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35th Anniversary of the Church I Planted in California, pt. 7
Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six
Going door-to-door the first year, I met Geri Singleton, a black woman about 45-50 years old. I preached the gospel to her. She received it. I came back. She still showed interest. She came to church, not faithfully at first. We baptized her and her teenaged son the same night as Art Anabo. Geri grew and grew. She became a faithful member. She is still one, and since that beginning, she taught Sunday School and discipled several women in our church.
After a year and a half, I informed all of the churches that supported us, we were self-supporting. This was in the Spring of 1989. Even though we had buildings, were still a new church plant. We barely had enough in expensive California to support a pastor and only one who lived in a tiny apartment with a wife and no children. Bridget also continued working at the bank.
While evangelizing in Hercules that first year, I talked to a man, who said he bought his house after selling his mobile home. I came home that day and told my wife the story. That very night we drove to a mobile home park and found a single wide, just for sale that very day. The owner died and left the home to her brother, who was eager to sell fast, and offered it for 10,000 dollars. We bought it and moved in.
The San Francisco Bay Area had Fleet Week every year because of the Alameda Naval Air Station, which closed in the early nineties during the Clinton Presidency. In the early days we had up to five families attend our church from the Naval base, and one faithful family in particular, the Ruckels, bought us carpet for our new tiny mobile home. The same year we bought it, the park voted to become 55 or older and we were now the only twenty somethings there. The timing was perfect. A few years later we sold the mobile home for 19,000 as a down payment for a two bedroom condominium.
Evangelizing door-to-door in Pinole, I met Brenda Rose. She came to a service. She was saved. Shortly thereafter she met a Navy man, who grew up in Arkansas in the Church of Christ. I met with both and Doug Stracener was saved. The two went to Bible college, trained, and then went back to Arkansas. There Doug discipled dozens of people using a thirty week discipleship I wrote and our church used.
I was never a carpenter, but suddenly with new buildings and no construction types in our church, repairing and maintaining the buildings was difficult. We had a tiny nursery spot right next to the meeting room and the babies were loud. We decided to split our only other large room into a nursery and a classroom, which required building a wall. About that time, a homeless man knocked on the door and asked if he could do any work. He said he didn’t want money, just a place to sleep and milk and cookies.
Scott had been a successful general contractor, who became disabled in a work accident and he wasn’t covered by insurance. He couldn’t do most of the work to build a new nursery, but he could tell me what to do. I would preach to him while I worked and every day bring him milk and cookies. He slept in the nursery.
In October 17, 1989, one day before our second anniversary of the church, I sat in front of the mobile home after supper with my wife in our running Subaru, talking before I went to work at the church building. That year the Oakland A’s played the San Francisco Giants in the World Series. Most people were already at home to watch the Bay Bridge Series.
Someone, I thought, as a practical joke began to jump up and down on the bumper of our car. As our car rocked violently, I saw the road in the mobile home park like a ribbon rolling in front of me. It threw our neighbors cat way up in the air and it shrieked as it flew in the sky. What was happening? It was the biggest earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early twentieth century San Francisco Quake. They called it the Loma Prieta quake.
I had never experienced an earthquake before, except for the typical minor tremors anyone will feel in the Bay Area from time to time. This was a Big One, albeit not The big one. I left my wife at the mobile home, not really knowing how serious this was. My first stop at a hardware store to pick up some things revealed the extent. Almost everything on the shelves was now on the floor. The rolling quake scattered nuts, screws, paint, glass, and bolts all over the store. After seeing that, I drove to the church building to see.
Everything at church was fine. I could only imagine how much the building moved. Our mobile home rode the wave, but up on stilts it was in a better position than some houses. It was the only moment I remember wishing I was in the air rather than on the ground. It was not terra firma that October evening.
What I found was that a church member was stuck on the Bay Bridge because part of it collapsed. He couldn’t get home that night. Over a hundred died on Highway 880 near Oakland, only ten minutes from us, when the top deck collapsed on to the bottom. Many across the country saw Candlestick Park swaying on national television right before the Series game began. The timing saved hundreds from death, as the highways were half as crowded as normal, fans from both side of the Bay already sitting on their couch to watch.
Anyone could wish that an earthquake would grab the attention of the lost. I can report that it did little to nothing for constructive introspection. More than anything, people in the Bay were, one, angry, and, two, determined to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
To Be Continued
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. 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
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