The Orange Crate

Building Your Greatest Cathedral

I took my first pastorate with the Church of God in southwestern Wisconsin in 1984. Backing up a bit farther, I had given Jesus Christ the keys to my vehicle on June 9, 1971.   I still haven’t fully learned how “NOT” to be a back seat driver. We were attending Falls Bible Church in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Every now and again the church would do things together as a group.   This “gathering” in June of 71 initiated a change in my life.   On a very warm afternoon we all took a church bus to McCormick Place in Chicago where we witnessed “the Jesus people” banding together and forming an interlocked arm brigade to stop protesters who were going to charge the stage and upend the teaching of a man named Billy Graham.

I saw and felt things that day that I couldn’t possibly explain. All I knew was that it felt like someone knocking on the inside of my heart and in that moment, I opened the door to the most amazing man I’d ever met. It was Jesus… and Revelation 3:20 was presented to me in a way that has kept that door open all these years.

I was called to follow Him in 1971. In July of 1976 I felt a calling to ministry as I experienced the infilling of the Holy Ghost while I was a youth counselor at Spencer Lake Youth Camp in Waupaca, Wisconsin.

I took my first job as a Senior Pastor with the Church of God organization. The town was Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Five months into this job I preached on prayer and intercession. What happened in January of 1985 was something that nobody could have predicted. As the prayer room grew, so grew the intensity of the Spirit.

By the end of January, we were in the midst of a sovereign move of the Holy Ghost that we could neither have predicted nor understood. We weren’t having “good services”. We were in the midst of the “genuine” and it went night after night for 23 straight weeks. It was like an explosion in our midst. When I first got to the church in 1984 there were seven people. By the time the Good Friday service rolled in the following spring, we were packed out.   You had to come to church an hour early just to get into the building.

I am not here to list all the signs, wonders and miracles, for that in itself would take volumes to write. What I will tell you is about the experience in the midst of this revival that was a defining moment in my life.

As the church grew, there was a need for a bigger building. 12 weeks into this revival we had outgrown the maximum capacity allowed by the local fire department. The talk started to shift from the things God was doing to the things we needed to have in the natural. We became very material minded. We talked of building a new building and carpet colors and roofing materials and perk testing and suddenly we were ablaze and innundated by the things of man instead of the things of God. Oh but we justified it by saying we were “doing great things for God”… “building great things for God”… “taking valuable ground for God”.

Being a very young pastor, I was also not seasoned enough with the Word and preparing for messages were also limited due to the excess of the material. I was preaching about the power and had taken two nights to speak about Charles Finney. How he used to take an old orange crate from city to city. While he was in the country, he would fit his head and upper body into that crate while his knees and lower body were outside on the ground. He would intercede there. After he had prayed through, he would take that crate to the cities of his day and stand on top of it as his pulpit so he could see over the massive crowds that would gather to hear him preach. It seemed that I was noticing a parallel to Finney and what was happening there in Wisconsin.

The Lord came in like a mighty rushing wind and without realizing it, we were installing windshields. The revival was a great gift of His presence and our consciousness of it. We began to put Him on a back burner. This all started with 6 AM prayer for the men. It continued with a noon prayer meeting at Aunt Bee’s home. Then it was back to prayer an hour before service. Prayer wasn’t a labor, it was like an oasis in a very dry place called life.

One morning I awoke for prayer at 5:45 and had a hard time rolling out of bed. My head was filled with my daily “to do” list which had grown considerably during the past six weeks. On this particular day I had appointments with contractors, decorators, builders and I was trying to get it all sorted out as I walked into the prayer room that morning.

I was having a hard time praying, and in fact did not get through to a brokenness that I had become accustomed to. There were no tears. Only schedules in my head and a lack of focus on the things that “aren’t seen”.   That night, God moved as usual. It was one of those nights when people in worship began to get slain in the Spirit without anyone near them. Healings abounded. We were in the altars praying and worshipping and ministering until somewhere past 2 AM. As the bus ministry loaded up those overcome with the Spirit and everyone had left, I thought to myself about how hard it would be to get up that morning with only a little over 3 hours of sleep.

As I was turning out the lights and heading for the back door, I heard the Lord speak in such a sweet way, but there in the darkness, it startled me. He only spoke a few words, but they were words that I remember to this day.

He said, “Well done this night. Tomorrow in our time together, I am going to take you to the greatest cathedral ever built for me”.   That was it. He was done and I was motivated to get to prayer no matter how little sleep I would get.

That morning I came with a renewed passion and excitement. God was going to give me some pointers so that I could build our Prairie du Chien church and perhaps pattern it after the greatest cathedral ever built!

He met me immediately and we began to walk and talk together as we had done for so many years together. I can remember that we were talking about the revival the night before and as we started to walk, I looked around and saw that we were in a very large city with skyscrapers and many people. I thought perhaps he was going to take me to a church like PTL or perhaps the Prayer Tower at ORU… or even back in time to perhaps Solomon’s temple. THE GREATEST CATHEDRAL.

Well… He has a way of getting into a discussion with me that I barely notice the things and scenery around us as we walk. About 15 minutes in, I noticed that we had walked out of that city and were now in what I assumed were subburbs with track houses and subdivisions. Again, He gained my attention and my focus and it was perhaps another 15 minutes and we were in a rural setting with maybe a house every mile or so, until there were no houses or buildings at all.

Perhaps He was taking me to our new plot of ground on the outskirts of Prairie! We talked and laughed and sometimes His words brought tears.

In what seemed like an abrupt heartbeat, He stopped and He was silent. When He is speaking and then there is nothing but silence… it is very loud. I looked around and we were standing at a crossroads. A gravel road crossed a dirt road and there were fields of crops in full bloom, forests in the distance, the weeds had overgrown the sides of the road we were on and the sun was very bright and very warm.

His voice shattered the silence. “There. There is the greatest cathedral that has ever been built for me.” I looked around and noticed nothing but nature and blue skies. “OH, I get it,” I said in my own attempt at being wise, “out here in nature, the sky as the roof of the tabernacle and no walls to box us in. Your Father built it.”

I was feeling very smart and somewhat proud when He burst my bubble with the word, “No. Over there.” And he pointed to the weeds next to the road.   I looked to where He was pointing and saw an old broken orange crate.

Finney’s orange crate. The one I preached about. It was broken by time and weeds had almost covered it over.   He then spoke as my eyes focused. “That is the greatest cathedral that has ever been built for me. It was where my son came and in his travail, most holy faith was built. We wept there together. We travailed there together. We laughed and we reasoned and we danced and we worshipped and we patched up old wounds and we ate there in the midst of our enemies… and we built the temple that the Holy Ghost dwells in. And each day we would build a little more. We would do maintenance on what we had built. It was a magnificent view when you were standing in Heaven looking down on it.   What natural building could you build for me that hasn’t already been built?   If you build this cathedral,   I will take care of every other want and need and building in your life.”

And just as quickly as we were standing there, I was slumped on the dark floor of that little church – reevaluating my focus and my natural building plans and with that morning’s tears, I began to partner with Him to build the greatest cathedral. I had much to do. I had been given an orange crate that was to be turned into a tabernacle.

We need to realize that when we are weak, then are we strong. When we are broken, then are we whole. When we focus on the things not seen, then can we see. When we fosake building our own kingdom, then can we begin to build His.

The church in Prairie du Chien where God had spoken to me about a greatest cathedral: