taught me well. My sales pitch was based on the argument made by the Greek philosopher Aristotle twenty-three hundred years ago that there are three basic tenets of persuasion to win someone over to your way of thinking. The first is ethos, or establishing credibility with your chosen subject, which is followed by pathos, or making an emotional connection with the subject. Then comes logos, or going in for the kill by making your case and being prepared to back up what you’re saying. Papa trained my siblings and me with challenges. One was that we’d be given an object, it could be anything, and we competed to see who could evangelize best using it as a prop.

  I got so good, or at least so I thought, that I could start the conversation with something as benign as a pencil. “Gosh,” I’d say, rolling a yellow No. 2 between my forefinger and my thumb. “The pencil is an amazing invention, don’t you think?” My seatmate would always take the bait and answer with a nod or a smile, just enough of an opening for me to be able to continue my pitch. “We’ve been so overtaken with technology over the years that we seem to have forgotten how to write our thoughts out,” I’d say. “And, you know, I feel like I have a lot to write about.” I’d wait a second or two for the inevitable question from my seatmate. Like what? That’s when I knew I’d hooked them. I’d then launch into a spiritual experience I’d had—a God Mo
ment. After that, it was time to reel them in: logos. The dictionary definition is “the Word of God, made incarnate in Jesus Christ.” Most times, people listened politely as I explained the way to salvation and recited some Bible verses to back up my position—that the difference between being swooped up to Heaven and doomed to Hell was as simple as the act of accepting Christ as the savior. As it said in Romans 10:9–10, “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” My efforts were usually met with some kind of praise about my commitment, as well as my knowledge of the Good Book. Ah, what a precocious kid. Remember, I was an adolescent, and I knew the Bible better than most of the adults.

  After a while, witnessing became a game to me. I remember this one time. I was seated next to this guy, a philosopher. I was on the aisle side, and he had the window seat. The plane reached altitude, and I started with my pencil teaser. He seemed half-willing to play the game. But by the time I got to the logos part of my pitch, about halfway through the two-hour flight, he had had enough. Judging from the grimace on his face, he was clearly becoming irritated with the pesky kid seated beside him. He flat-out ignored me, staring out the window, pretending to read his newspaper, or studying the safety card. I knew he was fed up with the game, and he clearly didn’t want to play anymore. Did that stop me? Uh-uh. It made me more determined. Unabashed, I continued my pitch. In my head I was thinking, Heh heh heh. I’m going to get this guy. Translation: I’m going to win this game. I gave it my best shot. In fact, looking back, I was absolutely obnoxious in my quest to win him over. It was like Chinese poke torture. I kept poking him with all of my religious fervor. I wouldn’t stop proselytizing. It got to the point where he was squirming in his seat and gritting his teeth, and I loved it. “Well, I appreciate what you’re saying, but I don’t agree,” he said. To which I smugly replied: “And just because you don’t agree doesn’t mean it’s not true.” I was a serious evangelical kid, and I took myself way too seriously.