Messy Spirituality

(Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the foreword to Mike Yaconelli’s book, “Messy Spirituality”. The folks at Zondervan wondered if we’d like to run a bit of the book as an article and we jumped at the chance. Mike Yaconelli founded two lasting Christian icons: the satirical magazine, The Door, and Youth Specialties. He also pastored a church in Yreka, California that he called “the slowest growing church in America. Mike Yaconelli is a man we admire deeply.)

Sometime between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. on October 2, 2003, our family’s life was irrevocably changed in the blink of an eye. Mike and I had been moving his father into a new apartment in southern Oregon, and the three of us were headed an hour and a half south to our home in northern California to spend the night. My father-in-law, who’d had aortic-aneurysm surgery a couple of weeks prior, seemed too tired to drive himself, so Dad rode with me while my husband went ahead of us in his father’s small pickup truck.
As we pulled in the driveway, there was no white pickup to greet us. My heart began to race as I tried to assure Dad that Mike had most likely stopped at the store and would drive in shortly. Ten minutes later, when I phoned the California Highway Patrol with the license plate number of Dad’s truck, my worst fears were confirmed: Mike had been in a serious, single-car accident and was in the hospital with major injuries and massive head trauma.

At 4:00 a.m. on Thursday, October 30, 2003, with family by his side, Michael Charles Yaconelli passed from mortal life into the eternal glory that is beyond time.

“Is death the last step? No, it is the final awakening.” -Sir Walter Scott

Mike Yaconelli doggedly chased after Jesus from the time he was ten years old - the real Jesus; not the ethereal, white-robed, sonorous-voiced, halo-headed, float-above-the-ground Jesus, but rather the earthy, untidy, wild, gritty, table-overturning, fully human yet divine, tender, compas-sionate, dangerous, understanding, grace-filled Jesus. That Jesus gradually revealed himself to Mike throughout his life, but never more profoundly than in the ten to twelve years preceding Mike’s untimely death.

In the 1980s and ’90s, as the editor of a satirical Christian magazine called The Wittenburg Door, Mike became a bit of a table-overturner himself in the face of the excesses of televangelism. (No need to name names from those days - a quick search on Google will tell you who they were back then. There’s a fresh and plentiful contingent of them today.) He was appalled at the “false gospel” that was being sold to people through their television screens. For nearly twenty years, Mike used the vehicle of The Door (the name the mag-azine had morphed into) to expose the outrageously fallacious and downright ridiculous things being done in the name of the Jesus he so loved.

Mike began introducing young people to Jesus as a church camp counselor in the early 1960s, when he was just eighteen years old. “Rebel” that he was, Mike was kicked out of two Bible colleges before ultimately graduating from San Diego State University with a degree in communications. He was always fond of telling people that it took him ten years to get his four-year education, and he gleefully told the stories of how he came to be “kicked out” of those two Bible colleges. These stories encompass unbelievably terrible things like violating the “eighteen-inch rule” by sitting too close to a girl at a basketball game; hiding in the dormitory bathroom stalls (by propping his hands and feet against the walls) during the “lights out” room checks; calling the Dean of Men a liar and telling him to go to hell when wrongly accused of planning to meet up with a girl (it was accidental, but he did use the opportunity to chat with her); using real blanks in a shotgun during the performance of a play he was student directing (flames shot ten feet out of the gun); and so much more. I’m pleased to report that Mike’s mischief-making continued to be part of his repertoire throughout his life, growing into much more sophisticated pranks that had me, the kids, and most of our friends laughing so hard we were frequently in danger of needing a change of pants.

In the late ’60s, Mike realized that he could ultimately reach more young people by providing resources and training to the adult volunteers and (eventually) paid youth ministers who worked with kids in churches all around the country. With the help of a financial backer who appeared out of nowhere (though Mike always knew it was God who orchestrated it), Mike co-founded an organization called Youth Specialties, ultimately legitimizing and establishing youth ministry as a professional calling every bit as noble as that of a paid pastor of a church. Before long, Mike was speaking to churches, youth workers, and young people all over the US, as well as in a few other countries. Nearly forty years later, Youth Specialties is still serving youth workers - now internationally, thereby impacting the lives of adults and young people across the globe.

Posted on August 6, 2007 12:00 AM