The chicken ranch and atom bombs

I was nine years old when I started sixth grade in a Christian school in California during our second furlough.  Fortunately Mrs. Rundall, my teacher, was the most wonderful of grandmotherly women and she helped me make it through a challenging time.  I had asthma most of that year.  We kids shared chicken pox for Christmas, measles for Easter, a car accident in Michigan and were delighted to return to the jungles of Brazil where it was safe to live. This time we moved to Quatipuru, a small town down the Atlantic coast from the Amazon.  Dad built a house and two new boats.  I built a tree house, borrowed money from Mom to start a chicken ranch, learned to roller skate, learned how to trap and trade song birds, became the premier bird cage architect and builder in the village, learned how to make and fly kites and flunked algebra.  Twice.  My Mercy Mom uncharacteristically foreclosed on my chicken ranch and made the family eat my investment.

Those teenage years were a maelstrom of activity.  Dad learned from the failures of the previous churches and became an avid reader of Roland Allen’s book, “The Spontaneous Expansion of the Indigenous Church” and “Missionary Methods; St. Paul’s or Ours?”  Trailblazer that he was, he became the leading proponent of discarding the colonial church planting methods which had been in vogue for 150 years.  While history has judged him to be a brilliant pioneer, his peers used some other terms for him at the time. The local merchants were not excited about an American who taught people to get out of debt and to stop drinking.  They started rumors about his smuggling radioactive sand to the U.S. to make atomic bombs.  This being the Cold War era, Interpol moved into our village and shadowed us relentlessly for months.  They even went to the point of bringing in a submarine to monitor Dad’s movements among the fishermen on the coast in his catamaran powered by twin 18 horsepower Johnson outboards.  Obviously he was a real threat. They searched the boat once and the Jeep once.  It was all very exciting and melodramatic to us until they searched our mail and never returned my eighth grade final exams.  I eventually had to do them over, some months later.  My reactions were more along the line of dramatic than mellow.  That term Dad established three churches, all of which are not only still in existence, but they are reproducing.  He added a daughter, Lois, to the family just before we came home for another furlough. A geek, geometry and the Guama River My senior year in high school was rough emotionally.  In Brazil, I was the big man in town.  No one had as many interesting toys as I did so everyone played what I wanted to play when I wanted to play it.  In California, I started my senior year at 15, didn’t know a first down from a first base and was clueless about the Beatles, sex, drugs, Mustangs and the flower children all of which were essential to the Christian school cool culture.  Alas.  I was a geek.  Academically I was as deficient as I was socially.  To my amazement however, I excelled at geometry and actually enjoyed it.  We puzzled over my disastrous experience with algebra and my stellar performance with geometry.  Mom nobly blamed herself for having been a poor algebra teacher and rejoiced that Miss Royer was doing a stellar job with me in geometry.  Later we found out that it was simply a case of laterality – I am massively right brained in a left brained family.  Geometry was a natural fit.

Somehow I managed to cobble together enough Cs to graduate from high school, but my parents opted to have me return to Brazil instead of immediately going to college. We moved into a new region on the Guama River and this time I was old enough to survey the area with Dad and walk with him through the process of establishing a base.  He purchased property, dug a well, built a pier and then built a storage building where we lived while the house was being built.  After bringing the family out from the city to the shack, he cleared the rest of the hill top, built a house and added one more child, a son, Ronnie.

I marveled at the skill of the woodsmen who would place rocks on the ground betting where they would drop a 100 foot tree.  Accuracy was usually within six inches.  I learned much about construction during those three years and enjoyed it very much.  Dad forgot to mention to me that in the States they have building codes and inspectors designed to diminish the joy of any free spirits.  Dad gave me a dugout canoe for my birthday.  I sanded and painted it with joy and excess.  I began meeting God in my boat at the crack of dawn, when it was high tide and the river was like glass, reflecting the trees perfectly.  I would sit there motionless in a cove, silently soaking up exquisite beauty.

At low tide I would check my shrimp traps and in the process of constant paddling, my brain corrected the laterality imbalance.  I was surprised to find myself an A student when I went to college and wondered for years how I accidentally became smart after years of proven academic incompetence.

	It was there that my love for land found a place to express itself.  I planted an orchard of 400 fruit trees, of 70 different varieties.  I did massive soil preparation for each one.  I made my first compost piles and loved the process.  Before the first tree bore fruit, I left home but by then I was hooked on land, although I had neither language nor legitimacy for this passion.
Choir, children and crisis I returned to the States in February of 1973 to help Grandma since Grandpa was dying of cancer.  After that

summer the Jungle Boy went to Bible school in the Canadian Rockies.  Wind chill dropped the temperature to -60.  Snow was everywhere.  But since I did not have to heat a house, drive in the snow or otherwise deal with reality, it was an idyllic experience.  Nonetheless, after a year I moved back to Southern California, married Ann and settled into family life with college as a garnish. Most of the years growing up, we had no church experience.  Dad was a pioneer church planter so for the first few years on location were all about evangelism and discipleship.  About a year before we left town, he would bring together the various Bible studies and we would endure 32

people singing three hymns off key.  Thus when I returned to the States, I made bee line for a church of 1,500 people with a full piano, organ and choir so as to water the dry spots in my soul.  That remedial experience out of the way, Ann and I reverted to our roots and immersed ourselves in small neighborhood churches doing a little bit of everything. Over the next ten years I served in every role from custodian to senior pastor, covering the range from planting a church to being interim pastor, helping heal a church split and taking over a dying church.  Meanwhile, four years into marriage, God graced us with an Exhorter son whom we named Roland Allen Burk in honor of the man who was so formative in my father’s ideological transition.  Shortly thereafter, we added a fourth generation Prophet daughter to our family and named her Desiree. After pastoring that last church poorly for seven years, I closed the church, resigned my ministerial credentials and went back to work in construction.  I was badly bruised because so much of my legitimacy was tied to being in the ministry.  Legitimacy, dignity and Plumbline That colossal failure was the seed of genuine growth for all the rest of my life.  During three years of anguish I learned much about legitimacy being rooted in love, not in performance.  My theology was significantly broadened to include the whole Trinity.  I also learned that although I am not called to pastor an institutional church, I have a father’s heart and I need to be life giving to people.  I am a shepherd, not a pastor. That began a grand adventure.  I had been seemingly ineffective at changing lives while a pastor.  Now God was surrounding me with deeply wounded people for whom I had no answers and telling me to shepherd them. It was in that impasse, that God taught me to give the gift of dignity.  I learned to walk with people where they were, seeing them first and foremost as individuals, not as projects, giving life to them that way, even when I had no answers.  Eventually some answers came.

Plumbline and my construction job co-existed for the first five years until I had an accident in construction.  The workman’s compensation benefits allowed me to work full time in the ministry for awhile until income from the ministry could support us.

We had home schooled our children so I traveled very sparingly while they were young. In the years since they left home, I  have been privileged to travel widely.  My greatest joy is seeing truths I teach lived out generationally.  I run a think tank, not a ministry center, so it is a delight to be out on the road seeing first hand how others have implemented the principles we have carved out in the “lab.”

 

Today  After teaching intermittently in the L. A. Unified School District, my wife retired and is now deeply vested in providing literature to chaplains who are deployed and in designing and making quilts for wounded soldiers. Our son has a home in a lovely Mercy community in Utah and our daughter lives near us in Southern California.  I am not able to indulge in my hobbies of land and chickens due to my travel schedule, so my primary hobby is reading.  There is always a stack of books by my recliner.  I am looking forward to getting a membership in a sailing club soon.  I am very much my father’s son in many ways, not the least of which is a shared deep appreciation for the ocean’s deep rhythms.

As I look back, I have made so many bad decisions that have been offset by so many interventions from God.  Any given year of my life looks amazingly random.  Any given decade looks astoundingly strategic as God has guided us in spite of me. I have no idea where I will be two decades from now in personal growth or in ministry.  But having seen where God has taken me so far, I am on tiptoes with expectation to see what the next lap of the journey will be like.

Arthur Burk
Anaheim, CA
November, 2007