Life Journal

Chapter Fourteen

2010-10-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

Astoria Oil Services
Some lessons are only learned the hard way.

I had gone to work for Astoria Oil Services in about October of 1984. It was a miraculous thing that, in such a small town as Astoria, an opportunity to ply my trade as an Ironworker would come along. Astoria Oil Services built an oil refinery for the Alaska oil fields, in Astoria. We built the refinery (several buildings) at the Port of Astoria and, when it was completed, barged the buildings to Alaska.

My name was on the unemployment office list. When the job came to town, I was called early on. Though the work was completely Ironworking, the Boilermaker Union had the job. Most of the employees were loggers, fisherman and an occasional shipyard worker. I knew one or two boilermakers on the site and there were I think two or three (including myself) Ironworkers. The day I interviewed another Ironworker was in the opposite side of the room being interviewed at the same time. The guy interviewing me was so excited to have experienced Ironworkers to add to the labor pool.

Because I was in town to pastor and not to work the job, I insisted that I would not work weekends, overtime and that I would take Monday and Tuesday off once a month to attend a pastor's fellowship meeting. They agreed to the terms and chose to pay me a very poor wage, even in comparison to the fishermen and loggers they were hiring to work alongside me. The job turned out to be a real blessing in many ways.

First, it relieved some financial pressure.
Second, it relieved some emotional pressure. For eight hours a day I could escape the pressure of trying to get the church off the ground.
Third, I had many opportunities to witness and saw a few men make professions of faith. Though I did not personally win him to Christ, I had witnessed to Mark Tanguay and was there the day he did trust Christ. Brother Tanguay and his family eventually united with our church and he is to this day one of my dearest friends.
Fourth, God put a man on the job who was a real help to me. I do not remember the man's name. He was a member of one of the nearby Conservative Baptist churches and, knowing that I was a pastor, he would slip up to me a few times each week and ask me for a quick sermon. I would be welding when I pulled up my helmet and there he would be. Because I never knew when he would show up I developed the habit of meditating and working on sermon outlines while I was welding. That way I would have something to give him. It also gave me something to work on for church messages.

My first assignment at Astoria Oil Services was on the Raising Gang. We put the pieces of the building together. My job was as the "hook on" man. It was my responsibility to read the blue prints to figure out which piece of iron went up next, to properly rig it to the chokers and hook it on to the crane. To have less down time for the crane, we would hook on five or six members of iron at a time, the first member would be on the longest choker, making it available to the connectors up on the steel. The second member would be on the next longest and so on. The connectors on this job were a pair of boilermakers. I do not remember the names of both of them but one was Brad. I imagine they were decent boilermakers but they had no idea how to connect an iron structure.
• Time after time I would send the iron to them and they would say they did not fit.
• Time after time I would try to yell (over the sound of the crane) instructions on how to connect the pieces from the ground (God used this to help me develop lungs for preaching) and
• Time after time I would end up climbing up the building and connecting the members for them then climbing back down to hook on the next members for connecting.

During one of our breaks I attempted to witness to the two boilermakers. Brad became infuriated with me and said, "Marvin, I respect you as an ironworker and will work with you. But if I ever see you on the streets witnessing in the name of Jesus, I will kill you on the spot!" I believed he meant it. The story was that he had been away on a job when a local Pentecostal church made contact with his wife and kids. They began attending that church while he was away. They each made professions of faith and they began to pray for Brad to be "saved" too. When he came home, the pastor came to the house and preached his version of the Gospel to Brad. When Brad did not get saved, the pastor turned to his wife and kids and instructed them to leave him. I figure he had a good reason to be angry! Two or three years later I was in the McDonald's restaurant in Astoria and saw Brad's Boilermaker partner. He was thrilled to tell me that Brad had become a Christian (not Pentecostal though). Not that this guy was a Christian - he just remembered the showdown between Brad and me that day at Astoria Oil Services.

I continued to work there, one of the few qualified employees, making one of the lowest wages for several months. Unbeknownst to me the Union representative had discovered what I was being paid and began lobbying to get me a raise. Just before the holiday's I received that raise - several dollars and hour worth, and a check recouping me for retroactive pay from the day of my hire. The Lord does take care of his own.

But not everything was great there. Sometime around the holidays he project adjusted from the connection phase of construction where we put the buildings together, stuffed all the bolts and rattled them tight and plumbed the structures, to the completion phase where we did everything else to finish them. I was placed on a detail gang s a welder. My foreman was Mike Dessert. Mike was a Christian, but from a different background than fundamental Baptist. His doctrine sounded very much like ours and I was glad to receive him into our church. But Mike and his family were not the same as we.

It did not take long before the fur began to fly. At first it wasn't too big of a deal. I thought I was teaching Mike. During breaks at work he would come to ask me questions about things we did and things I preached. I knew he had not done those in his last church, but I did not know he was not buying that we did them. I thought he was growing. One day I opened the door of our church building to find one of the church keys on the floor.
• No note
• No explanation
• Nothing to even tell me whose key it was.

Mike Dessert had quit the church. He was still my foreman at work, but he didn't have the manliness to even look me in the face and give me the key. I have since learned that this is the standard method of church quitters.

I have also learned that it is a very rare thing for a person who has been involved in a non denominational type of church to ever really become a Baptist.
• They might join a Baptist church.
• They submit to the teachings and practice for a time
But it is the rare case for them to truly grip hold of the heritage and convictions of Baptists. In some cases they have even gone into the ministry and became ordained as Baptist pastors, but only years later does is it revealed that, deep in their hearts, they were always what they always were, non denominational, and they lead their churches to practice Christianity in the more non-denominational church way. That's why we see so many Fundamental Baptist churches slipping into practices that are more in harmony with Bill Hybels and those of the less doctrinal churches; they never were Baptists. They have not compromised their Baptist convictions; the truth is they never had them. They merely went along with them when it was best for them to do so.

The lesson? Return to old Ana Baptist principles and practice church in such a way that it is difficult to join the church and easy to leave. The membership of a Baptist church must be, as best as we are able, Baptist.

I worked at Astoria Oil Services twice; the first time was from October 1984 to June 1985. After taking the summer off to try to focus on the church, I returned in September of 1985 and worked there until January of 1986.

Chapter Thirteen

2010-05-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

The Bus from North Bend

The blessings and the provisions of the Lord are encouraging all of the time. Sometimes they can be comical as well. Our first effort at a bus ministry was simply my wife going out in our little Volkswagen rabbit and picking up two or three children. That worked pretty well until we had two children of our own.

By and by George Simmons expressed interest in a bus ministry for our church. There was an area in Astoria commonly known as "dog patch" It was the Blue Ridge neighborhood and I had a burden for the families there, especially the children. Our financial resources were just about nothing but I brought up our burden for a bus ministry at a pastors' fellowship meeting. Pastor Roy Meksch, from North Bend Bible Baptist Church, North Bend, OR, offered to give us a bus and within a little time the McKenzies and the Simmons were on our way to North Bend to pick it up.

The bus turned out to have some "character." It was a "hodge podge" of a machine. I will not remember the exact combination but it was something like a 1950's model International bus body with a 1965 Ford engine, 1967 Pontiac transmission and 1969 Chevrolet carburetor. The year was 1985.

With a little coaxing we managed to get the thing started and off we went with our proud new ministry accessory. We hadn't gotten from North Bend to Astoria before Brother George and I agreed we couldn't in good conscience put children on that bus. It sat outside our building for the better part of a year when I was offered some new pews for our church building.

The seats we had in the building were also given to us. They were wooden theater seats and had served in several church plants before our own. We were thankful to have them as before we were sitting on home made benches. Berean Baptist Church in Pendleton, OR had given them to us and they served us well. Only trouble was that the laminate seats were beginning to separate and splinter and it was not at all uncommon for a lady to ruin her nylons on the seats and once in a while they would get a pretty good splinter in the leg. Greater Portland Baptist Church had just purchased new pews and offered to give us their old ones. They were home made, but much nicer than our home made benches and much less dangerous for the ladies than our theater seats.

Mark Rowland and I headed to Portland in the old bus to pick up the pews. We rattled along through Clatskanie and into Longview all right, but when we got to I-5 the bus began to make "different" sorts of sounds. The sounds got louder and louder until we decided we had best pull over at the Ridgefield exit. I called Anita who came to pick us up. We left the bus there and rented a u-haul to get the pews back to the church. Brother Simmons came back a day or so later tightened the lifter nuts on the bus and drove it home. We sold the thing to Brother Simmons' son.

The last I ever heard about the bus was when the police called me about it being abandoned along the road somewhere near Portland I think. I informed the police that we had sold it a year or two earlier (apparently Brother George's son had not bothered to get a new title for it). I learned to do the transfer of title page to the department of motor vehicles myself.

Chapter Twelve

2009-03-26T11:15:00.001-07:00

Chapter Twelve Something About My Kids

Shortly before Anita ad I moved to Denver to begin training for the ministry Anita became pregnant. We were pretty excited about it of course, but our excitement turned to grief when Anita began spotting about 6 weeks into the pregnancy. I had only recently surrendered for the ministry and just then was training under our pastor in Hermiston and driving a public school bus for some needed income. When I got to the bus barn that morning, I told the dispatch lady about my wife. She told me what she expected was happening and told me I needed to get home and take my wife to the doctor immediately. I heeded her advice and headed to the house. I will never forget hearing from the doctor that day. It was a woman physician, real natural sort of person. After her examination of Anita she called me in the room and told us this pregnancy was, in her words, a “no go.” It sounded to me like something mission control would tell an Apollo crew. She scheduled Anita for a procedure to be sure she would not get an infection, and the pregnancy was over. I don’t know that I realized how devastating that was to Anita until some months later.

By the time Anita and I tried to have a child again, I was in Bible college in Denver. The burden of losing the first baby was weighing on Anita and we had several conversations about trying again. I was in Bible College. I was not making much income and we were for all practical purposes living on Anita’s income as a Christian school teacher. Trying to have a child just then did not make a ton of sense to me. One day, while speaking to a fellow student about all of this I realized that there would be no time that seemed like a good time to have a baby. For my wife’s sake I agreed to try again. Anita became pregnant something like six months after the loss of the first baby. But at Christmas time of 1982 she began to spot again. It was Christmas morning and we were experiencing one of those once in 100 years type of snow storms. I could see a hospital from outside our back window, but I could not get there. We had to wait a couple of days before the weather cleared enough for me to get Anita out. Even then, the television stations were pleading for people with four wheel drive vehicles to volunteer to transport doctors and nurses to the medical facilities. The doctor was such a blessing! He arrived in the room looking like he was Santa Claus (this is just two days after Christmas.)
White beard
Brown outback type hat
Pipe in his mouth
Red flannel shirt and
Rubber over boots

After examining Anita he confirmed that she had indeed lost the baby and in a very fatherly and confident way said, “This is two in a row. Let’s find out what is going on.” He discovered a cyst that he was confident was causing Anita’s miscarriages and a surgery was scheduled. As a side note I learned a valuable ministry lesson the day of the operation. Our pastor, Jim Duncan, from First Bible Baptist Church in Boulder, came and sat with me during the operation. We didn’t talk much. He had a magazine he read and I read something they had there in the waiting room. When the doctor reported that Anita came through the surgery fine Pastor Duncan asked to pray in thanksgiving and then e was off. I have tried to practice that same thing for those in my ministry. Once the surgery was over the same doctor looked at us and said, “Everything is fine now. Go have babies”

Of course Anita had to heal up. Some months later I was reading about Isaac and Rebekah and how he prayed that God would open his wife’s womb. Not until then did I come to the place that I wanted a baby. Before it was Anita’s desire, I was just willing for her sake. But the story of Isaac spoke to me and I began to pray. Not much later Anita was again pregnant with who turned out to be our son, Bohannan.

Other changes were happening in our lives as well. During the course of all of this I had been seeking the Lord’s direction for planting a church in the Pacific Northwest. We had been in contact with the two families in Astoria and had settled on moving there in April of 1984. So we planted the church in Astoria, living in an 18 foot motor home that belonged to my father in law, with Anita being as pregnant as possible! Bohannan was born in July of 1984. By the time of his birth we had moved out of the motor home and into an apartment in a complex that at that time was known as the Riverine Apartments. We got home from our Sunday night service and we were relaxing on our coach when Anita began to tell me about the back aches she had been enduring most of the day. We had not connected them with her pregnancy because they were back ache, not stomach aches. But when she commented that she thought she could time them a light came on in my head! The back aches were coming every five minutes.

We did not have a telephone in those days so I left Anita on the coach to head for a pay phone and call the hospital. Platteville Baptist Church was paying for our health insurance but it was with Kaiser and the nearest Kaiser facility was more than two hours away, in Portland; the St John’s district. I called the hospital in Astoria and spoke with a nurse who said that she was also pregnant and she would feel comfortable in Anita’s condition heading to Portland if we left right then. She told me if anything happened on the way I could always borrow someone’s phone and call an ambulance. Anita and I got in the car and headed to Portland. But we did stop at Farrell’s Burger and got a couple of 25 cent Big Wheel ice creams for on the way. Bohannan was born I think 21 hours after we go to the Kaiser hospital. It was Monday night. The nurse gave newborn Bohannan to me the first thing. I will never forget looking into his face as he squinted at the bright delivery room lights thinking to myself, “What am I going to do now?”

Bohannan’s name was a topic of conversation since before Anita and I were married. I had worked as a welder with a man by the name of George Stone. We called him “Stoner.” He and I were joking around one day. I told him that I wanted to have a kid whose middle name was Tiwater so I could preserve my mother’s maiden name. The trouble was, I joked, that I couldn’t think of a first name that went well “Tiwater McKenzie.” Stoner said, “How about Bohannan?” So when Anita and I began dating I told her if we got married we would have to name our first son Bohannan Tiwater McKenzie. Anita agreed. But when Bo was born, I backed off. It was Anita’s dad who insisted that we stick to the plan. He said the name sounded like a president! As Bohannan grew up people would ask his name and he would sometimes respond, “Oh, you’ll just say it’s a mouthful!”

Wednesday morning Anita and Bohannan were released from the hospital and we headed, for the very first time, as a family of three to our ministry in Astoria. So Anita was in church Sunday night with birth pangs and was in church Wednesday night with a baby. Bohannan never even made his mother miss a single church service!

And he was a hit in our small congregation right away. Bob and Bernie Brandon were our first nursery workers. But they didn’t take Bohannan out of the auditorium. I boasted that I could preach louder than Bohannan could cry. That was only true for a few weeks. It didn’t take too long before Bohannan’s cry would get louder as my preaching got louder. We set up my office as the church time nursery and the ladies (but mostly Anita) took turns watching our son.

Life in the McKenzie house was nice. I can remember that before we had any kids, I was just thrilled to be married to Anita. We had such fun together, she and I. We have always gotten along very well and I was quite happy even without children. But when Bohannan was born I was smitten. Not that everything was easy. When we first got home Bohannan started to cry. And he kept crying. For the first few days all he did was cry. Anita called him “Little Lord Bohannan.” I figured he would quit crying when he got tired enough so I wanted to leave him in his room ith the door closed. I can remember thinking to myself, “Why did they let us out of the hospital without some sort of owner’s manual for this kid?” Guessing that the problem was with nursing, Anita spoke with a woman from the Le Leche League who suggested that she drink a little wine to settle her nerves and let the milk down. I am a preacher and I was not going to buy any wine. We talked Anita’s dad into buying it for us, but Anita felt so guilty about having wine that it made her more nervous. We flushed the stuff down the drain without her having tasted it. After a couple of days I was fed up. I packed Anita and the baby into the car and headed to a nearby doctor. It wasn’t our doctor, but he was close. He gave Bohannan a bottle of formula and he crashed asleep. Anita did nurse both of our babies but we had a back up bottle of formula around just in case!

As Bo got older his blue eyes seemed to me to have lights in them. To this day I can’t think of Bo without seeing those piercing blue eyes of his childhood. He still has them to this day, but the years have darkened his features and somewhat hidden those shiny eyes. Bohannan was always busy. I was sitting in our living room reading a book, I think by Jack Hyles that said something about you’ll know it is time to have another child when your youngest is too busy to hug you any more. I sat the book down and asked Bohannan to come give me a hug. He was too busy playing so I got up from the chair and told Anita it was time to have another baby.

When Anita got pregnant with our second child, we were without health insurance. Platteville Baptist Church in Platteville, CO had covered health insurance until Bohannan was born. When they stopped covering us, we dropped health insurance. I was reading a lot of John R. Rice’s stuff then and he was against the use of health insurance anyway. I did observe that as long as we did not have insurance we did not seem to need it, but whenever we did have it, there was always a reason to need it. Since we did not have health insurance we needed to find the least expensive way we could to have our next baby. The hospital in Seaside, OR, just 17 miles down the road, had a deal where if a mother could get in and out of the birthing room in less than 24 hours there was a flat fee of $700.00. Anita began seeing Dr. Sally Marie in Seaside and we began to pay down our $700.00. Anita’s sister Shirley and brother in law Larry were staying in Seaside the week that Caleb was due to be delivered and they had offered to watch Bohannan if our new baby happened to come that week. It was Saturday night when Anita began having those back pains again. We watched carefully because this time we were only driving 20 minutes, not 2 and a half hours and this time we HAD to be out of the hospital in less than 24 hours. When it seemed like we had to head to the hospital it was nearing 11:00 PM. We all packed up and headed to Seaside and I stopped by the motel where Larry and Shirley were and took Bohannan to their room. But they would not open the door. I could hear them inside, but they would not answer the door. Still carrying Bohannan I ran down to the office but it was closed. I ran back up the stairs to the room and once again knocked. Still they would not open. Again I ran down to the office and frantically knocked on their door. Someone answered! I asked the cal Larry and Shirley’s room. They thought I was just one of their friends there with them at the convention. We finally got Bohannan settled with them and headed to the hospital.

I got Anita into the hospital just a few minutes before midnight. The attending nurse had no help so she had to make a call to get some other staff in the hospital and to call our doctor. Caleb was born at ten minutes after midnight. He was as dark skinned as could be and had a full head of black hair. He looked as different from Bohannan did as he could have. But he was beautiful. After making some phone calls I headed to the house to get some sleep. I ran our little Volkswagen Rabbit bus route for Anita that morning and preached the morning services before heading back to get Anita and Caleb They were out of the hospital in plenty of time for Caleb to attend church the very day of his birth.

Caleb’s personality was just about as different from Bohannan’s as his looks. While Bohannan seldom slept through the night – even when he got older, Caleb slept through the night (at least much better than Bohannan did) right from the beginning. Caleb was quieter and much more given to hugging us.

My children have been the joy of my life since the day they were born. I cannot imagine what life and ministry would have been without them. They have not been perfect children and I have not been a perfect father. But I rejoice in my sons each and every day.

Chapter Eleven

2009-03-17T16:16:00.001-07:00

Chapter Eleven Early ministry
The earliest days in our ministry were the toughest and the best at the same time. When we first got into the building we had nothing so far as church furniture. So our first church benches were homemade. I had no podium and stayed that way until during the first summer when Pastor Bob Roarke came for a week. Pastor Roarke took some 1x4 rough cut cedar boards that were stacked in the back of the building and made from them a very handsome homemade pulpit. We used it with joy for all those years in the service station building.

Our auditorium room did have a natural gas heater in it, but we did not have the money to pay for the gas so that would not do for us. I found someone who was willing to give us a very old Franklin type wood burning stove. After creating a new handle for the stove door (out of my chipping hammer) we were in business. Most of the time people gave me wood rounds to split and burn. Sometimes I had to make trips to the mountains to get firewood.

Rod Hockley made one of those trips with me. My pick-up was a short box so I tried to take everything out of it I could so there was more room for firewood on those mountain trips. This particular morning I picked up Bro Hockley at his house in the morning and left my spare tire and jack at his house (saving room). Brother Rod joked with me as we were driving up to the woods, “No spare tire, now that is faith.” I joked back, “No, that’s just stupid!” Sure enough, we had a flat tire up there in the hills. I ran over a tree limb and drove it clear through the tire; ruined it for good. Trouble was, we were many miles up there in the mountains. Bro Rod stayed with the truck while I began the long hike down. I stopped at the first house on the route, several miles down the mountain from where my truck was and made a call for help. I did not have a phone at home in those days so I had to call Bro Hockley’s wife, who had to drive over to our apartment and tell my wife. She then had to drive over to the Hockley’s house to get the spare and the jack before she made the trip up to rescue us. I have very good memories of sitting there along that mountain road, meditating and praying while I awaited my wife. I also have good memories of splitting that wood out back of our building.

The Franklin fireplace was not an airtight stove so it burned a lot of wood. I would go to the building Sunday mornings about five AM. My routine was to start a fire, clean the building and then spend some time in prayer and Bible study before I headed back to our apartment to get my wife and baby for church. One time after cleaning the bathroom I washed my hands and threw the paper towel I dried with into the fire before sitting down with my Bible. A moment into my Bible reading and I realized my wedding band had come off in the paper towel and was in that roaring fire! I have no idea why, but that wet paper towel had not yet been consumed by the flames. I reached into the fire and retrieved it and my ring.

Usually heating with the wood worked fine. I got it down to a pretty good science after a while. But one time that fire got very hot. We had some students coming from the local Job Corps Center to our services at that time. One night one of those young ladies thought the building was going to burn down! She spent most of my sermon with wide eyes alternating between looking at the red hot sides of the fireplace and at me, hoping I would do something. I was preaching and nothing was going to stop me. But I was watching that fireplace turn red hot too!

We had some of the most fun times in that small building with our first little congregation. Some of my most favorite were our salmon BBQ’s. George Simmons would bring his BBQ to the church and we would get some of our folks to go catch a salmon or two. Then we’d invite people in town to come to church and have some salmon with us. We generally would get a visitor or two but I don’t remember that any of them kept coming to church through that event. I do remember building a very close heart to the Simmons family.

In those earliest days probably our most successful ministry for bringing in new people into our church was our Christmas programs. Karen Hockley babysat for a number of families and many of those children began to come with her to Sunday School and Church. So we were able to put together a simple Christmas program I think he very first year. It wasn’t much of a production. The children would dress up a little and sing some Christmas songs for about 10 minutes. Then I would preach a Christmas sermon from a “preacher of the past.” I got a monthly magazine that included each month a short bio of a preacher of the past and it always had a reprint of one of that preacher’s sermons. Of course, the December edition was always a Christmas sermon. It worked well, was simple to orchestrate and really did give us new families in our church.

I did a lot of door knocking, but we never saw any real results from that. We did get to bring some kids to church through our door knocking efforts. I met a family out in the Jeffers Gardens area of town that had two children they let us bring to church. Anita used our little Volkswagen Rabbit as a Sunday School bus and brought those two (and later a third) to church. Then Anita served as the Sunday School teacher for those kids too. They were a handful, but we loved them.

Chapter Ten

2009-03-10T13:57:00.000-07:00

Chapter Ten Rain
Speaking of rain and the building, it is time I describe our two and a half year rental in that gas station. Since our first services were held at the Pasco’s home in Young’s River Loop, driving to Astoria involved driving over the Old Young’s River Bridge and driving past an abandoned service station next to the bridge. The building was a dull green color. The old gas pumps were still out front, and someone had spray painted on the garage doors, “For Rent.” It looked like graffiti when you first saw it. Since nothing in town was coming available, I enquired about the service station. The owner was a businessman from Portland. We could not afford to rent the whole building from him (I think he wanted $600 a month) but he agreed to rent two rooms to us. I believe the monthly rent began at $300 per month and was eventually increased to $325. There was a man who rented the garage portion of the building for about one month, but that was the only time we did not have full use of the building, even though we only rented a portion of it.

Naturally we wanted to make the place look as nice as we could as we worshiped the Lord there. We did not have a phone in those days so I wrote the owner asking permission to paint his building (I was anxious to get “For Rent” off the front of our church!) He wrote back and broke my heart. I misread his letter to mean that he wanted to charge me $300 more for the building if it was painted. I, of course, knew we could not pay that much more, especially when we were the ones painting the building. The process took several days, but his reply letter assured me that his intention was to PAY me $300 for painting his building. Over the course of the three and one half years we were in that building we also:
Built a steeple
Covered the gas pumps and
Resided the building
Our landlord turned out to be one of the kindest men I have ever had the privilege to know. He cared for us in ways he did not have to and did all in his power to make it possible for us to continue in the building.

Of course he did have reasons to want to keep us happy and able to stay in the property. It was not without its unique eccentricities so to speak. For instance, whenever it rained the floor of the entire building was under water! The room we used for the auditorium had a dark tile flooring. That would have been fine enough, I suppose, but when it rained there would be a nice layer of water under our feet. In order to make the matter a little more tolerable I decided to put an indoor outdoor Astroturf carpet over the tiles. It did not prevent the floor from having water on it, but at least we couldn’t see it as the carpet was floating over the top of it. Looking back now, I have no idea why the floor did not mildew. God taught me a lesson in his provision with the carpet though. We had no money. Our offerings were just barely enough to make the rent. I was not working and we did not receive much in the way of support from other churches. The Astroturf was a few hundred dollars; might as well have been a few thousand for us. But God provided. We got the carpet without hassle and without waiting.

I mentioned that we had rented two rooms in the building. One room was our auditorium. The other (the room that had been where the cash register was when this was still a gas station) was my office/nursery/Sunday School room. One wall was filled with built in book shelves which I painted and used as my library. The rest of the room was a half hexagon with all three sides being glass. It really made a beautiful office and on sunny days I was able to look out the windows, across the Old Young’s Bay Bridge and into the bay. It was marvelous! But then there was the rain. The only room in the building that was professionally carpeted was that small room; I suppose about 10x10 foot. When the rains hit, as with the rest of the building, that room was under water too. During the rainy season (and in Astoria most of the year is the rainy season) I would have to get up many hours early on Sunday mornings so I could dry that carpet. My Grandma Jewell had given me a small canister vacuum for my high school graduation. I reversed the motor so it blew warm air and pointed it toward the carpet. If I got started by 5:00 AM, most of the time I could have the floor dry enough that the carpet did not “squish” when people came in around 10:00.

And then there was the parking lot. Of course the lot was asphalted, as it had been a filling station. That was nice for parking on, but when the rains came, it turned into a swimming pool. There was a large drain in the middle of the lot, but with the storms we had in Astoria, that drain quickly plugged with grass, tree branches and leaves. There I would be, Sunday mornings, after turning on the vacuum, wading in seven or eight inches of freezing cold rain water trying to unplug that drain. There was so much vegetation in the rain water that I would have to stay out there, scraping away the junk until all the water had drained away, It motivated me to diligence in keeping our lot as swept clean as possible when it wasn’t raining!

The Astroturf carpet was a huge blessing to us in that building, but it was not without its own problems. Since the floor was so often wet, I chose not to try to glue it down, but allow it to “float” over the water when the floor flooded. Most of the time that was not too much of an issue. One time it was. Our auditorium had four doors . One door went to a small closet (which later became a Sunday School class) One door went back to a shop that I used to story things in (at one point we had our personal washer and dryer back there. The apartment we lived in did not have washer dryer space in the unit so, instead of using a pay laundry, we set our old washer and dryer in the shop. It was fine except when it was very cold outside. Then the motor of the dryer was not able to warm up enough to spin.) One door went to the room that was my office/nursery. And the final door went outside into the parking lot. Since that door opened up into the middle of the auditorium, I encouraged people to come into the auditorium through my office door. That entered the back of the room. One very sunny Sunday morning I had that door opened just a little to allow some fresh air in. I blocked the door so it would not swing wide open into the auditorium with a brick. This particular morning Pastor Bill Bramblett had come to visit (he did that often) and had brought his entire young married class with him. Our attendance more than doubled that day as that one class from his church was larger than our whole church! I was in front of the congregation giving some announcements when I saw Ray and Levina Brandon pull into the lot. As I spoke with the congregation (and all of Brother Bramblett’s people) I could watch as the Brandons parked, stepped out of their car, and headed toward the building. I could also see that they were not going to come in through my office, but were headed toward that open door into our auditorium. I was giving announcements so my mind was occupied with more than one thing (not only were there announcements, but I was going to be preaching, that was on my mind AND I had the extra mental stress of having this MUCH larger than usual attendance to preach to) so I was not able to fully appreciate what was about to happen. At some point I realized that the red brick holding the door from opening too wide was going to be a problem and I “dove” for it, but missed. Levina set her shoulder against the door and pushed with Incredible Hulk like force. The carpet, at that point sitting on dry tile with only the pews on top of it. Pulled out from under the pews and into a huge pile behind the door. What a mess. And what an embarrassment with these good friends visiting on that Sunday. Bill Bramblett has long since forgotten about that and is, to this day, one of my dearest friends and a hero of the faith for me.

We had some great times in that building. Like the service with Evangelist Rocky Shanks. Rocky is a unique person to say the least. The first time I invited him to preach for us we had a small miscommunication. I thought we were going to begin revival meetings with him on a Wednesday night. He thought we were going to begin on a Thursday night. Wednesday night I was furiously working in my small office, trying to put together a sermon of some sort, while Brother Hockley was leading our little congregation to sing every song in our hymnal. Rocky showed up about two hours before the services were to begin Thursday night. He ate a bite of dinner with Anita and I and excused himself to go do some soul winning before services. Rocky had visitors in the meeting that evening. Sunday morning we had our building jammed with the highest attendance we ever had in that property, 52. There was literally standing room only with people crammed up against the walks and Rocky kept them spellbound for an hour! His preaching style could hold a crowd, but by the time he was finished he had also made sure no one was ever going to come back again. He had threatened to beat up some of them, rip the lips off of others and take the children away from a few of the rest of them.

And then there was the revival meeting with Evangelist Roger Holmberg. I met Brother Holmberg at a pastor’s meeting in John Day, Oregon. Since he and I were just starting out in the ministry at the same time, I invited him to come preach for me. He became a regular, preaching for me at least twice a year for four or five years. Brother Holmberg is a kind a gracious person, and it is a good thing. The first time he preached for me I did not give him and offering. I was not aware we were supposed to do that. Several of those meetings he ended up going door knocking by himself as I was working. One night during a Holmberg revival flying ants swarmed our building. I do not know how to describe the scene. We are taught that nothing is as important as the preaching of God’s Word so we don’t let anything stop us from preaching. Not even flying ants. Our congregation of 10-15 people patiently sat there, batting away the flying ants from their faces while Brother Holmberg preached. And Brother Holmberg preached without complaining one time about having to bat the flying ants away as he preached!

The Lord blessed us in our building with some good free advertizing. The local newspaper caught on that we were planting a church in this abandoned service station so they came to do an interview with me. The result was a full page article with a picture of me filling one half of the page. The article was taken by the associated press and sent across the country. For years we received a small support check of five or ten dollars from a family in Indiana who had read the article. But that advertisement also alerted the county to our efforts. I had never dreamed that I need permits to start a church. Apparently I did. A county employee came to visit me and informed me that, though the building was approved for commercial use, a church is not considered commercial use and we would need to apply for a conditional use permit to continue to use the building. After a few weeks the county came back with the results of the application and said we could use the building, but there were several upgrades to the property we would have to complete. The upgrades would have cost into the thousands of dollars. There were things that had to do with upgrading the septic system (it was an old building and, to be honest, the drain field) certain doorway changes and they wanted us to build curbs restricting the flow of traffic into and out of our parking lot. The owner of the building was not interested in paying for these thousands of dollars worth of upgrades so I was left to trust in the Lord and do what I could. I could do two things….
1. A young member of our church worked for the Coast Guard. They had access to several pieces of creosoted logs. They became our curbing.
2. I wrote to Senator Mark Hatfield. I did not know anything about him except that he claimed to be a Christian. Senator Hatfield wrote back and told me that it was out of his jurisdiction to influence the county regarding their requirements, but he did say he would forward a copy of his letter to me to the county expressing his concern over what he called “exorbitant expenses.” I never heard from the county again. We never got the conditional use permits, but we were never told to vacate the property either!

Believe it or not, for most of the years we rented that property, I felt like I would have loved to own it for our church. The setting was absolutely beautiful.
The property sat on a spit of land that was surrounded on three sides by the Young’s Bay.
We were situation on Old Highway 101 and the traffic in front of our place was huge for the area. And
Our next door neighbor was Utzinger’s Hardware. Everyone knew where Utzinger’s was. If you needed it, Utzingers had it. And if you went to Utzinger’s, you probably parked in our parking lot.
So I thought to lace was beautiful. I had visions in my head of how the storage area behind our auditorium (the largest room on the property) could be our eventual auditorium. I could see us building in the future off of that auditorium over the bay. Having a church sanctuary on pilings over the water seemed somehow magical to me. Still does.

I prayed and I dreamed. And one day a man from one of the local fish processing companies came to visit me. Just off of our property, into the bay, were several pilings. Those piling, the man explained to me, belonged to our property and he was there to negotiate the use of them for the purpose of tying off his fish buying barges. His offer was a flat sum of money and a percentage from every fish purchased on those docks. It reached into the several thousands and it made purchasing the property more than possible. I thought a dream was about to come true. My problem? I did not own the property. So I approached the owner with the proposition and, in the one time I don’t think he had my best interests in mind (although now I know God knew what He was doing and He DID have my best interests in mind) instead of agreeing to work out a purchase, he saw the value of his property as having increased and raised the price several hundreds of thousand of dollars. The fish buyer was no longer interested. We continued to rent the property for another couple of years.

Chapter Nine

2009-03-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

Chapter Nine Finances
Finances early on were quite a challenge. I had $1000 in my pocket when we moved to town. And as I said earlier, I did have about $350.00 of monthly support promised from the two churches in Colorado. As I remember it, Tri-Town Baptist Church supported us for at least two years. I think Platteville Baptist Church discontinued support (for our health insurance) when Bohannan was born. We did also receive $25.00 per month from Berean Baptist Church in Pendleton, OR for several years.

Astoria was in an economic slump when we moved to town and there were no jobs to be had; at least not ones that I could find. So we had to make do with what we had. We lived in my father-in-laws’s motor home until July, when Bohannan was born. I just knew we could not keep a baby in that motor home with us. We were blessed to get a bottom floor apartment at the Riverine Apts, with the window facing over the bay and, by the way, at the little gas station building we had rented for our services. I could walk from the apartment, over the Old Young’s Bay Bridge, to the church building.

I learned early on we could trust the Lord to meet our needs. While we had almost no income in the church, and therefore less than that for our home, God saw to it that money was there when we needed it. One outstanding memory concerned the carpet on the church floor. The building had a tile floor which seemed fine until the rains came. Every time it rained our floor flooded with an eighth inch of rain or so. It made church pretty difficult and there was no stopping the flooding. I decided that an indoor outdoor carpet, like Astroturf, would be able to withstand the water and would also not show the water as badly. The carpet was three hundred dollars. Three hundred dollars we did not have. However, when it came time to buy it, God provided it.

On another occasion I had gone to visit a family who lived outside of town a ways (It was the Burkharts. Wayne Ward had told me about them). It was raining and the road was very curving and slippery and my tires were so bald that I was skidding around most of the corners. I came home and began to pray or tires. We had no money and I had no way to tell anyone about the need. We could not even afford to have a phone in the house so our only communication with friends and family outside of Astoria was by mail. A friend of mine in Richland, WA wrote me a letter about that time. He said he suspected that our car would need tires about now and if we would come to the Tri-Cities he would buy them for me. I consider that letter a miracle to this day. I would not wish that sort of poverty on anybody. But I can say today that I miss the unmistakable answers to prayers that Anita and I witnessed time and time again during those days.

Chapter Eight

2009-03-05T11:04:00.000-08:00

Chapter Eight Our First Congregation
Our building there was not very pretty and I think it made it difficult to attract visitors.

I would go out almost every day and try to invite people to come to our services. Once in a while I would recognize the people in a car that pulled into our parking lot as someone I had spoken to during the week. But when they would see the building, they would drive away.

God did give us some great people though. Early on I recognized that we would not have been able to survive in Astoria through those difficult years if it had not been for what I came to call the “quality” of people we had.

Rod and Karen Hockley
They, along with their daughter, Jennifer, were no doubt the best godsend I could have imagined.
They were committed to our church
They were gracious with me
They brought visitors to church all of the time and
They provided really good music
I cannot imagine that we would have stayed in Astoria if it had not been for this family. They quickly became family.

Mark and Christy Rowland
Mark and Christy gave us a reason to minister. They were simple and kind people whose children were born and grew up alongside of our own – at least for the first several years.

George and Jonnie Simmons
The Simmons came to our church about August, just after the first two families quit coming. George had a good job and was a faithful tither so that helped us out financially. We did not have much; but we always had enough to pay the bills and keep us in a place to live.

Bob and Bernie Brandon
Bob and Bernie never did join our church. The first time they visited Bob told me that they were church hoppers and would not stay with us long. He meant what he said and they did leave. But their time in our church was healing and helpful. We would go to their home nearly once a week for a meal and Bob treated our baby, Bohannan, as a grandchild. Bob and Bernie quit attending when they got upset at the Hockley’s for singing a son they had requested as a special and not as a congregational song.

Along the way others came and went. We led a bartender to the Lord when she visited our services one week. Her husband and children began to come faithfully for a while but she could never get over the guilt of her job and, rather than giving up the job, she finally quit church. Her husband was a competition bass fisherman. He took me out fishing with him one day. We had an outstanding time (at least I thought) but he would never come to church after that. It is part of the reason I question whether a preacher should ever become friends with his church members. That, and I can’t see it in the Bible either.

We led another young mom to the Lord one Sunday morning. I baptized that morning and then found out she was living with the man who was the father of the kids. They had not been married. She and the kids faithfully attended services Sunday mornings, evenings and Wednesdays for I think four years while I tried to get her boyfriend to get saved and to get them married. She and the kids quit church very soon after they got married.

Not everybody who came to church got saved though. One day I was in the office studying when the mail man walked in the door after delivering the mail. He had parked the postal vehicle at the gas pumps that were still standing there in front of the building. As he opened the door he joked “Fill ‘er up and give me a five minute sermon.” We spoke a moment or two and I invited him to attend our services. He was there the next Sunday. I went by to visit him the following week and the conversation was nothing more than his expression of disagreement over several things in the message. He continued to deliver our mail, but he did not come back to church. Another time a lady came to visit the services. Before church began she explained to me that she owned a building in town that had been used as the first meeting place of several of the area churches. She wondered if I would want to rent the place. I told her I did not think so, but if she wanted to stay for the church service I would speak with her more about it after the message. When I gave the invitation she came forward and announced that God had called her to start her own church in her building. And she did it too!

Chapter Seven

2009-03-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

Chapter Seven Differences
The differences between the Pasco’s and Scull’s and the Hockley’s and Rowland’s did not take long to become a big deal.

First, I asked Bro Hockley to be the treasurer, a selection that Bro Pasco did not appreciate.
Secondly, I was invited to preach at Bible Baptist Church in Oak Harbor, WA. The church was the Pasco’s old congregation and Brother Pasco had personally recommended me to the pastor, Gary Prisk. However, I offended the Pasco’s and the Scull’s by asking Pastor James Watkins, from Cathlamet, WA to fill in for me without getting their approval of his doing so.
Thirdly, it was obvious that my doctrinal positions were more in line with the Hockleys than with the Pasco’s. It was not infrequent that, as I preached, Mrs. Pasco would gasp, slap her hand to her face and shake her head in disagreement. I determined fairly quickly I could not allow that to happen so one day, after she had done that, I commented publicly that whenever she did that I would know I was onto something I needed to park on awhile, so if she did not want me to preach on those things it would be best is she simply smiled at me and I would then move on.

The final straw happened in May. I recognized that I could not appease all four of these families; the differences were just too pronounced. I took my Bible and my concordance up to a remote place on a hill and turned a tree stump into a desk. There I prayed to the Lord and said something of this nature, “Father, ever since I became a Christian I have followed my pastors. When I was a member of Pastor Scudder’s church I believed what Pastor Scudder believed. When I became a member of Pastor Bellshaw’s church, I believed what Pastor Bellshaw did. When I went to Bible College and joined Pastor Duncan’s church, I believed what Pastor Duncan did. When we joined Pastor Smith’s church then I believed what Pastor Smith did. But Father Pastor Scudder and Pastor Bellshaw and Pastor Duncan and Pastor Smith are not here. I need to find out what You want me to believe.” I came down from that hilltop convinced I concerning my doctrines. I called the four men, heads of those families and told them; “This is what I believe, take it or leave it.” I already knew that two of those families would leave it.

The Pasco’s had already arranged a job move. They continued with us through most of the summer. Guy Scull took me aside and said, “I have always been able to support my pastor 100%. I support Pastor Blue in Lynnwood 100%. I supported Pastor McCormick in Gladstone 100%. I support Pastor Meskch in North Bend 100%. I cannot support you 100%so we will be leaving.” The Guys continued to live in the area for the next several years. They did not attend church anywhere during all of those years. I found Mrs. Scull outside of our house one day. I think she wished she could talk her husband into coming to church, but it never happened.

Chapter Six

2009-03-03T11:07:00.000-08:00

Chapter Six Our First Building
Finding a place to meet to plant a church was no easy matter. First of all, I had no money and no real promise of gaining any. Secondly, the business owners in Astoria were not thrilled to have a new church in town anyway. 1984 was a recession time in Astoria’s economy. Many of the storefront buildings in downtown Astoria were vacant. Most of them were owned by a woman named Mary Flavel, descendent of Captain Flavel, the first Columbia River Bar pilot. She told me bluntly that she would never agree to rent any of her properties to a church regardless of how much we could pay. I had to look elsewhere.

As a part of my search efforts I spoke with a realtor who took us out Walluski Loop road and to a grange hall out there. While the scenery was beautiful and the price would have been fine, I determined it was just too far out of town to reasonably expect people to drive for church services. We settled instead on an abandoned service station across the old Young’s River Bridge. It was a drab green color and had the words “for rent” spray painted across the garage doors. It was also attached to Utzinger’s Coast to Coast store.

I could not afford to rent all of the building so the owner, a businessman from Portland, agreed to let me rent a large room that could have been used as a convenience store and the office, where the cash register would have been. We made some benches out of scrap lumber in back of the building. I had a small home made lectern, the Sculls offered to put their piano in the building and we were set for church.

I don’t remember exactly, but I imagine we were holding services in there by the first of May. The Pasco’s were a pretty large family so with them and the other three families (not counting myself and a very pregnant Anita) the room was quite full. I turned the office area into my study (and the nursery once our baby was born) and we set out to win souls and try to reach the town. Rod Hockley suggested the name, Lower Columbia Baptist Church.

Chapter Five

2009-02-28T09:36:00.000-08:00

Chapter Five Lower Columbia Baptist Church
Anita and I left Colorado to return to the Pacific Northwest and plant the church in Astoria in April of 1984. We had been given $1,000.00 from our friends in Colorado and had the promise of approximately $350.00 per month support. $125.00 of that was designated for medical insurance until our baby was born.

Anita was pregnant with our first son, Bohannan, so we opted to have her fly back to Oregon rather than try to make the long drive. My father- in-law but a round trip ticket. He flew down to Colorado, helped us pack our belongings and we loaded Anita on the plane to return, while he and I drove our vehicles. The day we left was a blizzard in Denver. Anita later told us she cried as they had to de-ice the wings of the plane to take off. But she landed just two hours later in Portland, to the blossoms on the Cherry trees. She was home.

My trip, on the other hand, was just beginning. Things went pretty well for us as we travelled north in I-25 until we got on I-80 just passed Cheyenne. The blizzard was so strong and the wind was blowing so hard that my belongings began to blow out of the back of our pick-up. Trying to collect them on the freeway in that blizzard was no joy. Once we got past the pass west of Cheyenne, the weather cleared up and we did fine. We stopped over night in Ogden, UT and then in Pendleton, OR and arrived at my father-in-laws early Friday evening.

Saturday morning, April 7th, Anita and I drove over to Astoria to meet the two families we had spoken to over the phone. We checked into the City Center Motel and went to get a bite to eat at the brand new McDonalds. While we were there we met Rod and Karen Hockley. They would become our most solid family. They also introduced us to Mark and Christy Rowland. Including the two we had spoken to on the phone, we were looking at four families; and we hadn’t even held our first service.

The four families, and Anita and I met at the house of Carl Pasco out on Peter Johnson Road on the Young’s River Loop. It was determined that we would hold a service the next morning in the Pasco’s living room. The Hockleys would not be there because they were members of the Longview Bible Baptist Church, sixty miles away. They asked me to pray for them concerning God’s will on their church membership.

I also learned that these four families did not see eye to eye on some doctrines. While the two families I had met over the phone came from an independent Baptist background and so did the Hockleys and the Rowlands (the Rowlands were not strong Christians, but had been involved in an attempt to plant a Baptist church in Astoria a few years previous) there were some serious differences as the Pasco family had some pretty strong missionary Baptist influence and they in turn had strongly influenced the other family, the Sculls.

Sunday morning, April 8th, Anita and I prepared for services at the Pasco house. On the way out to their home we stopped at Hauke’s Sentry on the Young’s River Bay to pick up some coffee. The Pasco’s were out. Anita went in and I stayed in the car, trying to think over my message for the morning. It was a very sunny day and the Bay is a beautiful sight to behold. But I got the distinct impression that God was telling me we would not stay in Astoria forever. I do not believe I told Anita, but for the next 13 years, I never drove past that store without remembering that morning.

Sunday night we met for services in the Hockley home. They informed me that they told their pastor, Dan Lydick, that they felt led to move their membership to Astoria and help us plant the church. I needed to get in touch with Pastor Lydick right away!

After the evening meeting Anita and I drove the four hours back to her parent’s house in Springfield. Monday morning the four of us headed out across the state to John Day. I wanted to attend a preachers meeting there. My in-laws would attend a lodge meeting happening in the same town the same day. I met my friend Roger Holmberg there. He was just starting out as an evangelist so we had some things in common.

Since money was tight and we had no promise of support, my father-in-law agreed to let us move his 18 foot motor home to Astoria. We parked it, first in the Pasco’s driveway, and then, after we found a place to hold services, behind our building. Anita and I lived in that motor home from April through July 4th. I still remember driving that motor home through Seaside after the Wednesday evening services, July 4, 1984. Fireworks were going off over the ocean. It became a yearly tradition for quite a number of years, to watch the fireworks in Seaside each 4th of July.

Chapter Four

2009-02-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

Chapter Four Platteville
February of 1983: I had gone to Platteville, CO alone under the commission of the First Bible Baptist Church of Boulder, CO. We organized a large door knocking effort using students from Baptist Bible College West. Our original meeting place was the basement of the Methodist church.

Though we had canvassed every home in town, the only family that came to the services was some members of First Bible Baptist. They lived in Mead, not too far from Platteville. Other than the Hennings, no one else visited our mid-week Bible studies.

Over the course of the next few months, we had door knocked around town and had learned that there was another effort to plant an independent Baptist church in Platteville and it was taking place at the very same time. I eventually located a flyer from that effort and in June of 1983, contacted the pastor, Don Smith. They were being commissioned by the Tri-Town Baptist Church in Frederick, CO and were using the same name as us. After meeting we agreed to work together with Pastor Smith as the pastor. I would be co-pastor and gain valuable experience in future church planting in the Northwest.

God seemed to bless our efforts together and the church began to average in the 20’s and 30’s with some higher days near 50. It was an encouraging thing and Pastor Smith, though much different than myself in personality, did me much good. I was ordained in that church on December 29, 1983.

At the New Year, Anita and I began making plans to return to the Northwest. Understand that when we moved to Colorado, we thought we would return after college to LaGrande, OR to plant a church. While we were in school, however, word got back to us that someone else had already gone to LaGrande. We needed to find a new place. My original plan was to live with my grandparents in Lyle, WA for a few months while Anita and I surveyed the states of Washington and Oregon in search of God’s leadership as to where to plant a new church. However, Pastor Smith refused to allow us to go out of the church there in Platteville until we knew the town we would be sent to. It seems harsh but we were asking them to be our sending church. Now that I have a few years of pasturing under my belt, and have some experience in planting churches, I completely understand a sending church’s desire to be very much in the loop of the decision making process.

Rather than moving to the Northwest and then finding the town we would plant a church in, I began making phone calls. I believe my first call was to Evangelist Mike Gass. He gave me the name of several churches, some in Oregon, and some in Washington that he believed were searching for a pastor. While none of those churches panned out, we did get the names of several other pastors to call. One of them was Ken McCormick, of Tri-City Baptist Temple in Gladstone, OR. Pastor McCormick told us about two families in Astoria, OR who had been praying for a man to come and plant a church there.

After our research, Anita and I had narrowed our field of choices down to three towns; Baker, OR, Hood River, OR and Astoria, OR. I sat down with Pastor Don Smith, and Pastor Bob Roark (of Tri-Town Baptist Church) for lunch at the Cottage Kitchen in Platteville. I described for the two men what I knew about Baker, Hood River and Astoria. To be honest, I cannot remember what I said about Baker and Hood River, but I do remember very clearly what I said about Astoria. I told them that I had never been to the town but all I could picture was trees that only had leaves on one side because the wind blew all the time and that stinky ocean smell. (I had been to Florence, OR a couple of years earlier and that was my impression of it. I figures all of the coastal towns would be about the same.)

Pastor Smith and Pastor Roark laughed and told me that was where they wanted me to go. I do not, to this day, regret following their leadership on the matter.

Chapter Three

2009-02-26T20:08:00.000-08:00

Chapter Three Pillar of Fire

When we arrived in Denver we parked our trailer in my brother’s driveway. He and a couple of other people from Washington were rooming together in a large house in Westminster. Mike Riggs, who had traveled down with us, stayed with an aunt in the area of South Sheridan in Denver. I had contacted my union dispatch hall about where I might be able to find some work, hoping to raise enough money to go to college. The dispatcher told me that there was work in Oakland CA, Denver Co and Houston TX. He said that it was raining in Oakland and that if he were me he would go to Denver and, if he didn’t have a job in seven days, figure he was half way to Houston. Denver was more the direction I wanted to travel anyway (at that time I was expecting to attend Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg VA.) The seventh day at the Union Hall, both Mike and I got jobs. Mine was in Boulder.

Mike and I both went to check in with our jobs (I also dropped by the First Bible Baptist Church in Boulder and caught the pastor and deacons having ice cream at their monthly meeting) and planned to report to work the next day. To celebrate I sold some silver dollars I had and we went to Chuck E Cheese for pizza. Neither my wife and I nor Mike had ever been to a Chuck E Cheese. It is designed for children but it was the perfect “party” atmosphere for three Christians happy to be employed again. The next day I went to work and we moved the trailer to a RV ground in the Boulder Canyons over the weekend.

Although I was working, and it wasn’t very long before Anita got a full time job as a receptionist at a stock firm in downtown Boulder, we still were not catching up on the bills we had accrued during those long months of unemployment in Oregon. I was actively pursuing entrance (and a job) in Lynchburg, but things just were not coming together for us. It did not look as if we would be able to attend in Lynchburg come fall, but that I would have to stay in Colorado and work longer to get caught up with bills. One day we heard an ad on the local Christian Radio station KPOF in Denver for a school teacher at the Pillar of Fire School in Westminster. An opening for a teaching position that late in the summer was unheard of and we decided Anita should apply. The same time our new pastor, Jim Duncan, at First Bible Baptist Church, had informed me that there was a college in Denver that our new church supported. If I attended there I would get a discount as a member of a supporting church.

Anita got the job (I was asked to sit in on the interview because the position included a two bedroom apartment as a part of the compensation) and I was accepted into Baptist Bible College West, in Denver. All of a sudden the windows of heaven opened for us. Bills began to get paid and things just began working out. Anita and I, gone through some real hardships over the last many months but now we found ourselves singing
"If He keeps on blessing and blessing If He keeps on pouring it on If His love just keeps on getting richer If He keeps on giving a song If my cup gets fuller and fuller If my prayers keep getting through If it keeps getting better and better Oh Lord, I don't know what I'm gonna do"[1]

The Pillar of Fire turned out to be a real blessing to us and a wonderful experience. The church’s doctrine is Wesleyan. They were started by an old fashioned Methodist minister who wanted to ordain his wife (Alma White) before it was acceptable for churches to do so. They believe in a process of sanctification they called “second blessing” where a Christian can reach sinless perfection. One day Anita was speaking with the principle of the Elementary School, Mrs. Conkle, who confided in Anita and said, “Don’t tell the Bishop Conkle this, but I don’t believe the second blessing is really in the Bible!” The members of the Pillar of Fire Church had as many disputes and problems as anyone else, they had just redefined sin. Those things I would have called sin, they did not believe were sins.

Still the experience was a blessing and we made some great friends there.[2] The campus of the Pillar of Fire is right in the middle of a busy area overlooking downtown Denver. Since the campus had owned much of what was by then business and residential areas surrounding it, they had worked a deal with the Grocery store that was visible from our apartment. Once a week the store would deliver dairy and vegetable products to our own Pillar of Fire “store.” We could go in and get food FREE.

Almost all of the residents at the Pillar of Fire were elderly people. That is not to say that the church had no younger people, just that very few of them lived in the apartment complex at the Westminster campus. Some of our favorite friends were Mr. and Mrs. Stotts. Christmas one year the Stotts took Anita and I to see Handle’s Messiah in downtown Denver. MR Stotts had performed in it for years. He polished up his beautiful classic (Buick I think) and we rode downtown with them in it. That year, 1982, Christmas Day brought a blizzard to Denver. We were all trapped in our apartments. The Stotts had plans to be off campus with relatives. My mother and father in law flew in just ahead of the storm and were trapped in our apartment complex with us. The Wennan’s, some very good friends from church but that lived just a couple of miles from our place, could not get to their families either so the Farris’ the Stotts, and the Wennan’s all came to our apartment and shared what they had for Christmas dinner. When the Wennan’s asked us what they could bring Anita said “Toilet Paper!” Although the store was visible from our apartment, it was not easy to get to.

Anita lost our second baby that Christmas day.

Mr. Stott died shortly after. Mrs. Stott said that he jumped out of bed and ran out of the bedroom. When he did not return in a moment, she went to check on him. He had gone into the other bedroom (presumably so Mrs Stott would not have trouble sleeping in her bed after his death) and laid on the floor. She said she found him lying there with a huge smile of his face. He was happy to have gone to glory.
[1] I think this was a Bill Gaither Song
[2] In 2006 Anita and I made a vacation trip back to Denver and to the Pillar of Fire Campus. It had been twenty five years since we lived there and all of those friends we had made back then were in the cemetery right behind the apartment we lived in. We got to walk through that cemetery and remember those friends we grew to love during our stay at the Pillar of Fire.

Chapter Two

2009-02-25T15:21:00.000-08:00

Chapter Two Hermiston

When Anita and I met, I lived in Waitsburg, WA and Anita lived in Hermiston, OR. It wasn’t but a couple of months before I felt compelled to move closer to her. My Uncle Rusty lived alone at that time in a mobile home in Finley, WA and was more than willing to take on a room mate. It moved me probably forty miles closer to Anita. Not long after I made the move to Finley, Mike Riggs invited me to go to church with him. After I had responded to the altar call and made my faith public at Cornerstone, and Mike had announced to Pastor Scudder that “Marvin is in love.” Pastor came to visit me. Pastor asked me a few questions to confirm that I had been born again and then made some plans for my baptism. Then Pastor asked me about the girl Mike had mentioned. After I had said whatever it was I said about Anita, Pastor referred me to
2 Corinthians 6:14 KJV
Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?

And explained to me that this would apply to marriage. He said the only reason to date a woman would be for the possibility of marriage and it would be wrong to marry a woman who was not a Christian. He suggested I should speak to Anita about her salvation experience. I did. Anita told me about having gone forward at a teen rally when she was in high school and receiving Christ as her Saviour there. She said that since I had begun attending church she had decided to begin attending services as well. She had grown up in a Presbyterian church and had gone to the local church the previous Sunday. I happily reported all of this back to Pastor Scudder. His response was to take me again to 2 Corinthians 6:14 and to explain that an unequal yoke would not only be in reference to believer vs unbeliever, but also in reference to denomination and specific faith. He explained that the only reason to date was in view of marriage. If we were to get married attending two different churches, think of the confusion and division that would cause to the marriage and especially the problems it would cause in raising children. He said that the husband was supposed to be the head of the family and therefore, if Anita and I were to continue dating, she should begin to attend a Baptist church.

Next time I dated Anita I was a little more quite than I had been before. She could tell something was wrong and kept probing in an attempt to find out what the problem was. I was not sure how to approach the subject and kept putting it off. Finally I blurted out, “Anita if you are ever going to marry me you’ll have to become a Baptist!” Keep in mind that marriage had never been a topic of discussion between us. Looking back at it I should have taken her response as an acceptance of proposal. The following Sunday she attended the American Baptist Church in Hermiston. I asked Pastor Scudder about it and he suggested that wasn’t an appropriate church. She attended the Southern Baptist and the Conservative Baptist churches with the same response from my pastor. She even attended a home Bible study. Pastor Scudder recommended I attend that and see if it might be the potential makings of a new Baptist church. It wasn’t. Anita ended up making the approximately 35 mile trip each week to Cornerstone in Kennewick.

Then came the day we were married. Because Anita was a school teacher in Hermiston I decided to move there and personally commute to work rather than having her commute from Kennewick to Hermiston. I do not have the same powers of commitment she had. It did not take long before I decided that was way too long of a drive each Sunday; especially since I made the same drive each day for work. Our neighbors in Hermiston, the Pucketts, attended the Nazarene church in town so we visited it one time. I recognized a different “spirit” in the preaching the first service and we never returned. The people of that church, however, were kind to us from then on.

One Sunday morning as we were getting dressed to go to church (I think we were planning on driving to Kennewick that morning) Anita mentioned that she had taken a different road home from the school where she taught. She said she had seen a Baptist church on that road that she had not tried before we were married. She said she thought she could find it again and wondered if I would want to go there. We did and found it to be an independent Baptist church that was very similar to the Cornerstone. Bible Baptist Church of Hermiston, Pastor Roger Bellshaw, was a group of 17 people (including us) renting a quonset hut type building that had previously been a laundry mat. Since Cornerstone was a smaller church, in rented facilities this was right up our alley. And it was only down the road from our house. We joined that church and became very involved.

Anita and I had not been at Bible Baptist for more than a few months before the pastor asked us if we would teach the teenagers. It was a class we were happy to take on. We had a lot of fun teaching that class; and we were challenged in many ways. Teenagers are often very vocal about what they are thinking. One time I was teaching a lesson on creation and made the statement “You can believe the Bible and believe in evolution at the same time.” A teenage girl who was, I believe, attending for the first time, interrupted me and said “That is a lie.” It was the first time I had been challenged that abruptly. The teens were a challenge in other ways too. There were the normal problems of trying to get them to pay attention to the pastor’s messages and the typical type of boy/girl issues. But then there were some larger issues to deal with too. One year at teen camp one of our teen girls snuck off into the woods with a boy, a pastor’s kid, from another church. Our pastor’s daughter was always a handful for me. We attended a youth rally in Pendleton, about 30 minutes from Hermiston one time. For propriety’s sake we had two vehicles, one to carry the boys and another for the girls. Everything was fine when we loaded up to leave, with parents watching. But when it came time to come home the pastor’s daughter refused to get into the girls vehicle. She created such a stir that I ended up physically putting her in the car and told our pastor I would never allow her to attend another event unless our pastor attended with us.

It was also in this church that we became involved in Christian schools. Anita was teaching 1st grade at a public school in Hermiston when I met her. Shortly after joining the church in Hermiston Pastor Bellshaw brought in a speaker from the Christian Law Association. In those days CLA’s primary push, it seemed, was the Christian School movement. We had quite a number of young people in our little church so Pastor was anxious to begin a school for them. Anita agreed to quit her position in the public school to volunteer teach at the church school. Outside of some substitution work she has taught in Christian schools ever since.

Pastor Bellshaw was a fantastic Bible teacher. Though we were only in that church I think two years, Pastor’s consistent and methodical Bible teaching gave me a great foundation to build upon when I went to Bible College. It was under his teaching and preaching that I surrendered to be used in whatever ways God would choose for me and then finally, to be a church planting pastor in the Pacific Northwest.

I had surrendered to be a preacher, but wasn’t really aggressively pursuing that course. Though I had spoken to some preachers about it, most of them discouraged me from leaving Hermiston at least until I had finished my apprenticeship as an Ironworker. My first step toward true surrender happened at Teen Camp at Black Lake, new Olympia. Anita and I had gone as our church’s camp counselors. Many things impressed me during the week, but the think I remember the most was committing to the Lord that nothing would take the priority in the lives of my wife and I over the work of the Lord. Though I did not surrender to “quit” my job to train for the ministry, I did make the commitment that no work or financial obligation would come before my ministry with the teens of our church.

Not long after Pastor Bellshaw scheduled a revival meeting with Brother Mike Gass. Brother Gass stayed in our home that week. One evening I spoke with him about the ministry. He recommended that I remain faithful in the church there until I was at least 30 years old. He said that my assistance in the church there was crucial and that no one would really listen to a preacher until he reached age 30 anyway. While I did not follow that advice, looking back upon it I can see that patience and maturity are greater virtues than youth and energy. I could have waited and still probably accomplished as much with less heartache. Originally our hope was to rain directly under Pastor Bellshaw. Circumstances in the church as well as certain economic and other factors eventually led us to take a different course.

Anita knew I had been wrestling with the call to the ministry for some time. We had spoken about it on a number of occasions but she had also observed that the pastors of the stripe of church we attended were typically very poor people. I came home from work one evening and she shared with me that she had read of the children of Israel at Kadesh-Barnea. She said she viewed the ministry as similar to entering into that Promised Land with all of the giants and obstacles. And she said she wanted to be like Joshua and Caleb, not the ten unbelieving spies. Soon after that she and I figured out that, if I were to take a lay off at Hanford, where I worked, we could sell our house, move into our travel trailer and live pretty fairly on my unemployment income. I told my foreman that the next time there was a lay-off scheduled, I would like to be on it. The very next day Hanford’s construction work shut down. Not only myself, but hundreds if not thousands of men were laid off.

I learned very shortly thereafter than the plans of men and the plans of God are not often the same. As a laid off ironworker I had two advantages; one, my unemployment benefits were quite substantial, and, two, since my work was called out of a dispatch hall, I did not have to look for work. All I had to show the unemployment office was that I was on the out of work list in my union hall. So far so good. There were so many ironworkers laid off, I should have been able to collect unemployment benefits for months, if not longer. Then came the call. I had only been off work for a week, when I received a call for work from my union. They were looking for welders at one of the running reactors. An inspection on the sacrificial shield wall had revealed several faulty welds. These welders would have to pass a strict certification test and then would have a quality control man assigned to observe every weld they made as they made them. Though the job did not sound appealing to me, it was not for that reason I turned the job down. I had committed to training for the ministry. I could not take the job.

This however, meant that I had to tell the unemployment office that I had turned down a job and that meant that I could not receive benefits until I had worked full time a certain length of time. Trouble was, there were no jobs to be had – as an ironworker or otherwise. Anita and I finally took a part time job cleaning the cattle auction yard once every other week. After a while I also got a part time job driving school bus. But nothing that could get us qualified again for unemployment.

Times were hard for us. We didn’t even have the gas money to drive to and from church. Our friends, the Pucketts, told their church about what was happening and the Nazarene church in Hermiston put n a food pounding for us. It was the first time either of us had heard of it. What a blessing it was! Another friend, Ron Bissonnett, came to town each week for work reasons and would always give us some gas money and take us to Dairy Queen for a Peanut Buster Parfait. It made those a favorite of ours!

The economy took such a bad down turn that it was impossible to sell our house as we had planned. After having it on the market for several months we were forced to deed it back to the bank in lieu of foreclosure. My father in law paid off our pick truck so we could keep it. Lori and Wanda Puckett bought our car for what we owned on it, and I sold my motorcycle and hang glider together for enough to pay off the motorcycle. Thank goodness the hang glider was paid for! Of course, we still had the 33 foot travel trailer to live in. Through our friends, Lori and Wanda Puckett, we found a widowed lady outside of Hermiston who allowed us to park our trailer on her property in exchange for some simple chores around her property. We had not been on her place for more than a couple of weeks when both of us woke up one morning very sick.

As we lay in bed complaining of headaches, I finally got up to go to the bathroom. I do not remember anything else but Anita tells me I fell to the ground and crawled the rest of the way into the restroom. I closed the door and Anita could hear me breaking things and having trouble. She got up to check on me and found that she could not walk either. She crawled to the bathroom and opened to the door to find my unconscious. We did not have a phone so Anita crawled out of the trailer to go to the woman’s house who owned the property. Anita said tat as soon as she got out of the trailer she could walk, but only by dragging her feet. She got to the lady’s house and called emergency. The rescue workers discovered a propane leak in the trailer and said that, had Anita closed the door when she left the trailer I would have been dead before help arrived. As it was, the two of us only had really BAD headaches for a few days.

Because of the lack of work, the inability to collect unemployment benefits, and some issues at the church having to do with the rebellion of the pastor’s daughter, I was advised by a missionary, Brother Ed Williamson, that it would be wise for me to go to Bible College. He counseled that if I were to announce to our church that I was going to Bible College I could leave the church on a positive note and the church would be able to rejoice over it rather than causing any difficulty to the church. Some plans had to be made but Anita and I chose to leave Hermiston and head toward Colorado, expecting to work construction there for the summer before making it to college in the spring.

God began to open doors in ways we had not seen in months. A trip to Colorado is no easy thing to do when you have been out of work as long as I had been. I did have the trailer, and a pick up to pull it with. But a local mechanic told me that my transmission was not designed to pull such a large trailer, especially such a long distance and over the Rocky Mountains. What was I to do? We had no money to replace the transmission. Anita’s Uncle Dale got in touch with us and reminded us that she had a small amount saved in a pension account through the school system. There was enough money in that account to rebuild the transmission and to make the trip to Denver.
The Saturday of Mother’s Day 1981 Anita and I left the Pacific Northwest to move to Denver. My brother Wes was there working as an ironworker and we were told we could park our trailer in their driveway until we got work and found a place to rent. My good friend, Mike Riggs, came along in his own car, hoping to get work in Denver as well. Sunday morning we stopped in Mountain Home, Idaho to attend services. When church was over we discovered that one of the tires on my trick had a huge bulge on the side. Only one place that sold tires was open on that Sunday and they did not have a tire that would match the size of the other three. We ended up buying four new tires for my pick-up. Had to pay cash for them. By the time we got to Denver we only had twenty five dollars left to our name.

Chapter One

2009-02-24T11:50:00.000-08:00

Chapter One As Far Back As I Can Remember
As far back as I can remember I have had some interest in things Spiritual. My earliest recollections are as follows.

The neighbor across the street from my Grandma and Grandpa Tiwater held a backyard Bible class one year. As I remember it was similar to a Vacation Bible School, only held in a private home.

I remember riding the Sunday school bus to a Nazarene Church near Washington and 10th in Kennewick one Easter.

I also remember attending a Sunday school class one time in Finley. My memory of the church is vague. I do not believe it was the Southern Baptist Church next to the school but I do think it might have been a Baptist Church somewhere near the corner of Bryson Brown and Finley Rd. I do not know how old I was when these events took place but it seems like I was in the neighborhood of 5-7 years.

So much of our time growing up was spent travelling to various rodeos and other western events that I was not available most weekends to attend any type of church service or Sunday school. I do recall a conversation with mom one weekend about God. I believe we lived in Benton City at the time, so I was likely in 4th or 5th grade. I don’t remember anything about the details of the conversation other than my mom encouraging me to believe that there is a God.

When I was in 7th grade Shannon Alexander attended a church service and became a believer. Shannon’s dad was ne of my step father’s rodeo buddies and we travelled together many many weekends. I recall Shannon “preaching” one evening to me for quite a while. I argued with her about what she was saying, but never forgot she said it. Not too long after that conversation two events happened that removed Shannon’s spiritual influence from my life. First, her father left her mother when her mom became a Christian. We hung around them because her dad rodeo’ed with mine. When the family separated, the kids did not attend the rodeos as often. Secondly, we moved to Waitsburg. With that move also came the end of dad’s rodeo days. If we did go to any roping events, I don’t remember them anymore. I did not se Shannon again until about the time I graduated from High School.

There were some spiritual influences in my life in Waitsburg as well.

I recall an argument with some of the students at school where I made some comment like God is not a person but He is the emotion of love. I could not tell you what the results of the conversation were, but it has never left me that I said such silly things.

High School also meant my family got casually involved in the Presbyterian Church in Waitsburg. The pastor sang in a band that played in mom and dad’s tavern and we began to attend for the purpose of helping out the business. My sister Carrie sang in the choir for a time and I began to attend the teen meetings. It was during this time that Billy Graham hosted a film at the Theater in Walla Walla. I attended the film and went forward during the invitation. I do not recall what sort of “decision” I made, but I did begin getting the Billy Graham Decision magazine after that.

After graduation I moved to Kennewick, but only stayed there for a few months. By fall I was back in Waitsburg, living in my 30 ft trailer and working at Nelson Irrigation Sprinklers. I got a job there as a welder because I had enrolled in welding classes at Walla Walla Community College. There were two guys at Nelson Irrigation, who were outspoken about being a Christian. I was arguing and mocking one of them one day when he said to me, “Marvin, God is tapping you on the shoulder. You are not like everyone else. You listen to me before you tease me.” That night as I drove home I considered what he said. I did believe in God. I did believe in the death burial and resurrection of Jesus. But I knew I was not a Christian. Soon after I asked that guy how to become a Christian. He gave me a copy of Good News for Modern Man (a paraphrase of the Bible) and a book on Christian marriage. But he could not tell me how to become a believer.

It was then I began watching the religious shows on Sunday mornings. One of those mornings I heard Rex Humbard’ wife sing the song “It Is Finished.” The song is a graphic picture of the battle between Satan and Christ at Calvary. Rex Humbard then preached a message about that battle and finished by pointing to the camera and urging those of us in Television land to bow our knee and call upon Christ for salvation. I did that and I knew at that moment I had made a life changing decision. But it was not the end of my spiritual struggles. I was still going to rodeos most every weekend and that left church out for the most part. Also, I knew I did not want to attend the Presbyterian Church and the only other church I was aware of, the Christian Church, did not appeal to me either. I had graduated from High School with the pastor’s son and doubted that there was anything real there. Unfortunately, without the guidance of a pastor, I fell first under the influence of false teaching and then into worse sins than I had done previous.

Not too long after I called upon Christ a woman and her children came by my trailer and asked me if I had any spiritual interests. I told her than I believed in heaven and that I believed I was going there. She offered to have someone from her church come and teach me the Bible in my home. That appealed to me because I was gone most weekends and because it was in my house. I agreed and a man from the Jehovah’s Witnesses began coming to my home each week to teach me the Bible. Some of the things that appealed to me most from his teachings were:
First, he continually complemented my parents for raising a nice young man like me. That was an ego builder first of all, but I also like the idea that he thought I had good parents. Because my mom and dad were divorced and because my mom and step dad owned a tavern I wasn’t so sure they were that great of parents, but I love my mom intensely and liked hearing her complemented.
Secondly, he repeatedly told me that the Bible he used was just like the one that any other church uses. I am sure he mentioned that it was the same Bible that the Catholics used. He might have mentioned the Presbyterians too, since I had gone to it at one time.
Thirdly, it did not take him too long to teach me that their beliefs forbade people to join the military. Carter was the President then and it looked like we could go to war in the Middle East. I liked anything that kept me from having to be in a war. I do not remember how long the classes went on but when he began to urge me to come to his home to meet some of the people from his church I got gun shy and quit having him over.

Sometime shortly after that I got a new neighbor in the trailer park I lived in. I do not remember the man’s name but I do remember he had a large family and they lived in a very little trailer he pulled behind his Chevy Suburban. I was sitting on the steps of my trailer picking on my guitar one afternoon when he came by. He too played the guitar and began to talk to me a little about that. Soon the conversation turned to spiritual things. He was in his own words, an itinerant evangelist. He was not a member of any denomination he said, but he attended all of the different churches in the area where he was “ministering.” His ministry was to drive to a park, set up a stage on the top of his Suburban, began to play and sing until he had a group around and then preach to them. He was a nice enough guy, but I never did take him too seriously

And about that same time my mom got a little worried about my religious bent. She gave me a book on Indian religion. I did read that book and it did cause me to back away from Christianity for a time.

It was likely one and a half to two years later when I was working at the Boise Cascade paper mill at Wallula Junction and Mike Riggs invited me to attend church with him. By this time I had moved back to Kennewick and was living with my Uncle Rusty. Rusty was a member of the Southern Baptist Church in Finley where my Uncle Pete and Aunt Shorty also attended. Uncle Rusty and Uncle Pete were having quite a bit of influence on me spiritually, though I don’t think they ever realized it. Had either one of them invited me to go to church with them I think I would have gone in a second! Mike and I were working on a project fairly high in the air. It was very cold and the company had provided us a “heating shack” to warm up in from time to time. It worked out great. There weren’t a lot of people around us to bother us. Our foreman would come up and see how we were progressing a couple of times a day but other than that it was just Mike and me doing our job. Whenever we would get too cold to move our fingers we would take a break and go into the heating shack for fifteen or twenty minutes. On one of those breaks I made mention that people in the Bible lived to be one thousand years old. Mike asked me how I knew that. I told him what little spiritual background I had and he began to teach me things in the Bible. At that point I was going to go to church; it was just a matter of who invited me first, Uncle Rusty or Mike Riggs. It was Mike.
That first Sunday Mike Riggs met me at a parking lot on Commercial in Kennewick and took me from there to Cornerstone Baptist Church. The small congregation was only one week old and was meeting in the Pastor’s home off of Washington Street and just south of 10th. There were probably about 10 people meeting in the pastor’s living room. Pastor Scudder taught a Sunday school lesson on the book of Acts, I did not recall the eleven o’clock sermon and then preached a message out of Revelation 18 about the city on seven hills. I had indicated during the invitation that I was a Christian but was not baptized. Pastor encouraged me to come to the evening service to make my faith public and to present myself for baptism. That night he made arrangements to come and visit me the following Thursday to set up my baptism.

Those days at Cornerstone were the most life changing I have ever experienced. I had already met Anita and was not really planning to attend church every service. Anita lived 30 miles away, in Hermiston, and most of my weekends were to be dedicated to her. Mike made sure that the very first Sunday I was in church, Pastor knew about Anita by announcing to the whole church (remember there were only about ten of them) that “Marvin is in love.”