Here is the dedication and preface from my new book titled: For Those Who Have Made SHIPWRECK of Their Faith.

Dedication

I received a call from someone who had been part of our ministry in Marin County, California, during the early 1970s. He had joined with the Children of God, now called The Family, established by David Moses Berg, lost his family to that cult, and struggled mightily for the next several decades.

He announced himself and said, “Well, Philpott, I see you screwed up your life, too.”

This book is for my troubled brother and for all those who seemed to have made shipwreck of their faith and maybe of their lives as well.

Preface

This book is written for those of you who have stumbled and fallen along the narrow way, either by means of a physical trauma, a significant loss due to death, even a moral failure including that of a sexual nature, emotional and mental collapse, and anything else that might have caused you grief and shame to the point you wanted to give it all up — or were forced to give it all up.

Somehow or another you made shipwreck of your faith. Maybe the blame is only 10% your own, maybe it is 100%, no matter. Yes, you were sealed and sanctified in the Holy Spirit upon your new birth, your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, but you ended up crashing your boat against the rocks.

The Apostle John knew that genuine born from above Christians are yet fallen creatures. “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But ifanyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). We are indeed a contradiction; we are both perfect in Christ and sinners at the same time. And it is well known that we do not sin so that grace may abound.  Please note that the “if” in 1 John 2:1 is, in terms of Greek grammar, the third class condition which means a future probability; if in this instance means the apostle, and by virtual of the reality of Holy Spirit inspiration, the Triune God knew His sons and daughters would yet yield to sinful behavior.

The world, the flesh, and the devil — many have succumbed to this trinity of evil. Who has not fallen? Some of us either rebelled or were deceived, but it was caught on video for the entire world to see or at least those in the pews played it over and over.

Now you find out how much of a minefield a church, or really any organization, can be. People, and some of these closest to you, react in ways you never anticipated. It is not worth fixing blame either. Maybe you left people no other choice, but in any case, you fell and even thought of suicide.

Having been a pastor into my fifth decade, based on what I have learned, most of our trouble has to do with sex and/or money, sometimes in combo, and when it all blows up, and it usually always blows up, the guilt, shame, humiliation — the scandal never dies — it may be forgiven but it is never forgotten or entirely recovered from.

Is there no hope? Must you, even if you attempt to be part of a congregation, sit in the back pew, arrive late and leave early, and conclude you have no more service to offer your Lord Jesus?

There is restoration; my life has become a testimony to that fact. Any recovery from significant loss is painful and this book might just be a hard read, but if you will chance it, let us see where it can take you.

Who is the Greatest & Jesus Foretells Peter’s Denial

Find a quiet place, alone and apart from distractions. Be comfortably alert, still, and at peace. Say the Lord’s Prayer. Sing the Jesus Prayer. Pray for family, friends, neighbors, and yourself. Carefully read the passage of Scripture.

1.         Here very close to the crucifixion, Jesus’ disciples are arguing among themselves who is the greatest.

2.         Jesus, over hearing this, reminds them that this is what the kings of the Gentiles do, lord it over others.

3.         But this is not how it will be in His kingdom, indeed, just the reverse. His followers will be like the young people, these work and serve others. Jesus then points out that He Himself is a servant.

4.         He points out that the Twelve have stayed with Him through His trials, and they will be given a kingdom, the nature of which Jesus does not mention.

5.         The second section, Peter’s denial, follows the account above. In a startling fashion, Jesus tells Peter that Satan had asked for or begged that it might sift him like wheat. (This might be an instance of Jesus having the gift of knowledge as we find in 1 Corinthians 12:1–11.)

6.         Jesus tells Peter that He prayed for him, and that Peter would “turn” again, that is be the faithful follower that he was, and then Peter would do the same for “your brothers.”

7.         Peter boasts that he would follow Jesus through the worst of times, but Jesus straight away tells him that before the breaking of the morning sun, he would deny Him three times.

Introduction

How many of us think about killing ourselves? I am going to guess that the majority of the people on the planet will sometimes fall into this.

For those who do, let me just say that it is important to face it, to admit, not only to yourself but to others.

Should you be embarrassed about thinking of killing yourself?

If you do think about it, does this make you a bad person or a huge failure?

In the preparation to writing this booklet, I sent out a letter to a host of people asking their opinion about the subject of the book. Several hundred went out to alumni of our Divorce Recovery Workshop. The result was dozens of letters coming in expressing thoughts and these are categorized here. Here now is the substance of the letter I sent out.

Taking stock of your situation:

Explain in the space below how you are feeling right now.

Sum up in three sentences why you have decided to kill yourself.

Make a list of the persons who would be impacted by your suicide.

Make a List any persons you can think of who might be moved toward killing themselves after hearing of your own suicide.

Would some of these even blame themselves?

What needs to change in order for you to drop the notion of wanting to kill yourself?

What events brought you to this place?

I have placed the responses into two categories.

Some reasons why:

            a trauma

            a loss of relationship

            approach of incapacity

            depression

            discouragement

            dramatic reversal of life circumstances

            fear of a long, painful death

            Not caring anymore

            Being rejected by people I love

Some reasons why not:

            Don’t give your enemies the satisfaction

            People who love you will be hurt

            People who don’t even know you will be impacted

            There are some options you haven’t considered

Then three questions are asked, and without needing to be answered:

1.        What needs to change in order for you to drop the notion of wanting to kill yourself?

2.        Is suicide murder?

3.        Will I be condemned to hell if I kill myself?

Let me clarify some here. I have been a pastor now for 52 years, and during the earliest of these years I ran the Marin Counseling Center. (In my college years my major was psychology). I found that my work centered on encouraging counselees to talk about what they were going through. And just being able to get the inner pain out made a huge difference. And this is precisely what I am doing here.

Here is my email address, in case a reader is struggling to stay alive:

kentphilpott@comcast.net

Please include a phone # if you leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Luke 22:14–23

Find a quiet place, alone and apart from distractions. Be comfortably alert, still, and at peace. Say the Lord’s Prayer. Sing the Jesus Prayer. Pray for family, friends, neighbors, and yourself. Slowly and carefully read the passage.

1.         Thursday evening now, Passover began at night fall, Jesus and the Twelve, including Judas, are celebrating the deliverance of Israel from Egypt.

2.         Jesus said He “earnestly desired” to eat the Passover with them and in the same sentence He said, “before I suffer.” This of course is in reference to His betray and crucifixion. He, looking forward, said He would “eat it” again with them.

3.         There are four “cups” taken during the Passover meal, the one mentioned in verse 17 is one of these. Following this Jesus took unleavened bread, broke it, gave it to them to take a piece off it and eat it. He said that the piece of broken bread was as His body, and that when they would eat it, they would remember Him and what it stood for.

4.         Then the last, fourth cup, with red wine in it as tradition tells us, the liquid represents His blood which will be “poured out” or spilled or shed for them.

5.         This shed blood is the “new covenant” or testament, or agreement. Though not mentioned here, but the shed blood represents the forgiving or covering of sin by Jesus’ own blood. Jesus actually dies in our place.

6.         Judas, present at the Passover celebration, does betray Him, and he will pay the greatest price for this.

7.         The apostles then question who the betrayer might be because Judas had not tipped his hand.

Number 1

Here now is the first piece of Memoirs of a Jesus Freak, published by Earthen Vessel Publishing in 2016. I am doing this because of the attention the Jesus People Movement has garnered. I hope to present one segment after another over the years, yes there will be about 320 of these. All short.

MJF2.indb

Memoirs of a Jesus Freak

Second Edition

Dedication

This book is again dedicated to the families of those involved in the leadership of the Jesus People Movement. Awakenings are not always pleasant; there is “collateral damage,” and that was cer­tainly the case with the JPM. While there is glory accrued to God, there is also tragedy. Why this happens is little understood, and there are no easy answers.

In my own case, I want to dedicate these memoirs to those who lived through them with me directly and personally, my former wife Roberta Kay Philpott, my oldest daughter Dawn Doreen LaRue, middle child Grace Marie Reed, and son Vernon Robert Philpott.

Acknowlegments

What began as a simple personal story of my involvement in the Jesus People Movement morphed into something much larger. Friends encouraged me to include biographies of those men­tioned in the memoirs, and what I thought would be perhaps a dozen or so swelled to thirty-five at last count. Thanks to all of you who took the time and effort to compile a bio and find old photos. This is not something easily done, because it forces the writer to talk about dif­ficult realities.

For Stephanie Adams who collected and wrote many of the biog­raphies, we owe a great deal. Some bios she compiled by means of internet sites, some were submitted to her via email, and others she collected in direct contact via the telephone. Many bio submissions required revisions along the way (some by the named subjects them­selves), and Stephanie handled them with aplomb.

My own thinking about the Jesus People Movement started with two visits by Larry Eskridge, the first seven years ago and the second, two years later, when we talked about the JPM. Larry’s book, God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America, published by Oxford University press in 2013, stirred up a great deal of interest in the movement. Larry also contributed a foreword to these memoirs, for which I am very grateful.

To Michelle Shelfer, gifted with many talents, one of which is catching the smallest grammatical or spelling flaw—thank you.

For Katie, my wife, who is the editor, cover designer, format maker, constructive critic, and prime mover and shaker of Earthen Vessel Publishing—thank you very much.

If you are wondering about the photos on the front cover, here are the answers:

The background is a camera photo of one page of the manuscript for Two Brothers in Haight, an unpublished book that I co-wrote with David Hoyt (and plan to publish later this year). More than any other character in this book, David deserves an extra amount of thanks for contributions over several years—stories, photos, and discus­sions about our times together on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury, throughout the Bay Area of San Francisco, the East Coast of the U.S., and over the “pond” to England and Europe.

The group photo is one of Joyful Noise performing in 1971 at San Quentin State Prison in Marin County, California. We changed person­nel often during the band’s tenure, and I no longer remember every name. We had great fun bringing a folk-like brand of Christian music to audiences around the country. I describe more of our escapades in chapter 15. Suffice it to say, I wish I could thank each member of the band for making such a joyful noise amidst the adventure that was the Jesus People Movement.