The Sacred Perspective

Last night Dana and I watched the 2007 clip of Tom Cruise browbeating Matt Lauer on the evils of antidepressants. Dana was blown away by the odd way Cruise sounded. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she really didn't think he sounded right.

Mr. Cruise was conned.

He bought into a very simple con job. He's a good guy (barring a normal dose of sin and a superstar level of narcissism) who really wants to make the world a better place. He cares deeply about things, and L Ron Hubbard's folk told him a shortcut to helping the whole world. On the subject of antidepressants, for example, they told him something like, "You could dedicate a lifetime of study to pharmaceuticals, or you can study what we've already learned about them. You can sift through hundreds of experts' opinions, and spend years trying to figure out which of these experts has sold out to big pharma, and eventually you'll work your way down to the results we've already compiled. Or you can study our results and start helping the world TODAY."

It's a shortcut, and it's an appealling one.

I've been there and done that.

Gene Edwards once told me I was the foremost expert in the world on church history. I'd very much imagine he's since rescinded that opinion (forcefully) but he appeared to say it in complete sincerity. And when he said it, I believed it might be true.

They say you can't sucker an honest man. They're right. Gene offered me a too-good-to-be-true deal, and I bought into it because of my inner dishonesty. He'd written a handful of books and gave us personal talks touting his incredible insights into a grabbag of subjects: family, church, Trinity, missions, child-rearing, psychology, emotional development. One of his core subjects was church history. I could either study hundreds of books written by hundreds of authors on the subject of church history and do the hard work of weeding out all their conflicting errors, or (for the amazing low price of a few of Gene's books!) I could have the world's most complete view of church history.

I placed my confidence in Gene the same way any mark hands his savings over to a huckster. I went all-in, as they say in poker, with a pair of deuces. (For non-poker readers, I gambled everything I owned on the weakest possible pair.)

One day, I took all my cheap brilliance to an Internet News Group dedicated to church history, and floated a couple leading questions their way. I remember asking what they thought the literacy rate was in first century Europe. Those historians answered me in ways I'd never imagined. I learned more about literacy from that one question than I'd learned in all my studies of Gene's work. Those men and women knew their history deeply and widely and verifiably. Gene's pitch was rich in promises and conclusions, but devoid of peer-reviewed data. I walked away from that news group knowing I'd been rolled, and the diploma Gene had spoken to me wasn't worth the air it had briefly disturbed. It was a sick, unsettling feeling, but I owned my loss and started the process of reevaluating my "investment."

What happened to me, and what I'm sure happened to Mr. Cruise, is that instead of learning a single subject from many perspectives, I learned every subject from Gene's sacred perspective. Instead of the humility that comes with learning to respect experts in their fields, I thought I could quickly rise above all the experts in every field because I had the magic feather of Gene's divine insight.

Beware the expert with divine insight into everything, and run in terror from the man who needs your trust. When a man needs your confidence, look closely to what he's offering. All too often that free lunch costs your life savings.

Cooking on 4 Burners With Gas

Gene Edwards' books and tapes are visionary. And beyond having a vision, Gene is able to help people tap into their own vision of living in deeper relationship with the Lord and other believers. On the strength of Gene's leadership, an awful lot of people have bled heart and soul out to realize their dreams. In fact, when people give up on Gene, no matter the reason, they seldom give up on his vision.

I have given up on Gene's vision.

I'd obviously refer you to Gene's writings and tapes to understand his vision, but let me summarize it enough to explain on what I've given up. This will be no attempt to downplay or insult it. I'm sure to do it injustice, but only because it's so immense.

I characterize Gene's vision as vastly-encompassing. There is nothing in Christianity Gene omits from his dream. Starting at the relationships within the Trinity before time began, Gene reinterprets everything about heaven and Earth and the boundary between the two that we call "the church." He frames the Christian life as God's Life come to Earth. Seeing church experience from his perspective changes everything.

When a church comes together, Gene portrays the meeting happening in the heavens as much as on Earth. The church loves God with the same love they receive from Him, and it's through that love that God's purpose is realized. The church, meeting at the boundary between heaven and Earth, loves God in Spirit and in Truth as much as in body and voice.

Practically, this foundation results in a uniquely unique church. That church is both more creatively expressive and more mystically quiet than others. Gene teaches the church to be led by the Spirit through its members. As such, its members plan and execute every meeting. Those meetings might be mapped out for spontaneous praise or spontaneous silence, shared meals or shared fasts, unscripted prayers or a whole scripted liturgy. Anything is possible.

And the church is more than the meetings. A lot of the above might happen as easily over dinner as at any set gathering. The members of Gene's churches live near enough to each other to help each other in physical and spiritual ways. The members pray together, too. And that prayer is as uniquely unique as the church itself. It's a church-wide implementation of the lectio divina or contemplative prayer. It's silence as a way of touching God on a church-wide scale.

And Gene presents all this beautifully.

A conference attendee first hearing and seeing Gene deliver this message, then talking face-to-face with brothers and sisters living the vision, quickly falls in love. The testimony of hundreds of conference attendees over the years absolutely confirms that experience. Very nearly everyone who attends one of Gene's conferences is overwhelmed at the beauty of his spoken vision, and of the physical vision the churches live out.

Very few people who make it as far as a conference leave disappointed.

Some want home church. Gene brings a church that meets at the boundary of heaven and Earth ... in a living room. Some want the end of the clergy and hierarchy. Gene makes every member a conduit of divine Life ... and gives them all a degree of authority. Some want a church based on relationship. Gene makes every relationship an outflow of the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son ... and everyone lives near enough to each other to foster practical love.

Gene's vision answers every particular. It's a living piece of art. Like all art, it has its imperfections and flaws, but for the person who appreciates the picture the flaws only enhance its beauty. For the star-struck church-lover, an overly large personality or an occasional fuzzy doctrine only brings the core beauty of Gene's vision into more perfect focus.

I was that deeply in love 20 years ago today, and I still think that vision is beautiful. I've found a lesser one vastly more satisfying, but it's surely beautiful.

I have no bone to pick with anyone still committed to that vision, theoretically even including Gene. I can't say with certainty I'm right about the parts of that vision I've rejected, and I admire anyone still pursuing their relationship with the Lord down that path. We're all in this Christian life together, and I'm the first to point out I've been wrong before - in big ways. These are my thoughts and insights on the 20th anniversary of joining myself to Gene Edwards' vision.

Cooking on One Burner
There's an old saying, "Now we're cooking on both burners with gas!" For those of you who've not heard it, it means things are moving very quickly indeed. All the obstacles have been removed, and everyone's putting their heart and soul into getting to where they're going. Excitement is running high, and the job is being finished lickety-split. I think the saying might match up to the more modern, "He's on FIRE!"

My beef with Gene's vision is simple. Even cooking on both burners with gas can't keep up with it. His vision only cooks with all 4 burners cranked to high.

It's too much.

A romance goes through a number of stages. There's courtship, engagement, new marriage, new kids, kids moving out, etc. During the run-up from courtship to marriage the relationship advances from low to very high heat, and that's good. But then it ramps down again. It has to. Even those people who've got marriage down pat, and who continue to report passion daily in their marriages, have ramped down from those first burning months.

Life functions best for most people the same way most cooking works best, on one burner and medium heat. Everyone likes a little "four burner" time in their lives, but most of us need things to be normal more often than not.

I'd like to compare some four-burner ways of doing church with single-burner alternatives. I'm experimenting with all these, and am happy with things as they are. I'm still learning, though, and finding new things every day. The single-burner way is not as exciting, but I've found my life isn't scorched on the bottom and raw in the middle these days.

Relocating
Gene describes church life as so amazingly rare as to make it unthinkable that it could possibly exist for long wherever you live. To be sure, he teaches church life springs up spontaneously everywhere, but he warns that it doesn't last. If you want church life, you'll need to relocate somewhere a real church planter has established a church that will live.

If Gene is right, then there's no alternative to relocation. And relocation is a serious four-burner life event. It's stressful and exhausting, and leaves a person unrooted from family and networks they've spent a lifetime establishing. Americans relocate an awful lot, so it's not an unthinkable burden, but it is a major stress.

If Gene is wrong, then it's an unnecessary burden. If church life can be living and edifying on a single burner, then this call to relocation is a sacrifice without cause. It's been my experience that churches are full of Christians, and we share the same life of Christ. Sharing my worship and my life with them has been a beautiful and rewarding thing.

Living Close to One Another
Living close to believers whom you trust and with whom you can share everything is a joy. We need it and everything about the idea is commendable.

Gene ups the ante by asking anyone who would experience church life to intentionally live as closely together as possible. It was educational to watch the experience of living close to believers unfold in Atlanta. We all needed time with each other, but we gave varying amounts of our time to actually doing it. Single saints spent more time with others than married saints who spent more time than couples with babies who spent more time than couples with older children. Similarly, the younger a person was, the more likely he or she was to spend a lot of time in the homes of others.

We need that closeness, but there's a slower, quieter way. You can get out and meet the neighbors you have now. There's a pretty good chance you can find two or three Christian families within a block or two, and I've seen the benefits of Christian community work well with just three families.

Being With Christians of Like Mind
One of the most attractive things about joining a group as focused as Gene's is being on a long, hard, meaningful journey together with people of like priorities to your own.

Your closest Christian neighbors, though, are also on a long, hard journey, and if you take the time to get to know them you'll find it's meaningful. They may not be of like mind on how the church should look, but it's Jesus they're wanting to serve. You can feel pretty sure they're struggling with real issues, and the Spirit is speaking in their hearts exactly like He is in yours. Everyone's fighting for their lives in this place, and everyone's searching for connection to eternity.

You will find that other people trust their pastors and distrust some author they've never heard of. And you will find that their pastors are Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, and Vineyard folk. You may find it takes time to get to know them, but you'll find in them the mind of Christ. You won't find in them any burning commitment to your expression of the church, but you'll find the Holy Spirit. Share a couple meals, move a little furniture, watch a movie and trade your testimonies and you will probably find you can lean on them a little bit when things are rough. I have.

Ending the Clergy/Hierarchy/Leadership
Jesus commanded his disciples not to allow themselves to be called rabbi, father, or teacher because they already had brothers, a Father and a Teacher. And yet we call men pastor, elder, or reverend and give them authority over others. This is a big one to an awful lot of saints. It was huge to me when I started down the path that brought me to Gene's church, and I still rankle to call a man by anything but his name.

The organized church's hierarchy, based as it is upon college degrees, is disappointingly pragmatic. I'm sorry it's come to that. But leadership is a fact of human existence. Jesus clearly intended there to be leaders in His kingdom, and He clearly was happy for there to be servants leading servants in His household. Being in Gene's leaderless churches was a four-burner adventure, and I loved it, but Jesus, Paul, Luke and others make it clear some kind of leadership is a part of being a worshipping body of believers.

There might be an ideal single burner alternative to church leadership, but I'm not going to spend a lot of energy looking for it. I've treated the pastors under whom I've lived since leaving Gene as human beings, and found they warmed to the idea quite quickly. It turns out that people who give several years to qualifying for the ministry are often really neat people with a sincere heart for the Lord. It's been a privilege to know them as brothers. I know this barely holds a candle to the four burners Gene offers, but I'm OK with that.

The Church Planter Must Leave
Ah yes. I wonder what this would look like if it ever happened?

This was a key foundational point in Gene's teachings, but a confusingly implemented one. He never was an integral part of his early churches, so he could not properly have "left." And then when he was a real part of his later churches, he didn't really leave. Either way, the concept was key to the upbringing of the churches and shaped our character very directly.

The single burner alternative to this is understated. If a man has work to do, he should go do it. Full stop. I like work, and I'm in favor of men standing up and getting it done. But turning every day spent with a church into a melodramatic, extended goodbye is gratuitous. Paul left Antioch-Pisidia to work in Iconium, Iconium to work in Lystra, and Lystra to work in Derbe, but we have no reason to believe he made his impending departure the emotional centerpiece of his ministry.

I recently lost a pastor when he left to start a home church. It was a refreshingly touching time, and was constructive for everyone. It just wasn't hard. He was with us while was with us and he left when he had to leave.

Home Meetings
Again, home meetings are great. Participation by every member of the body is great. Everyone planning together, preparing in private, and delivering their best is a wonderful thing.

Making the home meeting the only meeting is not wrong; it's just cooking on four burners.

The single burner alternative is not really better so much as doable. Of my church of 80, about 10 of us meet weekly in a living room. It's a lot smaller than Gene's vision, and it's very happy. We don't try to do everything with the pregnant power of eternity, and somehow we touch each other and the Lord anyway. It's satisfying.

Learning from Old Christians
Not everyone is ever going to read books on being Christian. That's tragic to me, but it's a reality I can accept. The question is not whether everyone will read, but will the people who do read do so from books outside of Gene's genre? 2000 years of Christianity have brought an awful lot of glory and insight to the church. Limiting a church's input to Gene's books plus his highly edited reading list, was a weak thing. Reading wider and wider outside of Gene's publishing house has been a settling thing for me over this past decade, and I recommend it.

Why Cook on Four Burners?
10 years ago I'd have asked, "Why settle for one burner?"

My how things change.

Why would a man build an entire ministry on intensifying Christianity? Gene did not haphazardly stumble into this habit of choosing the fieriest expression of the church. He reminded us frequently how lucky we were to be blessed with a leader who knew how to keep the fire on high.

10 years ago I'd have said it was because Gene had "The Vision," and it drove him both to the fire and by it. I'd have said Christianity was meant to be that way. Today, those words ring false. Gene's promises consistently hurt people in the long run, and there's always a reason for things that happen consistently. His churches burn through people like a steam engine burns coal, and he keeps shoveling people into the fire. He relies on his book, tape, and conference ministry to keep a steady flow of people pouring into those churches. And when they're used up, the ashes don't even have to be shoveled out. We go away on our own. Gene just teaches the new wave of devoted souls how precious the vision of the church must be.

When a man courts a woman too insistently, with too many flowers, with too many words of flattery, with too many gifts, her friends say, "It's too good to be true." The subject of his ardor always objects, saying, "You just don't want me to be happy!" When it turns out it really was too good to be true, though, the outcome is tragic.

So here we are, believers who have experienced Gene's vision of the church and now need to decide what to do with it. Should we discard the whole thing? Should we keep it, but look for a better man to tend it? Or is there some middle path?

I've answered for myself. I decided 4 years ago the organized church was where the Christians are, and I was going to where the Christians are. I've wondered about my decision from time to time, but I'm so happy there I'm going to stay for the forseeable future. The brothers and sisters in my little church are as dear to me as brothers and sisters can be. They carry the Life of Jesus within them, and they share it with me. There are very few four burner moments, but an awful lot of good happens on a single burner.

You'll answer for yourself, and may the Lord bless your decision.

We're Only as Sick as Our Secrets

I learned something last weekend. I learned why I hardly ever hear from old brothers and sisters from my time with Gene Edwards. I gave my life to them and to Gene for 10 years, and somehow I seldom even hear from them. Oh, and I also learned why they never hear from me. And I think I figured out how to stop some of the bleeding.

Step one is to realize most of us are bleeding.

A couple hundred lovers of the Lord in a dozen or so cities across America and Europe stepped into the glorious unknown. We all hoped to advance the glory of Christ by restoring the testimony of the church. We wanted to work together to bring a deeper, truer, simpler way of fellowshipping with each other and with Christ. We wanted the Christian life to move into our living rooms, where it was so sorely missed. Gene Edwards gave us a vision, and we fell in love with each other pouring out our hearts and souls and climbing that highest mountain. Gene welcomed us into his plans and in turn, we embraced him and each other whole-heartedly.

All those churches died under Gene's tutelage. Their deaths and our wounds were ugly affairs, each stage-managed by Gene personally. Each of the deaths had a unique fingerprint, but I've noticed one consistent outcome. Nobody knows what happened. Nobody knows what happened to the other brothers and sisters. Nobody knows what happened to Gene. Nobody knows what happened to the brothers who were supposed to bail them out. Nobody even really knows what happened to them. Everything that mattered was a secret.

John and Jane Doe were members of a church in Jonesville, and they know how that church died, but they don't know what really happened. They know about "The Incident" and the "Emergency Meetings" and "Who left first," but they don't know "Anything that Matters."

John and Jane don't know why Joe and June quit talking to them about anything that mattered. They don't know why Jim and Jody were always Gene's favorites, or why Jack and Jan thought Gene hated them. They don't know why they don't hear from anyone any more, and they don't know why they think about calling but don't quite pick up the phone.

Secrets work like that.

We need to tell our stories.

We need to hear each other's stories.

This weekend I heard a couple stories, and things that plagued me for ten years melted away. In one evening and an afternoon, ten years of loneliness made sense. I began to feel reunited to my brothers and sisters. I did not hear what I wanted to hear, and it was still healing. In one case, I heard almost the opposite of what I wanted to hear, but I heard the truth and it was perfect. I heard what actually happened. It was just the truth, but the truth changes everything.

Gene taught us to hide the truth.

That was all well and good while I believed he was trying to protect people who deserved a second chance, but I don't believe that any more. After all these years, and after talking to the people who were there, the only thing Gene ever deeply cared about protecting was his work.

That explains why Gene never told anyone the truth, but it leaves an open question about why no one else told what they knew of the truth. We were all silent about the things that mattered. What did our brothers and sisters think as they were bleeding? Or as they watched others bleed? And why did they do what they did? None of us knows because no one talked, and that's no accident. Gene repeatedly and forcefully indoctrinated silence into us. He taught us that speaking of anything that matters is undermining the worker, and that undermining the worker was a grave sin.

Gene once told us, "I consider you to have neither honor, nor integrity, nor honesty, nor trustworthiness if you in any way undermine another man's work. Nor can I personally extend my fellowship to one who does."

We learned this lesson well.

We honored Gene and we honored God to the best of our abilities in refusing to undermine Gene's work. When we doubted, we spoke to no one. If one of us disagreed with any brother, even the most or the least disagreeable brother, we'd wrestle through to a satisfying conclusion. We grew close that way, and it was beautiful. But you could tell right away when a brother started disagreeing with Gene. He'd grow agreeable. He'd start going along with anything, and grow silent. He'd start having secrets. Then he'd announce he was leaving, and reserve the reason why. We'd all mollify each other with kind words and friendly smiles, and one day we'd help him pack and he was gone.

Gene warned us repeatedly of the power of words to destroy, and that only silence could glorify God. Only in silent suffering could a man not undermine the work of God. Only in silent suffering could the man with authority know how the Holy Spirit would measure his work. Only in silent suffering could the man without authority know the Holy Spirit would guard him. If a man spoke, he was hindering the Spirit. Gene taught us it was the Lord's church, not ours, and the Lord would defend it.

Silence, he told us, was the route to safety.

But that was all a smokescreen.

It was a lie.

Gene, himself, did not practice silence. I know it for a fact.

I sat and listened as Gene lied about practicing silence in the middle of a church crisis. I listened to him tell the leading brothers of a church he would never defend his work with words. Hours earlier I'd I heard him plotting and describing to us how he would defend his work with words. His promise to not defend the church with words was one of the things he'd told us he'd say to defend his work in that church. I listened while he patted himself on the back for his own cunning.

Three times I was personally ordered by Gene, face-to-face, to find a way to get three different churches to quit listening to three different brothers in those churches. Gene perceived a threat from them, and he told me to take them out. (In Scotland, Romania, and Florida. If any of you brothers wonder what I did, just ask. Gene rated me a failure all three times.)

In Gene's books and personal appearances he always advocated silence, but behind closed doors he undermined his own words. Why would he do this?

It's a pattern familiar to any woman or child who's suffered abuse.

An abusive husband relentlessly presses for control of his victim (don't call her a "wife" - that's a dishonor to the word.) Whether he gains control through seduction or battering, through flattery or belittling, through bribery or deprivation, he will have control - whatever the cost. The first thing he must do to win that control is isolate his victim from anyone who might help her.

We who gave our lives to Gene were already well isolated. To varying degrees, and sometimes to a great degree, we were isolated from families, from outside friends, from Christians who didn't follow Gene, from leaders in other churches, and even from great Christian writers and thinkers who had the misfortune of not being promoted by Gene.

Gene was isolated, too, but in a different sense. Gene reported to no one, except his secretaries and his wife. No one knew the whole counsel of Gene's heart and no one could speak with gravity into his life. Gene consistently claimed to be under the oversight of someone, but who that was changed on a regular basis and I never heard of that oversight making any difference in his plans. For a brief period my name was on that list, and I can certify he never heard anything from me that made him change his mind about the least thing. Maybe others fared better.

So far as I know, there was only one thing that impinged upon Gene's total control over his churches - those same churches.

Individuals in the various churches sometimes had opinions of their own, opinions that could spread and create tension and raise difficult questions . And Gene was never happy with difficult. If a brother in Timbuktoo loved everything Gene said and loved Gene, but questioned whether there might be a better way to do some little thing, Gene would shut him down.

An accountant in our church once recommended Gene let us handle our donations to him a little differently, so as to make our tax records more audit-proof. His suggestion was good for Gene as much as for the churches, and as we all listened to him we were all impressed and happy. All but Gene, that is. Gene came down on that brother like a cornered animal. He fired that brother from all responsibility in the church, and did everything in his power to discredit him to us. We were not to tell that brother anything; we were to treat him as someone who had a hidden hatred for Gene. He made our rejection of that good brother a measure of whether we loved God's work.

We were already isolated from everyone on Earth, but Gene still needed to isolate us from each other.

Over the years, Gene did two things.

1) He invented the doctrine of silence.
It's not quite true Gene invented the doctrine of silence, of course. Search for "code of silence" and you'll find it's been around for a long time. You might just notice it's been polished and perfected largely by two classes of organization: the mafia and cults. One thing is sure, though. Gene's idea of silence was invented by someone, because it was never revealed by God in scripture. It's not there.

2) Gene made sure we always were afraid of each other.
I was not the only brother sent out to "take down" another brother. Whenever Gene felt a threat from a young brother, one thing would not happen and another thing would, just like clockwork. Gene would NOT talk to that brother at all, and he would send another man to teach the church to distrust that brother. It was brilliant, because it didn't just isolate the brother Gene found threatening. It also isolated the man obeying Gene by doing something we all found frightening and questionable, and it isolated everyone by creating an environment of distrust in each other.

When Gene put a knife in one brother's hands and required him to use it on another brother, everyone was wounded, the brother who felt the cut, the brother who dealt the cut, and the brothers who knew their day would come. He isolated all of us. It was a double bind. We knew any man who respected Gene could not be trusted, and any man who did not respect Gene could not be listened to.

It's also good old, traditional, spiritual abuse 101, and we bent our minds like pretzels trying to make sense of it.

Gene was either practicing something so holy that his methods were justified, or the thing to which we'd given our lives was a garden-variety cult. From here it looks like an easy decision, but when you've sold everything and fallen in love with brothers and sisters, even brothers and sisters with whom you are sharing terror, it's a big investment. It's hard to walk away from that investment. Still, given what I witnessed while I was allowed "behind the curtain" my doubts eventually became certainties. Following Gene was a corrosive force on every life I knew.

Gene's work is most destructive to those saints who most give themselves to it. It has to be, because his work is glued together with lies and manipulation. Truth would bring his house down. The day that truth "undermines another brother's work" is an ugly day indeed.

I am not breaking silence to bring Gene's work down, though. Gene's already done that himself. A thriving community of a dozen churches has been reduced to a single church diminished by splits. I'm breaking silence because this weekend I saw a little healing come to some of brothers and sisters, and I felt a little healing myself.

For ten years I've wondered what really happened when I left. I've wondered what damage I did when I followed Gene's orders. I've wondered whether the brothers and sisters I loved back then could still love me after all the water under the bridge.

Gene's teaching of silence isolated me for ten years in his church and for another ten years after I'd left, but this weekend I ignored that teaching. For the first time, I sat face-to-face with brothers and sisters and heard little bits of their stories and told little bits of mine.

It was good.

A few pages up I said I have an idea what we need to do to heal.

We are isolated because we were systematically taught to isolate ourselves. We all loved the exciting, deep, and happy bonds we formed with brothers and sisters, but there was one area in which each of us was isolated. On any question of Gene's control, we each stood and bled alone.

If we're going to heal, we need to break the silence. We need to tell and hear each other's stories.

I don't think there's a formula for how it has to happen, but an awful lot of us need it. Face-to-face, email, phone, or web posting all work for me, but I know they don't all work for everyone equally. Let's find something that works.

It's been a long time. I think it's time we stopped bleeding and told the truth.

Kevin Knox
(Email Address in Profile)

Regarding my 10 years under Gene Edwards

In a small group meeting in my church, I mentioned that I had spent 10 years in a "cult." I then had to apologize for not having mentioned it before, and explain that this is not a fact one usually "leads" with when meeting new brothers and sisters.
:-)

About 2 months ago, I promised a sister in the Lord that I would republish a statement I made about 6 years ago regarding the leader of this little group.

Those two events finally pushed me over the edge to get off my duff and pull this little story back from the archives and publish it again here.

This article was written in specific answer to some question. I believe the question was something like, "Would you recommend I join Gene Edwards' church?" It's not tremendously detailed, but it covers the broad outlines of what happened. If you'd like a little more detail, you can look at this series of posts.
http://familyhoodchurch.blogspot.com/search/label/Gene%20Edwards

Leaving Gene Edwards

By the time I started college, I had decided to spend my life as an itinerant minister of the gospel. The two things I knew were that no minister of the gospel should earn a salary, and that I didn’t want to take over anyone’s church. Instead, I would move from church to church, helping as I could, when I could.
Yes, I was full of the arrogance and idealism of youth, but I also knew something of my ignorance. I knew that it would be decades before I could be of use to any church, and that I needed someone to teach me. I began looking for an old man to train me in what it meant to be a worker in the church.
My quest for a new type of church led me to Gene Edwards’ books. I loved every word, and practically memorized every one. I had found the man who could teach me what the church should be. Amy and I married with the understanding that as soon as possible, we would move to be a part of one of Gene’s churches.
I had written Gene some time earlier to request permission to move to his church in Portland, Maine. Gene had recommended that I wait, and move to a church that he planned to plant in Atlanta. I could not have been more excited. Gene always wrote about how important it was to be in a church from the beginning. This would be my chance.
Gene wanted us to avoid Portland. It turns out that Portland was in its death throes. Gene explained to us that half of that church was experiencing church life for the first time, but that the other half had been a part of his earlier experiment in California. The older members seemed to be tearing the church apart due to secret bitterness against Gene. It should have been a clue to me, but I was too excited that the Lord had answered my prayers for a mentor.
We didn't expect to find a "perfect church" in Atlanta, but we sure did expect an exciting ride.
We could not have been happier those first few years. We fell in love with our new brothers and sisters, and practically wore out each other's living rooms. We spent hours together eating, singing, and dreaming. Life in the church was everything I’d ever imagined. We described the church as a piece of heaven come to earth, and we meant every word. We fought more than we could tell, and hurt each other too frequently, but we loved each other, and were loved just as much.
In the end, we left Gene and his church, and we would never go back. We still love the memories and maintain relationships with people who accept our departure, but Gene’s church was not heaven after all. In retrospect, the church in Atlanta looked suspiciously like a frat house, commune, or any other group of college kids thrown together by any fate. It was fun, but I suspect the excitement was just youth.
I believe the problem in Atlanta, and in all Gene’s churches, lies in the vision of the worker.
Gene started a 40-year countdown on his ministry in 1987. In 2027 he wanted us to look back on his ministry, after he was long gone, to honestly evaluate whether his time had been well spent on this earth. He told us that there would be no way to honestly judge his work until it had survived forty years worth of crises. I half agree with him. There is no way to judge a man’s work a success without seeing it survive forty years. I believe, though, that we can and must judge his work a failure today.
Gene Edwards proposes two standards by which a worker in God’s kingdom should be judged. The first is by his ethical standard, and the second is by the health of his churches. I believe Gene’s work fails both standards. To be fair, Gene believes that he is doing exceptionally well in both areas, and that he is doing so against incredible odds. His followers agree with him, and will defend his record without reserve.
Gene teaches that the foundation of a worker’s ethics should be that the worker would consciously lose whenever one of his churches is in crisis. I believe that this standard is false. Moreover, I watched Gene neglect even to try to meet it. What I saw him do under pressure was the exact opposite of what he preached. In situation after situation he manipulated the church from the outside, and micromanaged the outcome of crisis after crisis. He chose a spy or two in each church (sometimes overtly and sometime covertly) and used that person to pull the strings of our lives. At first, we were amazed at how much he knew about what was going on in the church. Within a year or two though, we had figured out what was happening. By the third or fourth year his ways were old news.
Gene's churches never had true, independent elders while I was there. Instead, we had "contacts". The brother or (more often) sister who reported our actions to Gene and brought instructions from him had an aura of prestige, but no real authority. Gene changed contacts pretty frequently, such that they could never grow into de-facto leaders. Instead, all the brothers ran the church together via “brothers’ meetings”. Gene told us that this method was not biblical, but that it was necessary to keep the egos of 20th century Americans in check.
Gene teaches that elders will spring up organically within the church. He also claims that those elders are his head covering. In my brief tenures as contact/elder, and in my observation of others in that role, I never knew anyone to exert headship over Gene at any level except once. That once, Gene declared that brother a mortal enemy, shunned him for the next seven years, and never allowed that brother into any position of responsibility again. I believe that this action is a natural outflow of Gene’s theology, and I'm sure that he would defend it as safest for the church.
The job of the brothers was to implement Gene’s plans. Gene does not like to manage details, and it was the job of the brothers to flesh out his plans and make them happen. Gene alone set the spiritual agenda of the church, and any deviation from that plan was sure to anger him. I know that this is a far cry from the version of the church that Gene preaches, but it is what I watched for ten years.
I was eventually forced to the opinion that Gene ministers in a fundamentally dishonest way. He told us that he was the most honest man we would ever meet, and for years I took his claim at face value. With stunning regularity, though, he put my trust to the test with actions that seemed to give lie to his words. I made excuses for him again and again, and struggled to understand each of his actions in the light of his conflicting claims. For years I found ways to believe him, but it was an exhausting way to follow the Lord.
The house of cards fell for me over the course of a dismal year in which I watched him tear apart the church in St. Cloud. He bragged about his boldness and ethics, then explained to us how thankful they should be that he been so spiritual in their dismemberment. There was no excuse for the things I watched him do that year. Finally, I had been forced to look at his actions, rather than at his words. Looking back over the previous years, I saw everything he'd said and done, and everything I’d chosen to believe, in a new and heartbreaking light. Gene’s years of explanations and excuses were all torn away, and the reality of everything I’d supported came crashing home.
I had watched Gene plant a handful of churches, and I had watched each of those churches die, sometimes more than once. I had listened to Gene explain how in each of those cases, it was the church’s fault. They had ignored his warnings, and failed to do what he lovingly suggested they needed to do to thrive. Looking back, his excuses were the same in every case, going all the way back to Portland. I cannot know what happened there, but I sure recognize the excuses.
I knew several of the churches that grew and died under Gene’s ministry. I watched them weep as Gene dealt with perceived enemies in their ranks, and listened as they begged to know why Gene was being so cruel to them. My loyalty lay more with Gene than with my own eyes, though, so I allowed those saints to believe that they were bringing all this pain down on themselves. I was wrong. I should have known enough even then to conclude that Gene was lying to these people, but I was too indoctrinated to see the truth.
Whether you agree with my assessment or not, nothing can excuse Gene’s track record. The second standard to which Gene holds the worker is the health of the churches he plants, and there are no survivors. (Several crawled back from the grave and he called them resurrected, but I would call them zombified. I lived through one such rebirth, and the second church was only half-alive while he was not there to breathe life into it.)
Gene blames all that death on the brothers and sisters who gave their lives to those churches, and to him. I would listen as Gene praised brothers and sisters to the highest heaven. A year later I would listen again as he claimed to have known all along that these same brothers and sisters were troublemakers. I watched it happen in every church, and to saints whom I know had done nothing wrong.
I was forced to realize that the problem was with Gene, and had no option but to leave him. Leaving him, though, opened another can of worms. I had to decide whether Gene’s theology was right or wrong. Should I leave just him, or his theology too? Should I keep trying to practice what he preached, or had we been pursuing the wrong goals for those ten years?
There are brilliancies in Gene’s theology, and he is a wonderful speaker. His standard for church ethics is quite elegant (if the world believes it is wrong, it’s wrong, else wise it’s probably just someone hunting brownie points with God). His teaching of the Lord’s Supper is truly beautiful (it should be a high celebration and a joyful feast, rather than an introspective wake). He also preaches that salvation is not the prime force behind history (the relationship between the Father and the Son is the central motivator for all of redemption).
Still, the core of anyone’s theology is a hard thing to nail down, and I was most concerned with Gene’s theology of the church. Gene preaches that each church should be autonomous, but his actions belie his words. Practically speaking, Gene’s several churches share one leader. The church planter makes every significant spiritual decision for the church. Gene taught us that the wisdom to handle the weightier matters would grow up in the church, but it never did. Gene handled all the weighty matters himself, or through his trained men, and we in the church were simply required to keep our mouths shut.
The two defining characteristics of Gene’s churches are both direct fruits of his theology. The first is their church planters, with their ultimate authority. The second is their brothers’ meetings, with their displacement of eldership. Inevitably, the churches became men’s clubs.
This atmosphere has had some painful outcomes. Gene told us, during the conference in which he planted our church, that the church and the family are natural enemies, and that neither can flourish, except at the expense of the other. When asked to clarify that statement, he told us that the family must not be allowed to steal from the church. Over the next 10 years, I watched, applauded, and participated as time and again our church stole from its families. There is nothing that I regret more than the pain our church caused families, and I believe that most people who have been mothers and fathers within Gene’s churches would agree.
In the end, Amy and I left Gene's movement for a number of reasons, but mostly we left because of Gene. We had our share of troubles with the saints, but those could usually be worked out. We fled that man's ministry. We adored those first few years in the church, and there are a hundred things to remember fondly, but leaving Gene Edwards is the best decision we ever made.
Whether you chose to follow Gene Edwards, or to move on without him, may the Lord bless you, and the body of which you are a part.

There and Back Again: Closing the Book

I returned from the Florida retreat center a very confused young man.

I wanted Gene to remain for me the man I'd always imagined him to be. I'd gambled my youth on Gene and on Atlanta, and I wanted to wake up and find I'd been right all along. I wanted my clouds of doubt to part, and to find I'd faithfully puzzled through the hard riddles to earn a job in the kingdom. I wanted to be one of the guys who would change the world, save the church, and suffer in quiet dignity for the rest of my life, regretting nothing I'd done along the way. Remembering the little man I'd seen behind the curtain in that Florida retreat center left those desires on life-support.

The mighty wizard of Oz was shattered into a million pieces. I'd walked my yellow brick road in hopes of finding brain, heart and courage only to have Gene disappoint me in these very qualities. But maybe that was my only problem? Maybe I was simply disappointed that my hero had clay feet? Maybe in my intractibility I would reject Christ Himself, had I the opportunity to sit at His feet instead of Gene's. Gene was not the mighty wizard I imagined him to be, nor that he advertised himself to be, but maybe he was still the man God had put in my life. It was mine to decide whether the real man behind the curtain was worth following.

The last week of the conference did nothing to help me decide. It was more of the same. I volunteered to confront Lenny directly, and to let him know the score of the game in which he was caught. It was my last action of the conference, and our conversation lasted two or three hours. I was a good deal more honest than I had been with the sister I'd confronted earlier, and I listened a great deal better.

I left feeling like we understood each other, and we arrived in time to attend the last conference meeting of the whole church with Gene. Yet again, Gene expected to straighten things out once and for all. Maybe Lenny came to that meeting a little too prepared because, again, nothing significant happened. Maybe I played a part in the cooling the fireworks; I don't know. If so, it was not due to any noble intent on my part. I wanted Lenny to decide to be fully in the church or fully out, and to quit hovering on the edge like he had been. I was still very much trying to walk Gene's straight and narrow path.

After the meeting, I loaded my bags back in the car and headed home to Atlanta. The eight hour ride, just me and my incessantly buzzing questions, was not to be envied. I could not go back to my first intent of serving under Gene's ministry 'til death, nor move on to the new idea of getting out before it was too late. Cutting and running held no appeal for me. Some day having to write a history like this was a heartbreaking thought.

Zig Ziglar tells about an old shoe salesman who decided to show the uninformed kid how powerful a sales position really could be. The kid was merely trying to help customers pick their own shoes, but the old salesman explained how his job was to help the customer pick wisely. The rub was that the kid believed every customer knew exactly what he wanted. Finally, the old salesman pulled out all the stops. He told the kid he'd sell the longest lasting, best made, but ugliest shoe in the store to whomever next came through the door.

The hapless customer asked for assistance, and the salesman brought him a couple shoes in the style he asked for, plus the ugly shoes. He let the customer try on the ugly shoe. He said it was butt-ugly. Then he tried the other shoe, and it was the wrong color. So the salesman went back for another shoe size and style. When he returned, he let the customer try the ugly shoe again. The customer looked at it, and decided against it, then tried the other styles. After a short discussion, the salesman went back for more shoes. On his third trip out, he had the customer try all the other shoes, then finally the ugly shoe once again.

This time, the customer bought the well-built, long lasting, ugly shoe.

The strangeness of the shoe is what had thrown the customer off. It was simple unfamiliarity. The third time the customer saw the ugly shoe, it was no longer strange. He could see it for what it was, and having become familiar with it, he decided to take it home.

So it was with me and leaving Gene. I had never listened to such a thought as disagreeing with my mentor before, but I was wining and dining it now. Over the next several months the idea grew a little more familiar, a little more believable, a little more possible, a little more probable.

One day Gene called an emergency meeting of the church in my living room.

The whole church came together to hear whatever news was weighing so heavily on Gene's mind. We were all scared. We'd been in trouble before, and we didn't know what could possibly have gone so wrong. Gene had just returned from Florida, so we suspected it was something from down there, but one never knows. We were right. It was Florida.

He told us that Florida's struggles had gone on too long, and that the struggles were all due to Lenny's negative influence. Gene recounted how he had worked for a month during his training conference, then written and phoned Florida trying to drag them out of their problems. Finally, he had visited Florida alone, and only then learned the true extent of their problems.

While in Florida, during a brothers' meeting, Gene had taken a vote asking who were the most influential people in the church there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lenny was voted the most influential person in Florida. The rest of the votes had been scattered around as expected, and Gene had gotten a few votes himself, but Lenny was the most influential member of that church.

After that vote, Gene continued, his hand had been forced. He could not willingly split a church, so he had been forced to step aside as the father of the church in Florida. He had handed control of the church over to Lenny, and requested that every member of the church follow Lenny with all the faithfulness they had shown in following him.

We were stunned.

I'm sure the brothers and sisters in Florida were devastated.

That such a fate should come to such a faithful church was deeply shocking to us all. I was reeling. I fought to rationalize what Gene had done, wondering how it could be the right thing to do. I knew Lenny, and I knew the other brothers there, and I knew Gene. It was a matter of finding the missing link. I was missing something obvious, but key. I kept shuffling the players and games in my mind, seeking the combination that made it all come together.

Until I talked to one of the sisters in the church.

She said, "You believed that crap? None of that's what happened. Lenny won that vote and Gene lost his temper. They thought Lenny was the most influential person in the church, so Gene decided they could stew in their juices and gave the whole church to him. Gene knows it'll never last, and he was too angry to care who it hurt."

Wow. That was definitely the missing piece. Her explanation covered character, motive and opportunity perfectly. There were no gaps.

We sat for about an hour, connecting dots. We looked back at times Gene told us he was doing things for our good, and somehow those things always matched up with better with his convenience or emotions than ours. We looked at the way Gene treated influential brothers, and he always found a way cool their jets. And now, when the church in Florida withheld their affirmation, Gene lashed out.

No one knows what is happening in a man, except the spirit of the man and his Lord. I'll never know why Gene handled the church in Florida the way he did. I'll never know why he reacted the way he did to Florida, but when Gene rejected the church in Florida the ugliest shoe in the store started looking really good to me. I'd be walking away from Gene Edwards.

But it wouldn't be easy.

The old voice grew stronger as I slowly accepted my decision. My flesh screamed, "What about your work?! You have to mature into a worker in God's kingdom, and for that you need the church. You have to save the church, not run from its problems." I grew truly. I fantasized that I might change Gene's style, or run off and start another church, or that everything might just turn out OK. I'd built an inner world around waiting for the day I'd emerge from my cocoon and be a worthwhile person in God's kingdom. Breaking out of that cocoon was a slow, painful process. Losing my best hope of being "somebody," riding on Gene's coattails, was terrifying. Leaving Gene meant going back to just being Kevin, instead of Kevin Knox, church planter in training.

I couldn't really believe I'd be "somebody" as anything less than a church planter.

Slowly, though, walking away from Gene grew real to me. I loved the brothers and sisters in my church, but I realized I'd have to leave them. Too much of what they talked about was rationalizing the things Gene was doing in Florida, Lithia Springs, and all the churches. Many of their discussions assumed my implicit agreement with everything Gene was doing, and I'd have to leave the room or change the subject if they started wondering why I was so quiet. It was not workable, and I began to resign myself to my final departure from Gene's churches, from my church.

There were a couple of obstacles.

I lived in the heart of the Lithia Springs church, and I had promised to leave quietly if ever the time came. Gene was careful to teach that silence was golden, and anything else was a dishonor. If, at any point, you were unhappy with the church or the worker you were to talk to no one about it. And the day you decided to leave, you must leave without giving reasons, without confiding in friends, sharing your hurts, without "accidently" taking anyone with you. From the beginning, I'd promised to leave quietly and alone, and at the end I intended to keep my word.

That promise was a lot easier to make when I was sure I'd never, ever leave. Now that I was leaving, silence was a grave test. But was my word worth anything or not? I was silent. I said nothing, and prayed the Lord would show me an open door when His time would come. I prayed a lot - out loud.

The door opened painfully slowly, but when it finally opened no man could shut it.

One day while I was doing some of my freelance programming, Gene called. He had not called me three times in the nine years I knew him, so he had my full attention. To hear from Gene was an odd, odd thing. He called to ask me about the y2k bug. Did I know what it was? Did I know how serious it might be? Was it a threat to embedded systems? They were pretty technical questions coming from a pretty non-technical guy.

It so happened I'd just finished coding my very first y2k fix a day or so before he'd called. I had been examining some code from the Internet for reuse in one of my projects, and I noted a comment left by its second developer. He identified that the original code was vulnerable to the y2k bug, explained exactly what the y2k bug was, and outlined how his fix corrected the problem. (He explained all that in a 3 sentence comment. Computer programmers are very terse communicators.) From that day forward, I never wrote another y2k-vulnerable program, but that wasn't a big deal. The whole fix was only 2 lines long.

I explained to Gene that the y2k bug was mostly harmless. I explained what it was, that it could be very dangerous if us programmers could not make the fixes, but we would. The fixes typically took a few minutes apiece, and we all loved pizza and overtime. Embedded systems absolutely could not be hurt by the y2k bug, because they kept time in "seconds from the epoch," not Gregorian dates, so they'd never know the current year had 3 zeros in it. The electrical transmission grid was safe. I had solid knowledge on that one, because in my day job I formerly worked with 3-phase industrial generators. I let Gene know that I thoroughly knew what I was talking about on y2k, and that he need not worry about it.

Gene hung up, and I wondered whether I'd heard the last of it. I had not, but it was months before I found out what was brewing.

In late 1998, Gene released a book decrying the unavoidable disaster that would end Western Civilization forever. Y2k, he said, would take down the electrical transmission grid and all electrical generators. Without electricity we'd soon find ourselves living in the stone-age. There would be food riots radiating 50 miles outside of every major city, and little things like toilet paper would become the scarcest, most valuable commodities in our lives.

It took every ounce of discipline in my heart to read that book, but I did - from cover to cover. It was not a pleasant experience.

Gene's churches went into light panic mode, but Gene was prepared. He called us all together and layed out his plan. He assured us he'd been exercising practical parental care for us while we were still oblivious to the danger. He'd already thought through the ramifications and the wisest course of action for us. We only needed to believe the seriousness of the problem, and be thankful God had given us such a careful church planter.

He had already purchased a tract of land just across the Alabama border, more than 50 miles from any major city, and was preparing that land to be subsistence farmed. He counseled all of us to cash out our 401k's, taking the tax hit for early withdrawal, and invest that money into emergency supplies and a portion of the Alabama land. We'd move the supplies to Alabama throughout 1998 and some time in late 1999 everyone could evacuate there to start a new life.

My jaw went slack.

Brothers and sisters quickly figured out that I was not on board with Gene's plans and preparations. Not cashing out my 401k and buying zero emergency supplies was probably their first clue. At first a couple people asked me what I thought of the whole thing, but gradually they just left me alone. I was not 100% sure Gene was wrong, of course, but there was no way I was throwing my future in with Gene Edwards again on a subject about which he knew nothing - computers and farming were both in that category.

I watched saints cash out five-figure 401k's back when we thought that was a lot of money. They gave half their money to the IRS, spent the rest on disaster supplies and farmland, and then watched as the stock market soared (was it 40%?) in the ensuing months. I figured that a $25,000 401k was worth $14,000 after it was pulled, instead of the $35,000 to which it would have grown. I watched living rooms fill up with canned and dry foods, water, and survival gear. I listened while city-slickers debated what they could and could not grow in Alabama soil. The intensity kept ramping up, and I kept playing dumb. Finally, they reached the point of requiring a commitment from me.

They needed to know who was in and who was out.

That's how y2k gave me an open door out of the church. I went through it with peace in my heart. In Nov, 1998 I officially announced I would not be moving to Alabama and I was taking a break from the church. In late Jan, 1999 I announced that I would never be returning. In Mar, 1999 I received a piece of personal news that confirmed leaving was the right decision, but by that time I was already gone. I received that personal news exactly because I had finally left, so it was no factor in my decision. I hit the door because Gene did not treat churches the way he advertised he would, and Gene's y2k blunder was my convenient excuse.

I was well and truly gone, and never looked back.

I stayed in Atlanta through Dec 31, 1999, to see my company through the turning of the millenium. My family and I watched movies on the projector screen, while I babysat my computers through the transition into the new century. We had pizza that night, and not a single system hiccuped. I have no idea what the churches said or thought or did when all the lights were working on Jan 1, 2000. When I leave something I leave it for keeps, but I'm sure they congratulated themselves for preparing so well. It's human nature to always see the good in the things we do, and I don't blame them a bit. I shudder to think how much dried food I'd still be eating if I'd never gone to that training retreat with Gene.

I know the churches carried on after I left, and continued to explore the things I once held so important. I trust they found the Lord together, as I did with them during the good years. Their hearts were turned to the Lord, and He always hears His people. I praise Him for the hope I still hold that He's blessed them over the years.

For my part, I've slowly learned to enjoy being a regular Joe, a normal Christian. This month I will even sign the dotted line and become a thankful member of an organized church. My brothers from Atlanta will tut-tut me, and I will mourn my faded dreams just as if they'd been real. And somehow all of us, no matter what we've decided, will know that we are walking where the Lord has put us.

I'm not sure life gets any better than that.

And so I close the book on some of my dreams. As I look back at the pride that dragged me down, the pain I've caused and felt, the places the Lord has brought me, and the joy I've found at last, the letter from James seems to answer my story best:
Blessed are those who persevere under trial, because when they have stood the test, they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him.

When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each of you is tempted when you are dragged away by your own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.

Don't be deceived, my dear brothers and sisters. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.

Praise the Lord's mercy, it's never too late to stand the test.

Kevin Knox

There and Back Again: Against the Wind

In late 1996 I received an invitation for which I'd prayed since 1982. I would be allowed to spend a month with Gene Edwards, being shown how to nurture a church.

'96 had been a busy year. Gene poured his heart into rebuilding the church in Atlanta, and we began to see fruit. Our numbers went back into the double digits, as Gene put out the word that he would be working directly and specially with Atlanta over the coming years. And work with us he did. He publicized living room conferences and delivered some stunningly rich messages for us living in Atlanta and for those deciding whether to throw their lot in with us.

Gene hinted to us that he had never really liked Ormewood Park. It took little prodding to convince us to abandon the scene of our recent pain. Property values had gone up there too much, anyway. We needed to remove obstacles to entry for new folk, if we were going to make it back from the brink of death. Ormewood Park's inner-city feel scared people off even before housing prices soared into 6 digits. We all moved out to Lithia Springs on the West side of Atlanta.

Excitement and hope were back in Atlanta, and they felt good. Most of Gene's other churches seemed to be doing well, too, making it a good year for everyone. The church in Florida was the only exception. During our drought of '94 and '95 it was largely Florida's commitment to the Lord and their enthusiastic love for us that had kept our noses above water. We'd sent most of our inquirers and visitors down to Florida for two years, and they'd all come back with the highest praise for what they saw there. We'd even visited them ourselves, just to be reminded what it was like to be in the Lord's blessing. To hear that they were sliding toward trouble was worrisome, but then again, we'd seen up-close and personal that every honeymoon has to end eventually. Things were great all over, and Florida would bounce back, we were sure.

Into this exciting time Gene sent that monster of an invitation I mentioned above. He invited each church to send a brother to a retreat center in Florida to spend a month with him. He had observed that churches have down times and need encouragement. He could not be everywhere at once, so he decided to leverage some of his hard work. His idea was to prepare brothers from several churches to be able to visit and encourage the other churches through their hard times. He made it clear that the brothers sent to this retreat would not be learning to plant churches like he did, but only to encourage other churches. We would not be following in his footsteps, so no one would get too uptight about going or not going.

Right.

When Atlanta received the news, I was in "timeout." Harry and I had been kicked out of the brothers' meetings for not playing well with the other saints. Our presence was hindering the decision making process of the whole church, and detracting from her progress. You've probably heard me mention this before, but before I could even think about hoping some day to maybe be allowed back in I was required to read, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," ... twice. I needed the correction. I know I tell the story often enough, but I cannot help it! It was one of the most painful and profitable things that has ever been done for me.

In spite of my arrogance, I was surprised when I was one of the people the church chose to send. I was less surprised that Harry was chosen to go. For some reason, Harry could only stay two weeks but I was able to get all four weeks off from work and I took them. I'm pretty sure I'd have quit my job otherwise, but I worked for good people and they understood. I cannot imagine anything that could have kept me from that month.

I'm still glad I went, but for other reasons than I expected.

My fondest, most meaningful memories of that month in Florida are of the canoeing.

There was a little postage-stamp size pond set aside from the middle of the retreat center, and it had a canoe with a paddle. During the many moments of stress there, I would hop in the canoe and let the powerful wind push me along to the wayward shore. Once there, I would turn the canoe around and throw all my weight into paddling back up through the wind. It was a tremendous workout. If I pushed with less than all my strength or with a low stroke-count, I'd make no progress or even drift backwards. If, in my haste and exertion, I pointed the bow more than a few inches to the left or right, though, the wind would grab me and spin the whole canoe back in the direction from which I'd come. I'd lose dozens of feet of progress before I could get back on track every time that happened. The moments of abandon on that pond were deeply needed.

I faced a head wind the whole month.

There were seven of us there for two weeks, and six the rest of the time. We met in Gene's suite three times a day, and took meals in the cafeteria a quarter mile away. There was homework, note taking, and several oral reports. There was also a little ping pong, and a certain amount of time for me to keep my freelance web work on track. I stayed alone the public suite, and think the other suite had a good deal more fun. That suited me just fine. I was happiest when able to replay the events of each lesson and discussion in my mind. I only visited the other suite once in the entire month, if I recall, and I was content for things to be that way.

The first shock to my system came when I learned Gene's true views on prayer. Gene had been teaching us about prayer for 7 years, and I pretty much knew his spiel from beginning to end. In fact, I had gotten myself in trouble when he started one of his talks on the subject by saying, "I've never shared this publicly before..." Gene commonly starts messages with this phrase, and invariably I've heard him speak on that subject publicly a number of times. I stage whispered to the room, "Oh. Another rerun."

(For some reason, Gene and I had an on-again/off-again relationship.)

I had long heard Gene teach that one must first quiet the mind, before attempting to enter the presence of God in prayer. That made sense to me, even though I was quite fond of the Puritan tradition of prayer. Entering the presence of God in prayer always involved my mind and emotions at some point, but I could see the value of silence serving as the door to the deepest prayer. I embraced Gene's teachings on silence happily. For seven years I happily understood Gene to teach this very thing, so when Gene started repeating himself on our retreat I again embraced the practice of silence with joy.

We started with baby steps, doing the things Gene had taught us over and over again every six months since 1990. As the days rolled on, he added more and more and more silence to our prayers. Then he took away the crutch of the few words we had been speaking. Then we capped the silence with silence. Finally, it dawned on me that we were never going to advance to spoken, meaningful prayer.

Like those dreams where you suddenly notice you've been naked all day at school, I learned I'd been hearing Gene wrong for 7 years. I learned I'd been campaigning for real prayer from a false position for 7 years. I learned Gene really did teach something I found dangerous and unchristian. (I've already shared my thoughts on centering, silent prayer here.) Gene believed silence was more meaningful and spiritual than any expression of praise or repentance, and somehow I'd never noticed.

The discovery left me stunned and a little wobbly, but still standing. The hardest realization was the prayer itself, but that I could have been so wrong about what Gene believed. In 1992 I had even written Gene a 3 page letter (that's pretty short for me) explaining how I thought some of the members of our church were misunderstanding him. I complained that people in our church were merely doing transcendental meditation, and experiencing the relaxation benefits of meditation, but then claiming spiritual growth. I asked Gene to clarify this confusion for everyone, because it was not good to let people wander so far away from what he really meant. I thought nothing of it when Gene did not reply to that letter, it's not his way. I thought of it on that retreat, though. I was the one who was wrong about Gene's meaning all along. I was the one with no clothes on.

I thought about whether I should quit the conference and head back home. And I prayed about it. (Yes, out loud.) It seemed both that the Lord was not ready for me to leave, and that I could abide this difference with my church planter.

I pushed my canoe up into the wind, carefully keeping my bow pointed straight at the opposite shore. I accepted that I might have to disagree with such a man and still gladly follow him.

The second blow to my system was deeper and harsher.

Gene had chosen to have our little training on encouragement in Florida for a reason. The church in Florida was currently experiencing a time as dark and lonely as Atlanta's had been just a year ago. Gene intended to let us watch him lift that church. He even intended for us to dirty our hands a little bit helping him, but not too much.

It was very important to Gene that we be properly softened with impossible demands and clever ridicule. He often pitted us against each other and compared us unfavorably to each other. Not that this was in some way new during this conference. For seven years Gene had often "softened" brothers who showed signs of wanting to serve the Lord. Some were put off by this method, but my four years in the US Army made me comfortable with it. Drill Sergeants worked in this same way, and very effectively. The difference between a Drill's method and Gene's was one of duration. The Army treated its finest like trash for a few months, then spent the rest of their time building them back up again. Gene only saw fit to do the building back up part after ... well, I don't know exactly when. It seemed to me he waited much too long in several cases.

I could not imagine a more exciting use of our month in Florida than pulling a church out of the mire, nor a more valuable learning experience than watching an old worker in the Lord ply his trade. I was pumped.

I went in with huge expectations, too, from my years of reading Gene's declarations and principles. Gene has written at length regarding his standards, the Lord's standards in fact, for workers when interacting with a church in crisis. The core of his ethic was that room should always be given for the Lord to work the church's redemption, and the worker should always be the one to suffer. If there were a crisis in a church, it was almost always a crisis in leadership at some level, and the leader could best diffuse it by give the church Christ and taking upon himself the cross.

In a crisis of leadership in the church, a responsible worker would surrender the church into the Lord's care. Sure, a leader might try to defend the people of God on His own, but he would be subject to too many mistakes. He would almost certainly succumb to the temptation to defend "his own work" rather than God's people. He would most likely hurt people who would otherwise never even have know there was an issue. And mostly, he would pick up the tools of politics, manipulation and authority and learn to wield them.

There's an old mechanic's joke teaching people to buy 1 lb hammers.
"Don't ever buy a 2 lb hammer."
"Why not?"
"Because some day you might use it!"

Gene had taught us never to pick up these tools, and never to "defend the work of God." If it were truly God's work, let God defend it. He conjured images for us of dangerous workers in God's kingdom who had devastated entire churches for sake of "defending" the flock from "wolves." And he explicated those images, showing us how the real wolf was the worker who defended his own ministry at terrible cost to God's holy children.

His teaching on saving churches was positive, too. He explained that the church really only needed one thing, and it was not a thing at all. The church did not need messages, shepherding, counselling, or even defending, though she could benefit from all those things. The church needed Christ.

If a try to combine Gene's positive and negative lessons, I'd say that a church in crisis needed a rich, deep, living experience of Jesus Christ. She didn't need wolves to be shot nor rules to be established. She needed to be reminded of the work and character of her Bridegroom. Nothing less would do, and every trick of men and pastors was "less" than Christ.

We were into the second week before Gene felt prepared to start working with the nearby church. He called a special meeting to tell us what the church needed, and what he needed for us to do.

Gene told us about two sisters in that church. They had formed a clique of two, and they were constantly distracting themselves while he was preaching. In fact, he told us, they had unpleasant expressions on their faces the whole time he was preaching, and they were quenching his spirit. He would be unable to minister effectively in that church until two things happened.
1) They quit being a negative clique together. Their friendship needed to be sacrificed for the good of the church.
2) They developed better attitudes.

We were to visit that church over the weekend, and make that happen.

A mature man, a man without a selfish agenda of self-promotion, would have balked right there. I was not that man. I was a little man with big fantasies, and when I was sic'd on a victim, I sic'd.

Some people wonder how Nazi soldiers did the awful things their leaders asked them to do. It's easy. When you can get a man to focus on whether he's courageous enough, dedicated enough, man enough to overcome his own squeamishness, he will do anything. I already believed I was supposed to be being "someone" for the Lord, and if this was what Gene said I had to do to grow into that role, then this is what I had to do.

I would speak to one of the sisters, and someone else would speak to the other.

Like any other man in the depths of sin, I made a big point of being as kind as possible in breaking my sister's heart. My heart broke watching her, but I shut that down and did the job I'd been asked to do. I explained the damage her relationship was doing to the church, and that her friendship needed to be transformed or end. I also explained how her distracting habits were hurting the meetings of the church. And I saw the look of confusion and pain I brought to her face.

She didn't cry until after I'd left, but we both knew she would.

I never forgot the glass of water she and her husband served me while I was breaking her heart, the hospitality I accepted while I was bringing injustice into their home.

Some of you have emailed me and told me about meetings you were going to have with angry church leadership. Now you know how I knew what they would say. I've been those men, and I've hurt the children of the Lord for the convenience of a leader.

By the time I made it back to the conference grounds, I was squarely in the middle of a cognitive crisis. I was sure I had performed adequately, but I felt like death warmed over. Gene approved of me, but I did not. The two could not mix in my mind, so I shoved them to the back of it and dug more deeply into the training.

My little canoe started showing signs of heavy use.

By the next weekend, the whole story had changed. Those two sisters had never been the problem at all. No, instead the problem was two brothers. They were strangers in the church, having only moved in a year or two earlier, and they were too close to each other. In fact, Lenny was the leader and Terry was his lapdog, but together they were causing every problem in that church.

Gene aimed to cure the problem once and for all.

His plan was to call all the "black hats" and "white hats" of the church out to the conference center for a reckoning. All the brothers who were causing problems and all the brothers who were keeping things together would gather with us, the brothers in training, and Gene would settle all scores. (The brothers who did not get invited were probably hurt the worst. Who wants to be nobody in the family he loves so deeply?)

Gene worked hard to prepare us for that weekend meeting. He had us each read a selected passage from Paul without commentary. He chose all the passages that selfish men use to justify defending their work against sheep in wolves' clothing. They were all the passages about Paul kicking divisive people out of the church, and coming to the church with a rod, and the kingdom of God being built on power. Gene chose all the verses he had spent a lifetime writing and preaching he'd never use.

He told us that he would use every one of them, and that he would always use them. We were all dead silent. He promised us he would use them more swiftly and more brutally than we'd ever imagined before, until the wolves were scared away. Then he'd have a quiet laugh with all the sheep who remained and put away his scary verses, his rod and his power, and everyone would be happy again.

And he told us we'd all be there in that meeting with him to see how it should be done.

He capped our preparations off with this threat, "I'll be watching every one of you. I'll be watching your eyes to see whether you blink, and if you do I'll know it, and I'll know what you're made of."

The meeting rolled around, and nothing memorable happened. I'll never know what Gene thought of us, but I don't remember anything being said that warranted a blink. I remember everyone walking out and wondering why they'd even been called out to the retreat center. I remember wondering whether I'd blinked, too, and whether I should have. We'd publicly read Gene's tough-guy verses for him, but no one had risen to the bait. No one had really opened up and gotten honest.

I didn't really wonder why.

The last couple weeks of the conference forked into two separate conferences happening in the same living room. The first was the repeated rehashing of Lenny's and Terry's sins and how to split those two from each other. As Gene worked through this problem out loud with us, he identified a coherent enemy and a solution. He had delivered a message in the year or two leading up to our retreat regarding friendships that mutated into enemies of the church. Now he reapplied that lesson to Terry. He even sent a tape of that message to Lenny and Terry for them to listen to before the next weekend. Gene worked his way around to the conclusions that Lenny was bad for the church, that Terry was being sucked along, and that he would have to find a way to fix that problem.

At the same time, though, we talked about the heart-purity needed in the ministry, the brokenness. We talked about church history and the practical day-to-day grind of making sure a living room is properly ventilated, comfortably furnished, and suitably cleaned. Gene spent a lot of time trying to convince us that beautiful sermons are nothing compared to looking out for the little things.

He told us the old story about Watchman Nee visiting a church every year for three years. They had requested him to come and advise them why they were not growing in the Lord. The first two years he left, to everyone's consternation, without saying a word. The third year, he finally spoke. He pointed up at the clock at the back of the church, and observed that it had been broken the first day he came, and it was still broken. Then he left without saying anything else. I assume the story is fiction, but it was impressive.

Gene drilled home to us that caring for the little things, caring for maintenance, caring for comfort, was the real work of God. The people of God would take care of ministering Christ to each other, if someone would just keep the bathroom clean and the room bright and the clocks ticking. That job would fall to us because everyone else would overlook it.

It's hard to underestimate Gene's attachment to history, either. He took us over into the public suite and had us lay out a piece of butcher paper on a long table. On this piece of butcher paper he drew a picture of a bookcase with several shelves, and then he proceeded to draw a library of Christian history that he needed to know would be written before he died. There were series and period pieces and accountings of little groups in every age from before Genesis to after the Revelation. The church, he said, needed to know her place in the eternal drama of God's plan. She needed to be saved from her tunnel vision of the present, and have her eyes opened to the sweeping grandeur of God's eternal campaign for His bride.

When the felt-tip bookshelf was full, Gene looked up and asked me point-blank whether I'd agree to be the one to write these books, to carry this project to completion after he was gone.

He had no idea the cognitive dissonance wracking my heart at that moment. The things Gene said about prayer threatened to blow me to left, and the things he had me do to a sister threatened to blow me off to the right. The things he'd planned for Lenny were like a gale in my face. I was paddling my canoe upwind for all I was worth, but I wasn't sure I was strong enough to make it. I wasn't sure I could push hard enough to overcome those questions, and I wasn't sure I could keep from turning aside. I was paddling ferociously, but not single-mindedly. I wondered with I should be paddling with the wind instead of against it? Was I even in the right pond? I didn't know any more.

I've never been less prepared for a moment of decision in my life.

For all my doubts, I was still paddling into the gale with all my strength. I just didn't know whether I should be. I really didn't know. Gene wore his pecadillos on his sleeve and admitted them freely. Was that enough? Was it enough for him to be human and admit it? Or should I demand a standard of him to which I could not rise myself? Could I really be sure I was right about silence in prayer? Could I really be sure Gene was wrong to defend the church in the way he'd chosen? Was I sure enough to throw away this opportunity? I had a chance to co-author a whole library with the best church historian I'd ever known. Should I say no? I had a reputation for cussedly saying, "No." Wouldn't overcoming my stubbornnes be a good thing? The flesh lay on either side. There was no way to make this decision.

I didn't make it.

None of those thoughts went through my head at that moment. I'd already thought them all through in my canoe, and I'd never found the bottom of my heart. I'd never find it with 7 men staring at me.

But when looked him in the eye, I knew I couldn't say yes. So I said, "No." I told him I was "shooting at another target." I had no clue what that meant, but he didn't ask and the conversation moved on.

From that moment, I was outsider in the only place I'd ever hoped to be at home.

There were still a couple more scenes left to play out.

There and Back Again: The Honeymoon

At midnight on Dec 31, 1989 there must have been almost twenty of us gathered in one of our living rooms. We were together to take the Lord's Supper for the first time as a new-born church, intimately surrounded by another fifty or more folk. That's right. There were 70 or more people crammed into and around a normal little ranch style home. Very few of us could sit; very few of us could wiggle a finger without poking someone! It was all part of the way Gene had chosen to celebrate our birth as a new church. We committed ourselves to the Lord and to each other that night with intimate prayers, and vowed our hope that we would, one distant day, bury each other. We were committed with everything we had, and we were in for the long haul.

Later that night, out on the front lawn, Gene taught us all get into a big circle and hold hands. Then he broke the circle in one place and made one person the "front" of the line. He had that person start walking a circle within the circle, drawing the whole line behind her. As the line circled within itself over and over, the center of the circle grew smaller and smaller until there was nowhere to go. It was wall-to-wall circles of people holding hands, as tightly packed as human beings can be. Then he had us all throw our hands over each others' shoulders and sing the loudest songs we could out on the front lawn at 1:00 in the morning.

It was simple, brash, innocent, exciting, intimate, and declarative. It was one of the purest moments of joy in my life, and I'll never forswear those memories. It was one of those rare "real" moments, like when you raise your right hand and swear to defend your country and realize you can never look back again. These people whose hair was in my face and arms were on my shoulders, and whose voices were maxed out inches away from my ears, were one solid mass of love to Jesus. I was a part of a single organism with 70+ voices that weighed 14,000 pounds and was committed to loving Jesus with everything it had - forever. Our bond was more than lifelong, it was eternal and it was spiritual and it was real.

Les Miserables has a song:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the songs of angry men
It is the music of a people who will not be slaves again
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes.

This was as different from going to church as joining the Marines is from watching war propaganda. All but 4 of us had left everything behind to be in this place with these people. (There were orginally two dear local families, but they were forced to leave within the first year or two.) We expected a hard beginning followed by a life-long struggle, but we were safely under the caring eye of a man who had been hand-chosen and broken by the Lord. And we had broken bread together.

I have a hard time imagining a life I would have coveted more than mine at that moment.

The next 4 years were a whirlwind.

We had all moved together into a pretty nice neighborhood, but most of us could not afford to purchase there. That meant any who might want to join us would have the same problem. So, our first order of business was to find the perfect neighborhood to start a new church. By April, we were moving into Ormewood Park in Atlanta. By '91, we all lived within a stone's throw of someone's house. Our unofficial standard was that any member of the church should live close enough to everyone to push a baby stroller between homes in the rain. I think all told we ended up with 10 houses in a three block area.

Next, we needed to get the word out.

That was easy. Gene was one of the most charismatic speakers any of us had ever heard, and he was as excited as we were. Every 6 months we ran a conference of some sort, and brought Gene down from Maine to speak. We would send out hundreds of fliers, rent a place for everyone to gather, schedule Gene's speaking, find everyone somewhere to sleep, schedule meals, time airport pickups, answer myriad questions - first from each other and then from attendees, and generally run around like lunatics trying to pull everything together at the last minute.

We learned about "PCC - Pre-Conference Crud." In the last 2 weeks before a conference everything, and I mean everything, would fall apart. Plans, communication lines, relationships, tempers, and feelings of spiritual "greenness" all shattered. We would come closer to hating each other the closer D-Day approached, and we fully loathed the attendees before they ever arrived. Then the first saint would show up from the airport, and we would fall in love all over again - with all the attendees and with each other and with Gene, too. And when Gene started preaching, the revelation of Christ Himself would fill us all with wonder and thankfulness. Our great blessing in being where we were, doing what we were doing, would fill our hearts and the PCC would fade into a distant memory.

Between choosing a neighborhood, moving, setting up housekeeping, running a conference every 6 months for 4 years, and trying to earn a living we lived church. We met often, but it's hard to describe how often. Some of us met every morning at 5:00 or 6:00 am. Some of us usually ate dinner with some other family (especially the single brothers) and a few saints made beer and pizza a regular event. A couple nights a week we did something together - sometimes it was a song-learning meeting (or how could you really belt a new song out during a meeting?), sometimes a planning meeting, sometimes a brothers' or sisters' meeting. The brothers' meetings were where we made all our decisions and set all our plans.

And in between all that, we planned for "the big meeting." Every 3 months or so, we had a meeting where every member of the church was encouraged to share the best thing they'd seen of Christ. The concept was that we were working in the garden of the Lord, and we were to bring our harvest of Christ to be shared with all. That meant that for 3 months, we were responsible to be farming! We only had one key rule about sharing - don't bore anyone. So our "big meetings" tended to major in skits, songs, and stories. Sermons were deemed boring by default, and in 9 years I think we heard maybe 4 sermons by all the members in the church combined.

So, anyway, preparing for the big meeting usually meant meeting once or twice a week with a team of people to get something cool and rich together.

And did I mention several of us had infants?

There was babysitting, and cooking, and one brother was gutting and remodelling his whole house, and another worked loads of overtime (and so did I) and a couple others were self-employed and had unpredictable schedules.

I don't really expect that description to profit you much, except to communicate how we envied one armed paper hangers their easy, structured lives.

We ate, slept, and breathed somehow. I'm not really sure how. There was hardly a waking moment in any of our lives that was not filled with something of great importance. Whether it was a spiritual thing or a family thing or a work thing, none of us was bored for more than a moment. And it was all good. The most common sound to come out of any house where any two or more of us were gathered was laughter.

Not surprisingly, people started to wear down, and that was cool too. No one accepted any disdain toward our tired people. We all knew we'd all need rest some day, and pretty much everyone took time off in some fashion. In fact, Gene made that a constant subject of admonition. He would remind us over and over that we would all need to take a year off someday, and that we should make sure we rested from the blistering pace the church seems to set. So we did. We jealousy guarded anyone who was experiencing any kind of downtime, even when it was Gene being impatient with them. That's not to say we didn't feel some guilt, but we managed our energies as best we could.

With all this excitement going on, you might imagine there were some decisions that needed to be made along the way. And you might imagine there were some strong opinions about those decisions.

You would be right.

The government of the church was simple. The decisions were complicated. Gene was up in Maine, and we did not rely on him for much in the way of decisions, but structure could not have been simpler. The brothers made all the decisions as a group in prayer before the Lord. The brothers then presented the decisions to the sisters who had unquestioned veto power over every decision we made. If the sisters approved our ideas, it was done. Period. Simple. (No, the sisters didn't exercise their power often, but the time or two they did it stuck.)

There were always somewhere around 8 of us brothers in the brothers meetings, and some of us were secretly of the persuasion that we had a vision of what the Lord wanted. In fact, all 8 of us were pretty confident of that very thing. For a long time, we thought one of us was a follower, but we turned out to be wrong. We were all chiefs.

None of us was surprised that we were all Type A's, though Gene seemed to be dismayed at how much friction it caused. It was the most natural thing on Earth. If you call for people to gamble everything for the chance to start something bold, you're not going to get many shrinking violets.

It was in the brothers' meetings that the church seemed to evolve. It was not so much that the decisions we made steered the church, as that we grew together into being the church. And we went through a lot of changes. There were countless formational conflicts. We wrestled with things, and we wrestled with each other. We wrestled with praying and with pontificating. We wrestled with our own natures and we wrestled with the brothers around us. Along the way we learned a lot of respect for each other.

One of our early, and quite famous, conflicts was over tithing. We were Gene's only church (though other churches might have disagreed, Gene always called us the first) so it was important to get things like this right. Should we require a tithe on our own gross incomes? It's not like buying houses had made any of us any richer. But another church with which Gene had a very close relationship, and of which we were in awe, mandated an absolute and accounted tithe of anyone who would participate. Their example was flawless. They were absolutely legalistic on the subject, and they were the freest, most beautiful group of people any of us had ever met.

Our pattern of addressing problems showed through with this first one, and never much changed over the years. Harry (I'll tweak the names since I've not asked anyone's permission to use them) contributed his opinion to the discussion, and then worked hard to gather everyone else's. He formed a solid consensus around a modified position to which everyone could agree, and pitched the case in the brothers' meetings. Everyone was ready to commit to an accounted tithe.

I voted, "Nay."

This is a good time to remember how aggravating Boromir was before he went mad.

For all our years in Atlanta, Harry and I were pretty nearly irreconcilable. Don't get me wrong, I eventually came into conflict with every brother, but Harry and I seemed to be custom-made to rub each other raw. I could not brook his moral flexibility nor his political style, and he could not stand my priggishness nor my stubbornness. I was immovable, even when the whole church stood behind Harry. For my part, I was willing to bow to the brothers' decision, as long as they didn't ask me to agree with it, but that just seemed priggish to everyone. We smoldered together on this one issue for months and months. We dedicated week after week to trying to talk this issue to death, but it wouldn't die. I would not flex.

Amusingly, the decision we finally reached was vetoed by the sisters, and Gene gave all us brothers "a rest" for almost a year while the sisters took over the running of the church.

Liberally mix the excitement of being together with the tension of the brothers' meetings, and you begin to get a feel for those first four years. Everything was at a constant fever pitch, the highs and the lows together, fatiguing us and thrilling us around the clock.

During our honeymoon, it was easy to have the big fights and the living bonds of love flowing deep and strong together. In fact, it was almost natural. More than that, it was what Gene had taught us to expect. A big part of Gene's core message is that every Christian must be broken, destroyed really, before the Lord can use him freely. We knew our fights were a sign that we were still fleshly, still in need of breaking, so we overlooked the conflicts and focused on the feelings of love for each other and for Christ that lifted us above it all.

Until July of 1994.

That summer's conference surpassed everything we'd ever experienced. Gene was in full flight, and his messages the first weekend set us all on fire. Beyond that, though, it was a 9-day conference, and 40 people must have stayed for all 9 days. The first 3 days were at a retreat center, and they were delicious. The next 6 days beat them hands-down. The second part of that conference was other-worldly. We moved 40 people into our few homes, and for a week we had a church of 60 with nothing but free time to worship the Lord, encourage each other, and practice the things we'd learned in that first weekend's messages.

We cooked, we delegated, we laughed, and we hardly slept. We had guest speakers and surprise plans and last-minute saves beyond counting.

It was unbounded joy.

The day after everyone went home, Gene asked us to set the dates for our winter conference.

We said, "No."

We were too tired, and we were going to take that winter off. Pulling off a conference in December would mean getting to work in August, and there was no way we could imagine jumping back on the conference hamster wheel again in a scant month or two. We were thrilled with everything we'd just experienced, but we could not envision ourselves doing it again so soon.

We'd never said no to Gene before.

History has a funny way of morphing, but I will tell you what we told each other after Gene left. We told each other Gene was pissed. His face, his body language, his words; everything said we were in big trouble. There's no word to describe what we felt. The blood literally drained from our faces, and we went into damage control mode. We talked for hours about what to do, and how to balance our exhaustion against Gene's desire to minister. Mostly, though, we talked about how to get out of trouble.

We did not find an answer. We were already too fractured, too exhausted, too hurt to overcome our fear. All those little stress cracks between the brothers turned into fractures. We'd been so high coming off that conference, but within days we were in our first full-blown crisis.

The wheels came off the church in Atlanta in July of 1994.

For the next two years, we had nothing. The meetings were flat. The morning prayer gathings were dry and empty. Gene did not ask us to put on another conference in all those two years, and we didn't know what to do in the silence. Gene refused to come and lift our spirits.

We were alone.

We had spent four years on a high, and we crashed hard.

I cannot communicate the depths of despair we reached. A traditional church keeps meeting every Sunday, and the sermon keeps being preached and the songs keep being sung. We were not wired that way. We needed to be planning and preparing, but planning and preparation require hope and we were too shell-shocked to hope.

For two years, we went through the motions with all the heart we could muster. We had our usual big meetings, but they fizzled. It was not hard to know why they fizzled. We did hardly any preparation for them. We would come up with an idea, and we'd work up some enthusiasm, but one or two people would be too tired. Then a couple people would start hanging around with the tired people, and get tired. Pretty soon, we were nagging each other to work on preparations, and nagging is never encouraging. Then the big meeting would roll around and too many people would try to throw something together at the last minute. The meeting would flop. We'd all pretend that it was great, of course, but it was flat. There was life in Atlanta, but no vitality.

2 years is a long, long time when you live a stone's throw away from the people you're avoiding.

2 years is more than 700 days, and every single sunrise took its toll.

We'd start talking about trying too hard or being more natural or not trying hard enough or being more diligent or who was leading too much and who was following too little. We'd get down to the root of the problem, and how Christ was lacking, and how the real problem was being too tired, and how much we'd rested. If was dark enough and quiet enough, we'd talk about Gene having abandoned us. In the end, we'd usually come around to this being a time of testing.

We needed to stay faithful. We needed to wait on the Lord to return to His church. If we had been abandoned, we'd be remembered again. Gene taught so often on suffering and it's place in the Christian's life that we could not be surprised to be suffering now. It was for this we had moved to Atlanta in the first place.

We were almost 30 strong. A couple of families had joined us from Texas and Carolina on the energy of that July 1994 conference, so we were larger than we'd ever been. Those poor families didn't have the experience of joy in the church, though. They only knew the desert. We all worked to make sure they knew they were loved, and promised them that the rain would come back some day, but the drought went on.

Then one of the core, founding families moved to another of Gene's new churches in another town.

In scant months the church in Atlanta crashed from almost 30 members to fewer than 10. Remember that leaving the church in Atlanta meant selling your home, leaving your job, and giving up on the dream. Once the first family moved, though, 3/4 of the church vanished overnight. Before a year had passed, 20 of our brothers and sisters were gone.

Les Miserables has another song. It really doesn't deserve to be read, but to be sung by a man in or near tears. When I sing this one, I almost always give it its due:
There's a grief that can't be spoken.
There's a pain goes on and on.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone.

Here they talked of revolution.
Here it was they lit the flame.
Here they sang about `tomorrow'
And tomorrow never came.

Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will sing no more.

None of my brothers was dead, but the hole they left in our lives still bleeds. It always will. They are good brothers, and our love was true. Nobody left that church with a heart unscarred. Gene had promised us that 364 of the pills might kill us. Now we knew what he meant.

In 1996 Gene returned to the handful of us who remained. We wept together and poured out our hearts. There wasn't much to say that we didn't all already know, but Gene listened and comforted us all. When we were done, he asked whether we wanted to shut down or continue.

We decided to continue.

That night Gene explained to us that Dec 31, 1989 was the official start date of his mature ministry. And he explained that 40 years would tell whether his ministry was a success or a failure. 40 years was the time of testing, and no church's testimony could affirm his work before Dec 31, 2029. He was willing to fail, and to let the church fade away if that was what the Lord and we wanted, but he was willing to throw his back into it if we wanted to stay.

That was enough.

After Sherman visited Atlanta in 1864, the phoenix became the city's symbol. It seemed we would need to take that symbol to heart ourselves. Gene committed to rebuilding the Atlanta church from the ashes, and we committed to being there to make it happen.

The second church in Atlanta was a very different girl than the first.