Review: On Fire for God

April 3, 2026April 3, 2026 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

On Fire for God

On Fire for God, Josiah Hesse. Pantheon (ISBN: 9780553387292) 2026.

Summary: A memoir of growing up in a troubled family amidst a toxic mix of conservative Christianity, and escaping it.

Josiah Hesse is an accomplished freelance journalist with several books to his credit as well as regular contributions to The Guardian, Esquire, Newsweek, and other publications. He is also part of the growing body of “exvangelicals.” This book combines memoir with a sociological study of the impact of both religion and economic forces on a working class town in Iowa.

Josiah was born in 1982 in Mason City, Iowa, the town that served as inspiration for The Music Man. His father had converted through a Jesus Movement era ministry that combined lots of bible study and a Late Great Planet Earth expectation of Christ’s imminent return. Henry wanted to be ready, but also to enjoy the pleasures of marriage before that. He met Janet, a quiet and studious woman at a Bible study in her home. They married young. When Josiah came along, the marriage was already in trouble. Henry was abusing alcohol and drugs. Janet was probably suffering clinical depression. But ministers encouraged them to “claim victory in Jesus” by making generous donations and serving actively in the church. They hid the troubles behind fake smiles. But Henry’s business was struggling. The home was a mess. Meanwhile, ministry leaders lived in lavish homes.

Josiah was in the middle of it all. That included imbibing toxic teaching, frequent altar calls that only called into question his salvation, and as he grew older, struggles with doubts that couldn’t be voiced and his sexuality. He was taught to be ashamed of his body and its urges. There was also a shadow life of substance abuse and the exploits most teens engage in at some time or another. By then, his parents are divorced. He struggled in school, finally dropping out.

Finally, he escapes to Denver, discovering a talent for writing that he turns into a career. Through counseling, running, and in his case, cannabis, he comes to a healthy acceptance of himself. While not an atheist, he left Christianity and the troubling ideas of the God he grew up with.

To write the memoir, he returns home to interview family and friends. He also studies the history and current economic conditions of a town in which big agriculture and Walmart replaced family farms and local stores. He learns that religious shysters long preceded his generation. And he understands both the religious and economic sources of adherence to the ideas of the Right.

It was hard to read this book. The Jesus Movement played an important role in my spiritual journey. While experiencing some of the emotionalism described in the book, occasionally manipulative, I was blessed with wise mentors of integrity, including within my family. Raised in a home with a love of learning, I discovered that I could love God as well. And I spent a career helping college students connect those two loves in their own lives.

So it was hard to read this book, though good. I knew how different and good the walk of faith could be and grieved that this was not Josiah’s experience. It was also hard because I know of too many other instances of predatory ministry figures who love sex, money, and power more than Jesus. I know of those who played on the latent fears of congregants, rather than inviting them into the “perfect love which casts out fear” that flows out in love to neighbor and stranger alike.

I grieve for a generation that lost its way. The generation of Josiah’s parents. My generation. So many of us really experienced how Jesus changes everything. We envisioned working this out in loving and serving communities, living out the just love of Jesus in society. But Josiah describes ministry leaders who did not feed the sheep but fleeced them. And sadly, what many of the sheep learned was to pursue, not the kingdom of God, but personal prosperity.

Given all this, and all that Hesse experienced, it is striking that he writes, “Though I cannot, at this time embrace Christianity as part of my identity, I can place humble curiosity about it at the center of my being. And hope that one day I can view spirituality beyond the lens of fear and shame, and perhaps connect with something divine.” He also can acknowledge the great treasures Christianity has given the world. It says something about him that he can forgive and realize his connection to his people and their land. As much as I grieve what he experienced (and many others), I’m encouraged with how far he’s come, and long that in his “humble curiosity” he will one day discover a better story.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Testimony

July 21, 2023July 21, 2023 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation, Jon Ward. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2023.

Summary: A national journalist who grew up in an influential evangelical movement describes his separation from this movement as he witnessed its embrace of control and power, both within churches, and in increasingly authoritarian politics, at the expense of both truth and character.

Jon Ward is a national correspondent with Yahoo News who has covered the White House as well as several presidential campaigns. He is also the child of parents who came to faith in the Jesus Movement revival of the early 1970’s. That caught my attention. The Jesus Movement was significant in the spiritual journeys of both my wife and myself. And the words “the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation” in the subtitle are deeply troubling to me. I’ve written about the spiritual ideals and vision for society of evangelicals of my generation, and am deeply chagrined with how so much of this has unraveled. We failed our children.

Ward was born in 1977, several years after the wave of the Jesus Movement swept through the country. In its wake, a number of independent churches formed, many charismatic, believing in the baptism and gifts of the Spirit and worship expressing ecstatic emotion. He grew up in one such church in the Maryland suburbs of DC. His church, initially called the Gathering of Believers was pastored by C. J. Mahaney and Larry Tomczak. Ward’s father was also a pastor for a time until he was asked to step down, for reasons later found to be suspect.

He describes the Christian culture of the time, the music, personalities like Keith Green, who tragically died young, going to early pro-life rallies, the first connections of pro-life and Republican politics, a mission trip to South America, doing skits and getting people to pray. He describes the growing sense of being in a culture war, books like This Present Darkness that framed things as spiritual warfare. He describes the distrust of the intellect, learning how to feel and what to believe, but not having any understanding of why or any sense of engaging with the culture. It was an enclosed, insular life in church and Christian schools and Christian music. The church became Covenant Life Church. Larry Tomczak was forced out and moved the Cleveland. He describes people being slain in the Spirit and his own experience of being prayed for, feeling nothing, except C.J. Mahaney gently pushing him backward. He went along and fell–and began to wonder. Yet he eagerly wanted to please God and his leaders and around 1998 went on a trip with Mahaney to one of Louie Giglio’s Passion Conferences, being groomed for leadership, along with Josh Harris.

Then Mahaney took a right turn into the New Calvinism. This was also the time of the purity movement and “accountability” groups. By this time, Ward was a student at the University of Maryland and felt he was suffocating. It was time to get out. Teaching for a couple years, he pursued writing, getting a job with the Washington Times. He was a part of Chuck Colson’s Centurions course, and for the first time, was challenged to a faith with intellectual heft. While he left Covenant Life, on its way to becoming Sovereign Grace Ministries, he followed developments in the church of his parents–two streams. One was Mahaney, a thinker, gifted speaker, and increasingly exerting control over the churches within the movement. The other was Lou Engle, a culture warrior, seeing politics and spiritual warfare as conflict, violent if necessary. He describes both the scandals around Mahaney’s use of power, and later, Sovereign Grace’s cover up of sexual abuses, even while sharing the platform with Al Mohler at Together for the Gospel conferences.

By 2013, he is working for Yahoo News as a national correspondent. Because of his background, he covers Republican politics and the deepening alliance between evangelicals focused on abortion and sexuality issues, even as the party turned toward Donald Trump. Meanwhile, he is growing in his awareness of the grievances of Blacks, getting to know the work of Bryan Stephenson and others, and how the racial fault lines of the country were being exploited, giving encouragement to the White Supremacist movements and the tragedy at Charlottesville. He recounts watching people he cared about, even most of his family, become radicalized by this movement. ignoring flaws of character, outright lies, racist rhetoric and more, simply to advance pro-life and pro-American values. He painfully describes his pleas with his father, only grudgingly heard after January 6.

As the book ends, as disheartened as he is by political developments and the failings of the churches in which he grew up, exacerbated by the pandemic, he also describes a deepening Christian life, learning to pursue the way of the cross rather than the way of acclaim or power. He believes this is what the church needs to be about. He decries the attack on truth, and the complicity of those who should believe in truth. He argues, from his experience as a journalism, that we are in desperate need of nuance in a world the reduces things to soundbites. Many of the things we confront are complicated and good solutions are achieved by people who do the hard work of listening, who achieve workable compromises. He believes in the role of evangelicals who have followed neither the C.J. Mahaney’s down theologically precise, narrow roads nor the Lou Engles who frame things as a black and white battle. They are those who forgo dominance for repentance, seek reconciliation rather than race wars with Blacks, and seek to rebuild rather than tear down institutions.

This, for me was a powerful “testimony” in two ways. One was in how it traced the diversion through its weakest elements, of a genuine movement of God through the Jesus Movement. The anti-intellectualism, the framing of the church as a persecuted minority in a spiritual battle created the foundations for the political captivity of evangelicals in the Trump era. While many of us traveled different roads than Jon Ward, we recognize the landscape.

The other is in its call for the remnant who did not bow to these things to Christian faithfulness in this time–to repentance, to the way of the cross, to relational healing and racial justice and reconciliation, and to institutional and intellectual renewal. Only God knows if the tide can be turned–indeed he controls the tides of history. But we cannot sit around and feel sorry for ourselves–there is still work to be done!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Jesus Revolution

January 7, 2019January 6, 2019 / rtrube54 / 3 Comments

Jesus Revolution, Greg Laurie, Ellen Vaughn. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2018.

Summary: An account of the Jesus Movement centered around Calvary Chapel and Chuck Smith, who mentored Greg Laurie into ministry, and how such a revival might come once more.

Some might argue that the last major American Awakening took place in the late 1960’s to mid- 1970’s in what was known as the Jesus Movement. Young men and women were coming to faith out of the hippie, drug culture. It was happening all over the United States in locality after locality. There was no national campaign. I know. I was a part of it.

So was Greg Laurie, and in this book, he, along with Ellen Vaughn offers a personal narrative of the times, the Southern California movement that centered around Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, and Greg’s conversion to Christ, growth as a young believer under Smith’s mentoring, and the beginnings of his own ministry, resulting eventually in Harvest Christian Fellowship.

Laurie and Vaughn narrate the times: the transition from the staid 1950’s to the tumultuous 1960’s, the rise of the civil rights and anti-war movements, the proliferation of drug use, the rock festivals, and how the promise of Woodstock rapidly unraveled, leaving the children of the counter-culture desperate for something better.

Greg’s own story involved growing up in a single parent family with his mother and a series of her boyfriends. He didn’t know who his father was. Then he encountered Lonnie Frisbee, a charismatic minister who, at the time, was working with Chuck Smith, an older pastor who was open to this movement of God among young people and taught them the Bible, training converts to be disciples and witnesses.

Greg narrates coming to faith, and plunging into the life of Calvary Chapel, learning that drugs and discipleship could not go together. He began bearing witness to his faith, using art talents to create what became a popular pamphlet. Eventually he is invited to lead a Bible study over in Riverside that explodes, at which time Chuck Smith helps him plant a church that became Harvest Christian Fellowship.

The book goes on to interweave the subsequent life of Greg Laurie, and his wife Cathe, also converted through the ministry, and the subsequent narrative of the next forty years in the U.S. This includes some of the personal tragedies in his life including the death of his own son, and the falling out he had with Chuck Smith when he planted a church in Orange County, where he grew up and where Calvary Chapel was based. Fortunately, the two of them reconciled before Smith’s death.

One of the most significant parts of the book for me were a couple pages where he cited Billy Graham’s The Jesus Generation (a book I read during that period, so grateful for the affirmation of the evangelist for the work of God we were seeing all around us). Graham noted strengths of this movement that were evident in Greg’s narrative and that I saw as well:

“It was spontaneous, without a human figurehead…”
It was “Bible based.” All of us had dog-eared, marked up Bibles.
“The movement was about an experience with Jesus, not head knowledge.”
There was an emphasis on the Holy Spirit.
“[L]ives were dramatically transformed” as people were liberated from “addictions, and ingrained patterns of sin.”
“The movement’s emphasis was on Christian discipleship.” We talked about being “sold out” to Christ in every area of life.
“It was interracial and multicultural.”
“The movement showed a great zeal for evangelism.” I’ve often joked that if it moved, we tried to witness to it!
“The movement emphasized the second coming of Jesus.” Given the turbulence of the times with assassinations, Middle East conflict, and so much discord in the country, we thought Christ could come in our lifetime (pp. 165-166).

An odd characteristic of the book is that references to Laurie are in the third person, perhaps due to it being a co-authored work. Nevertheless, the book offers an eyewitness account of the times and the Jesus Movement that is helpful for anyone who wants to know more about this revival. While the cultural history offers a broad summary, and the account is centered in Southern California, I found that it rang true to my own experience, and that of others I’ve talked to from other cities.

It has been debated whether the Jesus Movement was a revival. The authors argue that it was, as a movement orchestrated by God and not human agency, in which Jesus was powerfully transforming lives through the Holy Spirit. Their purpose is not nostalgia, but rather to challenge the church that it can happen again. They ask whether, like the youth, and some of the churches of the 1960’s, we are desperate enough in our day:

“God grants revival. He grants it to those who are humble enough to know they need it, to those who have a certain desperate hunger for Him. Only out of self-despair–a helpless understanding of the reality of sin and one’s absolute inability to cure it–does anyone ever turn wholeheartedly to God. That desperation is sometimes hard to come by in America, because it is the opposite of self-sufficiency. In the US, many of us live under the illusion that our needs are already met, that maybe God is an add-on to our already comfortable existence” (pp. 232-233).

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown — Remembering “Johnny Kay”

December 17, 2014August 26, 2025 / rtrube54 / 9 Comments

Richard “Johnny Kay” Kutan.

“Johnny Kay” was the on air name of Richard Kutan, a long time resident of Youngstown, Ohio. I learned last night that he passed away on Friday December 5, 2014 in Marysville, Ohio, living near family. This is a loss that touches me personally. He was a mentor to me during my high school years and one who played a profound influence in shaping my faith.

I first heard of “Johnny Kay” in my middle school years. I would listen to him in the mornings on WHOT, our local rock music station while I washed up for school. In between songs by the Beatles or the Monkees, he would read the lunch menus for different schools in the area. At some point around then, he began attending our church. His sister, Louise Schenk had long been a member and was a woman of faith. I still have, and treasure, a copy of My Utmost for His Highest inscribed by her.

In the summer of 1970, he began hosting Bible studies at his home for teenagers searching for faith. I started going along with several friends. A few months before, I had made a commitment to follow Christ at a retreat but I was still pretty clueless as to what that meant. Those weekly discussions taught me what it meant to trust Christ in daily life and also the radical kind of love that was to be the mark of Christ’s followers.

Out of these weekly gatherings, the idea was hatched to hold an outdoor rally on the lawn of our church. Phil Keaggy, a musician with Glass Harp and several other local musicians who had come to faith played. Others were invited to speak about their faith. I was one who stood up–kind of my “coming out” day as a Christian in front of some of my high school friends. Johnny Kay was among those who spoke about what it meant to trust in Christ and how this could fill the place in our lives we were trying to fill with music, drugs, or sex. Many responded that day and the Bible studies moved out of Johnny’s den into the church.

Before we knew it, we found ourselves swept up in an awakening that was going on around the country, known as the “Jesus Movement.” Many of us would pile into cars and vans and do rallies at a number of the local high schools. Because I didn’t have a car, Johnny Kay often picked me up in his green VW Beetle enroute to these rallies and what I remember was his willingness to talk, listen, or pray with me about all the things I was wrestling with as a teen and a beginning follower of Christ. I remember how he listened when I talked about the pain of a break-up. He also challenged me to take steps of faith, most often in terms of being willing to speak up about my faith in school settings as well as at rallies. I’m still doing that and I think I owe that largely to him.

Our lives only intersected closely for about two and a half years. But I will always be grateful that he “had time” and challenged me in my faith. And what he did for me, I know he did for countless others over many years. I learned that he received the Victory Star Medal for his service as a radio operator in the Pacific theater during World War 2. He was buried with military honors. In later years he moved over to another local radio station. He was beloved in the community. Even in his retirement years he was the Director of Lay Ministry at the church where I grew up overseeing a food pantry and helping with efforts to create a community center in the church.

At one time, I think the DJs at WHOT were known as “The Good Guys.” There could not be a more fitting description for Johnny Kay. A member of “The Greatest Generation” who served with distinction, a voice that brought a smile to our faces as we were waking up each morning, a caring follower of Christ who took time with a rather “nerdy” teenager, and one who lived for others as long as he could. Johnny Kay was all that and more. I thank God for Richard “Johnny Kay” Kutan. Rest in Peace my friend. I will always remember you.