So, You Wanna Go Back to Egypt? . . . We Sure Move Around a Lot, When the Sand Gets So Hot! – title and lyrics from Keith Green’s album, circa. 1980
Author’s Note: This series is autobiographical to provide background for the books and articles you will find on this website. When the series is finished, I will provide a summation in a bio-page. Links to previous installments are found at the bottom of the article. –JWS, website creator.
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My wife brought to our marriage a new, 1984 Nissan Sentra from which I could get 50 mpg on the highway with a stick-shift overdrive. Between that amazing mileage and my barter dollars for food and lodging, we were able to travel vast distances, mostly to visit relatives and supporters. We returned frequently to Wyoming to visit family and friends, to Arizona to visit more family and friends, and even to Illinois for more family and friends. I was young and highway travel did not bother me.
On one of those trips, we happened to be passing through Iowa on the eve of the Iowa Presidential Caucus of 1988. I volunteered to work the phone bank on behalf of Rev. Pat Robertson who was the only contender against George Bush (Sr.) to claim Ronald Reagan’s legacy. Robertson won that first contest and shocked the world. I got to be a part of history.
In the coming years, we would move back to the Midwest, where for most of a decade it was spent in Wichita, Kansas. I had considered a mission to New Zealand, an aspiration that has sometimes been rekindled over the years. One wonders if I had gone in the 1980s, if I would have made any difference to provide a Christian Reconstructionist influence on that island nation, or whether I would have become trapped in the draconian socialism which it endures today.
My vision for Campus Action Ministries was beginning to fade as I began to realize that the public schools were hopelessly within the grasp of the secular humanists. It did not matter if a school teacher is a Christian. By law, a school teacher is not allowed to mention the name of Christ or to provide a student with guidance from the Bible. It violates the “separation of church and state.” That secularized definition stands to this day. Until the legal impediments to the Christian witness are lifted, Christianity will have zero influence on the public school system.
Campus Action had begun as a viable ministry project to fulfill the academic requirements of Minneapolis School of Theology. I had led a student Bible club during my high school years and had attended yet another summer conference at Rockford College in the summer of 1978 sponsored by Student’s Action for Christ which featured lectures from a young attorney and very travel-weary, John Whitehead. From him I learned the legal and procedural protocol to follow in planting student-run Bible clubs on public school campuses. Ever since my Junior High years, it had been my evangelistic aspiration. So, it was a natural choice for my experience at MST.
My colleague, Randy J. Thiry joined me in the endeavor. We started first with a publication. A sample of the earlier articles can be found here:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cam1.pdf
We were also joined by Linda McLane, who at 36, was the oldest student at MST. She was a recently divorced educator from the public school system and helped us put together a second publication called “Issues in Education.” She wrote an amazing analysis of Kohlberg’s “Six Stages of Moral Development” which can be found here (look at the final pages of the above file):
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/cam1.pdf
Her analysis holds true even to this day. At its core, it is secular humanism.
My yearning to live close to the land and learn more about its importance to a family-based society began to grow stronger. Instead of New Zealand, I opted to return to an abandoned family farm in Missouri. But, I would need resources to make a go of it. So I concluded that we would need to live near Kansas City where I could work for a few years and travel back-and-forth while making necessary renovations.
But I was not done with Campus Action just yet. I had just published the final version of The Seed of Cain & the Revival of Mystic Humanism (1987) as the first volume of a planned “Contemporary Issues” series. My next project was a response to John White’s Eros Defiled, The Christian & Sexual Sin (InterVarsity Press, 1977), which had been a focal point of no small controversy at MST. I felt that the Evangelical position on sexual morality was completely inadequate and unscriptural. Influenced by Rushdoony’s repeated insistence that Evangelical morality was just warmed-over neoplatonism, I dug deeply into the cultural context of the Mosaic Law. But it was a topic which required far more time in research than making a three-minute burger. I was now a decade into it with no end in sight.
(to be continued)
James Wesley Stivers, 7/29/23
