INTRODUCTION
Please allow me to introduce myself. I am the first-born son of a man from Oklahoma and a woman from Texas. Both came to California with their families during the Dust Bowl and endured the prejudice that entailed. I was raised in the farming community of Delano and moved to the state capital, Sacramento, when I was ten where I later completed high school and some college. (I finished college later in life.) I moved in a circle – to Portland in 1975, to Boulder, CO in 1984, and back to southern California in 1986 where I presently live.
I believed in and received Jesus into my life when I was eight years old in the spring in the First Baptist Church in Delano, California. I walked down the aisle on a Sunday night after an invitation given by Dr. Floyd Patterson. “Trust and Obey” was being sung and I went forward during the second verse:
Not a shadow can rise, not a cloud in the skies
But His smile quickly drives it away
Not a doubt nor a fear, not a sigh nor a tear
Can abide while we trust and obey
Oh, trust and obey, for there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey
And thus began my spiritual journey. I am writing this at age 73, so I have been a Christian for 65 years.
I remember always loving church and the things of God – even as a child. I was anxious to progress. I remember that when I graduated from kindergarten Sunday School to elementary Sunday School I was glad to go because I wouldn’t have to sing “silly children songs” anymore. (About twenty years later, I decided exactly the same thing about camp songs that I had to lead. More about that later.)
I attended church (Baptist churches) both Sunday morning and night with the occasional exception for Disney’s Wide World of Color and The Ed Sullivan Show when The Beatles were featured. Churches also had Wednesday prayer meetings that were perfunctory. Sunday School was also a regular part of Sunday mornings as was youth group on Sunday nights. So, to say I grew up in church is not far from the truth.
From time to time, we would visit our grandparents in nearby towns in the central California valley. My grandfather was a lay pastor in a Freewill Baptist Church which was quite an experience. Singing was loud! Preaching was loud – usually beginning in a whisper, but raising in pitch until an hour later Grandpa was in full throttle preaching fire and brimstone, and you could feel the fire of hell just inches from your feet.
I remember during these services someone would always come up and say, “God gave me this song to sing and I need your prayers so I can get all the way through it.” And then half way through the song, the person singing would start crying and have to leave the stage. I always found that odd and illogical; If God gave you this song, then wouldn’t He also give you the power to sing it all the way through? Such were the musings of a boy trying to understand the way God worked in people’s lives.
My grandfather was a welder and machinist and after work would come home, take a shower, pour a glass of iced tea, and sit in his recliner and read the Bible. After years of reading, he came to the conclusion that the theology of the Freewill Baptist Church was wrong – a church that believed salvation was temporal and that a believer’s sins could break his or her relationship with God. The week that he realized that error, he resigned his position and never went back.
Later in his life, he nurtured a friendship with Carolyn Coons and worked with Azusa Pacific University to build their mission in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Bi-weekly he took trips there to take bicycles and building supplies and used his construction skills to strengthen the buildings and build new ones. When I was 21, my church in Sacramento teamed with APU, and I took some high school kids on a mission trip to the same mission my grandfather helped build. (More about my grandfather later.)
When I was 16, my youth pastor, Don Parrot, challenged me to lead songs at summer camp. That camp began a music ministry that endures to this day. I was green, but under Don’s discipleship, I got very good at it very fast. I accompanied him to other camps in California during that summer and quickly honed my song leading skills at camps. I was the first person in my church to play an acoustic guitar on the platform during a Sunday morning worship service. (This was a big deal in the late Sixties when guitars were associated with rock music and hippies.)
My father died suddenly when I was 18, and I floundered for a couple of years. I worked at a 24-hour quick market from 6 p.m. till 2 a.m., slept for six hours, rafted the American River in the daytime with my girlfriend, and then repeated the cycle. I took some college music courses, and I continued to sing around northern California for youth groups and camps. I also started writing songs.
Then, when I was 21, a new youth pastor came to my church and asked me to be on staff at the church in a pioneering youth intern program. The youth pastor, a former Campus Crusade staff member, introduced me to the concept of discipleship – teaching others – and taught me how to share my faith. The youth pastor discipled the youth interns who, in turn, discipled the youth of the church. This was the first time that I had a desk in my bedroom for studying, and I studied the Bible, reading books about spiritual practices and theology. I was teamed with two female interns, and together, we worked with students from three high schools. The attendance at our weekly meetings was about 100 students. When all the interns combined their youth groups at a quarterly meeting, the attendance was somewhere around 350-400 students. When I was a high school student, our meetings barely had 75 students attend.
During the summer camp of 1975, we had a guest speaker from Colorado named Dawson McAllister and guest musician from Oregon named Byron Spradlin. Byron challenged me to come to Oregon after camp to participate in a fledgling program called Artists in Christian Testimony – a ministry dedicated to preparing artists for ministry in missions. So, in the fall of 1975, I loaded up my Mustang, drove to Portland, and knocked on his door.
From 1975 till 1981, I learned from the best about music ministry. We fleshed out the philosophies and techniques of Artists in Christian Testimony. Working as Director of Evangelism, we formed traveling music teams, Song of Praise and A New Song, that would study during the morning, do street evangelism during lunchtime and early afternoon, and then perform concerts in churches, camps, and occasionally in youth centers at night.
It was during this time, in the summer of 1976, that I traveled for nine weeks with Jews for Jesus on their Operation: Birthday Cake campaign. I honed my street evangelism techniques and began to fully understand the Jewish culture and the intense hatred that Israel has for Christians since the Nazis believed themselves to be Christians doing the work of Christ by eliminating those who killed Jesus.
While traveling with the Jewish believers, I heard astounding stories of their spiritual journeys. I heard miraculous stories of signs asked for and miraculous signs granted. I came to understand Passover and Hannukah as never before, and I danced and sang late into the night until I had no more strength other than that to drag myself into bed.
It was also during this time that I became one of the “Chicago Seventeen” – a group that was arrested and jailed for witnessing at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. In 1976, one used to have to obtain a permit making it legal to witness at the airport, a measure put in place to curtail the work of the Hare Krishnas. However, one rule affects all, and since the First Amendment guarantees free speech in all public places, Jews for Jesus was attempting to get the law taken before the Supreme Court to get it overturned. In order to do that, you had to break the law, get arrested, and go to trial. So, I broke the law, went to trial, but my case was thrown out of court on a technicality. JFJ did get the law overturned later in the decade.
In 1980, I was asked to write the string quartet scores for a Pam Mark Hall concert in the northwest. It was at that concert that I was approached by two elderly black women who asked to speak with me. They put their hands on my arms and told me that God had given them a holy word about me: I was going to do great things for the kingdom of God. I never forgot that encounter.
Also in 1980 was my first song leading for Village Church’s Son City Raft Rally. This youth ministry took 300-400 high school students white-water rafting on the Deschutes River in central Oregon. The support staff – all volunteer – was almost as large as the student population. This, paired with a day full of team competition and an evening meeting that started at 9:30 p.m. and went till almost midnight, was the most dynamic youth ministry with which I ever was involved. I led music and did the morning speaking at that rally off and on until 1997.
In 1981, after the ACT years, a man named Al Doolittle approached me after a concert I’d given and offered to finance a record album. I knew a producer in Nashville, and in the summer, I went to Music City for one week to record the basic tracks and sing the vocals for ten songs – six of them mine. In 1982, Walking in the Father’s Love was released and got radio play in 55 markets in the U.S. Two songs charted in Little Rock, Fort Lauderdale, and Portland, Oregon.
The album opened ministry doors all over the United States. I ministered with many traveling speakers with youth ministries I’d met in both Sacramento and Oregon. These speakers were always looking for competent song leaders at their youth conferences, especially ones who were in the Christian music industry. In 1984, I teamed with Dawson McAllister (from the camp in 1975) to write four songs for his “How to Get Along with Your Parents” video series, and then I accompanied him on his speaking dates in 1984 and 1985. This opened more opportunities with other national youth ministries like Campus Crusade’s Student Venture and California-based Youth Specialties. During this time, I met Josh McDowell and shared the platform with him several times.
1986 brought me to California to work with Byron Spradlin again to start a new church in the Rancho Cucamonga area. The growth rate of this community was 32% to 46% during 1986 through 1989. New churches were badly needed. New Hope Community Church opened its doors in December, 1986 and, as worship leader, I began an adventure that lasted until 1994. (Much more will be mentioned about this work later.)
During this time, I completed my last year of undergraduate work in Communication Arts (Film and Television) and also earned a M.A. in Theology (New Testament) at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA.
1994 began a period of time where I consulted with churches as they transitioned from worship services with traditional music to contemporary music-based worship. I worked in four churches, fought the worship wars, and survived with most of my dignity intact. (More about this later, too.)
After having been scarred enough by the worship wars, I got a teaching credential and taught language arts and film study classes to middle schoolers in the California public school system for 20 years. Concurrently, I also worked for three years for the California Department of Education writing, editing, and revising the state testing materials for all K-8th grade students under Gov. Schwarzenegger.
Dedicated to the local church and always the worship leader, I joined the music ministry of Hillside Community Church, Alta Loma, where I sang and played acoustic guitar for worship services, and later, for Celebrate Recovery meetings and various ministry opportunities in the church. In 2006, during the Christmas break, my wife, Mary, and I traveled to Eldoret, Kenya to train teachers and teach students guitar. (More about this later, too.) Today, in full retirement from public school teaching, I continue to lead music at my church with a small music team for a Bible study, Celebrate Recovery, and a monthly widows gathering.
Through my life I have experienced ups and downs, highs and lows, mountains and valleys. But to this day, after 65 years of walking with God, he has never disappointed me. I remain faithful and true, and with his help and his power I will continue to walk in his glorious light – a tree firmly planted.
Enough about me. Onward, forward!