“There were certain things I had theologically not dealt with. The whole Pentecostal thing, the speaking in tongues thing, was a very big issue in the country. The Charismatic Renewal was just beginning and so we went to a lot of churches where this was done and then we went to a lot of churches where they preached against it. There were prayers for healing and miracles that were claimed by people. But the thing that really struck me the most about the people was just how genuine they were, how much love there was, people welcomed us as if we were their own sons.

I was skeptical about the whole tongues thing at that moment and remember going up to a man’s house and knocking on the door and I said, “When you talk in tongues do you do it because you’re overcome or is it something you do intentionally?” He said, “Oh, I do it intentionally and here it is,” and he just started speaking in tongues in front of me. So I thought, “Well this is all manufactured.” I was wrestling with it. There was hypocrisy and fallenness. There was a family where there was incest. Of course when you get up in the hills of Tennessee all that’s a little vague. So it wasn’t as if because someone had the label Christian on them everybody thought, “Oh everything they did was right.”

There were normally three or four days between [home-stays] so we would have these intense meetings. I remember one in Kansas City, meeting in a nice suburban living room. And we were talking about all the things we had encountered. And Jeff Niese and I were outspoken Christians. There was another guy in the group, John Howard, who now is an Episcopal bishop. And I remember Robert Gaudino turning to John Howard and saying, “John, why aren’t you a Christian the way Jay and Jeff are?” John said, “Well, I’m a Southerner and I’m a gentleman. Therefore I am a Christian.” Quote unquote. So there were lots of challenging moments. We would talk about individual people we’d stayed with. He would say, “What’s their sense of who they are as a family? What are their values? What do those values mean? Do you agree with those values?” It was very intense.

–Jay Haug '73