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say, “I can see that you are going through some real struggles right now. ( How does he know? ) I can tell that you are experiencing some problems with a relationship in your life. ( How does he know? ) You are wondering what it is all about. You don’t know what is the purpose of life. ( How DOES he know? ) I used to feel the same way, and God has sent me to tell you that Jesus is the answer.”
     
    You would be surprised at how often this crude technique actually worked. I was more often respected than resisted. There seems to be a general feeling that if someone claims to be speaking for God, then he must be telling the truth—or at least it is safer not to challenge such a person. If it is religious, it must be good. After all, who has any answers? Our lives do have problems and mysteries. A preacher must be on to something; otherwise, we wouldn’t need preachers. It is easy to proselytize. I don’t understand all the psychology behind preaching, but I know that it works. Otherwise, we would not see the growth of movements such as early Christianity and Islam, or modern Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism and Mormonism. Most people are uncertain and susceptible, vulnerable to someone else’s confidence and certainty. If you want to be a preacher, then “just do it.” Do it with confidence and style. It works. (Just like anyone in sales will tell you.)
     
    But with religion, most people are uncritical. Never once in 19 years of preaching did anyone ever come up to me after a service and ask, “Rev. Barker, what were the sources for your sermon?” I was accorded an immense amount of unearned respect, simply for being a minister. Where were the skeptics, atheists, agnostics and humanists? (Well, why should I expect them to be in church?) Why did anyone rarely challenge my asserted “authority” to speak for God? I do remember a few slammed doors. I recall only two or three times during all those years when someone on the street would reject what I was saying, and it was a huge surprise to me when they simply walked away. Now, I don’t blame them; but at the time, I was perplexed at how someone could be so lost that they would run from God.
     
    I traveled with the Frank Gonzales ministry every summer for many years as Frank’s accompanist and as a preaching leader of my own team, and they were hectic summers. (I suspect that my problem with kidney stones originated with that experience. I spent days driving through blistering heat, drinking little, pushing the team, stopping to visit the bathroom only when absolutely necessary.) During the summer of 1967, I dehydrated and spent three days in Guaymas, Mexico, on my back in a burlap hammock being fed glucose through an intravenous needle, eating nothing, sucking on ice cubes. That was the same summer I got mangled by a dirty German Shepherd in the town of Zacapu, in the mountains of Michoacán between Mexico City and Guadalajara, after I hopped over the adobe wall behind a church into the next yard to retrieve a volleyball. I didn’t get rabies, but I went into some kind of nervous shock and slept for more than two days after being medicated at a local clinic. I know that kind of living is reckless, but at the time I figured it was justified. The world was going to end any day, and I had given my life and body to Jesus as a “living sacrifice.”
     
    From 1968 to 1972, I attended Azusa Pacific College, an interdenominational state-accredited Christian school in California, and majored in religion. Looking back, I can see that most of the religion courses (with a couple of notable exceptions) were simply glorified Sunday School classes and I don’t remember that we delved very deeply into the evidences or arguments for or against Christianity. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since I wanted to be out in the streets preaching the gospel, not stuck in a classroom chewing over pointless history and philosophy. After all, the world was ending soon. My attitude was