For those who harbor romantic ideas of life on the road as a traveling missionary, a closer look at Connie and Michael's van/office/bedroom/living quarters might quickly disabuse one of such notions. No, it's not painted with day-glo colors, and “furthur” is not tattooed above the front windshield—there is nothing retro about the work of these two traveling preachers. It does, however, have a Jesus fish painted on the outside, kissing a Darwin fish, with a small red heart presiding over them both, a testament to the nature of their divinely, and scientifically, inspired mission. But however divine the outside may be, the inside is decidedly not God's gift to comfort. With an improvised bed covering all but a few inches of available space, a clothesline draped from side to side functioning as a pseudo-closet, and hundreds of books and other bits and pieces of traveling gear jammed in, among, between, and around all other available space, Connie and Michael's living quarters look most like a sort of mobile homeless shelter—that is, if the homeless were passionate about evolution. (Don't send donations for an upgrade—soon after the interview, they purchased a new and much nicer vehicle.) However, for anyone whose spiritual longings have ever included the desire to walk out the front door with nothing but the clothes on your back and hit the road in the name of God, the life that Connie and Michael have taken up certainly strikes all the right chords. Imagine the freedom: you, a car, the open road, the vast cosmos, and three hundred million human beings—dry tinder just waiting for that evolutionary spark.

“I want you to take a deep breath.” Connie pauses to let the audience respond. “Okay. You can be certain that at least three to five atoms you just breathed in were once a part of the body of the Buddha or the body of Jesus. You see, we inter-exist; we are deeply interconnected at all levels.”

The Unitarian church is crowded this evening and the average age is probably about fifty or so—a collection of free-thinking boomers that I imagine run the gamut from peace activists to yuppie executives. Connie, a long-time Unitarian, is in her element here, dispensing scientific wisdom with the grace of one who knows just what buttons to push in her student's consciousness. Call it the Sagan gene, that unique ability to communicate the nature of the scientific world with a religious depth of feeling, but by whatever name, Connie has it. And in this audience, her presentation goes over a little easier than Michael's who is giving the congregation all they can handle.

“When I speak in Unitarian Universalist circles,” Michael confides afterwards, “for the first ten minutes I can always count on a certain percentage of the church having a tilt experience because of the way I'm communicating. They may love what I'm saying, but they balk at my style. It's the Pentecostal passion, the Pentecostal enthusiasm for life and celebration of life.” This passion is a key element of Connie and Michael's ministry. In a postmodern, ironic world that often seems to have associated all deeply felt spiritual conviction with Billy Graham style fundamentalism, Michael is something of an anomaly. He's not apologetic about his spirituality on any level, his body language, his words, his tone of voice all conveying an unspoken challenge to a culture long wary of anyone expressing too much confidence when it comes to matters of truth. Indeed, in both Connie and Michael's ministry, one can almost sense the emergence of a new form of spiritual expression, one that may seem to mimic the metaphysical certainty of a much earlier time, but that is now informed by an infinitely richer scientific and philosophical worldview. If Nietzsche's existential doubt helped set the tone for our spiritual lives at the dawn of the twentieth century, perhaps a new kind of faith, and a new kind of certainty, is destined to emerge as the prevailing mood in the twenty-first. And that seems to be at least one of the underlying messages—that it's time to venture back into the waters of passion and conviction, fully supported this time with the open-minded curiosity of science and the inspired idealism that comes from appreciating the position in which fourteen billion years of evolution has placed human consciousness. “What Pentecostal offers is a confidence, a groundedness in truth, that the liberal churches have lost,” Michael explains. “Liberal Christians so often lack the passion. They don't speak from that base of certainty. And now, with this Great Story perspective, we can all begin to speak again with that level of passion and confidence. You see, I am a Pentecostal still. I have the same exuberant, expressive, passionate relationship to God, to life, and to the risen Christ that I know in my heart.”

While that message may be just what the doctor ordered for liberal Christian churches adrift in a sea of theological uncertainty, Michael and Connie hardly see their mission as destined only for the more tolerant, more receptive, ecumenical edges of the Christian community, or even only for Christians. Michael acknowledges that this vision of evolutionary spirituality may only be alive in a small minority today, but, as he puts it, “That's how evolution happens. It happens on the fringes.” And he is simply undaunted by the formidable challenge their mission represents for much of the religious status quo. “I will be forty-five soon,” he declares. “I believe that in my lifetime, we will see the majority of Christians—I don't know whether it will be fifty-five percent or eighty percent—embracing a deeply ecological evolutionary cosmology, and seeing their traditions through that lens, interpreting Heaven and Hell, grace and forgiveness, the Trinity, the virgin birth, and all the Christian teachings through that lens.”

Now, if that vision is to be anything more than a good idea, then someone besides the Unitarians, the New Agers, and a few pioneering theologians is going to have to get on the evolutionary train. And that means really get on it, not just tacitly accept, as the Pope did not that long ago, that evolution plays a role in life's development. It means appreciating and embracing the profound spiritual significance of placing human life in a universal, cosmological, and developmental context. And for scientists, it means finally giving up the irrational fear that if they allow spirituality into their picture of evolution they are suddenly going to be overwhelmed by the minions of Oral Roberts, taking the country back to the theological dark ages. “Evolutionists don't realize that they have won the war,” Connie tells me, explaining that there are actually very few these days who still argue against the big picture of our evolutionary legacy. Too many scientists are stuck in the past, fighting the ghosts of long discredited creationists. “They are still fighting skirmishes,” she says, “missing the fact that the main argument today is about how evolution has happened—not that it has happened.”

Given their unique talent for conveying the message of evolutionary spirituality, and their unusual melding of science and spirit in a world where precisely that mixture is becoming the hot ticket of the day, it's hard to imagine that the mission of these two modern-day troubadours is not destined for great things. No doubt the bigger venues will come, and the reputation of these relatively unknown wanderers in the religious back roads of a sleepy but slowly awakening America will grow. Until then, if you pass by the local Church of Christ next Sunday morning, or the Rotary Club next Wednesday night, or perhaps the school assembly on Thursday afternoon, and you hear a preacher's cadence sounding out with all the fire-and-brimstone passion of a world in crisis desperately needing spiritual salvation, maybe you're hearing the early warning signs of a new religious vision, hidden now, but slowly building to what promises to be one of the most interesting cultural crescendos of the new millennium. And maybe, just maybe, that voice you hear is not just a call from the future, but the sound of Connie or Michael out on that missionary road, preaching the good news of a coming revelation, an evolution revolution, a new kind of Lord for a new kind of world.