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.
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