Posted by Helen on: 03.08.2007 /
This morning I had coffee with Tom, who told me over the phone he has been ‘challenging America since 1962′.
Tom called me last summer in response to my local newspaper article. He wanted to have coffee with me so we could talk; I asked if we could wait until my children were back in school. He got back in touch a week or so ago and we arranged to meet this morning.
Tom is now in his seventies. He was born and raised in Ireland. He was raised in church and as a teenager he was “Junior Church Warden” – a prestigious position. However he stopped going as a young adult once he found out they didn’t have good answers to his questions.
After a few years in the navy he became an industrial engineer. He found himself becoming troubled by the question “How can people get along better?” as he observed the unions and workers and bosses. Someone suggested he came to America to do some training and he had the opportunity to do that in the late 1950s. He continued to notice that people where he worked didn’t get along well. In 1961 he had an experience of God speaking to him (probably not audibly) which caused him to go back to the Bible and study it. He quit his job in 1962 and started challenging America. He wrote to a number of well-known leaders at that time but it seems like that main result of that was to get the police after him.
These days he writes to local people and/or has conversations with them, challenging them.
He goes to the church I used to go to but he doesn’t belong; he says he couldn’t belong; he doesn’t think anyone there is born again.
He’s very opposed to hypocrisy and self-righteousness. He doesn’t like large churches because he thinks they’re all about the pastor’s ego. He cares a lot about the environment and stopped taking communion in one church because they used little plastic cups for the wine (or grape juice) which he considered very wasteful. He pointed out that Jesus wasn’t wasteful – he had his disciples pick up the leftovers after feeding the five thousand people. I loved that application of the Bible, which I’d never heard before.
He doesn’t believe the Bible is the Word of God but he does believe it has truth in it. He likes to ask people questions and he generally finds they don’t have good answers. He asked me questions but when I tried to answer them I couldn’t tell whether he agreed with my answers or not, since he didn’t want to just ‘tell me the answer’.
It amused me to think of him telling lots of conservative Christians “You’re not born again” and all the leaders they look up to aren’t either.
Tom thinks that heaven shouldn’t be about where people go when they die but more about how we can be building heaven on earth now, before we die.
One thing of interest to me personally was, a couple of months ago he met with the pastor I met with last April (I don’t think Tom knew that) and in the course of conversation he asked that pastor what he thought of what I’d had in the newspaper. Apparently the pastor said “Not much – I think it harms the church”. Oh, and Tom said what he thought when he heard that was “But how has the church harmed Helen Mildenhall?” I liked that :-). Tom thinks
I told Tom that my favorite picture of the Kingdom of God in the Bible is the huge tree birds nest in. I said, it’s ridiculous to think of a bird harming that tree.
Tom wrote down four questions for me to think about on the back of a piece of junk mail he’d converted into spare paper. He wants to get together again sometime to see what my answers are. I said that would be fine. The questions are:
I’m not sure what his answers to these are but I do know that they aren’t going to be the traditional conservative evangelical answers. I asked him if he thought I was closer or further from the Kingdom than he had previously thought, now he’d had a chance to talk with me. He said he didn’t know nearly enough about me yet to form any sort of judgment about that – he said he’s slow to judge in that way. I was pleased with that response.
Comment by: Benjamin Ady
1Didn’t Jesus himself answer question one in Luke 4?
Isn’t “Define the Holy Spirit” akin to “Define God” or “Swallow the ocean”?
Tom sounds fascinating. I’d think I’d like to meet him and get to know him.
Comment by: Helen
2Benjamin, I could imagine you and Tom getting along well.
Comment by: Marty SB
3Helen – is there any update on your dialogue with Rev. F. Dean Lueking?
Comment by: Helen
4Hi Marty, I just updated the page
Why I don’t go to church anymore
The last response in that table is up online on the newspaper’s site but hasn’t been in print yet. I think they intend to print it at some point, but at present the newspaper is busy with local election opinions (there’s a local election coming up in April).
Rev Lueking is interested in what else we can do to dialog and invite people to join us, but we haven’t pursued that. I think he’s overseas at the moment because last I heard he was leaving on a trip and he hasn’t written again to say he’s back.