In the first of this three part interview, I talk with Jon Trott from Jesus People USA. Jon shares the background of what he is involved with below. So I'll let him speak for himself. Enjoy.

SMULO: Jon, please tell us about yourself, and what you’re involved with.

TROTT:  Trying to love Jesus, love my wife and children, love my fellow believers, and love my neighbor whoever she or he may be. Need I note I often fail?

Besides the above, it seems my vocation is mainly writing and teaching.  I wrote for over 25 years for Cornerstone magazine, and as its editor presided over the magazine being “retired” in 2003 or so.  I had a moment or two of notoriety for my Mike Warnke exposé, which was co-written with Mike Hertenstein, and also my other writings on so-called “satanic panic.”

I have a love and, uh… sex website I call “The High Romance” and it is a very incomplete place. A lot there, but a lot missing and a few pages I wish I’d never started (like the marriage ideas). The extensive poetry section there includes some verse of mine, and especially a rather lengthy poetic interaction with the Song of Solomon.  It’s a bit PG-13, but so is the original.

I currently am working on two books which seem never to be done, as well as blogging on my bluechristian.com site, project12.us, aremenreallyhuman.blogspot.com, and appearing occasionally on other rather dubious sites. John Smulo’s, for instance. The Ooze has a bit of an interview with me from a few years back regarding Jesus People USA and my own journey.

SMULO: You mentioned you’re involved with Jesus People USA (JPUSA). Please tell us how long you’ve been involved for, how the group was started, and what you believe JPUSA can teach the wider church. Humility is not allowed!

TROTT: Oh, dear. Well, first of all, I think our story is an illustration of that biblical truth wherein God uses the things that are not to confound the things that are. As individuals we are certainly nothing special, and I do not say that with a false humility. It simply is true. We (and here I speak of the original core group from 1972) were societal cast-offs and have-nots who, through a resurgence of faith sweeping through the remnants of sixties counterculture, encountered the Living Christ and His Love.

Being people without anything, it came easy to that original group of thirty to live together, to become a Jesus family of sorts, to make with their common faith a common life with common purpose. Yet so many other Jesus People groups did the same. We are one of the very few to survive. Why? I could play amateur sociologist, but won’t.

I joined the Jesus People in 1977, dropping out from Gordon College (an evangelical school near Boston) to do so. I’d become a believer while a teen growing up between my home town of Fort Benton, Montana, and the farm we had fourteen miles from Fort Benton. Frankly, I was unprepared for the evangelical subculture of Gordon, and I suppose have never really become prepared. My long hair and blue jeans, for instance, got me falsely accused by the then-chaplain of Gordon of being a drug-user.  (That individual later went on to a “cults” and discernment ministry, which I find fairly humorous in a sick sort of way.) Meanwhile, my evangelical cohorts were off getting drunk and doing the things I’d tried at the age of thirteen or so. The message seemed clear. Appearance was very important, and the inner life was one not shared with others.

In retrospect, with experience, I learned of course that these problems are far from being unique to conservative evangelicalism. They are not absent from JPUSA, or from any group of human beings. We naturally tend to replace inner substance with outer appearances no matter who we are. But I will say that when I left Gordon and joined the Jesus People – who at that time were living 160 strong in an old six flat at 4431 North Paulina on Chicago’s North Side – I did see a people who with all their flaws were relentless about pursuing a life of personal holiness and interpersonal transparency. They also seemed quite aware of the need for communal give and take rather than strict hierarchy. Nor was the “pietistic” side of JPUSA their only emphasis.  Even in the rather misogynistic world of the Jesus movement (and evangelicalism), JPUSA had one female pastor. And the community seemed very involved (and got only more so) with social issues.

The way the latter happened was due to JPUSA’s emphasis on evangelism. They were, in those first years before Jonestown changed the way people reacted to street witnessing, at it all the time. And as a result, people did become Christians. A young mother, a new Christian, told our JPUSA sisters she had nowhere to go and nothing to eat. We housed her and fed her as a natural extension of our evangelistic witness. In short, we never did run into that strange divide between those who witness to Christ’s salvific power and those who served the poor and worked for justice. Wasn’t it all one gospel, the telling the Good News and the doing what Jesus had showed us to do?

I of course have told a lot of this story in my never-completed but pretty thorough introduction to JPUSA called “Life’s Lessons.”

So back to my narrative. By the way, the Ooze does draw some of my personal story out as well:

I have lived at JPUSA ever since joining in January 1977. In fact, in a rather mathematically symmetrical way, I have lived at JPUSA for thirty years as of this year. I am fifty years old this year, as of yesterday (Easter, the first time in my life the two days ever coincided). And I’m sure the numerologists out there will find something profound about that.

What can the rest of the church learn from us? I think, honestly, we’re not the ones to say. I will venture what I *wish* the church could learn from us, just as we need to learn it better. Here’s a list:

1. Community is costly. It is both wonderful and terrible. In community, we meet ourselves in the faces and eyes of one another. And that experience is sometimes quite painful, wrenching, and enough to send not a few folks out the door running. For those of us dumb enough to stick around, we discover an abundance of human relationship simply not available in the ultra-individualized west. Human relationship is being re-emphasized these days by younger generations, and I fervently hope others can create 21^st Century communities of believers whose fragile strength mirrors the heart of Christ.

2. Faith is often made up of antinomies, apparent contradictions, which if worked through and within often reveal the very heart of faith. For instance, in community there is a real tension between the “border” of any individual’s truth and life and the way of seeing reflected by the leadership and majority of the community. How is this tension resolved in any specific situation? Does the community usurp the individual’s right not to violate her or his own conscience? If so, the community transgresses and does violence to the individual’s faith. Yet does the individual’s firm belief over-rule the communal standard? Is that not insisting on one’s own way regardless of what the damage done to one’s sisters and brothers might be? Obviously, in community one discovers that approaching these tensions is no abstract exercise, but rather a very real and specific one which requires the wisdom of Solomon and the discernment of the Holy Spirit.

3. We need not be afraid to fail, or even more importantly, let others within the community fail. If those of us who are older micro-manage younger believers’ forays into new ministries, ways of seeing, and so on, we will more often than not quench the Spirit. It may be, and often is, true that the said new idea will flop, that the new ministry is not going to take root. But failure is its own teacher, and the lessons learned there are usually far more important than those learned via success. American Christianity loves success measured in numbers, visibility, political clout, even cash. Biblical Christianity seems little concerned with such matters, but focuses rather on a love capable of covering many sins – or perhaps even many failures? Love in Christ is the only success.

4. Embrace suffering. This is not the suffering of the hair-shirt or self-flagellation variety. Far from it. Joy is a good thing in community, a very good thing indeed. But just as Good Friday lies at the heart of Easter, so suffering lies at the heart of Joy to make Joy complete. Christianity means lingering in the tomb with our dead Lord, finding in that darkness of suffering the darkness itself being transformed by the Easter seed lying near us. Some of us may not have terrible sufferings, but many of us do. And it is in those sufferings, which like Christ’s leave scars even in our “resurrected” selves, that we might begin really to understand that suffering is part of rather than foreign to faith.

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