Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Jo Buck.
Jo Buck was born in San Francisco to Italian Catholic parents. She came to Christ in Bay City, Michigan, three years before her husband Herman did. She and Herman eventually became Church Army evangelists, and for about ten years they served small Episcopal churches in Nevada, driving long distances between congregations.
Jo came to Camps Farthest Out in 1970, first as a camper and later as a council ring member and speaker. She taught creative writing and art, led creative conversation, talked about the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and spoke about finding Jesus in the quiet place within. She also had a way of making serious things funny.
Jo grew up in a strict Italian Catholic home. “My parents came from Italy, and we were very strong Catholics.” She attended parochial school with the nuns. But by the time she was fourteen, she had drifted away. “After I became 14, church was a thing of the past.”
Her family separated while she was still in her teens. She began dreaming about a place in Michigan where she had been happy as a child, so she went there. That was where she met Herman Buck. “I met Herman Buck, and we got married.”
In Bay City, Jo and Herman played cards, gave parties, and had what she later called their partying days. People from the Evangelical Free Church were canvassing the neighborhood, and a neighbor came to Christ. Jo was still hosting a party that night. “We did a little partying in those days.”
Then she had a dream. “I dreamt that I saw a cross and I shall never forget it. And Jesus was on the cross. And you know where I was? I was shooting dice.” She came to Christ and began telling other people about Him almost immediately. “With a cigarette in one hand and a Bible in another, I was preaching the Word of God.” She laughed about those early sermons. “You should have heard how I pronounce Zechariah.”
Jo and Herman built their house themselves on two acres and she started a Sunday school for the neighborhood children. She also began praying for Herman. She prayed for three years. She even put a New Testament in his hunting coat. He came to Christ on March 4, 1956.
The recession of 1957–59 put Herman out of work for a time. They kept tithing and learned how to live on very little. “I lived so long on $10 a week for groceries.” When Wellman Bronze and Aluminum came to Bay City, Herman found work there, first tending the owner’s garden and eventually becoming assistant production manager.
Jo, meanwhile, went through three difficult years. “I went through three years of darkness.” She was trying hard to live the Christian life, but she knew something was missing. One day, sitting in a cafeteria during her lunch hour, she suddenly saw what it was. “I said, oh my God, forgive me, I really haven’t loved your children.” She began teaching herself piano during those lunch hours. She was convinced Herman was going to become a minister, and she wanted to be ready.
In 1961 she was alone in her living room when she was baptized in the Holy Spirit. “A bolt of electricity went through me.” At first only a few syllables came. Two weeks later she was praying freely. Herman later joked that Jo was always ahead of him.
In the early 1960s, David du Plessis laid hands on Herman and Jo for ministry. They went to New York for a year of Church Army training. Jo had her own name for the training exercises. “Now, some people call it group dynamics, but at the time I was calling it group demonics.”
They had no health insurance. “We had no hospitalization. We had to have healing so many times.” Jo was commissioned as an evangelist in the Episcopal Church. “I am not a priest in the Episcopal Church.” She knew exactly what she was. “I was commissioned as an evangelist in the church.”
Herman and Jo went to Nevada in 1964. For the first year Jo lived in Eureka while Herman served two churches. Then the bishop gave her two churches of her own, in Pioche and Caliente. “I want you to be the lay vicar in charge of those two churches.”
She drove long distances and played hundred-year-old pump organs. The churches were small, but she took them seriously. She also had no illusions about the people in them. “If you come to this church to find perfection, I want you to know you’ve come to the wrong place.” The crosses later worn by the CFO council ring were made in Pioche.
In 1969 Jo learned that she had cancer. She wanted to get to a healing conference in Los Angeles, so she and Herman packed the car and started driving. They got as far as Las Vegas. Then the car fell apart in the middle of town.
Jo sat in a restaurant with a cup of coffee and asked God what she was supposed to do. She ended up in a hospital in Henderson, Nevada, where she had surgery. Lying in bed afterward, she heard “Surely goodness and mercy” being sung on a neighbor’s television. She began to weep. “Because I was truly healed of cancer through prayer and nutrition.”
Not long afterward, she was driving her Volkswagen in the snow when she went off the road. She came to lying face down in the sagebrush. She sat up and said only: “Jesus, help me.” A man came down the hill and went for help. At the hospital in Ely, the staff could not find a pulse. Jo came back. She was not afraid of death. “I want to be awake. I want to see the Lord. I don’t want to miss that step over.”
In 1970 Herman saw a brochure for the Arizona Grand Canyon CFO camp. “And Herman took one look at that brochure and he says, We’re going to that camp.” Jo went on a scholarship. “I would not be here where Glenn Clark stood if it had not been for a scholarship.”
CFO gave her a place to use many of the things she loved. She taught creative writing and art, led creative conversation, sat on the council ring, and eventually became a speaker herself. A little girl’s description of CFO stayed with her. “It’s like walking into the heart of God. That’s what CFO is to me.”
Jo spoke at Oregon in 1973 and at Arizona Grand Canyon and Montana in 1974. She taught that ministry is not something a person simply decides to take up. “You never place yourself in a ministry. You do not place yourself. You are called by God and chosen by the people.”
Around 1974 Herman and Jo moved to Valentine, Nebraska. Herman had churches there. Jo did not. She suddenly discovered that the work she had been doing had become part of her identity. “Well, I had an identity crisis. That’s what happened.”
She spent her time fixing up the house, but underneath it she was asking a much harder question. “And I didn’t know who Jo Buck was.” Their life in Valentine became difficult. For a year and a half the telephone could ring at any hour, and a small Christian community gathered around them in prayer. Most nights there were people praying with them. Jo came through it without bitterness. “Did I come through it with resentments? No. My heart’s full of love.”
In 1977 she helped Rita Bennett teach about the baptism in the Holy Spirit at an Episcopal renewal conference in Denver. That June she spoke at the first Black Hills CFO camp at Spearfish and later at Koronis with Tommy Tyson. Tommy took up something Jo had said about her surgery. “There’s no contradiction between Jo being in the hospital and kneeling at the altar.” For Jo, healing and suffering were never simple opposites. Both could become places where she met God.
Jo taught that there is an inner sanctuary, a place in the heart where Jesus lives. “In my sanctuary, don’t laugh, I have a rocking chair.” She learned the Jesus Prayer from the Orthodox tradition and eventually reduced it to one word. “I just say Jesus. Because I know what’s behind the name of Jesus.”
She taught that the body of Christ is people, and that some of those people might never be noticed publicly. “Maybe you’ll be a hidden one.” But hidden did not mean passive. She had little use for a faith that never got around to doing anything. “Wishy-washy Christians have never done very much for anyone.”
She could also puncture religious solemnity in a sentence. “God understands the King James language. He has had to put up with it for centuries.” When someone assumed she had a story about several husbands, she answered: “No, no, I have never had five husbands. One is enough.” And she had a little rule about giving: “The takers eat better, but the givers sleep better.”
Jo Buck had come a long way from the girl shooting dice beneath the cross. She had learned to pray, preach, drive desert roads, serve little churches, survive sickness, and keep going when she no longer knew exactly where she fit. She knew the answer to that last question too. She was Jo Buck, and Jesus was in the rocking chair.
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.