The Story of My Spiritual Life: Douglas Selph
12/03/02
Page 2
Post College Years (Where
did everybody go?):
After college, I
worked with as a computer consultant in a company formed by one of the students
from the Fellowship. But eventually all my close friends from the Fellowship
got married or moved away for some reason. Feeling alone and sorry for myself, I
moved back to my parent's house in the Bay Area.
Now my dilemma was
this: how do I live as a dead serious Christian after college? I had gone to
this huge missionary conference in Urbana, IL to explore if I should apply my
faith as a missionary. But I concluded that if I wasn't good at evangelism
here, I wouldn't be any better in some other country. Therefore, I decided to
take my faith seriously by seeing how I could apply myself as an effective
witness right where I was.
The primary thing I
was taught was to be a servant. So I picked (relatively randomly) the Baptist
Church near my parent's house and served there. Soon I met my brother in the
faith at that time, a janitor from the Baptist church, Paul Gasner. Paul was in
his 40's but he was full of joy and the love of God and was young at heart. He
was my chief discipler and confidant. We visited all the hot Christian spots
around the Bay Area - including various revivals, a charismatic meeting at a
Catholic Church, and Jews for Jesus camp retreats where I would learn all about
dancing in circles with praise. I adopted some eating practices from a holistic
and healthy Adventist Church group too. I got quite a smorgasbord of Christian
experiences.
At the Baptist Church
I basically practiced the lone ranger type of Christian witness and ministry. I
got to know as friends a few of the little old women in the Church. I
befriended a few and regularly visited them. But some of these folk wanted more
than I was able to provide. The little bits of time here & there didn't
seem like enough. It felt like the typical response from the Pastor when
approached with my desire for "something more" was to make me a Sunday school
teacher. That is what happened when I started getting serious in the Four
Square and Baptist church in Santa Cruz as well. When they saw my seriousness,
they made me a Sunday school teacher. Was that it? I felt that there was more
to living the Christian life, but anything I could imagine didn't seem possible
in the current Church.
Mark 2:22 "And
no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine bursts the
wineskins, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But new wine must
be put into new wineskins."
If I wanted something
radically different, I would have to find a whole new wineskin altogether. But
I didn't really know what I was looking for. As it turned out, other
developments in my life brought deep answers to these questions.
Pre-Sojourners:
The Wineskin Breaks
Now my Intervarsity
discipling experience was good. But they really didn't do much to prepare you
for some of the weird stuff, or even normal stuff, that you could encounter
while you are out there. As it turned out when I entered "the real world" after
college, there were really different expressions of how the gospel could be
lived out. At this time I was still attending the Baptist church but had moved
out of my parent's house to share an apartment with an old college friend,
Phil. We lived in typical bachelor mode, and I worked in downtown San
Francisco.
Becoming a Christian
through Intervarsity gave me a strong sense that I was a Christian first and
foremost, without any particular leaning toward any denomination. That felt
right. It also lent strength in me to be able to search out a variety of forms.
For fun, I even took the evangelistic woos of the cultish groups seriously. I
felt it would be fun to listen to them and point out the folly of their ways if
I found them, and then I could turn the tables and evangelize them. As it
turned out this attitude was dangerous and was like playing with fire. And yes,
I got burned.
I met an old friend
from high school that was a Jehovah's Witness that gave me his spiel. After
inviting me to his home, he finally got around to asking me what I thought. I
told him and he didn't invite me back. That one was easy, but things started
getting a lot harder.
One day, this older
person on the street approached me as I was leaving a Taqueria, and tells me
that if I say this particular phrase, I would get whatever I want. I thought,
man this guy ought to be easy to take down. I'll just go along with it, want
something ridiculous, and then when it doesn't happen, I'll say, "see!" We set
a lunch date. He tells me about all these successes and described it as if it
was just a scientific curiosity. He asks me if I would like to try it, and I
say "sure." So next date we go to his Buddhist temple to get this holy scroll.
Then, in the evening, doing as instructed, I take the scroll out of it's velvet
case, kneel before it, and prepare to say the sacred phrase with the object of
thing I want in my mind.
But then the
magnitude of what I was about to do overcame me. I was about to break the first
commandment! Faced with that reality I couldn't even say the phrase once. At
the next lunch date with the Buddhist guy, I gave him back the scroll telling
him I couldn't do it, not even once, much to his disappointment.
Then the chief
transitioning encounter took place. One day while at a Laundromat this young
college age guy approached me, named Chris, and started evangelizing me. I
receive him warmly and we end up having follow up times together. Turned out he
was from the Church of Christ. I was immediately impressed with two distinctive
elements that I saw in that group:
1. Their strong, in your face, evangelism styles.
2. Their strong discipleship forms.
You see, Chris
started discipling me. And it turned out he had someone, named Ben, discipling
him. And Ben's discipler had someone discipling him, and so on. Wow, I thought.
Very intentional. Very in your face.
The first point he
challenged me with was that in order to advance the Kingdom of God most
effectively I should associate myself with the group that will nourish me the
most effectively. That made sense. But it strongly implied that I should leave
the Baptist church and join their group. The Baptist church felt like a soft
noodle compared to these guys. That hooked me and I started taking them very
seriously.
However, there were a
couple of big problems. The major one was that they didn't consider me a Christian
because I wasn't baptized knowing the right things at the time. First I had to
know the specific sins in my life I needed to repent of. How else could my
baptism be real, they asked? This was the chief aim of their discipleship, to
have more mature Christians teach the younger ones their sins, so they could
repent of them.
They had other
oddities. In general, they treated the Bible like some sort of exacting textbook. They claimed that the list of sins to repent from were clearly spelled out by
Paul in his epistles. However, it wasn't my style in those days to simply write
people off just because what they said sounded too hard or because I didn't
understand them. Wasn't it the Christian way, I thought, to try to live what
they said, and then learn from my experience of living it, the truth or
falsehood of what they were saying?
During this time, God
brought into my life the Sojourner clan, who would become my home and family
and the answer to a lot of my searching for years to come. If it wasn't for Sojourners,
who knows where I would have ended up? This is how it unfolded.
