Part One     Part Two     Part Three     Part Four    Part Five

During the last part of our first year of our church plant in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hercules held their July 4 festivities, which included a parade.  Our church could enter a float in the parade, and we won the trophy for most patriotic float.  I built the whole thing in our small second floor apartment, much of it on the little balcony.

Our new church rented a flat bed trailer and a new couple we met door-to-door in our first apartment complex owned a truck with tow capacity.  My dramatic productions experience came in next.  The float had a back drop of a blue wall with large red letters that said, “Our Christian Heritage.”  I made a paper mache six foot long three dimensional black Bible with “Holy Bible” on the front cover and binding.  The edges of its pages were gold and it had a large red book mark forking out the bottom.  The classic look of a Bible.

I stood on the float and held a six foot tall copper penny that had everything front and back on the normal penny, but it had the emphasis of “In God We Trust” at the top, easy to see for the parade spectators.  I was Abraham Lincoln, full costume and make-up.  My wife was also on the float on a rocking chair, Betsy Ross, sewing an American flag.

After the parade, many, many came up to me, our town over fifty percent Filipino, asking to get a photo with me, Abraham Lincoln.  It gave many opportunities to talk with people and put us on the map.  As I stood on the float, while it was moving down the main street of Hercules, my wife and I waved at people, and I remember seeing a large smile on the face of a man whom just the month before we visited door-to-door in Hercules.

Bridget and another woman first visited the Willis family and talked to them about the Lord.  Then I followed up.  The husband and wife, Tony and Bev, both received Christ.  They were baptized and joined our church.  The first week after his salvation, Tony read the entire New Testament.  They stayed with us a few years before Tony’s job moved him to another state.  They became very busy in our church.  Still today they remain faithful to the Lord, serving Him.  I still see Tony on the side of the road, his face agleam when he saw the float from his church with that message to the community in California.

One elderly Filipino man received Christ, whom we baptized, named Art Anabo.  Arthur had served in the Philippine army along with Douglas MacArthur and his band during World War 2.  We didn’t have our own baptistry that first year, so we baptized in a swimming pool as I mentioned in the last post.  With Art, we borrowed the baptistry of another church.

The pastor of the church with the baptistry gave me instructions for filling it up and it is my most prominent (and worst) baptism story, because I overfilled the baptistry and the water went down into the office and on to the desk of the pastor.  Not fun.  I remember the baptism of Art that night, not just him, but also Geri Singleton, a story I’ll tell later in this series.

My wife continued working at Mechanics Bank as a teller, but our new church grew and the tithes and offerings increased until I could stop working my job at the sporting goods store.  At the beginning of the next year, 1989, a man told me about a church building in El Sobrante.  The church, Bethel Baptist Church, was folding.  They had five members left, two very elderly, and no pastor.

Bethel had 3 1/2 acres of property, all paid for.  By that time in February of 1989, about fifteen months after we started, we had twenty-five regularly attending our church.  I approached the group in El Sobrante with the possibility of a merger.  They wouldn’t survive.  Our church was their hope, one through which God worked His providence.

A few weeks before a vote from both sides, I preached to a mixed group of the two churches.  They liked the expositional preaching.  I came to their group with fifty questions.  Certain agreements must be met or guaranteed as we would reorganize under a new name, Bethel Baptist Church.  I now knew that North Bay was not good for a church in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area.  In the middle of February of 1989 both churches voted to merge, where we now had property and a building and a large majority of the people in the church.  Bethel Baptist Church became the new name of the church.

The very small group with which we merged understood what it really wanted.  It wanted people and a pastor.  Everything that I said we were, the group said it wanted.  However, the group really didn’t know what it was getting, as seen in what occurred in the first year afterwards.  There was good reason why it had shrunk down to almost nothing.

Only two of the original five members stayed through the first year.  Bethel Baptist Church only kept the North Bay people and their two elderly members that fit in much better with the church.  The wife was in her late seventies, but in her younger days, she ran for governor of the Constitutional party in California.  The husband had fought in World War 2 in the Battle of the Bulge.

The building itself, which we inherited, was in rough shape, more of a warehouse, a broken foundation, and many problems.  It didn’t look like a church building, more of an abandoned motel.  It was old and dilapidated, but we wouldn’t pay rent anymore and we had property to do whatever we needed to do.   The merger in the end gave our new church an already completely paid building and property.  That wasn’t all.

In the 1960s, Bethel, a GARBC church, took on a Christian School, Bethel Christian Academy.  The Christian school was still under the authority of the church on paper, but the principal and none of the teachers were members of the church.  All of them were members of new-evangelical churches in the area.  The church had no children in the school.  The school was Kindergarten to Fifth grade and had 125 students.  What would our little group do with a school?  It was now ours.

The first week after the merger with the school in its school year, I met with all the teachers in an after school meeting, so they could ask me questions.  In the most joyous, upbeat, and positive way I could, I answered them the best I knew.  They were fairly typical questions though about standards and dress, almost nothing about education or doctrine.  I told them what I believed, and the next week every one of the teachers except two handed in their resignation.  They taught until the end of that school year and they were done.

The next year, our first full school year, the enrollment went to 65 students, and I knew that we suddenly had only two teachers left.  Those two teachers stayed only the rest of that first year.  We took the position that Bethel Christian Academy was a ministry of the church, so all the teachers must be members.  That year my dad was teaching in a Christian school in Tempe, Arizona in the ministry of a fundamental Baptist church there.  He left there to join Bethel Baptist Church and become the new principal and the third and fourth grade teacher in a divided classroom.

To Be Continued