Remembering Mike Yaconelli

20 Years ago we lost the founder and original Doorkeeper, He was loved and is missed by all of us. Please enjoy the timeless words in his last interview by our very own Becky Garrison. ISSUE #169 2000

As a treat to our long-time readers, we decided to ask Door Contributing Editor, Becky Garrison to track down our beloved founder for an enlightened discussion about his recent book, Dangerous Wonder: An Adventure in Childlike Faith [NavPress,

1999],

THE DOOR MAGAZINE: Why is dullness the most critical issue facing the church today?

MIKE YACONELLI: Even though people say they believe in God, they really don’t. They’re just practical atheists. They use the name God, but it really doesn’t alter their lives in any way. So when you have a culture that’s Godless, its not that everybody goes around and drinks too much. What happens is that we all become dull, boring, and very predictable. We love being comfortable and we don’t want to change and do anything that might cause us discomfort. This dullness has affected so many of us and none of us seem to be aware of it, nor do we care.

DOOR: ZZZZZZZZZ…

YACONELLI: —

DOOR: Sorry. What do you mean when you say someone has been ruined by Jesus?

YACONELLI: When Jesus was walking with his disciples, He started explaining that being a disciple meant that you were probably going to lose all of your possessions and not have a home to live in, that your life might be in danger and you wouldn't have any friends and your family might abandon you. Well, people began to drop like flies. Finally, Jesus looks around and says to Peter, “Are you gonna leave, too?” And Peter makes the statement, and I think he said it just this way, “Where would I go? I used to be a fisherman and I knew all about fishing My dad was a fisherman, my grandpa was a fisherman. I knew when to fish and when not to. I knew when the fish ran and when they didn’t. I knew everything there was to know about how to bait, how to work nets, how to do the whole deal. You come along and invite me to be a fisher of men, so I say yes. Now I see the blind get their sight, I see the lepers get new skin, I see the lame walk, our lives are in danger constantly and I’m gonna go back to fishing?

There's no way. You've ruined me.”

DOOR: And the point of this story is?

YACONELLI: Once you taste the adventure of the Christian faith, once you taste what it’s like to follow Christ, you can never go back to the boring, dull, predictable life that you used to have. Therefore, you're ruined. You will never be able to be comfortable around boring people. You'll never be able to be comfortable around dull situations. You will be considered by many of those people to be dangerous.

DOOR: Why is the living Jesus such a threat to our religious institutions?

YACONELLI: The reality is that all these people that I hear say so glibly, “Oh Lord Jesus, come into the room. Oh Holy Spirit, please show up,” they have no idea what they're asking. The moment you ask that and Jesus shows up, every one of us is gonna be shaking in our boots wondering if we're gonna die or if we're gonna survive.

Now to me, that wild part of Jesus, that frightening, terrifying aspect of Jesus, has been forgotten and lost. So we have become so comfortable with Jesus that it wouldn’t occur to us that following Him would cause everybody around us to be nervous

DOOR: How would anyone who loses his life for Jesus’ sake really find it?

YACONELLI: What's happened is that you have a whole culture full of people who have not found life. Even if they know what their gifts are, they're working at a job that doesn’t utilize any of them. When you and I listen to our calling and listen to Christ's whisper in our life, listen to him speaking our name, listen to the giftedness that He’s given us, then follow that voice and hear that calling and respond to that calling, then in fact, we will be people who know how to live life and know what real life is about. Even though it may cost us friendships and family and financial security and the rest of it, we will discover what real life really means.

DOOR: What can legalist Christians learn from Jesus — who seemed to be the
ulti-mate rule-breaker?

YACONELLI: Rule-makers better be very careful that they don’t end up worshipping their rules. The moment that I don’t allow for the unpredictable noise or the unpre-dictable voice that speaks in the midst of the silence, then that’s when I begin to quench the Holy Spirit, when I begin to quench God. So the reality is that most rules are made because they are about power. They’re not about ultimately introducing people to the Ultimate Rule-breaker. They’re all about my maintaining control and power over people, rather than letting them get out of control by meeting the wild Jesus.

DOOR: What’ your response to religious leaders who justify their actions because they are acting according to God’s will?

YACONELLI: First of all, I have real difficulty with people who have decided what God's will is. God’s will is not a thin line. God's will is very wide And often historically, where people have erred is to decide that God's will is this one, tiny, narrow line. The reality is that there may be many things that are all God's will all at the same time And they may, in fact, bump into each other. They may be contradictory to each other. That is, God’s will for my life at this particular moment may in fact bump into God's will for someone else. So I have a hard time with anyone who starts telling me what God's will is either for me or for themselves or for others. I think we have to be very, very careful when we start throwing that around. Because once you've done that, then what you've done is to say, “I have the authority to do what I’m doing based on the fact that this is ultimately Gods will and therefore, you can't disagree with me and you can’t oppose me.”

That’s dangerous to me.

DOOR: How was playfulness a part of Jesus’ ministry?

YACONELLI: A side effect of a Godless culture is that we stopped playing We quit learning how to play, which sometimes, in a family, or in a marriage, or in a church, is just what’s needed to help us to get clear from the anxiety of our day and of our age and to finally just let loose and relax and enjoy each other in play. A lot of times that can release all kinds of tension and allow us to hear God and see God in a new way. It would be great instead of having another big theological treatise if the church all just went out and had a day and they all played in the afternoon I think that would do more for the kingdom of God sometimes than having another seminar on how to know the will of God.

DOOR: How are roller coasters an accurate model of the Christian life?

YACONELLI: I'm old enough that I actually rode the original wooden ones. They had one metal bar that had one adjustment, if you were fat you lived, and if you were skinny you took your life into your hands

DOOR? You mean only the fat survive? Well, that would explain Jerry Falwell

YACONELLI:

DOOR: Never mind Hey! Don’t blame us YOU were the one who started with the smartass answers already!

YACONELLI: That to me is a model of the Christian life. You start up the hill, first of all, nowadays when you get on the things you have a thing that comes over your neck and hooks under your armpits You have another hydraulic thing that comes and hits you in the stomach and you already think you're gonna die and you haven't even left yet. Then you start up this hill, which is exactly what happens when you become a Christian. Because you say, “OK, God, yes” and its like, “Uh oh, I’m gonna die ” That's right! And we start up this hill and the higher you get the more comfortable you get and baptism and Sunday school and all that and you're going, “Cool, I know God, I know Jesus. This is great ” You just get up to the top of the hill and zoom, for the next 40 seconds it like, bam! and you're done. To me, that’ the Christian life

DOOR: Um, say what?

YACONELLI: I say yes to God, I start getting comfortable with Him and then wham! And then 40 years of just bam, bam, bam and bam, I’m dead I really believe this with all my heart, that if I were to die while I was talking to you, I hope I have just enough breath left as I fall to the floor that I can whisper into the telephone, “What a ride. This has just been unbelievable. I've messed up, I’ve screwed up and its been hard and its been difficult, but I tell you, I wouldn't exchange this ride for anything in the world It’s been unbelievable ”

DOOR: What do you mean by the phrase that our Christian nation has become oblivious to a terror that can liberate us?

YACONELLI: We don’t like to be afraid because when we're afraid and terrified we're out of control. We don’t know what's going to happen, we're nervous. We have no power over what’s going on out there. Terror is a word that has just been lost in our vocabulary when it comes to speaking about God. The only people who spoke that way were the mystics. These people used the word “terror” a lot. And the reason was because they had isolated themselves and were alone with God so much that as God began to show up more and more in their life, they realized, “Wow. This guy is a terrifying, frightening, dangerous God ”

What I'm saying is, that if a church really believed that, those that call themselves followers of Christ, in fact, believed and recognized this terrifying Jesus, it world turn our churches upside down. It would turn our world upside down. It would be revolutionary to this country and to all of us.

DOOR: What would be the characteristics of church embarking on this kind of adventure?

YACONELLI: The first thing that would happen is that the church would be filled with gratitude. You would walk into that church and that would be the first thing that you would automatically feel and smell as though it were an incense. It wouldn't take you but a couple of minutes to suddenly sense that everyone in that room felt gratitude. They were grateful. They can't get over it, It blows them away. Every morning when they wake up they go, “I can't believe it. I can’t believe God loves me. I can't believe Jesus died for me. I can’t believe he wants to call me His church. I don't deserve this ”

DOOR: Sounds like the parable about the banquet.

YACONELLI: Yeah, the people who ended up at the banquet were none of the people who were invited. They were all the whores, the drunks, and the losers and the homeless. So how in the world can anybody feel arrogance whatsoever? There is no homogenous group. What ought to characterize the church is unpredictability. You just never know where God's gonna show up and how He’s gonna look in that particular congregation.

So gratitude, unpredictability, and the third thing is a sense of adventure and risk.

People are willing to take risks and take chances and go outside the lines and are willing not only to do that themselves but accommodate other people who do that as well.

DOOR: What does somebody do on a practical level when there is no community like that in their area?

YACONELLI: When I was younger I would have probably answered differently. But now that I’m older I would say, “Look, something is better than nothing. So what I have to do is find the best thing I can find. If I cant find a church that’s wild and crazy, maybe lean into one that’s full of gratitude. And I'll err on the side of that and sacrifice the other if I can at least find people who permeate the building with a sense of gratefulness and gratitude ” I think you have to be realistic and say, “I’ll take what I can get. I'll take the best I can find and go with that.” Then begin to live this thing yourself and maybe you'll be able to attract more and more people who will want to be with you or want lo make the larger body reflect what is going on in your own life.

DOOR: What about churches that seem to praise God on a very happy and superficial level?

YACONELLI: If I'm in a church that all they do is run around, hold hands and cry every Sunday and get all teary-eyed and happy and hug each other all the time, that would wear thin after a while because you have to talk about Lent and death and dying and suffering and complicated lives and tenaciousness and all of those things because that’s the whole gospel. The Bible talks about those things. You can’t just take one part of it and leave it there. You can write a book about one part of it, but you can’t live life on one part of it. So, if it’s too shallow, if being there week after week, rather than giving you a deeper sense of God's presence causes you to be irritated and frustrated and angry and beginning to realize that this is not what the gospel’ all about, that’s not being healthy for you. So you have to make a choice at that point.Either you’re gonna go nowhere or you're gonna try to find somewhere elsewhere they've got part of it right.

DOOR: Is there any danger though in the power of positive thinking such as theNorman Vincent Peale approach to Jesus?

YACONELLI: We need to be positive, that’s important — but it’s not the only thing we need to do. There are times when thinking positively is harmful and will get in the way and delude us, cause us to pretend and to hide behind our cheerleading rather than dealing with reality. So of course it’s dangerous. But anything in life is dangerous. Especially when its taken and isolated from every other truth and made to be the only truth.

DOOR: The Crouch crowd of Trinity Broadcasting Network claims to be spirit-filled How would you respond to that?

YACONELLI: Obviously, it would be very dangerous for me to read the motives or understand what’ really going on in people. I’m sure they believe they are spirit-filled I’m sure some of the people really are, whatever that means. What one has to do is go beyond that and say, “What’s really happening here? Are we just all getting together and feeling good ? Or is there something else going on?” And again, it’s too complicated to deal with in a couple of sentences. It’s great to have those moments where we sense a unity and one with the body of Christ, and we're all together and there are thousands of us in the building and we all feel, “Wow. We're part of something bigger than ourselves and part of this huge thing.” That’ great, its wonderful. But its also terrible if the only way we can understand God and relate to God is in huge meetings when we're all winning, when we're all on top, when we're all having victory because the call to discipleship is to feel that sense of trust in God and loyalty to him and being drawn and attracted to God even when I’m hanging on a cross and everybody has left me. Thats not easy to do. It’s not fun. All of our friends tend to abandon us when we're hanging on a cross. So it’s much more complicated than that. If we tend to simplify and make truth into something that we can completely and totally understand and control, we're on very dangerous ground.

DOOR: It seems sometimes that some of the people in the pews may be kind of sincere but there does seem to be kind of an emotional manipulation on the part of some of the leaders.

YACONELLI: I think any leader is in danger of being manipulating. That's why so many of them get into trouble and end up having sex or taking money or a combination of the two. Most leaders are so unbelievably, I call it, terminally insecure. They need people to respond to them and they need people to continually feed back to them that they're speaking for God and they're OK and that they're who they should be. Because they're so hungry, they don't really believe that they're acceptable. I know that very well, because I’ve been there. And I’m there all the time That terminal insecurity makes it easy for all of us who are in front of people to manipulate them and to get them all to agree with us and to follow us and look up to us and to worship us and then you’re in trouble.

DOOR: Do you feel that we're putting our religious leaders on too high a pedestal?

YACONNELI: The trouble is that we want to make our ministers into celebrities And the moment we do that we are contributing to their demise. And we are robbing the people of the significance of their own value Church is full of heroic people who are doing heroic things that no one ever hears about, whether it be taking care of the mother who has Alzheimer’s or the wife who has Alzheimer’s they daily without telling anybody — just live with the pain of that day by day by day. We don’t hear anything about them All we do is come to church and hear about the dazzling exploits of the pastor. That's dangerous. And to the extent that happens with Benny Hinn or Mike Yaconelli or anybody else, thats when you get into trouble. That's why we have the church, so we don’t allow that to happen.

DOOR: Why does the religious right give you the willies?

YACONELLI: The religious right frighten me because they are so damn arrogant. Somehow they believe that they are immune from being corrupted. They are immune from the power of power.

DOOR: So, they've kind of ignored what happened to them in the ’80s with folks like Tilton, Swaggart and Bakker?

YACONELU: Sure! They always think they're the exception. That they're gonna overcome this. They don't believe Jesus when he said, “The road to the kingdom of God is powerlessness ” The moment you start opting to play with Caesar, you've just gotten in bed with him, you're gonna be infected, you're gonna be in trouble. We tend to want to believe in people when it’s in our best interest to do so and that’s just human nature. The trouble is, when these Christians decide that they’re going to opt for power as a way of combating their fear of what's happening in our culture, they're gonna be contaminated and they're gonna be destroyed by it. It’s very clear in the Bible that when you and I opt for power, we’re gonna be corrupted.

DOOR: How do strangers react when you tell them you're a pastor? How do you break that stereotype?

YACONELLI: For one thing that’s why our church is the slowest-growing church in America. We’ve been there for 11 years and we have about 35 people and that’s about all we have. They’re disappointed. They want their pastor to be dazzling. They want him to be somebody that they can look up to and admire, and all that kind of stuff. I hope that I’m not somebody that they look down to. I hope I’m just an ordinary guy trying to follow Jesus just like them. It so happens that I can talk a lot. I do know that when visitors come to our church, they don't come back.

DOOR: How come?

YACONELLI: They're either turned off by the kind of people we have, or what happens in the service, because you never know what’s gonna happen. One lady in our church had forgotten that she was reading the scripture so there was a silence after the pastoral prayer before she was to read and suddenly she looked up because I was looking daggers to her trying to get her attention and she realized that she’d forgotten to read the scripture and she just blurted out loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, “Sh*t!” Well, that’s it. There’s no visitors coming back In our church, she’s safe to do that. We all understood that was an accident, that she didn’t mean to say that, it just slipped out. And she’s safe to make a mistake, even in church. But that wipes out your visitors, they’re gone. Then people leave because they hear that I'm not a real pastor, that 'm a K-Mart pastor,

DOOR: Why do you call yourself a K-Mart pastor?

YACONELLI: Because I have no credentials. My credentials are my calling, the fact that I struggled with the church for years and years and years, all the way back into the 60s. And it was as though, in fact God didn’t say it, a number of people said it to me, “Well, if you think that the church is all screwed up and you're cynical about it, then why don’t you do it the way you think it ought to be done?” Which is, the church shouldn't own any buildings and the minister shouldn't be paid, etc, etc. So I did. I decided OK.

DOOR: Didn't you get ordained by the Seventh Day Adventists, though?

YACONELLI: I was invited to speak for a group of Seventh Day Adventist ministers. I've been asked to speak to a number of their things for years I just talk about Jesus the way I always do and they love it. I may not hang around a rough crowd of Adventists, but it’s been great. So I was invited to speak at the pastors’ conference, 150 ministers in Oregon, and you know they’re very legalistic.

DOOR: Uh-huh.

YACONELLI: I was there to speak to these ministers about youth work but I realized right away as I started talking, they don’t need to hear about youth work, they need to hear about the pastor because they were all hurting like crazy. And I talked about the struggles of being a minister. When I was done, I went to leave, I had a plane to catch. They said, “Wait a minute. We want to give you something. We’ve been on the phone all afternoon. We've made some phone calls, we've gotten together. We're tired of hearing you call yourself a K-Mart pastor. We want to ordain you. We've never done this in the history of our church, we don’t know anybody that’s ever done this, but we want to do this. We feel led to do it.” And 150 ministers got up and laid hands on me and ordained me into the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

DOOR: So do you consider yourself a Seventh Day Adventist pastor now?

YACONELLI: No, I don’t. But I went back to my church and I said, “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is I’m ordained, the bad news is we're meeting on Saturdays.” We don’t. We meet on Sunday still, and I’m not a Seventh Day Adventist, but I thought what an act of grace from people who are supposed to be legalists. I really believe that God has called me to be a pastor. I don’t have all the formal stuff that everybody has, but I really feel that this is where I belong.

DOOR: Are there any other current projects or future projects you care to mention?

YACONELLI: I have a couple books that I want to write. One of them is a book called The Next Day, that would have to do with what happened the next day after the leper was cured of his leprosy, what happened the next day when he went to see his family who had abandoned him? His dad who wouldn't speak to him, what went on then? What about the adulterer that was let go by Jesus after everybody was going to stone her?

What happened to her when nobody called her a whore the next day? I just want to talk about how, the day of healing, the day of clarification, the day of understanding something, can turn into another day. It can be sabotaged by people and I want to talk about that.

DOOR: Like the guy, who gets cured of his alcoholism or stops doing drugs, does the family take him back in?

YACONELLI: They're terribly threatened by his being healed and cured and eventual ly, without even realizing it, they all kind of push him back into getting drunk again because now they can all go back and play the roles that they were used to.

Yeah, sabotage is a very powerful thing.

DOOR: Finally, what would you say to someone who has been damaged by the church?

YACONELLI: At some point or another, I have to let go even of that and begin to say, “I am broken I am hurt, and I am damaged. But now it’s time to move on. I want to meet the real Jesus.