CHAPTER 12: WHAT ABOUT BOB?

YANKEE HAD A STRANGE VISION for Bob. He envisioned Bob as a captain in the church’s bus ministry for Sunday school.

Could the same man who possessed a hair-trigger kill switch drive a bus full of kids to church? It was hard to believe it could be true. But it was. Even I wasn’t afraid of Bob anymore. He’d been transformed from a raging grizzly bear to a teddy bear, almost overnight. Only God could have transformed Bob from a street fighter to an evangelist to children across the city!

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, bus ministries gained popularity through the leadership of Dr. Jack Hyles, the controversial pastor of the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana. Hyles had built the largest Sunday school ministry in the nation by deploying school buses all over Hammond and the surrounding areas —including the city of Chicago —to pick up children and bring them to his Sunday school. Every week, thousands of children were bused in to hear about Jesus.

He and his team of bus captains were so effective at reaching young ones for Christ that Hyles started doing conferences to train other church leaders. Thousands of pastors and church leaders from across the nation attended his conferences to learn from his efforts.

Yankee was just getting his bus ministry started and was planning on taking a group of potential bus captains to attend the next Hyles conference. He invited Bob to be part of the group that was driving from Colorado to Indiana to see firsthand what a successful bus ministry looked like. Bob agreed to go. After hearing Dr. Hyles rant and rave about the need for reaching children with the gospel, Bob signed on to be one of Yankee’s bus captains so more children could hear about Jesus.

But Bob wasn’t content just to have a bus route that picked up kids every Sunday morning. He wanted to have the biggest bus route in Yankee’s ministry. He told Yankee that his goal was to break one hundred kids on one bus (even though the maximum official capacity was seventy-two!).

Bob threw himself into the bus ministry the way he used to throw himself into fights —full bore, giving it his all. Every Saturday morning, he’d drive to apartment complexes and trailer courts loaded with candy and popcorn and prizes to hand out to kids. He’d go to the poorest parts of the city and go door-to-door, introducing himself to parents, telling them his story, sharing the gospel, and encouraging them to let their kids ride the church bus to Sunday school the next day.

Parents putting their kids on a bus with a total stranger is unthinkable today, but a generation ago, it was a weekly occurrence in many cities and towns across the country. “Get ’em saved young” was the mantra, making bus ministries a big outreach focus in many Baptist and conservative churches at the time. And it worked! God used bus ministries to reach tens of thousands of children for Christ all over the United States.

As a result of Bob’s open, authentic, sincere love for Jesus, many moms and dads were comfortable letting their kids go with him to church. And the kids absolutely loved him.

When I was ten years old, Uncle Bob let me tag along on his bus. He had recruited my uncle Jack to be the bus driver on his pickup route. It shocked me to see these two men who had once tormented and terrified me laughing and joking with all the kids. Uncle Bob, who just a few months earlier had been in jail for manslaughter, ran up and down the school bus aisles, roaring with laughter as he kidded around and played games with them.

As the bus made its rounds, we sang praise songs to Jesus at the top of our lungs.

Could this be the same man I used to hide from at Grandma and Grandpa’s house? The truth is, he was not the same man; in fact, neither of them were the same men they used to be. I could see that with my own eyes. Their faces shone with joy, where once I saw only furrowed brows and dark, angry eyes.

If these other kids only knew . . . , I thought to myself. If they could have seen Bob and Jack the way they used to be, they would have been terrified. They would be running away instead of laughing and joking.

But Bob and Jack had been made new in Christ. The kill switch had been replaced with a new switch —reaching kids with the gospel.

Once Bob finally achieved his one-hundred-rider goal for his Sunday school bus route, he decided it was time for his next big challenge. “I’m going to Florida Bible College,” he announced at a big family dinner one Sunday at my grandparents’ house. I was shocked. Bob was a Colorado boy through and through. He loved to hunt in the mountains and fish in the rivers and drive the city streets of Denver.

I wondered what a Bible college was, anyway. Whatever it was, it had the word “Bible” in it, so I thought it must be a good thing.

While this news totally surprised our family, it absolutely astounded his old drinking buddies and street-fighting friends, who thought Bob had gone Jesus crazy.

True to his word, Bob packed up his stuff and moved to Florida Bible College (FBC) at the end of the summer. Although he was twenty-six years old, he felt like a kid again, absorbing God’s Word in his classes and deepening his relationship with God while holding firm to his passion for telling others about Jesus.

But learning how to walk with Jesus can be a sticky, messy process. Just like with Uncle Jack, Bob found that his kill switch sometimes switched back on even after his come-to-Jesus moment.

Soon after he started attending the college, Bob met the girl who would one day become his wife, a tall, big-smiled beauty from South Carolina named Diane. One Saturday night after a late date with Diane, Bob sneaked back into his dorm room, being careful not to wake up his roommate, Tony.

The next morning was church, which was held downstairs, right there in the dorm. But instead of getting up to go to church, Bob slept in. Besides the fact that he’d gotten in late on Saturday night, he was exhausted from school, studies, and his work as a plumber for the school.

That’s when Jerry, a fellow student at the college, barged into Bob’s room to wake him. During the church service, Jerry had been thinking about something that he was convinced God wanted him to talk to Bob about. So, dressed in his white dress shirt and oversize 1970s necktie, Jerry walked out of church and marched up the stairs, down the hallway, and into Bob’s dorm room.

“Bob, get up! I need to talk to you!” Jerry said urgently.

“What’s going on?” Bob asked, cursing, groggy from being roused out of a deep sleep.

“Don’t curse at me!” Jerry replied piously. “The Lord frowns on it. Just like he frowns on you locking your dorm room door at night. I should be able to come into your room anytime to fellowship with you and Tony. Get up right now, Bob. The Lord wants us to talk.”

Jerry was a legalistic guy who held on to rules the way dogs hold on to ham bones. And like a dog, he wouldn’t let this go.

“Get out of here! I’m trying to sleep,” Bob yelled at him, cursing again, raising the intensity of his voice to scare this modern-day Pharisee away.

It didn’t work.

“I’m not leaving. The rules state clearly that room doors should not be locked, and you lock your door all the time. We are going to straighten this out right now,” Jerry insisted.

The kill switch was about to flip. Bob growled from underneath the covers. “If you don’t get out of here right now, I’m going to beat the s — right out of you!”

Naively underestimating Bob’s capacity for violent rage, Jerry stood his ground. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he said. “I’m not leaving until we figure this out.”

With that, Bob sprang out of bed, his huge frame clothed in nothing but tighty-whities. In a flash, he picked Jerry up off the ground and slammed him full force onto the dorm room floor.

Realizing that he had literally awakened a sleeping giant, Jerry scrambled to get up and ran for the door, but Bob grabbed him by the back of his shirt with one hand and hammered the side of his head with blows from the other.

“Jesus, help me!” Jerry screamed, trying to escape from Bob’s vise grip on his shirt.

But as he pulled away, Bob’s grip on the back of his shirt was so tight that all the buttons in front popped off and Jerry’s shirt was completely ripped off him. Shirtless, but still wearing his oversize tie, Jerry ran for the door and down the hallway, screaming, “I’m gonna tell the president of the college what you did to me!”

Bob ran after Jerry and tackled him in the hallway. “You ain’t tellin’ nobody nothin’!” Bob yelled.

Grabbing Jerry by his necktie, Bob dragged him back to his dorm room, threw him in, and locked the door behind them.

“You wanna talk,” Bob said, “let’s talk.”

By the time Bob’s roommate, Tony, came back to their dorm room after church, Jerry was in tears. Tony, shocked at the sight of his bleeding, shirtless next-door neighbor —who frequently barged into their room day and night without being invited —and his underwear-clad roommate, asked, “What the heck is going on?”

Between sobs, Jerry whimpered, “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have been judging Bob for locking the dorm room door. I shouldn’t have woken him up from a dead sleep.” Jerry was apologizing profusely for anything and everything in a desperate effort to keep Bob from flying into another rage.

Bob just sat there quiet, disappointed that all it took was a loud voice early in the morning to flip that dreaded kill switch. Like Grandpa and Jack before him, Bob was realizing that while being saved from the penalty of sin happened instantly at the moment of salvation, being saved from the power of sin is a lifelong struggle.

FBC was a great place for Bob to learn how to live for Jesus and better fight his battle with sin. Yankee had graduated from FBC less than ten years earlier. It was the epicenter of the gospel movement that had given Yankee his crystal-clear gospel messaging and his crystal-clear vision for reaching young people for Jesus.

From the start, FBC’s emphasis was youth ministry. Its legendary founder, Dr. A. Ray Stanford, had been saved later in life. Shortly after his conversion, he had started a youth ministry in his own home that ballooned to a couple hundred teenagers. As his ministry grew, he spawned other youth ministries and nicknamed them “Christian Youth Ranches.” Although “Christian Youth Ranch” sounded like a reform school run by priests for wayward kids, teenagers came out in droves.

Ray believed that teenagers came to Christ quicker and spread the gospel faster than adults, so even though he eventually planted a church, deep down, he really viewed his church as a means to fund and fuel his youth ministry.

As his youth movement grew, thousands of teenagers from all across South Florida began attending Youth Ranches. Once teens got saved, they were trained to grow and go. From square one, they were equipped to share the gospel and unleashed to do it. The result was teens reaching teens, who, in turn, reached and discipled even more teens.

What Jack Hyles was to Sunday school bus ministry, Ray Stanford was to youth ministry. Because of his driving passion for reaching and discipling young people, Ray launched Florida Bible College, which helped propel the Youth Ranch movement beyond South Florida. By the mid-70s, the college had well over a thousand students, many of whom had been reached by the Christian Youth Ranches across the United States —including the one Yankee had started in Arvada, Colorado.

Yankee’s Youth Ranch had grown at a phenomenal rate. In his church of a few hundred adults, at one point the youth group mushroomed to eight hundred teenagers. I longed to go to the Youth Ranch meetings with my big brother, Doug, who had also been dramatically impacted by Yankee’s church. Although I was technically too young, I persistently begged and pleaded. “Don’t worry; I’ll sneak you in,” Doug finally promised.

Even though there were seven years between us, Doug and I had a special bond as brothers. But that bond would be stressed and stretched in the coming months in ways I never imagined in my worst nightmares.