by John Carney
Issue #197 Jan/Feb 2005

I t's simplistic, even a stereotype, to describe Mike Yaconelli as a man of contradictions. Maybe it's better to say that Mike looked different when seen from different perspectives.
      There was gregarious, practical-joke-playing Mike, who would say embarrassing things to his friends in crowded elevators. There was introspective, thoughtful Mike, who agonized over his own perceived spiritual shortcomings in print—and, by doing so, gave us the courage to think that maybe it was OK for our own spirituality to be messy.
      There was Mike the fearless satirist, who used The Wittenburg Door to point a prophetic finger at the self-serving and short-sighted.
      There was the kinder, gentler, contemplative Mike, who lost the satirist's righteous anger and decided to give away The Door.
      There was Mike who worked in Northern California .... and Mike who worked in Southern California.
      There was the Mike Yaconelli whom friends and family members lost forever in October 2003, following a tragic car accident, caused by an undiagnosed heart arrhythmia.
      And then there is the Michael Yaconelli who will live on for generations through his books—in particular, Dangerous Wonder and Messy Spirituality; through the company he founded called Youth Specialties; and especially through his influence and abundant writing on the world of youth ministry.
      "His passion for God obviously was infectious," recalled his wife, Karla, "but it wasn't your typical, evangelical, run-of-the-mill kind of faith."
      "It was never boring," said Ben Patterson about Yaconelli. "He was a lot of fun."
      Patterson, who edited the first two issues of the Youth Specialties-published Wittenburg Door, first met Mike in the mid-1960s, when both of them worked at the same Christian camp, Forest Home Christian Conference Center. They didn't know each other well at that time.
      C. McNair Wilson, on the other hand, was just a camper at Forest Home—but he made an immediate connection.
      "In 1965, I guess it would be, I had been going to Forest Home Christian Conference Center in Southern California for a number of years as a family camper and junior high camper, and one year the two people in charge were Wayne Rice and Mike Yaconelli.
      "Putting Mike Yaconelli and Wayne Rice in charge of a junior high camp was like turning a pharmacy over to drug addicts.
      "They noticed right away that I had brought with me a suitcase full of magic tricks, a suitcase with my ventriloquist dummy, et cetera, and various costumes. And so, when we did the skit night, Cabin One would do a skit, and then I'd do a magic bit, and then Cabin Two would do a skit, and I'd do a ventriloquism bit, and so on. So we hit it off."
      After the other campers were in bed, Wilson was still up in the office, bouncing improv comedy and other ideas off of Rice and Yaconelli.
      Later, Yaconelli and Rice were both working for Youth For Christ. They compiled a Campus Life manual with scores of icebreaker, skit and activity ideas. But by the time the manual was published, Yaconelli and Rice had moved on to other jobs, and were told that they couldn't even get a copy of the materials they had worked so hard to assemble.
      So they did it all over again, this time for themselves, and titled it Ideas. Around the same time, a wealthy businessman named Jack Young offered Mike an office, a salary and an expense account so that Yaconelli could devote himself to youth ministry full time. Young was noted to have said, "You don't know who I am, but I know who you are … and from what I can tell, there's not a church in the country that would hire you." Through Young's backing, Youth Specialties, was born.
      Meanwhile, Paul Sailhammer and Gary Wilburn had started a small, inexpensive youth ministry magazine that they called The Wittenberg Door, after the cathedral where Martin Luther had nailed his 95 Theses. Yaconelli and Rice decided that they wanted to launch their own magazine about current events from an irreverent standpoint.
      They tried to acquire The Wittenberg Door "only because it had a mailing list and a title that they liked," said Wilson. "They had wanted to do, on the heels of the Ideas book, some sort of current issues publication."
      "I think when they finally bought it from Gary and Paul, they bought it for 60 bucks, which was how much the guys owed the post office for their last mailing."
      Patterson became aware of The Wittenberg Door during the time it was run by Sailhammer and Wilburn. When Yaconelli and Rice acquired the magazine, Patterson got a call offering him the job of editor.
      "You know, I never asked them why they asked me," he said. "I didn't even like to write."
      Patterson edited the first two Youth Specialties-published issues (the first featuring eschatology popularist Hal Lindsey and the second with Jack Sparks of the Christian World Liberation Front).
      "Then," he said, "I realized I was not cut out to be an editor."
      According to Door legend, it was during Patterson's watch that the new logo for the magazine was commissioned. And it wasn't until the fourth issue that someone noticed that the unnamed designer had misspelled it as The Wittenburg Door. By then, no one was inclined to change the title back.
      "I'm really grateful that I got to do that," Patterson said, recalling not only his association with Yaconelli but also Rice, Rydberg and Tic Long.
      "I wouldn't be a writer today if it weren't for that time."
      He shared with Yaconelli and the others a passion to use the magazine to expose abuses of religion.
      "I think we all saw a lot of things wrong in the church," Patterson recalled.
      Patterson was succeeded as editor by Denny Rydberg, but continued to write the magazine's editorials until the mid-1980s. Yaconelli's well-known Back Door column became an established feature in 1979, and he took over as editor in 1981.
      Mike's wife Karla Yaconelli says he took the magazine's satirical mission seriously.
      "It represented a place for him to rant against all of the stuff that was going on in evangelicalism that was just ridiculous," said Karla. "You know, the televangelists, and the giant money schemes, and the 900-foot Jesus and the stuff that people were just buying hook, line and sinker .... In the early years, he was a lot more sarcastic, I guess, and confrontational ... so it gave him an outlet to air those huge quarrels with the church, and try to call the church to accountability."
      Early in the magazine's tenure with Youth Specialties, Patterson ended up re-introducing Wilson to his old camp counselors.
      "I was visiting Ben Patterson one time when he was in seminary," recalled Wilson. "Ben handed me, while I was visiting him at the seminary, this little 16-page, flimsy, newsprint, black and white, done with a typewriter, almost no illustrations other than a little bit of clip art, magazine. I had a background in graphic design. It was called The Wittenburg Door, which struck me as terribly Protestant, esoteric, whatever. He just said 'Here's something I'm involved with; I'd love for you to contribute.' I went home, and I opened it up, and the first thing I saw on the staff page was 'Wayne Rice' and 'Mike Yaconelli' and I thought, 'Ben, why didn't you tell me this?'
      "I immediately read it, cover to cover and word for word, and immediately sat down and did a cartoon that I sent off to them that I think was in the second or third issue [published by Youth Specialties]." The cartoon was of the "Perfect Youth Minister" paper doll.
      Shortly thereafter, Wilson was hired as the magazine's art director. It was his idea to begin numbering the issues, starting with #7. Wilson got the idea from Mad magazine, which was usually published well in advance of its cover dates and which used the numbers to help assure collectors that they had not missed an issue. Although The Door tended to come out after its cover date, not before, the principle was the same.
      "I had this arrogant belief that Door readers were the kind of people who saved their magazines," Wilson said.
      Wilson recalls Yaconelli as "great fun, as would be expected." But there was risk involved. For example, Wilson was riding with Yaconelli in an elevator full of strangers—all womens—one day.
      "You just can't grab women on the elevator," Yaconelli began to lecture Wilson. "Your parole officer is going to get on you about this."
      Wilson left his full-time job with Youth Specialties after a year but continued to sit in on the breakfasts at which new issues of The Door were planned and discussed.
      Patterson called Mike "erratic" and "whimsical" and said he was someone without pretense. "Mike kind of operated out of his gut most of his life. Whatever he was thinking, he said it. Mike was not larger than life to me. He was just a guy I knew."
      "What you saw was really who he was," agreed Karla Yaconelli. "He had a raw honesty about him that was really, really appealing to a lot of people. Certainly his sense of humor and his playfulness all sort of wove themselves into a person with this great charisma, ands—in later years, of courses—he gained quite a bit of wisdom as well."
      Patterson recalled Yaconelli's loyalty, saying he stood by his friends.
      But while Yaconelli was candid, said Patterson, he had a private side as well as a public side. "I don't think that I knew Mike's inner heart."
      Wilson sees no contradiction between Yaconelli's heart and his humor.
      "Funny people have a perspective," said Wilson. "They have a wider emotional and spiritual peripheral vision, if you will, about life. They see more of it. They absolutely see the goofy side, but they also see the dark. Because they see both, they tend to be able to maneuver .... The thing they get accused of, which I think is absolutely a virtue, is that they don't take life seriously. I think that they absolutely dos—but, come heck or high water, they're not going to be the serious one in the room."
      Mike's unconventional attitudes about church led him to pastor an unconventional churchs—Grace Community Church in Yreka, Calif., which began in the mid-1970s. Yaconelli's two jobss—Youth Specialties and Grace Community Churchs—were more than 750 miles apart, at opposite ends of California.
      Karla quotes her husband as saying that a satirist must love what he or she is satirizing. She was asked about regretss—about anything published in The Door which Mike later wished he had not included.
      "The first thing that comes to mind with that is the whole Wauhob thing," she said.
      Issue #80, August / September 1984, was the first of two theme issues about music. The normal Door logo was restyled to look like the Rolling Stone logo, and the issue contained a parody of a wordy, intellectual Rolling Stone-style record reviews—a review of a real record by a small-town Southern Gospel quartet, The Wauhobs. The review made it seem as if each amateurish sour note were intentional, each discordant harmony the stuff of genius. The piece was so popular that the magazine actually took orders for the Wauhobs' album in a later issue.
      "It was almost like the William Hung phenomenon on American Idol," recalled Karla. "These were just simple people, doing the best they could, and whatever the magazine did, it sort of put them in the limelight. That was something that we always regretted, because it turned into this horrible, nightmarish experience for them."
      In the late 1980s, the magazine underwent a graphic redesign. For years, fans and staffers alike had referred to the magazine casually as The Door, and the redesign made that nickname into the magazine's official name.
      "I think we were looking to update the logo," Karla recalled. "Everybody called it The Door. You hardly ever heard anybody calling it The Wittenburg Door. It made for a nice logo, and that's what everybody knew the magazine as. Of course, once we made the name change, then people again began referring to it as The Wittenburg Door."
      There were other changes afoot. Robert Darden became Senior Editor in 1988 and Yaconelli and Rice split as business partners in 1994, leaving Mike in sole control of YS.
      Mike never lost his sense of humor, but perhaps he lost his passion for the specific kind of sharp-edged satire for which The Door had become known. Over the years, as Mike's spirituality grew and changed, and as the church world grew and changed, Yaconelli began to change in his attitude toward the magazine.
      "Mike gradually sort of lost his passion for it.," said Karla. "He became mellower, and less sarcastic, more gentle. While he could still summon that stuff up and do a good column, it became something that really just wasn't him anymore."
      Youth Specialties conventions used to feature a "Wittenburg Door banquet" with satirical awards, not far in spirit from the "Boo-Boo Ribbon" which Wilson recalls Yaconelli and Rice giving out back in their camp counselor days. That event was replaced by an event offering positive recognition.
      There was talk of ending the banquet's namesake as well.
      "There had been talk of just killing it off for many years. It no longer really fit within the context of what Youth Specialties was doing. We'd stopped doing the Wittenburg Door banquets at our conventions, and some of the other people in the company had been hollering for the magazine to come to an end for a long time."
      Rather than end the magazine in which he had invested so much time, Yaconelli eventually sold it for $1 to the Trinity Foundation, a Dallas-based non-profit.
      After the first few months of the new ownership, Karla said her husband rarely read the magazine closely.
      "He would glance through it, but as for sitting down and reading it, no, not a lot," she said. "When you let go of something, you really have to let go of it, and not be tied to its outcome, because there's really nothing you can do about it."
      So Yaconelli, and Youth Specialties, went one way, while The Door went another.
      And then came October 29, 2003.
      Mike and Karla were on the way home from moving Mike's father into a new apartment from southern Oregon, where he'd lived (just an hour and a half north of them) for 15 years. According to the account in the Siskiyou Daily News, Mike was alone in his father's pickup when he veered off Interstate 5 and struck a light pole about 8 p.m. just north of Yreka.
      Mike died the next morning.
      The outpouring was deep and immediates—resulting in several thousand postings to the Youth Specialties site and tributes in various publications, from hip youth-oriented web sites and blogs to the pages of Christianity Today.
      "Reading the message page at YS was kind of like watching the flowers that amassed for Princess Diana," recalled Wilson. "It just was overwhelming.
      "Of course it would be that way."
      Was Karla surprised by the depth of the response?
      "I suppose I was, just in terms of the sheer size of it, just how widespread his impact was and how many postings and tributes there were."
      "I was dating a woman a few years ago," said Wilson, "who was really, profoundly impacted by one of Mike's books. This was before I knew her. Just on a whim, she emailed him—and she emailed him the kind of email that those of us who have any kind of public persona hate to get. It was very well thought out, but long. And he wrote her back an even lengthier response, and they went back and forth a few times, and she was just amazed by that.
      "There was that side of Mike, that who knows how many people knew? I have to guess, more than we can imagine."
      Patterson hesitates to guess what Yaconelli's legacy will be.
      "It's always a dangerous thing to speculate, but I think Mike's legacy will be his advocacy of youth ministry, and his advocacy of young people."
      Another form of legacy will be the Mike Yaconelli Memorial School, which will be dedicated in summer 2005 in Zambia. The school is a joint project of Youth Specialties and World Vision in one of the most AIDS-devastated countries in the world.
      "Mike did, in fact, put the church on notice," said Wilson, "to say this thing we do in the name of the creator, God, is a daily, hourly event, and we've got to be eyes wide open, bare-naked to the world, saying 'Here we are.'"
      "It was an indescribably wonderful journey," said Karla.