Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies . . . (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Johnny Quinn sat in his cubicle in the Wildlife4YouthRampage offices, but was not fully sure that was the right name. They kept changing the name on the brochures so it was hard to know from day to day what the ministry was called. Uncertainty was part of the appeal. That was just one problem with ministering to the youth of today—riding the wave of cool and contemporary youth ministry was like surfing the big ones, and with one false move, there you were with sand in your trunks.

Johnny was rubbing the back of his neck. He was one of seven assistants to the main youth minister, who was off doing stuff and never around anymore, and Johnny had been told many times that he had a promising future ahead of him in this “most important work.” He had short blond hair, and a diamond stud earring—big enough to give him street cred, so necessary in youth work these days, and yet the earring was small enough to not worry the small handful of people at Camel Creek who might possibly have a problem with it. And at one point in the church’s history there might have been a handful of people disturbed by this kind of thing in the church, but they had all died and gone to heaven quite a number of years before. And frankly, none of them cared about it now, apparently having better things to think about. But Johnny still agonized over such things—what size earring would the apostle Paul have worn if his mission had been to the skateboarding and pants-droopy youth of today? Not an easy question to answer.

Every month or so the stress of youth ministry—dealing with the kids and all their issues—would get to Johnny, and so he would head on over to Brandy’s apartment to have her give him a neck rub, followed by her specialty back rub. But somehow her giving him a back rub always turned into him giving her a front rub, and then they would fall again.

That was actually how their relationship started, which is to say, through those darn back rubs. It was her senior year in high school and she was in Johnny’s youth group, which was a combination Bible study and daisy chain back rub circle. At the end of that year they all had a good working knowledge of the gospel of Mark, and significantly improved blood flow in the delts. Brandy gave him a few back rubs back then that brought them perilously close to the edge, but honestly, there was no front rubbing until after she graduated and got her job at KING radio. That meant that when they finally followed the manner of all the earth, they were not violating the professional standards of youth ministry, but rather simply the seventh item on an ancient list which was from the Old Testament anyway.

But they would always confess their fall afterwards, and both of them remained entirely and blissfully unaware of what was causing it. And they would both try hard to improve, which of course involved reading Scripture together, holding hands and putting their heads closely together and praying about it. But somehow putting their heads together in this way didn’t really help all that much, particularly when Brandy had on the perfume he really liked, and when his mouth got anywhere near her ear, which it usually did. The more they prayed about it like this, the worse things seemed to get. Anyhow, their periodic lapses had become almost a routine, and both of them had kind of adjusted to it. And besides, there were lots of times in the month when they weren’t doing it. But the whole scenario did make Johnny have to adjust his talk for the kids on abstinence, euphemisms and indirect evasions now abounding everywhere, because he was not so hardened that he was capable of the hypocrisy on stilts that the senior ministry seemed to have mastered. Not that he knew anything about that, of course. Everything he urged upon the kids was still technically true, and the salient facts about his own testimony, as now phrased, were technically honest.

But this is where Johnny’s screen saver calendar came in. Each new day had a new Bible verse floating around on the monitor, and the day after the scandal at Camel Creek did the mushroom cloud thing, the verse that arrested his attention, that actually riveted his attention frankly, was the one about how the nation of Israel was defeated by the inhabitants of Ai, and all because of Achan, and how he brought his “sin into the camp.” And Johnny, despite his lunatic ignorance of what was and what was not a turn on to his girlfriend, was really a sincere fellow. As soon as he saw that verse, he knew that he was the Achan. Their senior pastor was an accused man, denying all charges vehemently, and twisting in the wind because of him. Johnny was the kind of young man who could have read or written Gullible’s Travels in one sitting, and he believed all those denials of Pastor Chad’s with a whole heart. But if the charge “were made against me,” Johnny wondered, “what would I do? What could I say?”

The two of them had fallen just last week. Their sin had to be the cause of this scandal falling upon his beloved church. The rumors about the policemen visiting had swept through the administrative staff at Camel Creek, and their presence at the mid-week service had not exactly gone unnoticed either. Everyone was rattled by the whole situation, and Johnny was a sincere staff member in the church with something on his conscience. I am the Achan here. I am the one with dog doo on the shoe of personal holiness. Behold the man. Icky homo. Something like that.

It takes special gifts to be a youth minister, and Johnny had them all. It takes remarkable gifts to be an outstanding youth minister, and Johnny had all those too. And to be honest, between us girls, the second set of gifts adds up to an ability to hide the stark and off-putting nature of the first set of gifts. Youth ministers are young men who resent having graduated from high school when they were finally going to start hitting their stride in about three months, at least in the imaginations of their own hearts. They had never quite made the grade back then, particularly with the nubile young seventeen-year-old girls who were always so plentiful in those classes dedicated to teaching seventeen-year-olds generally. The problem was that the boys were also seventeen, and there is no clearer mismatch in the universe than a seventeen-year-old girl and a seventeen-year-old boy, another divine sense of humor thing. The clear thing to do when you are just out of college, then, is return to high school and resume the fight to gain the admiration of seventeen-year-old girls, but this time with a five year handicap going. A twenty-two-year-old dope can sometimes appear—when the lighting is just right—as somewhat mature and not half bad, especially when the cute seventeen-year-old girls are being distracted and appalled by the current crop of seventeen-year-old boys.

And when the blind lead the blind, they both fall into a youth ministry. The theology of this gets somewhat complicated, but nothing else accounts for the steady stream of twenty-two-year-old cases of arrested development, baseball caps pointed in funny directions, into the burgeoning field of youth ministry. So that is the set of gifts that is requisite for young men in the field, and Johnny had all this going for him. But the second set of gifts was his ability to look as though this was not his motivation at all. To the kids in the group, and to their parents, on the rare occasions when parents actually met him, Johnny seemed to be devoted to youth ministry for the sake of the Great Commission. The only one who knew that he was sometimes a little diverted from bringing the gospel to the nations was Brandy, and she didn’t mind, so long as they confessed it afterwards.

But she was really sincere too, and when Johnny came to her, stricken in his conscience, she actually agreed with him that he really did need to talk to the policemen. He showed her the verse about Achan, was nearly stumbled by the perfume and her left ear again, but held up the shield of faith and quenched the fiery darts of the evil one.

He went over to the main office of the church, and Sharon Atwater gave him the names of the cops, along with their phone numbers. She was frantically curious about why he wanted them, but was keeping her head low and was still not-for-Chadding. So she said nothing, nothing at all. Zilch. As soon as the second hand swept by the appropriate number on the clock, she was out of there.

So late in the afternoon it was, and Johnny sat down by his phone in his office, closed the door three times, checked the latch twice, and tried to spit out the cotton balls that had mysteriously filled up his mouth. He fooled around for fifteen minutes this way, and finally got his toes over the edge of the high dive platform, took six deep breaths, four rapid and shallow ones, closed his eyes, and put the receiver to his ear. Beep beep boop . . . boop boop . . . ahhh . . . beep . . . akk . . . beep.

“MPD, Bradford,” came an authoritative voice. It was the voice of God’s minister of wrath, the avenging angel, coming to strike down all the first born. Johnny was first born, which was part of his problem, but pursuit of those issues would take us too far afield.
“Yes, hello,” said Johnny, his voice covering several octaves almost simultaneously. “I am on staff here at Camel Creek, and wondered if it would be possible to arrange an interview with you?”

The voice on the other end became even more professional, were that possible, and arranged a time for the following day when Johnny could meet with Bradford and Rourke. Johnny didn’t want to do it on the church grounds since Achan was executed outside the camp, and volunteered to come down to the police department. Bradford said that this would be fine.

It has to be admitted that Bradford was expecting far more from the interview than what they actually wound up getting. He thought that a staff member in the know had finally cracked, and was going to come down to the station and sing, as they used to say in the old movies, like a bird. What they actually got was a frightened young man who believed that he was the only one in the history of Camel Creek, or perhaps in the city, to have ever done anything like this.

Rourke was an old school Catholic so he didn’t really follow the Achan references. If it wasn’t in Latin, he thought, there was a certain impiety in paying attention. But Bradford had been reared in a different kind of old school thought, and as a youth had been regularly whacked about the head and shoulders with the story of Achan. And Saul and the Amalekites, and how Agag got hewn to pieces in the presence of the Lord. And how Uzza should have kept his hands in his pockets. And the point of these stories had been pressed home to him by the kind of preachers who rolled up their shirtsleeves, threw their necktie over the right shoulder, and hopped around when they preached. Many Americans have complained of too many hellfire and damnation sermons in their past, but Bradford was one of the 112 individuals in our generation who had actually heard one. He was thirteen at the time, and was a pretty good boy for five days afterwards. So Bradford was thoroughly conversant on the Achan thing.

At the same time he was a little disappointed. The guts having been spilled, and Achan having been explained to Rourke (twice), the end result was that Johnny honestly confessed to being the only one who had ever sinned in this way at Camel Creek. All others were saintly—some of them, including Pastor Chad, having two halos—and were far more focused than he was on the ever present task of evangelization. As far as gushing with salacious details about the activities of the senior pastor went, Johnny was a dry hole.

The two policemen just slumped and listened to the tale of woe. A diligent Catholic and a lapsed fundamentalist sat slack-jawed and stared as Johnny outlined his view of why these charges had been brought against Chad Lester. “And Brandy agrees with me,” he finally said, by way of confirmation. The two detectives were flummoxed, but both of them, unbeknownst to the other, had noticed an odd expression in one of Johnny’s statements, and saw something they needed to follow up later. Johnny had said, in a throwaway kind of way, that “Pastor Lester had once said in a Bible study with all the youth ministers that this sort of thing was ‘normal,’ whatever that meant.”

When the torturous saga was over, Rourke just looked at Bradford helplessly. I know I am the senior cop here, but you have to run with this one. You are no Mother Teresa, or the Protestant equivalent, as the whole department well knows, but you apparently have some idea of what the hell this young sap is saying. Rourke had expressive eyes. Bradford scratched his chin thoughtfully. Two things.

“Two things,” he said. “First, when it comes to the issues of spiritual warfare, our department is not really authorized to make any final determinations. I am sure you understand. But I will make note of your confession, and it will be in our file on this case.” Bradford made a mental note that his doodle in the upper right hand corner of the interview sheet with Sharon Atwater would constitute that note. “We are not saying anything one way or the other about your view that this behavior of yours is the cause of the accusation against your pastor. If it is, then presumably this confession should turn things around for you, or at least allay your conscience.” Johnny nodded eagerly. An allayed conscience. That was the ticket.

But then, on his second point, Bradford launched into some new territory for the MPD, and said a few things that caused Rourke to swear at him for a little bit in the hallway afterwards. Bradford could tell that this young man thought of them both as Authorities, in the high rarified Romans 13 sense. He could also tell that Johnny was not really a highly trained logician, and would simply go as he was directed, as long as the suggested direction did not conflict with the tangled bundle of platitudes, loosely tied with string, that made up his worldview.

“What you need to do,” Bradford said, “is ask this young Brandy to marry you. Then you can fool around as much as you want, and no more senior pastors will ever topple from their perch because of you. You like her, right?”

Johnny’s eyes were like a couple of trash can lids, only a different color. As much as he liked Brandy as a friend, and a friend who was a girl, and okay, a girl friend, and periodic co-sinner, the idea of marriage had never entered his head. He was not a long-range thinker, and next week’s activities and associated Bible lesson were about as far as it went. Marriage involved years, or so he had heard. And yet, here was this officer of the law, a man who now was in possession of all the facts, telling him to go in this direction.

He swallowed nervously. “Are you telling me I have to do this?”

Rourke looked at Bradford menacingly.

“No, I am not telling you to do this,” Bradford said. “But given what you have told us, what is the right thing to do?” Bradford had never felt this pastoral before, and he kind of liked it. Brandy owed him big time.

This did not make Rourke any happier, as the subsequent hallway discussion indicated, but it seemed to settle the matter for Johnny. “I will think and pray about it. I will have to look at what I am earning. There are so many things to think about . . .” He trailed off.

“Yes, but one of them will no longer be the question of whether happy times for Johnny mean sad times for one of your spiritual superiors the following morning.”

The logic of this, given Johnny’s premises, was unassailable, and deep within his heart, the tumbler clicked. He would do it. Okay. Got to check some things first, but he would still do it. He unrolled his baseball cap, stood up, stuck it on his head, and put out his hand. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Glad to be of service,” Bradford said. He meant it too.

Rourke was civil to Johnny, and opened the door for him. After it closed behind him, Rourke counted to fifteen to get Johnny a little farther down the hallway. At sixteen, his intent was to give his junior partner unshirted hell for leaving the path of detective work and becoming a lonely hearts guy.

He was clearing his throat, and deciding whether to stand on the chair or not, when Bradford held up his hand, looking for all the world like a minister about to deliver a benediction. “I know,” he said. “but there is no need to thank me. It is just a gift. My mother thought I was destined for the ministry actually.”

Rourke spun around and stomped out the door. Bradford followed him out. “Don’t you agree? We really need to do our part to reduce this epidemic of illicit banging in the evangelical world. Before this week I had no idea. Back in Arkansas, we were all good Christians until we got our drivers’ licenses. After that we were good pagans. It is this mixing of categories that I find so troublesome.”