We had only been back from Rhodesia for a few months, but it was clear that after eight years at Berachah it was time to move on. Thieme’s authoritative teaching was just what I needed to pull me out of the psychedelic/Jesus Freak morass in 1969. Bible class six nights a week and a community of like-minded believers provided stability.
The most significant event of my Berachah experience was meeting and marrying Pegi. In her I found a true soulmate. First of all, she was drop-dead gorgeous with blue eyes that just melted my heart. More importantly, although we couldn’t be from more diverse backgrounds (conservative Texas Baptist and liberal “almost a Yankee” Jew), we shared an overwhelming imperative to discover the “truth” concerning faith and God. Maybe it was the genetic seed of her Jewish maternal great-grandmother or maybe it was just God’s humorous intervention--whatever it was, that same life-upsetting drive for the truth is still there 33 years later. We are always shooting ourselves in the feet as we abandon any chance of normalcy in our quest for truth.
Think about it. How else would you explain finding someone who would be crazy enough to follow me to Rhodesia after being married for less than a year, join the Rhodesian Army herself, consistently and constantly pull up roots and relocate over twenty times (several times overseas) in three decades? And through it all, she is still ready to chuck it all and try something new. Just this week, she suggested that we really ought to consider aliyah to Israel. She said, “No one needs us in Chicago, but there are all kinds of people we could help in Israel!” [For the time being, we will stay put here in Illinois and spend time with our daughter and grandson. But, we always keep our bags packed!]
Six months after returning to Houston, I had completed just about every Hebrew correspondence course that Menachem Mansoor at the University of Wisconsin could send me. We packed our car and left for Madison to take classes from him in person on January 1, 1979. We knew we were out of Texas and Berachah when we encountered a monster snow storm as we drove on I-294 around Chicago.
By the time we got to Janesville outside of Madison the snow was blinding me. We stopped at a motel for the evening. Early the next morning we arrived at the duplex that we had rented in Madison. Before we could pull into the garage and unpack, our neighbor came to our rescue clearing our driveway of 36 inches of fresh snow with her snowblower. Our Texas-born cocker spaniel was going crazy not finding any grass. When I opened the back door for her to go out, she disappeared in several feet of soft snow. Rescuing her, I spent the next hour shoveling out a 10’ square by 5’ deep area for her. At least until Spring, we didn’t need to worry about fencing!
We were out of the Berachah community, but were still listening to Thieme’s taped bible studies. Each evening we would try to concentrate on the assault of his forceful voice screaming at us. Thieme was known for being a temperamental sourpuss. He regularly excoriated his audience. People were scared to even move in his classes. I got screamed at once for simply leaning forward and putting my chin on my fist while I concentrated on what he was saying. Pegi’s sister actually threw-up in her handbag rather than risk what would happen if she stood to excuse herself during one of Thieme’s 75 minute monologues.
We no longer cared about Thieme’s obnoxious behavior. We were simply trying to squeeze a few more drops of biblical knowledge out of this tapes. However, he had strayed so far from anything resembling a Christian lifestyle in his teaching, that we daydreamed or fell asleep listening each evening. I had heard it all before anyway. I had completed every single lesson that Berachah Tapes and Publications had recorded.
By 1979, he sounded more like a fringe psychologist than a minister. He had imposed his own flawed understanding of psychology on the biblical text, overshadowed the themes of love and compassion with military and political commentary, and lost himself in arcane details of Hebrew/Greek syntax and grammar. His “revised literal translation” of the biblical texts bore little or no resemblance to the very obvious message of the best seller of all of history.
He continued to insist that you could not understand the Bible by reading it for yourself. No, you needed someone like him to dig into the original Greek and Hebrew and lay it out for you. It was funny, because when I learned Greek and Hebrew, I discovered that any of the hundreds of translations in hundreds of languages had the same teaching. Pegi and I began to do something that no good Thiemite would ever do--we began to read the Bible for ourselves--in English!
And that was pretty much it for Thieme and Berachah Church as far as we were concerned!
Pegi was working in one of the Madison hospitals. I was selling cars and waiting for my Wisconsin residency so that I could afford to take classes from Dr Mansoor. About this time, I was promoted to sales manager for a Porsche/Audi dealership in Middleton, just outside of Madison. I am not sure how the subject came up, but when one of my customers discovered that I had been a chaplain in the Rhodesian Army, he decided to publish an article about me in the local newspaper. The story followed the lines of how I was a former Rhodesian soldier and minister now selling cars!
The article brought us a little business--it always helps in sales to be a bit of a curiosity. You know the story--all publicity is good publicity! Well, the story also got me a speaking engagement at a nearby Evangelical Free church that had supported some missionaries in Rhodesia years before.
I wish I could say that my sermon stirred the congregation to new heights in their faith! Not at all--I stumbled through a poorly constructed teaching on the the doctrine of Eternal Security--totally based on Thieme’s teaching. Oy! I needed to spend more time in preparation so that I could teach something from my own heart.
My embarrassment on this occasion moved me to begin an earnest study of theology, beginning with Thieme’s teachers at Dallas Theological Seminary. I built a theological library and applied myself to a systematic study of both Old and New Testaments. Aside from Greek and Hebrew courses, I also took courses in archaeology and ancient history. As my theological knowledge began to expand, I discovered a dozens of scholars with whom I found affinity. In particular, I was attracted to the scholars related to the Plymouth Brethren movement who centered on eschatology (study of “last things,” biblical prophecy). It had been eschatology that was a strong part of my original interest in Christianity.
The Brethren writers taught the doctrine of “death to self” doctrine which also interested me. Now, this had nothing to do with actual physical death, but was focused on minimizing self-interest and focusing on the God as the Great Self in the person of Jesus. In many ways, it is almost a Buddhist version of Christianity in that it is a matter of denying one’s own desires in order to have a “deeper” walk with God as part of the “Christ-centered life.”
One contemporary writer who drew extensively from these teachers was Miles Stanford. He did not actively minister in a church, but because of health concerns, had developed a ministry of counseling in “deeper life” subjects through the mail and publishing. I began to correspond with him and he helped guide me to numerous authors whose books began to fill every available shelf in my library. And, I read them all! As I had devoured Thieme tapes years before, I now devoured the writings of C.A. Coates, J.N. Darby, J.B. Stoney and a contemporary British pastor, T. Austin-Sparks.
By now, we had moved away from Madison to the village of Neshkoro, population 253. I just couldn’t wait to for the rest of the year to get my Wisconsin residency for school. I had to study now and the only way to get enough time to study was to move out of Madison. Pegi found a job 17 miles from Neshkoro at the Berlin Community Hospital in the booming metropolis of Berlin, population 5000 and one street light!
With the reduced cost of living, my head was in books from early morning to late at night. But the more I studied, the more I looked for an outlook for my rapidly developing spiritual insights. One day Pegi came home from the hospital with the news that another nurse she had met there wanted me to lead a Bible study in her home.
Next: Me a Pastor?
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