As you are aware by now, I enjoy dialoging about the philosophical big picture while writing about shifting paradigms and expanding perspectives. I also feel it is imperative to write about the lives of the very people who exemplify what I’m attempting to communicate. I do not want to simply stay in the clouds but share tangible life stories about those who have walked these principles out on their personal journeys. I am confident you will identify with their stories. Under the banner “Unsung Heroes/Untold Stories”, from time to time I will be sharing interesting behind the scenes looks at the lives of those who have or are having an impact on our societies. I hope you will find them fascinating.
A few weeks ago the movie “The Shack” premiered in theaters all across the US. It is a powerful drama about dealing with unexpected outcomes in the context of a spiritual journey and was based on the book by the same name. It has profoundly impacted audiences in a deeply visceral way. The movie, analogous to life, is an emotional roller-coaster of highs and lows all the while asking the very same question we each ask when confronted with bewildering situations… Why? Life seems particularly cruel and unfair in those moments. We find our sense of fairness being obliterated, our faith in formula’s crushed and our circumstances hellish instead of heavenly. Our minds in those moments act more like flashing computer screens screaming “This does not compute!” In some cases, this results in a motherboard meltdown.
While you may not have experienced the level of tragedy Mack the protagonist in the movie does, you will identify on a very personal level with his struggle. All of us have faced experiences in our lives in what we initially thought was an opportunity to a wonderful new adventure, later turned into a nightmare of pain and loss. We are all walking with the scars of unfulfilled expectations. We have all looked towards the heavens at one point and asked “God where are you?”
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
As it is with most cases, there is a “story behind the story”. For most of us who are familiar with this story, it is through the bestseller book “The Shack” credited to author William Paul Young. While Paul has received the accolades and been the public face of this project since it was first published in 2007, there is a great deal more to the story than the majority of people are aware.
My personal connection to it began in 1991 at Venice Beach, CA when I first met Brad Cummings. We had both been recruited by Ken Gullicksen to help plant a church in Santa Monica, CA. Ken was a product of the Calvary Chapel movement during the Jesus People days. He would later go on to start the very first Vineyard Church in 1974 in West LA. Ken was a gentle soul and influential in the lives of artists Bob Dylan, Keith Green and music producer T-Bone Burnett.
A few years earlier Brad had graduated from Pepperdine University with a degree in Film/TV Broadcasting. When I met him he was working on his Masters of Divinity at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, CA. A tall redhead with a jovial personality and brilliant mind, he was excellent ministry material. As we got to know each other more I realized he was a human vacuum for information. At one point he asked me if I would “disciple” him? The initial reaction on my face puzzled him as I was cringing. It was not due to the prospect of discipling him, but the use of the word itself. Even back then I was struggling with “Christianese” and our sub-culture vocabulary which is so disconnected from the world we live and operate in on a daily basis. I suggested maybe we start with friendship and meet weekly for some stimulating discussion. He laughed and said he was down with that.
OH THOSE FUNNY FEELINGS
Over the course of the next year we met for coffee and hung out together while having some really wonderful conversations. He was not only very intelligent, but had a mind which could process concepts both linearly and abstractly. We had a great deal of fun and for me personally it was a source of healing as I was processing a couple of unexpected outcomes of my own. I had poured my heart and soul into building two organizations back to back, and in both cases found myself unceremoniously released with nothing to show for it. It was confusing to say the least, especially in light of the fact that in both situations people prospered greatly due to my significant contributions. As you are well aware, those are painful moments to walk through!
The more I got to know Brad, the more I couldn’t help shake a “feeling”. It was one I knew he would not want to hear and would also have no grid to process. Nonetheless, I waded in one day and told him that I didn’t think his destiny lay on the path of church ministry. As expected, he gave me the tilted head look of confusion and the expected corresponding reasons for how I was wrong. He was right… from his paradigm of the moment. Of course to further complicate things, I was attempting to present this new paradigm while standing in our old one! We laugh about this today, but at the time we were both quite serious. For the next few months we had together, I shared what I could about how I thought his life might follow the trajectory of the biblical figure Joseph. I thought his impact was going to come from outside institutional religious structures.
WHEN THE PAST MEETS THE PRESENT
From there I would go on to spend the next decade establishing a new Record Company and he true to form, went on to plant a church. Both of us found a great deal of joy and success in what we were doing but sadly we lost touch with each other. Our lives took us down different paths until 2008 when I received an unexpected call from him. When I heard the first words out his mouth “Bob, this is Brad Cummings” my heart leapt. I was puzzled how he had got my number and yet thrilled he had. His next words had me laughing “I never listened to a word you told me back then and now I wish I had!”.
For the next couple hours, we caught up on life at lightning speed. The church plant he helped launch had been quite successful and for nine years he thought he was in his element. A fast growing church with a congregation of people with Hollywood credentials and financial resources seemed on the surface to be the dream job. It was only when he discovered those handling the church finances less than above board, that the cracks began to show. In pursuit of the truth it would hit him in the face hard as it was far more significant than anyone realized. It was a crushing blow. In having to confront the myriad of wrongdoing, as opposed to choosing a pathway of contrition and restoration, the powers that be turned their guns on him, which set in motion a cascading series of events that resulted in the church imploding. All of his many sacrifices and contributions were washed down the drain of despair. The dream became a nightmare.
The devastation was so extensive it left he and his family disillusioned, struggling to find any desire to ever re-enter the doors of a church. He would spend the next seven years digging ditches, installing sprinkler systems, doing whatever needed to be done in a landscaping and construction business he started. Survival became the priority as he and wife Kelly had three children to raise. Just prior to that season of life imploding, he would develop a key relationship with another former pastor Wayne Jacobsen. Wayne had gone through his own painful church experiences and having seen the writing on the wall, became an invaluable friend to Brad, helping him to navigate through the devastation while keeping his passion for God intact. When Brad was offered the possibility of a radio show, the two men began a dialogue. They soon recognized letting others become a part of their own ongoing conversation about pursuing a spiritual life outside the walls of the institutional church might be incredibly helpful. This was especially true for those becoming more and more disillusioned with organized religion. In 2005, instead of taking on the unknown world of broadcast bills and the economic machinery to fund it all, they opted for the simplicity of launching “The God Journey” in a podcast format which rather quickly developed a global following.
ANTICIPATION, REJECTION & OH MY!
In 2006, while speaking up in the Pacific Northwest, Wayne was befriended by a listener to the podcast, who had written a manuscript patterned after one of Wayne’s books (“So You Don’t Want To Go To Church Anymore.”) that had deeply impacted him. At his wife’s prompting, Wm. Paul Young had written a fictional story for his kids exploring some of the ideas he had about God. He had no intention of doing anything with it, but shared it with Wayne as a gift stemming from their growing friendship. The story was a bit ragged, and in need of a great deal of development, but there was an endearing drama buried underneath a string of sermon-ettes that had the courage to deal with pain and life’s most difficult questions in the face of suffering. When Wayne shared the manuscript with Brad, it had a fair amount of questionable theology and conclusions that neither of them agreed with, but there were strokes of creative genius that challenged our normal paradigms and stereotypes—just the kind of thing our pair of friends desired to explore. Wayne saw a lot of work; Brad saw a movie to be made. Because it was a large, heavy-set black woman who was one of the first people to help Paul understand the love of God, he rather controversially chose to depict God the Father as a black woman in the story. That is whom God chose to use to help love Paul as he sought to find his way back from a very painful set of failures and personal train-wreck of a life. For the next sixteen months the three of them wrote, rewrote, reworking the manuscript into different conclusions and removing the questionable theology, and together they crafted the book into what later would become a NY Times Best Seller.
Believing they had something special, with Wayne’s industry experience and contacts, they shopped the manuscript around to twenty-six different publishers who all rejected it!!! It wasn’t that they didn’t like it. Rather, no one knew what to do with it. It was too “Jesus”-y for the secular publishers; and it was too edgy for the Christian ones. Discouraged and a bit confused, yet convinced there was an audience hungry for something real and genuine that explored the hard questions of life, but free from agenda and the normal trite conventions, Brad and Wayne pooled their own resources and formed Windblown Media and self-published the book. They pre-sold over a 1,000 copies via their podcast and if that was all that happened that could very well have been the end of the story. It seems God had other plans. Unbeknownst to me, a longtime colleague of mine, Charles Lynn had introduced another friend Danny Seay to the book buyer at Barnes & Noble. Danny then did the same for Brad introducing him to the buyer and she loved the book and decided to purchase it for the chain. From there it seemed like the book took on a life of its own. There was no advertising or big media campaign. As each person purchased the book, the impact was so deeply personal they had to tell a friend. Word of mouth drove sales and as they say the rest is history. Twenty-Two million copies later and printed in over 40+ languages the book has become a global phenomenon.
While it’s a wonderfully exciting story to tell, as with most stories there are other aspects which are not so wonderful and out of the eye of the public. For any of us who know what it feels like to have others present our ideas as their own, you will identify with Brad and Wayne’s journey. Despite the fact, they spent 16 months writing and rewriting the book, shaping the story and crafting this into a bestseller, relatively few people know their names and others are receiving the credit for their work. I think we all know how painful these dynamics are. I have been greatly impressed with the dignity and class they have exhibited in handling this rather unfair situation they have been placed in. They are both men who live their lives in the context of eternity and in the end understand…God sees.
WALKING BACKWARD UP THE STAIRS
I use a phrase when consulting with other “Josephs” who have walked similar journeys and it’s “walking backwards up the stairs”. This was the pattern the biblical Joseph would understand one day but only in looking through the rear-view mirror of his life. In each step along the way he seemed to be confronted with a pattern of success and failure. He started out as favored son and ended up a slave. He then would find himself a successful wealth manager only to end up a prisoner. He would extend his hand in friendship only to be forgotten. All the while though, behind the scenes God was orchestrating events for a moment in time that in his wildest imagination he could never have anticipated. The lowly prisoner would be elevated to the second most powerful man in Egypt and save two nations in the process.
Brad’s own Joseph-like journey would continue as he recruited the help of a successful Hollywood Producer and found a suitable Studio willing to bring the story of “The Shack” as a movie to the Big Screen. Did he realize it would take nearly seven years? No. Did he think he would find himself an outcast in the land of giant egos which is Hollywood, betrayed, isolated and alone? No. With some assuming he was merely the “book publisher”, at times he was pushed out of his own movie project, sidelined so the “experts” could get the job done! Over and over again he was confronted with how to handle it. We walked the situation through together over the last couple years. I tried my best to encourage him to hang in there with dignity as I sensed God had a plan and all was not lost. Sure enough, after the experts presented their version of the movie to the studio, it became painfully clear they didn’t understand the story. Add to that Hollywood’s innate fear of anything appearing as too spiritual or Christian and you have a train wreck in the making. In true Joseph fashion, having patiently submitted to the dungeon, enduring what seems like the opposite of the dream, Brad was invited back in and was able to provide the needed wisdom and insight to re-cut the film, helping to solve what was not working and keep the story true to its foundation. After months of painstaking work, they finally ended up with a movie which is profound in not only its content but impact.
There is a story about a brother and sister who decided one day to take a hike to the top of a mountain in order to enjoy the panoramic view from the top. Along the way the tired little brother began to complain in frustration about all the rocks they had to climb over. At that point the wise older sister pointed out that it was a matter of perspective. You see she said “it’s the rocks which are getting us up this mountain!” Oh those damn rocks of life!
Loved it
Thanks for taking the time to write this story. It hits close to home. Well done and in a odd way it was healing.
Thanks for the encouragement Carl, it does my heart good to know it was healing.