Chapter 6: Stepping Out in a New Direction
When
I first became interested in philosophy, it was in the spring of 1980 during my
sophomore year at West Virginia State College.
I needed to take Introduction to Philosophy because, in defiance of the
directions given to me by Oliver Hogue, I changed my major from Mass
Communications to Psychology. Because of
an experience with a Calligraphy class I could not pass, a required class for
Mass Communications, I would not be able to complete my degree. The department would not let me substitute
another class, and so I had to do something.
Now, a student in this position would be able to avail herself of the
provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act. My experience was about a decade before the
ADA became law.
I was taking Psychology in a lecture hall with 150 people, and I was
making the best grade in the class! The
professor said I was in the wrong major.
I already knew that. My ACT score
in Social Sciences was my highest, at 29. The leaders of this group gave out these “revelations” with
no feeling at all for what people's actual gifts were. I needed to be in
a different field. It was apparent I
would not be able to graduate in Communications anyway, so I changed
majors. As a result, I had to take
Introduction to Philosophy.
Pastor Hogue had previously said to me that I should not take
Philosophy. His exact words were, “It
will mess with your mind.” I honestly do
not know if he really thought I could not handle it, or if he was trying to
impede me from succeeding at something I would really be good at. I signed up for the class with trepidation,
but when we got in there I did fine. I
found it fascinating. It was like 4th
of July fireworks went off in my head. I
was really excited by it. I took three
or four Philosophy classes at State, and a couple, cross-listed, at the
University of Charleston. My professor
there, Dr. Robert Newman, told me he thought I had what it took to pursue a
career in philosophy. He obviously did
not see me the way Oliver Hogue did!
My first philosophy instructor was a guy named Tom Kinney. Tom was a young man of about 30, single, and
a devout Catholic. He was a staunch
Aristotelian. We used An Introduction
to Philosophy by Jacques Maritain.
Tom was a nice guy but a kind of boring lecturer, but the subject matter
enthralled me. In my almost 18 years as a college professor, I am sure there
have been students who thought I was also boring. I do remember Tom was surprised that I was an
evangelical. He had assumed, from some
of the things I said in class, that I was Catholic. Little did I know that 32 years later I would
become Catholic.
I
was not a bit convinced that Aristotelianism was the true philosophy, as
Tom put it. But I did like Aristotle and
now every week my ethics students read one of the books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics. There was no philosophy
major or minor at West Virginia State, and the philosophy courses were overseen
by the Psychology department, so Tom’s office was on the same floor as my other
teachers, and most of the students in our department knew him. One evening, during a break in a class,
someone said, “Hey, did you hear about Tom?”
No, I had not heard. “He
resigned. He is going into the
priesthood.” I cannot say I was
surprised.
The relevance of this to this little volume is this—Tom Kinney awakened
something in me which led me to pursue philosophy farther. That is what led me to seek out a
relationship with D. Elton Trueblood.
I
stopped to meet Trueblood in July 1982, at his study, Teague Library, on
the campus of Earlham College in Richmond Indiana. My daughter, decades later, spent four years
on the Earlham faculty. Teague is still
one of my favorite places, and I have tried, before COVID-19, to spend a couple
of days there each year in personal solitude and reflection. I was so enamored with this library from the
first time I saw it.
My expectation was to meet Dr. Trueblood, get his autograph, and be on
my way. I had no idea our meeting would
last most of the afternoon. He said,
after we had visited over an hour, “I can see that you have an unusually keen
mind. I would like to have you come
here, study at Earlham School of Religion, and help us with the Yokefellows
ministry.”
I had told him my primary interest was philosophy more than religion,
and despite that, the first time he met me, he discerned the gift of ministry I
had, which neither Oliver Hogue nor Loran Helm would affirm. He recommended me for the pastorate of a
small Quaker meeting near to the seminary.
I was not ready, and they did not call me, but he sensed my calling from
God right away. I could not understand
why—knowing me for an hour—he could see that when those who were in a pastoral
relationship with me could not—or would not.
A year later, I became the Minister of Christian Education at Friends
Memorial Church in Muncie, Indiana. I
still was not ready, and I made a lot of mistakes. But I grew.
I learned as much about preaching from observing Richard P. Newby as I
did in seminary, if not more. It was a
hard year, but I am thankful for it.
The contrast between Loran Helm and Elton Trueblood could not be
starker. One was a seminary drop
out. (Maybe I should not be so critical,
I dropped out twice, but I eventually completed a Masters and a Doctorate from
two different seminaries.) The other was
a graduate of Harvard Divinity School with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins. One had written one book, the other had
written thirty-seven. One was all about
emotion and spontaneity and the other was the epitome of discipline and
structure.
The last contrast I mentioned was one which I struggled with a good
bit. It took me a good deal of time to
appreciate the difference. The cognitive
dissonance created between these contrasting styles put me in a difficult
place. I would have been better off had
I left Helm and his fellowship behind me then and there. I was not, however, in an emotional state
healthy enough to be able to do so.
An important event in the fellowship surrounding Loran Helm were times
of what he called Waiting on God.
I spoke in chapter 5 about his idea that a great outpouring of the Holy
Spirit would come if people could come “into one accord.” This is based on a faulty interpretation of a
faulty translation of the biblical account of the day of Pentecost in Acts
chapter 2. To make this happen, he would
gather in a hotel meeting room with a few hundred people, several times a year,
to worship and wait. There were not set
times for these Waitings to occur.
There might be one two straight months and then not again for a
year. It was all scheduled as he said
God had revealed to him, the dates, and the location.
There was no program. He would
have a list in his Bible of things like, prayer, preaching, singing,
revelation, etc., and he would ask God to show him what was supposed to happen
next, and then that is what we would do.
The preaching was horrendous, and the music was equally outstanding in
the other direction. I have never been
to any kind of worship gathering where there was anywhere near that quality and
quantity of musical talent in one place.
The closest would have been the chapel at the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary or the annual Church of God campmeeting in Anderson,
Indiana.
There would be altar calls and pleas for people to make things right
with God and right with one another because he just knew, he thought, that if
we did that, that another Pentecost would happen. There were times when he would say something
like “someone here has cancer,” and he would pray for their healing. There were times when he would declare that
someone was to move somewhere, or someone was to marry someone or assume a certain
line of work. All of this was despite,
as I quoted him in the last chapter, his insistence that he did not tell people
what to do. I cannot relate the amount
of heartbreak, and trauma, which this man inflicted on people, often without
their consent to even give input into what decisions they should make. I would not have admitted this at the time,
but this was a cult!
Now, if I ever met two people who were complete opposites, it would be
Loran Helm and Elton Trueblood. Both had
robust egos. But one was absolutely
committed to spontaneity and not planning, and the other was the epitome of
discipline and routine. One was shrouded
in secrecy and communicated mostly through intermediaries, the other was
direct, approachable, and kindly took time for the many people who wrote or
visited him each week.
I used to hear Helm say things like, “you cannot be a person who
analyzes anything and expect God to be able to use you.” I think he would have been an extreme P if he
took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Nothing was planned in advance.
This carried over and was handed down to Oliver Hogue, whose book was
called Mission Without Strategy.
Elton Trueblood was, in contrast, a thinker. Elton used to say all the time, “the
Christian’s task is to out-think the opposition.”
Loran Helm had an unusual personality which he mistook for the way God
wanted everyone to be. Recently someone
chided me for becoming Catholic, suggesting that there is no work of the Holy
Spirit in the Catholic church. That is
not true, but I think the person who said this to me was basing the presence of
the Holy Spirit on a certain emotional flavor.
In many people’s minds, the awareness of that flavor is equated with the
presence of the Spirit. I learned as a
Quaker that this is not exactly true, for some of the times when the Spirit’s
presence was most clearly visible were times when the only thing going on was a
deep, profound silence!
Elton was a disciplined, patterned person. Jim Newby writes in the prologue of his
biography, Elton Trueblood: Believer, Teacher & Friend, describing
how he would see Elton each day,
As the door
opens, he is smiling. “Good morning,
Kathy and Jim. How are you today?” His
voice is always encouraging. He places
the letters on his secretary’s desk, takes off his hat, slips off his coat, and
carefully puts them on one end of the couch while he sits down on the
other. Elton Trueblood is a patterned
man. This is a routine that I could
perform blindfolded. [1]
That patterned life was, I believe, the secret to Elton’s success and
the impact he made on others. There were
several young Quaker ministers and leaders he had taken under his wing. Jim Newby, Paul Anderson, and Richard Foster
were notable among them. I was
privileged to be among this group, even though my literary output has been
nowhere near any of theirs. For Elton,
though, the idea was to nurture those who would come along and be in leadership
after him. It was the spiritual
equivalent of his famous line about planting a tree, under the shade of which
one knows they will never sit.
The ministry of Yokefellows International was based on this idea of the
patterned life. The Thursday lunches of
the local Yokefellows group at First Friends Meeting in Richmond, Indiana, drew
men of all expressions of the Christian faith to share and fellowship. Most of the time the speaker was, by
intention, not a professional minister.
The entire concern of Yokefellows was what Elton called “The Ministry of
Common Life.” He wanted educators,
bankers, doctors, carpenters, and virtually every other occupation to have a
sense of Christian vocation, using their line of work as an opportunity
to share the Christian message with others.
I will say, as I have grown in my own theological life in the four
decades since I was part of Yokefellows, I wish the weekly luncheons had more
of a feminine presence. I do not believe
there was intentional sexism, because the annual Yokefellow Conference not only
was attended by Christian men and women, but some of the Saturday speakers have
been women, most notably Mary Cosby.
The lunch began promptly at noon on Thursdays. The members of the United Society of Friends
Women from First Friends Meeting provided our meal, and the proceeds went to
their mission involvement. As far as I
know, Yokefellows did not make a dime.
The meal was two dollars and those eating simply left the money on the
table. Around 12:30, Elton would
introduce guests and then introduce our speaker, who shared about their faith
journey for about fifteen minutes, followed by question-and-answer, and about 12:55,
the group would disperse. This format
was used every Thursday.
The other aspect of Yokefellows which was exciting was the annual
Yokefellow conference in March. This
took place on the campus of Earlham College, usually when the college was on
spring break. On Friday evening would be the Yokefellow Banquet in the dining
hall of Earlham Hall. Many excellent
speakers from around the country would come to speak at this event—with the
same aim as our local Yokefellows group, nurturing people for the ministry of
common life.
The dining hall in Earlham Hall was a particularly apt place for this
event. The mantle, which hung above the
fireplace had an inspiring quote, “They gathered sticks, kindled a fire, and
left it burning.” This was a quote from
the captain’s log of the British ship, Woodhouse. This ship was set to bring a group of Quakers
to America when it needed to dock for some repairs off the English coast. The
captain wrote about how, rather than stay on the ship, these Quakers went
ashore to see whom they could evangelize.
The entire quote said, “The ministers of Christ were not idle. They gathered sticks, kindled a fire, and
left it burning.”
Every year the program for the banquet was the same. Elton Trueblood was a patterned man, and when
he found something which worked, he stayed with it. For the Friday banquet there was always the
same rendition of an aria (from Matthew and Isaiah) from Handel’s Messiah:
He shall feed his flock like
A shepherd
And He shall gather
The lambs with his arm
With his arm
Come unto Him
All ye that labor
And learn of Him
For He is meek
And lowly of heart
And ye shall find rest
Unto your souls
The last part was the most important. Take his yoke upon you. Raised as an Iowa farm boy in the early
1900s, Elton knew that yokes were placed on teams of animals. An insight into this passage in Matthew 11
was what we saw as “Christ’s clearest call to commitment.” We do not go it alone, Jesus himself shares
the yoke with us. This insight which
Elton first spoke about at First Baptist Church in Cleveland in 1949, developed
into the idea of the Yokefellows ministry.
Following
the Handel aria, the keynote speaker would address the conference. The speakers included the well-known
Presbyterian pastor D. James Kennedy and Richard Halvorsen, chaplain of the
United States Senate, and other Christian authors and thinkers. Some years Dr. Trueblood himself gave the
keynote speech. In the case of Kennedy
and Halvorsen, I got to be a personal attendant while they were with us.
Saturday mornings, at 7 am, there would be a prayer gathering at the
Stout Meetinghouse on the Earlham campus.
A speaker would bring a brief message and the rest of the meeting would
be like unprogrammed Quaker worship. I
spoke out of the silence a couple of times.
My words were well-received. I
always wanted to be the designated speaker to open the prayer gathering
someday, but that never happened. After
the prayer meeting, we had breakfast and then either some break-out session or
panel discussions or something of that nature.
The conference ended about noon.
I really believe, if one thinks about the life of total spontaneity
which epitomized Loran Helm, and the life of discipline which characterized
Elton Trueblood, there is no doubt God was more honored by the Trueblood
approach. Patterns are important in the
Bible, such as the great detail with which the Tabernacle is described. When people came there to bring their
offerings, they were to bring the best of what they had. I cannot tell you how
many times I have heard Elton Trueblood say, “Deliberate mediocrity is a heresy
and a sin.” Even in an unprogrammed
Quaker meeting where there is no official “sermon,” Elton insisted that
meaningful ministry had to be a result of discipline and preparation. Anything worthwhile was worthy of a person’s
best efforts. I learned from Elton Trueblood
the importance of intentionality.
Words fail me to try to describe
the cognitive dissonance the chasm between these two approaches left me
in. I do know I did not handle that
dissonance well and made some extremely regrettable choices in my personal
life, in ministry, and in my studies. I
felt like I was being pulled apart. This
dissonance grew louder and louder until I separated myself from Loran Helm and
his fellowship.
There is no doubt in my mind that I made the right decision. In the end it came down to comparing fruit.
Is that not what our Lord said to do? “By their fruits shall you know
them.” The fruit of one was a
controlling, discounting presence which held me to be pitiable and tolerated
but not someone who God would ever be able to minister through. The other was the fruit of loving nurture and
care, encouragement, and not caring who got the credit for anything as long as
I was healthy and happy. Elton Trueblood
loved me, and it was evident from how he related with me. Loran Helm said he loved me, but in
the end he did not, and it showed by the suspicion with which he treated
me. The claim he made to be someone who
loved everyone as Jesus loved them became a claim which I could see was clearly
false. Somehow, the Holy Spirit
impressed me to ask myself a question.
“Would Jesus treat me the way Loran Helm does?” The answer was an unequivocal “NO.”
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