During the first summer after our conversion, Paul and I jumped into a cramped Ford Fairlane piloted by the daughter of a prominent family of Emmanuel Church. A recent high school graduate headed for college in the fall, she represented one of the responsible “elders” of our Christian tribe. We were headed for Jesus ’74, an outdoor Christian rock music festival held at a big farm in rural Mercer, Pennsylvania. A farmer organized the event that brought together top-flight Christian musicians for the annual three-day festival. This was to be our Woodstock, with all sorts of Christian denominations—Baptists, Catholics, Mennonites, Assemblies of God, Presbyterians, Methodists, and even non-Christians who might wander in for the music but leave saved by Jesus.
We arrived on a gorgeous summer day, thrilled to be a part of something big and important and cool—and spiritual. Young families camped alongside wild twenty-somethings, toddlers with dirty faces staggered around taking first steps in the crowd, and a few people of our parents’ generation were there. But overwhelmingly there were thousands and thousands of kids our age, nearly all of them white and middle class. For the next three days we sat on blankets, slept in sleeping bags in our tents, feasted on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and roasted marshmallows over the fire pit. We stood up and cheered and danced when early Christian rock-and-roll pioneer Larry Norman appeared on stage with his electric guitar and wearing a long green coat with a serpentine tail.
“Why should the devil have all the good music?” he shouted, throwing his head back as his long blond hair streamed behind him. We all went hoarse screaming our approval. When Phil Keaggy walked onstage—the John Sebastian of our world—he dazzled us with the simplicity of his acoustic guitar, his fingers tripping up and down the frets as he sang the lyrical, joyful song “What a Day,” about the glorious return of Jesus Christ to reclaim his own and take us all to heaven. Nothing moved us like Andraé Crouch, though. The black gospel singer who later turned pop artist, with his sideburns swooping down his cheeks, sat at the piano while the Disciples, his backup band and singers—women with enormous Afros and men wearing tight vests and shirts—provided harmony as he belted out his top hit, “I Don’t Know Why Jesus Loves Me.”
One afternoon at the festival, I found myself alone with Cheryl Smith, the girl I had noticed at Emmanuel the first night I attended service there. She was a smart, shy, and very pretty flute player in the Grand Island Senior High School band. With her blond hair and coy smile, she made it difficult for me to focus on God. After one particularly glorious afternoon of music, we washed each other’s hair under the stand-alone spigot that was our only source of water for the weekend, and by the time our heads were dry, I could imagine sharing my life with her. I only knew a bit about Cheryl’s family story: her house had burned down a year earlier, her parents were divorced, which was unusual in our town, and—unlike many other mothers on the Island—her mom worked outside the home. In a strange way, these unconventional facts of her life made her seem more accessible to me. We were both marginal people in different ways: Cheryl because of her unusual family circumstances, and me because of the unconventional strains in my own family.
I had learned about her journey of faith from a time of sharing at one of our youth circles. She told us that after an initial introduction to the message of Christ while watching a televised sermon at home one night, she attended a youth group at the big Trinity Church. Cheryl’s coming to Christ was not at an altar. For her, the moment came when she returned home that night and, once in her bedroom, got on her knees and prayed, “Jesus, come into my heart.” Cheryl’s father, like mine, was unimpressed with her life-changing conversion. We both laughed ruefully, in the emotional solidarity of children who had seemingly surpassed their parents in understanding the profound. Seventy-two hours before, I had left our house in Grand Island filled with anticipation for the music and for the freedom. I returned with both—and, as a bonus, a huge crush on Cheryl Smith.
Paul and I began the school year in the fall of 1975 drastically changed from the pot-smoking smart alecks our classmates might have remembered from our freshman year. Back then, as in most schools at the time, our culture was dichotomized between the “jocks” and “freaks.” If we were part of any group during freshman and sophomore years, Paul and I were with the freaks. My hair was as long as most of the girls’. I wore jeans every day and smoked both cigarettes and weed—although I never indulged in alcohol, the inebriant of choice for football players and other athletes. But now Paul and I were as holy in our faith as we had been righteous in our rebellion—but much happier. Even though most of the external parameters of our lives did not change—school, work, and home life—the way we functioned within them was transformed. One night Paul and I smashed our huge collection of rock-and-roll albums, purging the satanic strains from our lives. None of my friends had expected me to convert, much less to become an outspoken, dedicated, holy-living “Jesus freak.” I got lots of skeptical looks when I passed out gospel tracts, encouraging them to read and experience the joy of coming to Jesus. One lunch hour, another recently “saved” kid stood up on a cafeteria table to share a message he said he was receiving from God. The room was in shock. Then Paul stood up to provide the exegesis to what our classmate had shared. I began to counsel young people who came to the table for spiritual care.
As this went on, the students in the cafeteria, many of them my friends, sat in stunned silence. The vice principal asked us to stop, but we had hit our stride, with no intention of interfering with the work of the Spirit who we knew had inspired us. We were not on the tables for long, but afterward a few kids who would have never talked to us in the past approached to ask questions. One girl was crying and talked about the guilt she experienced after having had an abortion. I had not thought much about abortion, although I knew what it was: a final escape from a big mistake. I would have imagined that relief and not guilt would be the resulting emotion. I tried to talk to her about the love of Jesus, how forgiving He was and how she should turn to Him for comfort during times of pain, but I am not sure that what I said made much of an impression. We were unprepared for all this, to say the least.
One day, Mr. Anker, my industrial arts instructor, noticed I was carrying a shiny, new, green-vinyl-covered Living Bible. He stopped me after class and said I looked like a man of the cloth. He suggested that I should consider the ministry as a possible profession. I blushed but felt myself stand a bit straighter. The idea had occurred to me before that moment, but his offhand remark validated what had been just a daydream. I began to think seriously about preaching as a calling.
I was a restless kid and eager to get started with my life, especially since I had lost sixteen irreplaceable years as a nonbeliever while the world was rocketing toward the end of the world. At the time, Paul, Cheryl, and our friends at Emmanuel were all reading Hal Lindsay’s Late Great Planet Earth, subtitled A Penetrating Look at Incredible Prophecies Involving This Generation. It painted a bleak picture of an out-of-control youth culture ravaged by promiscuity and drugs, an increase in natural catastrophes, a revival of satanic witchcraft, and the looming threat of cataclysmic war in the Middle East. All portended the apocalyptic appearance of an Antichrist, whose presence preceded the return of Jesus Christ to earth to reign in righteousness over His people. But not before we, the “saved,” would be sucked into the air by way of a secret “rapture,” during which Christians rescued by Christ were lifted to heaven, their sudden disappearance confusing and worrying those who were “left behind.” I did not want to be among them.
The End Times seemed upon us on a global scale. We watched Palestinian terrorists murder Israeli athletes in Munich; Black Panthers had gunned down a California judge they had kidnapped while he presided from the bench. The Weather Underground, a militant network of American radicals, bombed the Pentagon. All this, plus some of the first public displays of homosexuality on screen and in parades, was evidence to us that the world was going to hell. One of the first Christian songs I heard as a new believer, and one that eased me across the cultural threshold from sinful acid rock to heavenly Christian rock, was Larry Norman’s rapture-themed “I Wish We’d All Been Ready,” in which he articulated all our fears and worries about being unprepared for the impending End Times.
The knowledge that our days were numbered informed every aspect of my life. Even though we hadn’t yet graduated from high school, time was running out for Cheryl and me to get married and have kids. I also wanted to enjoy what limited life I had on this earth—and get something done for the Lord. I knew the parable of the talents from the gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus told the story of a man who entrusts his three servants with specific amounts of money—or “talents”—while he takes a long journey. When he returns, the man asks each servant for an accounting of what they’ve done with his capital. Two of them report strong returns on their investments of his money, but one buried his talent in the ground, afraid to risk losing it. The two who took the risk and reaped a reward are commended as “good and faithful servants.” But the fearful one is denounced, then warned: “To everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
The idea of getting nothing accomplished for the Lord before He returned and held me to account preoccupied me. I needed to get going. So it was that during those last two years of high school, Paul and I helped establish a coffeehouse outreach ministry called the Maranatha Christian Center, named for the biblical term meaning “come quickly,” which refers to the longing of early Christians for the return of Jesus Christ. Open only nights and weekends, it was an early version of a pop-up café, with complimentary hot and cold beverages and snacks. Teens from our hometown would sit at bistro tables and talk about spiritual matters with trained counselors. The objective was to win souls to Christ, but we tried to do it gently, by making friends and not overtly pushing an agenda. We would witness, which is to say we would talk about how we found Jesus, to drop-ins who came by for free refreshments. More than once I participated in an exorcism to cast out the demons of drug addiction and promiscuity. We were responding to the alienated zeitgeist of the seventies, offering a place where adolescent cultural rebels, latchkey kids, and children of what seemed like an epidemic of divorce could find instant friendship and connection from caring peers and “elders” who also served as surrogate parents.
One afternoon in the fall of our senior year, the adult leaders of Maranatha, now looking more and more like a real congregation, asked me to share my story at one of their first special services. It was held on a Friday night and included Holy Communion. When the big day arrived, I spent the hours before the service in a complete and accelerating panic—so anxious, at one point, that I almost threw up. That evening my mouth was dry, my hands were shaking, and my stomach was in knots. I mounted the podium and looked down at my carefully prepared remarks. Since I was speaking as a convert, I brought to bear my Jewish background and described how Communion reflects the Passover meal, or seder.
Liturgical churches—Catholic, Episcopal, and Orthodox—make this comparison all the time, but evangelicals don’t. I spoke about Jesus as a Jew celebrating the Feast of the Unleavened Bread, but also as our Savior, who had embraced all people, Jew and gentile. It was an eye-popping revelation for the collection of Christian neophytes and small-town Methodists gathered in the borrowed Presbyterian sanctuary. They had never before considered the ways in which Judaism and Christianity were intertwined, and not just historically but also theologically and in terms of salvation. The feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive: those who attended were eager to learn more details about Christianity that would deepen their faith. For the first time I experienced the satisfaction that comes with an appreciative audience. When it was over, some of the men among the church leadership suggested I might have “a call of God on my life,” hinting at a possible ministerial future. My hope that one day I would become a minister was becoming a reality faster than I had imagined.
The message I wanted to carry to the multitudes was simple: human beings were separated from God because of our sin. The problem went all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, when God told them they could eat from every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They ignored the divine command and willfully took of the fruit of that forbidden tree, thinking they could determine for themselves what was right and wrong and ignore God’s moral law. The result was “the fall,” when mankind became alienated from its creator and was doomed to eternal damnation. Every generation since has carried that same sin in their hearts, perpetuating the problem.
At first, God gave his law in the Old Testament as a set of rules and required sacrifices to set human beings straight, but that failed to do the trick. So God, in his love for humanity, provided the perfect sacrifice his law demanded in the person of Jesus Christ, who came preaching the gospel, or “evangel,” the good news that reunion with God was possible by way of his voluntary death on the cross. The prerequisite to accessing this salvation from damnation is first believing in Jesus’ atoning death and resurrection, making Him the Lord, or boss, of one’s life—putting Him in charge, following and obeying His commands, and praying for His guidance. Reading the Bible was absolutely necessary to understand these things and benefit from them. God, the Bible, prayer, obedience, and telling others how they could be saved from hell was all of a piece—it constituted saving faith. This is what I believed, what I had experienced, and what I wanted to tell the world. The best way to do it would be as a pastor, an evangelist, or a Bible teacher, but I still wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted to do. I simply wanted to share the joy of knowing Jesus and all the wonderful things I was learning from the Bible. Now that I felt I knew God personally and what he wanted from mankind, I was obligated to communicate that truth to every person I encountered. But how I would do that was still uncertain.
Paul and I graduated with Cheryl and Paul’s girlfriend Becky in the class of 1976. Becky was a bold, outspoken tomboy, whose parents were well-loved Bible teachers in our new world. A propitious year, and not only because it was the bicentennial—an evangelical Southern Baptist peanut farmer from Georgia was running for president. We would turn eighteen that year, all of us before November, just in time to cast our first presidential ballots for Jimmy Carter, whose unabashed “born-again” Christianity had never been seen before in American politics. His candidacy brought the realization that we were part of a formidable voting block of some fifty million born-again Christians in the United States. We had until then felt like a powerless, disfavored, disenfranchised minority, but that would now change. Carter was also a Democrat, as was my father, which meant he was for the poor, the “little guy.” All of this seemed exactly what Jesus had wanted from each of us. Carter didn’t need to convince any of us that he was able to run the country; we just wanted one of our own in the highest office in the land. His faith was all the qualification he needed.
It was also during this time that, validated by the elders of my new church, my conviction grew that ministry was, indeed, God’s will for my life. When I first broached the subject of pursuing the ministry with my pastor, Fred Dixon, he suggested seminary—which would have required an undergraduate degree—but college was out of the question. Not only could my family not afford it, but it represented capitulation to a social demand my father resented. He had dropped out of college after his older brother’s death, and no one else in the immediate Schenck universe was college educated. They were self-made men, some even quite wealthy. You launched yourself into the working world, used your brains and brawn, and made something of yourself. Nobody needed a piece of paper on the wall to accomplish any of that.
Dad had inculcated this ethic in Paul and me, and we approached our new ministerial careers in the same way he approached his phone business. We would be entrepreneurial men of the cloth, starting our own religious enterprises, hunting down and securing funders, relying not on ancient liturgies and millennia-old conventions but on our own wits and business acumen. We imagined ourselves to be old-fashioned itinerant ministers, preaching, teaching, baptizing, commissioning, even ordaining clergy all over the country, on the fly, just like the first apostles.
Cheryl and I talked about marriage, but she planned to go to college. I was impatient—I wanted to start my ministry with her by my side immediately. I worried that her leaving for school would break the momentum we had started. I promised her she could continue her studies if we got married, but her mother was upset that her daughter would be getting married so young and worried that Cheryl would never be self-sufficient without a college education.
The ministry became my top priority, but I needed to support my family and be the head of the household. I imagined Cheryl and I would travel around the country for a while, or maybe serve in a pastorate as I established my reputation as a clergyman and preacher. We would eventually settle and raise our family. I would always work, and work hard, while Cheryl would remain at home and raise our children. Our community reinforced this interpretation of how a family should be structured, especially in the face of societal pressures emanating from the women’s movement that threatened the hierarchy of the household as we knew it. Marriage was a “calling” and something sacred. Your mate was “God’s match for you.” Like Eve to Adam, Cheryl would be my “helpmeet,” the caretaker of our family’s needs, while, in turn, I would provide the sustenance. I was to “love her as Christ loves the church.” She would submit to me as I submitted to Christ—that was what the Bible taught.
Paul and Becky were following the same path, and our parents were surprisingly supportive of the marriages of their two eighteen-year-old sons to two eighteen-year-old girls. At the time, I was working at a retail electronics store, making just enough to pay for my gas and a few other things, but I was sure I could do better in short order and earn enough to rent a small apartment. Paul had already been accepted at Elim Bible Institute, in Lima, New York, a school founded in 1924 to train Christ-centered, spiritually empowered leaders who would carry the gospel into the world to prepare us for the End Times. He had secured the sponsorship of a church, which would cover his tuition and expenses, and would attend in the fall. As soon as I could bank enough to take care of Cheryl and me, I planned to go there as well. Elim was a nonaccredited, private religious academy, so Paul and I would not obtain formal degrees there, but it would qualify us for ministerial ordination.
In the fall of ’76, as I was wondering exactly what my next steps needed to be, Reverend David Brett, a professor of “personal evangelism” at Elim, came to our coffeehouse as a guest speaker. He spoke to us about his work with Teen Challenge, the worldwide network of church-sponsored rehabilitation centers for recovering drug addicts founded by David Wilkerson, a legendary figure in our world and author of the bestseller The Cross and the Switchblade, about his work in New York City and his success in bringing Puerto Rican gang members to Christ. Brett had worked with Wilkerson in early-sixties Greenwich Village, where they had pioneered the coffeehouse outreach model of evangelism that we used as the pattern for our Maranatha Center, which that night was packed for his appearance.
Reverend Brett brought a single, autographed copy of Wilkerson’s book, and he gave me the prized volume. It became my other Bible. I devoured it in a week and referred to it constantly. At last I had found the direction I longed for; each page revealed answers to questions about how I was going to conduct my calling. I wanted to be one of those Christians who plunged deep into the margins of American life, carrying the message into ghettos and to do my part in hastening the evangelization of the world—a prerequisite for the return of Christ, which I believed was imminent.
With Dave’s encouragement, I visited a Teen Challenge center in the nearby city of Rochester, to see if there were any opportunities for me to get started in the kind of hands-on work I was picturing. When I arrived at two side-by-side, decrepit Victorian houses in a dangerous inner-city neighborhood, I instantly knew this was where I belonged. The door opened and a short, stocky African-American man wearing a clerical collar poked his head out, probably assuming I was another junkie in need of shelter. Instead I told him I was applying for a job. He gave me a big smile and introduced himself as the director, Reverend Herb Severin. After a few minutes of friendly conversation and an instant interview, I became the center’s new van driver. Chauffeuring a bunch of junkies around may not have been the glamorous preaching life I had imagined, but I humbly accepted.
I quit my job at the electronics store and told my parents, Paul, and Cheryl that I’d be moving into a residential center for heroin addicts. My parents were in shock. Cheryl was excited but concerned about a long-distance relationship. Paul was thrilled I’d be an hour closer to him at Elim. Cheryl and I hastened our plans for marriage so she could join me in short order, and soon I was settled in my new room, a former storage area under the staircase at the Teen Challenge house.
When I arrived in that late autumn of 1976, about a dozen young men, most of them Puerto Ricans from Brooklyn, were living at the facility in Rochester. One day, about a week after I started driving the center’s van, Adalberto, a recovering addict and resident counselor, suggested that I preach in the chapel during services the next day. I was taken aback. In my mind, this was true ministry of the Word, and I was intimidated—I had only ever given that one Friday sermon to our fledgling Maranatha congregation in the rented sanctuary. But I was thrilled at the opportunity. The next day my Teen Challenge congregation consisted of a dozen bedraggled and indifferent residents seated on a hodgepodge of worn-out chairs, but I approached my assignment as if it were in the pulpit of Westminster Abbey. I was a hit with the crowd, and our director began to organize preaching opportunities for me in area churches that supported our work. I can remember looking down at my hands on one of those occasions, with my fingers clamped so tightly to the pulpit’s side panels that my knuckles had turned white. But I was growing as a preacher, hitting my stride, and knew that I was getting through to people.
Meanwhile, back home in Grand Island, our wedding preparations were gaining momentum. Cheryl was in anguish about disappointing her mother, who, not surprisingly, still wanted her in college instead of married to me and living among drug addicts. But Cheryl knew what she wanted, so she borrowed a wedding dress from a close friend, arranged to use the Presbyterian church and its modest fellowship hall for our ceremony, and organized a cake-and-punch reception. To honor my father, we had a formal Jewish-Christian affair with dual officiants. Cheryl joined me beneath the chuppah and during a brief ceremony we recited our vows. I turned to Cheryl and said, “I will love you, comfort you, honor you, cherish you, and keep you, forsaking all others. Clinging only to you, as long as we both shall live.” She repeated the same to me. And then we kissed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Schenck.”
Until death do us part, we were one.