Reason should be destroyed in all Christians - Martin Luther
Los Gatos Christian Church was like nothing I had ever seen before. The membership had just topped five thousand, a number they were extremely proud of. They laughed and joked on the pulpit and (gasp!) clapped when the choir sang. I was shocked at this blasphemy of giving others the glory and was told to relax. One family from school attended this church and the daughter and I were good friends. So we hung out together.
The high school group had five hundred students and I was overwhelmed with the size and structure. The teaching, not as much. I was well schooled in the Bible and could not help but point out errors with the pablum lectures I heard every Sunday morning. At school and my other church I was getting comfortable with a rigid belief system that was comprised of black and white outlooks on life. There was no gray. Period.
When one of the high school ministers talked to me he was impressed at my knowledge of the Bible and invited me to join the prestigious Service Ministry Training Corps. It was a class for more advanced Christian high school students and even though I was too young to join, they made an exception for me. SMTC was a revelation. Although the teaching was more advanced, we focused on Jesus and doing good in the world. I took trips, one to British Columbia and another to Arizona to help missionaries there in various ways. We were praising Jesus and it was good. Best still, it knocked me off my path to becoming a rigid Christian asshole and showed me how to be a real one.
In the late seventies I sang in the immense choir at the Billy Graham Crusade in San Jose. People came forward by the thousands to accept Jesus in their hearts. The sinner's prayer always mystified me. How can a few spoken words save your soul from Hell? This was the time of ministers railing against backward Satanic messages on rock albums. Wasn't this a type of witchcraft? At the very least it was magical thinking.
SMTC was the only place I was ever allowed to ask tough questions without penalties. We could even express doubt and disagreement. And believe me, when it came to the doctrine of Hell and how only Christians were going to Heaven it got pretty hot. We were not a roomful of dummies and the simple logic, not to mention the total lack of Gods great compassion astounded us. In time however, all the hubbub was smoothed over and quieted down by that magical, wonderful word that solves all the problems.....faith. We had many lessons on the meaning of faith, Hebrew 11, and biographies of great men and women of the Bible who lived lives of great faith. God was with them, rewarded them, blessed them.
He would do the same for us if we just had faith.
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