A Privileged Heritage
"As I look back I am compelled to say that I had a privileged heritage. None of us chooses the time, place, or circumstances of our birth. But as I look back I bow in thanksgiving to God."
I owe an incalculable debt to my ancestors, and none of it is a debt I earned. I was born in Illinois in the era of the horse-drawn mower, into a family that had been walking with God, in its own imperfect way, for a very long time before I ever arrived to complicate the story.
On my mother's side, the Mayflower itself sailed from Plymouth, England, in 1620, carrying an ancestor of mine among the Pilgrims who first bound themselves to that hard New England soil. Not long after, on my father's side, a great-great-great-grandfather named Edward Maxey made the decision, around 1764, to sail to the American colonies as a lay assistant to a Methodist chapel in New York City — one of the few missionaries John Wesley's movement sent to the New World before it was fashionable to do so. In 1771, a twenty-six-year-old Francis Asbury was ordained in London and sent to America; my family's own arrival in the colonies runs alongside that same Wesleyan current. I did not choose to be born into people who had already decided, generations before me, that following God across an ocean was a reasonable thing to do. But I have never been able to shake the feeling that it marked me.
There is a rougher thread too, and I have never wanted to hide it. My great-great-grandfather Jesse Maxey survived a Tennessee frontier the way frontier people survived things in that century — fighting Indians bravely through a Revolututionary War hole in his own front door, left for dead by marauding Indians who scalped him and left an enduring hatred of native people in a man who, by every family account, was about as far from a saint as you could find. His own son, my great-grandfather John Vancleve Maxey, was orphaned at ten when Jesse died, and was raised the rest of his childhood more than a thousand miles from his own mother and grandparents. Jesse Maxey — 1882 to 1950, by the dates my family kept — was one of many preachers of the gospel who never saw firsthand what he had planted in the family line that came after him. Tracing one's lineage back several generations is more a matter of curiosity than anything that shapes a life. But I do think it is worth saying: I am not descended from people who had it easy, and I am not descended from people who were especially good. Grace, not pedigree, is the through-line.
My father, Parker Maxey, was a pastor — disciplined, hard-working, a man of real learning who translated portions of the New Testament himself and could quote long stretches of the Bible from memory, though he never got the credit for it that his peers did. In the fall of 1934, when my father was still a young man, he contracted tuberculosis. For two years he was hospitalized, and doctors expected him to die — one morning a doctor sat by his bed and told him, as plainly as you please, that he was "pushing daisies" more likely than not to see the next spring. He did not die. He recovered, against real medical expectation, and lived to raise a family and pastor churches for decades afterward — a story I heard often enough as a boy that it became part of how I understood what God could do with a body doctors had already written off.
I was born on a Bible-college campus — the same grounds that are now the campus of Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho — in a building where my own future wife would, unbeknownst to either of us, be born years later as well. That is a small detail, but it has always struck me as the kind of thing only God bothers to arrange. My childhood ran on the rhythms of a pastor's home: church every time the doors were open, Bible drills, family devotions every single day gathered around the dinner table working straight through Scripture memorization, verse by verse, book by book, until Bible knowledge sat in me the way multiplication tables sit in other children. My father knew how to throw a strong-willed boy out of the building when the boy needed throwing out, and I was, on more than one occasion, that boy.
I should say plainly that the faith I grew up around was not always healthy faith. There was real superstition mixed in with real godliness — I remember watching my uncles practice water-witching, walking a forked branch over a plot of land until it bent downward over the spot where a well should be dug, and I remember it working, more than once, in ways nobody in my family could explain except to shrug and move on. Ours was a household that prayed together on our knees for long hours on Friday nights, often staying up nearly the whole night in intercession, mentioning people by name, one at a time, straight through the church directory.
My mother's own family had come to America on the Mayflower, as I have said, and settled the Massachusetts coast generations before the frontier ever called any of us west. My father's people took a rougher road — Jesse Maxey's Tennessee frontier violence, his son orphaned at ten and raised a thousand miles from his own mother, and then, a generation later, my own grandfather, J. V. Maxey, whose life was changed around 1930 and who went on to pastor small Idaho and Illinois congregations for the rest of his own life. My father inherited that same pastoral calling and gave it real academic weight besides — beyond his tuberculosis recovery, he went on to author his own unpublished translation of large portions of the New Testament from the Greek, and to memorize long stretches of the Old Testament as well, a labor of scholarship that never found a publisher but that filled our house, growing up, with more serious study of Scripture in its original languages than most seminary students encounter today.
My own gift for music showed up early and unmistakably — picking out hymn tunes by ear on the family piano well before I could read the notes, a talent my parents took as seriously as they took my Scripture memorization, arranging lessons for me from the time I was quite small. I did not yet know, as a boy in that house, that the same discipline that drilled Bible verses into me by the dozens would one day translate, note for note, into the discipline it takes to seriously master a musical instrument — or that both disciplines, oddly, would eventually be surrendered to the very same call.
A godly heritage is a gift, and I did not deserve it any more than I deserved anything else that came to me in those early years. But — and this is the part of the story that took me until I was seventeen years old to understand — a godly heritage is not the same thing as a converted heart. I had one. For a long time, I did not have the other.
The Big 180
"Perhaps some would give their right arm to have been raised in a godly home like I was. Yet the sad truth is that I grew up in a godly home... as a spiritual rebel."
I wish I could say I believed in God from the very beginning, in the way a boy raised in a godly home like mine should. The sad truth is I grew up a spiritual rebel — outwardly a good preacher's kid, inwardly running from God at a very young age. I have come to regret, more than almost anything else in my life, that I learned the truth of Proverbs 13:15 — "the way of the unfaithful leads to their destruction" — the hard way rather than the easy way.
I did not understand it at the time, but underneath the mischief was something more serious: I was surrounded by spiritual accountability at a very young age, and I knew right from wrong with more clarity than most children my age. Romans 5:8 declares, "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." I knew that verse. I did not understand it in my heart. What I understood was pride, and shame, and a bad-boy reputation I found myself strangely reluctant to give up even when it cost me things I actually wanted.
Two memories from those years still surface more than the others. The first: I was three or four years old, sitting at the kitchen table with my mother, working through a coloring page of Jesus with children gathered at His feet. She asked me quietly whether I would come to Jesus if He called me the way He called those children in the picture. Strangely, even at that age, I told her no — I would not. I do not know entirely what to make of a small child refusing grace in a kitchen, but I have never forgotten it.
The second is clearer and came a few years later, around age six. I had prayed earnestly, and asked God where Jesus was — I said "no" to God repeatedly in the following decades, but on this occasion something happened. I saw, as clearly as I have ever seen anything, a vivid mental picture: I was a six-year-old boy standing at the edge of a wide and beautiful field, and there, some distance ahead, stood Jesus Himself, His hand outstretched, beckoning me forward with an incredibly passionate and loving look on His face. He did not come and grab me. He waited, arms open, for me to come to Him. I turned and walked the other way. I have often wondered, since, what would I give if I had seen the real Jesus that day and walked toward Him instead.
By my teenage years the rebellion had taken on the ordinary shapes teenage rebellion takes. I was gifted musically — a serious classical pianist, good enough that by age eighteen I was practicing eight to ten hours a day, chasing a career as a concert pianist, briefly acquainted with the great Leonard Pennario and dreaming of the fame and fortune of a life on the concert stage, a $10,000 prize (real money in those years) dangled in front of me by the Chicago Tribune's young-artist competition. Underneath the piano playing was a pride I am not proud of. And underneath the pride was something worse: at around age ten, through a pornographic magazine a friend showed me, I was introduced to images that ensnared me for years — "Satan's ploy," I called it later, and it was. I searched out more of it, secretly, through my early teens, a habit I am not going to describe in any further detail here except to say that it left me, in the years before my conversion, in what I can only call a miserable, guilt-ridden, double-minded way of life — awake to God's goodness with my head and running from it with my body, doing much that I look back on today with sorrow rather than pride. I turned seventeen a growing, wayward, ambitious young man — ripe, as I later put it, "for what was coming next."
Mounting Conviction
What was coming next was a camp meeting. My mother's people had been Free Methodists for generations, and camp meeting culture ran deep in our family's bones — open-sided wooden tabernacles, straw-covered dirt floors, altar calls that went on for hours, revivals that could run for three or four nights in a row without anybody in the county thinking it strange. I had watched scores of "sinners and untutored heathen" — young men and women who had lived godly lives right alongside me — get swept into the Kingdom at meetings just like the one I am about to describe. I had also watched, and quietly noted, more than a few church hypocrites who preached one life on Sunday and lived another the rest of the week. Nevertheless, it was truly the beginning of my life, the King's Highway, that a long journey ahead of me had firmly planted its first steps on, on a night in October 1965.
The conviction had been mounting for months before that night, though I did my best not to name it as conviction. I dodged discipleship teachers. I stumped out of a seminar rather than confess a besetting sin. Then, at a routine Friday-night service on that annual campground, "the dam" burst. I do not remember every word of the sermon that closed that Friday evening — I remember only that it was ordinary, un-dramatic preaching, "not as hot as the ones... on rebellion," and yet something in me that had been dry tinder for months caught fire. I found myself walking to the front, against every instinct of pride and embarrassment I owned, and kneeling at that rough wooden altar rail.
That night at the tabernacle, I broke down at last on my bench, close to the rear, as the evening service moved into an extended time of prayer at the front. I was not the only one moved that night — I stood up and out into the aisle before I could talk myself out of it, and stumbled forward to the altar, feeling nothing so much as raw, unspiritual terror. I gave God my confession and my guilt, and turned in surrender to His mercy, kneeling with a soul that felt light for the first time in years.
That was not, however, the final surrender. My own final struggle came a few nights later, alone, in far less dramatic circumstances — no altar, no crowd, just my own bedroom at two o'clock in the morning on October 23, 1965. I had gone to bed troubled, and I got back up, knelt down beside my bed, and settled the question once and for all: I would obey God in every particular I understood, whatever it cost.
"That was it. No drama. No feelings other than to feel completely calm. I was completely, fully and calmly assured of my salvation, yet without an ounce of excited emotion. I woke up the next morning with that same calm assurance — emotionless calmness, but a clear assurance that I was born again."
I have thought about that lack of fireworks often since. So much of my teenage religion had been built on performing emotion for other people's approval — sitting close enough to the front to be seen weeping, timing my "amens" for effect. What happened at two in the morning on October 23, 1965, was the opposite: quiet, complete, and entirely between me and God. No drama. No feelings but a clear, calm, settled assurance that I was, finally, exactly where I belonged.
I would thank God for all of eternity for His faithfulness in pursuing my unworthy soul. His love is real, but the truth is that I finally surrendered to that picture of who He was — not the angry, disapproving judge my adolescent guilt had painted, but the patient figure still standing in that field with His hand out, eleven years after I had first turned and walked the other way.
Learning to Walk with Jesus
What followed my conversion was a genuine honeymoon of day-by-day delight with God. For the first time in my life my mind had been swept clean of the ugliness that had plagued it for years, and I had a clear conscience, unhaunted by the lustful thinking I had previously tried, and failed, to accomplish alone. What I had struggled in vain to root out through willpower, God simply did for me, decisively, on the night I finally stopped fighting Him.
I launched, in those weeks, into a devotional routine I would keep, in one form or another, for the rest of my life: up at 3:45 or 4:00 each morning, dressed and ready for my own private prayer time before a ten-minute walk to the church, where I would pray alone until 4:00 or so, and then start my morning newspaper delivery route, which by then had grown to some two hundred customers across a bitter Midwestern winter. I cannot fully explain, decades later, how a teenager sustained that rhythm, delivering papers through snow up to his knees at four in the morning and still making it to school on time, except to say that something in me had genuinely changed and did not want to stop meeting with God long enough to find out otherwise.
I was eager, that same year, to get involved in anything and everything the church was doing. I had fresh energy to spend, and I usually wanted to be at the front of it — I asked our pastor how I could get more involved, and ended up leading an hour of prayer before nearly every service, going out on home visitation with him, and getting involved in house-to-house evangelism whenever the opportunity arose. In my final year of high school, out of more than two thousand students in a graduating class of nearly seven hundred, I was not the most welcoming environment in the world for open evangelism, and I never quite fit in socially with the more conservative, legalistic culture of our own church youth group. But I threw myself into it anyway. Paul put it bluntly: "if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17). I now knew exactly what he meant, having experienced the greatest turnaround of my entire life inside a single school year.
Discovering Holiness
"I could tell all was well between me and God. The sky was clear. My heart was free. I felt the cleansing power of the blood of Jesus. I was not conscious of any deeper need."
Conversion, I would learn within a matter of months, was not the end of the story. It was the doorway into a second and, for my life's whole direction, more decisive experience — what the Wesleyan holiness tradition I was raised in calls entire sanctification, and what I have simply come to call the discovery of holiness.
I grew up in a church that laid heavy emphasis on this second work of grace — I had heard it preached hundreds of times from those same camp-meeting platforms, watched boys my own age fidget and squirm on hard pews rather than sit still for it, and had, if I am honest, raised my own temperature somewhere south of my collar more than once sitting through a sermon on sanctification that ran long. What I am digressing to say is this: holiness was always my favorite topic among our people, and the fact that I understood it, thank God, saved me from the exaggerated and warped legalism that the holiness theology had become for many in the churches around us. Much of what I heard as a child would later prove overwrought and in need of real correction. But the core of it — that a believer could be filled, decisively and consciously, with the Holy Spirit's cleansing presence, in a moment distinct from conversion — that core I never abandoned, and it became, over the years that followed, the doctrine my entire life and ministry would organize itself around.
Consecration
The worst one of all was my pride. I wrote once that if all my characteristics could be lined up, pride would stand at the very top of the list, uglier than any of the others. Disrespect. An unclean heart. A mental picture of God gave me at that point is that my own heart was being threatened by some kind of eight-armed octopus of self, its tentacles squeezing tight around every corner of my life it could reach. I knew eventually all of it would have to be pried loose, finger by finger, and confessed. All I knew to do was plead with God to remove it from me, however painful and deathlike that struggle proved to be.
It was now March of 1966. Throughout February I had gone hand in hand with the young lady who had caught my eye at camp the previous summer, and God made it very plain to me that I should be prepared to abandon my relationship with her — or at least give it up to Him, fully, without any guarantee He would ever give it back — before He would communicate His decision to me. I gave the Holy Spirit my "yes" to God, with some agony, but I did.
What happened next was one of the most unusual experiences of my entire life. I went into total seclusion with God over a three-day period in that strangest of processes — an experience I can only describe, looking back, as being taken into an Interrogation Room. In my imagination, and it felt every bit as real as any physical room, I stood before an Expert Interrogator who knew my entire future already, in every detail, and who now meant to ask me, one at a time, whether I would consent to it sight unseen — the same Interrogator, I told myself, who had called Abraham out of Ur and later asked him to climb Mount Moriah and lay his only son on the altar.
The questions came one after another. Would I go without ever marrying, if that was what was asked of me? Would I lose absolutely everything I owned — money, possessions, the clothes on my back — if that was what obedience cost? Would I serve God without ever knowing the comfort or approval of another human being, without applause, without even the ordinary dignity of being known and appreciated? "Will you be willing to go to the Amazon jungle," the questioning pressed at one point, "and never get back?"
I could not answer any of it glibly. I labored over every question in turn. And as I forced out my "yes" to each one, I felt myself release, piece by piece, what I had been gripping so tightly — a young man's hunger for marriage, for financial security, for human approval, for control over his own future — and trust instead that whatever God's ways for me actually turned out to be, they could not be worse than clinging to those things myself.
The Bursting of the Dam
Even after that three-day surrender of the will, the Holy Spirit made it clear there was a deeper agony still ahead of me — a level of consecration my mind had agreed to but my heart had not yet fully released. I knew myself well enough by then to know that despite my sincerest intentions, self-centeredness had a way of quietly reasserting itself in the corners I thought I had already surrendered.
Then, one Sunday afternoon in May, at the close of a long day of services, I went into prayer that stretched on for nearly five hours — hour after hour, past the point where I could sustain it in my own strength, until at last, around eight o'clock that evening, heaven broke over me.
"Suddenly, right there in public, I could not possibly restrain it. It swept over me with far more force than anything I had felt at any evening revival service I could recall. I felt the mighty force of the Holy Spirit come upon me like a mighty rushing wind, and the Spirit himself began to bear witness with my own spirit that I was, at last, entirely His."
I had felt small stirrings of that witness before that night, in the slightest degree. That evening was the first time I felt it come like a mighty rushing wind — a sweeping-in of what Paul calls "the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (Romans 8:16), except now it was more than doctrine to me. It was the most vivid thing I had ever felt.
It was in May of 1966 that I experienced a glorious climax to a journey of eight years — seven or eight years since I first realized, as a child, that something was missing between myself and God — and seven days since I first began to harbor a real, deep conviction that this particular struggle with all those inner conflicts was a thing I could no longer live inside of. From that time on I understood that born again believers still share a common experience of which everyone must remain conscious, regardless of what system of theology greeted us as believers: the fullness of the Holy Spirit is not late-in-life mysticism. It is very important for everyone to be "saved and sanctified," whatever that phrase means to the tribe or nation or denomination doing the saying.
"I could tell all was well between me and God. The sky was clear. My heart was free. I felt the cleansing power of the blood of Jesus. I was not conscious of any deeper need."
I want to be honest about one persistent point of theological confusion from those years, because I think it is common enough that other believers may recognize it in themselves. Over the decades I have become convinced that nearly all born-again believers share a common experience of the Holy Spirit's work in them, regardless of what system of theology they were handed by their particular tradition — the language of "sanctification" is not the only vocabulary for it, and I have long since stopped assuming everyone needs to use my own denominational terms for what God does in a fully surrendered heart. What I do believe, without reservation, is that everyone born again needs to go back to the altar for a second, decisive trip — call it whatever your own tradition calls it — because the discovery of that fuller surrender is too important to be left to whatever theological vocabulary happens to be fashionable in a given church at a given time.
I did not find walking it out easy in the years immediately following. I remember one particular season, back in St. Louis, where I was eagerly anticipating growth in the leadership of holiness in my life, only to find myself repeatedly annoyed and inwardly irritated by the pettiness of a bachelor uncle I was living with at the time — a man who was, by all accounts, godly and well-meaning, but whose small habits grated on me in a way that embarrassed me given everything I had just supposedly surrendered to God. Learning to walk the Highway of Holiness, I discovered, was going to be less about a single mountaintop experience and much more about a long series of very ordinary tests, arriving in the most unglamorous circumstances imaginable — a messy kitchen, an irritating housemate, a delayed bus.
I graduated from Augustana College that August of 1966 with a combination music scholarship and a dean's list ranking. The college offered to fund my continuing music career; I turned it down, without much drama, and went instead to pastor a tiny, unremarkable congregation and enter Bible school in St. Louis — the beginning of a call to ministry that quietly but decisively eclipsed the concert stage I had once wanted so badly. Sanctification had rearranged my ambitions before I had even had time to notice they were being rearranged. From that dramatic altar, through that Interrogation Room, to that May evening, I never once assumed afterward that I was exempt from ordinary human temptation. Walking the Highway of Holiness has not meant a life without further conflict; it has meant walking that conflict, for nearly sixty years now, with God rather than in hiding from Him.
Called to Serve and to Marry
"Finding the call of God for my life did not prove easy. My earlier plan to strive for fame and fortune as a concert pianist evaporated quickly when I surrendered to God."
Getting clear on the call to the ministry was another matter altogether. It happened in my life the year after I began to walk with the Lord. I gave a lot of credit to my father for his wisdom in this regard — even after I was eventually called to the pulpit, he strongly cautioned me not to assume that I was called merely because past generations of Maxeys had been preachers before me. Even after I had become clear on my call to pastoral ministry, he wisely discouraged me to drop out of the unaccredited Bible school where he was then teaching and enroll in the more academically rigorous Augustana College instead. I entered Augustana that August of 1966, after graduating high school with a combination of scholarships that did not offer me a future in music, but did offer me the tools to think clearly.
There in black and white it had my own name written on it, in a way I could not argue with. God spoke to me through the verse that has anchored my entire sense of calling ever since — Ephesians 3:8: "unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ." I understood, reading it, that I had joined the ranks of God's called servants not because of my family's heritage of preachers, and not because of any credential I was chasing, but because of His own heart-level conviction about me, personally.
Finding God's Lady
Next to my Big 180, getting clear about God's choice of a marriage partner was the most important thing I have ever done. Emma Lou and I had actually seen each other, in passing, years before either of us thought anything of it — our families crossed paths at a church gathering in Rock Island, Illinois, when I was still a boy, and I remember mostly that her family was large and that her mother kept the girls in thick stockings even in summer, out of a strict, rather legalistic culture in her home congregation.
It was at that same camp meeting in the summer of 1965 where I was converted that I truly noticed Emma Lou for the first time — she had just graduated high school, one year ahead of me. I was struck by her the way I had never been struck by anyone before, and I have said since that for me it was love at first sight, though I did not act on it right away; the piano and my own unfinished business with God still had my full attention that particular summer.
We began writing to each other, and then courting properly, over the two years that followed, as I finished at Augustana. I proposed to her in the spring of 1968, more certain of that decision than I had been of almost anything else in my young life, and she said yes. We were married on August 23, 1968, at her home congregation. We were both still very young — I had just turned twenty, she was barely nineteen — but we went into that marriage with the same conviction we had brought to our own conversions: that God's choice for us would prove more reliable than our own instincts, whatever came.
"No other human relationship has contributed more to my success in life than my marriage to Emma Lou. There are few things in life as sweet as finding the will of God in a marriage partner. Once we heard clearly from God, we were both made for each other, and I have never doubted that we were made for each other."
I would be less than honest if I let this chapter suggest our first months of marriage were simply blissful. The romantic balloon was punctured fairly soon after the wedding — two young people, both strong-willed, learning for the first time what it actually costs to build one life out of two, and I remember writing to Emma Lou, in the earliest weeks, about some unclean thing or other I had allowed to creep back into my own thinking, a confession that cost me real pride to make to my own new wife so soon after the vows. What I discovered, working through those early frictions, was that I had not actually carried the fullness of that 1966 sanctification experience into the daily texture of married life the way I assumed I had; marriage, more than almost anything else in my life to that point, exposed exactly how much of my own self-will was still quietly running the show. "Create in me a clean heart, O God," became a genuine, repeated prayer in those first months, not a verse I merely knew.
Early in our marriage I also noted that Emma Lou needed new shoes and told her I wanted to buy her a pair. "No, let's just wait and see what God will do," she said, and within a matter of days someone gave her, unprompted and without knowing of the need at all, several new pairs at once. That kind of thing happened to us, in one form or another, numerous times over the next few years. We were young and often without much grocery money on hand, and one Saturday morning our car broke down without any means on hand to fix it. We drove it to the church parking lot, without a clue what was wrong or how we would pay for it, and a man neither of us had ever seen before or since walked up, diagnosed the exact mechanical problem before we had said a word about it, returned later that afternoon, repaired the car, and left without asking a cent for it. We have never been able to explain that morning any other way than God's own kindness to two very young and very broke newlyweds.
What has struck me most, looking back across more than fifty years of marriage from where I sit now, is how ordinary most of the actual glue turned out to be. It was not one dramatic rescue after another. It was thousands of small, unremarkable days — deliberately deciding, again and again, to follow God's direction and each other's, rather than our own individual preference, in matters as small as which church activity to attend and as large as which continent to live on. Our parents lived deliberate, exemplary lives before us in this regard, and we have tried, imperfectly, to do the same for our own four children.
No other human relationship has proven, across fifty-plus years and counting, more valuable than that one. We have not been spared conflict — over finances, over ministry disagreements, over the ordinary friction of two strong-willed people building a life together across two continents. But God's choice in a marriage partner is more valuable in life than the years of endurance I made the mistake of assuming, at twenty years old, would be the hardest part.
Mexico
"There in remote Mexican villages I worked in the fields for my room and board, day by day. Every night I preached to anyone in the area that would come and listen."
My enchantment with Latin America started well before my Big 180, in 1965, when I was fourteen and enrolled in a Spanish class at Washington Junior High in Rock Island, Illinois, taught by Mr. Herrera, a nearly flawless native speaker. My mother was a Spanish teacher and a few words had bounced off in my direction over the years, but it was that class, and the enthusiastic mentoring of a fellow student named John Blomberg — a boy with an incredible ear, "a typical nerd" by his own account, who could recite whole encyclopedia entries from memory — that got Spanish dynamically stuck in my head. By the end of that year I went in for the church's second-year students, teaching, and preaching about Lot's choice from Genesis 13, my first real sermon, in Spanish, to my own youth group.
My path into cross-cultural missions came in an unusual order. Most people, I think, get a sense of the call first and then go learn the language of the people they've been called to. In my case it happened backward: I learned the language first, for entirely ordinary reasons — a required class, a gifted classmate, a mother who taught Spanish — and only afterward did the actual call arrive, once I was already standing in Mexico with the words in my mouth.
Both summers of my Augustana years, I traveled south with our college's cross-cultural missions program, based in Parral, Chihuahua, spending a total of fifty days in Mexico each trip, working in the fields by day for my room and board and preaching by night to anyone in the area who would come and listen. It was in one of those remote villages, La Cienega de Arriba, that God spoke to me most unexpectedly. Quite without my planning for it, God was giving me my life's call as a cross-cultural missionary, right there in a dirt-floored room with a borrowed hymnbook and a congregation of a dozen or so people who had walked in from the surrounding hillsides to hear a nineteen-year-old American stumble through a sermon in their own language.
I confirmed it months later when I saw the same cross-cultural aspect in Ephesians 3:8, this time given me to preach, not just to read: "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ." Paul was the cross-cultural missionary to the Gentiles; I would be his, in my own small measure, to the villages of northern Mexico.
I owe a real debt to a fellow student named John Blomberg, whose gift for language left mine looking pedestrian by comparison. John was a nominal Lutheran with a sharp mind and a Craig, Colorado, accent thicker than any I encountered on either side of the border; he went on later to become a respected New Testament scholar, but in those college years his real usefulness to me was simpler — he unwittingly taught me half of what I know about how to learn a language well by watching him do it dynamically, dramatically better than the rest of us, and by badgering me, in the friendliest way possible, out of my own comfortable mistakes.
God had planted in me a love for the people themselves as much as for the work. I spent parts of two summers, and later a full fifty-day stretch, in remote villages of La Cienega de Arriba and the countryside around Parral, sleeping in whatever hut or church floor was offered, preaching most nights to whoever wandered in from the surrounding hills. My love for Latin America was never merely theoretical after that; it had a taste and a sound to it — the particular cadence of northern Mexican Spanish, the hospitality of people who had almost nothing and still insisted I eat first, the long, dusty walks between villages with a borrowed Bible under one arm. Even the Cuban missile crisis, which I followed as a teenager through short-wave radio broadcasts from Latin America, had somehow made the region feel personally significant to me years before God ever called me there directly — proof, I think, that God plants the seeds of a calling long before we recognize them as such.
Pastoring, Evangelism and Church Planting
We entered our Mexico assignment with a high degree of enthusiasm. We were barely two years into our marriage, and our first daughter, Becky, was still a baby.
I quickly learned that being far from the shelter of a large home church in the United States means every single decision — theological, financial, relational — becomes yours and your young family's to carry. In November 1970, that responsibility came to a head over a matter that was neither theological nor of our own making: a moral crisis among some of the leaders of our sending church swept in to take the fall over the lives of our young people, and our church was forced by circumstances neither of our own making nor of our own choosing to end our ministry in Mexico abruptly, with almost no warning.
The departure itself proved almost as painful, materially, as the reason behind it. As we made our way home to the USA, driving a pickup pulling a small trailer loaded down with every earthly possession we owned — furniture, wedding pictures, my books, Emma Lou's hope chest — we stopped for a brief rest stop outside the main gate at the St. Louis zoo. When we returned to the vehicle, the pickup and the trailer, with the largest of our earthly belongings, had vanished. All of it — clothes, wedding pictures, books, furniture — was the property of our church. We called the police, filed a report, and were escorted to the nearest bus station, where the church gave us just enough money to buy tickets back to Illinois, without a bank account, without even a change of clothes.
Two days later the pickup and trailer were recovered, abandoned somewhere, stripped of nearly everything of any value except a Spanish Bible with my name written inside the front cover, and a single book — Mount Sermon, Thou shalt not steal — that had somehow been left untouched, right on the dashboard, in plain sight, of all things, throughout the entire theft.
Valuable Lessons from Mexico
Emma Lou and I have said many times since that the lessons that came out of our Mexico fiasco were worth more than the material things we lost — though it took years for me to fully believe that sentence rather than merely say it.
Three lessons came out of it that I have carried ever since. The first was to firmly resolve not to dwell on the past — Paul's own counsel in Philippians 3:13, "forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead," became a discipline rather than a slogan to me that year. The second, which took me far longer to master, was to be slow to defend myself when I felt wronged; I was not vindicated in the moment, and I did not stop to argue my case with anyone who doubted me, and I found, decades later, that the truth had a way of vindicating itself far better than my own protests ever could have. The third was Paul's warning in Ephesians 4:31, against letting bitterness take root — and to this day I do not carry a grudge against a single person from that Mexico chapter of our lives, however painful it was at the time.
It was a costly disaster by our own young family's standards, but it was not the last major setback we would weather together as missionaries — a far more dangerous one waited for us in Nigeria in 1989, an ocean and two decades away, and I have often thought that Mexico was where God first taught Emma Lou and me how to lose everything material and keep going anyway.
There is no question that Latin America was the love of my heart for many years, and it remains so. It was not until more than a decade after our marriage that God made it clear He wanted something more from us — in Africa. In the meantime, our own family was growing: our second daughter, Rachel Esperanza, was born in Parral on September 5, 1970, her middle name a quiet nod to the Spanish word for hope, and to everything Mexico had given us even in the losing of it.
When God finally called us to Nigeria, one of my first responses was to ask, "How in the world am I going to reach all those Spanish over there in Africa?" My ears still perk up significantly whenever I hear anyone speaking the language in the world. It is an understatement to say that I was somewhat confused and at least in a state of shock when we returned to the USA in late 1970. I would come to see that loss more clearly for what it was: an inheritance of resilience, forged in a Missouri parking lot, that I would need again, and again, in the far harder years still ahead of us.
Graduate Studies and the Call to Nigeria
"The call to Nigeria was a surprise to us…for two years I resisted what I felt was a temptation of the flesh…and this always liked excitement, and Nigeria call sounded exciting."
All throughout that period, my thoughts about missions or ministry were aimed solely at Latin America. My focus, starting in 1971, was on graduate studies, preparing me for a more effective teaching career on the mission field. But through most of the 1970s I continued to believe that our mission field would be somewhere in Latin America. As I went into graduate studies my significant target was Latin America.
That January 1971, having married Emma Lou and finished my first pastorate, I enrolled in a Master's degree program at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City. The next five years were to find me head-over-heels engaged in graduate studies at the School of Religion, working under Dr. Sydney Mead, a distinguished dean of American church historians. It was not where I had expected to build a career, but it was, as it turned out, exactly the training ground I would need.
At Iowa I encountered, for the first time, an academic culture I was not prepared for. It was one of the few evangelical students enrolled in a school that was itself a bastion of theological liberalism, and I found myself, more than once, the butt of classroom banter for holding conservative or evangelical views. I discovered while there that the entire scope of biblical scholarship was far more conservative than the general conservative scholarship in America was far more sound and defensible than the caricature liberal professors had painted of it in class after class. I called a research scholar, Dr. Kenneth Kuntz, about certain archaeological findings he had cited proving camels were anachronistic in the Genesis narratives; he told me, to my surprise, that the archaeological evidence Harper & Row popularizers relied on had "not really held up," and that the scholarly consensus on the point was nowhere near as settled as my professors made it sound.
I also worked, during a research seminar, alongside a young Harvard PhD named George Nickelsburg and a brilliant Jewish scholar named Dr. George Goldstein on ancient Gnostic texts, six-syllable Greek terms flying across the seminar table that I had never encountered before. I remember the day Goldstein asked, half in jest, whether I knew the ancient literary device called "Hypostasis of the Archons." I did not. It humbled me in exactly the way I think graduate school is supposed to humble a young preacher who thinks he already knows what he needs to know. Dr. Goldstein, an Orthodox Jew without a shred of pretense about the difference between us, was one of the most respected scholars in the department, and he once told our small class of doctoral students, without any apparent bitterness, that he doubted whether he would recognize us again on the street a year or two out from our exams — a comment that struck me, and has stayed with me, as an oddly honest thing for a professor to admit out loud.
The pressure of the program itself very nearly broke me. In the weeks before my comprehensive exams, I had what I can only call a mental breakdown — periods of what felt like genuine panic, an inability to sleep, whole days spent hunched over the kitchen table at home with color-coded reading lists that felt, by then, entirely impossible to finish. I remember thinking, quite seriously, that I might not make it through with my sanity intact, let alone my degree. In the middle of that same punishing stretch, in 1974, Hurricane Fifi struck Honduras, killing an estimated eight to ten thousand people, and a call came asking whether I could fly emergency relief into the disaster zone; I said yes almost before I had thought it through, grateful, if I am honest, for any excuse to step away from my books. We rented a forty-seat Convair aircraft, filled it with relief supplies, and flew them into Tegucigalpa and Ponca City, Kansas, gathering donated goods along the way — a genuinely exciting, genuinely useful few days that also happened to be the most merciful distraction God could have handed a doctoral student on the edge of collapse. I came back from Honduras, sat my exams, and, remarkably, passed all of them.
God That I Would Pay Whatever Price It Might Take to Get Back on Track
What happened in the years that followed marked one of the lowest points of my life. This is not a chapter I have enjoyed writing, and I will not be exhaustive about it here — it is enough to say plainly that the pressure of a nearly impossible doctoral program, the isolation of academic life far from the pastoral and evangelistic ministry I actually loved, and my own long-unaddressed struggle with the pornography that had first ensnared me as a boy of ten combined, by around 1974, to bring me to what I have called the lowest ebb of my spiritual life. I will not describe the details further than that; I have said elsewhere that this is a subject I regret having to write about at all, and I will let that regret stand as the fuller account.
What I will say is that God did not leave me there. Through the patient accountability of friends, the confrontation of my own conscience, and a season of real repentance, I broke down completely — I wept nearly the entire three-hundred-mile drive home to Iowa City, more contrite in that one drive than I had been in years — and promised myself and God that I would pay whatever price it might take to get back on track, academic prestige or seemingly important career be hanged.
The price, as it turned out, was steep and immediate: I decided to be as radical about reformation as I had been about the failure, and I dropped out of my PhD program at the point of writing my dissertation, walked away from a fellowship at Aldersgate School of Religion in Ohio, and took the pastorate of a small, struggling church in Decatur, Illinois, instead. To make ends meet I sold cemetery lots, vaults, and markers door to door — a job I turned out to be unexpectedly good at, earning as much as $1,000 some weeks, more money than I had ever made in my life — while pastoring on the side and rebuilding, brick by brick, the spiritual disciplines I had let slip.
Learning Financial Faithfulness
It was in Decatur, in those years, that Emma Lou and I settled a pattern of radical financial generosity that we have never since abandoned — tithing faithfully, giving beyond the tithe whenever we sensed God prompting us to, and refusing to let money become the kind of quiet idol it had nearly become for me during the pressure of my academic years. We sold a new piano and a newer car, at God's prompting, and gave the proceeds away; more than once, within days of giving generously, unexpected provision came back to us in equal or greater measure — a pattern so consistent over the years that I stopped being surprised by it and started expecting it as simply how God dealt with us.
Those Decatur years also brought us the joy of expanding our family. We adopted two sons in the mid-1970s, Andrew Xavier and his younger brother, joining our daughters Becky and Rachel to make a family of four children. Andrew, still a small boy, once famously delivered an impromptu, chalk-in-hand lecture to a group of visiting African seminary students on "How We Milk Cows in America," drawing a confident, entirely wrong picture of a cow on the chalkboard — a story our family has never stopped teasing him about, especially once, years later, he grew up to marry a Nigerian.
Around this same period I also took a part-time job with the Decatur sanitation department, and one incident from those garbage-truck days has become a small legend in our family: one afternoon, missing my ride, I called home and told my daughters, half in jest, that their father drove a garbage truck for a living and that it was an honest, dignity-filled job. My daughters, not missing a beat, shouted back in unison, "We want to be garbage men too!" — a small, comic memory that captures, better than anything else from those years, how ordinary and unglamorous most of the work of getting back on track with God actually was.
Getting Back on Track — and the Call to Nigeria
By 1978, seven years after entering graduate school and two years after my own spiritual reformation, I had completed enough of the doctoral coursework I had once abandoned to matter, and I had settled comfortably into pastoral ministry in Decatur, with Latin America still fixed in the back of my mind as the mission field to which we would eventually return.
Then, quite without warning, a friend and colleague in ministry named Joel casually remarked to me one day, in the middle of an unrelated conversation, "What are you doing in Africa?" I do not think he meant anything prophetic by it. But that offhand question would not leave me alone. It was around the same time that I happened to read a biography of Elmer Schmelzenbach, a second-generation American missionary to Swaziland, in a book titled Son of Africa — a book that stirred something in me I could not immediately explain, given how completely fixed my sights had been on Latin America for over a decade.
I did not want to feel guilty about being interested in Africa without first bringing Emma Lou fully into the conversation, and I suddenly knew I could and should feel free to pray about it openly, in the coming days, rather than carrying it alone. What I did not expect was that God had used the very same simple statement to communicate to Emma Lou. Not sure how to broach this strange new interest with her, I opened the door to tell her about it — only to have her respond, before I had said very much at all, "Honey, I believe God wants us to go to Africa." I had not yet told her what I was going to say.
Needless to say, there was a good deal of dancing around our living room that evening. When our home church asked us a few months later, without even knowing of our private conversations, whether we would be willing to go, we phoned home the same day and accepted before receiving an application from the mission agency. "Of course he does," Emma Lou said when I told her the news. "I have known it for a long time." God is wonderful.
Calvary College of Theology
"The Bible college started in our own duplex, and even though we had our own private rooms we had our own living room doubled as the Bible college chapel."
March 4, 1982, is a date I have always liked to remind people of, because it reads like a command: march forth. Nigeria had not been where I expected to end up, given how completely my sights had been fixed on Latin America for more than a decade. But it was where God had actually been directing us all along, and once we landed, there was no question left in either Emma Lou's mind or mine about whether we belonged there.
Our specific assignment was to start a Bible college from nothing, in Port Harcourt, under the auspices of a Nigerian denomination that had asked for missionary help training its pastors. I felt spiritually, mentally and academically prepared for it. I did not feel, and neither of us was, prepared for the actual daily texture of life in Nigeria in 1982 — no refrigerator for the first several months, oppressive heat we had never experienced anything like, unfamiliar food, no reliable telephones, and a country in the grip of its own national strikes and shortages that first year. All six of us — Emma Lou, myself, and our four children — went into it together, as a team, determined to succeed at an adventure none of us had trained for.
Every day brought some new difficulty to work through, and more than a few brought real danger. Emma Lou was the first of us to be struck down, with a serious bout of malaria that left her weak for weeks. Not long after, our youngest, still a small boy, developed a severe gastro-intestinal illness that brought on convulsions in the night, his eyes rolling back in his head, while we had no real idea, that early in our time in the country, how frightened we were entitled to be or how quickly we needed to act. He recovered, by God's mercy, as did Emma Lou from an illness later in that same first term that left her so weak and fevered that I genuinely did not know, for a night or two, whether she would pull through; I prayed over her more desperately than I had prayed over almost anything in my life, and she got well.
Focusing on Our Work
Underneath all of it, I knew exactly why I had come to Africa. My assignment was the training of pastors and leaders, and everything I did, from our earliest days in Nigeria, pointed toward that single goal. The denomination whose invitation had brought us to Port Harcourt was led at that time by a man who was, by my own honest account, decidedly legalistic and authoritarian in his own leadership style — a hard man to serve under, though I bore him no lasting ill will, and the friction between his instincts and my own eventually became one of the reasons our young Bible college would, within a few years, move toward full Nigerian and interdenominational independence rather than remain tied to a single sending body. I will say more about that later, because it matters more for what came after 1982 than for that first difficult year itself.
Danger was not confined to illness. Looking back now, across more than thirty-five years in Africa, I can count eight serious encounters with armed robbers, and I have been shot at twice with intent to kill. Fellow missionaries have come and gone over the decades, and several I knew personally have died violently on the field. We are, remarkably, all alive and well today. Thank you, Jesus.
By the end of that first year, the Bible college had genuinely started — in our own duplex, the same building where we lived as a family, with our own private rooms upstairs and our own living room doubling, every Sunday morning and most weekday evenings, as the Bible college's only chapel and classroom. We began with a small handful of Nigerian pastors eager to be trained, gathered around our own dining table, and grew from there, one class and one term at a time. It did not feel, in 1982, like the beginning of an institution that would one day carry thousands of pastors through its doors and eventually bear the name West Africa Theological Seminary. It felt like a young, badly under-prepared American family trying to be faithful with exactly what God had put in front of us, one difficult day at a time.
A Family That Was Also a Faculty
There was no real separation, in those first years, between our home life and the life of the college. Emma Lou home-schooled our own children for the better part of a decade while also carrying much of the domestic weight of hosting a residential Bible school inside our own duplex, and by the time our youngest had been exempted from her lessons, virtually every student who had passed through our doors had eaten at our table more than once. Our rhythm ran from Sunday chapel through a full week of classes, personal ministry, and door-to-door evangelism, with Saturdays often given over to prison ministry — Emma Lou and I would go together to sit with boys as young as twelve behind bars, a ministry neither of us had trained for and neither of us ever regretted. One of our early colleagues, a missionary named Patrick, was nearly lost at sea on his way back from an island evangelistic trip; he was recovered, exhausted but alive, after a rescue that felt, at the time, like one more reminder of how thin the margin for error actually was in the work we had chosen.
Honing My Own Disciplines
It was in those same early Nigeria years that I settled into habits I have kept, in one form or another, for the rest of my life. I have always been an early riser, somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00 in the morning, and I began, in those years, a lifelong practice of setting New Year's resolutions tied directly to my own devotional life — a practice I have kept up for decades since, though I am honest enough to admit I have rarely achieved more than half of what I resolve to do in any given year. I need the benchmarks anyway, even the ones I fall short of.
My own devotional habits grew directly out of those early Nigeria mornings: reading the Bible cover to cover more times than I can now count with precision — well over a hundred times across my life, by my own rough reckoning — and reading it twice in a single year at one point, on a plan modeled after one I learned from Dr. Wesley Duewel, a man I would not actually meet in person until years later, in November 1994, at a conference at the University of Ibadan, where I had the small honor of lending him a pencil. I found real companionship in that period in the writings of men like Frank Laubach, whose Letters by a Modern Mystic describes an experience of God's nearness that "comes to my soul several times a day," leaving him feeling, in his own words, "as clean as new-fallen snow" — and in Brother Lawrence's Practicing the Presence of God, a slim book I have returned to more often than almost any other outside Scripture itself. Emma Lou has always been honest that her own sense of closeness to God has had its ups and downs in a way mine perhaps has not, but our shared prayer life together has been, from those early Nigeria years onward, the deepest and steadiest root of our marriage.
Revival
"It was the beginning of the greatest revival I have ever witnessed in my thirty-five-plus years in Nigeria. It went on for months and spread out into scores of churches."
Our vision for Africa, right from the start, was never confused or muddled. Everything we did in those early Nigeria years pointed toward the training of pastors, and I found myself, within a couple of years of our arrival, invited to preach at broadly interdenominational holiness conventions all over the country — three-day gatherings that eventually took me, over the years, to every state in the Nigerian federation, in addition to my daily teaching load at the Bible college itself. I remember being in Calabar for one such convention on my own fortieth birthday, six years into our time in Nigeria, and being struck, again, by how consistently and eagerly Nigerian believers responded to the message of holiness whenever it was actually preached to them, rather than merely assumed.
It became increasingly clear to me that my students, and the pastors I ministered to across the country, were hungry for something our churches were not, on the whole, equipped to give them: a genuine, practical way out of the ordinary slavery of sinful living, rather than one more sermon reminding them that sin was bad. Even in congregations with a strong existing interest in the topic of holiness, what I found again and again was a teaching gap — plenty of people who could define entire sanctification accurately on a theology exam, and very few who had actually experienced the practical, moment-by-moment freedom from sin's grip that the doctrine promised. That hunger for holiness ran, in our college, right alongside an equally deep hunger for revival — and in November 1983, both hungers converged at once, in a way none of us could have engineered if we had tried.
November 29, 1983
I have told the fuller story of what happened at Calvary College of Theology in 1983 and 1984 elsewhere, in The WATS Journey, and I will not try to repeat every detail of it here. But I do want to set down, for this website, the heart of what happened, because it is the single event that redefined our whole purpose for being in Nigeria.
On November 29, 1983, we reached the climax of a heavy season of fasting and crying out for revival to break upon us. Our student body — some sixty pastors and pastors-in-training — had entered a period of prolonged, intensifying prayer, with a growing awareness of deep spiritual need touching virtually every basic area of the Christian life: repentance, confession, restitution, hope for backsliders, the new birth, sanctification.
Then, in a chapel session on that November morning, something happened that none of us expected. One of the sixty pastors present stood up, unprompted, and began to publicly and brazenly confess his sins, never minding the personal embarrassment of doing so in front of his own peers. It was truly stunning. It was the beginning of the greatest revival I have ever witnessed in my thirty-five-plus years in Nigeria. It went on for months, and it spread out from our small college into scores of churches, with several thousand people, over that season, experiencing what John Wesley called Christian perfection — the deeper cleansing of entire sanctification that I myself had experienced, alone, in my own bedroom, seventeen years and one continent earlier.
I have thought often about why that one man's public confession broke something open that six years of my own faithful preaching, on its own, had not. I do not fully understand it, even now. What I do know is that revival, in my experience, is never something a preacher manufactures by force of eloquence. It is something God sends, in His own timing, often through the most ordinary and unplanned of triggers — in this case, one tired, burdened pastor who simply could not carry a hidden sin silently for one more day.
What burned into my heart, watching it unfold, was not only the scale of it but its source. As a boy, I had watched, at a distance too young to fully understand it, great revival movements move through the Bible college where my own father served as a teacher and administrator, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I was not yet a believer during those childhood years, but the scenes stayed with me, etched deeply, all the way into that November morning in 1983 when I finally understood, from the inside, what I had only watched as a child from the outside.
The Eneka Revival — and What It Became
In the months that followed, we came to call what happened the Eneka Revival, after the area near Port Harcourt where our college was then located. Its impact has never stopped resounding in my heart. I believed, watching it unfold, that the heritage of the great Evangelical Revival under John and Charles Wesley in eighteenth-century England needed to be seen again, in modern-day Nigeria — and that conviction directly shaped what came next.
When our Bible college relocated to Owerri in 1989, I deliberately named the reorganized, broadly interdenominational institution there Wesley International Bible College, invoking the Wesleys' own eighteenth-century revival as the explicit model I hoped God would repeat among us. Moving from a single-denomination institution to one that was openly interdenominational was a deliberate choice on my part, made directly in the wake of what I had watched happen at Eneka, and I have never once regretted it.
I do not know how to adequately convey, on a page like this one, what it is to watch several thousand people, over the course of a single season, come face to face with their own sin and walk out the other side clean. I have spent the rest of my ministry — the founding of new institutions, the writing of books, the national campaigns for Christian ethics that I will describe further on in this account — trying, in one way or another, to see that same fire lit again. Revival is the reason I stayed in Nigeria. It is the reason, thirty and forty years later, I am still here.
Imo State
"It was in God's providence that we arrived in Owerri, Imo State, in 1989…CCT has remained a strong beacon for sound theological education ever since its establishment in 1982."
By 1989 it had become clear that our Bible college needed to become fully autonomous and interdenominational rather than remain tied to a single Nigerian denomination, and that meant a move. It was in God's providence that we arrived in Owerri, Imo State, in 1989, for the start-up of what would eventually become West Africa Theological Seminary. By then Emma Lou and I had four children; our two oldest, Becky and Rachel, had already begun schooling in the United States, and the whole family's rhythm of life now ran between Owerri and Hillcrest School, a boarding school for missionary children in Jos, Plateau State.
God sent us remarkable colleagues in those years. Pilpo and Gloria Mirye, our first missionary partners in Owerri, came to us from Papua New Guinea through the Free Methodist Church of North America. Mike and Vickie Reynen joined soon after, with their five children in tow, followed by Leonard and Myrtle Adams and Karen Roller. None of us had any idea, arriving in Owerri in 1989, that the work God was about to do there would eventually carry the name West Africa Theological Seminary to every corner of the continent.
Breaking Ties, Becoming Ourselves
Some of the hardest friction of those years was not with outsiders but with the legalistic culture of the denominational structure our Bible college had originally been tied to — disagreements over hairstyles, jewelry, dress codes, even something as small as whether a woman's stockings were the correct thickness. I found real help, working through it, in the sociologist Ernst Troeltsch's classic account of how strict religious splinter groups tend to formalize over time into rigid institutions and then splinter again themselves — a pattern I recognized all too clearly in our own situation. By 1985 we had moved deliberately toward full independency of spirit, separating formally from the denomination that had originally invited us to Nigeria and becoming a genuinely autonomous, broadly interdenominational institution. There was real tension in that season over the US side of our partnership wanting more control over Nigerian finances than full Nigerian autonomy could tolerate, and it took the better part of four years, from 1985 to 1989, to fully resolve. I do not regret the separation. I do regret how long it took us to see that a Nigerian institution needed, eventually, full Nigerian ownership if it was ever going to become what God intended it to be.
Ken Fay's Legacy
One influence I want to name specifically from those years is Ken Fay, an old-school revivalist whose ministry of soul-searching preaching and teaching, aimed squarely at the revival of the saints of God, shaped my own father, Parker Maxey, long before it shaped me. My father was, by his own admission, addicted to Ken Fay's ministry as a young missionary. The two of them later co-authored a book, Ethics and Etiquette: A Guide to Ministerial Conduct, which was used all over Nigeria for years and eventually reworked by a team of Nigerian pastors into a properly African format — a small but telling example of how a piece of my own father's legacy quietly became part of Nigeria's own.
Coping with Setbacks
Owerri also brought us our most frightening single night in Nigeria. On August 31, 1989, I was at a filling station with my son Andrew and a young man named Oni when armed robbers struck. As I put my key into the ignition, a strange hand reached in through my open window and grabbed mine before I could react. Two gunmen fired at us; by what I can only call God's direct protection, both of their weapons jammed after the first shot, and though they ejected the spent shells and shook their guns furiously trying to clear them and fire again, neither man ever managed to get off a second shot. Andrew was pistol-whipped in the attack and suffered a concussion that kept him from sleeping properly for months afterward. All of us survived. It was the first of eight such encounters I would count, over the decades, but it remains the one I remember most vividly.
A different kind of setback came in 1993, when a long and painful season of disillusionment with our original sending agency, the Evangelical Bible Mission of Florida, came to a head. I will not go into the particulars here beyond saying that the disagreement centered on questions of paternalism and control — an older, pre-World War II model of missionary authority that increasingly could not coexist with the fully Nigerian, interdenominational institution WATS had become. The relationship eventually and painfully severed, and it was, by my own account, a more difficult setback for me personally than the armed robbery had been, though of an entirely different kind. What I learned from it, alongside Emma Lou, was the importance of institutional accountability — of never letting any one person, myself included, sit outside a structure of real, regular, uncomfortable personal accountability. That conviction shaped everything I built afterward.
COCEN — A National Campaign for Christian Ethics
By 1992, watching Nigeria's national corruption metastasize in the wake of the December 31, 1983 coup and the subsequent "War Against Indiscipline," I had become convinced there was virtually no hope for a top-down political solution — but I also saw, at the very same time, that the Nigerian Church itself was growing at an unprecedented, grassroots pace. I started with a list of twenty-five names on my own bedroom wall, people I began praying for daily, and that small, private list eventually grew into the Congress on Christian Ethics in Nigeria — COCEN — a national movement engaging pastors, business leaders, and politicians on questions of corruption and personal integrity.
That work reached its high point at a national congress in Abuja, November 4–7, 1997, where some 1,500 delegates gathered from all thirty-six states of the federation and signed, at the congress's close, a document we called the Nigeria Covenant. I do not know how much of Nigeria's national story that congress ultimately changed. I know it changed me, and I know it put me, for years afterward, in rooms with Nigerian leaders I would otherwise never have had reason to meet.
Springboard, and Learning to Depend on Others
In those same years we founded Springboard, a cross-cultural short-term missions program sending teams out every summer, six weeks at a time in June, July, and August, in partnership with CAPRO (Calvary Ministries) — an idea I credit to Leroy and Myrtle Adams rather than to myself. Our own son Kyle would later spend twenty-five years as a missionary evangelist in Ukraine and East Africa, alongside his wife Myrle, a calling I have always felt traces its roots back to those Springboard summers.
It was also during this second decade of our Nigeria ministry that I began to learn, more systematically than I ever had before, the power of personal accountability. I found a small group of trusted friends and gave them close, regular, uncomfortable permission to ask me hard questions — about my use of time, my finances, my internet activity, my closest relationships — and I have kept at least one such accountability partner, and usually more than one, in every season of ministry since. It is not always easy to find people willing to hold a senior leader's feet to the fire in a culture that often expects deference to elders rather than scrutiny of them. But I have seen enough of what happens to leaders who never submit to it that I have never been tempted to go without it again.
I will close this chapter with an observation Africa has taught me that the West, on the whole, has not: African believers I know and trust — women and men of godly character and common sense, not people prepared to see demonic activity in every difficulty — have told me, first-hand, about supernatural confrontations that Western skepticism generally refuses even to consider. I do not go looking for such things, and I try to stay cautious rather than credulous about them. But on a trip north to Bauchi State in 1985, our vehicle broke down in the worst possible spot, on a rising fuel gauge going the wrong direction, on a stretch of road with nowhere to be seen for miles in either direction; a stranger appeared out of nowhere, walked up to the car, put something in the tank, and vanished before we could properly thank him or even see him leave — and the car ran perfectly the rest of the way to Bauchi. On another occasion, back home, I heard a loud crash from an empty room and found a heavy framed picture that had been sitting undisturbed on a shelf lying shattered on the floor, along with several other objects that had, by every appearance, "jumped" clear across the room. I have stood, too, in rooms in Imo State where I watched deliverance ministry happen, quietly and without theatrics, and watched people walk out lighter than they walked in. Whatever a Western reader makes of any of that, it has become, for me, simply one more ordinary part of what it means to live and minister in Africa.
New Beginnings International Church
"Unlike the vast majority of large international cities in the world, I could not see in Lagos any church solely dedicated to ministry to internationals."
Our move to Lagos itself, when it finally came, was a deliberate, slow, and methodical process, not a sudden decision — the seminary's own growth simply made it necessary to be within reach of the Atlantic, of international airports, and of the wider partnerships WATS increasingly needed to nurture. Once the decision had been made, I never once doubted the wisdom of the move to Lagos, though relocating an entire theological institution proved every bit as difficult, financially and logistically, as anyone who has tried it would expect.
As WATS itself grew large enough to require full, capable Nigerian leadership rather than my own direct daily oversight, I handed the provost's role first to my own "twin brother" in ministry, Peter Ozodo — a man born on the opposite side of the world from me but who has shared my vision and passion for holiness, to the core, for as long as I have known him — and then, through a long and not always smoothly executed transition across the years that followed, to a succession of capable Nigerian leaders: David Njoku, Dr. William Udotong, and later Lawrence Ettu. That handover was not without real friction between what our Nigerian Governing Council expected of a founder who had promised to stay close, and what our American partners expected of a founder who should, by their instinct, step back and largely disappear. I lived inside that six-year tug-of-war more uncomfortably than I let on to most people at the time. But by late 2016 and into 2017, relief finally came into sight, and I have never stopped believing WATS has an extraordinary future ahead of it — one I am content, these days, to cheer for loudly from the sidelines rather than administer from the front.
A Church Lagos Did Not Yet Have
What I had not expected was that stepping back from WATS would open the door to an entirely new ministry. As early as 1994, I had become aware of hundreds, if not thousands, of expatriate believers living in Lagos and across Nigeria with no real church home of their own. That same year, I flew to Lagos to meet Dr. Wesley Duewel and, almost on impulse, requested a meeting with the American ambassador, Walter Carrington, to introduce him — a meeting that, remarkably, was granted, thanks in large part to an embassy staff member named Tibor Nagzy. It was a small, unlikely door, and I have learned over the years to pay close attention whenever a door like that opens without my having pushed very hard for it.
Small expatriate gatherings grew slowly through the following years, but it was not until 2009 and 2010, once the WATS leadership handover was finally settled under Dr. Udotong, that I was free to give this new work my full attention. Unlike the vast majority of large international cities in the world, I could not see in Lagos any church solely dedicated to ministry to internationals — a city of some twenty million people, one of the largest in the world, with, as far as I could tell, no congregation built specifically for the believers passing through it from six continents at once. That struck me as a gap worth filling.
On Sunday, September 19, 2010, we held the first service of what I named New Beginnings International Church, on Victoria Island. Fifty-eight people came — thirty-six adults and twenty-two children — and I remember the sense that we were, quite literally, off and running. My conviction in naming it was simple: expatriate believers arriving in a strange new city needed exactly what the church's name promised, a new beginning, and I wanted the congregation itself to embody that same fresh start for everyone who walked through its doors.
The church grew steadily rather than explosively — close to one hundred by the end of our first full year, nearing one hundred fifty by 2013, over two hundred a couple of years after that — moving, in its early years, from a private home to the Lekki Expressway, then to the Lekki Conservation Centre, and by February 2011 to a more settled home nearer where most of our people actually lived. What has struck me most, watching NBIC grow, is its sheer diversity: believers from six continents, dozens of denominational backgrounds, an Asian fellowship group, a Filipino fellowship group, mixed-nationality small groups meeting in homes all over the city. Pastor Sam Waddell, who trained under me for five years, became our Associate Pastor for Evangelism; Pastor Kabelo Lelala, a South African, joined us in 2014 and became a full-time Associate Pastor in his own right. Emma Lou — ordained into Christian ministry alongside me all the way back in 1969 — was named Associate Pastor for Discipleship, and has poured herself especially into our Filipino fellowship group in recent years.
I have said before that no other single achievement in my life besides the discovery of holiness itself has surprised me quite the way NBIC has — a congregation I did not plan for decades in advance, built almost by accident out of a gap I happened to notice, that has become one of the steadiest joys of my later years in ministry.
Disciplining Myself to Write
The years around NBIC's founding also became the years I disciplined myself, finally and seriously, to write. My first full book, The Latent Power of Mammon, on financial stewardship, had actually been largely written much earlier, in the months just after our arrival in Nigeria, though it took years more before I considered it finished. In the years around 2014, I wrote Living Nigeria on Purpose and Lagos on Purpose, both tied to a "Living on Purpose" discipleship curriculum I built specifically for believers living outside their home countries — people, like most of our own NBIC congregation, trying to find a sense of rootedness and purpose while permanently unsettled from home. Alongside that, I began, back in the mid-1980s, a twelve-volume discipleship series called Teach Me Your Paths, written with a team of Nigerian pastors, which has had what I would call modest but genuine sales success over the decades since.
I also wrote what became a two-part project on revival and its opposite. The first book, Capturing a Lost Vision: Can Nigeria's Greatest Revival Live Again?, was built on thirteen first-hand interviews with participants in Nigeria's civil-war-era revival of the mid-1960s through mid-1970s — the closest Nigeria has ever come, in my own assessment, to a truly national revival, and a movement I wanted documented before the generation who lived through it passed away. The second, The Seduction of the Nigerian Church, co-written with my Nigerian twin brother Peter Ozodo, was a far more uncomfortable book to write — a candid account of the false teachings and troubling trends, including an unbalanced prosperity gospel, that we believed had sent much of the Nigerian Church off course over four decades. It has not made either of us universally popular. I wrote it anyway, because I believed, and still believe, that love for the Nigerian Church sometimes requires saying uncomfortable things about it in print rather than only encouraging things from a pulpit.
A Holiness Assembly, a University Dream, and a Brother I Finally Grieved
"I have a deeper sense of satisfaction and optimism and acceptance with God than at any time in my life. The future is bright."
From the time I was a small child, I have lived with the conviction that God's people need to periodically go on their faces and seek a renewed heavenly flame — that revival is not a one-time event to be remembered fondly but a condition to be sought again and again, generation after generation. I had witnessed it firsthand in 1983 and 1984. By 2016, more than thirty years later, I felt it was overdue for us to build something deliberate to keep seeking it, rather than simply hoping it would come again on its own.
That year we launched the WATS Glorious Freedom Assembly, an annual gathering devoted entirely to the proclamation of practical holiness of heart and life — belated, by my own admission, but a step in the right direction nonetheless. It began in eastern Nigeria and, within a couple of years, had grown into a ten-day annual event held in both the east and the west of the country. My purpose in launching it was as much corrective as celebratory: I had grown up around a harsh, bitter, and legalistic version of holiness teaching, and I wanted the Assembly to model something different — holiness devoid of that legalism, rooted instead in the simple definition I have carried since 1966 and have never found reason to improve on:
"Holiness is nothing more or less than Christlikeness. It is living like Jesus. It is loving like Jesus. It is the message of the New Testament, over and over again."
No Real Concept of Retirement
People have asked me more than once, as I have moved into my seventies, when I plan to retire. I have never had a satisfying answer for them, because I genuinely do not see a convincing concept of retirement anywhere in the New Testament. The apostle Paul, in his final imprisonment in Rome, wrote to Timothy asking him to bring "the cloak... the scrolls, and especially the parchments" (2 Timothy 4:13) — a request I have always read as evidence that Paul fully intended to keep reading, thinking, and working right up until death interrupted him, not before. My own hero in this regard has been Tom Nelson, pastor of Denton Bible Church, who introduced me to a term I have adopted for myself ever since: "geezerology" — the theology of what a believer is actually called to in the closing decades of life, which is a great deal more than a rocking chair.
I expect to never run out of things God wants me to do as long as I am on top of the ground rather than six feet under it. My own handover of the WATS provost role was not, by my own honest account, a smoothly executed affair — there was real untidiness in that process, and much I would do differently if I had it to do again. But I have learned, watching Peter Ozodo and the Nigerian leaders who followed him, that a good minister of the gospel has to learn how to keep handing over the good work to the next person, preparing them to step into his shoes, while God directs him to whatever his own next step turns out to be.
Fifty Years at My Brother's Grave
I want to include, in this same season of my life, a story I have not often told in public, because it belongs here as much as anything else does. My older brother Bruce drowned when I was seven years old and he was about twelve — the most painful memory of my entire childhood, more painful even than my own rejection of God at around that same age. Bruce was, by every account of everyone who knew him, a godly boy. I remember, the day he died, going out to the back door of our house to empty the garbage and standing there afterward, alone, trying my hardest to cry and finding that I simply could not. That was not normal for a seven-year-old who had just lost his brother. My emotions had, in some way I did not understand until much later, simply locked shut.
Fifty years later, I found myself back at the very spot where Bruce drowned, on a rural Nebraska farm. There, alone, I finally broke down — crying, that day, more than I had managed in the five decades since his death combined, making up, in a strange and overdue way, for every tear that had refused to come as a boy. I found myself talking to my long-gone brother as though he could hear me, telling him about the family I had, the four children, the years in Africa, everything that had happened to me since the day he drowned. And it was there, at his grave after fifty years of silence, that I arrived at a most profound and yet simple insight: in the light of eternity, it does not really matter very much whether a person lives twelve years, as Bruce did, or eighty. He was safe in the arms of Jesus, and had been the whole time, enjoying already the bliss of eternity. He was not, in the end, in the least to be pitied. I was the one who had needed, all those years, to finally let the tears come.
The Dreaming Has Not Stopped
I have said very little, across most of this account, about what may be the boldest and least sensible dream of my entire life. The prophet Joel wrote, more than 2,500 years ago, that God's Spirit poured out would mean that old men shall dream dreams. I am not prepared, even now, to call myself old in any way that stops me dreaming, and the dream I want to set down here is this: a world-class Christian university in Nigeria, capable of training theological students not by the hundreds but eventually by the hundreds of thousands.
In 2016, major steps began to unfold toward that dream. Twenty-five thousand acres of land in rural Ogun State were acquired, at a remarkable price, from ExxonMobil — land where Emma Lou and I still spend several days most months, walking the grounds and helping keep the dream alive on the ground rather than only on paper. My friend and colleague Dr. James Rose has tentatively named the project Africa Christian University. I hope to see it, one day, host over one hundred thousand resident students, and I am also pushing, alongside it, an initiative to bring theological education online to a million WATS students by the middle of this century.
My friend Professor Danny McCain, who has served as a missionary in Nigeria for nearly thirty years, once told me, half-joking, that his own epitaph ought to read: "Gary Maxey: The Man Who Recruited Danny McCain to Nigeria." I told him I would be perfectly content with a much smaller footnote of my own, somewhere in the fine print of a book called Confessions of a Grateful Pilgrim. My role has changed more than once over the years — first the head of a seminary, then the administrator of a church, and both of those roles will, in their own time, fade away too. But there will always be causes worth being promoted into next, and books still worth writing, for as long as I have breath left to write them. I have a deeper sense of satisfaction and optimism and acceptance with God than at any time in my life. The future is bright.
Nigerian Citizenship
A formal seal on a home already fully embraced.
A note on this entry: unlike the chapters above, this one is not drawn from Dr. Maxey's memoirs — both of which were written and published before 2024 — but from the plain fact of the event itself, as recorded elsewhere on this website and confirmed by the family. We have kept it brief rather than invent detail his own books do not contain.
In 2024, after more than forty years of life and ministry in Nigeria, Emma Lou and I became Nigerian citizens. It was a formal step, but not really a new one in any way that mattered to either of us — we had considered Nigeria home in every practical sense for decades already, raised our family here, buried friends here, built two theological institutions here, and given the overwhelming majority of our adult lives to this country and its Church. Becoming citizens simply made official, on paper, what had already been true in our hearts since sometime in the 1980s.
We arrived in Port Harcourt in 1982 as visitors with a work assignment and a returning-flight mentality most missionaries carry, whether they admit it or not — a quiet, unspoken sense that this was a season of service rather than a permanent address. Somewhere across the following four decades, without either of us being able to name the exact year it happened, that mentality simply dissolved. Our children were raised here. Our grandchildren, for those who have settled nearby, call Nigeria home without a second thought. The seminary we founded from nothing in a rented duplex now trains pastors who will shape the Nigerian Church long after Emma Lou and I are gone. Holding a Nigerian passport at this stage of our lives changes very little about how we live day to day. What it does is put a formal, legal name to a loyalty of the heart that was settled a very long time before any government paperwork caught up with it. It is one of the quieter joys of these later years, and one I am glad we lived long enough to receive.
The Gary S. Maxey Network
"God is not calling us merely for good health and longevity. God is calling us to righteousness. He's calling us to holiness. He's calling us to be like Jesus."
A note on this entry: this chapter, more than any other on this page, is not drawn from a book — it describes something too recent for either of Dr. Maxey's memoirs to cover. What follows draws on his own address at the Network's launch in Lagos, and on the stated purpose of the Network itself, rather than on published personal narrative.
Everything this website exists to carry forward runs back to a single evening in May 1966, when a twenty-year-old with too much pride and too little peace finally stopped fighting God over the last, most private corners of his own heart. Sixty years later, that same conviction — that holiness is nothing more or less than Christlikeness, and that it is worth calling an entire generation back to — is the whole reason the Gary S. Maxey Network exists.
The Network was inaugurated in Lagos in partnership with West Africa Theological Seminary, as a way of carrying that same call into a new generation of consecrated believers, reproducing discipleship networks, and transformed communities across Africa and beyond, long after I myself am no longer able to preach it from a platform. It is not a monument to a man. Monuments do not call anyone to repentance, and I have never been interested in being remembered; I have only ever been interested in Nigeria, and the wider Church, actually becoming holy.
If there is one thread that ties every chapter of this account together — the rebellious boy, the piano prodigy who gave up the concert stage, the young missionary who lost everything on a Missouri roadside, the graduate student who nearly broke under his own pride, the young father building a Bible college out of his own living room, the older man weeping at last over a brother's grave fifty years too late — it is this: none of it was ever really about me. Every one of those chapters was God patiently, sometimes painfully, working the same holiness into one ordinary man that He is now inviting an entire generation into together. I did not plan most of what happened in this story. I said yes to what was in front of me, one call at a time, and let God arrange the rest.
"God is not calling us merely for good health and longevity. God is calling us to righteousness. He's calling us to holiness. He's calling us to be like Jesus."
That is the whole of it, really — the same message a nineteen-year-old heard preached, imperfectly, from a campground tabernacle platform in 1965, now handed forward, I hope, to people who were not yet born when I first heard it myself. If you have read this far, you have read the outline of a genuinely ordinary man's life. What was never ordinary was the God who kept pursuing him through every one of these years, and who is, I am fully convinced, not finished yet — with Nigeria, with this Network, or with whoever is reading this now.