Storytelling reveals meaning without
committing the error of defining it.
— Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
One of the problems with writing history or telling a story is deciding where to begin. Being the first missionaries to be arrested and then expelled from Taiwan by the Republic of China requires some explanation beyond the immediate circumstances around the events, at least back to 1955, when I decided that God was calling me to “full-time Christian service.”
Before the Reverend Roy Anderson asked me to come to his office, I knew nothing about what was required to become an ordained minister. The pastor, in the last year of his active ministry and having served for only one year at Iowa Park, sat across from me behind his desk. His office was a small room next to the choir loft with a window overlooking the parking lot in the back of the church. We were surrounded by shelves crammed and stacked with books that reeked of age—a smell I would come to treasure. To the brash seventeen-year-old sitting in front of him, he looked old and uncomfortable.
“Mike,” he said, his hands fidgeting with papers on his desk, “God calls different people in a lot of different ways, but the experience you had last Sunday surprised me.” He was right to wonder. He didn’t know me and had seen no evidence that I was “preacher material,” as they used to say. He knew my mother sang in the choir and sometimes played the organ. He knew of my sister, Cynthia, who had been active in youth fellowship, sang in the choir, and was sometimes a soloist on Sunday mornings when she came back for visits from the University of Texas. As I sat there so full of myself, I didn’t wonder if he knew anything about me or if it mattered.
“Yes, Sir,” I murmured, thinking that being polite was good when I didn’t have anything to say.
“You don’t have any question that it was God speaking to you in the service Sunday night?” he asked doubtfully.
“No, Sir,” I responded. Of course, I didn’t have any doubts; the experience was real. I was sure. I didn’t reveal, however, how weeks before the experience I had said to my mother and friends, “The last thing I would ever be is a preacher.” The irony was not lost on me as I thought about what had happened Sunday night.
Papa, mother’s father Wilhelm Mahler, had been a minister. He had come to the U.S. an immigrant from Germany at the age of twelve because his parents wanted him to escape the kaiser’s draft. In his new land, Wilhelm felt his own call to ministry and served in south Texas in the old Evangelical Church, later to become the Evangelical United Brethren Church, and still later to become part of The United Methodist Church. Thin and five feet in stature with a mustache and a full head of hair, he stopped preaching at the start of World War II when there was mounting suspicion of German immigrants. He and Granny also canceled their German newspaper subscription. Had he continued as a minister, it would have been necessary to stop preaching in German. He didn’t think his English was good enough, so he became a paperhanger.
Denied the outlet of two Sunday sermons and a meditation on Wednesday nights, Papa directed his preaching to the family at meals. When my mother, sister, and I would visit, they didn’t change their usual practice of prayers before eating; more prayers, testimonies, and singing hymns came after the meals. Breakfast took forever! And it wasn’t much better at lunch and supper. There were no excuses to leave the table, although some of my earliest memories were of being underneath the table where, presumably, a wiggly kid was allowed to go without punishment.
Granny was as tall as Papa and looked to weigh twice what he did. Her hair was always in a bun on the top of her head. On the rare occasions when I saw her getting ready for bed, she loosened the tight bun and her silver hair fell past her waist.
Although the nominal leader of these mealtime worship services, Papa didn’t get to say much because Granny took it upon herself to speak for him. I doubt that Papa and Granny ever heard of Jonathan Edwards, but years later when I read this eighteenth-century New England preacher’s famous sermon “Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God”, the voice that came off the page was Granny’s. She, like Edwards, believed that humans were under a sentence of condemnation, suspended by a slender thread over the fires of hell with Satan ready to pounce and claim us as his own the moment this wrathful God permitted. Maybe it was because they believed only Jesus could keep us from such a fate that Granny and Papa could so lustily sing “O How I Love Jesus” at the end of our breakfast services. Looming over us above the black veneer sideboard on the wall of that small dining room, I remember a plaque that read, “Only one life, t’will soon be past. Only what’s done for Christ will last.”
Those experiences made my not wanting to be a minister self-evident to me. I saw nothing attractive in singing about loving Jesus to keep him from cutting the thread that would drop me straight to hell. The rigid dogmatism had been passed down to my mother, but I wanted no part of it. “The last thing I will ever be is a minister!” was probably a declaration of independence from my mother’s spiritual heritage. When I made such pronouncements, my mother would just smile. I didn’t know that even if I could not hear God calling me in my early years, she believed she could. Years later she shared a poem she had written when I was a small child about how I would become a minister. In later years I would hear in clergy circles about pastors who mistook the “call of their mothers” for the “call of God,” but by that time the point for me would be moot.
“You know, don’t you,” Pastor Anderson asked, “that to become a minister you will have to go before the district ministerial committee to apply for a Preacher’s License, get a college degree and then spend another three years in a seminary?” No, I didn’t know. I didn’t have any idea about a ministerial committee or the years required in school. I would go before that or any other committee because I was so sure that God was calling me. Surely it would be as obvious to them as it was to me. As for formal studies, since my mother and father’s divorce had effectively removed me from the family ranch near Clarendon, I had given up on being a rancher. My alternate plan had been to become the doctor my dad had wanted to be himself. He settled on pharmacy because he couldn’t afford to go to medical school in the Great Depression. Knowing the years of study it took to become a doctor, the years of study required for the ministry seemed reasonable. I didn’t know whether I was confident or still numb from Sunday’s experience.
I don’t think the old man was trying to discourage me. I think he was trying to reassure himself before he risked his own credibility by putting me before the panel of his colleagues for that first step toward ordained ministry. I wasn’t about to be discouraged.
On that Sunday evening I wasn’t in church by choice; I never was. I was there because Mama made me go.
“I don’t want to go to church,” was my opening line in what became a litany at home on Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday nights.
“Of course you want to go!” she would say, which made me want to scream. My protest wasn’t so much about having to go to church but her insistence that she knew what I wanted and her assumption that I didn’t.
It was always the same week after week. I would go to church under protest. I can’t remember if we had the argument that Sunday evening in February 1955, but I assume so. I was in church that night. I was the only young person present in a service of fifty worshipers; my friends who had been to Youth Fellowship before the service exercised their freedom not to attend church twice on Sundays and were gone.
I sat in a blond ash pew near the back of the sanctuary under the balcony, a full ten rows behind the nearest worshiper. I stood with the congregation to sing to save embarrassment. I didn’t listen to the scripture reading or to Pastor Anderson’s sermon. I doodled on the back of a contribution envelope tucked into the little holder on the back of the pew in front of me with the small pencil provided.
Without apparent reference to anything in the service, I suddenly had a realization. There was no voice; it was a knowing. I realized God wanted me to be a minister. Despite all my former protests, I knew God was calling me. One moment the awareness wasn’t there; the next moment it was. The experience was simple but so real that doubting it never occurred to me. It was a calm certainty that my life had purpose. Instead of graduating from high school a year early so I could get away from home, now I was graduating early so I could be a minister. As the waves of realization rolled over me, I was so excited that I could hardly wait for Pastor Anderson to finish his sermon and give the Invitation.
The “Invitation” in a lot of churches was the time following the sermon when lost souls in the congregation who had been convicted were invited to come forward, confess their sins, and make peace with God. Church members who had fallen from grace and wanted to get right with God again were invited to rededicate their lives to Christ. A third category of invitees were any who were being called to “full-time Christian service.” In some churches, the invitation might take twenty minutes with the preacher ordering that every head be bowed and every eye be closed so that no one could see you when you raised your hand as a signal that you were in need of salvation. If responses were slow, the preacher would often intone, “We’ll sing just one more verse” of “Just As I Am” or “Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling” so that no wavering soul should go out of the church without “being saved.”
The invitation was extended that night, but nobody expected anyone to come forward. In this church few did. But before the first verse was over, I was down at the chancel rail standing in front of Pastor Anderson anxious to declare my new revelation. When he saw me running down the isle he might have imagined I was there to confess my sin or rededicate my life to Christ, but I don’t think he had a thought that I was there to announce a call to the ministry.
He leaned over the communion rail and his hand tightened on mine as I whispered, “God is calling me to be a minister.” I thought I saw him recoil at what I said. He asked me to repeat it. I did, this time loud enough so that Bertha B. MacDonald, my history teacher and debate coach, could hear from her usual seat two rows from the front.
Pastor Anderson turned to the congregation and said, “Mike has told me that God is calling him to full-time Christian service as a minister.” And he quickly added, “I can assure you that this is as much a surprise to me as to you.” While it was a surprise to him and me, too, it wasn’t to two people in the congregation. Mrs. MacDonald was grinning ear to ear. She knew, even before I started down the aisle, she told me after the service. The other person not surprised was my mother. She had gotten to the service late and was waiting in the anteroom behind the choir loft when Pastor Anderson made the announcement. From the anteroom she slipped into where the choir sat and took her usual place.
After the benediction, everyone came down to the front to shake hands with me, the look of disbelief still on some of their faces. For the faithful who believed in miracles, the fact that it was me and not one of the other more promising young people seemed to add to the magnitude of the night. On the way home, mother didn’t say much. Like Mrs. MacDonald, she had known it was coming.
After my conference with Pastor Anderson, he arranged for me to meet with the ministerial committee in Wichita Falls at their semiannual meeting in September. A timely—Mrs. MacDonald called it providential—visit to our high school by Lamar Smith in March to recruit students for Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth gave me a place to go to college and a summer job at the YMCA Camp Carter.
On September 8, a week before I left for college, I appeared before the ministry committee. In the five months since the experience, I had thought a lot about what I would actually do as a minister. Being like Pastor Anderson or Papa didn’t fit. I told the eight- or nine-man committee that, while I believed I had been called to the ordained ministry, I didn’t think God was calling me to be pastor of a congregation.
“What else would you do as a minister if you weren’t a pastor?” one skeptic asked.
“I don’t know, Sir, but I believe God will let me know in good time.”
“Son, do you believe the Bible?” another asked.
“Oh yes Sir. Every word of it!” I said.
What they didn’t ask was how I would live my faith. Racial tensions in the South were about to explode. Ten days before our meeting, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till from Chicago, who was visiting his relatives in Mississippi, was murdered because it was said he whistled at a white woman. We didn’t talk about such things in church or in ministerial committees.
They talked about my call. While they had heard many stories of calls by those who came before their committee, they were uneasy with my uncertainty about what I would do if ordained. I learned later that I was almost not granted a license because of it. But they respected the story of my call and my commendation from the folks at First Methodist Church in Iowa Park, who by this time had decided I was fine “preacher material.” Before the afternoon meeting was over, they relented and gave me a license. The “license to preach” was permission to preach where invited in Methodist churches. College and the seminary would lead to ordination and Taiwan.
Seventeen years later, when I was in the stacks at the Missionary Research Library at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City working on my dissertation, I encountered Eleanor Munro. Eleanor and her husband, E. J. Kahn, a long time writer at The New Yorker, found me on their visit to Taiwan in 1970 because a reporter of the New York Times had told them that I could put them in touch with dissident Taiwanese. She had just published a book on art in the T’ang Dynasty[1] and E. J. had finished his book on Foreign Service Officers in China.[2]
No one else was on this floor of the stacks, so we sat in a carrel beside a tall narrow window that allowed in a little light and talked. She wanted to catch up on the things that had happened since she and E. J. were in Taiwan. Then she asked if I would talk to her about my decision to become a missionary.
“I was raised in New York City and Cleveland,” she said. “My family hid our Jewish heritage from the neighbors and didn’t profess any religion. I’ve always been curious to know what makes religious people tick. Would you mind telling me about why you decided to become a Christian?”
“I grew up in the church, and when I was seven I told my mother I wanted to join the church.”
“Just like that? But why did you decide to become a minister?”
I told her the story of my call that Sunday night. Later, she asked about the circumstances that led me to become a missionary in Taiwan, but she kept coming back to the Sunday night experience. She wasn’t antagonistic; I felt like she was sympathetic and trying to grasp what didn’t make sense to her. A few years later Eleanor wrote a book about religious pilgrimages in different religions, but only after going on all of the pilgrimages herself.[3] I think at the time of our conversation she may have seen in me someone on a pilgrimage.
“Did you believe it was God talking to you?”
“That night I was sure of it,” I said, “but who is to say what is of God and what is not? It might have been a decision made deep in my psyche out of particular needs. The only thing I can say is, unlike anything else in my life, a certainty descended that Sunday night that has never left me.”