Talk to Action has a great article up highlighting the role that Mart Green is playing in wresting control of Oral Roberts University away from its founding family. He’s given $70 million, and he’s using his leverage to completely redo the way things are done at ORU.

And I used to work for him.

As a kid, I bought my first CD from his first Mardel store, now a chain selling Christian music and books on one side of the store and office supplies on the other. The story I was told was that his backer (his dad) didn’t think Christian books and music could keep a store afloat on their own.

I was fascinated by the shelves and shelves of evangelical, fundamentalist, and charismatic books. There was Christian jewelry, t-shirts, and wall art. And mechanical pencils, which I thought were pretty cool.

By the time I was in high school, the original Mardel had moved to its second location. (It’s now at its third, never having made it more than two miles away from my parents’ house.) I was working for a pizza joint with my girlfriend when a classmate let me know there was an opening.

It was my evangelical dream job. The manager of the book department was a Methodist seminarian (as I hoped to be eventually), and he’d let me bring home books to read as long as I’d bring them back to the store in good condition. I got an employee discount, so I hardly brought home a check some weeks. I must have bought four $50 study bibles while I was there, and this in the 90s with car insurance to pay.

The last study bible I bought—probably my last purchase form Mardel—was in college. I no longer worked there, but I went back to see if they could special order me a paperback of the one I needed for my Biblical Literature class so I wouldn’t have to pony up for the hard covers they sold in the school bookstore. They tried to talk me out of it. It was a liberal study bible.

Now that I know from the article that Mart was only 19 when he started the first store, I can remember meeting him when I was ten. A middle-aged employee pointed him out with something in between fear and fascination at his chutzpah. Mart recommended a cassette tape (this was pre-CDs) by the Archers. The music was mediocre, but it was Christian so I didn’t care.

By the time I worked for him, he was way beyond helping ten-year-olds find albums. He’d stop by now and again, making a b-line for the store manager’s office. He was friendly enough, and everyone liked him. Standards were high, and there were lots of opportunities for advancement in the rapidly expanding company. All the full timers wanted to impress Mart.

I didn’t last long. I was no good at organizing the stockroom, preferring to stamp customers’ names in foil on their freshly purchased bibles and hang out with the folks in the book department. I quit when I started college at a Methodist liberal arts school, beginning my path out of fundamentalism in earnest.