Part One     Part Two

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