How to get the cops almost called on you during class at Bible college....

During my third year of college, I took a course called creative classroom communications. The point of the class is obvious from its name; learn to communicate creatively in a classroom setting. Our major assignment of the semester was to take an entire class period and to try out our new found skills on a small pre-arranged section of the class. The only stipulations were that it had to have some sort of biblical relevance and it had to be creative. As classmates we would grade each other on how well we performed.

Well, if I'm going to do something well, I have to do it all out. I decided early on that I wanted my lesson to be something that no one ever forgot.

On the day of my presentation, I welcomed my classmates to a dark, candle-lit classroom and handed them a hymnal. When everyone was seated I thanked them for coming and reminded them that our very lives were in danger should the police find out about our underground church.

A few minutes passed while we sang worship songs and prayed. There was a knock on the door. I nervously looked around... everyone was accounted for. When I opened the door a crack it was thrown forcefully open and three men entered. One man was in a sleek suit, the two others were in military fatigues with their faces painted. All were carrying guns and all were shouting.

Now these were different times. School shootings weren't as common as they are now and people weren't quite as jumpy about school violence. These guns were toys of course, but still... looking back on it, this entire presentation wasn’t the smartest thing to do at a school.

The three men stormed through the room, tossing over chairs and tables, dumping out book bags and shouting orders. Down on the ground! Hands on your head! Who’s the leader?! They were met with mute silence and inaction. My classmates were stunned and confused. Is this for real, one of the students asked. I nodded and got down on the ground. The students struggled mentally before following suit. The line between the reality of being safely in the middle of Portland, and the ruse of three loud armed men stalking to and fro calling themselves the KGB, was hard for them to integrate.

I SAID GET DOWN ON THE GROUND! One of the guys in my class was staunchly refusing to follow the gunman's orders. He shouted back at them, calling them names and infuriating them all the more. The man in the suit pulled out a huge roll of duct tape. The two men in fatigues tackled my classmate and held him down while the other man wound him round and round and round with tape-- ankles, hands, mouth and head; he was completely covered.

I was honestly a bit shocked at how good my gunmen were doing at acting like gunmen. I had given them a little pep talk before class and had cautioned them against acting half baked. They needed to be believable if I was going to get my point across to the class, I told them. Little did I know that that was one warning they did not need to hear. They were so loud, angry and potentially violent that I was growing concerned that things were getting out of hand.

A crowd had gathered outside the classroom door as students passing by stopped to watch the drama unfold. Suddenly there was shrieking from outside. I went to investigate and discovered a fuming woman from the office next door demanding to know what was going on. "I heard shouting and then these guys are walking around with guns!" she yelled at me. "I WAS ABOUT TO CALL THE POLICE! What on earth is going on I DEMAND to know."

I apologized profusely for not warning her. I'd explain everything at the end of class, I told her, but in the mean time I had zealous gunmen to go control. I closed the door behind me as I reentered the chaotic police raid on my underground church.

ON YOUR FEET! We did as we were told and we were marched single file, duct tape and all, out of the classroom, across campus, down some dark, narrow, spooky stairs and into the underbelly of the academic building. In the darkness water dripped. I could have sworn I heard tiny feet scuttling across the floor.

The gunmen left us alone, climbing the stairs and slamming the door at the top. My classmates were completely silent. They looked at me with cold mutiny in their eyes.

I took a deep breath and launched into my teaching about suffering for Christ and the dangerous reality that some of our brothers and sisters endured every day. Together we examined scriptures and shared about how the experience we had just gone through impacted us. By the end of class some of the students were quite happy about their ordeal and the insight they gained from it. Others, however, probably hold bitter grudges against me to this day.

One classmate told me I had gone too far. "I was really afraid they were going to hurt me," she said, referring to the gunmen. I silently thought that was the point... but then wondered if she was right. Was it wrong of me to try to create a dangerous façade of reality so we could attempt to empathize with the persecuted church?

But it was said and done and now I had to go do some damage control. I walked into the office next to my classroom and spent the next thirty minutes apologizing to the office lady and hearing about how it was only an act of God that had kept her from calling the police and how I need to think things through and how those boys shouldn't be carrying around toy guns on campus and how I should warn her next time and on and on and on....

And that's how you almost get the police called on you during class at Bible college.