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me what I already knew: that God personally called me to the ministry of the Gospel. After four full-time years, I fell nine elective units short of graduation and never went back to finish. (In 1988, Azusa Pacific University allowed me to transfer some creative writing units from the University of Wisconsin and mailed me my degree in religion.)
     
    I like languages and enjoyed the two years of New Testament (koine) Greek at Azusa, which I still find useful. It added a certain credibility to my sermons to be able to throw in an occasional word from the original text of the New Testament (so I thought), though I don’t think the listeners cared. “Paul called himself a slave of Christ,” I would preach, “and the word ‘slave’ in the Greek is doulos .” I would announce this with solemn authority, hesitating slightly before the final word. No one asked why it was important to point that out. They must have thought I was on to something.
     
    At Azusa Pacific I met a singer (again paralleling my dad’s life). The world had not ended yet, so Carol and I were married in 1970, when I was barely 21. We have four children: Becky (1973), Kristi (1975), Andrea (1977), and Danny (1979).
     
    Over time, I was an associate pastor in three churches in California. My first full-time post was in 1972, right out of college, at Arcadia Friends Church in my wife’s denomination. (They didn’t care that I didn’t have a degree or wasn’t formally ordained.) The Friends are the modern Quakers, and in California they are more evangelical than their eastern forbears. (Richard Nixon was from that denomination.) I directed the choir, often preached from the pulpit and led Wednesday night bible study and worship. Joy Berry, who later became a well-known children’s author, was minister of Children’s Education at the same church at that time and also ran the Christian Day School there. (As a pleasant coincidence, Joy later came out as an agnostic, broke her ties with Christian publishers and today we remain freethinking friends with similar stories. More than 80 million copies of Joy’s books have sold worldwide.)
     
    The Quaker/Friends tradition abjures the sacraments (except for marriage, I think, which they probably don’t call a sacrament), because of the Protestant break with the formalism of Catholicism. Worship is supposed to be directly with God, with no intermediaries, saints, priests or rituals. I remember how absurd this became one Wednesday evening during a social potluck, when Pastor Ted Cummins made a few remarks before praying for the meal and happened to mention some of the words from the Last Supper in the bible. A few days later he was called to task by the denomination for conducting the sacrament of Communion.
     
    We are all heretics!
     
    I have mixed memories of Pastor Ted, a genuinely friendly, gentle and approachable person with a smart and beautiful wife and four darling children. He was not a hell-fire preacher. He was a friend and a peer. One evening I happened to enter the sanctuary to find Ted alone, kneeling in prayer at the front pew. After a moment, with no words said, I walked over and placed my hand on his shoulder and silently prayed for God to bless him. He looked up and smiled. The following Sunday he told me that that was the first and only time during his entire Christian life that he ever felt anything. He said he had always taken things by faith alone, but until that moment he had never known that anyone could feel the spirit of God. Years later, an alcoholic, he left the ministry and went into seclusion, ruining his family and his life. He died too young in 2006, and although his final tragic years clouded the memorial, no one forgot the truly loving, vibrant man he used to be.
     
    After more than a year at Arcadia Friends Church, I was “called by God” to move to Glengrove Assembly of God, in La Puente, California. The Assemblies of God are Pentecostal, more in line with my own