Chapter 2: How We Got Here

There is one thing that I love about Utahns—they are genuinely friendly people. It’s completely normal here for strangers to meet and talk to one another without pretenses, something that I believe LDS missionary culture has made more normal here than almost anywhere else in the States. Many Utahns have served on missions for the LDS Church, where they became experts at engaging in genuine conversations with complete strangers. It’s not hard to get to know people around here when so many of them are former missionaries.

When I meet people, I typically ask them two common questions: Where do you live? What do you do for work? When you ask those kinds of questions it’s only natural for people to ask the same kinds of questions of you. These days, I tell people what I’m doing now with the Evangelical Free Church, but I also tell them that I was the pastor at CenterPoint Church for 35 years. Most people that I meet today have seen the building along the freeway and usually know someone who goes there. It hasn’t always been that way.

In the early years, being the pastor of a church in Orem made me a unicorn. People had questions. People would ask: Ok, but what’s your real job? In the LDS Church, the leaders of LDS congregations (also called wards) are led by bishops, and bishops don’t receive pay for their service. That someone would be paid to lead a congregation—that they would claim that as their ‘job’—is foreign to many Latter-day Saints.

Curiosity would often kick in after that. Were you sent here? How long will you serve here? What is it like being a pastor around all these Mormons? At the root of all of these and many other questions was, I think, a genuine desire to understand why someone like me would be motivated to spend my life in a place like Orem leading a church like CenterPoint.

Over time, the way you live your life—the way you continue to ‘show up’ for the people around you—will answer that question. And it’s always a good idea to examine your motives along the way. What was my motivation to come here?

The 1960s and Air Force Barbers

I wasn’t raised in Utah and I’m not from an LDS family. However, there were things in my upbringing that helped me understand parts of the Mormon experience. I was the youngest of four boys in the kind of family Mormons would admire. I had great parents; my mom and dad loved us. My dad was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. He always said that one of his goals was to raise his sons to be good citizens, and part of being a good citizen was going to church. We were Presbyterians and every Sunday we attended the local Presbyterian Church.

My high school years were spent in Rialto, California, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. The ‘60s and ‘70s was the era of “sex, drugs, rock and roll, and rebellion.” In one sense, my brothers and I completely missed the ‘60s. Boys my age used to grow their hair long as an act of rebellion. But my dad? He was big on haircuts. Every other Saturday morning, my dad would take us out to Norton Air Force Base to be shorn by Air Force barbers because, in my dad’s words, “Those guys know how to cut hair.” 

My parents were strict about the example they set for us, in ways that would make a lot of sense to Mormons. They stopped drinking and smoking as we grew up because they didn’t want us to do those things. But they also knew how to have fun, and I’m grateful to have grown up in the home and family they created. My dad was my hero. He was the starting tailback for the LSU Tigers. He then joined the Army Air Corp and flew fighters in China during World War II.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my dad’s approval. When he said that he was raising us to be good citizens, he was specific on what that would look like. He wanted us to play football and encouraged us toward military careers. His great hope was that we would all go to one of the military academies. We said, “Yes sir,” and went along with it because we loved our dad.

Ye don’t know anythin’ do ye?

For a while, things were going that way. My oldest brother, Bob, played football and graduated from the Air Force Academy. My second oldest brother, Bill, did the same at the Naval Academy. My high school grades were unspectacular, but I was recruited to play football and received an appointment to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD.  When I graduated from high school, my brother Keith was already at the Naval Academy himself. As one of my Naval Academy classmates put it, “The Naval Academy gives you an opportunity to fall in love with the Navy.”

I didn’t.

After being at the academy for a few months I realized that I had no desire to be in the Navy. I did not want to spend my life at sea. I was completely uninterested in receiving a Naval education filled with classes like Naval Science, Engineering, and Weapons. My academic struggles came to a head when Lieutenant Shanahan, a computers professor, came to me and said (in his strong Irish brogue), “Mac, ye’re failin’. Why don’t ye come in for some extra instruction.”

That was the worst thing that could have happened to me. He was going to find out how little I knew. We met and he gave me something simple to program. I looked at him with this blank stare, wrote a few things down, and handed it to him. He read it, then looked me right in the eyes.

“Ahh Mac, ye don’t know anythin’ do ye?”  

Failure, Redemption, Moving Forward

The truth is that my problems were not just academic. Lieutenant Shanahan had this Catholic-priest way about him, so I decided to unburden myself. “Lieutenant, do you know what my problem is? I don’t care about computer programming. To be honest, I really didn’t care about anything.” I had zero motivation to be at the Naval Academy—I was failing to earn my dad’s approval.

That reality hit me like a truck. I was a failure. I was a failure in so many ways. I wasn’t just failing academically; I was failing athletically. I had missed much of my freshman football season with a separated shoulder. I was in constant trouble. I had reached a point of crisis with nothing going for me.  

The turning point for me came when my brother, Keith, who was also a midshipman, a class ahead of me, decided to leave the Academy after the end of the first semester. Keith was a committed Christian, and he spent a lot of time talking to me about the Lord before he left. I didn’t get—or maybe didn’t want to get—what he said to me about God, but he was all that I had to lean on. On the night he left the Academy, I watched him drive away and I realized that I had nothing left. I had come to the end of myself.

I went to an empty classroom and told the Lord that I hated my life. I told him that I give up. I told him that if he wanted to do something with me, he could have at it.

I expected overwhelming guilt and shame, but Jesus took away my sin and that deeply rooted feeling of unworthiness, and in return he gave me his life. There is no other way to describe it—I was born again that night. I knew that, in Jesus, I was loved and accepted by the God of the Universe. I came alive in that moment, and I had a sense of purpose and a great desire to serve God.

I didn’t have any idea where that would take me, it took many years before I began to see a larger story coming together, but I did know that it did not include the Navy.

Shared Experiences and Newfound Differences

When I told my dad that I was going to leave the academy, he wasn’t happy.  There’s no other way to say it—my dad was deeply disappointed in me. And since there was incredible family pressure for me to stay, I decided to finish my Plebe year to prove that I wasn’t leaving because it was too hard.

I often can relate to people that are walking away from the LDS Church because of my experience leaving the military. For me, leaving the Naval Academy was like leaving the family faith and failing to meet the expectations of my family. That was a profoundly challenging experience for me and, for many Latter-day Saints, leaving the LDS Church is one of the most difficult decisions they will ever make for the same reasons.

There’s another part of my story that also involves the LDS Church, a quite significant part actually—my high school girlfriend was a Latter-day Saint. Remember that I was raised in a Presbyterian household, but none of our religious differences mattered before I went to the Naval Academy. We began to discuss my newfound faith when I returned home, and those differences suddenly became a mountain between us.

In reading more about the LDS Church, I started noticing significant differences between the LDS Church and Biblical Christianity. So, I decided that I was going to argue her out of the LDS Church and into what a lot of people at that time called “Born Again Christianity.”

I was going to save her by proving her wrong. I’ve learned a lot since then.

I quickly discovered in those days that the way Mormons and Christians understood God is fundamentally different. She believed in eternal progression, something the third president of the LDS Church, Lorenzo Snow, defined succinctly when he said, “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”

But I believed what the prophet Isaiah wrote about God in 43:10, “Before me, no god was formed, nor will there be one after me.” So, I read that to her.

She responded, “Ok, you’re right. We’re wrong.”

Surprised by her admission, I said, “So… what are you going to do?”

 “Nothing,” she answered. “What you don’t realize is that this is my family. These are my people. This is who I am.”

Whether she really believed that I was right and she was wrong, I’ll never know. She seemed comfortable agreeing that, if all you had was the Bible, what I had said made sense. But in that moment, I discovered something critical about her and about many Latter-day Saints.  In her mind, what Mormons had was so much more than just truth.

They had more scripture. They had a living prophet and a restored priesthood. They had a family community that went beyond blood relations. I realized then that being Mormon was so much more than just believing another set of theological truths.

Being Mormon was an entire way of life.

Now What?

Sometimes the harder you try to argue someone out of their system of belief, or into another one, the more they reject the change. I learned that hard truth in those days too. My girlfriend and I were going in very different directions, so we decided to go our separate ways.

Out of the Academy and out of a relationship, I found myself asking: Now what? God had given me a new life, and I was eager to discover what he wanted me to do with it.