What has the WCG
to do with Princeton
Reunions 2002?

By John McKenna

When I returned for the 45th reunion of Princeton University’s Class of 1957, I certainly did not expect to speak of God with my classmates as often as I did.

I certainly did not expect to have one of my classmates pray with me and ask Jesus to come into his life. I certainly did not expect to find so many of my classmates actually interested in the way that Christ had delivered me from my life in the subcultures and enabled me to go to work for the Worldwide Church of God. To claim that my visit to Princeton University’s 2002 Reunions was full of surprises is to put it lightly, as they say.

On the final day of the reunion celebrations, I spoke at the Nassau Christian Center in the township of Princeton. It is in one of the oldest Presbyterian church buildings founded in the Princeton community, dating back to the beginning of our nation.

Nassau Hall once bore a portrait of King George II in its main hall. The portrait was replaced by one of General Washington. Princeton was deeply involved in the freedom our nation claimed from foolish taxation and for the worship of God according to the individual’s conscience.

The Assemblies of God have assumed the ownership of the building today. An organization going by the name of "Prayer for Princeton" was instrumental in obtaining my invitation to give my personal testimony there. To speak in that church in the name of Jesus Christ to a congregation that included such distinguished guests as James Baker III (class of 1952, U.S. secretary of state, 1989-1992) and his wife, Susan, was for me a great privilege indeed.

In order to tell my story that morning I needed to refer to two other classmates. I spoke about Robert Budington Griffiths, born to missionary parents in India in 1937.

He came to Princeton a few years younger than most of us in the class. He was a slight young man, purposeful, with a deep interest in science. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, earned his Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University and soon took up teaching quantum physics at Carnegie-Mellon University.

He has taught there his entire life with a singular devotion that has culminated in the publication of his book titled Consistent Quantum Theory.

The only conversation I can remember having with him was about what happens to water molecules when water is compressed. Bob never married and throughout his career he has maintained an open witness to Jesus Christ, and has given courses on the relationship between Christian theology and science.

Here is a man whose steady witness and admirable integrity in science and to God is easy for us to observe. I think of Bob as the truly "Beautiful Mind" from Princeton.

Another of my classmates was Bruce Douglas Bringgold. He was born in 1935 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Bruce was always adventurous. He became president of Princeton’s Whig-Clio Society, a debating organization, inviting the likes of Alger Hiss to come and speak on our campus.

He married Diane right after graduation, became a Navy pilot, then graduated from Stanford law school. He had three children with Diane and they loved to fly from Ventura, California, where Bruce was a partner in his own law firm, to a log cabin he had built in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

One weekend returning from the cabin Bruce hit bad weather and was killed along with his three children in a crash on Black Butte. Diane was badly burned and tried to crawl away from the wreckage to hide herself in some rocks nearby. She could hear rescue crews coming up the side of the mountain, but grieving for her family, she did not want to be discovered and hoped that she would die that night.

Her testimony is that Jesus Christ appeared to her and commanded her to live. She objected because of her loss and grief and the pain. Christ won the argument. She has written a book titled Life Instead.

In 1984, I saw her picture on the cover of Guideposts magazine and got in touch with her. I never could ask what it was like for her to sit there in her living room and see me alive and well, full of the joy of the Lord. As she said, I should have been one of her clients.

In 1968, she with Bruce and a few of my other roommates had somehow found me in San Francisco’s North Beach area near death on drugs and alcohol. They spent three days and nights trying to persuade me to turn myself in for rehabilitation. Diane was a probation officer for the state at that time. Now, in her living room, the one who ought to be dead was alive, and the one who ought to be alive was dead.

Then I gave a version of my testimony. The context was easy to set down at Old Nassau. I needed only to pronounce the names: Emperor Hirohito, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, the personal centers of World War II.

There was Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt and J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb. A New Age had begun. Time magazine dubbed the Class of 1957 "The Silent Generation." In the silence, a great chasm was created in our culture between the rational, scientific man and the humanism of the artist.

Law and Order could rave against a free imagination. The self-made man with principled force could deny the existential man his problems with becoming.

The Establishment was held up as opposed to the creative freedom of poets, artists and revolutionaries.

In the ’60s, the schizoid condition of our nation reached its peak in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District with "flower children" and other dropouts in rebellion against the traditional values of our nation. Our government’s war in Vietnam was deeply questioned.

My personal journey from Princeton to this world was made with literary heroes. Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin, Scott Fitzgerald’s Dick Diver, J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, and a host of poets and writers landed me among the alienated in our time.

But, at age 37, Jesus came to me, healed me, and gave me a new life to live.

I recounted how most of my friends simply thought I had taken too many drugs. Finally, I hitchhiked out of San Francisco to Laguna Beach, California, where my brothers lived. They also thought I had taken too many drugs. No one I knew liked to hear that Jesus Christ was alive and willing to help us.

I ended up in an outreach house in Laguna. I starting making the rounds of the bars in which I formerly drank with my brothers. I tried telling everyone I knew about Jesus.

I met a woman named Mickey there one night. We were married six months later, after she too, with her son, had received the good news gladly.

We lived and worked at the Laguna outreach house for two years. Then we moved to Los Angeles to attend Hal Lindsay’s Jesus Christ Light and Powerhouse Bible school.

Two years later I was ready for academic studies once more. I started studying at Fuller Theological Seminary in 1975, earned a master of divinity degree in 1979 and then a Ph.D. in historical theological in 1987.

I taught at Fuller and then Azusa Pacific University and some other schools as an adjunct professor until the Worldwide Church of God hired me in 1996 to chair Ambassador University’s Theology Department.

I told those at the Nassau Christian Center that the point I was trying to make was easy to see. Whether it was for the singular devotion and steady commitment of a man of science and God, such as Bob Griffiths, or for the deep and profound suffering of loss and grief, such as with Bruce and Diane, or for a rather ordinary failed sinner such as myself, the truth of God’s grace in the world may be understood.

We shall never be able to turn the logic of that grace into some "common sense," but in the light of Jesus Christ we may hear God’s Word with us and for us even in the midst of the darkness of this world.

I was struck by the way that after I had spoken with Mr. and Mrs. Baker, Pastor Richard Linderman and his staff at the Nassau Christian Center proved most interested in asking me about the miracle of God’s grace with the Worldwide Church of God.

I have sent them copies of Joseph Tkach’s Transformed by Truth and Michael Feazell’s Liberation of the Worldwide Church of God. I have already heard from them about their joy over the amazing story we have to tell. I believe it is because of this grace that we as a part of the church of Jesus Christ can hold out the good news of a surprising future for humanity in this world, for the noble and suffering and even failed humanity in our time. Yes, surprisingly, the Worldwide Church of God has much to do with Princeton University’s Reunions 2002.

Copyright © Worldwide Church of God, 2002