What if Jesus Meant Every Word He Said — Dean Taylor

A Change of Allegiance: Choosing the Way of Peace

Okay, so the title of this conference is A Change of Allegiance, Choosing the Way of Peace. And the first part of that title came from my book entitled A Change of Allegiance. And this book tells the story of my wife, Tanya, and I had in our journey about embracing Jesus' teaching on war and peace.

And that title suggests something changed in my life, and that's right, it did. See, about 27 years ago, my wife, Tanya, and I were soldiers in the United States Army stationed in Germany. We were in the army band and we had other assignments there in the army.

And I'd say in most respects we were your average American Christian, but one night we asked a question that would forever change our life. We asked the question, what if Jesus really meant every word he said?

And since we asked that question, our life has never been the same. And if there's nothing else you get during this conference, if you get just that, to allow the teachings of Jesus, his words, his ways, his teachings, his very person become alive and real in you today, I promise you too will be changed forever.

Jesus' Teaching on Love, Peace, and Non-Resistance

The other part of the title of this conference is called Choosing the Way of Peace. And in particular, we're going to be talking about Jesus' words, his teaching concerning peace and non-resistance. You see, Jesus commanded us to love our enemies, not just our neighbors, but our enemies.

He told us to do good to them, to pray for them, to feed them, to help them. And he said in doing so, we would become children of his Father. And you know, in the first 300 years of the church, the early Christians simply believed the teachings of Jesus for what he said.

Because of that, thousands were martyred, but they were equipped with the knowledge that Jesus told them that in reality, they would never die. Furthermore, in their place, the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the church.

And with such boldness, Christianity spread rapidly and Rome, the entire Roman Empire was nearly converted. And that's amazing because Jesus' words actually worked. And I think they still work today. And that's why I'm here, not to talk about my ideas or the nomination or anything like that.

I want to talk about Jesus because I think he has some great ideas. And I think his great ideas are also good for us today if we will dare to put his ideas into practice. So dream with me today. You know, I'm finding that more and more people every day are starting to dream of a Christianity that would be based around the teachings of Jesus and what that would look like.

What a great idea. And that's what we want to lift up today. But here's the problem. This is the problem that I face and the problem that the American church or the world church today is facing also. For far too long, the teachings of Jesus have taken a backseat literally to empire building, to denominationalism and vain traditions of men.

And perhaps some of you here were, like I was, used to be, your Bible believing Christians, but you have theological reasons why you don't take the words of Jesus realistically and practically in your life today.

And I hope to change that. I hope to show you the reasons that support that what people call the just war theory or any type of idea of Christians killing their enemies is based upon human traditions.

Unbiblical philosophies are just a natural desire to save our skin, but it's not based upon the word of God. So I'm excited about this topic and I'm excited about Jesus and I hope that by the end of this seminar, the Holy Spirit will inspire you to put the words of Jesus into practice personally speaking.

The Testimony Behind the Theology

Now when I first went to start writing my book, A Change of Allegiance, and I think Tony said a little bit about this earlier, I started off writing primarily just a straight theology about the doctrine of non-resistance, but I started to realize that people relate to a subject more when they see the background behind it.

You know, the story behind the theology. Because the word of God is living and active and alive today and there's nothing better than a living testimony. And so as I began to put the book together, I started to put not only just the doctrines and the theology of non-resistance, but I began to put together the story of how Tony and I embraced this in our journey.

Well Brother Tony here from Wellspring Mennonite Church really liked that idea and that method I used in the book I guess, and as he began to talk to me, he asked that in this seminar that we first introduce the teachings of Jesus, but along that to give that sort of journey that of how we discovered that.

And in my book, we talk about not just myself, but how Tony and I both embraced the teachings of Jesus in this area. We were both soldiers in the army. And so he went so far as to dare to ask, would you mind if your wife would come up and share with us also.

And so y 'all pray for Tonya, this is new for her, and so it's going to be a blessing. And so I would like to thank also, I know you already did, but all the good people that made this possible. It's really an incredible event.

So I'll come over here with my wife and we're going to talk about, we're going to tell our story about what Jesus did in our life. So alright, I have just a few pictures here I hope you like, right at the very beginning.

Tonya and I, here's a picture of us, Tonya, this is actually in front of our unit in the army, oh, pushing 25 years ago, maybe a little more, sitting there. And I had a chance, I went on a little Anabaptist tour a few years ago, we got to go right back to the same steps and there we are.

And so, not too much worse for the wearer, it's been, I don't know. But it's been a blessing and we have been married 28 years and have six beautiful children, wonderful children, and now we live, here's a picture of them, of my family, and they're a blessing.

They've been an encouragement and they've stuck up with their dad through all these years also. And now we live with our six children in a revived Hutterite community called Altona Christian Community.

It's my house about right in there. And some incredible believers and I'm really blessed to be there. But so, here we are and Tonya, so yeah, you've been married to me all these years, but it did come with a bit of a warning, didn't it?

He's right. I have to confess, we both vividly remember this one particular phone call. Somehow, he felt compelled. We had already been engaged to be married, but he felt compelled to call me and inform me.

He said, Tonya, I just need you to know, if you marry me, I have this feeling we are not going to live a normal life. Well, I can definitely look back and say, boy, was that an understatement. Was he ever right?

But I can definitely say, though, we've had our share of trials like anybody else. It's also been a journey of joy. And I really am so blessed to have pursued seeking the kingdom of heaven with my husband.

It's been an honor.

You've been a blessing, too. Well, we started out the time in the Army with me in the Army and her coming over first as a civilian. We were in the Army band. We had been in high school band together, and that's where we met.

And then we were in the Army band there in Germany. But shortly after, shortly after we were there, the Army band actually had a little shortage for clarinet players. And so she happened to be there. She was good at playing the clarinet, so she filled in, and many times in playing the clarinet in our music assignments there in the band as a civilian.

And I started to travel a lot, and so we started to think, you know, this is a nice job. So we decided to make the Army career. So not long after that, Tanya ends up joining the Army and with a promise to come back and be in the unit with us and travel with me in the Army.

Now even before Tanya had left for basic training, you know, we had different kind of music assignments that you were part of. And one of the assignments that I was a part of was an Army rock band. And this had an effect on us that wasn't all that good.

It eventually led me down a bad path. I was a professing Christian, I was a professing Christian, but I don't know, it was sort of a superficial kind of, I don't know, a sinner's prayer kind of a Christianity.

And our concept of Christianity was very weak. I had an understanding and lived some aspects of the Christian life, but actually thinking of following the teachings of Jesus literally had never crossed my mind.

And what little I did have, slowly we began losing, I think, through the consequences of being in that rock band and the lifestyle that was very ungodly.

Yeah, like Dean said, we'd both been raised in Christian homes, but in our churches, actually really literally following the teachings of Jesus was just really not talked about. And Dean had always been very patriotic, though.

I remember he once won the Room of the Month award, and I really think it was because his over-the-top expression of patriotism. I remember he'd sent me a snapshot of his little desk there in his room, and it had the Statue of Liberty on one side, and he had the Army flag and the U .S. flag, and then a big picture of Ronald Reagan, and so that was good at ensuring that he won the Room of the Month.

But he was very patriotic, and to tell you, he truly, really embraced being a soldier at that time. That was what he was all about.

It was. It's true, I was raised very patriotic, and my earliest childhood memories, I think about it, include trips to Confederate battle sites, going to the Alamo, or watching war movies, and that kind of patriotism really was part of me.

And I loved it. When I joined the Army, I did it very, I did it with all I had. I felt what I was doing was pleasing God and pleasing my country. I felt like I was doing the right thing.

And while I might not have initially had quite the patriotic fervor that Dean had, his zeal was contagious, and eventually I was getting caught up and swept away by that spirit of patriotism, I definitely felt a sense of pride and belonging among our newfound U .S. military family in Germany.

You become pretty close, because all you have are your U .S. military family there. To tell you a little bit about my family, my father had come to the States in 1956 as a Hungarian refugee, and he was raised in the tumult of war.

And he always had told me, Tonya, you just need to make sure you don't ever take our freedoms for granted, you know. He just really wanted to instill in me just to appreciate what we had. Now my mom, to tell you about her, she has been and still is to this day a very spiritually minded lady.

I am very thankful for the influence of my mother almost all of my growing up years and to this day. My memories of getting up in the morning, I've always found my mom praying and reading her Bible with tears, and I'm very thankful for that testimony.

We also had, even though maybe it wasn't always the best, we had Christian programming on all the time in our home. And I look back on that as it actually did increase my faith. I heard, especially from Pat Robertson and the 700 Club, it was a very big influence on me as a child and heard lots of personal testimonies.

Just, to me, God was real and that he actually longs for a relationship with us and takes pleasure when we reach out to him. And so that proved to be a seedbed of faith in my life. But along with that faith, the idea that America was God's chosen country, you know, to help deliver the world from evil was kind of a preconceived idea I came into married life with at that time.

The same kind of thing, right, yeah. When Tanya left for basic and advanced training, we had been only married a year. We knew each other through high school very well, but we'd only been married a year.

And it meant a nine month separation that we had right at the beginning of our marriage. But what it meant after that was that we were going to be able to spend the career together and traveling and things like that together.

But one thing happened about when she, when she, when she joined the Army, the Army gave us a double housing allowance. And what that meant for us is that we got to move into a really nice little place.

And we ended up living in this town called Hulkspire. And it was a lovely village and tucked away in the trees in a little valley there. It was a lot closer to work and everything. But it had one interesting defect.

You couldn't get television of any kind in the little valley that we were living in.

Television-Free Bible Reading and Keith Green's Testimony

That's right. So without television, things were quiet for the first time in our married life. Although we hadn't been married all that long, but it was very quiet. And then something happened that I never thought I'd see.

My husband actually began to read. We both started reading our Bibles. He had never in his adult life been a reader. I remember he would see me reading and he would always say, you make that look so fun.

I wish I liked to read like you do, but I don't care for it. I don't want to. But I do believe God was doing something. He was preparing my husband for a future. And at some point, I remember going to the local military bookstore and there was a little Christian section off to the side.

And it was there, I vividly remember Dean finding the book written by Melody Green about the Christian singer songwriter, Keith Green. It was a very big book. It was about this thick and it had this funny watercolor of Keith with a great big Afro.

And I thought, poor Dean, he's never going to read this book. But I thought, if you want to get it, get it. You know, it'll make you feel good even if you're not going to read it. But he took it home and he read it and he was being changed by that book.

Then I read it and I was being changed. I'm just so thankful for Keith Green's testimony. He challenged us to a life of no compromise. And it was working in our hearts, slowly but surely, for a thirst for more.

I think what initially inspired me about that book, what was it in that book that inspired me, was originally was he was a musician. And so I think as a musician, I related to it. But more than that was it was awakening in me, just reading his life story, this thirst for righteousness and just following Jesus with everything he had.

And that comes out in his testimony and his life and his desire for missions and those sorts of things. And I wanted that. I wanted to have something. I knew we had a very empty Christianity. And I remember just wanting more and more of this sort of radical Christianity.

And I think that that challenge got a hold of me.

And at this time, to be honest, our spiritual lives were looking pretty, pretty shallow, pretty bad. And I had wanted to travel with Dean even more than I already did. So I also joined that army rock band with him.

And that had an inevitable bad influence on us. So in addition to playing our normal army jobs, we began playing in bars and clubs on the side. And it would eventually nearly destroy our spiritual lives in the end.

Conversion in a German Hotel Room

Yeah. At about a rock bottom around that time when we started playing in these different band assignments, and they were all very worldly environments. At about rock bottom, the army had sent us to this city in northern Germany.

The name of it was Mützengladbach up in northern Germany to play for this rock concert for this thing called Fasching. The Germans have this thing called Fasching. It's like an American Mardi Gras where you have all this drunkenness and carousing before the time of the Eastern Lenten season.

And our rock band was sent up there many times to play during this season. And it proved to be very, very ungodly environment. But nevertheless, I think we found ourselves just being influenced by the spirit of that place every time we went there.

So finally on one of those trips, in despair, we came together in our hotel room. Amen. Praise God. Like he said, we were in Mützengladbach, Germany, way up north. After reading Keith's life story, we just felt so challenged.

And we just knew we needed to do something. We either needed to give up on our fake profession of Christianity or devote our lives with everything we had to Jesus. We actually said that. That's right.

We literally did. We were like, Lord, we're just sick of ourselves. And so we got on our knees and we confessed our sins to the Lord. Right there in the hotel room. And we cried out to him to help us be committed to him.

And we committed our lives to follow the Lord and do whatever we saw in his word. And when we got up, it was like we had this banner over our heads. No compromise.

No compromise. Amen. It was a blessing. God visited us there in that hotel room and woke us up and gave us a chance of coming out of this mediocre, superficial way of Christianity. And I think the first thing that God convicted us in our lifestyle was the rock music itself.

And so early on, the first thing that we did was when we got back to our base unit, we asked to be released from this assignment. And that was pretty easy. I mean, there was always people waiting in line to try to be in this kind of an assignment.

So that was easy. Not long after that, we started digging into our Bible and getting more and more into the Bible. And it was then that something really big happened to us.

Taking the Sermon on the Mount Literally

That's right. I'll never forget the night. I don't think he will either. No, amen. Dean was reading from Jesus' words in Matthew 5 through 7, commonly referred to as the Sermon on the Mount. And he suddenly got to this passage that just seemed to really blow him away.

Amen. We were there. We would be doing this sometimes with the books that we were reading or the scriptures. And we'd be laying in bed at night there and say, okay, read this. Or she'd find something and say, okay, look at this.

And it came to this one. And I said, okay. And I remember leaning over on this lopsided pillow and I said, okay, just listen to this. And this is what I started to read. And I can remember reading this.

This is what I read. And so I said, and I was reading from Matthew 5, 38. Okay. So listen to this one. You have heard it has been said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But I tell you, do not resist an evil person.

If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.

Give to the one who asks you and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it has been said, love your neighbor, but hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be that the children of your father in heaven who causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

If you love those that who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even the pagans do that?

So I finished reading that and I looked over her and I said, so what are we supposed to do with that?

And I remember saying, well, it sounds pretty clear to me.

Yeah. I said, yeah, but we're in the army. And he had a really good point there. So and then it was something like almost supernatural took place. It was like a light bulb of grace came on and the words of Jesus, his way, his life just started to be real.

And it was like Jesus was saying over his words, simply this this phrase. I mean that. And so then we dared to ask each other the question, what if Jesus really meant all these words that he said? And after asking that question, after asking that question, our whole world and our whole lives was forever changed.

Jesus' Authority and the Judgment of His Words

That's exactly right. So then it dawned on us that if you actually were going to go through all of Jesus's commands in the Sermon on the Mount and devise a church that would actually go out of its way to purposely do everything opposite of what Jesus said.

So if he said, don't go to court and sue your brother, let's go to court and sue our brother. If he says, do not divorce and remarry, well, we'll not only do it, but we'll promote it. Do not store up riches for yourselves.

Love your enemies. You know, we're just going to go ahead and do the opposite of every single thing. Well, it kind of scared us because when we stopped to think about it, what you came up with, that was something that looked frighteningly similar to the modern American church.

And that really scared us.

That scared us. So we were going through the scriptures and we said, wait a minute. I mean, the church that we understand is the American church. I mean, every one of the words of Jesus were almost like going out of the way to do the opposite.

And that's a problem. Making matters worse, in all the challenges, we were trying to be honest with the words of Jesus for the first time. And we saw that Jesus himself was not just throwing out these words as some sort of, you know, meditation or some sort of niceties or something.

And even in his own word, he talks about it very strongly. For instance, right in the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus put it this way. He said, whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.

But whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. In the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, he put it this way. He said, when people were seeing Jesus in the testimony, the testimony of his teachings was, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.

And I think that's the kind of way we use, we go back to using that way with Jesus. We talk about it as like a theological point or some sort of meditation. But he spoke with authority and not just some theological point.

John put it even stronger and brought it into our judgment and says in John chapter 12, verse 48, and Jesus said, he who rejects me and does not receive my words has that which judges him. The word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day.

Now, in my background, we kind of put the words of Jesus in some sort of different dispensation or some different millennium or maybe to be in heaven or something. But as I've read, another writer once said, all right, come on, how hard is it to love your enemies in heaven?

These teachings are meant for us today, to live out today in this world, and that's exactly what we wanted to embrace.

So we began to ponder what Christianity would look like if it were actually purposely based around the teachings of Jesus and his commands. What would the church look like if it actually took Jesus literally?

But it made us think of the verse where Jesus says, well, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and you do not the things which I say?

Yeah, amen. And that's, there's a thing. I mean, Jesus giving us his way, his teaching, telling us that when the Holy Spirit come, he would testify of him. And a Christianity that really was based upon him was something that was challenging us more and more.

Rejecting Just War Arguments

Well, as I began to ponder these thoughts and pray, I evaded the question for a little while thinking, okay, the theologians are going to have a good reason for this one. I mean, there's, the teachings of Jesus have got to mean something different than what they are actually literally saying.

And so, because I thought, well, the Christians have always believed in a just war, at least that's what I thought. And so I began to try to find some books. I went to the chaplain. I found a book written by some high up chaplain guy about the just war theory.

And I began to look at that. But when I began to read the actual arguments, when I began to look at their reasons for just war, I got scared. I got scared because I wanted to believe these guys. But when I was looking at their arguments, I was realizing they're really not, they're, they're, they're bringing scriptures up out of context.

They're, they're not applying the word of God properly. And as much as I wanted to, I just couldn't shake these easy words of Jesus. And now when I actually was reading the arguments, it began to, to worry me a lot.

But there's one other element that came from reading the arguments against non-resistance is they introduced to me this concept of an early Christianity. Because in each of these books, and you still, when you find books today, it's the same thing.

When they talk about the just war theory and everything, they always have a chapter in there that they try to explain away the early Christians. And so they talked about the early Christians like, well, they were naive, the faith wasn't fully developed, or the thoughts haven't come up to them, or something like that.

And as I began to read that, I was thinking, wow, I long to be one of those naive, childlike early Christians, just like one of them. And so after all that reading, in spite of the rationale, as much as I tried, I just could not let go of the simple, albeit impractical words of Jesus like, love your enemies, do good to them that hate you.

And all of this happened to hit us at a high point in our army career. We're both really loving our jobs, we had really good relationships with our coworkers, and life just seemed good. Dean had just recently been promoted to sergeant, and I was now being put on the fast track for promotion as well.

So in addition to being a musician, then Dean was also recently, he had been sent to armor school. And that gave him a special position in our unit of taking care of all the weapons, and everything pertaining to that.

And so he was really advancing his career in that way. And our future looked bright. It seemed we were really prospering in the army. But things were also really stirring in the world, and that was putting the pressure on us.

We were bombarded daily by news and the media about war. And we had, it made our searching, I guess, feel all the more critical. We're like, okay, we really need to come to a decision. We've been pretty open with all our coworkers.

We just wanted to get answers. A lot of our coworkers actually were a little older than us, and they were good people, professing sincere Christians. We talked about it with them. Yes, we would share our concerns with them, and some of them would say, Dean, you're asking questions that Christians shouldn't be asking.

He actually said that. Yeah. He actually said that. And, but Dean would say, well, what do you do with the teachings of Jesus? And he'd say, well, I'm comfortable. He said, I'm comfortable. That's one thing Dean just couldn't say at that time.

He was definitely not comfortable, and neither was I. And so out of all of our friends' growing concern for us, they actually removed Dean from being the armorer. They didn't want to put him in a position of having to, I guess they were waiting to see if he'd just grow out of it.

But then people started getting genuinely worried about the two of us and our two friends who seemed to be agreeing with everything we were seeing. And the day finally came for our deadly force briefing.

They called us all into a room. The war was really heating up. We were being inactivated as a band. We laid aside our instruments, and we were being called to ship missiles. So at that time, our acting first sergeant called us into a room, and I just vividly remember him singling Dean out.

And he said, and if someone comes into this unit, you will be required to use deadly force to stop him.

If necessary. Yeah. I knew then that, okay, things were, you know, getting pretty serious. So and the whole thing had become more than just a theological argument, but I was still dealing with it. I remember just a little bit before this, you know, I was in the armor before they took me out of the armor.

And I remember the time we were starting to read some of these books, you know, and I remember one was a book by Tony Campolo, I think it was called 20 Hot Potatoes Christians Are Afraid To Touch. And one of the topics was non-resistance.

I remember he had some story in there about a bomber pilot dropping a bomb and asking what would Jesus do. And so I remember, I remember they sent us this shipment, and that was the armor, and they sent us this shipment of M203 grenade launchers.

It's the name of this grenade launcher. My job was to install four of these onto some of our M16 machine guns. And I remember there, I can remember, I can take you back to that place. And I remember there, and I was taking these grenade launchers, and I was installing them to the machine guns, and I was twisting on these little wires.

And I remember stopping and asking, what would Jesus do? That word of that book just kind of put that in my mind. And then I just remember saying, oh, it's confusing. Who knows what Jesus really meant by that, the context in and out of that.

And I'm ashamed to say I finished and just dismissed it and finished the project. But the war did something good for us. And what it did was, it brought this out of just some theological abstract theology in our mind.

It brought it to something that we had to make a decision about. And I think that that's good for us. I think, I was going to say American Christians, but I think all Christians need to face these words of Jesus Christ.

I mean, if you kill somebody, it's either, and you kill someone in some sort of a, you know, righteous, supposedly righteous way, it's either of God or it's not of God. It's either some sort of a brave thing to do, or it's something outside of the will of God, according to how you're reading the words of Jesus.

So I don't think it should be left as something, as some sort of arbitrary theology. I frequently ask the question here recently when people ask about how important this is to Christianity. And I ask the question, can a person be a follower of Christ without following Christ?

And that's why I think that looking at topics like this and looking at the teachings of Jesus are very important. And Christianity needs to be talking about the words of Jesus a lot more and not just leave these off as some sort of arbitrary theology or something.

Seeking Conscientious-Objector Status

Well, after that deadly force briefing, we knew we needed to do something. So we had found a lot of really good books on non-resistance. And so we just picked one. It happened to have been published by Herald Press.

So we wrote a desperate letter. Please help. We don't know what to do. We've discovered the teachings of Jesus. We sent the letter off to Herald Press. They received the letter and then forwarded it to Mennonite Central Committee, who had enough foresight to have sent a couple of army counselors over to Germany to help people just like us.

So they forwarded that letter to them. They happened to be, their names were Andre and Kathy Stoner. And we're very, very grateful for the help they gave us. They knew all the regulations. They had us in their home.

They came out to our home. We had regular meetings. They were a godsend. And we're just really thankful for their input and all they did for us.

Yeah, it was a blessing. Without them, we could have been in a lot of trouble. And as I look back now on how it all happened, real quick, I can't fail to mention another event that happened a little bit before this that I think made an impression in our life.

And it was our trips to East Berlin. I visited Berlin twice. And the first time that I was there is when Tanya was in basic training and I went there with my mother. And as I was there, it's your typical Cold War scene.

You're there and there's these, you know, long cement walls. You have your concertina wire around the wall. You have these East German and Russian guards patrolling with their machine guns. And as you look at that in this Cold War scene, it's very obvious they are the enemy.

But the next time Dean went to East Berlin, I got to go with him. It was 1989. And wow, what a scene. The wall was coming down. Yeah, the Berlin Wall was actually coming down. And as we made our way to Checkpoint Charlie, we just were just amazed.

So different from Dean's last experience with the Cold War scene, the air was literally charged with excitement. We were all sort of rejoicing. There was a sense of excitement. All kind of stuff going on.

People were taking turns trying to knock holes in the wall with hammers. And our friend Rick Shirley even literally drove his car into the wall. I don't recommend it. It didn't do much for the wall. No, it didn't.