News From Heaven's Gate: Chats Around the Campfire with Jesus (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781979883351)

Raised Baptist (Southern Baptist, Conservative Baptist, and Fundamentalist Baptist-schism was my middle name in my youth), then, in the last year of high school, charismatic (due to some fearless Youth Group leaders in the Fundamentalist Baptist Church who got terminated because of the heretical teachings-but not until they infected me first!) A young Baptist boy next went to an Assembly of God school-Bethany Bible College-where he wouldn't have to fight over speaking in tongues. Good college I suppose-openly admitted to be a "factory" producing Assembly of God Pastors (which I failed by not taking the one required course to be ordained-Pentecostal History-so I got through college relatively unscathed.) With my first wife (d.1994), I moved to Mexico for awhile to help build (with bricks) a free, pastoral training center for mountain church pastors, then moved north (seven hours above San Francisco) into a communal ranch, wound up co-running it (with Andrew Herbert), then left in order to pastor a church in the mountains in Willow Creek-about 1500 population and really close to the Trinity Alps in northern California-and preached there for over 35 years. That was long enough to watch babies being born and raised, accompanied through their teenage years and into their twenties and young adulthood (what a trip!) I've been around, collected a lot of influences and simmered on a low boil for 35 years in an isolated mountain community. It's the isolation that served me best, protecting me from casual fly-by-night trends in the churches at large, and giving me a perspective on the danger and uselessness of churchianity and the need to personally step aside from the whole church thing and instead be part of the ekklesia that Jesus is building.