Home » Posts tagged 'Bethel Baptist Church'
Tag Archives: Bethel Baptist Church
35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 6
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
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
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
WORD OF TRUTH CONFERENCE 2021
In 1987 my wife and I, having been married for two weeks, took a U-Haul truck to the San Francisco Bay Area, and we started a church in the San Francisco Bay Area. I pastored it thirty-three plus years. In 2009, I started the Word of Truth (WOT) Conference.
Besides helpful edification of our church, Bethel Baptist, a plan for the conference from the morning sessions was the writing and publication of books. A Pure Church came from the first three years of the conference. A short book on apostasy, Lying Vanities, is coming soon from the next three years. From the following four years will come a book, The One True Gospel, not yet published. We covered the doctrine of sanctification the last three years, and a book, Lord-willing, is also forthcoming, which will be titled, Salvation That Keeps On Saving.
Past conference audio is still available at the Word of Truth Conference website. You can also watch video. The church is the pillar and ground of the truth, and the church is local only. It was our goal with the conference to propagate and preserve the truth. God has given churches this responsibility.
This year will be the first every WOT conference I will miss. It’s occurring this year again and you can watch it on livestream through the links below. I’m sure it will be very helpful. I believe the sessions could be watched later as well upon its completion. The theme of this years conference is Why Is The Bible True? Here is the schedule. You can also click on each one of the links to get to the location of the livestream at youtube.
Wednesday Evening Service, November 10, 7:00pm—Preaching (One Sermon)
Thursday Morning, November 11, 9:30am-12:00pm—Two Sessions
First Session: “The Testimony of the Spirit through the Scriptures and through the Saints”—There is the witness and self- attestation of the Bible being the truth, by the witness of the Spirit in the words of Scripture and in the heart of believers. This session will also address the notion of circular reasoning and of its failed application to the Bible.
Second Session: “The Attack from Satan and Sinners”—Satan seeks to discredit the authority of God’s words; and sinners, in boldness against God’s rule, receive Satan’s lies and play along his cryptic plan.
Thursday Evening, November 11, 7:00pm—Preaching (Two Sermons)
Friday Morning, November 12, 9:30am-12:00pm—Two Sessions
First Session: “The Issue of Biblical Manuscripts”—This will address the argument of manuscript apparent disparities, not only behind the entirety of the text issue, but also behind the manuscripts of the Textus Receptus.
Second Session: “Archaeology of the Old Testament”—This will cover the general proof of archaeology, as well as hone in on a particular, factual, archaeological proof regarding the Old Testament Scriptures.
Friday Evening, November 12, 7:00pm—Preaching (Two Sermons)
Saturday Morning, November 13, 9:30am-12:00pm—Two Sessions
First Session: “Archaeology of the New Testament”—This will cover the general proof of archaeology, as well as hone in on a particular, factual, archaeological proof regarding the New Testament Scriptures.
Second Session: “The Proof of Prophecy”—An unfailing proof to the truth of the Bible being of the mouth of God is the voice of biblical prophecy and its harmony with the real past and the real present. This session will show biblical prophecy to be of God alone.
Sunday School, November 14, 9:45am
“The Realness about the Bible”—This session will walk through the stories and facts of the Bible and expose the simple fact of its realness to our world, rejecting and abandoning the notion that the Bible is mere myth, legend, fable, fantasy, or a compilation of moral stories. It will also include final exhortations to believers and unbelievers, considering the instruction and impact of all the previous sessions.
Sunday Morning Service, November 14, 11:00am—Preaching
Sunday Evening Service, November 14, 6:00pm—Preaching
Recent Comments