This review was published in the Sept. 30, 2006 issue (Issue 114) of The Journal: News of the Churches of God. For the original of this review click here.
Take an affectionate, critical look at '70s AC
by Mac Overton
(c) 2006 The Journal, Box 1020, Big Sandy, TX 75755. Reprinted with permission.
The writer is a longtime Church of God member and editor
of the weekly Gilmer Mirror.
Gilmer, Texas--I remember Greg Doudna, the writer, as a young man of almost boundless energy and superior intellect.
Mr. Doudna is the author of the newly revised Showdown at Big Sandy: Youthful Creativity Confronts Bureaucratic Inertia at an Unconventional Bible College in East Texas, available at The Scrollery (scrollery.com), Bellingham, Wash.
Greg came to Ambassador College, Big Sandy, as many (most?) of us did: with an enthusiastic desire to learn more about how to live "God's way" and then use the knowledge and skills about living we learned there to help the church and the world at large.
Greg came from a Quaker background and, after several years in the Worldwide Church of God, eventually returned to that tradition. He was a friend of mine in college, although probably not as close a friend as he should have been, as I realize after reading this book.
The exception tests the rule
First, a brief detour:
As I read of his experiences in the church and at Ambassador, I realize that except for the grace of God there go I.
I had the blessing to be hired by The Worldwide News after my first semester at AC (spring 1974) and was accepted into managing editor John Robinson's inner circle. the circle included people who continue to be guiding factors in the greater Church of God after the many splits from the WCG that began in earnest in the early 1990s: Scott Ashley, Ellis Stewart, Scott Moss, Dixon Cartwright, later Linda Moll (now Linda Moll Smith) and Janey George (now Janey Milligan).
John, who died in January 2006 after a bout with prostate cancer, was loyal to the teachings of the church but was also loyal to his employees.
He was that rare leader, not only in the WCG but in the world in general, who recognized that loyalty is a two-way street. He went to battle for his staff. (Being college students, we occasionally violated trivial rules.)
John was solidly enough entrenched in those days that even the most fatuous church or college administrators were not eager to challenge him as they routinely challenged others.
One tactic: If they couldn't directly challenge someone, then they would attack his staff to prove they had stronger power within the organization than the targeted one did.
John bailed this old country boy out of situations that would not even have caused a blip on the radar screen at almost any other college or university (or church, for that matter).
One such situation was when I failed to show adoration for a certain attorney and financial officer who was everybody's favorite future evangelist. Those were strange days, friends and brethren.
"The Press," the printing-department building on campus, provided a place where we could express our justifiable frustrations and legitimate questions in a supportive, nonthreatening atmosphere.
I wonder what might have happened to Greg Doudna if he had found such a patron. Such men as John are few and far between. I have tried to emulate him with my own coworkers as far as I have been able.
Complex study
Greg's book chronicles the three years (1972-1975) he spent at or near Big Sandy and how he repeatedly wrote complex study papers to amplify or explain WCG doctrines.
It explains that his writings were sent through what he believed were the proper channels, and then disappeared into what was the black hole of church intelligentsia at the time.
(Some might say that "church intelligentsia," like "military intelligence," is an oxymoron. Those who read Mr. Doudna's book will understand this statement even more thoroughly.)
The volume is an updated version of one he published in 1989 that did not enjoy wide circulation. Greg was inspired to update it after the 30-year reunion of the Ambassador Big Sandy Class of 1976 in Colorado in August of this year. His conversations with Linda Moll Smith, a member of that class, and perhaps others inspired this 526-page revised version.
Lots of notes
Greg writes his book in a highly readable style. I received my review copy on a Monday and found it difficult to put down. It was my main reading in the evenings after work, and I finished it on the Friday night after receiving it on a Monday.
There are few such large books (it's a trade paperback, essentially the same size as a hardcover) that grip me enough to read them through so quickly.
Greg was an obsessive note-taker, and, unlike many of the rest of us, retains his college notebooks to the present day.
Artifacts from a past life
In addition to recounting personal experiences and observations, he reprints or summarizes major papers he did as a student during his years at AC.
These include:
- "Evidences for the 7,000-Year Plan," in which "I showed through charts and graphs that the return of Christ must be very near."
"The Bible and Interracial Marriage," in which "I showed that there is not the slightest biblical justification for forbidding interracial marriage among Christians, and cited examples such as Moses marrying a black woman to prove it."
"The United States in Prophecy," in which "I set about to conclusively prove that the United States is Eprhaim and Britain is Manasseh, not vice versa."
"Meat Offered to Idols: Did Paul Permit What James Forbade?," in which "I attempted to reconcile apparently conflicting statements in the New Testament concerning this burning issue."
"The Servant and the Woman," in which "I likened the course of the church to a lovely lass being taken across the desert by a dashing Arab sheikh."
Probably the one that rankled church leadership the most was his paper on tithing, "in which I showed that tithing is supposed to go to the poor and homeless, not church leaders."
"I wrote these papers as an idealistic 19- to 21-year-old Ambassador College student," Greg states. "That is a past era for me now. These papers are like artifacts from an archaeological stratum of a past life."
I read these words with sadness, because, with his analytical ability and gift of being able to make the complex simple, he would have been such an asset to the church in those days or one of the branches of the church today.
The autobiographical volume recounts Greg's upbringing in the Quaker tradition, then his learning about the beliefs of that era's WCG from literature his father was receiving.
Place of safety
Full of idealism, Greg came to AC at Big Sandy seeking a refuge from this present world's troubles.
He recounts the roadblocks and frustrations he encountered there.
Also shining through is the good attitude with which he took put-downs and setbacks as he commendably sought to validate and expand the reasons for believing in some of the church's more-esoteric doctrines.
As an AC-graduate friend who is now a deacon in the UCG confided in me years before there was a UCG or the demise of Worldwide as we knew it was even contemplated, "if you are in a good attitude, they [meaning church leaders, I think] can do anything to you they want."
And, as the brilliant writer and newly elected U.S. senator James Webb stated in his book about the Confederacy, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, the "amazing thing is not that they were defeated, but that they [the South] held out so long against such overwhelming odds."
Paradise for some coeds
The same can be said for young Mr. Doudna's idealism.
Among his observations of AC and the WCG:
- Women were treated as commodities and had better not overtly display too much intellect. God forbid that they should outshine the males in intellectual matters. Of course, as Greg points out, this made AC a paradise for coeds whose only attribute was their beauty.
- In spite of the church's admonitions to "prove all things," once you were safely inside the compound of AC and the WCG, you were supposed to check your mind at the door.
- Genuine intellectual inquiry was stifled and even discouraged if there were the slightest chance it might disagree with revelations given to church leader Herbert W. Armstrong.
- The church's original teaching on divorce destroyed many marriages.
- The churche's teaching on interracial marriage could not be supported by the Bible and, again, destroyed some relationships.
Gift idea
More, much more, is in the book. It's too bad it did not see print until late in 2006. It would have made a great Feast gift.
As far as Greg's assertions that the church's and college's practices objectified women, was racist, destroyed marriages of many years because of an unbiblical divorce doctrine and stifled true research into new areas of biblical understanding, all I can say to Mr. Doudna is "Picky! Picky! Picky!"
[End]
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