I graduated from Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1971. Just to get you oriented, this was the same high school that Bob Seger graduated from. But I didn’t know him, and he was a few years ahead of me. He had to have been a few years ahead of me because he is an old guy.
I had grown up in Annapolis, but my family had moved to Ann Arbor so that my father could help InterVarsity open up the first Logos Bookstore. That lasted about a year — my dad objected to some of the theological liberals that the store was stocking. When an appeal to the honchos at InterVarsity went against him, he resigned out of principle, and so there we were, high-centered in Ann Arbor. He got a job in the textbook store at Concordia College to tide us over, but we were quite willing to go somewhere else. Through an odd series of circumstances, a man who lived in Pullman, Washington contacted him about the possibility of him helping open an evangelistic bookstore here in the Northwest. The Lord confirmed the move in a number of remarkable ways, and the decision was made to come out here.
While still in my senior year, I had joined the Navy on a delayed entry program. I graduated, but still had some months to kill before I reported for duty. It was the spring, and I did not have to report until (I think) November. My family was all packed up, and I went along to help with the move. When we got to Moscow/Pullman, a number of interesting things started to happen. My dad was quickly involved in getting two evangelistic bookstores established, one in Pullman (One Way Books), one in Moscow (Crossroads Bookstore).
In the meantime, we rented a house on Jefferson (now demolished) just right next to Moscow High School. A sharp hill sloped down from the high school property into our back yard, with our garage right next to the bottom of the slope. The set-up was affectionately called “doper’s ditch” by the students, and they would all cluster there, right off school property, in order to smoke cigarettes and horse around.
Now one morning my father looked out and saw a cop dispersing the assembled students. Never one to let an evangelistic opportunity pass by unaddressed, Dad ran out and asked the cop if the kids could smoke in his garage. The response was something like “suit yourself, mister,” or “it’s your garage,” or something like that. The students thought my father was the coolest man in the whole world. And so it was that the ministry of God’s Garage began, with the policeman herding all the kids into our garage.
One thing led to another. I staffed this temporary ministry, spending my days there until I left for the Navy. My brother Evan painted murals on the walls inside, in a seventies Jesus people style, and we got a pop machine set up. The place was crowed, and days were full of conversations about God and the gospel, and quite a few kids came to the Lord. But, as should be obvious from the circumstances of its inception, it wasn’t your average Sunday School class. There were incidents, including the throwing of live ammo into the woodstove, and one knife thrown by a student at another, with the knife hilt (fortunately) hitting the other student in the small of the back.
The ministry did not catch fire in any kind of “gospel blimp” way, meaning that I am not now currently the president of God’s Garage Ministries, International, thanks be to God. But God, who weaves all things together, really used that time in a number of significant ways.