Kayy Gordon has braved subzero weather and harsh living conditions for 40 years to bring the gospel to the inuit people of Canada’s northern artic region.

Young Kayy Gordon of Vancouver, British Columbia, couldn’t escape the burden that God had placed on her heart. While praying one Saturday night in 1953, the19-year-old received a vision of herself ministering to the Inuit people of the frozen Arctic–a land of snow and ice, subzero temperatures, polar bears and caribou, reindeer herders and the aurora borealis. This was a land where few missionaries had dared to tread.

The Inuit, known to Westerners as Eskimos, have inhabited the Canadian Arctic for 5,000 years. They are relatives of Arctic inhabitants in Russia and other lands above the Arctic Circle. Their spirituality was founded on spiritism and occultic shamanism, except for some inroads made by ritualistic Anglican missionaries and others in Canada’s north.

Kay y had her work cut out for her. Her first test was to withstand the protests of Reg Layzell, pastor of Glad Tidings Fellowship, an independent Pentecostal church in Vancouver that she attended.

When Kayy told Layzell that God had showed her she would be a missionary in the Arctic, he chided: “Well, Kayy, God knows your address and your phone number. When He wants you, He will call you.” That retort sent Kayy, now 67, scurrying out of Layzell’s office in tears.

“Pastor Layzell was a disciplinarian, but a real revivalist at the same time,” Kayy said of her now deceased pastor. “He was the way he was because he was so anxious to develop ministry that would last. He was my mentor, and I have tremendous respect for him.”

Though Kayy’s pastor was more interested in supporting missions that had a chance to survive, during the next two years he watched her endure ridicule from family and friends. He also saw that her deep, inward passion for the Inuit people was not shaken. Layzell finally realized that this young woman, now in her early 20s, would not be swayed from answering God’s call to the Arctic.

Before Layzell would release Kayy to missions work, however, she had to meet one requirement: have direct contacts in the Arctic. On the very day that he was going to tell Kayy she couldn’t go without having developed those contacts, a couple wandered into Glad Tidings Fellowship.

Anna and Mikkel Pulk had lived in the Arctic for 30 years, herding reindeer from Alaska into Canada. They were vacationing in Vancouver and looking for a church to visit. Just moments before the Pulks entered the church lobby, Layzell was impressed by the Lord that strangers from the north were arriving.

“You people are from the Arctic, aren’t you?” Layzell inquired of the amazed Pulks, who wondered how he could know that. With their white skin and modern dress, the Pulks gave no clue they might be Arctic dwellers.

Kayy had her contacts. Layzell released her into ministry with his blessing and support. In 1956, at age 22, Kayy left her world for the icy territory of the Inuit.

FARMING SOULS IN A FROZEN WORLD Kayy arrived to a then primitive Arctic, gradually learning the customs of the Inuit, living in their tents and traveling with these nomads of the north as they herded reindeer. In most villages, no running water or electricity was available. Sometimes, however, she was blessed with the use of a few electric generators.

As an outsider, Kayy found adjusting to Arctic living conditions challenging. As an evangelist, she sometimes felt she was trying to farm frozen ground.

“Forty years ago, it wasn’t easy,” she said. “The Inuit were pretty steeped in religious and cultural traditions. It took them a long time to see the need to be born again–to have a Spirit-filled life. We had many years of sowing before the real harvest began to come.

“There [were] what they called shamans–like the medicine men of Africa. They felt they had special powers to cure or bless, which might include healing. But it great move of the Holy Spirit in the 1980s that really broke the power of shamanism for many.”

Kayy says she met only minor resistance as a woman missionary. That resistance faded quickly when the Inuit saw that her prayers for their healing were heard and that her words of prophecy came true. She also noted the generous nature of the Inuit and how this often made her work easy.

“When you live with them, they often have a wonderful way of yielding themselves to the Lord and to the moving of the Holy Spirit,” Kayy said. “That yielding permits God to bring great change in their lives rapidly. Because of that, they grow quite quickly as Christians and the qualities of humility, love and compassion become very evident in their lives.”

WOMEN LEADING THE WAY Today, Kayy is president of Glad Tidings Arctic Missions, which has established 12 churches and two Bible schools in the Arctic. Kayy’s goal to raise up Inuit leaders to evangelize and disciple their own people has been met beyond her expectations. She’s especially pleased that her presence as a woman minister inspired Inuit women to take on leadership roles in their villages.

Hattie Alagalak, an Inuit and wife of the mayor of Arviat, a village on Hudson Bay’s northwestern shore, emphasized Kayy’s influence. Hattie, who is pastor of Glad Tidings Fellowship in Arviat, first met Kayy in 1975 shortly after having accepted Jesus. The two began traveling together in 1977, and Hattie became a pastor in Arviat in 1990 after years of mentoring by Kayy.

“I really had a desire to work for the Lord and then seeing a woman who had a ministry gave me more urge to give myself to God,” Hattie said. “Being a woman, that amazed me that [Kayy] would come, that she would be a missionary.”

Another leader to emerge from Kayy’s missionary efforts was Lynn Patterson. Lynn was 28 years old when she first traveled north with Kayy, and she spent the next 20 years serving in Kayy’s ministry.

Now 48, Lynn is pastor of Glad Tidings Fellowship in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, and she serves as supervisor of Glad Tidings Arctic Missions–a job that requires frequent trips across the Arctic.

“We travel by plane–Kayy traveled by dogsled,” Lynn said. “We can’t forget what people like Kayy Gordon did. She blazed the trail.”

Kayy says because of God’s favor to her, she has faced little persecution as a woman minister. On one occasion an Anglican bishop sought to have her banished from preaching in a village, but Kayy attributed that incident to her delivery of the Pentecostal message, not prejudice against women in ministry. But what few incidents she did face–she overcame by staying focused on the mission God gave her.

“My attitude has been whenever anything negative is said, I don’t respond to it,” Kayy said. “I just get about doing what God has called me to do.”

Kayy has been courted a few times but has never married. “It’s true I did have others show an interest in me, but I simply felt too fulfilled in life to get involved,” Kayy said.

Forty-four years ago, one young woman heeded God’s call to the Arctic tundra. Today, as a result of her faithfulness, an entire people’s ancient culture has been penetrated by the good news of Jesus Christ.

Billy Bruce is news editor for Charisma magazine. He traveled with Kayy Gordon on a ministry tour of six Arctic villages in March 2000 along with evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne.

Austere beauty and severe weather mark the Canadian northern artic region–the homeland of the Inuit people, commonly referred to as Eskimos.

Following a move of the Holy Spirit in the 1980s, many of the native people began seeing their need for Christ.

Missionary Kayy Gordon has braved subzero weather and harsh conditions for 40 years to bring the gospel to the Inuit people of Canada’s northern Artic region. Charisma takes you above the tree line to witness this unusual revival.

In the Canadian Arctic, subzero temperatures and wind-whipped blizzards accompanied by blinding, icy fog can leave human travelers directionless, stranded and vulnerable–in much the same way that sin can prevent people from ever finding God. Fortunately for the Eskimos of the Arctic, God raised up a missionary who has shared the compass and light of the gospel in this stark, frozen land for 40 years. Kayy Gordon has left the Arctic ablaze, bringing the Holy Spirit’s revival fire to the icy land, penetrating a 5,000-year-old indigenous culture with the good news of Jesus Christ.

Above the tree line, they call this expanse “the barrens.” The ground becomes frozen solid and snow-covered over the long winter months. During the short weeks of an Arctic summer the ground turns to a mushy tundra that supports swarms of mosquitoes, and for three months the sun never sets. Arctic dwellers then endure 24 hours of daylight.

Despite such extremes, on a frigid January night in 1958–as temperatures dropped to 50 below zero–24-year-old missionary Kayy Gordon from Vancouver, British Columbia, was determined to take her borrowed dog team 50 miles from her base at Tuk on a one-day journey to a roaming camp of reindeer herders. She took nurse Iona Blakney with her to do immunizations of the herdsmen’s families.

Tuk, short for Tuktoyaktuk, is an Eskimo community located high up on the northwestern shores of the Arctic Ocean east of the MacKenzie River Delta on the Beaufort Sea. Out on the barrens Kayy hoped to spend a few days ministering to the herdsmen, many of whom already had become faithful believers. Also, Kayy was watchful for an opportunity to share the gospel with Blakney, who was known in Tuk as a woman who liked parties and could drink most men under the table.

Accompanying the women were two men: Nels Pulk, their guide, and his helper Komeak, an Inuit, or Eskimo–the more common term used by Westerners for the Canadian Arctic’s native people. Inuit are related to most Arctic dwellers who inhabit the Earth’s frozen rooftop. Their relatives can be found in portions of Greenland and Iceland and among Asiatic tribes in Russia.

At about 9 a.m. on the cold, overcast day, the missions team pulled out of Tuk into a terrific icy wind–the kind that cuts like a knife and slows to a crawl even the healthiest of Husky dog teams. Eight hours later the group set up temporary camp at Sownuktuk, or “place of bones.” Nels and Komeak raised a tent and fired up a portable stove for heat.

After some hot tea and a meal, the team packed up and moved on again. As darkness fell, the moon lit up the Arctic landscape. Kayy pondered the God-given beauty of the Arctic, now lit by an almost heavenly light.

“There is something about the perfection, the vastness of this white by any strife or problems of this world, that to me is akin to heaven,” Kayy writes in her book, God’s Fire on Ice.

Taking Jesus to a Frozen World

After a few days of ministry among the reindeer herders, Kayy’s missions team packed up to head back to Tuk. The day they left, the sun set at noon after about only two hours of morning daylight. The temperature dropped to 58 degrees below zero, and soon Kayy noticed her feet were getting very cold. They had gotten damp–a serious danger in subzero temperatures. Dampness can lead to frost bite–or amputation.

Kayy tried changing her socks, but her feet were nearly frozen, and they did not respond to the dry-sock treatment. She knew she must run to get her blood flowing again. She ran in painful strides as the toboggans traveled.

But the running wasn’t working, either. Her frozen feet felt like wooden stumps. She feared the worst and prayed for healing. Thirty minutes later she felt
sen
sations in her feet. Miraculously, the blood began to flow, and her feet were spared.

Taking a different route home, the team found an abandoned cabin in which to weather the night. Soon they had a fire blazing. Before turning out her gas lamp, Kayy read her Bible and prayed. She noticed eyes zeroing in on her–those of nurse Iona Blakney.

On the way home, the temperature dropped to 60 below zero, and wind-chill factors lowered it to about 100 below zero. A misty, icy fog settled over the team as they crossed a frozen lake in search of an igloo for shelter.

“We couldn’t find it,” Kayy said. “We drove round and round, crisscrossing the lake several times until finally Nels stumbled onto the igloo, which had become iced up on the inside and was consequently very, very cold.”

The team settled in to wait for the moon to rise, since the darkness and deep fog made further travel impossible. As soon as the moon was up, Kayy called on the team to leave.

Traveling again, it wasn’t long before the wind had swept away all traces of the lead team’s tracks, and Kayy’s team was in danger of being utterly lost. Kayy prayed silently: “God, somehow make a way for us. I’ve brought this unsaved nurse with me, and I don’t want to be an instrument of her death.”

Suddenly, the blowing snow stopped briefly, and Kayy was able to spot Nels’ team moving faintly in the distance.

Back in Tuk, Kayy was frustrated that she had not talked with nurse Blakney about Jesus during the trip. But God had different plans. After four days, Blakney
came to Kayy’s hut, a 14-by-20 plywood house she had built, and nervously asked her questions about her faith. She came back three nights later, and Kayy led her to the Lord.

At Kayy’s next service, Blakney–the only white woman in the church besides Kayy–kneeled at the oil heater that served as a makeshift altar and gave her heart to Jesus.

“To the Eskimo people, it was a miracle,” Kayy said.

“The white nurse has been saved!” they proclaimed hut to hut. “Even the whites are getting saved!”

Some eight years later on Dec. 6, 1966, nurse Blakney died of cancer at age 40.

Called to the Wilderness

Now 67, Kayy can recite many

such stories of miraculous survival during her pioneering days, when dog teams or skidoos (snowmobiles) were the only mode of travel. She can tell of thousands of salvations among the Inuit people

during her 40 years of crisscrossing the northern Canadian Arctic.

There was Silas, an alcohol-abusing Inuit man who liked to gamble and was headed for an early death until he heard the gospel. When he accepted Jesus, he went home and threw out his home-brewed alcohol and posted a “No Gambling” sign on his house.

He couldn’t read English but wanted to read the Bible, so he prayed for the Lord to enable him to read His Word. God answered with a miracle, and Silas could read the Bible in English, but he could not read any other work printed in English.

Although Kayy’s mission has achieved much in 40 years, her work is not complete. She received two very clear words of prophecy not to lay down her Arctic work. In one, the Lord spoke to her and said that “a slower transition is a more solid one,” she said.

Kayy allowed Charisma to fly with her team for a week last March during an Arctic ministry tour with evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne. At each stop, Kayy beamed as community centers filled to capacity with Inuit families and town officials hungering for revival services.

The evangelism team took the gospel to Arviat along the western shore of Hudson Bay. In the very first service, the power of God flooded the room. A woman who was blind in one eye gained her sight, and a deaf woman could hear again. The altar looked like a Holy Ghost hospital, with several Inuit strewn about the floor, many sobbing and weeping, others laughing hysterically under God’s anointing.

The troupe flew east to Coral Harbor on Southampton Island on the Hudson. At Arviat and Coral Harbor, Kayy’s ministry team was honored by town mayors who are Christians, largely as a result of her ministry’s outreach.

After an evening service at Coral Harbor, the team flew west at night to Baker Lake to beat poor weather forecasted for the next day. As team members marveled at the incredible lights of the aurora borealis, the airplane’s autopilot disengaged, and Howard-Browne had to fly while the pilot corrected the problem. The matter didn’t phase Kayy, who
bragged about the quality of the airplanes used for her travels today compared with those used 20 years ago.

Kayy first heard the call to minister in the Arctic at age 19 while attending Glad Tidings Fellowship in Vancouver. She was praying on a Saturday night and received a vision of herself ministering to the Inuit, going from place to place in the land of ice and snow. Kayy was ecstatic and told pastor Reg Layzell that God wanted to send her to the Arctic.

“Well Kayy, God knows your address and phone number. When He wants you, He will call you,” Layzell said. Kayy was devastated and left the church in tears.

For the next three years friends and relatives ridiculed and rejected her for her “Arctic calling.” She prayed that God would remove her passion for the Arctic peoples, but it only grew stronger. Finally, Layzell realized Kayy’s passion would not be silenced, and he agreed to send her to the Arctic if she could find a contact there.

Again God provided. On the same morning that Layzell planned to tell Kayy she could not go north without prior contacts, Anna and Mikkel Pulk decided to pay a visit to Layzell’s church. The Pulks had lived in the Arctic for 30 years, herding reindeer from Alaska to Canada. The couple had given their lives to Jesus at Reindeer Station in the 1950s and were vacationing in Vancouver.

Moments before the Pulks came in the building, the Lord impressed on Layzell that strangers from the north were arriving at the church. He went to the foyer.

“You people are from the Arctic, aren’t you?” he asked, greeting the Pulks.

How could he know that? they
wondered. They both were white people and wore no fur parkas or mukluks
(fur-covered boots).

Layzell introduced the Pulks to Kayy. At age 22, she left for the Arctic, and the rest is missions history.

Wings Above the Arctic

Kayy left Vancouver to begin her Arctic ministry in June 1956, and through the rest of that decade and the 1960s her work was concentrated in the western regions of the Canadian Arctic. She lived among the Inuit, learning their culture and eating their whale meat, reindeer, caribou and fish, while enduring the harsh weather.

By the 1970s Glad Tidings Arctic Mission was a registered arm of Glad Tidings in Vancouver. And in the 1980s, Kayy had set up Glad Tidings Arctic Missions Society to more easily meet government requirements for lands and grants. She remains president of the society.

She also had
raised enough funds by March 1976 to begin operating a small Cessna 185 airplane that had been donated by Immanuel Church in Calgary, Alberta. The use of airplanes would greatly expand Kayy’s outreach into the eastern regions across the Northwest Territories into what is now the Inuit’s homeland–Nunavut Territory (see story on page 48).

The introduction of airplanes into the ministry also brought new danger and threatened to end the ministry.

In March 1978, pilot Royden Janz, a dedicated Christian, was scheduled to pick up Kayy at Cambridge Bay to fly the Cessna 185 south to Winnipeg, Manitoba, for a maintenance checkup and to give Kayy a break. Hours before Kayy was to leave, she got a call from a
pastor’s wife in Washington, D.C., to compliment her on her book, God’s Fire on Ice, which Kayy did not know had finally been released.

“When I heard that, I decided that I should not go with Royden but should go west to my home church in Vancouver to begin presenting my book in my home church,” she says.

After celebrating the release at Glad Tidings church, Kayy came home to her apartment and learned that the ministry airplane had crashed about a mile from Janz’s home in Steinbach, Manitoba. Janz, married with five children, was killed.

The loss of Janz and the airplane greatly discouraged the Inuit believers, but God quickly taught them a lesson in faith. Kayy was invited to appear on The PTL Club with Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. The Bakkers interviewed Kayy before millions of viewers about her Arctic ministry and the loss of Janz and the plane.

They then asked viewers each to send $1 to help Kayy get another plane. By the time she got back to Vancouver, she had nine big bags of mail–and $32,000 mostly in $1 bills.

Within five months of the crash, Kayy’s ministry–with more support from Immanuel Church–gained use of a twin-engine Piper Aztec airplane, and her ministry soared on wings again.

Turning Point

By April 1983, Kayy’s Arctic missions work had produced a Bible school that began in Cambridge Bay and now operates in Rankin Inlet. Churches had been planted in villages across the far north. Her mission to evangelize, disciple and send out Inuits to reach their own people was coming to pass at a rate that far exceeded her expectations.

In fact, Kayy was so pleased with the progress that she planned to transfer full-time oversight of the Arctic work to a promising group of leaders God had prepared under her. She then would be free to travel in North America to raise more funds for Arctic missions and have time to minister in other countries.

But another tragedy struck, taking some of the mission’s finest leaders.

Pilot Bill Goward, assistant supervisor of Arctic Missions for Glad Tidings, revved up the ministry airplane on April 6, 1983, to take Kayy, pastor Lynn Patterson and a guest minister from Rankin Inlet to Coral Harbor, where they would conduct a short-term Bible seminar.

Goward flew up to Repulse Bay to pick up church leaders who wanted to attend the seminar. As a storm brewed near Coral Harbor, Goward’s passengers boarded: new pastor Paul Suisangnark and his adult son Solomoni; and two of Kayy’s finest Bible school graduates, David and Cathy Tulugak, and
their 10-month-old daughter, Holly. It was a routine one-hour flight.

The airplane crashed in the storm just 26 miles north of Coral Harbor’s airport, burning badly, and all aboard were killed on impact. Kayy was asked to identify the bodies.

“I became angry,” Kayy says. “I said: ‘Lord, it is not fair! Why should these young people be wiped out when they were so dedicated?’ Especially troubling to me was the baby’s death.”

Then in an instant, God showed Kayy all the hundreds of Inuit who had been blessed by the airplane ministry, how people were changed, saved, delivered and empowered to reach others. And Kayy had to accept the deaths that she did not understand.

“From that moment, the burden of it lifted off of me,” Kayy says.

“And out of bitter came sweet,” she continues. “God is never a loser! In the months after the tragedy, many, many [people] dedicated and rededicated their lives to Christ. Many young people were touched. Many relatives responded, saying they wanted to finish the job that their loved ones gave their lives to do.”

In addition, Kayy dropped her plan to leave full-time work in the Arctic.

“That was my turning everything. It seemed a lot more settled for me after that. I accepted what happened as God’s plan and knew that He also had more for me to do in the Arctic.”

Today, Kayy looks back in awe at the network of some 12 churches planted across the forgotten lands of ice and snow and the Rankin Inlet Bible school that is recognized by the Canadian government. As she edges closer to her 70s and retirement years, Kayy has plenty of work to do before turning over Arctic missions to other servants.

“There are some 32 Inuit communities scattered throughout Nunavut, and we have been to about 26 of them over the years,” Kayy explains. “The whole key to me is that the Inuit now are carrying this move of God into their churches. The mantle has fallen on them, and they are running with the message.”

She’s blessed with uncanny vigor and health, and the younger Charisma reporter who followed her on the recent Arctic tour found it tough to keep up. Kayy is planning another Arctic tour in March 2001 with evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne.

“It is the principle Paul said to Timothy–to commit the truth to faithful men who will be able to teach others,” Kayy says.

“As a missionary, I would not feel that I have completed my work if the torch of truth had not been gripped by local hands.

“I am so blessed to see my vision come to pass in my lifetime.”

Billy Bruce is news editor for Charisma. He traveled with Kayy Gordon for a week in the Arctic last March.

Claiming Nunavut For God

Canada’s newest territory is proof of God’s love for the Inuit.

It’s a miracle similar to the 1948 return of Israel to the Jews. After centuries of displacement and roaming through a native land now dominated by white descendants of Europeans, the Inuit people were granted their own homeland. On April 1, 1999, the Canadian government formerly created Nunavut Territory, and the Nunavut flag was raised over the capital, Iqaluit, for the first time.

Nunavut, a land mass the size of western Europe, was carved from the Northwest Territories to provide the Inuit people a chance for self-government. Nunavut means “our land” in Inuktitut, the Inuit language.

Thirty years of negotiations between the Canadian government and Inuit leaders culminated in the largest land-claims settlement in Canadian history–with no violence or protests. It was a testament, Kayy Gordon believes, to the peaceful, humble nature of the Inuit people.

Despite its size, Nunavut is home to a mere 28,000 people, 85 percent of whom are Inuit. The small population is attributable to the harsh Arctic climate and the difficulties of travel in and out of the region. Half the population is under the age of 25.

Fifteen of the 19 people elected to serve on the Nunavut Territorial Legislature are Inuit. While the issues of merging an ancient culture into a capitalistic society are complex, one factor working in the Nunavut leadership’s favor is prayer, Kayy says.

“It is wonderful that many of the people involved in the Nunavut government are Spirit-filled Christians,” she says. “It is common for them to get together and pray about governmental issues and to ask for God’s wisdom.”

It was only 50 years ago that the Inuit lived in mostly cultural ways as superb hunters, living off the fat and meat of whale, walrus, seal, musk ox, caribou and fish. Their religious tradition involved a spiritism similar to the shamans, or medicine men, of other occultic religions. Kayy taught the Inuit spiritual warfare and how to cast the spirits out in Jesus’ name.

“At least 95 percent of the people in the North believe in the spirit world,” Kayy states in her book Arctic Ablaze. “They know about, or have seen dark figures coming into a room. They know about the anagkok, or shaman power, to make bears or wolves appear, or to make people sick.”

The Nunavut flag shows an inuksuk–a stack of stones placed in the shape of a man–as the symbol of ancient Inuit culture.

Some Inuit oppose the use of the ancient symbol on their flag because they believe it tells the world that the Inuit are a people stuck in past traditions who can’t move forward in a fast-changing society. Kayy applauds the Inuit who oppose clinging to the old ways but says she spent little time during her pioneering years trying to explain away Inuit traditions. Rather, like the apostle Paul, Kayy wanted to “become a Roman to reach the Romans,” and accept
the wholesome aspects of the Inuit culture.

“I felt I was called to preach the more abundant life in Christ to release them from all the powers of darkness and the old ways,” Kayy says. “I found that I wanted them to focus on Jesus and on the Holy Spirit. I didn’t mess with the traditional thing. And I saw the power of God break it off many lives.”

The Inuit are intensely social, according to Lois Neely, who co-wrote two books about Kayy’s ministry–God’s Fire On Ice and Arctic Ablaze–with Kayy. She says their way of life changed significantly after World War II.

“The world of the Canadian Eskimo was changed forever when Distant Early Warning (DEW) stations were thrown up all across the Canadian Arctic,” Neely wrote in her forward to Arctic Ablaze. Along with searches for minerals and oil came helicopters and jet aircraft. Igloos made way for heated homes with running water and color television.

Today, Inuit youth can access the Internet and see the world outside of the Arctic on satellite TV. The lack of career opportunities in an economy limited to mineral mining, DEW stations, oil refineries, and arts and crafts manufacturing leaves many youth feeling trapped. Rising crime and suicide rates among teens and adults are becoming so numerous that the Canadian government has stepped in to provide counseling and rehabilitation programs.

But Kayy has brought the real answer of Jesus to two generations of Inuit, and she’s preparing an outreach base in the Arctic that will last for years. “I do look forward to seeing those who follow in my footsteps,” she says. “The Inuit people are catching God’s fire.”

Warming Hearts in Yellowknife

Another brave woman, Lynn Patterson, is reaching the Arctic region for Christ.

In the bustling city of Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, miners have dug for gold since the early 1990s, drawing in hundreds of people to settle in this center of Arctic activity.

Considered the capital of the Arctic, Yellowknife is home to some 20,000 residents and the territorial legislature. There are a few skyscrapers, hotels, convention centers, an airport and a regional hospital.

Despite a mining tragedy in 1992 that killed 11 men and temporarily closed down the gold mines, miners now are exploring the area for diamonds. The city’s commerce, combined with its stature as a base for regional politics and Arctic tourism, make Yellowknife a hub in the far north.

Today, Arctic missions led by two women are preparing the city as a future base for outreach across the frozen north. Kayy Gordon, president of the Glad Tidings Arctic Missions Society, planted seeds of ministry in Yellowknife during her many years of missions work. Kayy found a dedicated servant in Lynn Patterson some two decades ago.

Since 1991, Lynn has pastored Glad Tidings Fellowship in Yellowknife, a small church of about 125 parishioners. The church enjoys a strong multicultural mix of native Indians, Caribbean blacks, Inuit, whites and Metis (pronounced MA-tee), who are half white, half Indian.

A river of revival is flowing in the church. More than 1,700 people were saved in meetings with Kayy and Rodney Howard-Browne in March. Some 32 Cree Indians drove 2,400 miles from Saskatchewan to attend the meetings. They took the revival back to their village of Pinehouse, and now have a thriving church of 300.

“They all got filled with the Holy Ghost,” Lynn told Charisma. “I water-baptized them all and sent them home. I even married a couple that had been living out of wedlock. They got right with God before they went home!”

Lynn also is supervisor of Glad Tidings Arctic Missions and frequently travels to Arctic villages visiting the 12 churches raised up by Kayy. Lynn was 28 when she answered God’s call to serve in the Arctic. She worked in Canada’s criminal justice system in the south and planned only to help Kayy with her Bible school in Cambridge Bay.

“I went for two months. Twenty years later, I’m still there,” Lynn says. She was in Coral Harbor with Kayy in April 1983 when a plane crash claimed pilot Bill Goward, four members of Kayy’s missions team, and an infant.

“We made a covenant with God that if our friends could die for the cause of God, we could live for the cause of winning people to the Lord,” Lynn says. “When everyone was wiped out–we carried on.”

As a result of the mining and tourism boom in Yellowknife, property values have increased tremendously. The Yellowknife church can’t afford their rented space in a shopping mall much longer.

“We own about one acre, and we plan to build a church there,” Lynn says. “But it would cost us $800,000 Canadian–about $500,000 U.S. dollars–to build. It costs
2-1/2 times more to build in the Arctic because everything has to be flown or trucked in from the south. The closest city for supplies is Edmonton, Alberta, and that’s nearly 1,000 miles away.”

Lynn wants to expand Kayy’s ministry base at Yellowknife to create a hub from which to launch missions teams into the Arctic. A critical need for ministry to youth has evolved as the north populates at an incredible rate. The Northwest Territories also has the highest youth suicide rate of any Canadian province or territory.

“I attribute a lot of the suicide to the darkness in winter, the isolation of smaller communities in the north, and drugs and alcohol,” Lynn says. “But the gospel is making a big difference.”

She spent nine years in Rankin Inlet and a year in Cambridge Bay before coming to Yellowknife. She’s admired Kayy’s determination for 20 years, and says a new generation of missionaries will be responsible for carrying on Kayy’s work.

“We travel by plane–she traveled by dog sled,” Lynn says. “We can’t forget what people like Kayy Gordon did. She blazed the trail.”

When the Men Didn’t Go, These Women Did

Kayy Gordon heard God’s call to go north. It was that simple. She was 19 years old when she heard the call and 22 when she finally arrived in the primitive Arctic of the mid-1950s.

Lynn Patterson was 28 years old when she first traveled north with Kayy. Twenty years later, Lynn is still working for the Lord in the harsh northland.

And the two of them are raising up women pastors among the Inuit, like Hattie Alagalak in Arviat.

It seems the farther into this harsh frontier these women go to serve as ministers, the less trouble their gender presents to them as they fill leadership roles that more traditionally are held by men. And they’ve done it through grace and with respect for their fellow male
ministers of the gospel.

Kayy had a tough time convincing her pastor, Reg Layzell, that God really did have a mission for her in the Arctic. But Kayy believes that had little to do with her gender.

“Pastor Layzell was a disciplinarian, but a real revivalist at the same time,” Kayy says of her mentor, who is deceased. “He was the way he was because he was so anxious to develop ministry that would last. I have a tremendous respect for him.”

Kayy’s worst troubles with prejudice against female ministers occurred in the early 1960s. An Anglican bishop gave an Anglican minister in Cambridge Bay an ultimatum to get her out of town, but Kayy says it was her Pentecostal, full gospel message that got her in trouble with the bishop–not her gender. And most of the opposition she faced was a result of her preaching Pentecostal doctrine, although some Inuits once tried to cast a curse on her.

“They looked at me more as a threat because of the message I brought. They didn’t see that we were all on the same team,” she says. When she traveled in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, she ran into some opposition because of her gender, but she says it was minimal.

“Some people would say they didn’t like a woman preacher, but I have had men come to me after a service and tell me they changed their minds,” Kayy says. “How can you knock that? I do know some have been terribly adverse in all this, but I haven’t experienced that.

“My attitude has been whenever anything negative is said, I don’t respond to it,” she continues. “I just get about what God has called me to do. It just doesn’t seem to be too controversial an area with me. In fact, I have had so much help and support from male pastors that I feel men have treated me not badly at all.”

Kayy has been so busy in ministry that she never married, although she’s been courted a time or two. “It’s true I did have others show an interest in me, but I simply felt too fulfilled in life to get involved,” she says.

Lynn, 48, says she’s single because God hasn’t brought her the man who will share in her busy ministry travels in the north.

“A husband? He’d have to be someone who had a real call of God on his life to travel to 14 different Arctic communities,” Lynn says. “I’m a lady. I will never chase a man. If God has a man for me, I’ll know it.”

Lynn too says she’s had little trouble as a female pastor and evangelist. She attributes that to her respectful strategy toward men.

“Women are created to be ladies. I’m not a women’s libber. I’m only liberated because of Jesus,” Lynn says.

“I always honored the men in our ministry. I never got into a debate over this issue because both men and women died in those plane crashes that took our fellow ministers,” she says. “I didn’t think gender was the issue. I thought getting people saved was the issue.”

–Billy Bruce

A new understanding of God’s love keeps the artist working through the fallout of his divorce and drug addiction

If the life of Christian singer Michael English were a roller-coaster ride, one would have to think this period must be the low end of the deepest valley–and that everything from here must be up.

Friends, family and fans alike are praying that this is so, that his fall from acclaim as one of the nation’s top Christian singers after an extramarital affair and a subsequent bout with drug addiction that could have landed him in jail are now behind him.

That is, the worst is behind him if a judge who reviewed his case in October agrees that English’s confession of guilt to abusing prescription drugs and his voluntary participation in treatment programs prove that more punishment is not warranted. If not, English could face jail time.

English, 38, was slated to appear before Judge J. Randall Wyatt on Oct. 6 to find out if he would serve jail time for the 12 counts of fraud for illegally obtaining prescription medication. He became addicted to the codeinelike painkiller drug hydrocodone in 1997 after receiving a prescription for it following back surgery.

After his back healed and his physical pain subsided, English continued to take the drug.

English was completely open about his problems during a recent interview with Charisma. With his sobriety intact and a new album under his belt, Heaven to Earth, and a restored relationship with his father and a strengthened relationship with his 15-year-old daughter Megan, English was upbeat and optimistic about his life, his ongoing restoration and rehabilitation, and his regenerated ministry.

“God doesn’t throw anyone away,” English said. “He ‘don’t make no junk.’ Sometimes it is hard to believe–that God loves a bum on the street as much as He loves the president of the United States. I am just thankful because after all the things I’ve been through, He loves me still.”

English credited Topper Council, 51, of Paducah, Ky., as being his spiritual mentor who holds him accountable daily while he recovers.

“I’ve known him for years. He’s just been here for me through this whole ordeal. He constantly calls me and leaves me scriptures on my answering machine. He gets on to me if I miss church. It makes me feel stronger to know that he’s there.”

English went through a rigorous on-site rehabilitation program at Vanderbilt University. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and this doctor believes that English’s drug addiction partially resulted from his brain trying to replace a stabilizing chemical.

“He said I was taking these drugs, not to get high, but to feel normal,” English said. “It really made me feel better to know that there was something wrong with me. I’d been ADD and didn’t know it.”

Now English is hearing a different call for ministry–to reach out to struggling believers like himself who want to give up their walk because they don’t feel worthy of God’s love when they fall.

“If you need to get your car fixed, would you take it to someone who has read all the manuals, but has never been underneath the hood?” En

glish explained. “I kind of feel like the guy who has never read the manual–his fingers are all dirty–but he sure can ‘fix the car.’ There are a lot of hurting people in this world. Who better to tell them about a God who forgives us and loves us no matter what?”

In liner notes on his CD Heaven to Earth, English apologizes to those closest to him who were hurt by his fall into adultery, including his former wife, Lisa. “Lisa and I try to get together as often as possible to discuss our daughter,” he said.

“I’m not going to hold my head down because God told me I don’t have to anymore,” English said. “I told God I was sorry. He heard me the first time. I am excited about the future. I get excited about a lot of things these days. I don’t take anything for granted after what I have been through.”

Megan, English’s daughter, played a major role in inspiring English’s addiction recovery. The singer said she came to see him at the Vanderbilt rehab center.

“My daughter is a great little is someone I can be proud of,” he said. “She hides her feelings most of the time and that is hard for me. She doesn’t want to hurt me. She says she just wants her father back –mentally and emotionally. My promise to her to come back as her father was a driving force in my recovery.”

English hopes his audience sees a man on stage who has struggled and at times was vulnerable to sin, but who fought back in faith to stand in the victory that Jesus offers.

“What has happened to me has happened, but it is not the sin that can tear us down. It is how we react and what we do about it.

“Through it all, if we learn how to keep our faith in God, He can totally turn around our failures and use it for His glory. That’s what I am trying to do–get back up and keep on going. I know that is what God wants me to do.”

Two respected bishops in the denomination are campaigning to unseat Bishop Chandler D. Owens in November

The Church of God in Christ (COGIC), the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States, is at a pivotal crossroads in its 103-year history. As the second four-year term of Presiding Bishop Chandler D. Owens winds down to a November election, uncharacteristic campaigning by candidates who are seeking to unseat Owens reveals that COGIC faces an important juncture.

Those challenging Owens’ leadership include top COGIC bishops who say his incessant battle for political power through threats, firings and other intimidating actions has damaged his ability to act in the best interests of the denomination and it’s 5.5 million members.

Traditionally, COGIC’s presiding bishop is re-elected on a first ballot with no opposition at the denomination’s Holy Convocation. The election is held every four years. No sitting presiding bishop has ever been unseated in an election.

Months prior to the upcoming November election, two key leaders in COGIC already had stepped forward to declare their desire to take over Owens’ post. One of the candidates–Bishop Gilbert E. Patterson of Memphis, lost an election bid against Owens in 1996.

Patterson, who was some 500 votes ahead of Owens on the 1996 election’s first ballot, lost by one vote on a rare and controversial

second ballot. Patterson said he refused a call for a vote recount in order to preserve unity. He is seeking the post again because the people who supported him four years ago still support him today.

“It seems to be a mandate from the people who want me to run,” Patterson told Charisma. “This time we’re hoping the victory will be so broad that there will be no need for a recount.”

Bishop Charles E. Blake, pastor of West Angeles COGIC in Los Angeles, also believes he can lead COGIC to the “next level” in the new millennium. West Angeles is COGIC’s largest church, and Blake serves as bishop over COGIC’s largest jurisdiction.

Blake nominated Patterson for the post in 1996. He says he’s not campaigning for the job to oppose Patterson, but to make sure Owens’ bullying style of leadership is stopped so that COGIC can succeed in meeting the spiritual challenges of the new millennium.

“I believe if we can eliminate the atmosphere of fear and intimidation, and rise to a new level of unity, then the Church of God in Christ can be revolutionary in its impact on modern society,” Blake said. “COGIC is uniquely positioned in the urban centers of the world to exert unprecedented influence for Jesus Christ.”

Blake was not pleased when Owens sued the entire congregation of a church in Orlando, Fla., for misconduct because the church would not accept Owens’ appointment of a political ally as replacement for pastor Derrick Hutchins.

Hutchins said he had committed no offense, immoral or unethical, that would warrant his removal from the Orlando

church. However, Owens sought his removal about the time he learned that Hutchins supported Blake for the presiding bishop position.

Owens said his grounds for removing Hutchins were that Hutchins failed to keep a verbal agreement to give up his pastorate at one of two other churches upon accepting the Orlando job. However, in COGIC’s policy manual there is no prohibition against ministers pastoring more than one church.

There is a provision that allows a pastor to be removed when a congregation is found guilty of misconduct. Owens used political allies to try the Orlando church on those grounds, and succeeded in convincing a local judge to permit Hutchins’ ousting, despite a pending appeal of the misconduct finding to COGIC’s national pastors and elders council.

Today, only a handful of parishioners meet in facilities that once were packed under Hutchins’ leadership.

Patterson and Blake have made donations of $15,000 and $20,000, respectively, to Hutchins’ church to help build or buy new facilities. The church is now called New Life Church of Orlando COGIC.

Patterson said if he is elected he will work to remove the provision for trying an entire congregation on misconduct charges.

“That provision is like a nuclear weapon in the arsenal of terrorists,” he said. “It enables the national church an option of dismissing a local pastor and taking a church from the people who bought and paid for it. They should not be allowed to take the property from the people.”

Owens has stated that his authority is as unchallengeable as the authority of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church. That assessment was not only dismissed by a civil judge, but it apparently triggered a rallying cry for change in COGIC.

“Where you have abusive leadership, there are almost no provisions that can be legislated that will control that leadership,” Blake said. “Where there is wise and compassionate leadership, an imperfect constitution will still work.”

–Billy Bruce

Kerry Livgren, a founding member of the group Kansas, is just one of many secular musicians who has decided to serve Jesus in a rock ‘n’ roll culture.

By 1977 the then-28-year-old Livgren had achieved superstardom. His homegrown rock band named for his native state of Kansas had achieved international acclaim for songs he had penned, such as “Carry On Wayward Son” and “Dust in the Wind,” and for the hit albums Leftoverture and Point of Know Return.

Livgren had wealth, fame, a good marriage, and his band’s songs were being played on virtually every FM rock station in America and around the world. Indeed, Kansas had become America’s premier progressive rock band.

The group’s unusual use of amplified violin meshed with soaring guitars, all riding intricately laced time signatures, combined to produce music more akin to progressive jazz than straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll. The group’s uniqueness, topped with classical leanings, turned millions of listeners into record buyers and die-hard fans.

Lyrics also were a key element in the Kansas success formula. Livgren’s words, in particular, were offered as a map for fans to use to follow along on his search for the meaning of human existence. Livgren’s “Dust in the Wind” became a classic expression of this: Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea / All we do crumbles to the ground, but we refuse to see / Dust in the wind; all we are is dust in the wind / Don’t hang on; nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky / It slips away, and all your money won’t another minute buy / Dust in the wind; all we are is dust in the wind.

Today at age 51, Livgren acknowledges the sadness of that famous ballad that was a Top 10 hit in 1978. “It is a sad song. It’s the same message as Ecclesiastes,” he told Charisma during an April interview at his farm outside of Topeka, Kansas.

Fame, success, wealth and achievement could not fill the large hole in Livgren’s spirit. Although confirmed in the Lutheran church as a child, he had no relationship with Christ–only a knowledge of Christianity, which he had rejected as a religion for extremists.

“A Christian was either a hypocrite who went to church on Sundays as a social maneuver, or a wild-eyed Jesus freak who fanatically threw tracts at people on the street and told them they were going to fry in hell,” Livgren writes in his autobiography Seeds of Change.

His family’s participation in church was parallel to what Livgren described as typical of cultural American Christianity, and he acknowledged that he had “become inoculated with just enough Christianity” to have become immune to the real thing.

“I think that happens frequently with people,” Livgren told Charisma. “I see many who were raised up in a churchgoing family as opposed to a Christian family. I’m not saying my family was not Christian. In retrospect, I am very glad I did [have a church background] because it gave me a structured background to come back to.”

Livgren was never a drug or alcohol abuser; instead, he spent much of his time devouring books about history, philosophy or religion. Yet he tired of writing songs about “searching,” even though doing so had brought him success. He wanted to tell his fans through his songs what he had found.

The problem was, he hadn’t found it yet.

By 1976 Livgren had embraced the I Ching, or Chinese Book of Changes, and bathed himself in

several Eastern philosophies. Then he decided not to be so “exclusivistic” and explored “truths” in all the world’s religions.

In 1977 he discovered The Urantia Book and its bizarre 2,097 pages of occultic gobbledygook that featured chapter headings such as “The Seven Super

Universes” and “The Local Universe Mother Spirit.” The book described itself as a revelation from superhuman beings that is designed to assist people to progress from animal to angel to spirit to God.

The Urantia Book put the name of Jesus back into Livgren’s life, although in a highly distorted form. He read how Jesus of Nazareth is really Michael of Nebadon, one of many

local universe sovereigns. Livgren was impressed that this Jesus was not written off as a mere prophet or avatar of Eastern religions.

His Kansas band mates weren’t bothered by his spiritual discoveries in Urantia or Eastern religions. But once the real Christ entered the picture, Kansas would never be the same.

A God Encounter

In 1979, Livgren was a happy Urantian. Kansas was touring on a wave of success with a new album, titled Monolith. Livgren didn’t know, however, that his song lyrics had enlightened some of the band’s Christian fans to discern that he was on a spiritual journey. They had been praying fervently for his salvation.

When Louisiana band LeRoux joined the tour to open for Kansas, Livgren enjoyed getting to know the band’s singer, Jeff Pollard, a Christian. Livgren learned that Pollard was “into the Bible” and saw an opportunity to talk with Pollard about Urantia.

Livgren began joining Pollard in LeRoux’s tour bus after shows to compare beliefs, and it wasn’t long before Pollard had used Scripture to dismantle Urantia as an enemy of the cross. Soon Livgren was in full dilemma. He knew Pollard’s Bible was truth–and he was going to have to admit it–and choose.

“Another part of me kept saying: ‘My God, you can’t become a Christian! What would everybody think?’ The last thing in the world I wanted to be was one of those fanatical born-again Christians,” Livgren says.

On July 23, 1979, Kansas was playing in Indianapolis. A Christian fan who attended the concert later told Livgren that he had felt compelled to pray for him during the show and prayed so hard that he left the concert in tears.

Later that night, about 3 a.m. on July 24 in his hotel room, Livgren, with his religious books and the Bible spread all around him, and tears flowing, prayed: “Lord, if Jesus Christ is your Son, then I want to know Him. If He really is the living God, my Redeemer and my Lord, then I want to serve Him with all my heart.”

At that second, Livgren says that the Holy Spirit overcame him, and he was laughing and crying and “felt that the huge weight on my shoulders was suddenly taken away forever.”

“I was full to overflowing–absolutely,” Livgren says, and recalled meeting the fan who had prayed for him that night a year or so later at a Christian radio station
in Lakeland, Florida, after a Kansas concert.

“He had carried the ticket to that Indianapolis show in his pocket all that time not knowing that that was the night I got saved. He was in a spiritually dry place at the time, and that revelation just floored him. There were tears everywhere!”

Livgren’s conversion gradually produced a tension between him and other band members, and when Kansas bass player Dave Hope also became a Christian in 1980, a division over the band’s direction came to a head. Lead singer Steve Walsh left the group, partly because he refused to sing Livgren’s lyrics, which now espoused a Christian worldview. John Elefante, a Christian, replaced Walsh.

The band recorded two more albums with Livgren and Hope–Audiovisions (1980) and Vinyl Confessions (1982)–and Livgren completed his first solo album, Seeds of Change (1980). He and Hope left Kansas in 1983 to form AD, a band made up of Christians. That band disbanded in 1986 after recording several albums.

Faith and Miracles

Livgren settled into a comfortable solo career and helped start a church in Atlanta called East Side Community Church in Covington. (He had relocated to Georgia during Kansas’ heyday.) At the church, he served as elder, Sunday school minister, church treasurer and minister of music–a one-man pastoral support team.

In 1993 Livgren and family–wife Vicci and son Kyle and daughter Katy–moved back to Topeka, Kansas, where they currently reside on a nearby farm. Livgren built a home studio there and has recorded When Things Get Electric and recently released Collectors’ Sedition Vol. I. They attend Topeka Bible Church–an evangelical congregation with some charismatic leanings.

Livgren’s wife, Vicci, miraculously survived an accident in May 1998. Vicci, who also became a Christian after her husband, was walking out of a store on a Saturday when a car driven by a teen backed out of a parking space and struck her, knocking her some 8 feet. She landed on her head and suffered several skull fractures.

Doctors said she either would die or be permanently disabled. Church members prayed and wept that night at the hospital chapel, and the next morning Vicci came out of a coma and has been fine ever since. Doctors have confirmed the miracle.

Today, Livgren challenges Christians who believe he should not be straying into secular music markets. He recently wrote every song on a new Kansas album–Somewhere toElsewhere–which reunited the band’s original members at his farmhouse studio. Dave Hope, who today is an associate priest at a charismatic Episcopal church in Destin, Florida, also participated.

Livgren produced the album and played all the keyboards, half the guitars and wrote all the lyrics and music for the album. Livgren isn’t touring with the band because it means a full-time commitment that would take him away from his family, as well as other projects he’s working on, such as a new classical recording with Ambrosia singer David Pack–a cantata titled, “The Resurrection of Lazarus.” Running his own record label, Numavox Records, is a time-consuming endeavor for Livgren as well.

Charisma asked Livgren about Christian critics who would say he shouldn’t be “casting his pearls before swine” and wasting his musical gifts on heathens.

“I do not understand that attitude in regard to the Great Commission,” Livgren says. “It says, ‘Go ye into the world.’ Granted, that has to do with evangelism, but evangelism takes many forms.

“If a Christian had not been in that ‘dark place’ when I needed the gospel, would I have heard it from those who offer criticism? The whole time I was in Kansas, until the time I met Jeff Pollard–not one Christian ever approached me to tell me about the gospel. I suppose the final argument is, I have to do what the Holy Spirit tells me to do.”

Says Livgren: “When He tells me to stop being a shining light in a dark place, that is the one voice I will listen to.”

Billy Bruce is news editor for Charisma. While working as a reporter for the Daytona Beach News-Journal (1987-94), Bruce often moonlighted by playing drums in a bar band. He met Jesus in 1991 and decided to leave the band after reading Kerry Livgren’s book Seeds of Change.

MARK FARNER:

Lead Guitarist for Grand Funk Railroad

After rededicating his life to Jesus in an Assemblies of God church, Farner today boldly tells his audiences about Jesus.

Mark Farner, lead singer, guitarist and songwriter for the hard-rock band Grand Funk Railroad, thought he had accomplished everything he had sought to attain in the secular music business.

He was wealthy. He was famous. He had a platform from which to present his views on everything from the environment to politics.

But he was miserable.

Farner had formed Grand Funk Railroad (GFR) with bassist Mel Schacher and drummer Don Brewer in their hometown of Flint, Michigan, in 1968.

The band’s hits like “Time Machine,” “Rock ‘n’ Roll Soul” and “We’re an American Band” built a fan base that was loyal enough to defend the group against constant attacks from music critics who dismissed GFR’s music as part of a passing fad.

GFR sold more than 25 million copies of their 17 albums and toured the world, thanks to those loyal fans and what Farner recognizes today as God’s grace.

When Farner was 9 years old, his father died after his car was struck by a train. His mother became an alcoholic.

“I wasn’t raised in a Christian home,” Farner told Charisma. “There were Ouija boards and spiritism there, and a Jesus, too, but not the one we know. I knew things weren’t right, and nothing was getting better with mother.”

The young grieving boy turned on the television and found a live telecast of a
Billy Graham crusade.

“Billy Graham told me that Jesus was the way out. I got down on my knees right there in front of the television and prayed to receive Jesus. My hurting heart was healed–I felt the pain lift, and that blew me away. And I believe from that day I was saved.”

Farner, however, did not become a servant of God until years later. His limited knowledge of God did influence his songwriting, and GFR turned out several spiritually minded songs as a result, including their now classic theme song “I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home.”

Farner spent millions in pursuit of a
happiness that continually evaded his grasp until September 1983.

By then, GFR had disbanded, and Farner’s solo career was faltering–as was his marriage. His wife, Lesia, had left him, taking their children with her.

Farner wandered into a small Assemblies of God church in Onaway, Michigan, where he heard a sermon that brought him to his knees at the altar. There he prayed that God would bring his wife back as he recommitted his life to Christ.

In another church some 50 miles away that same morning, Lesia Farner made her first commitment to Christ. Soon the couple reunited, and together they began devouring God’s Word.

A year or so later, Farner heard God’s call to go where the church doesn’t usually go. He booked gigs in bars and casinos, and he recorded three Christian albums.

He joined with Schacher and Brewer in 1996 for a GFR reunion that lasted three years, into 1998. Farner says the band broke up again because he became uncomfortable with the other members’ lifestyles, and he felt they compromised his beliefs.

At the beginning of the reunion, Brewer tried to get Farner to sign a contract that prohibited him from saying “God” or Jesus” from the stage. Farner refused.

“I do love those guys, I really do,” Farner said of his former band mates. “I hope someday they will be humbled by the saving knowledge of Christ and that we will play together again to glorify Jesus Christ.”

Meanwhile, Farner continues to tour with a band made up of Christian musicians, playing secular venues to reach the lost. He mixes some of his Christian songs with GFR tunes that he believes do not compromise his faith, and he boldly tells his audiences about Jesus.

“It used to be real common that we were accosted about playing secular music in secular environments,” Farner said. “But when you go fishing, you have to put bait on the hook, or you are liable not to catch anything. And you cannot isolate yourself from the very world that the Lord anointed you to minister in. Jesus never avoided sinners, and neither can I.”

–Billy Bruce

PAUL JONES:

Vocalist for the R&B
Group Manfred Mann

An ex-atheist and onetime rival of Mick Jagger,
Jones now is singing his blues for God.

Paul Jones has been described as one of the best British Invasion singers of the 1960s and was at that time regarded as a rival to Mick Jagger, lead singer for the Rolling Stones. He also was well-known as an ardent atheist–until God convinced him otherwise.

Born in the maritime city of Portsmouth, England, in 1942, Jones became an atheist as a teen-ager–because of “bad Christianity,” as he puts it. He decided music was his future and became proficient at singing and at playing harmonica.

Jones’ resonant vocals were thought to be the best feature of R&B group Manfred Mann–who scooped hits like “5-4-3-2-1” and “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” His stance against Christianity also became well-known.

In 1968 a TV debate about Billy Graham saw Jones pitted against Christian rock singer Cliff Richard. “We ganged up on Cliff–and beat him,” he recalls.

Jones left Manfred Mann and got involved in films, Broadway, session work with artists like Tina Turner, and formed The Blues Band. He met actress Fiona Hendley in 1982, and they fell in love while starring in the musical “Guys And Dolls.”

The Blues Band also kept Jones busy. To relax, he visited art galleries and found himself deeply moved by paintings. It didn’t help his famous atheism. “I became aware of a whole other dimension to life,” he says.

Hendley was also on a
spiritual search, and the couple started attending church. “Church was a revelation to us,” Jones says. “It was fun and lively!”

In 1984, he got a call from his old TV opponent Cliff Richard. Richard said he was singing at an evangelistic crusade led by Argentinian preacher Luis Palau and that Jones should be there.

Jones and Hendley attended the meeting and ended up becoming Christians. The couple have now been married for 16 years and tell their story at outreach events.

Blues colleagues “really hated” the news of Jones’ conversion, he said. But he’s hardly had any criticism from Christians for continuing with the blues–though one letter-writer told him to “stop playing that carnal music.”

However, Jones is clear in his theology: “The devil is a liar. He is not a creator.” Increasingly, he tries to play his own songs, mostly written since he became a Christian.

“What I used to relate to in the blues, and still do, is in its intensity,” says Jones, now 58. “If you want to, you can experience life intensely–and that’s really what the blues is.” –Clive Price

RICHIE FURAY:

Guitarist for 1960s’ Buffalo Springfield

He was running from God when he helped to forge country rock, but today he’s a pastor in Colorado.

Time was when Richie Furay believed he had earned the right to be as famous as his rock ‘n’ roll peers. And Jesus Christ not only wasn’t the first thing on his mind, He wasn’t even the last thing on Furay’s mind. But all that has changed for this original member of Buffalo Springfield.

Furay, who today pastors Calvary Chapel in Boulder, Colorado, believed his dues as a rock musician had been paid during his days with Buffalo Springfield–the 1960s supergroup that broke ground for country rock and featured frontmen Neil Young and Stephen Stills.

But his next adventure in the band Poco, another foray into the California country-rock sounds that continued to make his buddies world famous, didn’t quite give

guitarist and songwriter Furay the same return.

So by 1973, Furay had left Poco to sign with Asylum Records and form a band with J.D. Souther and Chris Hillman.

David Geffen, now a partner of entertainment conglomerate DreamWorks SKG and then-president of Asylum Records, convinced Furay that Souther, Hillman and Furay would be another supergroup like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

“All I cared about was rock ‘n’ roll and success,” Furay told Charisma. “All my friends from former bands had achieved major success. I thought, What about me?”

To help define their sound, Hillman wanted to bring in pedal-steel player Al Perkins from the Manassas band, but Furay was against it.

“Al was a Christian, and I thought, This is all we need,” Furay says.

Perkins immediately began talking with Furay about Jesus. In addition, Furay noticed that his wife, Nancy, had begun studying the Bible. He didn’t know yet that she had become a Christian or that she was thinking about leaving him.

When the new band decided to go to Aspen, Colorado, to rehearse and prepare for their first concert tour, Nancy stayed home.

“I knew something was wrong, but I later saw how God had to get us apart so He could deal with me,” Furay says.

Perkins’ persistence coupled with Furay’s bewilderment over his wife’s sudden coolness toward him resulted in Furay’s crying for help from God. During an after-dinner invitation to become a Christian, led by Perkins, Furay prayed the prayer.

But when he went home, Nancy
announced that she was leaving. The couple had been married seven years, and Furay was devastated. Later, while he walked on a beach in St. Petersburg, Florida, God reminded him of the commitment he had made to serve Him when he prayed with Perkins.

“That night in my hotel room I woke up, and it was like someone had turned on all the lights,” Furay says. “The room was brilliant. I wasn’t afraid, though. I sat up in bed and waited for what seemed like 10 minutes. A peacefulness came upon me, and I believe the Lord was telling me it would be OK.”

After a seven-month separation, Richie and Nancy reunited, and four daughters and 33 years later they are still together, living in Boulder and pastoring a small church (see ).

Furay began the Calvary Chapel church in Boulder as a home fellowship, and today the small congregation rents space on Sundays at a public school.

Furay recorded three Christian-oriented albums for Asylum, but he sought release from his contract because he said the company did not give him support. “I was too Christian for secular markets and too secular for Christian markets. It was quite a dilemma.”

Furay dropped out of a Poco reunion in 1989 when he learned that the band had released a video of a song performance that included more than 20 objectionable depictions in it.

Today, Furay has released In My Father’s House–a fascinating collection of songs a la Poco and Buffalo Springfield gone Christian and is working on a new secular music album and another Christian project.

He plays secular concerts mixed with a gospel segment. “If I can touch some people’s lives in a bar, and it means I will see them in heaven, that means a lot to me,” Furay says. “Where did Jesus go? He went out among the people and ministered to them. Jesus said it is the people who are sick who need help.”

–Billy Bruce

JOHN LODGE:

Bass Force Behind The Moody Blues
After being a Christian in rock music for 30 years, Lodge says nothing deters his faith.

He claims to be “just a singer in a rock ‘n’ roll band,” yet John Lodge is an unusual figure in pop music. During his 30-plus years in rock music, he’s never gotten involved in drugs and has always declined to indulge in the legendary excesses of the music-industry lifestyle. He puts it all down to the Christian faith he adopted in childhood.

“In the ’60s we were all looking for something,” says Lodge, who helped transform standard British R&B band The Moody Blues into world-class pioneers of symphonic rock, mixing electric guitars with orchestral sounds.

“If you did a gig you’d spend hours afterwards meeting people, talking about religion. I grew up through an evangelical church, and the more I talked to people, the more I realized all the things I’d learned at church

were relevant–and what everyone was looking for. I was thinking, Just a moment, I think I’ve got that!

“That’s really when I started to find an inner strength,” Lodge told Charisma. “The ’60s was a crazy time in rock ‘n’ roll, and you could have really gone to extremes in everything. But I found I had this inner strength that seemed to see me through a lot of things.”

Born in 1945, Lodge attended Sunday school regularly as a child at Birches Green Evangelical Church in Birmingham, England. Lodge described the church as “quite
fundamentalist,” but there was freedom to ask questions.

“What it made me do was try to understand what the Bible was about–not
organized religion–and what strengths
you could gain from [the Bible],” he says.

The spiritual foundation proved its worth later in life when Lodge played bass for the Moody Blues. “Some things would come along–the excesses–and I’d question them and say this can’t be right.”

Lodge recalls one bizarre episode when he spoke with a Detroit pastor in a hotel room, while more than 100 people partied around them after a concert. “I remember us talking about Christianity amid this party, and I said to him, ‘Isn’t this strange?'”

It was a picture of his life: a nice, clean, Sunday school boy right in the middle of the dirty business of rock ‘n’ roll. Yet Lodge managed to make it work.

On one occasion, about 10 years ago, Lodge lost the strength in his arms.

“I ended up in the hospital,” he says, “and they were bringing all these different people to try and find out what was wrong, but they couldn’t find out.”

Deeply troubled by this, his family contacted longtime friend and charismatic church leader Gerald Coates. “He got his whole church to pray for me,” Lodge recalls. “That same day was the turning point. I started to feel better.”

The incident had an impact on Kirsten–his wife of 32 years–and on his daughter, Emily, and his son, Kristian. “Everyone got strength from it,” he says.

Through the years some Christians have challenged Lodge to pinpoint his “born again”experience. He sees his spiritual life as more of a journey than a reaction to a crisis point. He’s not a regular churchgoer, but he attends events at Coates’ church, Pioneer People, and visits churches while on tour.

While the Moody Blues were touring in the United States once, Lodge travelled more than 300 miles to hear Benny Hinn preach in Orlando, Florida.

So far, Lodge’s Christianity hasn’t fazed the rest of the band.

“They know where I’m at. It doesn’t matter whatever we discuss, they know where I’m going to come from on it. But they also know I’m not going to come from an organized religious point.”

Lodge still enjoys researching other philosophies–causing some people to question his reading habits. “Nothing’s going to come along and determine who I am. I don’t think that’s going to happen, because I think if it was going to happen,
it would’ve happened a long time ago.”

So what is it like being a Christian in mainstream rock?

“To be honest, I just ride it,” Lodge says. “Nothing deters me. I’ve got an inner strength that comes from it.” –Clive Price

RICK WAKEMAN:

Yes’ Symphonic Keyboardist

The classically trained player and contributor to some 2,000 recorded songs couldn’t live today without Jesus.

With glittering robes and mid-shoulder-length long blond hair, keyboard
virtuoso Rick Wakeman stood like a ghostly figure amid the dark-suited orchestra that supported him for his “Journey to the Center of the Earth” tour. His image would become a classic scene from an epic piece of ’70s rock. Ten years later, Wakeman would engage in a different journey when he rededicated his life to Christ.

Born in 1949 close to the edge of London, Wakeman was the only child of devout Christians. “My father was a Baptist lay preacher, and my mother was a very strong Methodist,” he told Charisma.

South Harrow Baptist Church became the spiritual home for the 5-year-old Wakeman, who says: “I was never forced to go to Sunday school–I actually loved it!” He grew up through the various stages of congregational life–and even became a Sunday school teacher.

“I never questioned the existence of God and what He could do,” Wakeman says. “But by 1968 I was already at the Royal Academy of Music and playing in various bands.”

He absorbed rock ‘n’ roll–his heavy drinking became legendary–and felt a
conflict between his new lifestyle and
his upbringing. “I had no doubts–I

wanted to give my life to the Lord. The difficulties were with the other things.”

It was 1969, and he went to see his pastor, who put him on a six-month course on the Christian life. But Wakeman knew his work as a musician meant travel–and he knew that meant his life was going to change.

“I went away and worked in pubs and clubs. And apart from the fact that I was working every Sunday, I used the excuse, ‘You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian,’ and I stuck with that for 15 years.”

Wakeman left the academy and set about forging a career for himself in music. He recorded the chart hit “Space Oddity” with David Bowie and played with an early British folk band called the Strawbs, taking it decidedly away from its roots with his progressive music style. Rock newspaper Melody Maker dubbed Wakeman “Tomorrow’s Superstar.”

In 1971 Wakeman joined the band Yes, who helped pioneer “progressive rock” and with them recorded Fragile–a definitive album of that genre. He was with Yes off and on until 1997. He also recorded his own monster hit albums.

Wakeman became heavily in demand for work in recording
studios. He has played on more than 2,000 tracks by artists as diverse as Black Sabbath, Elton John, Lou Reed, Harry Nilsson and Cat Stevens, with whom he recorded the hymn “Morning Has Broken,” which became a Top 10 hit in 1972.

One of Wakeman’s most significant years was 1974, when his own Journey to the Center of the Earth snatched Top 10 placings across the globe. But after only one performance Wakeman collapsed–due to poor health–and composed The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table while in the hospital.

Poor health was one of several crises for Wakeman at the time. Up-and-coming punk rock was grabbing the attention of rock fans. Wakeman’s father died. His marriage folded. Business decisions backfired. By the early 1980s the great keyboard virtuoso was sleeping on park benches.

During that time, Wakeman met former model Nina Carter, who helped him rebuild his life. When they decided to marry, Nina insisted on a church wedding. The only place that would perform the ceremony, because both of them were divorced, was Camberley United Reformed Church. The couple married in 1984 and attended worship there.

“When I brought my Christianity back into my life, things were going well,” Wakeman says. “I was thinking how I’d managed to pick myself up from the gutter with Nina’s help. And I thought, This is great–but there’s something missing.

“Because I’d had such wonderful teaching from people I’d met in my first 19 years, it was easy for me to know what
was missing.”

In a Sydney, Australia, hotel room, he reflected on his life and rededicated it to Jesus.

Rick and Nina moved to the Isle of Man, a tiny island off northern England. A friend persuaded Nina to attend Broadway Baptist Church, where, says Wakeman: “There was no apparent hymn or sermon going on, but the Holy Spirit just hit her.”

He returned from touring to find his wife’s faith had been set on fire, and he began attending Broadway with her. The couple have been members there ever since.

When Wakeman considered retreating from the mainstream to focus solely on Christian music–such as his 1996 The New Gospels–his old friend, Chuck Smith, pastor of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, encouraged him to share his life and talents in both arenas–Christian and non-Christian.

RICKY SKAGGS:

Country Star and Charismatic Christian

This bluegrass icon doesn’t blink an eye when he gets an opportunity to play for Jesus in casinos or honky-tonks.

Ricky Skaggs believes God’s Word when it comes to music. Like King David of old, he wants to use his instruments in a spiritual way to drive out demons and usher in the Holy Spirit. And when he applies that strategy in casinos, bars and county fairs across the country, folks who would not think once about setting foot in a church are led into the Lord’s presence right where they are.

Skaggs is God’s “musicianary”: a missionary who uses his musical fame to get him into places where sinners are, usually venues where the church can’t–or won’t go.

The country music star, now 46, cut his teeth on bluegrass music, becoming a
legendary fire-brand picker of mandolin and guitar and was voted one of the Top 100 guitarists of the century by Musician Magazine. He wandered out of bluegrass into country music circles in Nashville, in the 1970s and was “discovered” by Emmylou Harris.

It was Harris and Sharon and Sheryl White who nicknamed Skaggs “Picky Ricky” for his relentless search for perfection in the recording studio. Sharon White later became

his wife.

“I have always been a perfectionist, and I believe that doing your best honors the Lord,” Skaggs told Charisma. “I do admit I was picky before I did it to honor the Lord. But I realized that God wanted to ‘perfect’ that ethic in my life.”

When Harris had to ease up on touring long enough to have a baby, Skaggs believed his time had come to try a recording of his own. In 1981 he cut the smash country album Waiting for the Sun to Shine, which gave Skaggs two No. 1 hits and a nationally recognizable face.

He then recorded Highways and Heartaches, which produced four No. 1 hits

and cemented Skaggs as an icon of country music. The third album Country Boy came, and more and more fans hooked up. Now England was paying attention.

Skaggs also knew that his international fame and the personal satisfaction from success had begun to tip his attention away from God and onto himself. He had been a practicing believer since age 13, but his first marriage had ended in divorce, and he didn’t want to suffer that pain again. He and his new bride, Sharon White, wanted to keep the Lord in the middle of their relationship.

“There was an emptiness inside my heart,” Skaggs says. “I knew the Lord and had rededicated my life to Him at a church Sharon was going to.

“In the early 1980s I was on the road and working the weekends out–playing–so Wednesday night was the time when Sharon and I could be together. We’d go to church. One night I got up and went down to the altar to make sure I had things right with Him.”

What happened that night was “like an explosion,” Skaggs says.

“It was the deep calling the deep. I just wanted more of Him, but that’s hard because having more of Him meant having less of me.”

Skaggs met Barbara Fairchild, an on-fire Christian, and pastor Ray Hughes, who taught him about using his instruments in spiritual warfare. Hughes showed Skaggs that his musical calling was to shine a light in dark places.

Then Skaggs met minister Bob Jones, who prophetically confirmed the calling Hughes had described. Skaggs claims Jones as his spiritual father today. By this time Skaggs had been introduced to prophets and pastors alike–Mike Bickle, John Wimber, Rick Joyner, Paul Cain.

Skaggs found that the hotter he burned for the Lord, the cooler the mainstream record labels became toward him.

“We’d go out, and sponsors would
complain to the record companies that we had been preaching from their stages,” Skaggs says.

Today Skaggs has returned to his
bluegrass roots and has his own record label–Skaggs Family Records–from which to propel his mission. He questions Christians who criticize his gigs in secular venues, during which he always plays some gospel music and talks about Jesus when the Lord leads him to.

“I have people writing me: ‘Why in the world did you play in this casino? We prayed for four years that that casino would not come here. What kind of Christian counsel do you have?’ I write them back and say ‘You sure won’t be reaching those people with that attitude.'”

Skaggs points out that Billy Graham is welcome just about anywhere, but he notes: “They would drop their jaws if Dr. Graham walked into a bar or a casino. But Ricky Skaggs can walk in there, and they accept me in there. This is what the Lord would do.”

–Billy Bruce

JOHN FORD COLEY:

A Pop Duo With England Dan
The former 1970s pop star says playing for secular fans and mainstream audiences keeps his fire for evangelism burning.

Jesus says do it–so John Ford Coley does it. It’s that simple.

The former half of the 1970s pop music duo England Dan and John Ford Coley says his calling is to go into the secular arena with his music, where he believes he is being the most influential for the sake of the gospel.

“Christ says, ‘I came to save that which was lost,'” Coley told Charisma during an interview in Nashville, Tennessee, last April. “My ministry is to people who have lost their way. I prefer to be with hungry people. It keeps my fire lit.”

Coley, 51, and England Dan (Seals) parted ways in 1980 after scoring several major Top 40 hits, including the Grammy nominated “I’d Really Love to See You Tonight” and “Nights Are Forever Without You.” The two remain friends, and both live in the Nashville area. Coley attends The Oasis Church, pastored by Danny Chambers, in Bellevue, Tennessee.

Coley’s Southern Baptist background kept him grounded during the drug-happy ’60s and ’70s. He and former band mate Seals came from Christian backgrounds. During the duo’s career together, Coley became a disciple of the Bahai faith, which teaches that all religions lead to God and are acceptable.

Coley left his Christian roots after being soured by the divisions in the body of Christ and recalled how his dating relationship with his Catholic girlfriend opened his eyes to see the damages that divisions bring. He heard his Southern Baptist pastor and her Catholic priest preach very similar messages, but he could not understand why he was being told they were so different.

“[Catholics] love the structure and the dogma and the tradition. It is perfectly fine for people who need ‘the box,'” Coley says. “I just look at the love aspect–if we are loving each other or not.”

Coley’s trek to rock stardom took him around the globe and put him in the path of all sorts, from pot smokers and alcoholics to prostitutes. At age 18 while playing in Texas bands, Coley played for strippers.

“What I found through all of that was a compassion for people,” Coley said. “You saw that they were lost. Instead of judging them for where they were at, you had compassion because they were lost. And since I know what it feels like to be lost and struggling, I only want them to know there is a place for them.”

He found his solid Christian walk again after country singer Paul Overstreet invited him to The Oasis. Today, Coley, who plays guitar and keyboards, is still writing songs and plays his music in secular venues for people who don’t know Jesus. And when his church ministers to the homeless, Coley says he brings them sincere care: “For me, I feel comfortable just finding out where they’re from or how long they’ve been out there. Sometimes Scripture isn’t what they need at the moment.” –Billy Bruce

KEN MANSFIELD:

Former Executive of Apple Records and Capitol Records

Now a Christian, Mansfield got a rare look at the
spiritual side of The Beatles during the 1960s.

Ken Mansfield knows that fans of The Beatles, the most popular rock group in pop-music history, love to hear insider
stories about the Fab Four.

So the former Beatles employee and now born-again Christian released a book this year, The Beatles, The Bible and Bodega Bay, to share Beatles lore from his firsthand accounts with Britain’s most famous “lads”–and more importantly, to provide a witness for Jesus by telling his own spiritual journey.

The book is intertwined with chapters on his Beatles days followed by chapters on his spiritual journey. The spiritual chapters are laced with proclamations of praise and awe for God and His creation and the Lord Jesus Christ (see ).

Amazingly, surviving former Beatles Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo
Starr approved Mansfield’s book, as did
Yoko Ono–widow of John Lennon–who represents the slain Beatles’ estate.
Mansfield has frequent contact with Ringo Starr, but not with the others, though he left the band’s employment in good stead.

He resides in Bodega Bay, California, where he and his wife operate a seaside shop. Mansfield, now, is suffering from what his doctors say is a fatal, incurable bone-marrow
disease, called Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia.

Mansfield was working for Capitol Records in Los Angeles as the promotions manager of the company’s West Coast district when the Beatles came to town to perform at The Hollywood Bowl in August 1965. Mansfield, then 27, managed Capitol’s press conferences for the band and then was befriended by the Beatles. They later hired him to be the U.S. manager of Apple Records, the group’s subsidiary record label formed in 1967.

Beyond their well-documented impact on modern music, the Beatles were “just really nice people,” Mansfield told Charisma.

“They grew up in a working-class society, and that just carried into their adult life,” he says. “They were always so courteous.

“But they were not a band of angels, either. There were times in this

whole thing when they were ‘out there.'”

Mansfield was directly
influenced by George Harrison’s involvement in Eastern religion philosophies and metaphysical teachings. But in one of the
“spiritual” chapters of his book, Mansfield refers to Harrison’s beliefs as “New Age sew-age.”

“I am curious as to what George’s
reaction was when he read that part when reviewing my book,” Mansfield quips.

Mansfield left the Beatles just before their breakup in 1970 and stayed in the music business, becoming a Grammy-winning record producer, as well as a music publisher and songwriter. But his career bottomed out in 1984, causing a disappointment that led him to move to a new city–only to discover that God was there waiting for him.

After his first marriage had failed and his career had floundered, a broken-spirited, financially broke Mansfield decided to try Nashville, Tennessee, in hopes that his music career could be rejuvenated on Music Row. He got off the plane at the Nashville,
Tennessee airport with his “misery and three suitcases,” he says, and sought the help of music-business friends who gave him a place to stay while he tried to start again.

Shortly after his arrival, he met an
attractive woman named Connie. Their first date was August 1984, but their argument over her Christianity nearly ended their
relationship right away.

“She said Jesus was ‘the Way.’ I said Jesus was ‘a way’–and she chose Him over me,” Mansfield says. “She said she would not be unequally yoked with an unbeliever.”

Writing in his book, Mansfield says: “The deep love she had for her Lord really spoke to my heart when she chose Him over me. I saw faith and belief in real terms, and I knew I had to have some of this.”

Mansfield then accepted Jesus as his Lord and felt an incredible freedom from sin.

“I still stand in amazement that in one minute on my knees all the sins and horrors of my past were erased and I was brand-new–as pure sinless and unstained as a newborn child,” he says.

He and Connie were married in 1987 and continue serving the Lord in Bodega Bay.

Already his book is having a witnessing impact. An attorney for Ringo Starr told Mansfield he enjoyed the spiritual chapters more than the Beatles’ chapters. And Beatles historian Brent Stoker, who helped Mansfield keep his facts accurate, was so moved by the spiritual chapters that he was baptized and now is a believer.

Says Mansfield: “God works in such incredible, mysterious ways that if the whole meaning of my being with the Beatles was to do this book, and lead even one person to Christ, then I am satisfied.” –Billy Bruce

Derrick Hutchins and his flock were removed from their church in June

Bishop Chandler D. Owens, presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, finally got his man. In June, a local court granted Owens the authority to remove Derrick Hutchins as pastor of Orlando Institutional Church of God in Christ (COGIC).

Circuit Judge William C. Gridley ruled June 23 that COGIC Western Florida jurisdiction’s conviction of the Orlando congregation for misconduct for walking out of the church when H. Jenkins Bell–Owens’ political

ally whom Owens appointed to replace Hutchins–was valid and that the remedy sought by COGIC to remove Hutchins as pastor was enforceable.

Hutchins took his 800-members with him and set up a privately owned corporation–New Life shield his new church–New Life COGIC–from further legal harassment from Owens.

The private corporation provides New Life COGIC with property rights under Florida law that the church did not enjoy under Malone Memorial COGIC–renamed Orlando Institutional COGIC after Hutchins became pastor in 1996.

Hutchins maintains that Owens turned on him for political reasons after Owens learned that Hutchins supports Bishop Charles E. Blake as presiding bishop in the November election. Blake is pastor of the 18,000-member West Angeles COGIC in Los Angeles.

COGIC insiders say Owens may have won the battle, but the win may have cost him the war–eroding the support he’ll need to win re-election in November to another four-year term. Blake and Bishop Gilbert E. Patterson will seek Owens’ post in November.

Members of Smithton Community Church relocated in April

The revival at Smithton Community Church is no more–in Smithton, Mo., that is. The church’s entire congregation pulled up stakes earlier this year and moved to Kansas City, Mo., where they’ve been ministering in area churches in a campaign dubbed “Cover the City in Glory.”

Smithton will soon have its own new home, and may have to change its “Cornfield Revival” nickname. Beginning June 30, the church will host its Big Tent Revival meetings that are expected to continue through September on 62 acres of land purchased by the church along I-470.

The church will continue to hold services in a huge air-conditioned tent until an aluminum building is constructed. The new facility should be completed in time to beat the harsh Midwest winter.

Pastors Steve and Kathy Gray said they obeyed the Holy Spirit’s call to relocate the revival from tiny Smithton–where the town’s 532 residents had grown weary of revival crowds that outnumbered the town’s population and where recharged Christians and new believers found few ministry opportunities.

The Grays told Charisma in April that they believe God would have closed down the revival had they not been willing to leave Smithton, where revival broke out on March 24, 1996. “I asked the Lord once for a guarantee that if we went to Kansas City, revival would continue,” Steve Gray said. “His only guarantee was that if we didn’t obey, the revival at Smithton would end.”

More than 225,000 visitors from the 50 U.S. states and 40 countries have made their way across country roads to Smithton. But the Grays insist that being near an international airport in Kansas City just for convenience is not a primary reason for the move.

“This revival is not about us,” said Steve Gray, who is 47. “It’s about us being willing vessels to be obedient. This move will open up incredible avenues of service for [church members] to unleash their zeal for Jesus. Evangelism teams have little to do there [in Smithton].”

This is in contrast with Kansas City, where the metro area’s 1.7 million population offers many new channels in which the Smithton outpouring can flow–especially to the city’s youth who attend a public school system that in May lost its accreditation with the Missouri Board of Education for failure to meet 11 state performance standards.

While the church’s more than 60 families–about 300 people–have taken new jobs in Kansas City, more people are expected to join the revival as a result of the move. Gray said many people who felt called to move to Smithton to support the revival could not do so because they could not find work in the small town. But Kansas City’s opportunities are enabling them to make the move.

Gray noted a reporter’s inquiry about whether the pastor believed the move to Kansas City would be successful: “I told him we weren’t moving to be successful. We were moving to be obedient.”

A Florida appellate court rejected Presiding Bishop Chandler D. Owens’ latest attempt to oust an Orlando pastor

The Church of God in Christ’s (COGIC) Presiding Bishop Chandler D. Owens lost his second court battle to remove an Orlando pastor from his pulpit on grounds that the pastor refused to give up his dual position as pastor of a COGIC church in Columbia, S.C.

The Florida Fifth District Court of Appeals in May rejected Owen’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that allowed Derrick Hutchins, senior pastor of Orlando Institutional COGIC, to remain in his position. “We affirm because no legal error has been identified and no record adequate to demonstrate

error [in the lower-court ruling] has been provided [by Owens],” the three-judge panel wrote in its May 5 decision to reject the presiding bishop’s appeal.

Hutchins contends that Owens has only political motives in his campaign to remove him from his Orlando pastorate because Hutchins supports Los Angeles pastor Charles Blake in the upcoming November election for presiding bishop. Hutchins won a July 1999 lower-court battle against Owens when state Circuit Court Judge Belvin Perry Jr. ruled that Owens had not followed COGIC procedures for removing a pastor.

Owens wants to replace Hutchins with West Florida Jurisdictional Bishop H. Jenkins Bell, who supports Owens as presiding bishop. But both men say election politics have nothing to do with the legal issue. They contend that Hutchins’ rebellion against the authority of the
presiding bishop is the core reason behind their pursuit to remove him.

Perry, however, rejected Owens’ opinion that the presiding bishop has the same hierarchal authority of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church. And Perry’s admission of the testimony of Charles Blake as an

expert witness on the COGIC constitution sunk Owens’ case when Blake refuted Owens’ opinion that he had sweeping administrative powers similar to the pope’s.

The appellate court’s decision pushes the matter back into the hands of COGIC officials who continue to wrangle over interpretations of the COGIC manual.

The Orlando church left the Western Florida Jurisdiction after Owens appointed Bell to the top administrative spot there, and Bell led an ecclesiastical trial against the church for walking out in rebellion against his now rescinded appointment as Hutchins’ replacement. The trial board found the entire Orlando church guilty, and issued an edict dismissing Hutchins as pastor.

Hutchins then moved the church into the Central Florida Jurisdiction, headed by Bishop C.D. Kinsey. Kinsey’s support of that move cost him his position as leader of COGIC’s Men Of Distinction men’s ministry. Meanwhile, the Orlando church appealed the Western Florida trial board’s decision to COGIC’s National Pastors and Elders Council, an appeal ruled appropriate by COGIC’s general counsel. Kinsey sits on the council as associate justice.

After receiving notice of the appeal, Owens issued a letter that said the Elders Council has no authority to review an appeal by a jurisdictional ecclesiastical trial board. The Orlando church must first appeal the Western Florida decision to that district’s pastors and elders council, Owens said.

EVANGELIST PLANS ANNUAL TOURS OF INUIT VILLAGES AFTER MARCH VISIT.

In the Arctic, some of the coldest places on earth are just wood stoves of revival lying in wait for the strike of an evangelist’s match. A recent jaunt into the high north by a Florida-based ministry team, however, found the Arctic already ablaze with a move of God among the region’s indigenous peoples–thanks largely to the tireless efforts of a woman missionary.

In the treeless land of polar bears, caribou, the Aurora Borealis and extreme winters that often challenge the very existence of human life, South African evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne found a spiritually hungry, broken and humble people among the Inuit people–known more generally as the Eskimo people.

Howard-Browne’s six-village tour in northern Canada last March stoked a desire in the minister to continue annual crusades above the tree line. He plans to return each year to new stops in the
30-plus Inuit villages in Canada’s Arctic regions, including several stops in Nunavut (NU)–the newly created Canadian province that divided the Northwest Territories (NWT) to provide a homeland for the Inuit people.

“I live for this,” Howard-Browne told Charisma as he choked back tears, watching the indigenous natives raise their hands in worship, some weeping and others trembling as God’s presence enveloped the room during the trip’s first session in Arviat, NU.

Inuit, which means “The People” in the indigenous language of Inuktituk, are known in some places as the Eskimo people, though that term is not preferred among the indigenous residents of Nunavut.

It was Vancouver missionary Kayy Gordon’s lifelong sacrifice to spread the gospel to the Inuit that inspired Howard-Browne to visit the Arctic for the first time in 1999, when he made a stop in Rankin Inlet on the western shore of Hudson Bay.

He returned this year with a nine-member ministry team that included Gordon, RMI music pastors Jimmy and Becky Pearce, staff pastor and singer-songwriter James McCurdy, and RMI evangelism coordinator Bojan Jancic.

The troupe traveled on a chartered, one-prop plane across thousands of miles of barren, frozen fields of snow-covered tundra, bringing gospel music, praise and worship, preaching, prayer, and revival-pitched altar services into town halls crammed full of villagers and their children. They found among the snow-bound villages of Arviat, Coral Harbour, Baker Lake, Yellowknife, Cambridge Bay and Taloyoak a refreshing warmth of humility and openness to the gospel not readily found on the streets of their own American homeland.

Mayors in Arviat and Coral Harbour attended the meetings to greet the evangelists with gifts and to profess their own faith in Christ before their constituents. Arviat Mayor David Alagalakuk, whose wife pastors a church there, offered Howard-Browne the traditional harpoon’s head to the city and Coral Harbour’s mayor offered the village to God: “I just want to see God have His way with our people,” the tearful mayor explained.

Team members were humbled by the Inuit’s simple faith.

“They’re a very kind people–they have a tendency to take care of one another,” said music pastor Jimmy Pearce. “They have this bond with one another–even if they aren’t acquainted. They take care of their neighbors. What’s embarrassing is that we used to be that way in the U.S. But even some Christians tend to be standoffish.”

Team member James McCurdy marveled at the young children. “The kids may have seemed distracted during the services–walking around or talking,” he said. “But when the altar calls were given, many of them were sobbing and weeping–they were really pressing in.

“And in Taloyoak, they’d never heard the gospel. The kids got saved, and then they begged Rodney to bless them. Rodney prayed for them, and they all fell into a pile, rolling and laughing. Now no one will ever be able to tell these kids the joy of the Lord is not real.”

Who is that masked man? He’s not Jesus–nor does he think he is. But he dresses like Him, and people’s hearts are changed after they hear him speak, some listeners say. And there have been miracles reported.

Now the man known as “What’s Your Name?” has gained national attention after his barefooted travels through rural Pennsylvania were picked up by the Associated Press, ABC, and Time magazine.

His robe, long hair and beard present a messianic appearance that, when coupled with his teachings on Jesus, draws curious crowds of believers and nonbelievers to his streetside sermons. His nickname is based on the question Moses asked God in the burning bush.

His real name is Carl J. Joseph, age 39. As many as 2,000 people have come to hear him speak.

Joseph claims to

have traveled on foot through 13 countries and 47 states since 1991. His most recent ministry appearance was in Hazelton, Pa., and Shenandoah, Pa., where he showed up suddenly last October. His driver’s license record has reported him to be a resident of Toledo, Ohio, and the Bronx, N.Y.

Although Joseph says he is Roman Catholic only in the sense of the term’s “universal” reference, he also says we need to respect the authority “given by Jesus” to Catholic bishops and the pope.