Protestant Reformation

The Next 30 Years

 

After my born-again experience in 1971, everything changed. My head was theologically spun around, altering my perspective on everything. I now saw God and the world through Protestant eyes wearing fundamentalist spectacles. I stopped going to mass and started attending a house church with six other people. I no longer prayed to Mary or believed priests had the power to do the two things Catholics thought made Mother Church the means of salvation – forgive sins and transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus.

 

I quickly learned that we Evangelicals were serious as lymphoma about our faith; serious enough to go witnessing door-to-door and to hand out tracks on street corners. That summer I joined the Blitz evangelistic team and traveled to the University of Oklahoma. Open air preaching and witnessing scared the snot out of me but peer pressure kept me from running.

 

In 1974 I took my new bride, the former Susan Wright, to Fairhaven Bible Chapel in California for the nine-month Discipleship Intern Training Program (DITP). The intensive experience confirmed my desire to be in full-time ministry; a passion I pursued for the next 30 years. Everything during those decades revolved around knowing God and making him known.

 

Susan and I returned to the house church in 1975 where I became an elder at the age of 23. How’s that for an oxymoron? The church grew to over 100 people, moved to a trailer park clubhouse and became Fellowship Bible Chapel. I quit my job at a chemical plant in 1977 to devote myself to the work.

 

Like a sprinter who attacks too soon in a stage race, I ran out of steam a few years later. Tired of butting heads with an older elder, I resigned from FBC and moved my young family to Ceadaredge Colorado where I spent the next 18 months decompressing. Then it was west to Portland, Oregon to join Bruce McNicol at Laurel Park Bible Chapel. In time I became a teaching pastor there.

 

We spent nine happy years in Portland among some of God’s choice children but once again I found myself marching to a different cadence from the church. In 1990 the Hamels, now with four children, matriculated to Wheaton Illinois to join Interest Ministries where Bruce had gone a few years earlier. I served in various capacities for the next five years, during which time I also helped start a new church that has since grown into Trinity Vineyard in St. Charles, Illinois.

 

Interest Ministries got squeezed between conservative and progressive groups of Brethren like a walnut in a nutcracker. A lawsuit ensued and I decided I’d had enough of passionate believers fighting over petty issues. I left Interest and turned down a great opportunity to start something new with Bruce McNicol and Andy Holloman. Instead I moved to San Jose where my friend Greg Davis and I tried to create a self-funding mentoring ministry. We couldn’t pull it off and the Hamels relocated to Colorado Springs in 1996. We tried to help a church plant called New Harvest that didn’t get off the ground.

 

I didn’t want to go to a Brethren church but we wound up at one anyway. We enjoyed the people at Harvest Bible Fellowship and I was soon preaching and helping with small groups. There were other factors at play but it seemed like the more time I invested, the more people left. HBF eventually went under and I found myself looking back over a checkered ministry career. The years had been filled with wonderful people and worthwhile endeavors but little of lasting import this side of heaven:

 

• Fellowship Bible Chapel – defunct.
• Laurel Park Bible Chapel – grown into Spring Mountain Bible Church after I left.
• Interest Ministries – defunct.
• Servants Church – grown into Trinity Vineyard Church after I left.
• EMT Mentoring – stillborn.
• New Harvest Church – defunct.
• Harvest Bible Fellowship – defunct.

 

I didn’t blame myself for people and circumstances beyond my control; still, I felt like a failure. I didn’t know if my ratio of “defunct-to-surviving” was normal for entrepreneurs, whether in business or ministry, but my record disillusioned me. I began to question everything. I tried to argue with God but he wouldn’t talk back, not in any way I could perceive.

 

I had abandoned Catholicism in my teens when I found a more biblical way of relating to God and life. Now as I reached the mid-century mark, I outgrew the Evangelical worldview. It didn’t jibe with my experience or adequately explain what I saw happening in the world.

 

The most painful part was not having anything to replace it.