All our young lives my identical twin brother, Paul, and I had searched for a place to belong. We were two Jewish kids who knew no other religious identity but, at the same time, were no longer practicing the faith in which we had been raised. Marge, our mother, was a convert and our father, Hank, had lost interest in continuing our religious education when the social and financial demands of temple membership exceeded what he thought was fair. And so our bar mitzvah preparations ended abruptly.
Our hometown of twelve thousand, Grand Island, New York, was literally an island, smack dab in the middle of the Niagara River, just three miles upstream from the famous falls. When I rode my bike along West River Road, I could see Ontario, Canada, and when I hitchhiked to a friend’s house on the East River, I would look across to the Buffalo suburbs of Kenmore and Tonawanda. We were the youngest of four, our two sisters, from our mother’s first marriage, were six and eight years older. We all loved each other but our ages, different families of origin, and respective cultural experiences—they had started out in life as Christians, my brother and I as Jews—not to mention the unique bond that is twinship, left Paul and me in our own world.
So many times in my life, Paul was the catalyst for momentous change. And none of the biggest moments—not the years of ministry, not the arrests for our acts of conscience in anti-abortion protests, not the move to Washington, D.C., or the work with elected officials, the publicity, or the politics—would have happened if Paul had not forged a friendship with a Methodist minister’s son, Charlie Hepler. Charlie was an intense, withdrawn, and troubled boy, but Paul drew him out in long conversations about God, about the Bible, about Christianity and prayer. My brother would come home and share those conversations with me in the basement room we claimed as our private space. I listened with genuine interest and curiosity, but also skepticism—even worry. I could not ignore all the stories about the Manson Family murders, or how Hare Krishna devotees had left secure middle-class lives to wear strange robes and sell flowers in airports and on sidewalks. It was a time when weird cults ensnared vulnerable young people and turned them into zombies.
My brother was a levelheaded guy, so all this talk about Christianity felt unsettling to both my Jewish and secular sensibilities. Our father was not a pious man, but his ethnic Jewish identity was strong and predicated as much in family tradition as in suspiciously viewing any majority religious group as potential persecutors. For me, all Christians were pretty much alike, and I knew nothing about Methodists, much less their founder John Wesley, who emphasized not the busy, endlessly rationalizing mind but touching the heart of the believer.
As Paul talked about Jesus, I remembered when, as a six-year-old boy, I went to play at the house of a Portuguese-Catholic neighbor. In my little friend’s bedroom hung a crucifix, the image of a bloodied man, with jutting ribs and a crown of thorns, dangling from nails. I was transfixed by it, yet frightened into a sleepless and fitful night. Years later, when I was a pot-smoking thirteen-year-old, I went to the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium and encountered the man on the cross again—this time earnest but still tragic—from a very different perspective in the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar.
The musical was consistent with who we were back then—too young to have been involved in the counterculture of the sixties, but just old enough to indulge in its lingering messages and music and challenges to authority. Our father set the tone and the direction—more accurately the lack of direction—for our lives. He subscribed to the “hands-off” school of parenting with spasms of explosive rage. In general, our early adolescence was remarkably unsupervised. This comported with the way Dad grew up in the thirties and forties, with a working mother and a chronically ill father who was often hospitalized. For us, though, coming of age during the tempestuous post-Vietnam era meant exposure to the youth culture of the day, but without the existential stakes of being drafted. We protested the bombing of Cambodia, Nixon, and napalm. Jesus as countercultural rebel fit nicely into those times. We challenged everything, our hair was long, and we wore army fatigue jackets and provocative T-shirts. Our bedroom was festooned with beads and plastered with iridescent posters, including one of Popeye and Olive Oyl having sex—all bathed in the glow of a black light and the haze of marijuana smoke. In those days the life of Christ was not completely alien to me, but the Christian religion Paul was exploring seemed a bridge too far. And yet, slowly, I began to venture across it. At least to see what might be on the other side.
One day Paul told me Charlie had invited us to go to church with him. Not his father’s prestigious church, Trinity United Methodist—a large, established institution, located prominently in the center of the Island—but the Emmanuel Evangelical United Brethren. This group, which had recently merged with the Methodists, had colonial-era German roots. Emmanuel, known among locals as the other Methodist church, had a relatively young minister and a slightly bohemian vibe, and Charlie liked the motley group of young people who gathered there. We joined him for the Friday-night prayer meeting.
Charlie escorted us into the simple sanctuary that reminded me of our childhood temple, Beth El, in Niagara Falls. A prayer service was under way and Pastor Fred Dixon came down off the platform to be with the people, a stark contrast with our rabbi’s remote behavior. Emmanuel felt more like being in somebody’s living room than in a religious ritual. I looked around at the pews: older men and women sat with young parents of small children, and there were many teenagers, most a few years older than Paul and me. It was the unseen presence, though, that affected me. My brother and I sensed something more than simple human companionship in that place—a presence outside and above the people collected there. I would later call it “the Spirit of God,” but I had no such language then. Whatever it was, I was transported to a new realm, one that was permeated with love and an overwhelming, palpable, and almost visible energy.
After the service, Charlie led us to the adjoining fellowship hall, where about fifteen kids were sitting on the floor in a circle. They looked like us: boys with shoulder-length hair, T-shirts, torn-up jeans, and weathered army jackets. Two older girls strummed guitars and led the group in singing as Paul, Charlie, and I found spots in the circle. I was unsure about being a Jewish kid in a Christian church. I found out only later that everyone was delighted Charlie had managed to bring the two Jewish Schenck boys to the meeting; they had never spent time with Jews before. To show us how much they accepted us, one of the girls told us the Jewish people were “the apple of God’s eye.” We had grown up with regular infusions of the “Chosen People” narrative but never imagined that, for these Christians, Jews would have a special place in God’s plan for the world. Christians had always been portrayed as anti-Semites. To have our Jewishness celebrated, rather than shunned, came as a gratifying surprise.
When the group sat on the floor, leaning against each other, swaying back and forth to the music, I tentatively joined them as they sang, “I’ve got peace like a river / I’ve got peace like a river / I’ve got peace like a river in my soul.” Some of them had their eyes closed; others looked at each other and exchanged smiles. We all rocked gently in the candlelight, and gradually I got the hang of the chorus. I didn’t expect to be moved or to feel as if I had caught a glimpse of something I had longed for. But in that room, for the first time in my life, I knew a profound feeling of comfort and connection as peace flowed like a river in my own restless, troubled, adolescent soul.
* * *
Paul and I returned to the Friday-night meetings, but not because I had come to a personal belief in God—not yet. We have always been seekers, and we were looking for something more meaningful than the cultural and religious netherworld we inhabited at the time. Untethered to a synagogue or religious study, classic rebels without causes, we experienced what I now realize was spiritual hunger. We read the Hindu Vedas, books about the search for extraterrestrial life, and what was known as the Aquarian Gospel—an early-twentieth-century manuscript that was a potent mix of astrology, Christianity, and philosophy. We went to meetings at Emmanuel because we liked the kids who were there, the feeling of community, the introduction to Jesus—it all felt harmonious. It was a new kind of family.
Charlie told us a special speaker was going to lead a combined Lenten service at Trinity Methodist, his father’s church. I had no idea what Lent was but knew it came around the time of Passover, which somehow made it less alien. The fact that Dr. Peter Bolt would be coming all the way from England was a big deal in our small town. Plus, I had never been inside a formal Methodist church and I was curious. I envisioned there would be hooded monks intoning Latin prayers, but Charlie reassured us it would be a lot like Emmanuel. The rest of our Friday-night group was going and Paul and I didn’t want to be left out, so we accepted Charlie’s invitation. Before the event, my brother and I planned our strategy. We worried the ushers might throw us out if they discovered we were Jewish. What would we say? Argue or just get out as quickly as possible? We decided we would leave peacefully.
I was a nervous wreck, but the people were warm and loving, accepting and welcoming, just as the young people at Emmanuel were on Friday nights. And once again I felt a presence in the sanctuary. We were instantly at home and our sense of comfort and safety only increased as the service wore on. No guitars this time, but instead a strenuous organ nearly drowned out the voices of the congregants. Then Reverend Bolt preached the sermon and invited us to “meet here the living Lord Jesus Christ.” I wanted to respond, but I hesitated as I thought of my father’s disapproval. Our bedtime stories were often about the Holocaust and the crimes against humanity, mostly against Jews, that had been perpetrated by Christians. Part and parcel of this was his emphasis on not believing the tenets of Christianity, because he saw them as being intrinsically hostile toward Jews. (That didn’t stop him from falling in love and deciding to marry my mother, who was a Christian. But she had to agree to convert.) Now Reverend Bolt was encouraging us to step forward and embrace those Christian beliefs—and change our identity in the process. The implications were enormous.
As Reverend Bolt waved people forward, the organ played, first softly and then gradually building to a crescendo that reflected the experience in my soul. As I saw others leave their pews, it was as if an external power was forcing me to join them. I recognized more fully than I had ever before that Christianity, in all its grandeur and simplicity, was the true and even ultimate belief. Paul and I glanced at one another, then simultaneously rose and made our way to the aisle.
Here I was, an already awkward sixteen-year-old male, bending my knees for the first time in my life to pray in public. Yet I did it almost automatically, feeling barely self-conscious. Paul was right beside me. “Dear God, I admit I am a sinner in need of your saving,” I repeated after Reverend Bolt. “I confess my sin and trust in Jesus alone as my Savior. I pledge to follow Christ as my Lord. Thank you for your great gift of salvation. Send your Holy Spirit to help me live for You all the days of my life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
Some at the altar were crying. Others looked profoundly relieved. I don’t know what I looked like, but Paul’s face betrayed a simple happiness that I imagine might have also been on my own. A lifetime of weight had lifted from my shoulders, and I experienced a satisfaction I had never known—not in temple, not in a marijuana high, not during sex with a girlfriend, not at a concert. Nowhere had I known the peace that I knew at that moment, in my soul, psyche, body. As I returned to my pew, some who had remained seated were smiling approvingly as we passed. The service closed as we sang:
It is joy unspeakable and full of glory,
Full of glory, full of glory;
It is joy unspeakable and full of glory,
Oh, the half has never yet been told.
I felt every word.
As Paul and I left the church, we met our friends from Emmanuel who had been sitting on the floor in Trinity’s expansive vestibule. They had sent a spy in to report on whether we had responded to the altar call, and when it was confirmed we had, there were lots of “Praise the Lord”s. They had wondered if this would be the night we would be saved.
In fact, it was.
When we joined up with our group, smiling and awash in the afterglow of our official and, for evangelicals, crucial public profession of faith, they effusively congratulated us on what we had done. I felt instantly better—spiritually, morally, and even socially. Now I belonged: to God and to the community that had so warmly welcomed, accepted, even affirmed me. Peace was present in that group that I had never experienced at home, in school, or anywhere else. There was friendship and there was music. Our soundtrack was the soaring organ music and the intimate strumming of a guitar while youthful voices sang. Everything about these kids and their churches fed my ravenous soul. I was happy in a way I had never before experienced.
Something about the gospel and the Christian religious experience made sense to me, both intellectually and emotionally. Perhaps this was evidence of my Jewish background: we learned it was our responsibility to wrestle with God and spiritual messages in an active way—as Jacob wrestled with the angel. All that I had learned so far came together. I needed to only look at the positive impact Jesus had made on the lives of those I had come to know, and I wanted the same for me.
At the end of the night, Paul went off with one of our new spiritual companions, and I headed home alone. All my senses heightened in new and extraordinary ways. I looked up at the stars and was struck by the sheer magnificence of God’s creation. I felt so completely transformed, I assumed that it would be evident to everyone—strangers on the street, my classmates, my sisters, and of course my parents. Perhaps they would be impressed by my joy and conviction. At some point during that walk home, I realized that part of my responsibility as a new Christian was to bear witness to my conversion. And the place to start was at home.