17. Like Mike

How comes it, Michael, you are thus forgot?
——Othello, II.iii

Earlier I said that Q. reminded me of Michael Moore. Now another comparison occurs to me: Christian comedian Mike Warnke. I was once a big fan of Mike, and even used to call him "my favorite theologian" in my high school years. (This was before I'd read Frederick Buechner, Walter Wangerin, C. S. Lewis, or Henri Nouwen, let alone any more, um, serious theologians.)

If you want to unmask the closet antinomians in a roomful of evangelical Christians, just mention Mike Warnke's name. You see, in 1992 Cornerstone magazine conclusively debunked Mike's claims about his past as a drug-pushing, pimping Satanist high priest—and, to boot, exposed him as a quadruple-divorced charlatan bilking evangelicals to the tune of $800,000 a year. The teen-crisis hotline Mike used to raise funds for? Didn't exist. Mike never answered any of Cornerstone's specific charges, responding only with denial and vague evasion. Yet people will still leap to his defense because his "ministry" was so effective—and in fact he's still out there kicking around, although I gather he doesn't talk much about the Satanist stuff anymore.

Compared to, say, Robert Tilton or Paul Crouch, Mike was only a mid-level con artist. And compared to Mike, Q. is only a two-bit con artist. But when I get around to talking about the results of our Athens outreach (which I will, in the interest of fairness and honesty), a certain segment of the population will want me to "forgive and forget" Q.'s shortcomings because "God is using him" to "reach people." (There's even a primal corner in my own fundamentalist-raised brain that still reacts this way.) So here are a few preemptive points:

1. Forgiving bad behavior and allowing it to continue are two separate things. Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery (John 8), but he also told her, "Go thou, and sin no more."
2. Yes, God used Q. And Mike Warnke. God may have used Bob Tilton (I doubt it, but if it happened I'm sure it's written down someplace). Heck, God used me, all my bitterness notwithstanding. The point: Sometimes God, being God, finds a way to use us despite our imperfections. That hardly renders our imperfections irrelevant. If the Golden Gate Bridge had a cracked girder, God could still drive across it—but the rest of us might want it repaired.
3. God used Balaam's ass (Numbers 22). That doesn't entitle the people he uses to behave like barnyard animals.
4. I don't know of any evangelicals calling for a "forgive and forget" approach to the Roman Catholic clerical sex-abuse scandal. Do we have different standards for Them than we do for Us?

After the Cornerstone article was published, Mike set up a board of ministers to keep him "accountable." The accountability didn't include answering the charges, but it did seem to slow down Mike's divorce/remarriage rate. Q., too, claims to be accountable to a board—but unlike Mike, he won't identify the board's members. (Q.'s concert ministry purports to be a nonprofit. I've looked, but I can't find any evidence that it's registered as such. Registered nonprofits are required to publish their board members' names.)

Also like Mike, Q. persists in telling tall tales. Here's a quote from his Web site:

For the past three Olympics we have produced concerts at various venues in the host cities. Some sponsored by large corporations, some sponsored by the host city Olympic committee.

Perhaps Q.'s Salt Lake City miracle meets that description. (I don't know what he did at the Sydney Olympics. I heard it alleged that he had a booth there and gave away CDs, but didn't bring any bands—but I don't know if that's true.) However, if he produced any concert in Athens that was sponsored by a large corporation or the host city Olympic committee, I sure would have liked to be there.

"But wait," you say. "What about that showcase you auditioned for? Wasn't it at an official Olympic venue?"

Which brings me back to my narrative.

Brian returned to Athens Christian Center after our rehearsal ended. Lucky guy, he'd gone off by himself for a little sightseeing—something I'd been itching to do for days. Q. relented and let him back in the band, and there was no further talk of his needing adult supervision. I don't know whether my show of solidarity had anything to do with this. Holly walked Brian through our new arrangements, which he absorbed immediately.

We auditioned on an Olympic stage sponsored by the Athens Ministry of Culture and located smack in front of the Athens Theatre Museum (an interesting place, judging from the 10 minutes that Sarah and I grabbed to walk through it), a couple blocks from the Panepistimiou Metro station. Nearby there's a bust of Nikos Kazantzakis (author of The Last Temptation of Christ), a fact I kept pretty much to myself. And someone in the band mentioned that the Orthodox Metropolitan (bishop) of Athens lived next to the museum, although I don't know if it's true.

Most of our audience were other performers auditioning for the same showcase. We met the Russ Rosen Band, Raw Motion, and a troupe of Native American musicians from Vancouver. Our set that afternoon was the tightest we ever played. It certainly didn't hurt to have cool stuff like professional sound technicians and a good monitor mix, not to mention a successful rehearsal under our belts. That rehearsal wasn't exactly enjoyable, but the audition certainly was. As far as I'm concerned, we eclipsed "not so much a band" status the moment we hit the first chord. Loudmouth became, for the first time, an actual band. We clicked. We liked playing together. We felt that we had something to say—musically and lyrically—and deserved to be on that stage.

John Lee Hooker has been quoted as saying that he endured twenty-two and a half hours of misery and pain every day for the sake of the 90 minutes he got to spend on stage at night. Or words to that effect. Well, every member of Loudmouth knows what he meant. As I told someone later in the week, our gigs were the only time I felt like a human being. That audition gave us hope that the experience of performing would be worth all the crap we were going through.

But in so hoping, we underestimated Q., whose idea of a successful trip did not include band members feeling like human beings, or experiencing joy and a sense of unity through their music. More later about that.

In case you're wondering, we passed the audition and came back the next day for the showcase. Now whereas the venue sponsor was the Ministry of Culture, the showcase was sponsored by Flame 2004, a joint evangelism venture by several missionary organizations and dozens of Greek churches doing Olympic outreach. They had arranged to use the venue during "off" hours, when Ministry of Culture–sponsored bands weren't playing. Flame 2004 was spearheaded by AMG International, the Tennessee-based parent organization of Logos Music. (I’ve already mentioned More than Gold, another organization that specializes in evangelism at international sports events. Naturally they too were involved in Flame 2004.) AMG also built and operated the Cosmovision Center, a multipurpose facility on the outskirts of Athens, where Loudmouth was scheduled to play on August 29.

So if we had a sponsor, it was Flame 2004, which is neither a large corporation nor the host city Olympic committee. And our appearances at that stage were bones thrown to Q. by Michalis the day before they took place—not something Q. had booked in advance. To claim that Q. produced those concerts is to do him far too much credit.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Q. allegedly told Holly that the bands who played the showcase were expected not to be overly preachy or evangelistic. That's his only concession to the anti-proselytization law that I know of. So we said nothing between songs, although our lyrics contained plenty of Christian imagery and references to God, oblique or otherwise. Russ Rosen, on the other hand, preached up a storm and got away with it. Which is great. One doesn't expect to worry about one's free-speech rights in the cradle of democracy.

I'm not saying we wanted to preach—we were more focused on communicating through the music. Nor could anyone predict how the rules would be enforced at any given moment. The irony here is that the Q. was more of an enemy to free speech than the Greek government turned out to be. We'd all seen what he did when Brian, Ben, and Pandora spoke their minds.