Introduction to the 'God's Call' project

John 15:16 – Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain:  that whatever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you.

This project first came to mind more than a decade ago.  At the time my family was living outside of Austin, Texas and I was a freelance writer.  Jim Leickly, a college friend, had become heavily involved in some Christian men’s movements and in the course of a conversation he mentioned that he had become friends with Ted DiBiase, a popular professional wrestler known as “The Million Dollar Man.”  A high school friend of Jim’s, Hal Santos, had introduced Jim and Ted.  Hal, it turned out, was the pastor who came to Ted’s aid after the wrestler had bottomed out while on the road in 1992, drinking, doing drugs, and being unfaithful to his wife.  With Hal’s assistance, Ted cleaned himself up, reconciled with his wife, Melanie, and set forth on a successful path of evangelism that he continues to this day.

I’ve always had a respect for and fascination with people who had devoted their lives to doing God’s work 24/7.  And I was curious about what that call must be like.  Is it something you hear?  Something you feel?  Something that others divine on you?  There were times in my life when I wondered if I should or could pursue a career in service to the Lord.  But I was pretty sure that I had not received a calling which pulled me in that direction.  And without that, I feared I didn’t have the commitment or qualifications necessary.

So, how did someone like Ted DiBiase wind up moving from the mat to the pulpit, preaching God’s word?  I started to learn more about Ted’s story, and I did my research, I was surprised to discover that many professional wrestlers had become ministers.  I decided it would make a great story to examine why such a violent form of entertainment had yielded so many men of God.

Jim put me in touch with Ted and I recorded an hour-long interview with him.  I had just started to make contact with several other wrestler/ministers when the project came to an abrupt and prolonged pause in the fall of 2001.  That’s when I accepted a job offer to come work for the Baltimore Sun, the city’s major daily newspaper.  In the course of the move from Austin to Baltimore, my notes and interview tapes were misplaced.  And with a full-time job to keep me busily distracted, the project drifted from my mind.

I love my job.  Working in a newsroom can be an energizing experience.  You’re often the first to know what’s going on and you meet interesting people.  But the past 10 years in this business have been incredibly stressful.  Newspaper circulations and revenues are down industrywide.  Staff cuts have been frequent, deep and emotionally draining.  The cuts have resulted in more work for those of us left.  Add to that the unrelenting deadlines and daily diet of stories that are often overwhelmingly depressing and discouraging and by the summer of 2011 I was exhausted, defeated and felt like I was a passenger, not the driver in my professional life. 

It’s was during a weekend of self-examination that I convinced myself that I needed to start a side project, something that I had control over and that would provide me with a positive and affirming distraction from the grind of the newsroom.  For the first time in years, I remembered the wrestler project.  I went into our home office and pored through our file cabinets, hoping that I might rediscover the notes lost in our move.  But an hour of searching turned up nothing.

The next evening I was back in the office.  This time I was simply looking for a music CD to take on my commute to work.  As I flipped through the CD cases, I noticed one with the word “Calling” scribbled on the case.  It was a data disc.  And yes, it had the notes from my 2001 interviews.  To borrow a phrase from one of the people interviewed for this book, you didn’t have to hit me upside the head with a wet squirrel to convince me that this was a sure sign that it was indeed time to resume this project.

Once I restarted it, I decided to take it beyond wrestlers turned ministers.  For a couple of years, I had been reconnecting with old friends on social media sites like Facebook.  It impressed and intrigued me that so many of them had gone into Christian ministry.  For some of them, it seemed to me like a natural progression.  When we were kids, they were among the leaders in our Bible study and youth groups.  But others – well, I was pleasantly surprised that their paths took them to where they are today. 

So I began to contact people and ask them to participate in this project.  Ted DiBiase graciously agreed to be interviewed again, even after I told him that I’d lost the original interview tape from 2001.  It didn’t matter to him.  He’s a man with a tremendous testimony and he enjoys sharing it.  I contacted Ben Holloway, an old friend who was one of my Facebook finds.  Ben and I grew up on the same block in Madisonville, Kentucky.  He was a wild child when I knew him and when I moved away from Madisonville in 1973, Ben was one of the last people I would have expected to develop into a globetrotting evangelist.  David Cobb is an Episcopal priest and friend I first met in Oak Park, Illinois, then reconnected with when we moved to Baltimore.  David baptized two of our three children.  Another Episcopal priest, Carr Holland, was rector for my brother’s church and was the officiant for my niece’s wedding. I had never met the other two ministers profiled in this book until starting this project.  But I feel I was directly led to including them because their stories are so compelling.  Derrick DeWitt, a large, powerful leader of a Baptist church in one of Baltimore’s most crime-ravaged neighborhoods, has proven to be the right person in the right place for churches in need of rescue.  And Marellen Mayers, a Roman Catholic Woman Priest (yes, you read that correctly) has been resilient and persistent in answering a call to serve that never waned despite numerous obstacles.

For the most part, this is an oral history.  I conducted hours of interviews with the participants, and rather than translate what they told me, I felt it would be more effective to simply step aside and let them tell their stories so that you can pick up through their voices the personality, thoughtfulness, enthusiasm and passion of each person. 

The project was an education for me.  In retrospect, some of the things I learned probably should have been obvious.  Among them, you can be called to serve in a ministerial capacity other than pastoring.  I was directed to Ephesians 4:11, which says that some are called to pastor, while others are called as apostles, evangelists, prophets, and teachers. 

As expected, there was some variation from story to story.  But there were also some common themes.  Most, but not all of the people I interviewed had grown up with strong Christian foundations.  A couple of them had strayed from the church, lured by drugs, alcohol and or sex, and bottomed out before storming back into the fold.  Two of the people had profound transformational experiences that involved water imagery.

Then there were experiences that were consistent among all the people I spoke with.  Each person felt a strong, personal invitation from the Lord to go into their particular ministry.  They felt the call, listened to it and acted on it.  Each person credits others with recognizing the call within them, sometimes before they themselves heard it. 

What I hope the reader will learn from these stories is how these ministers experienced, recognized and acted upon their callings.

Ted DiBiase - 'God's Game Plan'

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TED DIBIASE: The Million Dollar Ministry

I’m not sure why I was so surprised to discover so many wrestlers in ministry.  After all, you don’t have to go very far into the first book of the Bible, Genesis 32:24, to find mention of the first biblical wrestling match, pitting Jacob against an angel.

I first spoke to Ted DiBiase, professional wrestling’s “Million Dollar Man,” in 2001 after my friend Jim Leickly told me about Ted’s ministry.  Ted truly loves sharing his testimony and it’s one that a lot of people can relate to because, as he’ll tell you, like most of us he’s far from perfect.

Ted was born January 18, 1954 in Miami, to Helen and Ted Wills.  Ted Wills was Helen Nevins’ second husband.  Her first was Al Galento, a professional wrestler she married in 1943 when she was 16.  That marriage was short lived, ending within a year.  Her marriage (IN WHAT YEAR?) to Wills, a singer, didn’t last long either.  They divorced soon after Ted’s birth.

By 1956, little Ted and Helen were living in the little town of Willcox, Arizona, with Helen’s mom, Verda Marie Nevins, who kept an eye on Ted while Helen went out on the road to earn a living.  At first Helen was a dancer, but then she found a niche as a lady professional wrestler.  It was during her wrestling career that she met, fell in love with and married another wrestler, “Iron” Mike DiBiase, who adopted Ted and became his role model.

Although the family moved frequently during Ted’s youth, the church played a major role in his life no matter where the family was living.  Ted was raised as a Catholic and early on entertained thoughts of becoming a priest.

But his dreams of priesthood were eventually eclipsed by his dreams of becoming a professional athlete.  At first, he wanted to play big-time college football and then go onto the NFL.  He received a scholarship to play for West Texas State University.    His NFL dreams never materialized.  Injuries suffered in football, a marriage in 1973 to Jaynet Foreman and his first forrays into professional wrestling began leading him in a different direction. 

In 1977, his first son, Michael was born.  By then, Ted’s wrestling scheduled prevented him from spending much time with Jaynet and Michael.  By 1978, Ted’s reputation as a wrestler was growing and he was given an opportunity by the National Wrestling Alliance for a title match in St. Louis against long-time family friend and NWA heavyweight champion, Harley Race.  The match ended in a draw, with Harley Race retaining his belt.  But Ted had caught the attention of Vince McMahon, Sr. who was about to launch his World Wrestling Federation (WWF) into the big time.

As Ted’s wrestling career began to come together, his marriage was falling apart.  In early 1980, he and Jaynet split up.

Early the next year, a mutual friend introduced him to Melanie Kennedy.  Ted was in love at first sight and on December 31, 1981, he and Melanie were married.

Ted’s wrestling career continued to arc throughout the 1980s and he returned to the WWF as its popularity exploded  In 1987, Ted took on the ring personna, “The Million Dollar Man,” and became one of the WWF’s most popular villians.

But worldwide fame brought with it a worldly way of life that was far from Ted’s altar-boy upbringing.  He fell victim to the temptations that come with fame, money and constant travel.  It came to a climax in the spring of 1992 when he was in Chicago.  During a phone call home to Melanie, she confronted him about his drug and alcohol abuse and about his infidelity. 

The phone call devastated and scared him.  He was afraid he was about to lose his life with Melanie and their two sons.  Knowing that he had to make big and immediate changes in his life in order to keep his family together, he phoned an old friend, Pastor Hal Santos.  As Ted’s wrestling career had grown, he had often used Hal as a spiritual sounding board. 

Ted explained what had happened.  Without hesitation, Hal said he would fly from St. Louis, where he lived,  to Chicago to help.  Once in Chicago, he listened to Ted’s story and then contacted Melanie.  Then he arranged a reconciliation meeting between the couple, which included a trip to the Ascension Convention, a youth revival being held just outside Chicago.  It was during this event that Ted answered the invitation to come up and accept Jesus Christ.

Ted continued to wrestle, manage and serve as a commentator for WWF, but also began sharing his testimony wherever he went.  In 1996, he left WWF for World Championship Wrestling, and he stayed with WCW until 1999.  That was the year that he founded his Heart of David Ministry and became a full-time evangelist.

Today, Ted and Melanie remain happily married.  They live near Jackson, Mississippi with their sons, Ted Jr. and Brett, both of whom have gone into the family business of professional wrestling.  Ted has also reunited with his son Michael, from his marriage to Jaynet.

Jackson is also the homebase of Heart of David Ministry, which takes Ted to churches, schools, prisons and other venues all over the United States, inspiring more men to take active roles of leadership in the church.  And, as “The Million Dollar Man,” he still makes an occasional appearance at wrestling events.

In this excerpt, Ted talks about his Heart of David Ministry and the advice he gives others who think they may be called by God.

HEART OF DAVID MINISTRY

Heart of David Ministry was born in 1999.  I probably could have just called it Ted DiBiase Ministries, because I am Heart of David.  It’s evangelism.  It’s my ministry.  It’s me going and speaking wherever God leads me.  Whether it’s a church or a prison or a halfway house or a schoolyard or a street corner.  I go and proclaim the Gospel. 

Why I chose the name Heart of David was in studying the Bible, I remember when I was in this infancy in terms of my relationship with God and my knowledge of the Bible, I was led to the 40^th Psalm.  It’s basically David’s cry for help after he had sinned with Bathsheba and had been confronted by God.  I can remember going and reading it, even before I knew a lot of the psalms were written by David.  I would read that psalm every day.  It was my comfort.  When I realized it was written by David and I started studying about him, I found that his major sin, the flaw that caused his fall was the same as mine.  It was adultery.  Again, in studying the word and our relationship with God, when a man understands that he’s flawed from the moment that he starts breathing, that his body is selfish, that it’s our instinct to take care of number one first, all the time, that’s the battle.  We don’t need the devil’s help.  I tell people, “The devil made you do it?  The devil didn’t make you do squat!”  Here’s when the devil had influence.  When we get to a place in our lives where we can’t do this alone.  When we get to a place where we keep trying to do things our way and our way keeps bringing us to the same dead end.  There’s a proverb that says, “As a dog returns to its vomit, so the fool to his folly.”  People will continue to go back to what they were doing and the only thing that’s going to fill the void is Jesus Christ.  I’ve seen it time and time and time again.  Now, when you finally cry out to God and say, “Okay Lord, I realize that I can’t do this on my own.”  That’s when you’ll realize that’s why God sent Jesus.  Because he knew that none of us could to this on our own!

He gave us the Ten Commandments to show us that we couldn’t live up to them in our humanity.  When you say, “Lord Jesus, come into my life.  I accept the Father’s gift.  I accept your death on the cross and your sacrifice as the atonement for my sins.  Lord, you come into my life and you begin to lead my life and I’m going to follow you.  You come on board my ship and take the helm.  You take the ship where you want it to go and I’ll follow you.”  When you make that decision, when you realize that you can’t do it without Jesus, now that’s when you’ve got the devil’s attention.  That’s when he’s going to come in and that’s when he’s going to tempt you.  And he’s going to tempt you where you’re the weakest, where you’re the most vulnerable because he’s the greatest liar of all time.

That’s what I tell people in my testimony.  That is exactly what happened to me.  I had made a walk down the aisle in the church that I attended, Morrison Heights Baptist Church.  It was the second time I’d walked down the aisle and said the Sinner’s Prayer, asking God to forgive me and I got baptized again.  The pastor told me, get into the Word, read the Bible daily, get a daily devotional.  And get into a men’s fellowship – you need accountability.  Get to church as often as you can.  All that says one thing.  Dive into this relationship with Jesus!  I say this over and over and over that the difference between every other world religion and genuine Christianity, is that genuine Christianity is not a religion.  It’s a relationship with Jesus Christ.  If you don’t have that relationship, if you’re not speaking to him on a daily basis, if you’re not in the Word as often as you can be, if there’s no conviction in your life, then you don’t have it.  I’ve held the Bible out in front of churches and said that if the only time you crack this book is on Sunday, then Jesus Christ isn’t Lord of your life.  You can’t have a relationship with somebody you only speak to five minutes a week or two minutes a day.  Jesus said, “Clothe the naked.  Feed the hungry.  Take care of the widows and orphans.  Visit the prisoners in prison.  When you do this for the least of my brethren, you do this for me.” 

ADVICE FOR OTHERS

I say this from the pulpit all the time that we’re living in a day and a time when I see Christianity floundering.  I see religion floundering in the world.  When you read the Bible, there’s always a remnant.  Some people say, “How does God speak to you?”  A lot of people go to church on Sunday.  They show up and they put in their hour.  Some of them for the most part try to live a pretty good life.  Some think they’ve got their ticket punched and they’re in.  Well, I’ve got news for them.  Jesus, in Matthew 7:21 said, “Just because you say to me ‘Lord, Lord’ doesn’t mean you’ll enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in Heaven.  Many will come in that day” – and he’s speaking of Judgement Day – “many will come in that day to me, ‘Lord, did we not prophesy your name and in your name drive out many demons and do many miracles?’  And then I will tell them plainly, ‘Depart from me for I never knew you.’”  So I ask them, “Who was he talking to?”  He’s talking to people who’ve done miracles in his name, driven out demons.  I mean, big miracles!  And they’ve done them in the name of Jesus.  And he’s going to say, “I never knew you”?  Who’s he talking to?  Well, he’s certainly not talking to a murderer or a rapist or a drug dealer.  I said, “People, he’s talking to people who go to church every week.  He’s talking to people who just punch the ticket.  Because what God looks intently into is the heart of man.” 

There are three things I tell them they have to have.  Number one is an understanding that if you’re really a Christian, then you have to have a relationship with Jesus.  They say, “What does that require?”  I say, “What does that require with anybody?  You have to spend time with him.  Think about your closest friends.  Think about the person you call at two in the morning when you break down on the side of the road and you’ve got one bar left on your cell phone?  Think about who you’re going to call.”  Well, I’m going to call that one person who no matter what the situation, I know they’re coming.  They’re not going to let me down, they’re not going to make an excuse because of the intimacy of the relationship.  The greatest relationship of a Christian’s life is not supposed to be with their wife or with their kids.  It’s with Jesus.  It comes absolutely first.  And when it does, everything else will fall into place.  I have lived a life that proves that.

And if you ask me, “How do you hear God speak to you?”  Well, if  you’re in that relationship with Jesus, then he’s got to be able to speak to you daily.  “Well, how do you do that?”  You read the Bible, the Old and the New Testaments.  And you read it daily.  Now, that doesn’t mean you have to read 25 chapters a day.  I do a daily devotional.  Sometimes I read one verse and I meditate on that verse.  Sometimes it’s just a random verse.  You can go online and there’s different Bible-reading plans, if you will. But reading the Bible educates you to the history.

GOD’S GAME PLAN

We live in the flesh and the flesh is weak and the flesh is self-serving and self-centered.

The first thing people hear from me is called “Following God’s Game Plan.”  God has a plan for everybody’s life.  Ephesians 2:8-10 says, “For it is by grace you have been saved through faith.  This not of yourself.  It is the gift of God.  Not by works so that no man can boast.  For you are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for you to do.”  That Scripture says several things.  Number one it says you can’t earn salvation.  You can’t work hard enough.  You can’t light enough candles and go to enough masses and say enough Hail Marys to earn Heaven.  You can’t earn it.  If you could earn it, Jesus wouldn’t have had to come.  But because it’s impossible for us to earn it, we needed a way and God provided a way through Jesus.  We’re saved by God’s grace, by his mercy through the sacrifice of his son.  When we accept the sacrifice of Jesus as our atonement, what we’re saying is Lord, you gave all of yourself for me.  Now I am your bondservant.  I’m going to do whatever you want me to do.  I’m going to try to transform my life.  Dr. Ed Cole said this, “Genuine manhood is synonymous with Christ’s likeness.”  And he’s right.  The more Christ-like your character is, the more of a man you are.  And that’s what you try to attain.

Another Scripture says, “God’s gifts and his calling are irrevocable.”  I tell men this all the time, “We’re not unique.  We’re all the same and we’re all equal in the eyes of God. But we are all uniquely called.  We all have unique gifts and we all have unique talents and what God wants of us is to take whatever gift he’s given us and whatever sphere of influence he’s given us and be number one.  That’s okay!  Be ambitious.  Some people will tell you it’s not important to live a significant life.  That it’s prideful.  That ain’t it.  God wants you to live a significant life.  The difference is, and this is why it took so long for Ted to find out, it’s too the glory of God.  Not to the glory of self.  Seek first the kingdom and its righteousness and then everything will else will be added to you. 

Ben Holloway - 'Little Man of God'

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BEN HOLLOWAY: Little Man of God

Ben Holloway is a fidget.  Always has been.  My memories of him as a kid are that he was undersized and overly active, always moving, even when he was standing still.  It’s not surprising that someone with that much energy found an outlet for it as a drummer.   Drumming was in his blood – his mom, Mary, was a singer, and dad, Starling, was a drummer who encouraged Ben to start playing at an early age.  Starling, who when he wasn’t doing a thousand other things (I guess the boundless energy also ran in the family) had a jazz band back in the 1940s and 1950s and even spent some time playing for Dinah Shore.

Ben and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Madisonville, Kentucky, a town of about 15,000 souls in the heart of the strip-mining coal fields in the western part of the commonwealth.  Ben was exactly two years younger than me – we share the same January 25^th birthday – and we lived at diagonal corners on the block.  He was always a lot of fun to hang with, in part because of his bottomless pit of energy, and in part because we were both a little impish, prone to mischief, albeit harmless mischief.

One of the reasons I was surprised to find that Ben was on the Lord’s payroll was that he was one of the first people I knew who casually took the Lord’s name in vain.  I don’t know why it left such an imprint, but I clearly remember him doing so one day in the presence of his older sister, Finley, and her reply was, “God’s last name isn’t dammit!”

Another reason his current vocation was a little surprising is that in the early 1970s in Madisonville, there were two rapidly growing movements attracting young people.  One was the blossoming of Bible study groups all around the town.  The town was ripe for it.  You probably couldn’t walk 10 minutes in any direction without passing the door of a church or two.  And, since there wasn’t much else to do in Madisonville, the Bible studies provided kids with a great social gathering outlet.  But there was another movement rapidly growing, and Madisonville was earning national notoriety for it.  Drugs were becoming pervasive.  Many teens, and lots of adults, were coping with small-town boredom by getting high.  Kids were getting arrested and kids were dying.  And CBS’s 60 Minutes produced a 1975 report, holding up Madisonville as the poster-child for America’s rural drug problem. 

In early 2011 Ben and I reconnected via Facebook.  I had moved away from Madisonville after my sophomore year in high school and lost touch with Ben.  What I found out after our online reunion was that Ben had lost touch with Ben, too.  He detailed his lost years with drugs, but very passionately described his profound transformational experience in 1974.  During that experience he had a vivid vision of Hell.  That was followed by a complete surrender to the Holy Spirit during which his drug and alcohol addictions were replaced with an addiction for the Word of the Lord (his description, not mine). 

After that experience, Ben began sharing his testimony in churches around Madisonville, and it was in one of those churches, Christian Assembly Church in Madisonville, that he met his wife to be, Karen Roberts.  They were married in 1980.

Ben continued playing the drums and traveled with Christian bands throughout the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.  In 1982 he decided to settle down and he started a home-security business.  On the weekends, he continued to share his testimony.  But in the mid-1990s others began to recognize that he was blessed with a calling to global evangelism.  He began to travel, sharing his story and helping train pastors in foreign lands.  But the more he traveled, the more his business suffered and in 1998, with Karen’s support, he decided to devote his enormous well of energy to full-time evangelism and Impartation Ministries was born.

Through Impartation, Ben focuses on pastoral training and he teaches at conferences throughout the United States.  He frequently takes his message, enthusiasm and passion to conferences abroad in Mexico, the Middle East, Africa, South America and wherever he is called.

Ben and Karen have raised two children and still live in Madisonville, where Impartation Ministries is based and where they continue to be active in Christian Assembly, and where Ben has served in many capacities since 1977.

The following excerpt is Ben's story of his profound conversion experience in 1974.

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TRANSFORMATION

I continued to party and I continued to do drugs and I continued to drink. Until July 14, 1974. That’s when I had this dream.

What I saw in the dream I now know was scriptural. Now that I look back on it it was so cool because I didn’t have any Bible frame of reference. In this dream I saw a very dark place. It was a literal, physical place, like a cave. There were flames burning out of the rocks. I saw people screaming in torment and burning, eternal weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth. It was just incredible. I had no idea what all this meant. But I was later to find out that what I was seeing was the scriptural interpretation of this place called Hell. What was interesting about it now that I look back on it was that none of these young people had talked to me about Hell. It wasn’t something that had been planted in me, it was just something that I saw in this dream. It’s been too many years and I can’t remember how long the dream went on – it seemed like it went on for a very long time. But I remember sitting up in bed in a cold sweat and I was stone cold sober. It was the first time I’d been like that in three years. It was about two in the morning because I remember looking at the clock. I laid back down in the bed and it was soaking wet and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I just tossed and turned all night. And I remember saying to myself – it wasn’t like I was praying – I was thinking out loud, “What does this mean? What does this mean? What does this mean? Why am I dreaming this dream?”

Carol Cummings was one of the teenage girls who had tried to share Jesus with me. She called about eight o’clock the next morning and asked me if she could pick me up and take me to church. I didn’t tell her anything about the dream, I just said, “Yeah, sure, why not. I don’t have anything else to do.” I remember her reaction to that was kind of shocked because she expected me to say, “No.” When I said that I’d go, I remember her saying, “Really?” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll go.”

So she picked me up in time to go to church. We walked into this service and it was a full-blown charismatic full-gospel service with a band and singers. I’d never seen that before. People had their hands raised up. This worship was intense, it was extreme, it was passionate worship. Carol and I sat about halfway back in the building. After about four or five songs, the pastor, Roy Conley, who I’d never met before, takes the platform, comes up to the pulpit and says, “About two weeks ago, I had prepared a message to preach this morning. But I cannot preach that message. I have to preach what the Lord has given me to preach.” He said, “At two o’clock this morning…” – and that got my attention. I had just remembered my experience from a few hours earlier – “…the Lord gave me the message that I’m supposed to preach.” And he took his Bible and he began to preach exactly what I had seen just a few hours earlier. Oh, and he did say this, “This is only the second time in 20 years in the ministry that I’ve ever preached on this subject.” And he preached exactly, I mean exactly, what I had seen just a few hours earlier. And, he said, “I have no idea why I’m preaching this message.”

At that point I hadn’t told anybody. I hadn’t told Carol or my parents or anybody about my dream. I remember the pastor giving an invitation to receive Christ, and I stood there. I was holding onto the pew in front of me until I thought my knuckles were going to break open. It was a hot day, there was no air conditioning in the building and I was shaking like it was 40 below. He said, “We’re going to open up these altars here if you’d like to come and pray, and if there’s anybody here who’d like to receive Jesus and avoid this place that I have just describe, come up.” He preached not only about Hell but about salvation through Jesus and it was not God’s will that anyone should perish but that everyone should have everlasting life. I mean, I’d never heard this before.

I literally stepped out from the pew into the midldle aisle and I ran. I didn’t walk, I ran as fast as I could and I just fell on my face. I didn’t pray this elaborate, wordy prayer because I didn’t know how to pray. I just said, “Jesus, help me.” That’s all I knew how to do. I did say, “Jesus, if you are Lord, if you can do anything with my life, I want to give it to you. Just set me free.”

My emotions didn’t manifest in weeping or anything, but let me tell you what happened next. I was on my knees and oddly enough, there was nobody around me. Nobody was laying hands on me, nobody was praying for me. I think maybe in that situation it was that God didn’t want anybody to touch me or help me pray because I just needed something that was so real, and for lack of better terms, untainted by human contact.

I had my head bowed. I was kneeling and I had a sensation of somebody taking a garden pail with a big shower head and pouring it on top of my head. Hot water. It was so real that I thought some kid had gone to the back of the church and filled up a pail and was pouring water on me. In fact, I know this is going to sound funny, but it kind of irritated me. I’m having this experience with God and some parents have let their unruly kid do this to me! Isn’t that strange?

I was just about to open my eyes and say, “Stop it! I’m connecting with God here!” And when I looked up, I raised my face toward the ceiling, and I opened my eyes fully convinced that I was going to see this garden pail pouring water on my face. When I looked up, there was no pail, but I felt the water cascade over my face, all the way down my chest, over my shoulders, totally like I was standing in the shower. And then there was this sensation like someone taking a toothbrush and just scrubbing me. Every square inch of me. Just cleansing me. It’s the only way I can describe it to you.

You’ve got to understand that for three years I had seen the world through the cloud of drugs and alcohol. When I got up from that experience – and I don’t mean to sound spooky or strange – the sky was bluer, colors were more vivid, I heard birds singing. Things I hadn’t seen or heard in three years. It was like God was showing me the earth that he had created and I was able to see it through eyes and a brain that was unclouded by drugs. I was totally, completely set free from addiction in just a matter of moments.

Marellen Mayers - The Womanpriest

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MARELLEN MAYERS: The Woman Priest

Marellen Mayers laughs easily and often as she shared the story of her vocation.  Sometimes the laughter is ironic, because the road she’s taken to the ministry has had twists, turns and detours that might have discouraged others from following through on answering the call.

Marellen is a Roman Catholic Woman Priest.  It’s a provocative title and one that she is fiercely proud of.   Roman Catholic Women Priests, or RCWP,  is a an international movement that was born in 2002 when seven women were ordained on the banks of the Danube River in Germany.  The group openly challenges the Roman Catholic Church’s Canon Law 1024, which states that only a baptized man can validly receive sacred ordination.  RCWP describes the law as unjust and discriminatory.  Today there are more than 130 Roman Catholic Women Priests worldwide.

The Catholic Church does not recognize RCWP as a movement within the church or the ordinations.  However, the women priests contend that they have been accepted by the Catholic people and will continue to serve in “grassroots communities where all are equal and welcome.”

Marellen’s ordination 2011 was the fulfillment of a calling that began to feel when she was growing up in Baltimore.  As a child she often “played priest” with her brother and sister.  A few years later, as a young woman she joined the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent DePaul, an apostolic community of women throughout the world dedicated to helping the poor.

But her deep devotion to the church has been accompanied by a need to understand why the church does what it does.  She has always asked questions and those questions have not always been met with comfortable or satisfactory answers.  Among the questions she feels was never fully answered was why, in May 1980, she was asked to leave the Daughters of Charity after serving five and a half years.

During the ensuing 31 years, she worked as a nursing assistant, child live specialist, social worker and campus minister.  It was also during this time that she met her husband, Craig, to whom she’s been happily married for more than 25 years.

The embers of her calling were not fully extinguished when she left the Daughters.  In fact, they began to burn hotter, leading her to feel that she was being led to serve in a higher capacity than she had before.  But she was also conflicted by this feeling, knowing that as a Roman Catholic there was no way she could become a priest.  She and Craig considered moving to the Episcopal Church, but Marellen ultimately did not want to walk away from the Catholic Church.

Then one evening, a friend who not only recognized her calling but also the struggle she was having with it, asked if she had ever heard of the Roman Catholic Women Priests.  Marellen initially thought the friend was joking, but after he told her more about the group and she did her own research, she reached out and contacted RCWP.  She was ordained June 4, 2011.

The path since has not always been smooth.  The ordination has cost her one job and perhaps prevented her from getting others.  But Marellen will tell you that the fulfillment of a life-long call to answer Christ’s call to ministry has been worth it.

In the following excerpt, Marellen describes finding out about RCWP.

RECALLED

I started at Shelam Institute in what was more of a residency program than an internship.  It was 10 days in the summer of ’07 and 10 days in the summer of ’08. In the summer of ‘07 when I met my class there were 15 of us in the class, all women, all Christians, but there were eight different denominations represented.  Of those 15 women, there were also eight women who were ordained in various ministries – Episcopalian, United Church of Christ, Lutheran, Methodist.  I felt like  I had hit a gold mine of , “Wow, can I talk to these people!”  And they were very helpful, too.  And in ’07 I shared with them that I kind of had this calling to priest hood and I didn’t know what to do with it because I’m Roman Catholic and it’s not going to happen in the Roman Catholic church, or so I thought.  That’s when, it was the year of ’07, that Craig and I started talking about the Episcopal church.  He said, “If you want to do that we can do that, part of my family’s High Anglican anyway.  This is important to you and you can go to seminary and  you can be ordained and you can get a parish somewhere.”  So that was the year that I took to really discern about the Episcopal church.   My classmates thought that when I came back in ’08 that I’d be telling them that I’d been accepted into the Episcopal seminary.  In the meantime, a dear priest friend of ours came to dinner and we were talking, and I’m forever asking him, “When do you think this is going to change?”  And, “When do you that’s going to change in the church?” When I mentioned the role of women and I mentioned women’s ordination – and I had looked up the women’s ordination conference and that kind of stuff.  And he said, “Haven’t you ever heard of Roman Catholic Women Priests?”  When he said that, I said, “What did you say?”  And he repeated it and I threw my napkin across the table at him.  Craig didn’t know what was going on.  I said, “Oh, come on, you’re pulling my leg!”  And he said, “No, I’m not.  When you get a chance, go to your computer and look them up.”  Lo and behold, that night that’s exactly what I did and I was on the computer about three hours, reading everything on their website.  And when I finally went to bed – it was like 2:30 in the morning – I woke my husband up and said, “I think now God has found a way that I can be ordained a priest!”  

 

Derrick DeWitt - 'Lifted Up'

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DERRICK DEWITT : LIFTED UP

Baltimore’s Western District is typical of many seen-better-times American inner-city neighborhoods.  It is dangerous and downtrodden. The district has suffered more than 150 homicides since the beginning of 2007.  A drive through the streets of the community reveals an abundance of boarded-up homes and businesses.  It almost seems that the only things thriving in this environment are dueling symbols of despair and hope – liquor stores and churches.

A bright oasis among the islands of optimism is the First Mount Calvary Baptist Church on North Fulton Avenue.  The church is presided over by Pastor Derrick DeWitt, a large man with a passionate voice.  DeWitt is a product of the neighborhood.  He was born in West Baltimore in 1967 to Carolyn DeWitt and Steward Koger. First Mount Calvary was one of the churches he attended regularly as a child.  He lived in an apartment with his mom, two older brothers and younger sister until he was 10.  That’s when his mom met William Marshall and the family moved to his house in East Baltimore, a side of town that offered safety and comfort rarely found on the west side of town.  The east side was also home to his other childhood church, Southern Baptist Church.

Discipline has always played a major role in DeWitt’s life.  Self sufficient from an early age and influenced by the leadership exhibited by the men of the churches, it’s not surprising he was drawn to a career in the military.

DeWitt’s time in the Army and National Guard was distinguished, with time served in Korea, Iraq and an assignment at the Pentagon.  It was during his time in the military that he answered his call to the ministry.  It was also where he met his wife, Cassandra, a woman who was literally the answer to his prayers.

A hallmark of DeWitt’s pastoral career has been turning around struggling churches.  His first success story was rescuing the Garment of Praise Baptist Church outside of Washington, D.C.  Most recently, it has been the remarkable turnaround of First Mount Calvary.  Although he’s had success with both suburban and urban ministries, he notes they offer vastly different challenges. And he sums up those differences with a story.  “When I got to my current church in the city I was praying for the people in the church.  I said, ‘If you need prayer, come up.  I want to pray for you individually.’  So a gentleman comes up in the prayer line and says, ‘I need you to pray for my hearing.’  I oiled my hands and laid them on his ears and began to pray for his hearing.  I said, ‘Young man, I hope this helps you.  Please let me know if it does.’  He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll let you know.  My hearing is on Tuesday.’” 

While DeWitt can use humor to make a point, he knows that the problems facing his inner-city congregation are serious.  He has pulled First Mount Calvary from near financial ruin.  And one of the pillars on which the church currently operates is a commitment to community outreach.  First Mount Calvary has a drug rehab ministry, free youth summer day camp, food pantry and fresh produce distribution, and a senior health program.  The church also participates with the city of Baltimore and other organizations on a community rehab program that fixes up abandoned properties, turning them into temporary housing for displaced families. He and others in the church are also actively involved in the Western Police District Council.  I first met Pastor DeWitt a week before Christmas in 2011 when that group was preparing a holiday meal at the church to thank the police officers and fire fighters who protect the community.

DeWitt is working on his own book about his ministry.  In it he plans to detail his guide to answering God’s call.

The following excerpt details a vivid dream DeWitt experienced while serving in Korea that turned his life around.

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LIFTED UP

I had a very wonderful and successful career in the military.  My last 10 years in the military I was promoted five times.  But when I first joined the military, I fell into the life a lot of young men fall into, hanging out at the club.  Just going to church occasionally as many of us young men do when we get away from home, when we get away from grandmom. 

But I had an experience that brought me back and sealed it for me.  At one point I was living with a young lady.  Even though I had a room at the barracks, I spent most nights there at her home.  And I had this tremendous guilt all the time about doing that, about living with her.  One night I’m lying in bed and it appears to me that I’m fully awake.  I’m just lying there, and then I begin to levitate off the bed.  I go up through the ceiling, through the trees in the front yard, all the way up to the clouds in the sky.  When I get up in the clouds in the sky, the winds begin to blow, the clouds begin to move and it’s raining.  I mean it’s really pouring down rain.  And the clouds begin to form words, and the words said, “Last chance!!!”  And I began to fall back down.  Everything I saw going up, I saw coming back down.  I fell back through the trees, I fell back through the roof of the house and I landed on the bed softly. But when I landed on the bed, I was soaking wet.  I mean I was soaking wet from head to toe as if I had really been in a rainstorm.  The young lady said, “Did you have a bad dream?  Why are your clothes wet?”  I mean I was soaked from head to toe.  I got up out of the bed, dried myself off, changed my clothes, packed up all my stuff and I went back to the barracks.  When I got there, I got on my knees and I prayed.  I said, “Lord, from this day forward I will preach your Word.”  And I’ve been preaching ever since.

J. Carr Holland - 'The Discerner'

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J. CARR HOLLAND: The Discerner

“Ordained ministry is at its heart about the formation of character: i.e. whatever function and prerogative is laid upon us must rest side by side with the spirit and heart, a way of seeing, a way of being, which we bear for the whole community of the Baptized.”

The Rev. J. Carr Holland delivered those in 2003 during the ordination of five deacons at Trinity and St. Phillip’s Cathedral in Newark, New Jersey.

At the time, Carr Holland was the rector of St. Grace Church in Newark, New Jersey.  He was also in transition into the role of President on the Commission on Ministry for the Diocese of Newark.  In his latter role, he served on the commission that oversaw the church’s process for evaluating candidates for ordination. 

The Episcopal Church has a comprehensive process for discernment, or evaluating an individual’s call to serve the church.  The process has evolved over the past several decades from a fairly informal process to one that is structurally codified in the canons of each diocese.  Prior to the 1970s, the typical path was that a candidate for ministry was recommended by his or her home vestry and priest to the bishop, who would then make a determination as to whether or not the path to ministry would continue.  The ‘70s saw the rise of the Commissions on Ministry and the formalization of the prescriptions for discernment.  The commissions would still make the recommendations to the bishop, but because of the scrutiny of the process, their recommendations were very loudly listened to.  The process, once begun, takes several years to complete and moves candidates through a series of interviews with clergy and lay councils, a psychological examination, seminary, ordination as a deacon, and then, if it is deemed to be the proper move for the individual and the church, ordination into priesthood.

Holland understands well the serious personal and institutional vetting involved in evaluating a call to ministry.  As he pointed out in his remarks, the vocation must be for the balanced good of the individual’s “spirit and heart,” as well as being compatible for the good of the church as a whole.

As a member of the Commission on Ministry, he is quick to point out that not everyone who feels he or she has a vocation actually has one, and that the commission’s responsibility is not to herd ministers into the church, but to protect the institution of the church from people who may not be truly be called to serve.  Perhaps the greatest challenge to his own sense of calling came from within when, as a student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the early 1970s, he had to sort out a personal crisis of faith.  But after considerable self- examination and spiritual guidance from friends and mentors, he recognized that he was experiencing a genuine call to serve. 

After graduating from UNCG in 1972 with a Bachelors of Science in Sociology, he earned his Masters of Divinity from the General Seminary in New York.  He served parishes in New Jersey for more than three decades, before returning to his native North Carolina in 2010 where he now serves as an interim priest.

In the following excerpt, he describes how incidents late in his college years helped answer questions he had concerning faith and vocation.

CHANGING DIRECTION

By the second semester of my freshman year I had taken a fairly significant number of art courses.  You were expected to do mostly academic things.  I done a little more than dabbling and I realized that as much as I loved art, it probably wasn’t going to be a place I’d want to spend my life.  I had this other value in my life that began to shift in.  I wanted to do something with my life that helped people.  I thought about teaching, and I settled into sociology, thinking it might be the right thing.  I was doing social welfare concentration.  And that just settled in more and more and felt that it might be the right thing to do.  And by my senior year, I was concentrated in services to children.  I was given a field placement in a children’s home for two semesters.  That was what I chose to do and I had a sense there might be something more. 

In my junior year I made an appointment with Father James Hindle to talk about whether I had a vocation to the priesthood.  I wasn’t clear.  It was just a conversation and I didn’t have a follow-up conversation.  I was given books to read and that didn’t help me in the slightest.

Looking back on it, I’m not sure if Father Hindle could have done more for me in that moment than he did.  But there was one phrase he used with me back then that has always stayed.  He told me I should prepare for a career outside the ministry and only when I felt like I had no alternative but to be ordained should I seek ordination.  That was a curious phrase that I played with for the next several years, because I felt like there were other things I could do since I thought that’s what I would do.

But at the time, I was left with what I would say is I had a confusion, and I wasn’t sure whether it was a direction or whether it was a desire on my part.  I couldn’t sort out where it emanated from.  By my senior year I was afraid it was other peoples’ pressure and not really a calling. Katherine and Frank Whaley I think recognized what were the possible signs of a vocation and so they encouraged me.  And you know, encouragement, when you’re not there, can feel like pressure.  I wouldn’t say they pressured me, but I experienced it as pressure.  I think maybe I pressured myself from the time I first had the conversation about a vocation.  I wasn’t sure what it meant but I didn’t want to be unfaithful, so there was a kind of inner pressure.  Some of my peers certainly saw the possibility there.   And of course, in your college years you’re so desperate to sort our what it is you’re to do for life that that’s it’s own kind of funny thing.  So, I was a little bit confused whether it was other people pressuring me or if it was something I felt genuinely called to, and so I just pushed away.

The other curious chapter was that in my junior or senior year, sometime around Christmas time or thereafter I had a real crisis of faith.  I don’t remember the chronology of these two things – the conversation with Father Hindle and the crisis – but I had a moment of crisis when I suddenly felt, “What if none of this is true and I’m making my life on it?” I resigned from teaching Sunday school and from everything at that point and I told Father Hindle that I would not be coming to church for a while.  He didn’t push me.  It was a deeper conversation, so there were questions.  But I recall that he said, “When it’s right for you, you’ll be back.”  I only stayed away two weeks.  And then it was like, “This is the answer.”  So I began to continue to go to church, but with this puzzle in my brain.  I think it was my junior year, because I remember I decided to take a course in religion, but it was a course in the phenomenon of religion.  The very first book we were assigned was a book by Elizabeth Sewell called, “The Orphic Voice.” (cq, cq).  In the introduction to that book she used the phrase, “I’m going to take you on a journey, but to take you I must use the myth of Orpheus.  You must trust the myth to bear truth to make the journey.”  I remember it was like I got slapped in the back of the head and I said, “There’s my problem. I have to trust the biblical story to bear truth, and then I’ll know where I am to go.” It was like turning the light on.  It sprang forth and it was that phrase that caught me.

There is another moment that’s critical in all this.  I mentioned that I had a fieldwork placement in a children’s home.  I had two afternoons a week from noon to five, and I had three specific people on my caseload plus other kinds of training going on.  One of those people was a teenage girl.  All three were siblings and all three had been severely abused in the home of their origin. I would meet with them regularly.  I don’t remember the rotation exactly, but I think it was once every two weeks.  The teenage girl had these questions, and we would talk.  But as a social worker you have very defined areas of what you can respond to and how you respond.  You’re essentially trying to assess the needs of this individual and where the system can reach in to meet those needs.  This girl’s questions struck me.  By my second semester, they were all religious questions, and because it was a Methodist children’s home we couldn’t deal with those questions, we could simply forward them to the chaplain.  But I had a real sense that because they were so profound and came out of her very abused childhood and this was a pretty fundamentalist Methodist home, that the last person she could talk to was the chaplain.  The questions were about why things happen and about meaning. They were about what her life means now.  She was trying to finish high school and figure out what was next.  And I don’t remember them except there was a sense that they were really more religious than social work and they were the questions I really wanted to deal with in life.  That was a push-pull.  I could sense the vocation again, but was I deluding myself?  What’s going on here?  So while I credit her with that moment of sparking that question in me, I don’t even remember her questions, and I certainly didn’t deal with it by saying, “Oh, this is what I’m called to.”  But it was just one more question inside myself.