John Talbott - Ahead Of Me In Everything
Exploring faith journeys and inspiring ministries that embody the good news of God. This is the Cumberland Road. I'm your host TJ Malinoski. Today, John Talbot joins us on Cumberland Road. John grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Eugene, Oregon.
T.J.:He attended the Methodist University in Oregon. There, he joined the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and he committed himself to the ministry in the dorms. Fortunately, John tells me university required him to take classes too, But it was in these classes that he was exposed to a set of brilliant and engaging bible teachers who nurtured his love for Jesus parables. And after college, John joined a group of intervarsity friends. They formed a community committed to inner city ministry. The name is Misfits, which is short for missionaries in San Francisco in training. And this group of nine individuals moved to San Francisco to pursue God's call. So did ministry in San Francisco. And today, John is married to Sharon, and they have two adult children, Justin and Claire. John attends Grace Fellowship Cumberland Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, California. He serves as an elder, and he is active in Presbytery Del Cristo.
T.J.:John, thank you for joining us today.
John:It's a pleasure, TJ. Thank you very much.
T.J.:I would like to start our conversation with a question, a question about journey and about experiences. I find a great place to start on our faith journey is by asking you, can you recall your earliest experience with God?
John:I can, I think? But I answer that question differently than I used to answer it. On on reflection, I realized that God was active before I was aware of it. And I think that's true for all of us Mhmm. But it was certainly true for me.
John:I generally talk about my conversion story and the way that many people experienced it. I was a high school kid who was really interested in girls, and there were cute girls at this Youth for Christ group, and so I I went there. And something happened. Something very positive. Positive.
John:And And that's that's a standard story that I've been working with for a long time. But I was reflecting a few years ago on my experience. Both my parents were elders in the, what's now the PCUSA, and we always were very faithful churchgoers. And, when I was in middle school particularly, we had a pastor who helped us ask hard questions. And his name was Boyd Lehen.
John:He's retired and living in North Carolina somewhere. If anybody, hears this and knows Boyd, give him a give him a thumbs up and tell him thank you. But he put us into situations where we something wasn't right, and, you know, we play little games or whatever. And I didn't know at the time that that was actually him trying to introduce us to the idea that God doesn't see things the way we see them. But he did that.
John:And one year, he took us to San Francisco on a missions trip or something, whatever middle schoolers do. And that was kind of my introduction to what wound up being the rest of my life. And I had no idea at the time, of course. I was just there because, you know, probably it was the thing to do. But, I'm very thankful for the fact that I got to come here and experience things.
John:We visited the seminary and we visited the ministries that were going on in the city. And we went to baseball games and amusement parks and other sorts of things that weren't available in Oregon. But I, you know, I realize now that God had had his hand on me in ways that I had no idea of at the time.
T.J.:How has your faith in Jesus Christ given you purpose?
John:Well, in the you know, you mentioned in the intro that I became involved with InterVarsity in when I was in college. And InterVarsity was a really helpful organization because it was committed to bible study. And the Youth for Christ group that I'd been involved with in high school was also somewhat committed to it, but there was something something different, that began. And God began to force me to do what pastor Lian had tried to get us to do years before, which was to respond to things that weren't the way they seemed. And an example of this, I was leading a bible study in in a I think we were looking at Philippians or something like that, and there was a woman in our in our group who was a fine woman, very involved in in her church.
John:And at that time, there was the I don't know if you remember this or not, but in the early eighties, there was a evangelical who was elected president of Guatemala and Rios Malt. And she wanted us to get involved in supporting him because we've got one of our people, you know, is there and he's gonna solve all these problems or whatever. And so we, you know, we're kinda giving up, oh, this is gonna be a good thing and all the rest. And one of the guys in the in the study said, you know, you may wanna take a closer look. And he was an older guy who had some some insight into the fact that Guatemala was was undergoing a genocide under this guy.
John:And that was a really difficult moment for me because Christian, genocide, oh, these things don't go together. But what I found, TJ, is that those sorts of situations are situations where God can come in and change your life, because it doesn't make sense. And we were talking earlier about the, today is the the day when the Catholics remember Mary standing in front of the cross watching her son die. Well, that's a situation where everything, everything is broken, but that's what we we have as Christians. You know, we have a situation where our our lord was killed.
John:Our lord was also resurrected, but she didn't know that at the time. But as as we let go of the way things are supposed to be and follow God and recognize what that God is going to do things that you may not understand, that's when we get a chance to see God at work. And so that's just one example, but I there are many more because that's how God seems to work in me.
T.J.:John, what you've said is a great segue into this next question I'd like to ask you. You were talking about the broken and the healing and even the resurrection. What is it about God that just keeps you coming back and identifying with Christianity?
John:It's not always easy to to do that because Jesus goes places that are very uncomfortable. I think I the best pastoral advice I ever received came after we'd first moved here to San Francisco. And the nine of us you know, we came in as college students, which meant we thought we knew everything. And we had figured out what church we were going to be part of because we we held very high view of the church. And so we wrote down our 27 things that a church had to be, and then we we went to the one that met the most of them.
T.J.:Did your group create a of a a thesis of requirements? This is this is what the church should be?
John:Exactly. Exactly. You know, as long as you can control it, know. But I went to a class. Someone invited me to a class at the local, there's a school called New College, which the Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, had sponsored.
John:It was an Earl Palmer kind of thing. And they had invited John Perkins, doctor John Perkins, to come and teach a class on, his three Rs. Doctor Perkins came he he was interested in what we were doing, and so he came over to our house and sat down with us to talk a little bit about things. And one of the things that he said, which just blew my mind at the time and probably should still, I said, So where are you young people going to church? And I said, Oh, we're going to this this And it was a sort of mega church wanna be really sexy place that was super attractive in all the right ways.
John:Yeah, we're going to the church. Why are you going there? Well, we've got these 27 reasons. It matches all this kind of stuff. And he says, do I see Jesus on that list?
John:Woah. And you know, he didn't mince words. Right? And and he says, you know, there's a little bit more conversation, but he said, what you need to understand, what you young people need to understand is you're trying really hard to bring your university experience to this neighborhood. And, you know, at the time, we were all graduates of Stanford at that point, and he says, Stanford University, as much as any place in the country, thinks that it knows the solution to problems.
John:But I wanna tell you something, he said. Jesus was here first, and Jesus is working in this neighborhood long before you came and long after you left. So I when I walked in, I saw there was a a church three doors down the down the street. Why don't you start going to that church? We said, well, John, we we don't speak the language.
John:And he said, are you listening to me? Your problem is that you are speaking. You need to learn to listen. Do you have the faith to believe that God is working in those people already and that maybe they have something to teach you? I want you to go somewhere where they've never heard of your university and then let them teach you.
John:And that truly was mind blowing, but we were obedient to it. A couple of us went and we joined that church and became part of it. The people taught us to speak Spanish. We did what we needed to to do to faithfully attend and made friends, and I would have, you know, I would have stayed there for a long time. That church wound up failing, as many first generation churches do, because they couldn't get a pastor and various other things.
John:But, just going and allowing ourselves to start with what is Jesus already doing is the bigger answer to the question that you asked, which is, well, what keeps me going or identifying with Jesus? Jesus is ahead of me in everything. And so the question of life is not so much to continue to identify with Jesus, it's just to open up to where can I get closer to him? Where can I where can I be around around something he's doing? Because whatever he's doing is really what's worth being part of in this world.
T.J.:Yeah. And and we can find that in individuals in our our lives, even acquaintances that that have a closeness with God that is not only attractive, but it it's something that we we want in our own lives. So I wanted to ask you. You've mentioned doctor Perkins and your mom and and your dad. Who has had the greatest impact on your journey of faith?
John:There are different people at different times like all of us. I kind of ran to the Cumberland Church, Grace Fellowship because, I knew the people there and they had made We'd had relationship before through the intervarsity circles and I knew that they could provide that for me. And it wound up that a whole bunch of people from that church, from the Spanish speaking church actually migrated to Grace Fellowship as that church failed. Really? Yeah.
John:A bunch of my friends came together at the same time. But we had a strong idea of wanting to be part of the church. You know, whatever the church was, we wanted to be that. And, you know, thirty years later, I can certainly say that we failed on so many different metrics, but that 's normal. We wanted to be whatever it was that God wanted the church to be.
John:We we tried to to do that. And so Bob Appleby was the pastor then, was a was a very strong bible teacher. You know, he just lived and breathed Ephesians and Philippians and, wanted those wanted those to be in the congregation's way of thinking. But he loved verses that I had already been taught earlier to really love. Blessed are the poor in spirit.
John:You know, we could we could relate, if you will, on the fact that we had this mutual love for these words of Jesus that caused us to, caused us to really want to go forward. I took, you know, one college thing that happened, just to illustrate how God works. I had taken a class on Jesus and his gospels, and the teacher was a very famous bible teacher, and he was wonderful with explicating the gospels. But I was an engineering student. I didn't, I didn't have time to learn Greek or any of that kind of stuff.
John:We had to write this paper, term paper, in which we were supposed to dig into the whole thing really well and do an exegesis. And so I picked the shortest parable because I didn't have time to really dig through all of that. Well, what's the shortest parable? The twin parables, the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl of great price. Do you know what happens to you when you spend a month really, really paying attention to those parables, you get a new you get a new look.
John:And those were the kinds of things that I found happening at Grace Fellowship. You know, people were people really wanted to be impacted by the words of Jesus, and there's a lot of words of Jesus to listen to. Mhmm. And so that's how I wound up being part of the of the Cumberland.
T.J.:There's a hunger, John, as as I've gotten to know you over the years, and you are in involved in multiple ministries there in San Francisco. Do you mind sharing for a few minutes what is happening in your life and and some of the ministries that you're a part of now?
John:Several years ago, and this would be 2012, 2013, a group of us, not all from Grace Fellowship, in fact, just a couple from Grace Fellowship, but we have a organization which is informal of church leaders from we call it the sixteenth Street group, because there's a bunch of churches in the area. There's a Mennonite church and an Episcopal church and the Catholic church and, a synagogue, interestingly enough, too. And so we get together on a on a regular basis to just be partners. And we started this thing called the Mission Night Walks. And the point of the Mission Night Walks, which was inspired by some things that were happening in other towns, was to go around to places where some violence had occurred, typically gang violence in those days.
John:We just wanted to pray at the places where something awful had happened, to learn the stories, to remember the people who had been victims of the violence. And so we got pretty good at at at studying the news and trying to figure this out, you know, and then getting to know people who knew the people and, you know, so over time, you get into the you get into the things and all. Well, one night, we're up there, where a young man who was a middle school student at the school across the street from me had been knifed and killed, by another young young person in a fight that started on Facebook.
T.J.:Wow. You
John:know, the two of them got into it on Facebook and the other kid had some had some issues. And so he waited where where this particular kid went to pick up his his little sister after school and, pounced on him with a knife and killed him. So we're there praying at that point, and a whole swarm of police cars came flying by, lights on, all that kind of stuff. Well, just up the hill a little bit, a, another man who was a significant community figure had just been shot by the police in, in a killing that was just horrible. He didn't even know that he was the one that they were coming for because someone had called in that there was a Latino young man who was carrying what appeared to be a weapon, and acting out wearing gang colors in this park.
John:Well, he was wearing a forty niners jacket, which is red, and that was the color of a gang. And so that's why they said that he was a gang. He was a security guard working his way through through school, and, he worked as a security guard and carried a taser, which was the weapon reported. And he had, he was he was in school at the time and he was studying to be a, counselor in the juvenile justice system, you know, so just a horrible situation. He didn't know he was the target, the you know?
John:Anyway, it's a long story. You can read about that one per se, but that was a point for us at which it happened, you know, right there where we were there, and we got to know the family and we got to know the parents, and we began to, get more involved in what does it mean to advocate in the in the neighborhood for the people who are feeling the pain of stuff that's happened. So, you know, in in the ensuing eight years, there have been many more shootings, and we've been we've become involved as a group in some political things. I sit on the the police chief here as a reform, committee. I think it's called the executive sponsored working group or something like that.
John:So I I sit on that. And so we're working directly with the police on how to improve, different processes and and that kind of thing. You wouldn't believe. Well, yes, you would. You would believe.
John:But the, you know, the police department has all kinds of just bureaucratic nightmare kinds of kinds of issues. And so, you know, from my point as a as a wealthy white person who does not feel the pain that some of the folks who are in overpoliced situations might feel, but my place is is to be there and bring, you know, my knowledge of organizational behavior and that kind of stuff into a situation where, I could, you know, I could sit with one of the assistant police chiefs and say, do you have any idea what is gonna happen to you if you release that public statement like that? Know? Put my marketing hat on here for a second. But on the other hand, to hold them accountable to the fact that reform needs to happen.
John:But to be able to support when the right thing happens, to be able to know people and all the rest, that's, you know, that's where ministry takes place. It's when you build these relationships. And of course, all this multiplies out to all kinds of different healing that needs to happen. And I'd go on because there's a zillion different pieces of the puzzle that need to happen in order for any kind of healing to go on. But I'll touch back on some of that down the line, I'm sure.
T.J.:Yeah. You were able to take your relationships that you've had in living in San Francisco for a good part of part of your life and use that for the building of the kingdom. And that is something I've since I've known you, I've I've admired John, and I wanted others to to know that about you as well. I wanna ask you, John, where do you see God working in the world today?
John:There there are situations where things happen when you're involved with some of these people that you just can't believe whatever happened. And sometimes they're not, oh, God came in and did some crazy miracle and, you know, whatever, wonderful Gloria theology kind of thing happens. Sometimes it's really Lutheran theology of the cross stuff, but it's very real. So I'll stay with some of the police examples give an just to give an idea. So we're standing one of the things that we did for a while was we would go regularly to the police station to, pray for the police, And we'd stand outside.
John:It wasn't like they were letting us in, but the public information officer at our at our local, precinct is one of the greatest women you'll ever meet. She actually is a a survivor of the Jonestown, cult situation back in 1979. So she's got a story, and she has been so supportive of Christians being involved in the different kinds of reform efforts, which she knows we need. So we've got an advocate. Right?
John:You know, we've got someone who knows Jesus who is calling us to to be involved. So anyway, we're out there in one night in front of the police station. I happened to be leading the group that night. There's maybe 12 of us, and we're mostly gray hairs. A lot of lot of folks with collars because particularly in the Episcopal church, deacons can wear collars too.
John:And so, you know, a lot of folks in those wearing that. So we're not a particularly threatening looking group. Right? And the there's this guy, and he's a he's a known neighborhood character. He's probably about five foot six maybe and very strongly built.
John:Wears a red 49ers jersey and drinks too much. And so he comes up to us and he starts yelling at us, and at this point, we're we're standing in a circle being quiet and praying, and we're ignoring him, which may or may not have been the right thing to do. I'm I'm sure we could have turned around and called lightning down from heaven or something like that, but it's not our way. And he grabs me on the shoulder and pulls me around. And again, I'm trying to maintain a spiritual posture as opposed to reacting violently even though it was highly tempting.
John:And boom. The police come flying out of the building and take him away. You know? So they were basically watching this on the camera and waiting for him to touch me, at which point or touch one of us, at which point they were gonna drag him away. So the captain comes up, and I know this captain, and he's a good guy.
John:He comes to me rather than addressing the whole group, which was weird, and says, you know, just call us if you need help because we'll protect you. Well, the man standing right next to me at that point was the man whose son was killed in the story that I told before, and he didn't recognize him. He didn't make that connection. And so he's telling me that he's gonna protect me when, in fact, what had happened to this other guy's son three years before, was there. And that's a faith moment.
John:That's a point at which you see God working because you wanna get mad. You know, you wanna you wanna jump in and say, do you understand how insensitive you're being? Do you under do you know I mean, dude, you've been the police captain here for three years and you don't know who this guy is. You know, those are all the things that run through your mind. But because I've seen God work in this man's life and work help him work through all of the pain and agony associated with what it meant to lose his son, I was able to stop and say, this is Jesus' thing.
John:You know? This is this is not a place where I'm gonna win this with an argument or conversation or whatever. I'm here to pray. I will pray. You know?
John:And so to invite the the police captain into that, which he declined to to join and never has, but to recognize that God's peace doesn't always come with some dramatic resolution or something, but it comes in the developing character of the people who follow him day to day. And so, there I am, and there this whole group of 12 is, and not all those people are Christians, by the way. Many of them are activists or whatever. And one of the things that we we absolutely hold onto as far as our activism role, if you will, is nothing comes out of our anger. It only comes out of what God tells us through our discernment and through our contemplation.
John:And so, yeah, there there's bad stuff out there. There's reasons to be angry, but that's not our purpose. Our purpose is to be prayerful and then take that prayer into the community where it goes. And so this was a moment at which you could you could literally feel the hand of God working, diffusing the anger, helping people to not yell and scream, but to say, this is why we need help. You know, this is this is why God's work will happen.
John:And I've had multiple situations like that, where you just look at the whole thing and and you say, only God.
T.J.:John, what are some of your ideas, your hopes, your dreams for the church?
John:I'll start with a worry. I have I have two answers to that question, and I'll start with a worry. During this pandemic, when we've been doing Zoom church, and I know other Cumberland churches have been doing it differently, parking lot worship and outdoor worship and and things like that. I was talking with our pastor about this yesterday. It's really hard for him to preach to us with zero feedback.
John:And to be fair, he started pastoring in February, So he was in the pulpit once before churches were shut down because we had we had asked him to not to preach for for a month. He started February 1, and we wanted him to just be part of the congregation before he started preaching for reasons I think Sheila probably recommended that one to us because she's got a really good feel for, the dynamics. Right? And maybe it was you. I don't know, but someone someone had recommended that.
John:But we're mediating all of our preaching now through screens. And to a large extent, particularly here in California and in the South, we've been doing that for a while with megachurches, where you don't actually see the, the preacher in person. You see him on this big screen. And, you know, I've been to Saddleback. I've been to Bethel.
John:Bill Johnson, Rick Warren, they're great preachers, and I love listening to them, but I don't know them. And they don't know me. And I'm really concerned because, and this is what Paul and I were talking about yesterday, he's the sort of pastor who preaches to what he knows about you, and it's really important to have that as part of how we do things. And so if this turns into everybody is just watching the three or four great preachers preach on their computer screens every week and we don't have local churches anymore, something like that, I may be really sad, because I don't think that's what I want from a church. I want a group of people with whom I can partner in the gospel and move forward.
John:I think, and we all know that our denomination and most of the traditional mainline denominations are not prospering in the sense of new 400 person churches are are appearing. And that model seems to be seems to be on the way out in various different ways. But surveys I read suggest that the megachurch model isn't actually, evangelizing, so to speak. So one of the hopes that I have is that we will, as a church, go back to our first love. There's a particular verse, greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for a friend.
John:If we don't have friends, then we don't have great love. And that verse is really important in terms of how we we think about church. And we struggle with that, man. We struggle with that at Grace Fellowship because we're just as bad as any church. Know, 80% of the effort seems to be going into keeping the organization going as opposed to, doing the things that build gospel friendships.
John:And so, you know, every all of us are in that situation in various different ways, and I I want us to step out of that, and I want us to, at some point, say, no. The kind of friendship that Paul talks about when he talks about his people who've walked with him all his lives, those are the those are the friendships that that Jesus is calling us to, and I want us to go there. You know, I I have another hope too, and this is a really dangerous one. It's really dangerous, particularly in this, postmodern age. I want us to come back to truth.
John:We've we've struggled a lot with what it means to be truth, and I fully recognize that when I say that, people think Spanish Inquisition. You know? Because that's what happens when people are more concerned about truth than about the people, you know, the people who are who make up God's God's family. And so I don't wanna go to the back of the Spanish Inquisition. And, you know, the other story that's that's the same is the people who crucified Jesus.
John:You know, that's what's the difference? Right? They thought they were standing up for truth.
T.J.:And
John:you can interpret it lots of different ways, but I I choose to say that they were corrupted by their relationship with with Rome, because they knew that if they went against Rome, they'd get wiped out. And so they've put their trust in something else. But Jesus' truth, the truth that will set us free, has a lot to do with those relationships, with the friendship that he wants us to build. One of the things that's true about San Francisco, which is not true of every, Cumberland church, I heard doctor it's doctor Hill's, presentation on the Cumberland Road, and one of the comments he made that he really liked about, one of his first churches was how diverse it was. And I laughed because he's he talked about political diversity.
John:Well, we've we've made that a dividing line in our country, and that's true in a lot of different places. We're not the only ones, but it's it's really true here at this point. You know, in my in my church, which is mostly children of of immigrants and mostly Chinese, but we have Filipinos we have Filipino immigrants. We have we have some folks who speak various different Latin American languages. We've been doing, when we were still meeting in person, we were doing real time translation into both Mandarin and and Spanish.
John:So we've got some we've got some language diversity in the congregation, and we have some economic diversity, because we've got some very wealthy people and we've got some very poor people. And those are way difficult shall I use the use way those are very difficult to cross. Those barriers are hard. And political barriers are kind of chosen. One of the civil rights leaders, and I don't know which one, and if anybody listening knows, let me know, please, made the comment once that our politics are driven by what we see when we get up in the morning.
John:It is natural that you in Tennessee are gonna see things differently than I'm gonna see them in California because our environment is different. You know, there's all kinds of things going on that's different. For my folks in my in my congregation, most of and by the way, my my family immigrated to this country, back to start a town called Baltimore, you know, so, you know, Talbot County's across the across the sound from Baltimore there. You know, we've been here a long time. And, so I've got, you know, and it's a military family and the whole bit, you know, we've got all the the stuff going on.
John:But for these folks who come from from different backgrounds, it's really natural that they're gonna see things differently. And a lot of those people are very committed Christians. So what is right and what is wrong? Well, it isn't politics piece of it. And so that's just one of those truths that we we sort of need to grab onto, is that we have a perspective, and I'm not gonna call our perspective legitimate or illegitimate or something, but the person across the aisle might have a very different perspective, and that's gonna drive the way they think about things.
John:And that's okay because actually you're both Christians. You know, you have something in common and you may even see it very differently, but you've got it in common. And so if we're gonna talk about the kind of friendship where I will lay down my life for you, well, I gotta give up that other stuff, right? No, because we love each other in a way that Jesus has called us to, not that we chose to do, but that Jesus has called us to. And yeah, we're gonna fight, we're gonna have all sorts of disagreements and that kind of stuff, but I want the church to get toward that truth, and that is the that's the one that Jesus gave to us.
John:That's that's what he did on the cross. That's what he did in the resurrection.
T.J.:That is a powerful, powerful challenge. I think you're gonna find plenty of us. You'll have to drag us kicking and screaming along the way in terms of the the truth. I I thanks for sharing, John, in terms of your hope and your dream for the church and its aim towards the truth. John, how can we continue to follow your faith journey?
John:One of the decisions that I have made is to be pretty silent about a lot of the things that I'm involved in and let other people speak. So I'm going to, I'm going to dodge that question a little bit, because I'm not, you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of different things I do like running websites and that kind of thing for different groups to speak. I'm involved in nitty gritty detail sort of stuff and TJ, believe me, it can be as boring as any job I've ever had. But it's what I can do.
T.J.:Alright. Thank you, John. We can find John in the nitty gritty of life in Grace Fellowship, Cumberland Presbyterian Church. And, also, we can find him doing prayer walks in the San Francisco community. Thank you, John, for sharing your time, and thank you for listening today.
T.J.:Tell a friend and travel with us on our next journey down Cumberland Road.
