Minister Bridges Two Disparate Worlds
A new year traditionally means new starts, when people resolve to change their lives. So it's an apt time for one pastor's tale of the epic change he made 25 years ago, when he was transformed from atheist to evangelical Christian.
His story is one man's experience, which some will appreciate and others dismiss. But it means the Rev. Dave Schmelzer, 43, senior pastor at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Cambridge, bridges two worlds often at odds in America today. He's a theologically conservative Christian who sees his mission as preaching to secularists who are spiritually interested, a description that he says still applies in some ways to himself. "He doesn't act like everything's always easy and fine," church member Jill Tonelli said of her pastor. "So when he talks about his struggles, you're usually having the same ones."
Schmelzer grew up in San Diego, the son of a disaffected Catholic father and a mother who, though exhorting him to attend church when he was in high school, didn't go herself. The fall of 1980 found him a freshman at Stanford University, where, as he had in high school, he debated religious friends, arguing that "if there is a God up there, you can't know" with any certainty.
When they told him they talked to their God, he recalled, "I would just relentlessly mock that. `What do you mean you go to the movies with Him?' "
Yet Schmelzer was profoundly unhappy. A self-described brooder with an artistic temperament, the young man was slow to make friends far from home. Yearning to be a writer but knowing that success would be a long shot, he feared being forced into some remunerative but soulless job.
He foundered academically, which culminated when a professor returned his essay on "The Aeneid" and pronounced it "garbage." Crushed, apparently a failure at the one thing he thought he did well, Schmelzer went back to his room and prayed for the first time since his childhood, asking for some sign.
He found his "road to Damascus" along the main drag of Menlo Park, Calif., that night. He'd gone to a movie and was listening to some tapes his sister had sent him from a Christian conference she had attended. The speaker was compelling. "I think I'd found churches to be incomprehensible," he says. "This guy was, like, talking real sentences."
But the transformative moment came when, distracted by looking at a map, he veered off the road and ran into what he thought was a post.
Backing up his undamaged Volvo, he discovered he'd actually hit a cross in front of a church. Ten minutes later, pulling out of a parking lot where he'd stopped to consult his map again, he realized he had parked under a second cross at a second church. The coincidences "How many other crosses have I run into in my lifetime?" sent him into classes on various world faiths.
If this had been the sign he prayed for, Schmelzer pondered, whose God sent it? He ruled out Judaism and Islam, thinking he'd have to be a prophet to get such a message. Hinduism perplexed him, and Buddhism did not offer him a message-sending God. The only religious world view that made sense to him was Christianity, but it took a year and a half of study to take hold.
After graduating from Stanford, Schmelzer got a master's degree at Fuller Theological Seminary in California, then briefly pursued his dream of playwriting in San Francisco. He and his wife, Grace, joined a church in the Vineyard movement, which has churches worldwide and was led by a man who described himself as a "beer-guzzling, drug-abusing pop musician" converted by a Quaker Bible group.
In 1995, the Schmelzers came to the Boston area to help friends launch a church that became the Vineyard Christian Fellowship of Cambridge. Two and a half years later, he became pastor.
Molded from the clay of his earlier atheism, Schmelzer's theology lacks the sharp edges of some more self-certain conservative believers. "I believe that the only way to get to heaven is through Jesus . . . [but] the way that happens is not necessarily by becoming a Christian," he said.
Schmelzer says that his congregation is diverse, spanning far right to "wacko environmentalist I say that with all affection."
Tonelli, who grew up Catholic, says she lost her faith studying philosophy in college and found it again during a troubled time in her life. A 45-year-old freelance writer, she says Schmelzer and the Vineyard appeal to those whose faith journey has been potholed.
"It really helps that somebody understands that you haven't led a perfect life," she said. "There's not a holier-than-thou attitude here."
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