Evangelical Thought Leader: The Early Years

Probably the hardest part of being a Christian is when people don’t realize how important you are.

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Oftentimes, the straw men will ask me, “have you always been an elite brand ambassador for the Church?” The answer, of course, is yes. But people didn’t always recognize it, and this has been extremely inconvenient, for me.

When I was in youth group, none of the babes understood how important I was. They somehow got distracted by my skinny frame, poor complexion, halting social presence, and the mumbled spiritual non-sequiturs that came out of my mouth at random intervals.

And then the babes at my youth group got super bored, because all of the boys in our youth group looked like that one scene in the high school movie where they show the dork table in the cafeteria and it’s one guy with an inhaler and two guys playing a role-playing game. So the girls invited the cool guy from the youth group across town, and he showed up to our church one night in a white t-shirt and leather jacket, with gel in his hair and actual sideburns, looking like an Assembly of God-brand Freddie Prinze Jr. He would tack on the phrase “praise God” where it didn’t belong, like “me and my boys went to Ted Drewes and just sat on the hood of my car talking, praise God,” and every time he said “praise God,” all of the babes would moan and grab their abdomens, because their ovaries were blasting dozens of hungry evangelical eggs through their fallopian tubes like bullets out of a machine gun. Anyway, that was the year Age of Empires came out, so I was pretty busy.

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A few years later, I was playing basketball for my Christian college, and it was the same thing: no one realized how important I was.

Winning a prestigious fourth place plaque at a tournament

I actually got to meet the sweaty televangelist Rod Parsley once, because my school went to Ohio to play against his Bible college. He came into our locker room before the game, but it wasn’t to collab with me or my brand. Instead, he brought an old man with him and told my team “guys, this gentleman was hit by a train, but God healed him.” And then Rod kind of just stood there, like we were supposed to be in awe of what he had said, but we really wanted to hear the whole story, because how does an old man accidentally get hit by a train and not disintegrate into a cloud of Poligrip and regret?

Anyway, his Bible college had a live praise band that performed during basketball games, and as we took the floor, the band played “Stomp” by Kirk Franklin, and all the people in the gym sang along and got their worship on, raising their hands and swaying back and forth. This freaked out some of my teammates, who it turns out had enrolled at my school to play basketball, and not because of deep theological devotion to the Church of Christ tradition¹.

Rod Parsley watched the game from the stands and spent the entire two hours shrieking at the officials like an insane person. His team got down big, rallied, but could not quite beat us. After the game, he shambled back into our locker room, covered in sweat, and hoarse. He asked if he could join our huddle, and he wheezed out a prayer for our safe travel home. The old man was not with him this time. I don’t know if there was a designated person to watch the old man at all times and keep him away from the trains, I’m not sure how that worked. But Rod gave us some pizza, so maybe he did know who I was, after all.

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1. coming from the Assembly of God, very little bothered me