Personal Stories Part 4

(Rochelle and her college roommates pictured above)

Iowa is full of solid, hard-working and kind people. For me Iowa was a place of healing and rest. I worked in a factory while my wife finished school at Dordt College in Sioux Center. We were part of a church plant that allowed me to preach the Word without a seminary education and to teach Sunday school to the students there as well as lead a college Bible Study. Rochelle and I enjoyed our first year of marriage and prayed about where God was calling us to next. From a local counselor I received tools for healing from anxiety, but it still lingered and yet we had such joy with friends coming over to our little apartment, sharing stories, a little mission trip to Kansas where my Dad had grown up and a lot of prayer with friends and each other. Rochelle was the campus worship coordinator for a worship service called “Gift”. She spoke often there and allowed me to be one of the guest speakers as well. She had experienced the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit on the campus there at the same time as I did while in Lynden. She felt the call at the same time, though we had broken up and hadn’t talked for about a year’s time, to use her musical gifts to care for and bring the Gospel to the poor. That was part of why when we started talking again, we saw that the Lord was bringing us together, not only for marriage, but also for ministry.

In Zuni the idea of a coffeehouse had come to me in the middle of the night as an excellent way to use the gifts that Rochelle and I had in music and prophecy to reach out and care for the poor with the Gospel and community in Jesus. We thought that God was calling us to start a coffeehouse/community in Chicago, since the Spirit had told me to go there 4 years earlier. So when Rochelle finished college, we hit the road, first playing a coffeehouse in Minnesota and staying with friends there. Then we went to Grand Rapids, on then on to Chicago where we stayed in an apartment for house sitting and finally with the Jesus People USA in uptown Chicago.

The Jesus People USA has an old hotel that Al Capone used to own, and they live communally there with 500 people. They took over a nursing home that had been located there where the old folks were abondoned and starting ministering to them. We stayed in the room of some old hippies who were at the Cornerstone music festival at the time. Rochelle and I cooked in the kitchen while we were there, because of course they had to make meals for 500 people three times a day. We helped with the children at one of the homeless shelters and became part of one of the Bible Studies there.

It was an amazing place with punks and old hippies, former drug addicts and prostitutes; all living with everything in common and seeking to be faithful to Jesus. We really considered whether God was calling us to be there and start a coffeehouse with them, but we realized God had called us not to build on someone else’s foundation. They had already developed businesses to support their community and homeless shelters that transitioned people into life again, a huge church of very humble folks seeking Jesus in their brokenness. It seemed to us that they had already done it and didn’t need us. The real kicker, too, was that we would have to allow the wood-paneled station wagon to be owned by everyone there. 🙂 We realized that this level of community was too radical for us and we still wanted to have our own space from which to minister in love. We also saw that Chicago was not a coffeehouse city at the time, so we purposed in prayer to go to Seattle and see if the Lord would open a door for us there.

From the Jesus people we learned a quote from Jean Vanier: “Humility is the soil of unity”. The Jesus People exemplified this truth well. The only way we can move forward in community is to have humility before God and one another. We believed that this was the lesson God wanted to teach us from that community as we sought to move forward in fostering authentic community in Christ Jesus.

So we traveled back down through Kansas to Colorado where Rochelle’s parents live, to Zuni, to encourage our friends there and up to Lynden again, so we could raise funds to be missionaries in Seattle, Washington. But as we passed through Bellingham on the freeway on our way back to Lynden, we had a very strong pull there and wondered if God was speaking to us that we should move there. We decided that this was wishful thinking and prayed fervently about moving to Seattle to the inner-city. We married, after all, with the intention of living in the midst of the inner-city, not having natural children for the sake of having spiritual ones, and being willing to stay in an apartment where there was crime, cockroaches and car fumes. Bellingham sounded too good to be true, so we decided to work at jobs in Lynden in order to raise money to do mission work in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. Find out next time how God called us from there…