Godless (5 page)
After that, he and I became “brothers” in Jesus, spending much time discussing the bible. In spite of the recent court decision about religion in the schools, we started a prayer and bible-study group on campus. We called it an “advanced Spanish literature and discussion” group (something like that), and the first and only piece of Spanish literature we discussed was the bible. (This was a front, folks.) Some other Christians heard what was happening, and this group became a focal point for devout students, including a couple of other high school evangelists like myself. We dropped the Spanish pretense and quickly turned it into a Christian club.
James Edwards came to my church a couple of times and introduced himself as “Dan Barker’s son,” meaning that I was his spiritual father, which embarrassed me a little, though it was quite affirming to a young preacher. I was called to the ministry in that church and I was now “bringing in the sheaves,” so to speak. After I graduated from high school, I would occasionally return to speak to the expanding Christian group we had started, which had to be moved to the choir room because it had grown too big for a classroom. They all wanted to learn about my missionary and evangelistic adventures, and to meet the guy who started it all. I heard that James Edwards was still holding those Christian meetings on that campus 25 years later!
Experiences like these helped to affirm and cement my commitment to my “calling from God.” I was effective. I had proof. I was encouraged and appreciated. I felt like I was set apart for a special ministry, and I devoted every day to it. I got involved with several local ministries, including the gentle Peralta Brothers—Eli (who had been my first-year Spanish teacher), Abraham, Aaron and Benjamin. They were second-generation Mexicans who sang Spanish gospel music to the Hispanic churches in southern California and northern Mexico, and for whom I played piano and occasionally filled in for an absent voice.
I eventually spent a total of about two years as a missionary in Mexico, trying to convert Catholics into Christians. (Looking back on it, I am embarrassed at the arrogance and ignorance of American Protestant evangelists, thinking we should convert an entire “lost dark country” to Jesus.) Besides the ministry, being in Mexico was an eye-opening cultural experience. During one of the first visits across the border, I was in a church with no glass in the windows. As we were sweeping the cement floor before the evening meeting little children were climbing through the windows, jumping from pew to pew, playing and laughing. In a misguided moment of saintly solemnity, I yelled to one of the boys: “Don’t you know this is a church? You should not be playing here! And you should wear shoes when you come into the House of God.” He looked up at me and said, “I don’t have any shoes.”
During another early missionary trip below Tijuana, I walked up to a group of young men and in not-yet-perfect Spanish said, “God has sent us here to talk to you about Jesus. Do you know Jesus?” One of the guys pointed down the street and said, “Yes. He lives down around the corner beside the pharmacy.”
In a little town on the Sea of Cortez, in 1965, I met Manuel Bonilla, a diminutive but exuberant Christian singer and guitarist whose immense talent made him seem larger than life. His ministry was beginning to be noticed throughout Latin America, and when he came up to Los Angeles in 1966 to record his songs he asked me to produce one of his first projects. I was 16 when I arranged and recorded an entire album for Manuel, including the song “Me Ha Tocado” (“He Touched Me”), the same song we sang at the Kathryn Kuhlman meetings. That simple recording, which I arranged for piano, marimba, guitar and a trio of background voices, became a big hit in the Spanish-speaking Christian world and is still selling today. It was exciting to hear myself, a high school student, playing piano on Spanish radio stations in southern California and Mexico. Manuel went on to become the leading Spanish Christian recording artist in the world, selling in more than a dozen countries. He used me to arrange and produce many of his California recordings from those early years. There were about a dozen albums through the 1970s, which grew in sophistication as we both learned the ropes of the recording industry.
I did not view my music production and performance as a career during those years of ministry. I was reluctant to charge money for what I considered an honor and a duty. I was serving God. Looking back on it, I realize I
should
have charged more, especially later when I was married and we started raising children, but of course the world was going to end at any moment so why plan for the future? The bible teaches: “Take no thought for tomorrow. Tomorrow will take thought of the things of itself.”
should
have charged more, especially later when I was married and we started raising children, but of course the world was going to end at any moment so why plan for the future? The bible teaches: “Take no thought for tomorrow. Tomorrow will take thought of the things of itself.”
One day I walked into the mayor’s office of a small city in Mexico and told him that God had sent us there to preach to his town and that he was going to allow us to use the large kiosk in the downtown park, for free, as a stage for our performance. Without hesitating, he said, “Bueno.” He even made sure we had police protection. Dozens of people came up to the kiosk that evening to pray, confess their sins, and ask Jesus to come into their hearts.
Right after high school, in 1967, before going to bible college, I spent a year with the Frank Gonzales Evangelistic Association, a cross-country gospel team. Frank, a graduate of Bob Jones University, was a flashy Mexican-American trumpet player who preached bilingual, hell-fire sermons. I spent that year singing, playing the piano, preaching, doing house-to-house witnessing and getting doors slammed in my face, but winning converts.
I was playing the accordion standing on picnic tables in the park... singing about Jesus in restaurants and inviting the rest of the customers to join us...holding weeklong revival services in large and small churches across the continent.
I once drove non-stop from one side of the continent to the other—from Riverside, New Jersey, to Riverside, California—and later even further, straight through from Norfolk, Virginia, to Los Angeles. Among my other experiences:
Driving through freezing blizzards and blinding desert sandstorms.
Approaching members of the Hell’s Demons motorcycle gang in Phoenix to invite them to hear a sermon about the love of Jesus.
Holding drug awareness musical rallies in complicit public high schools—rallies that were just a front for us to invite the students to an evening evangelistic rally (we didn’t know the
first
thing about preventing drug use).
first
thing about preventing drug use).
Playing soccer and basketball in countless prisons across Mexico and the United States so that we could witness for Jesus during halftime.
Rounding up hundreds of barefoot children in Mexican towns and villages so that we could sing Protestant choruses to them and tell them about
Jesús
—counting all the hands that were raised when we asked who wanted to be saved and reporting back to American churches how many
thousands
of souls we had converted.
Jesús
—counting all the hands that were raised when we asked who wanted to be saved and reporting back to American churches how many
thousands
of souls we had converted.
Sleeping on church pews, church roofs and once on top of a Volkswagen van.
Hiking up and down mountainsides and ravines to remote villages that required an additional interpreter since the Indians there didn’t know Spanish. (I tried to learn some Mayo, but all I can remember now is “Dios ta enchianía”—God bless you.)
Inviting ourselves to local TV and radio stations, with some success, so that we could get the gospel to as many people as possible.
During those years, I was the kind of guy you would not want to sit next to on a bus. After a few minutes of chitchat, I would turn and say, “I can see that you are going through some real struggles right now. (
How does he know?
) I can tell that you are experiencing some problems with a relationship in your life. (
How does he know?
) You are wondering what it is all about. You don’t know what is the purpose of life. (
How DOES he know?
) I used to feel the same way, and God has sent me to tell you that Jesus is the answer.”
How does he know?
) I can tell that you are experiencing some problems with a relationship in your life. (
How does he know?
) You are wondering what it is all about. You don’t know what is the purpose of life. (
How DOES he know?
) I used to feel the same way, and God has sent me to tell you that Jesus is the answer.”
You would be surprised at how often this crude technique actually worked. I was more often respected than resisted. There seems to be a general feeling that if someone claims to be speaking for God, then he must be telling the truth—or at least it is safer not to challenge such a person. If it is religious, it must be good. After all, who has any answers? Our lives
do
have problems and mysteries. A preacher must be on to something; otherwise, we wouldn’t need preachers. It is easy to proselytize. I don’t understand all the psychology behind preaching, but I know that it works. Otherwise, we would not see the growth of movements such as early Christianity and Islam, or modern Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism and Mormonism. Most people are uncertain and susceptible, vulnerable to someone else’s confidence and certainty. If you want to be a preacher, then “just do it.” Do it with confidence and style. It works. (Just like anyone in sales will tell you.)
do
have problems and mysteries. A preacher must be on to something; otherwise, we wouldn’t need preachers. It is easy to proselytize. I don’t understand all the psychology behind preaching, but I know that it works. Otherwise, we would not see the growth of movements such as early Christianity and Islam, or modern Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism and Mormonism. Most people are uncertain and susceptible, vulnerable to someone else’s confidence and certainty. If you want to be a preacher, then “just do it.” Do it with confidence and style. It works. (Just like anyone in sales will tell you.)
But with religion, most people are uncritical. Never once in 19 years of preaching did anyone ever come up to me after a service and ask, “Rev. Barker, what were the sources for your sermon?” I was accorded an immense amount of unearned respect, simply for being a minister. Where were the skeptics, atheists, agnostics and humanists? (Well, why should I expect them to be in church?) Why did anyone rarely challenge my asserted “authority” to speak for God? I do remember a few slammed doors. I recall only two or three times during all those years when someone on the street would reject what I was saying, and it was a huge surprise to me when they simply walked away. Now, I don’t blame them; but at the time, I was perplexed at how someone could be so lost that they would run from God.
I traveled with the Frank Gonzales ministry every summer for many years as Frank’s accompanist and as a preaching leader of my own team, and they were hectic summers. (I suspect that my problem with kidney stones originated with that experience. I spent days driving through blistering heat, drinking little, pushing the team, stopping to visit the bathroom only when absolutely necessary.) During the summer of 1967, I dehydrated and spent three days in Guaymas, Mexico, on my back in a burlap hammock being fed glucose through an intravenous needle, eating nothing, sucking on ice cubes. That was the same summer I got mangled by a dirty German Shepherd in the town of Zacapu, in the mountains of Michoacán between Mexico City and Guadalajara, after I hopped over the adobe wall behind a church into the next yard to retrieve a volleyball. I didn’t get rabies, but I went into some kind of nervous shock and slept for more than two days after being medicated at a local clinic. I know that kind of living is reckless, but at the time I figured it was justified. The world was going to end any day, and I had given my life and body to Jesus as a “living sacrifice.”
From 1968 to 1972, I attended Azusa Pacific College, an interdenominational state-accredited Christian school in California, and majored in religion. Looking back, I can see that most of the religion courses (with a couple of notable exceptions) were simply glorified Sunday School classes and I don’t remember that we delved very deeply into the evidences or arguments for or against Christianity. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since I wanted to be out in the streets preaching the gospel, not stuck in a classroom chewing over pointless history and philosophy. After all, the world was ending soon. My attitude was that it is not necessary to know how an automobile works in order to drive one, nor is it imperative to become a biblical scholar or theologian in order to save souls from damnation. All of those “Christian evidences” could be left to the experts who, I believed, had already figured it all out and who could provide the historical, documentary and archeological evidences if anyone ever asked. (No one ever did.)
I believed that my education was secondary to my calling. I was pretty successful at winning souls, probably much more so than my professors, and although I got good grades, I didn’t see what difference it made. I coasted through college, spending almost every evening and weekend out somewhere preaching, singing, playing the piano and doing the
real
work of the ministry.
real
work of the ministry.
Most of my memories at Azusa Pacific College are ministry-related. I sang and played piano for the Dynamics Chorale, which toured the state promoting the college and Jesus. I often played piano for daily chapel services. One year I was elected Christian Life Director of the student body government and brought in dynamic Christian speakers and performers such as Andrae Crouch (“It Won’t Be Long”) and Audrey Mieir (“His Name is Wonderful”). We listened to end-time author Hal Lindsey (
The Late, Great Planet Earth
) assure us that the second coming of Jesus would be no later than the mid 1980s. That late?
The Late, Great Planet Earth
) assure us that the second coming of Jesus would be no later than the mid 1980s. That late?
For many years, Azusa Pacific College sent hundreds of students down to Mexico to learn something about mission work, and because of my experience I was involved as organizer, performer, preacher and interpreter. We took teams of young American students into many of the dusty villages below Mexicali to sing and preach in churches at night, and during the day to play games and tell stories to children in order to bring them to Jesus. I ushered the Azusa Pacific soccer team into the overcrowded Mexicali jail to challenge the prison team and, win or lose, preach to them. (We mostly lost. Those inmates have a lot of time to practice.) After a while, the prison officials and guards came to know me, so I was the perfect liaison for such ministries. Flattering the ego of the main warden, I even managed to gain entry for a film crew (whose nervous cameraman was told, “Don’t shoot the guards!”) that was making a documentary film about Christian youth ministries. This time it was basketball and we lost again, but I would love to find that film if I could remember who made it.
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