Unsung Heroes – Houston pt.1

Here is another exciting story in the Unsung Heroes series. In Western society it’s difficult to do life together, but it does happen, it can be sustained and it can be life-changing. I pray these stories encourage you to keep meeting, keep searching and start gathering. This story is told by Terry Stanley. You can check out Part 2 here.

My name is Terry Stanley (George is my middle name). I grew up in Houston. I received my undergrad degree at Baylor University, I am a tennis coach and a doctor of clinical psychology with a private practice in Christian therapy. I help Christians in their marriages and with a variety of individual and personal issues – all from a Biblical worldview. I have been happily married to Nanci for 35 years with four kids who are all grown. 

I encountered the truth of God for the first time while at a party in high school in 1987. A friend of mine told me, “Terry, if you keep living how you are living, you are going to burn in eternal fire for all eternity”. Although I had zero interest in the things of God at the time, this statement got my attention. I thought to myself, “If this is true, I would be a fool to ignore it.” So, I began a quest to see if God was real or not. I attended a few church meetings. In those meetings, I felt the Spirit of Jesus drawing me and calling me to believe and to surrender to Him. I believed on the Lord Jesus in December of 1987. 

I had no mentoring or discipleship at the time. I understood that I was not going to be thrown into the fires of hell now, but my heart was empty and I was miserable now that I was a Christian. I was miserable because I really did surrender to Jesus, but “what now?” At the time, I was in a hard rock band, I drank very heavily, I did drugs, I slept around, I was very much a wild man.  I had a big heart with deep needs that I was trying to fill with the world. But now I was trying to be a Jesus man. But Jesus people were nerds. They had ZERO fun. Christians were geeks and they went bowling for fun and they played volleyball. I used to torture Christians because they were so dull and nerdy. They were the direct opposite of me. 

I was crazy and wild and fun and Christians were all like scared little sheep. Christians really made me sick. But now, I was one of them. I just signed up for the Christian life of boring misery. And I did this, just so I wouldn’t burn in eternal fire. At 17 years old, I tried to endure this monotony, although I was empty and bored out of my mind. I would sit at home with my parents on Friday and Saturday nights and watch old cowboy movies with my dad while some of the greatest house parties with all my friends and the hottest chicks were just right down the street. UGGHHH, this is torture! This Christian thing is killing me! My friends were ringing my parents phone off the hook. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING MAN! HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND? GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW! EVERYONE WANTS TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE!”, my friends would say while the slow and boring cowboy movie was playing in the background on the TV. I guess my friends were right. Maybe I had lost my mind. 

On one particular night while a great rock and roll party of debauchery and drinking was raging just a few miles away, I told my friends (yet again) that I wasn’t going to the party. Instead, I drove to a school playground nearby. All by myself in the dark at the playground I sat. I looked at the moon. I would watch the clouds slowly pass across the moon in the dark. I decided I needed to have a talk with Almighty God. With as much sincerity as I could possibly muster, I looked God straight in the eyes and with all of my heart, I told Him: “I want to be your man. But I can’t do this. I am MISERABLE. I am craving all of the things I used to do. If you want me to live for you, you are going to have to take care of this problem. I just kept sitting there on the monkey bars in the park. I sat and I waited. I was resolved. I was absolutely not going to the party. God had to fix this. I was not going to get drunk anymore. I was going to follow Jesus now. But how? After I prayed in the dark at the park. I sat and I just kept looking around and then I sat there some more. It was a stalemate. “I am not going to the party God. But here I am trying to be your man, so now what? 

After a while of sitting lonely in the dark, something absolutely amazing happened. Now keep in mind, I was not raised in the church. I had no idea of what or who “the Spirit” was. I had no charismatic background. I had absolutely no understanding of scripture or theology at this time in my life. At the school park in the dark all alone, the Lord Jesus Christ fell on me. He fell on me with power, with love, and with the most amazing experience of joy that I didn’t even know was possible. This was not my emotions. I did not initiate this. I did not work something up. I did not fabricate this. I was being visited by someone. It was another person, but He was invisible. It was a Spirit. It was an experience of INTENSE, INTENSE, INTENSE, peace and spiritual elation. I began to cry, to shout, to dance and sing! It was wonderful! The best part about it was that I now knew that the Christian life was possible. Having God Himself touch me in this way was the most deeply satisfying thing that had ever happened to me at this point in my life. A smile was plastered on my face. I drove home so deeply at rest. It was the beginning of a new life, truly I had just set sail on a brand new journey into the depths of the spiritual. 

My experience with Jesus was very real that night in the park. It was raw and deeply authentic. After that happened to me, I would attend church meetings and the atmosphere at the church meetings was very different from what had happened to me in the park. Things at the church meetings seemed “canned”. Kinda shallow. Kinda fake in a way. The preachers almost seemed like used car salesmen, trying to sell us something. Then, they always wanted money. 

I had SO MANY QUESTIONS? Hundreds of questions. I had just completely given my life over to something and I had a very deep need to understand everything about it. I would ask all of my questions to other Christians and especially to pastors: What happened to me in the park? What does the word “saved” mean”? How does the blood from a man 2000 years ago help me now? Why do we do all the things we do in the church service? And on and on and on. People couldn’t answer my questions in a way that I understood or that satisfied me. Every answer the pastor would give me, would create 5 more questions from me. People were really annoyed by me. My hunger and excitement to learn was deeper than their current understanding or experience of Christ. 

About 9 months after my conversion and my experience in the park, I went to Baylor University as a freshman in college. I met a guy in the dormitory who had Jesus posters everywhere in his room! I thought to myself, “Surely this guy can answer my questions!” And he did. Doug Howey spent hours and hours with me answering my questions. He didn’t know all the answers, but we would find them together! We stayed up all hours of the night reading the Bible, praying, and answering my hundreds of questions. I thank Jesus for Doug Howey. One night Doug took us to a “Bible study” which was held off campus in somebody’s house. I had never seen anything like this Bible study before. People were praying with their eyes open. People were singing with their eyes closed. People were crying and praying for one another. People were confessing sins out loud to the whole group. It was intense. It was honest. It was real and it was authentic. They all really cared for one another and loved one another. I was particularly impressed with the fact that their lives were about Jesus. Not just at the Bible study, but all of the time. They weren’t attending the Bible study because they had to come out of some duty. But they wanted to be there to love each other and to get help from one another in order to learn how to grow deeper in Jesus in during the rest of their week. Come to find out, this wasn’t just a Bible study. This was a house church. 

I was there every week and for every meeting. And I got to ask more of my questions! The main guy of the house church was named Frank. Frank took an interest in me. He would invite me to lunch. He would invite me to pray. He would teach me, encourage me, confront me and rebuke me. Frank and I developed a mentoring relationship. He poured into me for about 4 years. But as equally important as Frank’s mentoring of me – I got to live church life! 

The group that met at Frank’s house was actually a part of a larger network of organic church people – about 25 families is my guess. We would meet in parks. We would meet at the lake. We would meet from house to house. We would rent halls. There were brothers’ meetings, sisters’ meetings. Bon-fire meetings in the country. These people were 100% serious about Jesus all of the time! I got invited to some meetings where only the older brothers were allowed to attend and they would talk about oversight things in the group and pray ( I didn’t dare say a word in those meetings). Brothers would call a special meeting for all 25 families to attend just to deliver a message that would take all day on a Saturday (we would take breaks after 2 hours, then he would go again). We would worship outside in the park on Thursday nights with a piano, guitars, a violin player, a flute, and girls dancing to the worship music barefoot with their hands lifted high to Jesus. The group would intentionally buy up houses in the same neighborhood so they could live next to each other. A brother and sister would walk the neighborhood during the week in the evening carrying a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread. They would see others in the group outside and from the street they would say, “would you like to have communion together?” We would work at each other’s houses on the weekends. There was someone having dinner at someone else’s house every single night of the week, every week. We would travel to other cities together to visit other groups. We would all go camping together. We would prophesy, teach, worship, lay hands on the sick, preach the good news throughout the city and break bread together. 

I lived in this group of people from 1989 to1993. In 1993, five families from the group, including mine, moved to a nearby town to “do a work” and start another group. That group also grew to become a large network of families sharing life together. I lived in Bryan / College Station from 1993-2008. After many years and because of a series of negative events with some of the key personalities, both groups slowly disintegrated and are no longer in existence.  (End of Part 1)

Feel free to contact Terry and learn more about him. Check out his links www.homechutchhelp.com, www.homechurchhouston.com, www.cypresschristiancounseling.com. georgecanchat@gmail.com.

Also click these links to read excerpts from his book The Way Church Was Meant to Be. First excerpt, second excerpt.

I would love to hear from those who have been doing organic church for an extended time. Contact me (Jonathan Rovetto) at 414.217.2189 or at jirovetto@yahoo.com. Don’t miss the next Unsung Heroes, subscribe below.