Was it that confession of faith over forty years ago or a restatement of faith eighteen years  later that brought a forty-six-year-old, long-haired, blues-loving, ex-druggy landscape designer
into the mission field? My initial confession of faith was followed by intense study of the Word, and being involved in ministry while sitting under great teachers; then came the long backslidden walk in the world that resulted in the need for a renewed declaration of “not my will Lord but Yours.” 

       Without reveling in all the triumphs that led to failure, the stumbling that led to a fall, I found myself living in Ocean Beach on the sunny side of the hill in San Francisco, California. I had just finished promoting and staging a Christian outreach concert, Pearl in the Park, in the iconic Golden Gate Park. The idea was birthed in the mountains of Oregon on a trip I took on my forty-fourth birthday when visiting the Applegate Christian Fellowship.

       At the time I was working for the international ministry Jews for Jesus. On this trip, I sat in on a live set with a guy I had just met upon my arrival, Robert. When I met him he told me he was going to perform his original songs in the fellowship’s Hard Rock Kave haz for a live broadcast on the church’s radio station that night. I asked if I could sit in. After the set, I said we gotta do this again.

       Now I traveled for various business concerns as part of my ministry work. On one of my trips I stopped in Salt Lake City, Utah, at a Calvary Chapel that had recently received the Liberated Wailing Wall, a musical group of JFJ. I immediately bonded with the assistant and youth pastors, John & Kim, and the senior pastor, Terry; in fact, I assisted him with worship that night.

       I told Terry and John about a trip I’d made to Oregon earlier in the year, that I felt the Lord  calling me to put together an outreach concert in San Francisco (as we did the ‘my city is darker than your city’ routine). They invited me back that next May to their annual outreach concert their church had been doing in Salt Lake City for a few years to see what they were doing.