My Journey to Evangelical Christianity

While growing up in a medium sized Missouri town, my parents raised my sister and me in a typical, liberal United Methodist church.  Even in my earliest memories, I can remember my father encouraging me to attend youth group and my mother wanting me to make wise choices in my life.  At the church I can distinctly remember people, especially Sunday school teachers and youth group leaders, attempting to teach us to think spiritually and with the Bible in mind: one Sunday school teacher had us listen to testimonies from repentant gangsters and New Age Spiritualists; my youth minister preached a literal interpretation of Genesis; my elderly, sixth grade Sunday school teacher told us stories of her encounters with angels; another couple frequently taught about the book of Revelation and the end of the world.

However, these were fragmented, minority voices within the church, and their disconnected efforts tended to relegate them further to the fringes.  From the pulpit, the pastors preached feel-good messages and stories that tended to overlook the difficult questions and controversial doctrines found in scripture. The leadership’s failure to take firm doctrinal stands indirectly contributed to the unpredictable Sunday school experience. The political and social ramifications of church teachings were never discussed; politics was off limits.  Membership in the church seemed inherited and automatic:  people were baptized as infants and attended confirmation as sixth graders. The church was and is large, and it is easy to get lost in the crowd; members have no structured accountability or use of Biblical church discipline procedures, and the call from leaders to evangelize is minuscule.  When discussing other religions with a charter member of the church, she once told me, “I have my religion and they have theirs.  We don’t need to convert them.” The prevailing wind of belief in the church was a murky, kind-hearted, liberal relativism.

By the time I had graduated high school, I questioned these beliefs, but for lack of other alternatives accepted the hazy, well-intentioned beliefs of my upbringing.  My participation in the Boy Scouts of America reinforced these beliefs.  While I will always love the outdoor activities encouraged by the Scouts and treasure the lifelong friendships fostered by the organization, I now realize that the group delivers a spirituality based more upon civic participation than a search for truth.  As long as you are not an atheist or a homosexual activist, all beliefs are treated equally and without judgment.  Fraternal organizations within the scouting movement encourage people to make promises to attend religious events and fulfill obligations, but the search for truth and inward spiritual change are rarely mentioned; the spiritual implications of the military and patriotism are never questioned; moreover, the Boy Scouts offers shiny medals and embroidered patches for fulfillment of these duties, awards that only reinforce the importance of outward appearance over spiritual change.

Though I may not always sound that way, I am quite thankful that my parents loved me enough to encourage my participation in organizations that encourage religious duty, good citizenship, and individual morality. In a global society where hedonism is rampant and lack of responsibility is destroying the family unit, I sincerely believe the world would have fewer problems if more people would join organizations that acknowledge a creator and encourage some degree of wholesome living.  But I also recognize that such organizations don’t and can’t provide salvation and, in an effort to build consensus, promote a nebulous, non-convicting, non-offensive, somewhat hackneyed version of the truth.

Unfortunately, in me at least, my civic participation fostered a significant amount of pride: I was proud of my organizational attendance, the ranks I had earned, my religious participation, and the various other accolades that I had achieved. Deep down inside I thought that I was intrinsically better than people that did not come from such a background. Moreover, instead of understanding man’s place as a sinful creature urgently in need of redemption, the tolerance of diverse, liberal doctrine in my background allowed me to justify attitudes and actions that are sinful and in direct contradiction with the Bible.

Fortunately, my real spiritual journey began in college when I moved to the fourth floor of Gillette dormitory. The student leaders of several evangelical campus religious organizations had decided to live on the same floor.  These were people with strong convictions about the Bible, that confessed their sins and kept one another accountable, that believed scripture should be the foundation of all theological teaching, and had faith that Jesus dying and being resurrected was Good News that should be shared with every tribe, tongue and nation.  Like everyone else, these student leaders had problems and I feel they often errored on the side of impetuousness, but I am thankful that by God’s grace I was serendipitously placed in a position to befriend and live with them.

Before my first Christmas break as a college student Adam Wheeler, a Baptist Student Union Leader that lived down the hall from me, challenged me to read the entire New Testament.  I frequently had debates and arguments with him and I thought that doing this would increase my credibility in these conversations.  Instead, reading the New Testament made me realize how fragmented and incomplete my Bible knowledge was.  Despite being raised in a church, I had never fully developed a holistic story in my mind about the life of Jesus and God’s plan of redemption.  Until that time, I had developed the habit of using snippets of the Bible as convenient fodder to justify whatever opinion I felt the need to have; it hadn’t occurred to me that the Bible is actually to be read as a unified book that gives answers to most of the questions that burden mankind.

I also began to see the hole in my heart that existed because, until college, any spirituality I possessed was more about religious practice than a personal relationship with God.  The salvation that I sought was more about living a moral life and attending religious services than prayerfully, quietly seeking His will and learning more about Him through contemplation on the scriptures. It was also during this time period that I began to annoy some of my friends and family members. In addition to the Bible, I was reading books such at Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee. I wanted to discuss theological issues with most people that I met, but quite literally these people weren’t on the same page.  In some ways I regret being so intrusive, but in other ways I am thankful for the processes.  In college people make decisions about their friends and careers, but unless the core values behind these decisions are thoroughly investigated, it can often be the fast track to a meaningless, materialistic existence.  As for annoying people with theological questions, if it has to be done, I think it is probably easier to do this at nineteen rather than thirty-nine.

Also during the time of questioning, I began sending e-mails to a former high school teacher that had changed jobs to become a professor of a Baptist university. While I still don’t agree with his every theological conclusion, these correspondences, initiated nearly ten years ago, revealed to me the inadequacies of my adolescent thought processes and solidified a belief that, ultimately, the supreme call of a Christian is to love God and our neighbor with “reckless abandon.” Through these conversations I began to realize that words, arguments, and doctrines that don’t help demonstrate this love are little more than counterproductive, decidedly un-Christlike weapons of control.  Ironically, the man that revealed to me the weaknesses of arguments and ideology was a former speech and debate coach and, even more ironically, a Methodist.

During my junior and senior years in college, I continued to grow spiritually.  I eventually began attending Bible studies and living at the nondenominational Christian Campus House, an organization founded by Roy Weece, a lifelong campus minister and an evangelist that had traveled to dozens of nations. I also had my first taste of missions on short trips to Honduras and Mexico. Two friends, Wes Tappmeyer and Donnie Berry, that I originally met on fourth floor Gillette are currently seminary students and have continuously challenged me to seek God in my life. During the past four years, I have found spiritual fellowship and encouragement, and served the Lord at City Gate Church in Singapore.

It’s true that through the years there have been struggles, ups-and-downs, doubts, frustrations, sins, and distractions, but ultimately I believe that I’m trying to walk God’s path to serve him during my short time on this earth.

My Journey to International Christian Education

My journey to become a teacher began during my senior year of high school.  Unlike other subject areas that involved memorization or solving hypothetical problems, I enjoyed writing because it allowed me to create something that could be shared, evaluated, and appreciated. I also had an active reading life; I was frequently visiting the library and was constantly devouring the next book, newspaper, or magazine.

When I began filling out college applications, I wanted to declare English as my major.  I felt that studying English would give me the background to one day become a professional writer, perhaps authoring books or writing human interest stories in a newspaper or magazine.  Unfortunately, my parents had issues with that plan.  They felt that an English major wasn’t marketable, and if I chose that major I would need to live at home during college.

In the end, I decided upon a degree in English education.  At the time, becoming a teacher made sense.  My father is journalist and my mother is a music teacher; it was only logical that I might teach writing.  Moreover, as a youth I liked most of my teachers and appreciated their lifestyle and hard work.  Between Boy Scout camps staffed by teachers on summer holiday and speech and debate tournaments run by dozens of teachers, I had spent thousands of hours with teachers and thought that I knew them well and could handle their job.  I also understood that my parents were right; there are thousands of out-of-work writers, but a well-qualified teacher can get a job in any time at virtually any place.

While growing up, I have always had a fascination with Asian culture.  I’m not sure when this began, but I still have vague recollections of coming home from a summertime Cub Scout day camp and watching PBS’s “Let’s Learn Japanese,” letting out a guffaw as “Weird Al” awkwardly made his way through capsule hotels and pachinko parlors in a silly video that I rented from Blockbuster, and watching Big Bird yell “Ohio” as he meandered around Tokyo during a prime-time eighties children’s television special. In high school and college, I continued this fixation by taking four and a half years of Japanese classes.

The culmination of my collegiate Asian studies occurred when I attended the Japan-America Student conference in July and August of the year 2000. Unfortunately, the conference was in the United States that particular year, but I still got to attend classes and rub shoulders with thirty Japanese and thirty Americans as we visited exotic locations such as the Pearl Harbor War Memorial, the top of the United Nations, Harvard University, and Chapel Hill. We did cultural exchanges, met members of the Japanese internment, shared academic papers, and made friends.

Yet, attending this conference opened my eyes to the struggles of both ivory tower academia and Japanese society. The theme chosen by the executive committee was about promoting new methods for social change. Some of the changes the other participants, especially the Americans, advocated represented ideas that I was ideologically or morally resistant to accepting: gay marriage, increased religious pluralism, and a down-grading of America’s role in Asian affairs. On the Japanese side, underage drinking and smoking were the default recreational activities and most of the other Americans happily joined in on the fun.  My Japanese speaking ability was too limited to make deep relationships with the Japanese students, and I was the youngest member present. The only close friend that I made during the conference was a conservative, Singaporean that was a foreign exchange student in Japan.

Yet somehow, despite the differences, the other participants saw enough integrity in me that I was selected to be on the executive committee for the upcoming year. Unfortunately, during the planning stages of the committee I made the decision to quit; in this case, I must admit that I didn’t stand up well under pressure. Some parts of me still regret this decision. Controversy engulfed the planning committee and jealousy ensued: a few radical liberals wanted to influence the agenda of the conference, an obsessive-compulsive homosexual constantly expended energy on things that didn’t help, and an African exchange student to America had the paranoid fear that the Japanese were going to “control the conference” (The conference that we were planning was happening in Japan). Moreover, the responsibilities assigned to me were just a little too big for my boots.  At nineteen and having never visited the west coast, I might not have been ready to coordinate the pre-conference orientation in San Fransisco, a task that was assigned to me.  As I read my resignation letter, the room was still and tense; the motion-controlled lights clicked off in a room filled with over a dozen people. The day after I resigned, a few others followed.

But my experience at the Japan America Student Conference was also the juncture that solidified my decision to become a teacher.  I knew that if I changed my major to something more international or elite- say business, finance, or political science- I wouldn’t be content hawking on behalf of some Kansas City insurance company, I would want to play ball on the same field as the internationals and Harvardites that attended the conference with me. And I realized that in the end, such dreams my prove a futile lifestyle.  Had I gone this course, to this day I still might be toiling about some law school accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt only to walk into a future that requires I work day-and-night with people who had the same goals as the people that frustrated me at the conference: to implement humanistic social agendas and to gain wealth. I decided to take the life I had initially chosen, the vocation of a teacher.

From this point, I finished college  and completed my certification portfolio and student teaching internship without incident.  With members of the Christian Campus House, I had attended some missionary conventions for the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ. Upon graduation, I was optimistic. I had a well-intentioned plan to teach English in Taiwan with a program affiliated through the University of Missouri and volunteer at an orphanage on the weekends.  Unfortunately, at the last minute those plans fell through.  The Taiwanese administrator that hired me was fired, and the Taiwanese ties to my university.  To complicate matters, it was 2003 and the budding “War on Terror” made everyone a little nervous about international travel.

It was May, I was graduating, and I had no job.  Then suddenly, out-of-the-blue a principal from Maries County, Missouri, called me and I landed my first real teaching job. It was in Vienna, Missouri, the least-populated county seat in the state, but it was a real job. Like most first year teachers, perhaps much worse than most, I had a terrible time at my  new job. My Mizzou education classes pumped me up with little experience and a lot of progressive education jargon that just didn’t jive in a small rural town where some students still discretely kept hunting rifles in the trunk of their car, teenagers frequently had babies, children occasionally used the same textbooks as their parents, and the administration had to occasionally issue edicts and warnings about skinning deer in the school parking lot. As a twenty-two year old single person, I was attempting to educate some some students that were married, had spouses in Iraq, raising children, were sometimes three years younger than me, and had only minuscule interest in correct comma placement and the history of American literature.

I made efforts to understand the town’s culture, attending community events and joining a local church. Between my first and second year, I revamped my lesson plans and improved my content knowledge. Unfortunately the change was too late. I was and am still a fairly week disciplinarian, and the school’s constantly rotating leadership offered only little help.  My reputation as a teacher that students (and even some parents) could walk over was solidified, and despite having students vandalize my car, illegally enter my home, prank call me at two in the morning, throw spit wads, and break classroom windows, I would have to tough-it-out until the end of my contract.

In November of 2004 my life would change.  Frustrated with my job situation, I remembered my commitment to teaching and my desire to become a missionary. I did a simple Google search for international Christian schools.  Lo and behold, I found an entire organization called the Network of International Christian Schools. Without hesitation, I filled out the online application form.  The school’s network is worldwide, and when you fill out the application form you rank the locations that you wish to work.  Naturally, considering my language background, I put Japan first and remembering the friend that I had made, I listed Singapore as second.

Soon I was hired to work in Singapore, the nation that I have been working in for the past four years.  During this time I have been able to improve my teaching in a warm, friendly environment that has as its stated mission to instill in students a love of Christ and a Biblical worldview. I have become certified with ACSI, an organization that recognizes that there is “no neutrality in education” and that every effective Christian teacher must face spiritual issues head on and have Biblical answers to some of life’s toughest questions. In addition to this, my job and teaching have allowed me to travel to more places and make more friends around the world than I ever would have had if I had chosen a different profession.

Though I confess there are still some days when I’m not enthusiastic about my job, I realize that anything other than a heart of gratitude dishonors the One who brought me on this journey.  I now see that even during the difficult times, God was shaping my mind to think more clearly about Him, my career to be a better educator that can adapt to his surroundings, and my heart to become more like Christ’s.

I pray, and I hope that you’ll pray with me, that on this journey of life I won’t fall away or fall short of God’s calling. But instead I will put aside personal ego in my career choices and listen to the still, small voice that lights the path, whether that path is in rural Missouri or rural China. For now, God willing, I believe that my next stop is Nagoya, Japan.