35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 5
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four
Anyone who might want to start a church in the San Francisco Bay Area likely understands two difficult realities, one, it’s hostile to Christianity, and, two, it’s very expensive to live there. My wife and I went there because of the former. We trusted God with the latter.
Our Dodge Omni did not make it through the first year. We bought a used Subaru Wagon with a three year loan. It was our last car loan. We drove it until it dropped by which time we had saved for another used car. We also moved to a different apartment that was fifty dollars cheaper a month.
In my twenties in the 1980s, no one could force you to buy health insurance. I was taught by wise men to get it, even if we “didn’t need it.” This paid off our first year. Jumping into the car again and again in door-to-door evangelism resulted in surgery for a pilonidal cyst surgery. It’s minor but very expensive without health insurance.
How did the church grow? No one knows who will listen to preaching and who will not. No one knows who will respond well. An important part of starting a church is pressing through the difficulty and rejection.
What helped me persevere were two factors. One, I experienced hardships already. I carried a heavy load through college and grad school that was tough. I majored in biblical languages. Greek and Hebrew were not easy. Our family lived in difficult conditions, my dad working two jobs and taking a full load of classes, driving junk cars and living in harsh circumstances. I played competitive sports and lost a lot of games in college. Our teams won in high school. I played quarterback and we won. Our basketball team won. In college, we lost and lost and lost at every sport.
In football, you don’t just lose, but you get beat up too, especially playing my position. It was tough getting in and staying in shape with many other responsibilities. I could never quit. It was drilled into me by my father never to give up. It wasn’t winning that got me through. We had very few wins in those four years. As our coach liked to say, we were small, but slow.
Two, the Bible gives great encouragement. Most of you reading probably know this one, but 1 Corinthians 15:58 helped.
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in. I thought of it all the time.
What a great verse from the Apostle Paul in God’s Word. When things are not going well, I thought, as can you, my labor was not in vain in the Lord. Even if I got no or negative results, I abounded. God said so.
I hit every door in Hercules, around 20,000 people, 1 1/2 times in the first year. We never had a single service with twenty or more that first year. This occurred to someone who thought he would have 100 in his first service. I had already lost a lot, been literally beaten up, had my bell rung, as we called it then. It was hard.
In the first few months Bridget and I had a few hundred dollars to our name. I lived in an urban area for the first time. I was not a city boy. Someone called our church number, said he was a pastor stranded without gas on a long trip. Out of compassion, I gave him half him a hundred dollars. This might seem crazy, but it really was how naive I was to this kind of situation. It wasn’t the last time someone fooled me in a similar way.
We had some great stories though. God saved some and the church did grow by His grace. God used my wife and I to start one of the Lord’s churches.
In December of that first year, my wife got me an unusual Christmas present. We had no television. She knew I liked watching bowl football games at the end of December and early January. She would rent a television from rent-a-center. Up to that point, I had never heard of rent-a-center. Fundamentalists would preach against television and I understand, but I evangelized the man at the counter. I invited him to church.
The story was that this newly married couple wanted a church, but he didn’t want her Catholic Church. They came on a Sunday night, and besides my wife, those two were it. Four people. They were the Brants, Dan and Van, the latter Vietnamese. On Sunday night, I did a series through Ecclesiastes, which I saw and still see as also evangelistic. It did impact the couple. They kept coming back.
Within a few weeks, I went to visit them to preach the gospel. After preaching the entire message, I asked if they wanted to believe in Jesus Christ, to follow Him. She was ready, so she stood up on her own, and moved to the chair right next to mine. She received the Lord. We baptized her in her swimming pool in their back yard. Van Brant, Mrs. Brant, we now call her, stayed with us from that time henceforth. She is still a faithful member of Bethel Baptist Church, gloriously saved.
To Be Continued
USS San Francisco and the Battle of Guadalcanal, Lands End, Golden Gate Recreation Area
San Francisco has some very interesting historical monuments. At Lands End in the Golden Gate Recreation Area, there is a monument commemorating the naval battle of Guadalcanal in World War II and the USS San Francisco, the lead ship that fought the Japanese army there. The next stop for Japan after Guadalcanal was Australia. U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal August 7, 1942, capturing and secured the airfield. The Marines fought for months against thousands of Japanese soldiers attempting to regain control of the airfield.
A short video about the USS San Francisco and the Battle of Guadalcanal is below:
You can also click here to view the video on YouTube.
Click here to view the video on Rumble.
Japan’s Vice Admiral Hiroaki Abe was dispatched to bombard and land troops on Guadalcanal. Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan, on board his flagship the USS San Francisco (CA-38), a 10,000 ton treaty cruiser, was directed to intercept the Japanese naval strike force. On November 12, near Guadalcanal, a damaged enemy plane crashed into the USS San Francisco, destroying the aft control station, killing and wounding 51 men. With a crippled flagship, RADM Callaghan bravely prepared his task force for this imminent battle, which began at 1:48 a.m. Friday the 13 of November 1942. Never in the history of modern warfare had U.S. Naval Forces clashed with enemy ships at collision range in a pitch-black night. This battle is also the only U. S. Naval surface ship engagement in which two American admirals were killed in action: RADM Daniel J. Callaghan on the USS San Francisco (CA-38) and RADM Norman Scott on the USS Atlanta (CL-51). A total of more than 6,000 men on both sides were killed or wounded. The USS San Francisco, severely damaged, limped home to receive a new bridge and other major repairs at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. She then returned to sea to give battle and bombardment support for landings and occupations in the Pacific. This battle of November 13, 1942, was a major turning point of World War II. It prevented the possible loss of Henderson Field, thus saving Australia from the planned invasion. It marked the beginning of victory in the Pacific.
–TDR
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 4
Bridget and I arrived in San Francisco in late August, joining Calvary Baptist Church there. We found our first apartment in the Marlesta apartments in Pinole. She succeeded at finding a job as a teller at Mechanics Bank. I found one at the Big Five sporting goods. We rented the multipurpose room at Ohlone Elementary School in Hercules. We printed brochures and hired someone to paint two street signs. Our first service we set for Sunday, October 18, 1987. We copied flyers as an invitation for that date.
My wife and I moved into our first apartment. Both of us started working about thirty hours a week. Our missions support would cover only part of the immediate expenses of the new church. I knocked on the first door next to Ohlone School and started covering the town of Hercules with the gospel. For the first month and a half, I invited everyone to our first service.
After arrival, I heard people use the terminology, North Bay. I thought Hercules was North Bay. Early I wanted a name that included a larger geography, so I chose “North Bay Baptist Church.” No one told me, “Hercules isn’t North Bay.” It wasn’t. Hercules is East Bay. Despite that, we still used that name for the first year and a half of our church. We designed a logo with the name.
At least 100 people promised to come for our first service. I was too ignorant not to know how unlikely that was. I expected it. Bridget’s uncle and aunt, who lived down in Santa Cruz, would drive up. We had one family from the sending church who lived in Hercules. They would come. Until that first service on October 18, Bridget and I attended all the services at Calvary Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Every late Saturday night, I set out two wooden portable handmade signs in front of the Ohlone school. I also did this for the very first service. One was larger that sat near the street pointing toward the parking lot. The other sat closer to the multipurpose room, visible from the parking lot, pointing toward the multipurpose room. It was a sandwich board style with the same image on both sides, hinged and propped up against each other.
My wife and I were paying for the multipurpose room in a public elementary school by the hour on Sunday. We rented it for five hours in the morning and two hours at night. This time allowed for us to set up and take down every week. The school had a piano and a podium. We brought a table in front of the podium.
I hung a banner behind the podium that said, “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth,” which was the scriptural theme from the beginning of our church. In the back we had a table with literature and offering plates. All the tables had table cloths. The front table had some kind of flower arrangement on it. This was a ritual every Sunday.
The philosophy I held for the building was that God built the church through His Word. Such a building, good or average, would not stop someone with a true motive from visiting or coming. Even though 100 people promised to come the first Sunday, 7 came.
As you read this, having 7 new people come to church might sound good today. I really did think they would all come. One family of four, the one that lived in Hercules from the sending church, came the first Sunday. We had several others, family and people traveling from other churches, but only the seven invited who said they would come our first Sunday.
What would happen next? I folllowed up on the seven and the 93 or so others who said they would come, but didn’t. From that point, I could start telling the story of those who came, those who stayed a little while, and those who were with us for years. Some from that first year are still in the church. No one from that first Sunday stayed. A couple kept coming off and on that first year, then they were done. The work had begun though.
That first Sunday I started preaching through John and my first sermon was in John 1:1. I continued that series on Sunday mornings until I was done. Every sermon was typed with a manual typewriter on regular typing paper.
I believed preaching was most important to the founding, strength, and continuation of our church. Long term, I believed it was most important in every way. Jesus told Peter, Feed my sheep. I didn’t have many sheep yet, but I knew this church would grow from evangelism, yes, but also from exposition of scripture.
People had personal computers in 1987. I knew one person with a computer at that time. It wasn’t until later that first year that I bought a used IBM Selectric with a removeable ball. The first half of that first year I typed a bulletin every week on a manual typewriter. All my flyers were literally cut and paste. That’s where the terminology, cut and paste, came from. Each letter was cut from a sheet of stylish letters and then pasted. We really have it good today when it comes to laying out printed materials.
My wife and I were working, so we had regular work hours at the bank and the sporting goods store. We lived in an second floor single bedroom apartment in Pinole. We bought a used bed, used mattress, used sofa, used kitchen table, used chairs, and a used lamp. I think all our furniture cost us two or three hundred dollars total. When I wasn’t at work, I jumped into the Dodge Omni and went door to door. Sometimes my wife came with me. We started covering every house and apartment in Hercules, moving out concentrically from the building where we met.
During the first year, up the street from Ohlone School I rang a doorbell with my wife and preached the entire gospel to a man, I remember, named Brian. I know his last name too, even though this was the last time I ever talked to him. Why? He prayed a prayer. He made a profession of faith. My wife was with me and afterwards, I asked her, “Do you think he really got saved?” She said, “No.” We argued a little bit, but the reason I still remember it is because Brian didn’t really receive Christ.
I had evangelized for years, since I was a teenager. I preached to hundreds of people. Nothing compared to what I was doing in the San Francisco Bay Area. I felt like I knew little to nothing about what I needed to do. I began studying evangelism, reading my Bible, studying books, and listening to recordings. How would a church start without anyone hearing the gospel and receiving Christ? That was why we came to California.
To Be Continued
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 3
By the time I finished scouting the San Francisco Bay Area as to where to start a new church, I had about three places of interest. I still didn’t know when I left my Dodge Omni in California, parked on a curb in front the home of our sending church pastor. Then I flew to New Hampshire, where I would work and live in the area of Plymouth. I would serve at Calvary Independent Baptist Church and ready for a wedding to Bridget Kirby on August 8, 1987.
My now wife and I didn’t meet in a conventional manner. I’m not going to tell that story, but I asked her to marry me in Arizona on Superstition Mountain in December 1986. We were visiting where my parents lived as my dad started teaching fourth grade in a church school. Most of our courtship involved writing letters; yes, those paper things with ink on them. We would call on what we now term a “landline” once a week “long distance.” Then it was just “the phone,” always connected to the wall with a “cord.”
Bridget knew what we would do and wanted it, despite the difficulty. I remember when I asked her dad if I could marry her. He asked, “How do you propose to support her?” Hmmmm, I wasn’t prepared for that question. I wove together a theological answer, bouncing around for information in my head. Church planting is not lucrative, especially without support. Even several theological degrees do not prepare for gainful employment.
I preached that summer once a week and worked for a family in the church, repairing Plymouth State College student housing after a school year of abuse of its properties by its students. My father gave my daughter a 1967 Volkswagen wagon. I drove the car home from the airport and stripped its clutch on that first drive. Welcome to the real world, as I paid for a new clutch on a car that wasn’t mine…yet. I preached an expositional series through 1 Corinthians 13.
The plan was to spend the summer in New Hampshire, marriage, honeymoon, and then a drive all the way across country in a U-Haul truck. We would stop in Wisconsin to pick up some of my things in Watertown, left in the house where I had lived that last school year. A church in San Francisco, Calvary Baptist Church, would license me and send us to Hercules.
Hercules was a bedroom community in the East Bay, just north of Berkeley California in West Contra Costa County. It exploded with population in the previous decade. It was non-stop people through the entire East Bay, an urban area. Only city limit signs separated one place from another. Hercules, however, had no churches. When I say no churches, I mean not a Baptist, Lutheran, or anything else.
There were zero churches in Hercules period. I always like to say, there were no gas stations either and only one grocery store in a city limits of 20,000. Not many years before, it was nearly empty hills in the home of a former gunpowder company from which it took its name. In 1970 Hercules had 250 citizens. Woven in and around each other were the towns or cities of Crockett, Rodeo, Pinole, El Sobrante, Richmond, and El Cerrito, several hundred thousand people.
Before our marriage and afterwards, my wife had a great desire for people to know the gospel and receive Christ. She was very organized, spoke well, and loved the Word of God. Both her parents served the Lord in their church and encouraged her to do the same. She was a Biology major in college with the idea of medical missions. Bridget took a medical missions trip to Togo, West Africa after her last year of college.
Growing up, my wife worked in her dad’s small businesses, which gave her good experience in hard and varied work. Bridget was president of her college society her last year and did well with people. She also took piano lessons and played hymns well, especially for a new church setting.
Three times I visited Calvary Baptist Church in San Francisco on tours West, one of two independent Baptist churches in San Francisco. My father-in-law received Christ as a teenager at the other, Hamilton Square Baptist Church. Calvary agreed to send us and supported us with the largest amount of any church. We are thankful for Calvary’s big part at the start. Bridget and I would join there and we remained members until our church chartered in the East Bay within that first year.
After our wedding and a two week honeymoon in New England, Eastern New York and Pennsylvania, my new bride and I placed our belongings in the truck. We drove cross country, stopping at churches along the way. We couldn’t fill the small truck with what we owned, it was so little without a stick of furniture.
Bridget and I both talk about the moment we crossed the crest North of Vallejo, viewing the entire Bay Area from that vantage point above the bridge over the Carquinez strait. We then crossed the Bay Bridge and stayed at a hotel in San Francisco in the Mission District. The room had hair in the bed, so we changed to a new room on our very first night. This did not portend confidence at a moment of weakness.
Someone in the sending church allowed us to stay at their house while we settled in, looking for an apartment, jobs, and a place to meet. We were two newlyweds. College was done. We now lived in a metropolis all alone. We knew we wanted to serve the Lord and start preaching the gospel. Almost everything still needed to be done. The San Francisco Bay Area did not know what was coming for it.
To Be Continued
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 2
Every true church starts by the grace of God and under the headship of Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul wrote and I echo his belief in 1 Corinthians 15:10:
But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.
He described in part his planting of the church at Corinth, a New Testament church under the authority of Jesus Christ.
My first church was a Baptist church, First Baptist Church of Covington, Indiana. As a 12 year old, I joined Maranatha Baptist Church in Covington. Later that year, I gave a public testimony of salvation to become a member of Calvary Baptist Church in Watertown, Wisconsin. For three months after my last year of graduate school, I became a part of Lehigh Valley Baptist Church in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. I came back to Calvary in Watertown for two years before joining Emmanuel Baptist Church in Elkhorn, WI.
One of my college professors, the late Richard Weeks, allegedly had the largest personal Baptist history library in the world. He accumulated a huge collection of old, out-of-print Baptist books available for his students to read. The bookstore sold Baptist books, required for outside reading. My college reprinted the two volume A History of Baptists by Thomas Armitage. The textbook for Baptist History was John T. Christian‘s, A History of Baptists. We read books by Roy Mason, S. E. Anderson, Chester Tulga, J. M. Carroll, and B. H. Carroll.
I was and am a Baptist. I believe that there have been true churches in perpetuity since the first church in Jerusalem, known by different names. They began calling those churches, Baptist churches. Certain distinctives characterize those churches, the first of which is the Bible is their sole authority for faith and practice. They are also separatist, separated personally and ecclesiastically. True Baptist churches are the Lord’s churches.
Three different summers I traveled to 70-80 churches out West. I witnessed firsthand the dearth of true, biblical churches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both the teaching of Romans 15:20 and the obvious need to preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15) worked on me toward the idea of starting a church in the San Francisco Bay Area, Romans 15:20 reading:
Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man’s foundation.
It was not my desire to go somewhere where I believed the gospel was already being preached. With 40 million people in California and 7.75 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area, in my lifetime I would not run out of the opportunity to preach to people who had not heard, no matter how hard I worked. The Bay Area is also a transient society with a huge turnover. Every 5-10 years, new people or families occupy the same apartments or houses. Even if most didn’t listen or were hostile to the gospel, some would.
From my own observation, professing Christians were not bumping into each other and scrambling all over the Bay Area, like ants on an anthill, to preach the gospel to those who haven’t heard. I didn’t know how they would react, but I was optimistic. I theorized that the Bay Area was so bad, as bad as people think or worse, because not much preaching occurred there. Before fire fell like Sodom and Gomorrah, someone should make a greater attempt at preaching to it.
As I went to college in the early eighties, I heard very little exposition of scripture, except on the radio. I became convinced of exposition as superior or even God’s will for preaching and dedicated myself to its practice. Exposition became my belief for or philosophy of preaching. It was not until graduate school that I planned in the sense of preparing to preach exposition. Zooming forward to right now, I preached or taught through every word of the Bible over the thirty three years. Nothing had a greater impact toward success than the Word of God in its context.
I had decided that I would start the church with raising only limited support. I determined not to spend any extra time doing so. Instead, I would receive some money from churches and work a job. I had not heard the term, bivocational, but I did know the word, tentmaking. Rather than spend months waiting, I wanted to get going right away.
In May 1987, I knew the San Francisco Bay Area, but I wasn’t sure the exact location where I would begin. I drove out to California in a Dodge Omni my parents gave me, stopping in churches on the way. Once I arrived, I started scouting. I did that for one week. There was no internet. I couldn’t go online to find out about cities, towns, and other churches. Using paper maps, I went from one town to another, stopping at a phone booth to look for what churches were there in the yellow pages of phone books and took notes at each stop. I called churches at pay phones and talked to their leaders. I had a goal of finding towns with no Baptist church at all.
To Be Continued
Does the KJV mistranslate with the phrase “God forbid”?
The phrase “God forbid” is relatively frequently asserted to be a mistranslation in the King James Version:
Me genoito … means literally, Be it not so, and which might properly be paraphrased by our emphatic “Never!” but which … with small warrant … [has been] seen fit to paraphrase by using the semi-profane expression, “God forbid.” There are fourteen such mistranslations in the epistles of Paul according to the King James version.” (John William McGarvey and Philip Y. Pendleton, The Four-Fold Gospel [Cincinnati, OH: The Standard Publishing Company, 1914], 593.)
The phrase appears in both the Old and New Testaments, in English, in the following texts:
Gen. 44:7 And they said unto him, Wherefore saith my lord these words? God forbid that thy servants should do according to this thing:
Gen. 44:17 And he said, God forbid that I should do so: but the man in whose hand the cup is found, he shall be my servant; and as for you, get you up in peace unto your father.
Josh. 22:29 God forbid that we should rebel against the LORD, and turn this day from following the LORD, to build an altar for burnt offerings, for meat offerings, or for sacrifices, beside the altar of the LORD our God that is before his tabernacle.
Josh. 24:16 And the people answered and said, God forbid that we should forsake the LORD, to serve other gods;
1Sam. 12:23 Moreover as for me, God forbid that I should sin against the LORD in ceasing to pray for you: but I will teach you the good and the right way:
1Sam. 14:45 And the people said unto Saul, Shall Jonathan die, who hath wrought this great salvation in Israel? God forbid: as the LORD liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground; for he hath wrought with God this day. So the people rescued Jonathan, that he died not.
1Sam. 20:2 And he said unto him, God forbid; thou shalt not die: behold, my father will do nothing either great or small, but that he will shew it me: and why should my father hide this thing from me? it is not so.
1Chr. 11:19 And said, My God forbid it me, that I should do this thing: shall I drink the blood of these men that have put their lives in jeopardy? for with the jeopardy of their lives they brought it. Therefore he would not drink it. These things did these three mightiest.
Job 27:5 God forbid that I should justify you: till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me.
Luke 20:16 He shall come and destroy these husbandmen, and shall give the vineyard to others. And when they heard it, they said, God forbid.
Rom. 3:4 God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged.
Rom. 3:6 God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world?
Rom. 3:31 Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.
Rom. 6:2 God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?
Rom. 6:15 What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid.
Rom. 7:7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.
Rom. 7:13 Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.
Rom. 9:14 What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid.
Rom. 11:1 I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.
Rom. 11:11 I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.
1Cor. 6:15 Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.
Gal. 2:17 But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin? God forbid.
Gal. 3:21 Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid: for if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law.
Gal. 6:14 But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.
Does the KJV mistranslate the Hebrew and Greek phrases in question? The answer is a clear “no”! The phrases are idiomatic phrases that involve the invocation of God. Please see my new article at FaithSaves.net on this topic, “Is ‘God Forbid’ a Mistranslation in the KJV (King James Version)?” for more information.
No verse in Scripture promises that God would give English speakers an infallible translation in their language, although one would expect God’s special providence to be upon the Bible He knew would be that of the world-language for many years. Nevertheless, King James Only believers do well to have a knee-jerk reaction in favor of KJV renderings, as, in vast numbers of instances, the KJV’s translation decisions prove to be justifiable, and critics prove to be wrong.
–TDR
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 1
Yesterday, October 18, was the day of the 35th anniversary of the church I planted in the San Francisco Bay Area. Some want to know how it occurred. Bethel Baptist Church now is a solid church in a very, very liberal area, hostile to Christianity, with 3 1/2 acres debt free in the most expensive housing market in the country and a K-12 school. How did this occur?
In 10th grade, I knew I wanted to preach. When I knew that and surrendered to it, it changed me. My priorities changed. I still played sports, still took my regular classes, had my friends, but the Bible, my preparations for that role, moved to the top. During study hall, I pulled out my Bible first. I studied for Bible classes first. I took Greek for my language in my jr and sr years. This allowed me to skip first year Greek in college, and take second year Greek my Freshman year. I majored in biblical languages.
I had already acquiesced to biblical evangelism. I preached the gospel the best I could in different ways. I started preaching door-to-door. I talked to competitors about the Lord after sporting activities. I preached sermons in high school when I had the opportunity and worked with children in church, while in high school.
At one point, someone preached in college chapel about preaching. I had never made it public in a service. I knew it in tenth grade. At that point, our “youth pastor” had young men preach. I signed up and preached. That’s when I knew. In college, I came forward at an invitation, as prodded by this revivalist, to say I was doing this. It is a marker for me at the most. I started arranging everything in my life to fit this future goal. It affected me every day. It still does.
Let me throw something into this story that’s important. My parents sacrificed a lot for me. They both worked to keep my brother, sister, and I in school for jr. high and high school. They allowed and contributed to many opportunities. When I started taking Greek, it was because my dad took Greek. I carried Greek cards on my belt loop and went over my alphabet and vocabulary. I knew that before I ever took first year Greek. No one made me do that. I did it because it emulated my dad taking Greek. It’s not popular to support and honor parents today. My parents did a lot. In whatever way someone opposes what I do, it challenges what they did too. My mom still mentions that to me. It’s personal to her.
I minored in speech in college. All the aspects of leading a church plant require communication. I agree with the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 2 that it does not depend on excellency of communication. Being a part of a speech department meant dramatic productions and oral interpretation. I took advantage of almost every opportunity to communicate in front of people to where it became totally natural to me, when it wasn’t at the beginning of this journey.
I applied to counsel at a Christian camp the summer before my Freshman year in college. I counseled the whole summer at Camp Joy in Whitewater, Wisconsin under the leadership of the late Charlie Hatchett. That helped me. I’m not saying that it’s something someone should do, but I dealt with the salvation of young people under a very good philosophy held by Camp Joy. The camp wanted true conversions and Brother Hatchett emphasized that. Including winter retreats, I counseled 35 or so weeks of camp over three years. I worked with a lot of younger people during that time. It was a good experience for me then and for my future.
My Freshman and Sophomore years, I was voted president of those two classes, then my Junior year, the whole student body voted me Vice President of the student body. I was President my senior year. All that required a lot for leadership then and in preparation for the future.
The summer after my junior year, I traveled with a college team and we put on the lives of Adoniram Judson and Michael Sattler. We played instruments, me trumpet, and sang. I saw many churches in those travels, and I saw the Western United States, where we traveled. I had never been there. Now I witnessed the needs of the West, what was there and what wasn’t there. Something clear, the San Francisco Bay Area may be the neediest area of the entire United States.
During high school, I wrote an essay for the primary high school English teacher. She later became the Dean of Women for the college. She praised my essay. She said, “You can write.” Her positive reinforcement changed my life as a writer. I continued to work at writing the best I could. Fundamentalism was not doing a good job of preparing writers. They still don’t do that well. I didn’t know one person who wrote a book. It’s important to write in the work of the Lord. The Bible itself is writing. Paul wrote epistles.
I kept working at writing. Others noticed it. The Dean of Students, the late Terry Price, and his wife Colene, did Vacation Bible Schools in the summers, and they asked me to write their scripts for their puppet programs every summer. I wrote scripts for the summer groups, the Victory Players, the life of Balthasar Hubmaier and others. Obviously taking college and graduate classes, I wrote many papers. As much as I tried to do a good job, all that writing helped me. I learned how to research, read and comprehend large amounts of material very fast, document, and summarize. All this moved toward planting a church in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1987.
For twelve years, I was member of Calvary Baptist Church in Watertown, WI. I worked with teens. I produced programs for the Wisconsin state youth conclave. The church and its pastor, William Lincoln, and other pastoral staff, encouraged work for the Lord. No one impeded me. If I wanted it, they allowed it. I kept this up.
Growing into fundamentalism, I got a pretty decent music philosophy. The major musicians had an okay philosophy. I don’t go further than that, because it was still undeveloped and weak compared to biblical teaching on worship. I participated in a lot of good music. I sang in Handel’s Messiah seven straight years. I sang in many choirs. All of that aided future worship of God in the church. I’m glad for the impact of the late Monte Budahl and then Don Degraw.
Between my senior year and first year of graduate school, I worked in a so-called pastor-preacher boy program at Lehigh Valley Baptist Church under Tim Buck. This church was just a few years old, started by Calvary Baptist Church in Lansdale, PA. On staff was a former college graduate. My friend Dwayne Morris and I went there with the plan of attending Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary. We did much different work in that church, living with the assistant pastor on his second floor. They helped me develop organization. I started a filing system. I determined to have a huge tract rack like Lehigh Valley. All those would characterize our church in the future.
I didn’t stay in Pennsylvania and attend Calvary Baptist Theological Seminary. I attended a pastor-preacher boy conference at Calvary in Lansdale, where professors from the seminary attacked and mocked the King James Version and biblical standards of Christianity. The seminary doesn’t exist any more, perhaps because of this same reason. If I got one thing from those men, they did a thorough and credible job at breaking down and explaining a text of scripture, something I didn’t hear in person much while in college.
No one affected my theological development than Thomas Strouse. Dr. Strouse still pastors and trains pastors. He taught half my grad classes. I still consider him one of the most important teachers in the country. He put in tremendous amount of work to prepare one of his students.
I wanted to pastor a church in graduate school. I did. I became an intern pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. While I served as Student Activity Director of the college and finished my last year of graduate school, I pastored that church. I taught adult Sunday School every week and preached Sunday morning and evening services. I was doing three different series every week. Also, I sang solos for special music. I wasn’t a soloist, but my solos affected one elderly lady in the church to where she had me sing a solo at her 50th anniversary celebration. I think those were the final solos of my entire life.
To Be Continued
The Blue Trinitarian Bible Society Greek New Testament or Scrivener’s Greek New Testament
Someone said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. When I hear a critique of the perfect preservation view, standard sacred text view, or verbal plenary preservation view, it almost always focuses on ‘which text is the perfect text of the New Testament.” In the White/Van Kleeck debate, White asked this kind of gotcha question, which Textus Receptus edition is identical to the autographs? A person then waits for the answer.
In the Van Kleeck/White debate, White asked Van Kleeck whether Scrivener’s TR is the perfect Greek text. He said, “Yes.” I’m not saying it’s a good argument, but it works well with a certain audience.
I watched a critical analysis of Van Kleeck in the debate, and the podcast started with the moment White asked Van Kleeck that question. The critical analysis is essentially ridicule of the most inane variety. The young man in the podcast with three other men simply repeated Van Kleeck’s answer and then summarized it with a mocking voice. They didn’t explain why Van Kleeck’s answer was wrong. It just was. Why? Because it is so, so strange and ridiculous.
The critical text side does not have a settled text. If the question were reversed, that side would say it doesn’t know, unlike it’s proponents might say about knowing the 66 books of the Bible. They would say that’s knowable, even though the oldest extant complete twenty-seven book manuscript of the New Testament dates to the fourth century. Books are knowable. The words are not. Why? No biblical reason, only naturalistic ones. The same reasons could be used to debunk any doctrine of the Bible.
I believe Van Kleeck said that Scrivener’s or the blue Trinitarian Bible Society Greek New Testament is identical to the autographs of the New Testament because that corresponds to His bibliological position. If someone says he believes the biblical and historical doctrine of scripture, his saying there is a perfect text conforms to that belief. If he did not know what the text was, he would also admit that he doesn’t believe what the Bible says about itself or what churches have believed about what the Bible says about itself. An alternative is to change the historic and scriptural doctrine of bibliology to fit naturalistic presuppositions.
A biblical methodology that proceeds from a biblical bibliology must fit what the Bible says about itself. Because of this, it believes that the agreement of the church is evidence. This is the unity of the spirit. I’m not going to continue through every aspect of a biblical bibliology but all of those components combined lead to an agreement on one text. Van Kleeck had the audacity to utter it with confidence. I’m assuming that his confidence and assertiveness comes from faith that comes by hearing the Word of God.
Van Kleeck attacked the presuppositions of White in the White/Van Kleeck debate. He wanted to expose the naturalism. White wouldn’t answer the questions and the moderator would not require an answer. White also took the offensive by saying that the audience also was offended by the questions. It’s a common tactic of the left, when they “channel” everyone in the United States by speaking for “the American people.” Van Kleeck asked if there was even a single verse of the New Testament that was settled, guaranteed never to change with a future find of older manuscript evidence. White would not answer.
A vast majority of the opponents of the biblical and historical view on the preservation of scripture say the Bible doesn’t say how God would preserve scripture. I like to say that the whole Bible describes how God would do it. The Bible is very clear about how God said He would preserve what He said. If He told us how, that castigates all the means other than how He said, which includes modern textual criticism.
Very often, even among the standard sacred text proponents, they will not say what the perfect edition is. They anticipate the reaction. They ready for the ridicule. If it isn’t that blue Trinitarian Bible Society textus receptus, then what is it?
Mark 7:4 and the Baptism of Tables–Video
Mark 7:4 reads:
And when they come from the market, except they wash [baptidzo], they eat not. And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as the washing [baptismos] of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables.
This passage is the best attempt in Scripture if one wishes to argue against dipping or immersion for baptism. “Surely the Jews did not immerse their tables in water!” many pro-pouring or pro-sprinkling Protestants and Catholics have argued.
This issue was discussed in the past on the blog; see part 1 here and part 2 here.
People have also attacked the King James Version for rendering the Greek word baptidzo as “baptize” instead of as “immerse.” Is that a valid criticism? Did King James or the KJV translators have an evil motive, and were they trying to hide the fact that baptism is immersion?
If you would like to watch a video that answers these questions, please check the discussion in my first year Greek class #23 here on YouTube, or see the same video on Rumble, or go to 5:23 into the video embedded below:
The discussion of baptidzo continues through 22:55 on the video.
This passage does not prove sprinkling or pouring for baptism because the evidence is actually clear that the Jews did indeed immerse their dining couches or tables. Also, there was no conspiracy to hide the fact that baptism is properly by immersion, as King James himself was immersed (as an infant), as were the English monarchs before him. A strong anti-immersion push actually developed only several decades later at the Westminster Assembly, where requiring immersion for baptism lost by the narrowest of margins–one vote.
–TDR
The Peter Van Kleeck/James White Debate on the Textus Receptus Being Equal to the New Testament Autographa
I’m happy to say that the biblical and historical position on the preservation of scripture is making headway across the world. Today people refer to this viewpoint or doctrine by different names, including providential preservation view, standard sacred text view, confessional bibliology view, verbal plenary preservation view, and the perfection preservation of scripture view. I think some even use a different label than those. Over twenty years ago now, our church published Thou Shalt Keep Them: A Biblical Theology of the Perfect Preservation of Scripture to provide an exposition of this position from scripture.
About a month or so ago, Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio contacted me to debate James White in Pennsylvania. I was glad he asked. This debate, I told him, I wanted to do, would probably do it, but I wasn’t sure if his date would work out for me. I asked him a follow-up about the costs of lodging and travel The next day he told me he needed to know right away so he asked Peter Van Kleeck, who agreed to the debate. I believe it was God’s will. I still want to debate White and wish I could have then, but I was happy that Van Kleeck would be the man to do it.
Along with his dad, Peter Van Kleeck Sr. (Brother Van Kleeck is Jr.), he helps the cause of this doctrine online and many various ways. Several men right now are writing excellent material to read along with what Thomas Ross and I write here and then in our book on preservation. I believe Van Kleeck easily won the debate against James White. I watched it all and have not been able to make the time to critique what occurred, but I don’t want to keep waiting to post the debate, which is right below here.
Every one of the primary defenders of this doctrine, who have contributed much to the defense of the biblical and historical doctrine, would probably do a little bit different in his approach, strategy, or tactics. James White did not answer Van Kleeck’s arguments. His arguments stood and since he took the affirmative, he won. I’m not going to say anymore except that I wish to include below this paragraph the takeaway of Jeff Riddle over the debate. What he said was so close to what I would have said or written about the debate that it could be identical. I don’t think I need to write more than what he said. I might say or write more in the future, but this is good for now.
After having completed this post, I began to listen to the Van Kleecks, dad and son, analyze the debate, starting and stopping and commenting. It is a very helpful exercise, so I’m going to include their videos so far here. They so far have spent two parts on Dr. Van Kleeck’s opening statement and then two parts on White’s opening. Here they are in order.
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