It was January 1986. I remember hearing that singer Ricky Nelson had been killed in a plane crash when his plane caught fire. They were headed to Dallas to do a New Year’s Eve performance as I recall. In China, thousands of students had just spent twenty days protesting for democracy and the demonstrations spread from Shanghai to Beijing, culminating three years later with that unforgettable massacre in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

Deep in the heart of Texas, we were fighting a different battle. When I say we I mean the Christians of the city of Arlington. It was a spiritual battle, one in which, I now realize, we had no business.

Not in that way.

Not the way we did it. The fact is, despite the fact that we kicked over the biggest hornet’s nest any of us could have imagined, the vast majority of Arlington’s Christians did not know there was a battle going on between them.

To make matters worse, in my opinion, those who dared to get involved had no idea how it was supposed to have been run and fought for. Like the Light Brigade’s charge, our well-intentioned heroics proved futile and devastating to the local Church.

My hope and reason for writing this tract is that despite the many teachings by spiritual leaders on the subject of Spiritual Warfare in books, pulpits, and on Christian television in the US themselves and their community the agony of what a well-meaning but misguided Church Body went through in Texas…and the relentless, spiritual backlash that followed.

Norm Hines was a graduate and tenured professor of art at Pamona College in Claremont, California in 1984 when he was commissioned by Jane Mathes Kelton, CEO and COB of the Kelton Mathes Development Corporation (and heir to Scottish-American television magnet Curtis Mathes), to take over the Caelum Moor project. It was a monumental work of art that would become the signature and focal point of The Highlands Business Park, a 340-acre multi-use business community in Arlington, Texas.

Norm won $1.5 million for the project, a task that would take more than two years to complete. The sculpture would consist of 540 tons of free-standing pink Texas granite, 22 pieces in all, ranging in height from 15 to 34 feet, and was named Caelum after a remote constellation in the southern skies that comes from a word Latin meaning “sculptor’s tool”. and Moor after the mystical and windswept moors of Scotland. The Stonehenge-like artwork, set on 5.5 acres of gently rolling parkland, included a small winding lake, fountain, seasonal landscaping, and a 350-seat natural amphitheater. The stones were placed in 5 separate groups, each with its own Celtic name, including Tan Tara, De’Danaan, Morna Linn, Tolmen Barrow and Sarsen Caer. Caelum Moor was one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere.

From 1986 to 1997, this collection of twenty-two pink stones was at the headwaters of Johnson Creek in Arlington. I vividly remember driving home to DeSoto, through Arlington from Fort Worth in 1986, when an errant convoy of about sixteen 18-wheeler flatbed trucks hauled the huge pink stones from what would become known as Caelum Wasteland. Instantly, I knew they would be a problem wherever they ended up. I never thought the stones were headed for Arlington. I assumed they were just passing through.

Boy was I wrong.

In time, Caelum Moor, and the war we wage over it, would be broadcast on CNN, FOX, Dallas-Fort Worth television, and in newspapers and websites around the globe.

How it all started… In those days I attended a “Bapti-Costal” church called the Arlington Christian Center (ACC) which boasted 3,000 members. ACC was located on Bardin Road and was located at (please write to Pastor Michael at [email protected] to get this book in its entirety)