The Healer, Part 1

A fallen megachurch pastor is pulled out of a spiral of depression and doubt by his old college roommate, now a seminary president, who entrusts him with a file of strange church phenomena and asks him to investigate.

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JD’s hand hovered over the doorknob.

Frozen. Unsure.

What time was it? Two in the morning? The tiny Kansas farmhouse held no clues in the darkness.

On the other side of the bedroom door, the woman’s voice was calm. Firm. Mumbling commands, gibberish, and what sounded like strings of numbers. What? The man in the bedroom said little, only the occasional yes and I understand.

JD inched forward to lean his ear to the door, to make out what the woman was saying. As he slid his sock-covered foot forward, it found a dead spot in the hardwood floor.

A creak. The voices in the bedroom immediately fell silent.

JD shrank back into the shadows. Adrenaline surged through his body, speeding his heartbeat and causing the hairs on his arms to rise.

For the first time in a long time, he felt fear. Real fear. The kind of animal panic that pushed you past fight or flight and made you ball up your fists before you even realized that you chose fight.

Who was the man talking to?

The strange little man lived alone. No one else had come into the house tonight. And his wife had been dead for over a year.

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The white Land Rover eased into an open spot along the curb.

It was July, summer break, but a seminary campus is rarely still. Earnest-looking men in khakis and polos trudged along the sidewalks. One would turn abruptly, vanishing around the corner of the immaculately trimmed hedges. Presently, another one would pop out from a side path and take his place in the procession. Like ants, racing to the pulpit.

Inside the Land Rover, a man who had just given up his pulpit. JD Lucas, 49, six weeks removed from a spectacular exit from Rivercrest, the huge church he founded in the St. Louis suburbs. When the news stories covering his resignation began to drop, some of them said that Rivercrest was the 4th largest church in America. Others said 7th largest, but it didn’t matter. With online viewers and multiple services, you could make the numbers say whatever you wanted.

Beside him, his daughter Audrey, 21. Demure but sharp-witted, with full-bodied black hair falling in waves over her shoulders. In her high school years, the two of them had been very close. Just as Audrey started navigating her teen years, her father was stumbling through a meteoric rise from anonymous pastor to national figure. They had found a solace in each other’s company, a refuge from the chaos. Then, she went away to school on the East Coast, and things changed.

“Smile, Dad,” she said wryly.

JD leaned back in his seat and tried to rub the anxiety out of his face. A seminary campus was the last place he wanted to be right now. He wasn’t famous enough to be recognized by average people, but here? These church kids would know who he was.

He let out a long sigh. If it had been anyone other than Eldredge, he would have ignored the call.

For a moment, they sat in the Land Rover, safe.

“I could have gotten you in here,” JD said absently.

Audrey looked away. The seminary had an undergraduate college attached to it. Three years ago, JD pushed for her to come here. Would be closer than the coast, he said. He never let go of that.

Back to silence.

JD’s fingers found the door handle. He took a deep breath and slid his sunglasses down over his eyes.

“Are you coming?” he asked his daughter.

Audrey shook her head and smiled.

“Eldredge won’t get me,” she said.

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In the post-Billy Graham evangelical ecosystem, Sommers Eldredge was perhaps the closest thing there was to a national leader. While orators like Osteen and JD Lucas filled the celebrity pastor lane, Eldredge was the champion of the evangelical thinkers. He was president of Southern Seminary, the flagship of the American conservative theological apparatus. His weekly podcast Engage! with Sommers Eldredge was always near the top of the Christian charts. When CNN needed a Christian talking head who could speak with authority, they called Sommers.

Once upon a time, Sommers and JD had been roommates, at the undergraduate college here. As young men, they were very different: Sommers was serious, ponderous, and stately, almost as if he knew the role that had been set before him. JD, however, was salt of the earth. He came from a poor home and a single mother. He was not interested in the networking and palace intrigue that consumed the other students. How could he be? He was an outsider, dirty, who would never be let in by the gatekeepers. While the other boys worshipped their professors and debated theology, JD watched sports. He dated girls in the community who had nose rings and tattoos. He swore. He wrote long papers on what the unsaved were feeling, and how to reach them.

“I should have known, back then, that you would go further than me,” Sommers told him once, just before JD’s life fell apart.