Story by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

The pastor was tired of hearing all the Woe is me! talk that had been making its way around his congregation.

“The people who have the hardest time dealing with a crisis are Christians,” he said, leading into a series of tales from the Bible and contemporary life involving people who had considered themselves to be religious to a fault, until they faced one calamity or another and then lost their faith.

Shane Lam has a different perspective on calamities and what they’re supposed to do to one’s faith.

***

“Did you go to Wilson?” Lam asked me about a minute after introducing himself as the pastor at Revolution Church. I’d had a feeling a moment earlier that we’d met somewhere before, too. His question jogged my memory. “You’re … Shane Lam?” I said, not really asking for verification, but more incredulous, than anything else.

The impromptu meeting had been set up by a friend, Kathie Kincheloe, who had mentioned to me a few weeks before that she had been attending Revolution for several months, and then told me about the pastor and his interesting background, which involved drug and alcohol use and abuse and other stories that she didn’t go into with details. I told her that I’d driven by the church a few times and noticed the sign, and that I’d wondered if the church was anything like the Revolution Church that had been set up by Jay Bakker, the prodigal son of the infamous Jim Bakker of “The PTL Club” fame, which had been bringing about a revolution in religion by reaching out to the disaffected, holding Sunday-morning services in bars and welcoming gays and lesbians and leather-clad bikers and the rest.

It turns out that there is no direct affiliation between Bakker’s church and Lam’s church on North Delphine in the Basic City section of Waynesboro, though there are a lot of similarities in what the two churches do, and in the life stories of their founders. The Shane Lam that I knew in high school - we’re both graduates of Wilson Memorial High School, Class of 1990 - was just as Kincheloe had advertised, if not more so. And as he told me, his life got even more out of control after high school. He enlisted in the National Guard and then the United States Navy because he thought the structure would help him clean himself up, “but all it did was make things worse,” he said. “I became a really bad alcoholic in the Navy. It was part of the culture. It was accepted.” Back home after his tour was up, “My life just completely, utterly went out of control, in every way that you can think of. I was 22 years old, and I just didn’t know if I was going to make it. And not just if I’d make it in society. I didn’t know if I’d make it another year living. I was surrounded by people who were involved in everything you could think of - from drugs to dealing to every bad element that you can think of in this town.”

He ended up in rehab, “even though I’d been in rehab before, and it had done me no good,” he said. But this time, through David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge Ministries, something clicked. “I went there on Oct. 1, by Oct. 10, I was sitting there in a service, and I gave my life back to God,” Lam said. “He just got a hold of me, and I could sense Him, sense His voice, hear Him. I went up to the front of the church, and I said, God, look, I will give my life to You. Whatever I’m worth, if I’m worth anything, I’m giving myself to you.”

In a flash, Lam saw his life laid out before him. “They laid hands on me, and they prayed, and instantaneously, I saw myself standing on a platform, in my mind’s eye, speaking to people, hundreds of people, thousands of people,” Lam said. “And I got mad. I got really, really angry. Because all these guys were talking about their experiences with God, with hands touching them, and I went back to my seat, and I was angry. I said to God when I sat down, I can’t stay clean, I can’t manage my life. It’s a mess. Everything I try fails. And I try to give my life to you, and you show me this vision of me leading people? I can’t even lead myself!”

Lam said he has realized since that he had needed to go through what he had gone through in school, in the military, to do what he was supposed to do with his life. “There are just some people that need to be. Not to prove who you are, but to be,” Lam said. “The sense that He gave me that day was, you’ve been radical in everything that you do. I’m the most aggressive person in everything I do. I’m the most aggressive basketball player you’ll see on the court. I was the most aggressive person in the military. In the war games, I was the dude that was infiltrating the camp. Everything about me was that way. So He just gave me a sense. Shane, you just can’t be that guy who just goes to church on Sunday. You can’t be the guy who just changes your life. It won’t work. I’m going to help you change your life so you can change everything around you.”

***

And so it was that Shane Lam ended up in college. “This is me we’re talking about here, Chris. You remember me in school,” Lam said to me, and I do remember him. He had been a year ahead of me at the start, and I remember taking a couple of math classes with him in which I had served as something of a tutor to him, if you can call letting him look over my homework answers and do whatever he did with him after seeing what I’d put down tutoring. He quit school the year that he was supposed to graduate, then worked his tail off to graduate the next year. It was this guy who not only earned his college degree, but was a campus leader who took an assignment pastoring a small Baptist church not long after getting his diploma, then started another small church on the side before making the big move back to the place where it had all almost ended a few years before.

“I didn’t want to come back here. I never thought I’d be back here,” Lam said. “The Bible says that a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown. But when I’d come back home to see my family, I’d drive by that building on Delphine and say to myself, We could do something special there.”

The building on Delphine that he was referring to was an old Foursquare Gospel church that had essentially become a flophouse. “The only room that was being used for ministry was the sanctuary,” Lam said. “The rest of the rooms were just being rented out by the owner, and you could literally see a cloud of darkness. I don’t want to be superspiritual. But you could sense that it was death. Police were in and out of there, raiding the place at any given time.”

This is the home today to Revolution Church. Lam and a group of volunteers began holding services there last year about a year before Lam had thought he would be ready to begin building a small congregation in Waynesboro. “It started with me, my wife, and another couple, four of us, and just grew from there,” Lam said. The group grew every Sunday morning, reaching out to “the lost sheep, people who love God, but hate church,” Lam said. “They love God, but they’ve been hurt by the politics and the organization and the stuff that just happens in churches,” Lam said. “I’ve been part of megachurches down South with five, ten, fifteen thousand people. So He started speaking to me. It’s become for the ministry a situation where people come and sit in the pews and give and sustain the ministry. He said to me, I don’t want you to do that, Shane. He said, I want you to build something that the ministry is for the people.”

I saw how that vision has become reality firsthand on the Sunday that I visited in May. Lam apologized to me when I walked over to shake his hand. “The bikers aren’t here today. They’re out visiting another church. So it won’t be quite as rowdy as usual,” he said, smiling. The pews were still almost full without them. I counted 48 people in attendance at the service, which was itself lively, spiritual. The first hour - of two - featured a series of praise songs that resembled more what I hear on my favorite alternative-rock station on XM than what I’ve ever heard before in a church. And people were actually jumping up and down to the beat to a couple of the songs. And I don’t know that describing it that way relates just how it felt to me. You’ve seen fans at Virginia Tech football games jumping rhythmically to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” before kickoff. That’s what it was like. Except at church.

“The appeal to this type of church is just the realness of it, the rawness of it. Rather than there just being all these facades and faces. People acting a certain way because it’s Sunday morning. You just come as you are. You don’t have to act like somebody you’re not. You can just be yourself,” church member Luis Pluguez said.

“Not everybody is going to be drawn to our church. People who were raised in church all their life is not going to typically feel comfortable with a service like ours, because it’s not the norm. But for people who haven’t been in a church and don’t know what it’s supposed to be like, it’s their first taste of it, and they like it. They can accept it,” Pluguez said.

“We definitely have to wake up early in the morning. Get some coffee, get the vocal chords stretched out so we can hit those notes,” Pluguez said.

“The vision is a church where the broken people are celebrated, uplifted and empowered. The purpose is all about the people. Broken people,” Lam said, before introducing me to Tinker Campbell, a 46-year-old Staunton man who first made his way through the doors at Revolution in January at the urging of two close friends. “I was sitting at home getting ready to go to Virginia Beach to shoot somebody over a bad debt,” Campbell told me matter of factly. “God done it. Through a friend, God through a friend, He told me He knew a better place for me. He told me He knew a better way for me and a better place for me. And that was Revolution Church.”

Campbell is now a leader in the church’s motorcycle ministry and its Alcoholics and Addicts for Christ program that meets on Monday nights. “Every Sunday, if I’m not doing something with the motorcycle ministry, I’m in the church,” Campbell said. “I do everything for God. And God says for me to reach out to other people. A lot of my friends who see me now and knew me before, they still have a problem understanding me. But the more they see me, the easier it gets. My mission is to win souls to Jesus. And Shane keeps me guided in the right direction, with God’s guidance.”

Lam knows what Campbell is going through when it comes to the friends issue. “I had a parishioner the other day come and tell me, I’ve heard all this stuff about you, Pastor, and I told this person who was telling me all these things about you, No, there’s no way that’s true about my pastor,” Lam said. “I looked that person right in the eye, and I said, I don’t know what that person said, but I’m just going to tell you, it’s probably safe to say that every bit of it is true. I don’t know what they said, but every bit of it is true. I have made so many mistakes, had so many failures. But I am not that man. The Bible says, You are a new creation. I’m not that man. I’m not my mistakes. A person who is divorced, they’re not a divorcee. We label people by their mistakes.”

“I am who I am because of my mistakes,” Lam said.

After a pause, Lam said, “I’ll admit it, I was skeptical about starting here. But God told me, Shane, the only way this is going to work is if you’re willing to scream your failures from the mountaintops as much as your successes.”

***

I would be misleading you if I reported that Revolution is a group of bikers over here and a group of addicts back there, and that’s it. People from a variety of backgrounds make up the congregation. I ran into a woman I know who heads up the preschool across the street from my office, a church preschool, incidentally. Kincheloe, for her part, is solidly middle-class.

“We do also reach people who are not in that place of being lost, but they want to be a part of a church that’s doing something,” Lam said. “So if you come in, if somebody comes in to visit, I’m in a suit and tie. I look like a businessman. And around me, up at the front, the most vocal people, they’re in leather. They roll in on their Harleys, and they’re in chaps and leather. You’ve got that group, you’ve got the group over here that’s dressed up, you’ve got another group that’s in blue jeans and T-shirts. That’s what Revolution is to us.”

Which prompted my last question. Why Revolution?

“We need to have a revolution in our personal lives,” Lam said. “As Americans, we’re destroying ourselves emotionally. This epidemic of depression - you know, our moms and dads didn’t deal with this. Sure, there were people who were depressed. But today, it seems like everybody’s depressed. I think it’s because we’re hopeless, we don’t have a purpose to live for. We’d hear our mothers and grandmothers when we were younger, and they had dreams. You take away people’s dreams, and they have nothing to live for, and they get depressed.

“We need a personal revolution. We also need a spiritual revolution and a social revolution. That’s the way I define it. And revolutions are done at the grassroots. People who have a cause. Every great movement in America started with a revolution. Martin Luther King Jr. started a revolution. He put his life at risk, and he put himself out there,” Lam said.

Lam exhorts his flock to put themselves out there. “We will have failed if all we do is come here every Sunday, and nobody on that side of town,” he said in his sermon, pointing west, toward the more affluent West End, “knows that we’re here.” Later, talking with me, he expounded upon what he was trying to impart there.

“We want to do something about the addiction to crystal meth,” Lam said. “I hear people talk about it, complain about it. But there’s not many people saying, Let’s do something about it. We have to ship our kids and young adults off to other places because we’re not equipped to handle it. It’s our community problem. It’s not somebody else’s. We’re going to have a full-blown residential program where they come in, and they spend a month or two in an intensive, Christ-based program. And we’re going to do something here to address our child-care needs. We have a crisis in child care in this community. And we have a crisis afterschool. The afterschool hours are the most dangerous hours in America for kids who don’t have a parent at home to guide them.

“We need to get involved. We can’t just keep to ourselves here and hope that everything is better one day. We have to make it happen,” Lam said.

“We need to get this city to understand that you can’t abandon people. For this ministry to be effective, it has to be able to effect change. And that’s the first thing I want us to do,” Lam said.

Filed under: 1-July 2008 Issue