Honey vs. Cod Liver
Oil
I have measured out my life with coffee
spoons.
T. S. Eliot, "The Love song of J. Alfred
Prufrock"
Selah, Wing and a Prayer, Country Faith, Good News, Mustard Seed Faith, Blessed Hope, The Way, Love Song, Children of the Day — Calvary Chapel in 1972 was awash with such music groups, made up of long-haired, bearded, reclaimed sinners who were forever fooling around with their cables, lights, sound boxes, mikes, bass guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and traps. In time they formed a fraternity, an "in group" totally absorbed in what they were doing, and very noisy. When they were performing, people listened with fascination and applauded enthusiastically. When they were not, many of the same people tended to avoid them.
But not Michael; he loved the music-makers. The beat was in his bloodstream and these were his buddies, a part of his generation. He would pick up one of their guitars and strum the few basic chords he knew and be happy. The groups would cart him along in their vans to churches and campus meetings, and after their concert he would give his testimony: "Jesus saved me from bankruptcy ... Jesus put my family back together ... Jesus
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healed me from acid flashbacks."
Michael's affinity with the musicians had come to the attention of Pastor Chuck Smith back in the Living Waters days. Smith had incorporated Maranatha! Music in 1971, but after several months of sensational growth he sensed that the leadership of the company was taking it in directions with which he did not agree. He wanted to make a change, and he knew Michael had a vision that paralleled his own. They both thought the music money should be plowed back to help the musicians support themselves as they ministered to high schools and colleges and out on the beaches. So Smith dismissed the people who had been running the company and asked Michael to take over.
In January 1973 Michael was transferred from the church ministry proper and appointed pastor and director of Maranatha! Music. For the young pastor's assistant it meant leaving the church work he loved; yet it also meant that his salary was back up to $150 a week. He was again in the world of business; but this time it was God's ordaining, and he had a brand new challenge, a developing market and an exciting product.
In the next two years under Michael's leadership, the company was on its way to becoming one of the largest and most popular Christian record producers in the world, with an ASCAP label and a diversified line of products. Michael was not a detail man, and he could easily have fallen on his face had he not received expert help. His mentor at this period was Robert J. Ward, the man who had been president of the burglar alarm enterprise, who had since joined Chuck Smith at Calvary Chapel.
Six feet two inches tall, forty-two years old, an ex-Air Force pilot, blond, with a mind like a computer, Ward was now pastor of the new Maranatha Evangelical Association. This was Pastor Chuck's effort to respond to the
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dozens of communities in the United States and Canada that were writing and telephoning him, asking for help for their churches and even for Calvary Chapel ministries to be formed in their localities. Ward's efforts were restricted mainly to California and Arizona.
Before becoming a Christian, Ward had been a broker specializing in international finance. He took Michael under his wing and taught him the basic principles of business, of which Michael knew very little. He taught him to let his "yea" be "yea." If Michael entered a transaction, he learned to live by what he said. Ward taught him to plan and administer and be a good steward of God's money.
Ward also was used by God to help Michael mature so that he could grow out of all the psychological problems and irresponsibilities that had plagued him. He spent hours counseling with Michael, pointing him in the right direction, encouraging him. He became a big brother to Michael. Like Michael's older brother David, Ward had served in the Air Force in Korea and had flown missions as an F-86 pilot.
Ward also introduced Michael to a level of society he had never known. Many of the people he knew had position and wealth and knowledge of the world. So while the Holy Spirit used Chuck Smith to groom Michael spiritually and train him as a minister, Bob Ward was used to mature him as a man and as a communicator. If Smith's teaching on biblical prophecy expanded Michael's horizon of thinking, Ward's teaching on practical application helped him understand his environment.
Within a few weeks of assuming his new role, Michael found himself on a jetliner bound for the Philippine Islands with the Love Song musicians. This amazing turn of events came about through the ballooning popularity of Love Song, which was under contract to United Artists
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and had recorded three of the Philippines' top ten hits of 1972-73.
The invitation came from secular Filipino promoters, who featured the group at leading hotel supper clubs in Manila, at the University of the East, and on national television. Michael's chance came during five public concerts given by Love Song in Manila's Rizal Memorial Stadium, starting on Valentine's Day. Fifteen thousand people a night bought tickets and turned out, some smoking pot, some drinking beer, all there for the music. And each night Michael stepped to one of the microphones and gave his testimony of deliverance. When the invitation was then given to receive Christ, the response was incredible. By official estimate, during the five nights in the stadium, as many as seventeen thousand people came forward to put their trust in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.
Love Song was also the overwhelming attraction at the University of the East rally. Many people couldn't hear Michael's testimony because of all the yelling and screaming. President Marcos had recently declared martial law in the Philippines and had forbidden public meetings. This rally was the first exception granted, and national guardsmen in khaki uniforms were everywhere. They formed a human chain to get the performers through the crowd. The trip was a new kind of mind-expanding experience for Michael, because he saw vividly what God could do with evangelism. A seed was planted in Michael that God would water. A friend told him at the time, "I have a vision for China, Mike."
But all too soon midnight arrived, the ball ended, and the pumpkin coach flew the pastor of Maranatha! Music back to Cinderella's cottage. Instead of floating across the pacific in a jetliner, he was bumping up U.S. 99 in a van to the cities of northern California — Sacramento, Marysville,
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Chico — and freezing with his musicians in places like Flagstaff, Arizona.
In April Michael rounded up sixty young people from Calvary Chapel, and they drove with the Maranatha musicians to Palm Springs in the lower California desert for a week of meetings. Each might the stands at the local ball park, known as Angel Stadium, were filled as five hundred people showed up to hear the music; many received a touch from the Lord. During the day Michael sent witnessing teams roaming the city streets and school campuses, passing out leaflets that invited people to the Bible classes that were being held in the International Hotel and to the evening rallies. After the week of meetings closed, Michael and some of the musicians continued to drive into the desert for Saturday night services at the hotel. One night they were singing and having a good time in their hotel room when the manager called up. It seemed the plaster was falling off the ceiling into the cocktails of people in the lounge below.
"You'll have to move somewhere else."
"Where? We paid for this room!"
"O.K., tell you what. I'll put you out in the pool area."
That was the most fortuitous thing the manager could have done, because all his balconies opened up on the swimming pool, and the cocktail lounge adjoined it. When the musicians went into their beat, all the hotel guests came out on the balconies and listened to the songs about Jesus Christ. Barflies brought out their drinks, tourists filled the lawn chairs, and the gospel entertainers had a packed house without even looking for it. Then Michael stepped out and preached a gospel message.
It had its hilarious aspect, but the venture ended in frustration. The team had to move to another hotel, and the open door at Palm Springs seemed to be closing. Michael was forced to take stock of his situation. Where
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exactly was he? It seemed inevitable that after each taste of honey he would be handed a dose of cod liver oil. If he worked up an opportunity to preach, as likely as not the door would slam on him. If he put together a massive concert at Long Beach Municipal Auditorium, Tom Stipe or somebody else from Calvary Chapel would be assigned to deliver the main message. God had called him to preach the gospel and win souls, he knew that, but as the months went by he seemed to be doing mighty little of either. I'll never amount to much, he told himself. I can't preach. I'm a lousy minister. The effects of chemical excess, the drag of the wasted years, had not entirely disappeared.
When little Megan, the precious first fruit of the reunited marriage was born in August of 1973, the growing family was still living on $150 a week, and Michael was still trying to level his mountain of debt. The demands of home were increasing. The business world was becoming more involved. Projects he tried to start came to nothing. Clients and customers either misunderstood him or took advantage of him. Personality clashes impeded the work. It seemed to Michael as if everything he did was wrong. He felt he was in God's way, and he wondered if He were trying to kill him.
Michael went back to spending more time in the Scriptures, relearning what the Psalms and the New Testament said about trusting, loving, forgiving, and taking the lowest place at the table. He realized that his traveling companions, the musicians, were not always as taken up with the things of the Lord as they were with their music. On their journeys in the van he began reading to them from the devotional writings of Andrew Murray, Charles Spurgeon, G. Campbell Morgan, and Norman Grubb. In Flagstaff, as he had done in Palm Springs, he divided the men into small units and had them on the downtown streets, passing out evangelistic tracts and handbills.
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But his calling remained unfulfilled. Michael felt that promoting albums, paying out royalties, and putting together concerts was not what God had laid out for his future. During the closing months of 1973 he experienced what many a Christian had gone through before him — disheartenment. He was learning what it means to be crucified with Christ.
In a sermon on "Discouragement" which he delivered over a century ago, Charles Spurgeon told his London congregation, "Depression comes over me whenever the Lord is preparing a larger blessing for my ministry. The cloud is black before it breaks, and overshadows before it yields its deluge of mercy. The Lord is revealed in the backside of the desert, while his servant keeps the sheep and waits in solitary awe. The wilderness is the way to Canaan. Defeat prepares for victory. The raven is sent forth before the dove. The darkest hour of night precedes the dawn."
In Michael's case the preacher spoke prophetically. If God was bringing his servant to a Golgotha of spiritual death, it was because he was about to open the windows of heaven and pour out a divine blessing upon him. Something surprising and marvelous was already in the works.
