My journey as pastor – Beginnings

I became a Christian in 1973 while living in Nashville. I was Catholic in my youth but in my teens I had become an atheist/agnostic seeker for spiritual reality. I began my spiritual life in a Baptist church and was an active “Christian worker” in all the churches we attended. When I went off to college (1974) I was introduced to the charismatic renewal. Well, before that, my pastor in Nashville had challenged us one night to read a book by R.A. Torrey, The Holy Spirit: Who He Is And What He Does. I read it and thus began my drift away from the Baptist Church.

When Mary graduated from Nursing School we moved to Memphis so she could work and I could attend Mid-South Bible College. Mid-South was dispensational, baptistic, and moderately Calvinistic. That’s a mouthful! I don’t even want to attempt to define all the terms but perhaps this will help: it was like an independent Bible church.

I received a good theological foundation. I never bought into the dispensationalism, which made it fun navigating the waters. And I was never comfortable with the Calvinsim vs Arminianism they proposed - in their minds these were the only two possibilities, and Arminianism wasn’t an acceptable alternative.

We were taught about the Reformers, but never read them. Of course, the Reformers wrote a lot of stuff… I really learned a lot once I began reading Calvin and Luther and Zwingli. The Fathers? They were mentioned and dismissed in almost the same breath – ‘they had a merely childlike understanding of the faith’. Oh what I learned by reading them! My Bible college was also very anti-pentecostal. More fun!

Then came the break with the Baptist church – over the Spirit, gifts, healing, and worship. That was when I found the Christian & Missionary Alliance (with their distinctives of sanctication/deeper life, healing, and missions).

Every group I was affiliated with was basically baptistic in their view of church and the sacraments, excuse me, ordinances. That is, no liturgy ever. Never. That would be Catholic at worst or simply un-spiritual at best. We never even prayed the Lord’s Prayer. And the ordinances are memorial acts and nothing more.

So that was me when I began pastoring: theologically trained and equipped, baptistic background, charismatic leanings, and very little practical experience. Well, I had a lot of personal work experience (teaching in Sunday School and Training Union, children, young people, VBS, backyard Bible schools, and a lot of evangelism) but very little experience as pastor. Very little? I had none!

So, when I got to my first pastorate in Pensacola (Brent Alliance Church), I could preach and teach but didn’t really know how to pastor a church. It was a small church and I did everything but play the piano. I knew nothing about administration, so I was merely going from Sunday to Sunday. After a while, the Lord began to convict me about administration. My response? “Lord, I don’t know anything about that. I don’t know how to do that.” His response? “Just do it.” Ha! He doesn’t coddle you. Thanks be to God, I learned. And by the time I got to my last pastorate I had quite an excellent team assembled.

That was how I began. So green but God was so good. And I threw myself into what I knew: preach and teach the Word; love and visit the saints; door-to-door evangelism. They took us in and loved on us and we learned and grew a lot in Pensacola.