The Wilderness I Left Behind

              In a recent biographical memoir, I wrote about the decade I spent in an abusive religious group known as Revival for Our Day, founded and led by Rev. Loran Helm.   Further reflection on my experience led me to the conviction I should extract that narrative and make it the basis of another volume.   This is that work.   It is intended to not only tell my story, but also offer both theological reflection on the teaching of this group, which exists still, although Rev. Helm died in 2006, and offer some practical counsel for those who have been wounded or victimized in similar groups.             Not only has Rev. Helm died, but earlier this year of 2021, his one-time right-hand man, and my former pastor, Oliver C. Hogue, has also died.   At one time I considered each of them to be a servant of Christ, and a godly man.   Over the course ...

  I sensed a call to the Christian ministry from the time I was in ninth grade, at a high school in southern West Virginia.   It did not seem to me to be incompatible with the fact that I had cerebral palsy.   I loved Jesus and wanted to follow and serve him, and I had a clear sense that ministry was the way I was to do that.   God had given me a gift of insight into the Scriptures, and I did not believe that gift was just for my own edification.    I anticipated going to college, and then to seminary. I was not even aware of skepticism people seemed to have, at least not yet.   We moved my senior year of high school, and after that move I began to encounter skepticism, but the first high school I attended, most of my friends knew I had a call to preach, and they never said anything to me which cast any doubt on it.   It was not until after we moved and were attending a different church that the doubt and skepticism began.   When I encounte...

  Rev. Loran Helm was an unusual and initially impressive man.   He was a travelling evangelist who got off track somewhere, sometime before I knew him.   A Voice in the Wilderness is his autobiography.   He attended Taylor University, and then graduated from Earlham College, in the 1930s.   While in college he served as pastor of several small, rural Methodist churches in Eastern Indiana.   Helm began attending seminary but only lasted a few weeks.   I do not think he had the intellectual ability for graduate theological study.   Years after I knew him, I learned that he had experienced a nervous or emotional breakdown about that time.   I cannot fault him for that, I have been close to that point more times than I can count.   There is a scene in one of the Batman movies where the butler Alfred expresses concern about Batman/Bruce Wayne’s mental health, noting that the hero walked a fine line on the edge of where light meets darkness. ...