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