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