Atheist. Playwright. Novelist. Pastor?

These three realities interwove intricately to form what is now the life of Dave Schmelzer; an award-winning and produced playwright, former atheist and current Senior Pastor of a local church in North Cambridge.

Schmelzer until his early twenties was an atheist. Throughout his teen years, Schmelzer got pretty skeptical about God and about most conventional wisdom, a category he put God into. "But I remained pretty engaged in talking about God. I'd corner most of my religious friends in high school (largely Protestant or Mormon) and ask them about their experience of faith, and we'd end up debating. My take was that the existence of God was moot, since there could never be proof that he existed,” Schmelzer maintains.

Within the first week of his freshman year of college Schmelzer got known as the dorm atheist. But his first few months of college, as so often happens for new freshmen, were disorienting. He found himself wondering what he was banking his life on. Success in school? Working toward becoming a lawyer like his father? All eventually leading to a happy life? Suddenly, it seemed absurd to bank all his hopes for happiness on what seemed, to him, pretty flimsy stuff.

This dissonance suddenly had him wondering, "What if the Christians are right?" Schmelzer said a prayer to the effect of, "God, I don't believe you're real, but if you are, today would be one great day to show me."

Nothing noteworthy happened, but he decided he wanted to get away from campus. On his drive back, he got disoriented. So he referred to a map and tried to read it under the dome light as he continued to drive slowly. As he was looking at the map, the dark and deserted road forked and he went straight, and ended up bouncing up a small hill until he ran into a post. Although his 1980 Volvo was not damaged and the post seemed fine, the incident startled him. As he slowly backed down the hill, he noticed that what he had taken to be a post was actually a giant, floodlit cross. It was a church on the hillside. While he looked at the cross, he realized he would not have thought twice about this if earlier that day he had not prayed earlier.

By now Schmelzer had found his bearings and started heading toward campus, only to get disoriented again. He pulled off this time, noting his previous experience. As he figured out where he was and pulled out of the parking lot he had entered, he noticed that he had parked under a giant floodlit cross--another church. This was twice in ten minutes.

Schmelzer was rattled by the evening. Did this mean that there was commerce between this God way out there and us here on earth? If so, his whole argument against God was shot. He started looking into the world's religions; taking classes on sufi Islam and another on Judaism, reading up on Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and a little on Taoism.

A year and a half into this, it was finally settled for Schmelzer that what had happened to him was distinctively about Jesus. That was because it seemed to him, both on that night and as he further tried to explore prayer, that what was compelling to him was that there was a God out there who was eager to speak with him - so began his journey of faith.

To further explore his new-found faith, Schmelzer moved into the inner-city after graduation, where he helped to start a ministry that worked with inner-city, at-risk kids. It was while he was doing this that Schmelzer decided to go to seminary.

Schmelzer maintains, "I went to seminary not so much to be a pastor, as to learn more profoundly how to think about God. Maybe I'd be a writer--a longtime interest--and having thought more coherently about my worldview seemed helpful in that. The inner-city experience had taught me a lot about my limitations and made me very aware of needing more tools to really offer God's power to people.”

Schmelzer left seminary with an MA degree in order to pursue his interest in playwriting. With the help of a college friend who was a theater director, Schmelzer had two of his plays professionally produced in San Francisco. One play received glowing reviews and sold out the run. The other had a much more mixed response, but Schmelzer had vision for how to retool it and see it prosper.

While pursing this, he and his wife, Grace, got a call from some college friends of who were interested in seeing a new Vineyard church started in Boston. Schmelzer was drawn to the idea as he and his wife were members of a vibrant Vineyard church and he also thought his plays, with some work, would be able to get New York productions.

Schmelzer and his wife moved to Boston in August of 1995, with the thought that he be an associate pastor, unpaid, while their friend became the lead pastor of the new church. But through a series of dramatic events over a period of two and a half years, that included the friend returning to California, Schmelzer was faced with a position he had never wanted--being a pastor--and it would require him to give up something he did like, being a playwright; but he had such confidence that God wanted to do something great with this offer and he agreed.

Reaching into his playwright toolkit, Schmelzer presents faith as a gripping story that is worthy of attention. The delivery is without melodrama but is remarkably instantaneous in its emotional clarity and impact. At the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Cambridge Schmelzer regularly uses popular movies, live theater, and pop music performances during his sermons.

His dream is to pastor secular America; he regards the culture he comes out of as being basically secular and media-driven, not necessarily religious or church-going in any sense and is thus passionate about being in conversation with folks who are like that.

In a city where the cacophony of the self-righteous is regarded with skepticism and the Christian right viewed as an irrational enigma, Schmelzer is the voice of neutralism. In the politics sans religion war, he is Switzerland.

Deities do not exist in the world of an atheist. Playwrights' and novelists' realms are wrapped in stories. The life of a pastor is embedded in God. Through the thread that is faith the proverbial twain did meet.