After I had spent my time in the Navy, and after I had been a neuropsychiatric technician in the Navy, I went home to Sacramento, California. Sacramento is a valley town. For a long time it was more of a town than a city. Even though it was the capital of the state, it just did not seem to rise to the level of a place like San Francisco or Los Angeles. However, it always kept growing, because the population of the state kept growing. Every six or seven years my family would move house again because my parents liked living on the outskirts of the metropolitan area.Before moving back to Sacramento, I had been living in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay area. More precisely, I lived in a house on Skyline Drive, across from the Redwood Regional Park. You could drive along Skyline and in places at night, when the moon was full and the fog had socked in the whole bay, the light of the moon reflected off the fog and created a silvery, billowing blanket with the spires of the Golden Gate Bridge sticking out at one end. It was stunning. There was nothing like that in Sacramento, and I returned from a larger-than-life place to what seemed like a smaller-than-life place. I also needed to find a job.One day I saw an ad in the paper in which someone was looking for a group facilitator, someone to run groups under his supervision. He had a master’s in psychology and he was doing group therapy, and he was interested in me because of my experience in the Navy. So, I went to the interview.We met in this house in a low-income part of the town. The man had invited someone else to join in the interview, and that man was a Methodist minister, an ordained man who was pastoring a local church and who already facilitated one of the groups this man was offering to the community. I had had what people used to call a “born-again” experience, and I had become a Christian; it was still really new to me, but I had been reading the New Testament. I believed it, and I gave myself whole-heartedly to it.To my amazement, though, the Methodist minister was an atheist, and he and the other man became fixed on what they described as my “self-confidence” in regards to what I believed about God and about Jesus, and also about who I was or had become because of my faith in Jesus. The two of them tried to argue with me and catch me in an inconsistency, to discredit me and demolish my confidence. I told them that I had felt called of God to go into full-time ministry and that I intended to go off to seminary just as soon as I could (which at that point still was several years away, because I had to finish my undergraduate education). The Methodist minister said, “You go. You go off to seminary, and you’ll find that there are more atheists there than believers. Many of my professors were atheists!”I have never forgotten that experience, and I wrote off the entire contemporary Methodist church because of it, lamenting that the efforts of John and Charles Wesley, and also of George Whitefield, who actually preached here in Bermuda at one time, had suffered at the hands of liberal, sceptical theologians who either diluted faith with intellectual games and abstractions or rejected a Biblical faith altogether.So, imagine my surprise when I found myself sitting in the congregation at Wesley Methodist Church here in Hamilton, listening to their pastor, Rev Calvin Stone, deliver well thought out messages that both made good logical sense, showing that he had put in some time in the study to prepare them, and relied on the authority of the Bible. This man “preached the Word”. I wish that some Baptist ministers I have known, me included, could have done as well. Not only did he preach a message that talked about a Biblical concept, but he also got after the congregation in terms of our response. Now some people would call that meddling, but I loved it.I have also realised that God answered a prayer of mine, which was more of a talking out loud in front of God than a formal prayer. At one point in my life, after I had resigned my pastorate and no longer was forced to make my living by being a “professional Christian”, I wondered what it would be like to visit a lot of different kinds of churches so as to gain an experience of each one and learn something first hand about the different ways in which church is done. As I reflect on my time so far here in Bermuda, I realise that God has given me this experience. My wife and I did not intend to be church-hoppers, just flitting from one place to the next and never settling in to become part of the congregation. In each place that we have been we have attempted to become friends with people in the congregation, let alone with the pastoral family, and to find our places there. We have attended the Evangelical Church, First Baptist Church, Better Covenant Christian Fellowship, The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, St Mary’s, St John’s, Touch Through Me Ministries, Christ Church Warwick, and now we are at Wesley. Whew! There was nothing particularly wrong with any of them nor with us; it has just been an answer to prayer, and I have learned a lot.That atheistic Methodist minister from so long ago had it all wrong. When he told me he was an atheist, I had asked him how he could be a minister, standing up in front of his people as if he believed in God, and speaking about the things of God when he evidently did not really know God at all. He told me that he wanted to help them with their psychological problems and that he felt he could do that better wearing the clerical collar, blending in as it were and speaking to them in their language. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, and I told him as much, even with my young and limited understanding. One of the things I like about Calvin Stone is that he seems genuine a fellow sheep in sheep’s clothing. Authenticity is a prized commodity wherever one finds it.