A personal reckoning — not a testimony for public consumption, but an honest accounting for a man who needs to know where he stands before he can lead well

A reflection by John Hargrove April 2026

I. Who I Was — The Hargrove Man Before the Road Was Named

There is a kind of man that East Texas produces with some regularity. Quiet in words. Strong on action. Raised right — by people who respected God, kept their word, showed up when it counted, and did not spend a great deal of time talking about their inner life because their inner life was expressed through what they built and fixed and provided and protected. This is not a criticism. It is a description of something real and genuinely good. The Hargrove men, by what I can understand of them, were this kind of man.

I was formed in that. It gave me things I am still grateful for — a bias toward doing rather than theorizing, a respect for people who carry weight without complaining, a deep instinct that faith is not primarily what you say but what you actually do when things are hard. These are not small gifts.

They also produced in me a particular vulnerability that took decades to recognize. When the interior life is not named, it does not disappear. It goes underground. And underground, it does what unexamined things always do — it shapes behavior from below the waterline, invisible to the person it is shaping, entirely visible to everyone who lives with that person.

I knew the Sunday school stories. Every single one. I could navigate the language of faith, the vocabulary of the church, the expectations of the community around me with complete fluency. I wore that fluency like a garment — not dishonestly exactly, because I believed what I said — but not transparently either, because there was a gap between what I presented and what was actually happening in me that I did not know how to close and was not entirely sure I wanted to.

This is the facade that the Emmaus tradition names directly. Not hypocrisy in the cynical sense. Something more human than that — the instinct to present well, to be seen as put together, to protect the gap between the public self and the private one because the private one feels too unfinished, too complicated, too likely to disappoint if fully seen.

I was a young follower of Jesus who was easily distracted and more easily corrupted than I wanted to admit. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way a man drifts from the center of what is true in him, not through one wide catastrophic choice but through a hundred small ones, each of which seems manageable in the moment and none of which announce themselves as the thing that will eventually nearly take everything down.

The 1990s were the reckoning with what had accumulated below the waterline. The success was real. The drift was real. They coexisted in the same man, and the man did not fully understand how both were possible until the weight of the consequences made understanding unavoidable.

This is who I was. A Hargrove man. Raised by good people. Formed in a tradition that respected God but did not always know how to talk about what was actually happening inside a person. Fluent in the stories, wearing the garment, and carrying something below the waterline that needed to be brought into the light before it took everything with it.

II. Who I Became — Redeemed, Still Wearing the Past, One Step Back and Two Steps Forward

October 13, 2000, did not produce a new man in the sense of replacing the old one. That is not how redemption actually works, whatever some testimonies’ language suggests. What it produced was a man who had been found, rather than a man who had been fixed.

The past does not disappear at the moment of recognition. It becomes honest. The facade does not dissolve — it becomes visible, which is the beginning of being able to put it down. The underground life does not surface all at once — it surfaces slowly, uncomfortably, with resistance, over years of the kind of work that no one sees and that does not make for a clean narrative.

What I became in the years after Walk 51 was a redeemed man still learning to live in the redemption. Full of faith and doubt simultaneously, the way all honest disciples are. Making progress and losing ground and making progress again in the particular rhythm that spiritual formation actually follows in real human lives — not the clean upward trajectory of the inspirational story, but the actual terrain of one step back and two steps forward, sometimes one step back and one step forward, sometimes just standing in place, confused about which direction the road runs.

The licensing in WMF gave my formation the structure and accountability it needed. The eight years between licensing and ordination were not a waiting room — they were a proving ground, and what was being proved was not primarily my capability. What was being proved was whether the man who had been found on Walk 51 would remain found. Whether the recognition that happened in the chapel was going to become a life rather than an experience. Whether the redeemed man was going to keep doing the slow interior work that redemption actually requires or whether he was going to settle for the testimony and leave the transformation unfinished.

I am still in those eight years in some sense. Ordination did not conclude them. Pastoring a church did not conclude them. They are the permanent condition of the honest disciple — the ongoing process of sanctifying grace working in a man who has been found but is still being formed, who has been redeemed but still wears the past, who is genuinely different from who he was and genuinely not yet who he is becoming.

This is not a failure of faith. It is the description of what faith actually is in a human life. The disciples who ran back to Jerusalem in the dark were not finished, people. They were found, people. There is a difference, and honoring that difference is one of the most important things a Spiritual Director can bring to a Walk weekend — because the pilgrims sitting in the Conference Room are not looking for a finished person to show them how it is done. They are looking for a found person who can help them recognize who has been walking beside them all along.

III. Where I Am Now — Looking at the Church and the Community With Clear Eyes

I have been looking at the teachings. The early church. The structure of an institution that has been fighting Romans 3:23 for two thousand years — for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God — and losing and winning and losing again in a cycle that should humble every generation that assumes it has finally gotten it right.

What I see when I look at that history honestly is a church that is perennially tempted to solve the problem of human fallibility by building better systems, drawing clearer lines, establishing more refined hierarchies of spiritual authority — and perennially discovering that the systems and the lines and the hierarchies are populated by the same fallen humans they were designed to manage. Rome did not solve it. The Reformation did not solve it. The Methodist renewal did not solve it. The apostolic movements did not solve it. The non-denominational world is not solving it. Every generation of the church rebuilds the Tower of Babel with better theology and discovers again that the materials are compromised.

This is not cynicism. It is the honest reading of church history that every serious student of it eventually arrives at — and the reading that should produce, in a pastor, not despair but a particular kind of clarity about what the church is actually for and what it cannot do by institutional effort alone.

What I see in the mainline argument about sacramental authority.

The UMC, now the GMC, and the mainline traditions like them are, in significant part, arguing about form over substance. Who can consecrate? Who can baptize? Who holds the keys to the sacramental moments that the tradition identifies as the primary vehicles of grace? The argument is presented as about theological integrity — and there are genuine theological questions embedded in it — but beneath the theological argument lies a much older and more familiar human argument: who is in the elite spiritual class and who is not.

I am not dismissing the question of order. The New Testament takes order seriously. The pastoral epistles take qualifications seriously. The early church took the separation of leadership roles seriously. I take it seriously. GTEC’s standards around sacramental authorization exist for real reasons, and I support them.

But I am also a man who was ordained in an apostolic interdenominational fellowship, who now pastors a standalone church, who has watched the Holy Spirit move with unmistakable power in rooms where no one present would meet the mainline criteria for sacramental authority — and I cannot pretend that the movement of the Spirit I have witnessed respects the boundaries that institutional Christianity has drawn around it.

Where is the priesthood of all believers in all of this? Not as a slogan. Not as a corrective to hierarchy. As a genuine theological question about what the New Testament actually envisions when it describes the community of the redeemed as a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession. What order are we supposed to have — and what is that order in service of?

I do not have a clean answer to this. I have a deep conviction that the answer is more dynamic and more Spirit-responsive than the institutional forms of the church have generally been willing to accommodate — and an equally deep conviction that the freedom of the Spirit is not the same as the absence of accountability, that the priesthood of all believers is not the same as the authority of all individuals, and that the early church’s distributed leadership was characterized by enormous accountability alongside enormous charism.

The tension is real, and it lives inside me as much as it lives in the institutions I am critiquing.

What I see in GTEC.

This is intended to explore a cluster of deeper questions underneath the presenting issues

What is Emmaus actually for?
Is Emmaus mainly a place for powerful spiritual moments, or is it a disciplined instrument for renewing already-committed Christians and strengthening the church? That question sits underneath almost everything.

What kind of authority does the model have?
Is the model merely a helpful tradition that can be flexed when leaders feel led, or is it a covenant framework meant to restrain personal improvisation for the sake of the whole community?

How does GTEC understand the relationship between Spirit and structure?
When something feels spiritually urgent, does that urgency authorize deviation, or does the community believe the Spirit ordinarily works through the structure already given? That is one of the central tensions you are pressing on.

What is the real meaning of covenant fidelity?
Is covenant fidelity mainly about obedience to the inherited model, or can it include pastoral judgment in unusual moments without dissolving the model itself? That is the live tension behind Walk 189 and other edge cases.

What is the proper scope of pastoral authority on a weekend?
How far may a Spiritual Director, ASDs, Lay Director, or Board Rep go in responding to a real pastoral moment before they are no longer stewarding the weekend but reshaping it?

Who gets to decide what counts as faithful leadership in an exception?
Is it the clergy in the moment, the Lay Director, the Board, the Community Spiritual Director, or the manuals? You are really probing where discernment resides when the unexpected happens.

Is Emmaus a ministry of renewal or an event that can drift into becoming a church substitute?
Your writing keeps returning to the question of whether Emmaus can accidentally begin to perform functions that belong to the local church, especially in sacramental and pastoral acts.

What does sacramental restraint protect?
Why does the model include Communion prominently but not baptism during the weekend? The deeper question is what that restraint is protecting theologically, ecumenically, and pastorally.

What counts as legitimate clergy in GTEC’s actual context?
Because the ecclesial world around GTEC is fragmented, you are asking whether inherited assumptions about credentials still work, and, if not, what should replace mere credentialism without collapsing standards.

What is the minimum non-negotiable for presiding at the table?
You are exploring whether the key question is denomination, ordination path, sacramental theology, accountability, community standing, or some combination of these.

How should GTEC evaluate clergy in a changed church landscape without becoming either rigid or careless?
That is a major thread in your clergy formation papers. You are asking how to be serious without being captive to outdated assumptions, and open without becoming undiscerning.

What does ecumenism actually require now?
Is ecumenism just mutual goodwill, or does it also require boundaries so that one tradition’s instincts do not overrun the shared weekend? You are exploring whether openness without discipline eventually ceases to be truly ecumenical.

What is GTEC’s theology of servant leadership?
Are leaders there to improvise boldly, or to disappear into faithful stewardship of something larger than themselves? This sits under your repeated concern about anonymous servanthood, training, and discipline.

How much local variation can GTEC carry before it is no longer really following Emmaus?
That is the institutional version of the question. At what point does “local flavor” become theological or structural drift?

How should a community handle situations where pastoral compassion and model fidelity appear to collide?
This may be the sharpest practical question in all of it. You are not only asking what should have happened, but what kind of community process can hold both compassion and discipline without tearing itself apart.

What does accountability look like when there is disagreement?
You are also exploring whether GTEC has the relational and spiritual maturity to process conflict through direct, loving, Matthew 18-shaped communication instead of triangulation, rumor, and factional pressure. This is not just about policy; it is about the spiritual health of the community. Based on your project context and Walk 189 materials, that concern is central.

What kind of formation does GTEC want to produce in clergy and Fourth Day servants?
Do you want leaders who are bold improvisers, careful custodians, sacramental stewards, pastoral discerners, or some mature combination of all four? That seems to be one of the deepest formation questions behind your training guide.

What is the real measure of a faithful weekend?
Is it that people were moved, that leaders responded boldly, that the schedule was kept, that sacraments were handled rightly, that pilgrims were protected, or that the weekend produced long-term Fourth Day fruit? You seem to be asking what counts most when those goods compete.

If I had to compress all of it into five master questions, they would be these:

1. What is Emmaus for?
2. Who has authority to interpret the model in hard moments?
3. How does GTEC hold Spirit and structure together without betraying either?
4. What standards actually matter for clergy and sacramental leadership now?
5. How can the community stay faithful without becoming either rigid, reactive, or factional?

And underneath even those, there may be one deepest question:

Can GTEC be a spiritually alive Emmaus community that is also disciplined enough to submit itself to a form it did not invent?

I see a community that is carrying something genuinely valuable — the Emmaus model, the lay-clergy partnership, the theology of grace, the pattern of Luke 24 — while simultaneously struggling with what every community of humans struggles with. The staffing challenges. The unwillingness to speak the authentic truth in love to each other. The board meetings where Jesus is presumably present and the behavior is sometimes difficult to distinguish from any other organizational meeting where humans are managing competing interests and protecting established positions.

I see the new pastors/4th day (‘how does the board override the Spirit’)  situation as a symptom of something larger than itself. Whatever the specific facts — and I do not have all of them — what new pastors/4th day (‘how does the board override the Spirit’)  appears to be expressing is the feeling of being managed rather than pastored, controlled rather than discerned, processed by an institutional mechanism rather than encountered by a community. That feeling may or may not be accurate in its specifics. But it is real as a feeling, and it is naming something real about the gap between what Emmaus claims to be and what it sometimes actually is in its organizational life.

The Holy Spirit does not move by board resolution. But the board is also not the enemy of the Spirit — it is the organizational form through which a community seeks to create the conditions in which the Spirit can move consistently and safely, for pilgrims, team members, the clergy pool, and the broader church the community serves. Both of those things are true simultaneously and the tension between them does not resolve into a clean answer.

I see the past trust issues — the decades of argument, the 4th-day conflicts, the pushback against appropriate change, the loyalty to forms that have outlived their function — as the natural accumulation of what happens in any community that has been together long enough to have a history. History is both the community’s greatest asset and its most persistent liability. The people who were there when something significant happened carry it as identity. The people who arrive after carry it as mythology. The community that cannot distinguish between the two cannot change when change is necessary, and it cannot recognize when the proposed change is actually the kind that will take something essential away rather than add what is needed.

I see the cultural shifts pressing on local churches as something GTEC is not yet fully reckoning with. The congregations that send pilgrims to GTEC are being reshaped by forces — demographic, technological, economic, social — that the Emmaus model was not designed to address and that the community’s current leadership culture does not always have language for. The renewal that Emmaus offers is real. It is also insufficient on its own to address what is happening to local churches in East and Southeast Texas right now. Renewed disciples returning to declining congregations, with diminishing cultural authority in their communities, need more than the Fourth Day framework has traditionally offered them.

IV. The Future — What I Believe Is Possible and What I Believe Is Required

I am not a pessimist about any of this. I say that as a man who has read the history honestly, seen the institutional failures up close, and carries the specific scars of having been found on a road I was walking in the wrong direction on. Pessimism is not my conclusion. Something more demanding than pessimism is my conclusion.

What I believe about GTEC’s future is this:

The community will be as healthy as its willingness to practice what it preaches. An Emmaus community that teaches sanctifying grace and does not embody it in its board meetings is not a hypocritical community — it is a human one. But it is also a community that asks pilgrims to receive something the community itself is not fully inhabiting, and that gap eventually becomes visible to the people in the room, costing the community credibility and vitality over time.

The willingness to speak authentic truth in love — which Emmaus asks of pilgrims and team members, and which the community’s own health requires — is the discipline that most needs cultivation in GTEC’s leadership culture right now. Not as a management technique. As a spiritual practice. As the embodiment of the grace we teach.

The new pastors/4th day (‘how does the board override the Spirit’)  situation, whatever its specific resolution, needs to be approached pastorally rather than institutionally. A person expressing a sense of betrayal by the community is not primarily a board governance problem. It is a pastoral emergency, which does not mean the person is right about everything they claim, but that the primary response needs to be human contact and honest conversation rather than procedural management. If GTEC handles it institutionally, it will win the argument and lose the person. If it handles it pastorally, it may not resolve the structural question immediately but it will demonstrate that the community is what it says it is.

The sacramental question — who can do what and on what authority — needs to be held with both clarity and humility. The standards exist for real reasons. They also cannot become a hedge that protects institutional comfort rather than theological integrity. The CSD and the board together need to be able to distinguish between standards that protect the mission and those that have become organizational habits that protect themselves.

The cultural reckoning is coming whether GTEC engages it proactively or not. The communities that are sending pilgrims to GTEC in ten years will look different from the communities sending pilgrims today — different demographics, different pressures, different understandings of authority and community, and what the church is for. An Emmaus community that does not develop the capacity to understand and respond to those shifts will find itself renewing disciples for a church culture that no longer exists in the same form.

What does this mean for me personally?

I am not a disinterested observer of any of this. I am a man with a specific history — the Hargrove formation, the facade years, the drifting decades, the Walk 51 recognition, the apostolic ordination, the standalone church, the GTEC investment — who is trying to figure out what faithful service looks like at this specific moment in this specific community.

The training document I am building is not just a project. It is an expression of what I believe the community needs and what I am able, given where I have been and what I have learned, to offer it. It is also a form of the accountability I was talking about — submission to something larger than my own vision and preferences, the willingness to build something that serves the community rather than the community serving my need to build.

The conversations with various SDs are not just a data-gathering exercise. It is a practice of the partnership that the Emmaus model teaches — genuine collaboration among people with different gifts, histories, wounds, and angles of vision, none of whom can see the whole thing alone.

The work of becoming a better WSD and ASD is the ongoing work of becoming a more honest version of the found man — more willing to be seen in the weakness that makes pastoral presence possible, more willing to hold the space rather than fill it, more willing to trust the model and the community and the God who was on the road before any of us arrived.

This is where I am. In the middle of the road that began in a child’s bedroom and ran through the decades and arrived at a chapel, it has not stopped.

Still being found. Still finding. Still believing that the stranger on the road is the risen Christ — and that he has been there longer than any of us have known what to do with that.

The future is His. The work is ours. And somewhere in the tension between those two sentences is exactly where the Emmaus community has always lived, and where it will live as long as it is honest about both.

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“Did not our hearts burn within us?”

Yes. Still. That has not changed.

That will not change.

John Hargrove Walk 51 Table of the Living Word October 2000

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