Donald Joy 1983 vocational autobiography, “The Formation of an Evangelist,” from Modern Masters of Religious Education, Marlene Mayr, editor. Birmingham: Religious Education Press, 1983, pp. 188-196.
ISBN 0-89135-033-0
At the age of twenty-seven, as one of the newest ordained members of the Texas Conference, I waited to speak to Bishop Leslie R. Marston who was presiding at our annual business sessions. I had spoken with him now and then since I was fifteen or so, and now I had an offer to make to him: Would he like to ride with me to Shreveport where his next conference chairmanship would be and where I had been hired as the guest minister with youth during the annual family camp of the Louisiana Conference.
Bishop Marston said yes, and we drove from Baytown, Texas across into Louisiana the next Monday. He was then completing From Age to Age a Living Witness, our denominational history updated. So we discussed his observations, and he drew on some of my youthful perspectives. I’m afraid he was also making mental notes.
Within the year our family was moving to the denomination’s headquarters at Winona Lake, Indiana. Bishop Marston had engineered my appointment and made possible subsequent appointments which, by August of 1958 would see me installed as the seventh Editor of Sunday School Literature, successor to distinguished editors with long tenures who had either been elected bishops or died in office in generations when there was no “retirement age.” I was twenty-nine.
During the next thirteen years I would take responsibilities for developing the Aldersgate Biblical Series, for designing and facilitating denominational planning for the Aldersgate Graded Curriculum—serving seven denominations, for supervising two lines of denominational curriculum development, revision, and publication. In short, I was to hold in my hands the teaching tools by which the theological and social ideals of my denomination would be shaped. Beyond that, by furnishing the influences of the chair and by virtue of my role in curric- /end page 188/ ulum design, my name and my values would come to bear on six other denominations. Today, ten years after leaving that post to engage in seminary teaching, I am recognized by name in the unlikeliest of places—because of the privileges and responsibilities of those years. My sons were unable to ride on public transportation during their college years without being spotted by the telltale mark of their father’s name.
At twenty-nine, however, my formal preparation for entering the professional world of Christian education and curriculum development was minimal. My masters-level work in education and counseling was not yet secured by the approved thesis at Southern Methodist University. My brief career at public-school teaching had been, I thought, only an in-between stop to earn money to sustain my voyage through theological seminary. Those three years of teaching public school music and junior-high English in Minneola, Kansas, had forced me into emergency study in education simply to maintain my temporary credentials from the Topeka office. From the age of sixteen, I had had a clear summons from the numinous tugging at my insides; it was to be a man for others, a minister, a missionary, a prophet. Oddly enough, the education courses at Greenville College, during the summer of 1951, and the extension courses from Emporia State Teachers College and Kansas State University across those three years were transported instantly into an orientation for ministry and the care of persons within the kingdom of Christ’s summons to me.
When our family loaded into the Allied van to move from Kansas to Kentucky, the indelible mark of “educator” was superimposed on my previous visions of ministry. It was here at Asbury Theological Seminary that Dean W. D. Turkington’s “The Teachings of Jesus” and Harold Mason’s several explicitly “education” courses continued the ferment and the consolidation into vocation. The Asbury spirit of evangelism and of prophetic preaching combined during that time to send me out to Texas to a ministry that was a synchrony of evangelism and education. The Rockwall Free Methodist congregation was not exactly a place to establish a twelve-tiered “university system” of elective education. But house to house, and family to family, the practice of ministry combined the hope of Gospel with the means of nurture, and both I and the congregation experienced radical change and growth.
The Rockwall chapter cannot be written as easily as can my own. It is especially complex since there are so many persons involved. My debt to the people there is certainly greater than any obligation I may have /end of page 189/ created by my ministry among them. It was there that Bishop Marston found me, and, for reasons he never explained to me, it was his initiatives which moved me to the religious education specialization which now follows me and consumes my energy.
I managed to get my wits about me when I was negotiating the final arrangements for taking the interim “assistant to the publisher” slot in 1958. “If,” I reasoned with the representatives of the Board of Administration, “I am to assume responsibility for the denomination’s curriculum directions, how can I do that with integrity when I have never had any training in curriculum development?” They easily consented. It was eight years later before the weight of responsibilities could be adjusted and I could begin doctoral level work.
Where would I look for curriculum development training? I had had the good fortune in the winter of 1959 to attend a conference of denominational editors meeting at Spring Mill State Park, near Mitchell, Indiana. Rachel Henderlite led stimulating Bible studies. D. Campbell Wyckoff was the guest resource person in curriculum. My host was Dr. Albert F. Harper, then serving the Church of the Nazarene in a post parallel to mine in the Free Methodist Church. He invited me as the fledgling curriculum executive of a sister denomination. My own governing board had forbidden my denomination’s participation in any committee structures related to the National Council of Churches; hence I was in no sense a “member” of that conference group, but was a welcomed guest. I would return from that conference to read Henderlite and Wyckoff in the days ahead, but I turned a corner soon that would take me away from further graduate theological education and toward a great public university.
I began, in the early sixties, to read Norman Cousins’ editorials in Saturday Review. I also followed John Lear’s science section in the Review. My wife and I subscribed to the Chicago Tribune. I wrestled with the black and civil-rights issue. The Free Methodist Church had been conceived in 1860 in abolitionist sentiment, but by 1960 it was all but “lily white.” Our “Freedmen Societies” in Kansas had by then been abandoned as blacks moved to the cities. The underground tunnel still connected the basement level of the Aurora, Illinois church to the river nearby. But we were essentially racist. Our editorial staff consulted, then bought John Howard Griffin’s serials which preceded his book Black Like Me. I was taking cues from A. W. Tozer, whose editorials in Alliance Witness, while provocative, were pale compared to his hard- /end of page 190/ hitting appeal for realism in Christian writing. It was Edmund Fuller who, with Tozer at a Wheaton writers’ conference, had urged all of us to read John Updike. C. S. Lewis died in 1963, just as I discovered Screwtape Letters, and I phoned in an order to my bookseller buying up every Lewis title that sounded remotely interesting to me. It was to be his Miracles which carried me through my mid-life faith crisis which was yet to come.
The cross currents of the times in the mid-sixties and the books I was reading—which included all of the James Baldwin books I could locate as I searched for the black perspectives—generated an almost chemical ferment. I examined the books and articles which were coming from the seminaries and the graduate schools of theology. While much of what they said was comprehensive to me, most of it was “common sense.” I was troubled by the fact that my limited experience with secular educational resources had created in me an appetite for fruit “fresh from the tree.” I could observe that the occasional religious education writer who cited research into human development tended to be three academic generations behind what was then current in the secular journals. For that reason, I studied catalogues looking for universities which offered majors or degrees in curriculum development. I located three: Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and Indiana University. It was then 1965. I drove for an interview to Bloomington. Shirley Engle interviewed me while my family waited beneath a tree outside. A month later he phoned to ask me to come to campus for another interview. I made the second trip. Only then did it dawn on me that he was looking me over very closely. “You are thirty-six years old,” he said. “It is not always easy to place a graduate who is turning forty.” It wasn’t easy to get into his program in curriculum development, and when the committee had approved my dissertation and my degree in 1969, as chairman of my committee, Dr. Engle shook my hand giving congratulations. “Yours is the fifth degree earned here in curriculum development,” he said.
Where Did I Come From?
Doc Adams took me with forceps from my mother in my Joy grandparents’ bedroom some twenty-five miles southwest of Dodge City, Kansas. I was eight pounds and more. It was a difficult delivery. Dad was there to help, since it was a home delivery. During the spring of 1928, my parents moved from Terre Haute, Indi- /end of page 191/ ana, where Mother’s roots lay in nearby Clay County in the farm family of Quillow Royer. Dad had been born in a granary quickly built as the first “above the ground” home of the Charles Joy family on their Cave community homestead farm. They had lived in a cave house, burrowed on the southern exposure of a bank as a protection from the blizzards and high winds of dust storms which often blew in from the northwest. Cave community, southwest of Dodge City, was to sustain the evangelistic and Christian education impact of my grandmother, Carrie Hulet Joy, who almost single-handedly carved out a Sunday School in the Cave school house. She conspired with other earnest Christians in the community to bring a Kentucky Methodist evangelist to the school house for a revival meeting. She was chagrined to discover that he used tobacco. Yet Grandpa Joy was converted in that meeting. To her great relief he stopped chewing tobacco and even promised each of his five sons a gold watch at age twenty-one if they would never use tobacco. That revival meeting led to the organizing of a church—the Cave Community Free Methodist Church. Virtually all of my early experience in the congregation was centered there. I eventually served as pastor of that small rural church at the same time Robbie and I were teaching in Minneola in 1949-52.
Grandma Joy was the first Sunday-school teacher I remember. Of the half-dozen other children near my age, I had the privileged status. Only I was her grandson. I sat on her lap a lot. And I knew that in the next hour when the entire congregation knelt to pray I could raid her purse to find the carefully planted Wrigley’s gum. While the pastor and others would lead in prayer, I would enjoy the gum, its stimulating flavor, and would inhale the extended delicious odor from the foil which had, only moments earlier, contained the chewing gum. The giant Providence Lithograph pictures, hanging from their metal stand, are still imprinted on my memory. Grandma always gave each of us a tiny replica of the giant picture to take home with us. B. L. Olmstead was editor and writer of my curriculum pieces. I would later be his immediate successor. Helen Hull bought manuscripts and art which leaped at me from Primary Friend and Story Trails. I would later find Helen on the editorial staff I was to lead, and would learn much from her. Helen introduced me to Norman Cousins and the Wheaton writers’ conferences and to some truly fine novels before her early retirement. But she had spanned my childhood and had tutored me as her “senior editor.” I never remember making “paper airplanes” out of the Sunday-school papers, but I have vivid memories of reading stories and poems from them. I wrote letters /end of page 192/ to pen pals whose addresses I found there. Eventually I wrote poetry that got published at Winona Lake. Something in me died when Louise Tenney put Oliver Haslam’s name as author of a poem I had sent her when it appeared in The Free Methodist. She would be nearing retirement when I handled the magazine after the sudden death of Dr. J. F. Gregory for whom she worked as office editor. I never mentioned the pain of her editorial error.
I have no other Sunday-school memory between preschool and junior high. During those years I was a child of poverty; the dust-bowl era was cruel, and survival in Western Kansas was, in itself, a kind of miracle. I had friends both at school and at church. But it was the church friends with whom our family shared meals. We wept with them at tragedy and loss. I went skinny dipping with friends on Sunday afternoons, and shared everything with my cousin Rex Hoffman. Rex’s father was a high-spirited and devout man; his temper and his fervent public praying created a paradox in me which has fueled a lifelong quest for reconciliation. His verbal and physical abuse of Rex and the contrasting tenderness as a Sunday-school teacher and his public praying baffled me then and now. Sunday afternoons were often on the Hoffman farm where Sabbath rest precluded everything except evening milking and feeding the livestock. Rex and I had the run of the farm with its horses and its rattlesnake-infested pasturelands.
When I turned thirteen Mrs. Schmidt was my Sunday-school teacher. Eunice Gardner was the only girl in the class. Clayton, Ed, Chuck, Quentin, with Rex and me, turned the class into a lively, sometimes physically active circus. We met on the pulpit platform, with a sort of choir curtain pulled from one side of the alcove to screen us visually from three adult classes which were meeting in the sanctuary. Uncle John was one of the teachers, Lula Gardner was another. I could follow them in their intricate biblical interpretations, especially those theories they espoused with great feeling. But it was Mrs. Schmidt who won me, somehow. She gave each of us the most beautiful wall plaque at Christmas that year. She had painted each frame by hand. And she had used an art technique by which black letters were stenciled backward inside the glass. Foil was the background to fairly shout two words at us for the rest of our lives: “God First.” It wasn’t easy to contemplate what life would be like at thirteen if God were “first.” But I knew then that it was a task that I could not avoid—making God the top /end of page 193/ priority in my life. I still treasure the small, framed art piece; it remains my aspiration and often accuses me in a gentle way.
What Happened to Me?
I was a man at thirteen. I grew more than twelve inches in height that year. At school my best friends turned me into an “instant” basketball player—simply because I was tall enough to play center and could jump better than most people. When I was four years old, my Grandma Joy sometimes called me “My little preacher boy.” My peers in high school, sometimes in derision, dubbed me “reverend.” Secretly I had visions of having my own dance band, as my admired band teacher did. Oddly enough, however, at seventeen, my vocation appeared in a moment’s mental vision which remains indelible—one in which I saw myself serving as the instrument of liberation of one person. While presenting a guest solo in another church, I had seen him hunched down on the very last row, showing his face only enough to make eye contact, then, leaning forward until all I could see was the back of his head and his shoulders as I sang. I scarcely knew him except in the halls as an underclassman at high school. But I sensed then that he was a victim of religious abuse in his home, and perhaps at church.
My vocation was confirmed by the decision-makers in the small rural church I was later to serve as pastor. They issued me the first of a series of licenses which indicated their endorsement of me and, in some special sense, their “responsibility for me—forever.” Today , my ordination and its summons to a vocation in the care of persons is firmly bonded to my daily life as much by those people of the high plains and the authority they vested in me as by the hands of the bishop and other elders who laid holy hands on my head symbolizing the transfer of Jesus’ authority to preach.
My structural view of reality has undergone some major reconstructions since the age of seventeen. During my sophomore year of college, confronted with the physical and human sciences as if for the first time, I found myself also immersed in a men’s dormitory environment along with newly returning World War II veterans, and with several non-veterans who were the product of troubled homes. Something or Someone evoked within me an enormous sense of (a) respect for the value of each of them, and (b) hope that every one of them might rise above trouble and tragedy to peace and fulfillment. In some deep radical sense I became an “evangelist”—one who articulated that optimism to others. It was the “underworld” crowd on my campus which elected me /end of page 194/ student-body president. In adult life, youth in trouble seem always to find me and to tell me their troubled story.
At thirty-five, with two masters-level degrees behind me, each put in place with gigantic amounts of reading and writing, I was still in search of a basic theory of humanity to match what I was experiencing. By this time, I was holding eagerly to the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth who I regarded as the original and prototype Evangel. I was well saturated in C. S. Lewis. I was a well-read and well-informed Methodist in the Wesley tradition. Much later, nearly fifty, I discovered Herman Hesse’s “A Bit of Theology.” The decisive catalyst for me at mid-life was William Lynch’s tip. I was trying to nail down my research problem at Indiana University. “Have you ever looked at Piaget’s The Moral Judgement of the Child?” Somehow I had only read summaries of Piaget but had never read his primary sources. The center half of that 1932 title was to weave together a high-fidelity pattern which organized my life experience in a highly satisfying way. His observations of children playing marbles and dealing with rules led him to articulate perceptions of adult constraint, unilateral respect, moral realism, and to trace the consequences of cooperation in the changing views of justice. I have painted the main lines of that satisfying pattern in two chapters: “Life as Pilgrimage,” and “Moral Development and Christian Holiness: John Wesley’s Faith Pilgrimage.” They appear in my Moral Development Foundations.
So, here I am, found at last by a research and theoretical base-line on which I was already intuitively ministering and developing curriculum. My research published in 1969, on The Effects of Value-Oriented Instruction in the Church and in the Home was paralleled by the launching of the Aldersgate Graded Curriculum. It was put into service in more than a half-dozen denominations in September, 1969. Simultaneously, my leader-training text supported the adventure: Meaningful Learning in the Church.
Today, everything I touch is left printed with my belief that the human adventure is dynamic, relational, aspirational, epochal, and cumulative. I regard this more general human pattern as especially responsive to the grace of God who has created is in the divine image, creating us male and female to display the essential minimum spectrum of that image. The image of God has implanted in humans the indelible/imprinted marks of justice/righteousness and attachment/love. These potentialities /end of page 195/ are designed for good, for ennobling and enhancing the common human adventures, but they may also be corrupted by evil and turned to destructive and seductive purposes leading to the common dissipation.
Reflection: Apology
The editors’ instructions for this chapter were clear. “The chapter should not deal with the personal odyssey of the person (whether farm boy or city lad) but rather should deal with the professional odyssey of the individual.” I have failed to comply. My professional effectiveness today and my commitment to concrete experience as the primary source of any theory or theology (after all, God acted before humans wrote!) is rooted in my life experience first and in professional and theoretical sources only a pale second. I can read the “sources,” and I try to heed the pitfalls which historians point out, but I have little patience with the dullness, the ineptitude, and the commonsense redundancy which plagues much of the literature in the field of Christian religious education.
[keystroked for the WEB site September 28-29, 2001, with minor corrections. DMJ]