The photo of me in front of El Capitan in Yosemite, California is a reminder that my life does not belong to me. I belong to God, the loving Savior, Creator of the Universe, who rescued me in the midst of a snow storm when stranded 1,500 feet up the Salathe Wall route in March 1976. As I sat on a ledge belaying my climbing partner Rick, lightening struck the wall around me. I saw the futility of my life lived for self and pleasure as I awaited imminent death. I turned away from being director of my life and gave my self over into God’s embrace. I resolved that if I made it off this mountain alive I wanted my life to be new, wholly given over to God’s purposes for me. We did in fact make it down the next day, after a night hanging under a rock overhang in a storm. My life did indeed take a turn. 
I have always been attracted to mountains and walls— in part because of the challenge of finding a way past apparently insurmountable obstacles. These walls have changed from rock, snow and ice to other social and spiritual forms. Ways to go up or around them have evolved as I have grown in my awareness of the world, the Kingdom of God and God’s liberating and healing Presence. In 1978 I spent eight months hitchhiking through Europe, including three months in France where a strong attraction to this country and its people was birthed. Three months in Israel formally launched my calling to read Scripture with the not-yet-believing as Jaime, a Cuban Jew and I began to read and discuss the Torah every afternoon on our Kibbutz. Jaime educated me about the struggles of poor people in Latin America as we talked through Genesis and Exodus and went on an extended sojourn through the Holy Land. A lecture series at L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland by a recently converted British Marxist labor organizer on Liberation Theology challenged me further. I responded to a Peruvian priest, Gustavo Gutierrez’ challenge to read the Bible alongside the poor and oppressed in Latin America by spending the following year in a transformative liberal arts semester at The Oregon Extension in Ashland and a Semester of Latin America studies at Seattle Pacific University before heading off for a nine months of travel through Central America beginning in September 1980. Crossing the border from Mexico into Guatemala changed my life forever as I found myself in the midst of a bloody civil war, touched to the core by encounters with indigenous people, street kids and my university student Spanish teachers. Daily conversations with these language instructors about God, the poor and appropriate resistance to structural oppression coalesced into a calling. I asked Gracie to marry me and two months later we were traveling together and felt compelled to work somewhere, somehow with the poor to address the root causes of poverty and war. A year later with the support of Lincoln Christian Church of Ashland, Oregon, Gracie, me and Catalina—an indigenous Maya Quiche language instructor who came to faith launched Tierra Nueva in Minas de Oro, Comayagua Honduras. We began Tierra Nueva in partnership with Jose Elias Sanchez, a sustainable farming guru and Fernando Andrade, a 53-year-old peasant and master organic-intensive farmer. Fernando, Catalina, Gracie and I demonstrated sustainable farming practiced on a model farm and began courses with peasants on organic-intensive farming. After three years hundreds of families were implementing Fernando’s highly productive farming practices, and we were asked by a group of impoverished men in the village of San Antonio to lead them in a Bible study. There we grew into our vocation to read the Bible for Good News. Soon my focus became training Tierra Nueva’s growing cadre of village agricultural “promotores” as Bible study leaders. Inspired by Swish Bible scholar Wilhelm Vischer’s writings and French theologians Daniel Lys and Jacques Ellul, in 1989 we moved to France to study theology at the Institut Protestant de Theologie in Montpellier, where Gracie and I completed our Master of Theology and I began my doctorate in Old Testament. While in France I felt called into pastoral ministry and began the process of ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). I also became active in the Fraternité Espirituelle Les Veilleurs— a fellowship of people committed to contemplative prayer, spiritual retreats and learning from universal monastic practices. In 1991 our first son Isaac was born in Montpellier. We moved back to the United States that same year, living with our friends at Lincoln, Oregon. There we continued the process of ordination and I researched and began writing my dissertation on the theology of the Servant Poems in Isaiah according to the Septuagint Version. From there we moved to Berkeley where our second son, Luke was born. I taught Old Testament at New College of the Graduate Theological Union part time and served as half-time interim pastor of Mission Presbyterian Church- Iglesia Presbiteriana de la Misión in San Francisco. There, in the Mission District of San Francisco we became aware of the plight of immigrants from Latin America and began considering starting a ministry among farm workers in Washington State. In 1993 we moved to Seattle where I taught Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary half-time for a year and worked on my dissertation and I was ordained as Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). In August 1994 we moved to Burlington, Washington to launch Tierra Nueva del Norte. The following year our daughter Anna was born in Mount Vernon. Since 1994 Gracie and I have served as Directors of Tierra Nueva, which has grown into a ministry that includes jail chaplaincy, a Family Support Center to help immigrants, ex-offenders and the homeless, Spanish and English congregations, The People’s Seminary and Tierra Nueva Honduras. In 2002 our family moved to a home on 35 acres of forest and pastureland along the Skagit River near LaConner, where we are developing New Earth Refuge, a healing, retreat and hospitality ministry in partnership with Tierra Nueva. In 2003 I was profoundly touched by the Holy Spirit at a pastor’s retreat in Toronto, leading me and the whole of Tierra Nueva into spiritual renewal and a broadening of our ministry to include physical healing, inner healing and deliverance ministry. My work now includes serving as ¼ time chaplain of Skagit County Jail, co-pastoring our English and Spanish faith communities, supervising staff, writing, and teaching courses to lay people and to graduate students in partnership with Regent College at The People’s Seminary. A quarter of my time is reserved for itinerant speaking and teaching locally, in the United States and around the world. Since the publication of my book Reading the Bible with the Damned, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), I have taught and ministered regularly in France, Canada and Honduras and traveled and taught in the Netherlands, Mozambique and South Africa. In all these places I have seen ministries confronting and at times overcoming walls that from poverty, racism, discrimination, materialism, abandonment, and HIV/AIDS to addictions, lust, greed, hatred, depression and apathy. I am committed to empowering and equipping the body of Christ to effective ministry to people on the margins of society: the poor, rejected, broken, and oppressed. I long to see people empowered by the Spirit to seek after until finding “lost sheep”, joining in Jesus’ ministry that he inaugurates by reading from Isaiah 61:1ff in his first recorded sermon:
I love to see people experience spiritual renewal through encountering the God of love and liberation—Jesus Christ. I long to see people become fully empowered by the anointing of the Holy Spirit, contemplative prayer practices, liberating reading of the Bible and direct involvement in advancing the Kingdom of God through engaging in the ministry of Jesus. I am committed to helping people become transformed through the renewing of their minds and experience healing of their hearts and bodies so they can experience as much freedom as is possible in this life. I am committed to helping people discern and step into their callings within the five-fold ministry of Jesus as outlined in Ephesians 4:11-16 and exercise their spiritual gifts as described in 1 Corinthians 12-14. I long to see people experience the joy of saying “yes” to God’s call on their life and experience the satisfaction of being sent out as harvesters (Luke 10:1-2; Matt 9:37-38) into fields “white for harvest” (Jn 4:35) to advance the Kingdom of God—on earth as in heaven. |
