Who Is James Willeford?

Hearing The Call At some point in your overconfident younger life while you were learning to swim, you might have had this common boyhood experience: you found yourself foundering in a panic in the deep end of the pool. The lifeguard warns you not to grab the lane divider (somehow those things are more important than your life), but he doesn’t lend a hand. As far as he is concerned, you got yourself into the pool and you can get yourself out. “Calm down and apply the fundamentals,” he says. Meanwhile, humiliated and terrified, as your energy ebbs and exhaustion delivers your body to the will of the water, you decide that you can't obey the rules and stay alive. So, lane divider it is. Immediately, the whistle screeches. "Out of the pool!" The lifeguard is now standing. You finally have his concern, but only because you’ve violated the rules. He didn’t budge when you needed him. He only reacted once you became a problem. This is how some of us feel about church. Scripture is the deep end of the pool. The fundamentals are the doctrines espoused by the church. The lifeguard is our ministry staff or advisors. Their disregard as we struggle demonstrates their reluctance to enter the water. Our shock is the realization that the fundamentals aren’t helping and the support we expected is not coming. Their alarm is that we are resisting authority. What happened? During our continued growth as Christian men who are developing a moral framework for our lives, if we are diligently studying the Bible, we inevitably come to deep textual and theological questions, answers to which can transcend the doctrines of our churches. The problem is, we often can’t ask these questions. When we do, we find scant support, even from trusted leaders. Their responses can include immediate discomfort, fear, and urgent pushback in the form of terse replies, warnings, silence, or even criticism. This causes us to feel rebuked for having our own minds. So, we keep our thoughts to ourselves. We just keep coming to church with no answers and no clear way ahead, suffering through endless rote repetitions of the same messages year after year. We founder and splash while our ministers and advisors are either incapable of understanding or refuse to venture into the water with us. Azimuth Christian Ministries has been created for Christian men of all traditions who want to grow spiritually and are willing to be frightened by what they will find, men who are brutally honest with themselves and others. Men who, like Herodotus at the bridge, remain on the battlefield so they can fight on their own terms. Certainly, such a man understands that there will be consequences, but he prefers the reward of struggle to the ignominy of safety. You are reading this because you are already aware, deep inside, that you simply must have answers, and if the establishment can’t or won’t give them, then you must take heroic risk and go get them yourself . You must become someone else to do this, because who you are now, an underdeveloped seeker with unanswered questions, is no longer satisfactory. If you’re this man, you have heard the call to adventure. Everyone else retreats into the walled city, behind the safety of their Sunday School beliefs. But you have been privileged to somehow glimpse the lights and shadows beyond the veil, and you know the beliefs you used to hold have changed. Perhaps some of them are no longer plausible. You no longer believe them. You have let them go. And so, you refuse to retreat. Instead, you remain on the battlefield, draw your sword, and advance. And the hordes descend. Good! Let them. May they devour us completely in our quest for truth. Why Are We Christians? Why are we Christians? Chances are, you’re among the millions of uninformed faithful who have no idea how to answer that question. Many of us are Christians because we were raised in a church; it’s who we are and have always been. Many others found Christianity after a rough series of life experiences, and its morality and order helped us clean up and change our path. Some of us are Christians because we are searching diligently, and Christianity happens to be the current location at which we have arrived. All of these are good reasons to be Christian. But let’s not delay our journey at these stops. We have miles to go. Joseph Campbell’s book, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” describes the journey of the hero. It tells us what we must do. We cannot stay in the ordinary world of the church and expect to develop heroically. We must leave and venture forth into the unknown, the extraordinary world. The would-be hero who takes this step loses many friends and family to accomplish his goals, but in doing so he gains better friends and family. If you want to follow a true path, if you want to be a hero, you must leave the walled city, draw your sword, and make your stand. Are you willing? You’ve heard this before. It’s the same thing Jesus told his disciples in Luke 9:24, 59-62 and 14:26, 27. In our modern language, these verses might have sounded something like this: “Follow me. If your friends and family can’t understand your decision to follow me, leave them. If you follow me today, you are beginning the process of losing your false self and finding your true self. Now, saddle up and let’s go.” This is a tough decision. Most people won’t do it. I encourage you not to hesitate. It takes courage to be a seeker. If you have courage and desire to know, come to Azimuth and we will seek. You will be in the much-abused minority but also in good company, since the weak will not dare walk this path. Regrettably, most men will never learn deep things. In my experience, many older Christian men don’t know any more, biblically, than the well-taught 14-year-old Christian boy. To know what to believe, we must venture into struggle and not simply swim in the comfortable pools of our religious traditions. Struggle is preferable to comfort because strength is preferable to weakness. It is uncomfortable to be challenged, but growth never comes with comfort. So, let us challenge everything and believe nothing until it is worked through. Azimuth. “On the Way”.