my ministry history
As I consider the history of my ministry for the last 35 years, I am overwhelmed with the memories. The number of events that have impacted my ministry, and who I am as a sixty year old minister are numerous. I will try to limit this record to those events that I feel had the greatest impact on how I think, and how I approach my work as a minister.
1972 Sunset School of Preaching.
1973 Married.
1972-1974 Influences of Sunset.
1974 A brief mission to India.
1975-1984 Mission work in Athens, Greece.
1984 Return to Oklahoma City.
1984 to 2018, The Northwest Church of Christ.
1998 to 2009, Guyana, South America.
1986 to present, continued work in Athens.
2004 to present, Adjunct Professor at Oklahoma Christian University
1972 Sunset School of Preaching.
When I decided I wanted to go to Sunset, I had been a Christian for a couple of years. I wanted to learn the Bible. I considered going to Oklahoma Christian University, but I had no money. The preacher at the church where I was baptized told me about Sunset--a free school where the course of study was the Bible. That was exactly what I was looking for. I had no intention, at that time, of becoming a preacher. That idea scared me to death. I enrolled and began classes in 1972. I was twenty-four years old. Sunset accomplished for me what I had hoped for. I learned the Bible better than I ever could at a Christian university.
1973 Married.
Of course, the greatest impact upon my ministry, other than Jesus Himself, is getting married. I learned that having the right wife will make or break a minister. I realized this early as a Christian and began praying for God to lead me to a strong Christian woman who would have the same mission desires as I. God granted my prayer while I was a student at Sunset, and I married Rebecca Miller in 1973. She was the daughter of a mission family who had spent two years in Greece as missionaries. Her father had taught at Harding University, Sunset, and was teaching at Texas Tech University when I met Becky. We were just kids at the ages of twenty-five and twenty-three.
1972-1974 Influences of Sunset
All of the classes at Sunset, of course, had their benefit. However, there were some which had greater impact on me. Historical Christian Evidences gave me the foundation for my faith that I believe every Christian should have. There have been many times in my life when I turned to those evidences. When my sister, Diana, was killed in the bombing of the Oklahoma federal building, it shook me deeply. I questioned everything. I had prayed for God to let them find her body. It was two grueling, agonizing weeks before they found her body. During that time, I cried out to God. My family was dissolving in tears. God was silent. Time and time again, when I was feeling doubt about whether there was a God, I returned in thought to those classes and was able to stand firmly on the fact of the empty tomb. Larry King interviewed me on CNN Live during this time. The interview was at the bomb site. My sister's body was still in the rubble. He asked me what I would tell people who say that the bombing was God's doing. I told him that I felt it was arrogant for us to think we could completely understand God's work in our lives. I told him that my faith wasn't based in whether I could answer the tough questions about God or not, but that my faith was anchored in the empty tomb. There was enough evidence of the resurrection of Jesus that I didn't need answers to the hard questions.
The evidences I studied at Sunset has steadied my souls over the years. This has influenced my ministry as I understand the importance of such evidence to faith. After all, faith is the evidence of things not seen. We sometimes allow people to build their faith without that evidence. I have learned it is a mistake to do so.
The study of The Book of Galatians also had a huge impact because it taught me the grace of God. I remember watching the grown men in my class cry as they heard and came to understand the grace of God. What a wonderful truth to learn! This has impacted my ministry more than I can say. I think my own conversion from such a depraved background required that I understand and accept the grace of God or give up. The class by Ed Wharton functioned as an introduction. I later began to learn from Jim McGuiggan more deeply how God loves to forgive, and how limitless His forgiveness can be.
My preaching and teaching is heavily salted with God's grace. I believe this is the reason we have many in our congregation who have come from prostitution, addictions and the sort of sins that normally keep people out of church. Single pregnant girls can find acceptance and love at Northwest (the church where I preach). We don't accept the sin but we do accept the sinner. They hear from my pulpit that they are welcomed by God. I find that understanding God's grace causes a person to strive harder to please Him. As I travel and preach in various churches, my soul delights in seeing the looks on the faces of those hearing just how much God loves and accepts them.
The Book of Romans introduced me to the logic of Paul. Richard Rogers did a great job in teaching this book, even though I believe he missed some things in the book, his understanding of logic was well demonstrated. Richard caused me to enter into the process of examining major and minor propositions. As a result, I have become developed an ability to analyze Paul's letters. That all began with Richard Rogers and the study of the Book of Romans. I have become a better thinker and I read analytically because of that class.
Richard Rogers and Jim McGuiggan had the greatest impact on me as instructors and mentors. Their teaching was of the type that pushed the envelope. The times I was able to spend with them one on one helped me to learn to think for myself. It was a huge revelation to me as a young student to learn that they didn't agree with all that the other instructors were teaching, but had their own views that were sometimes quit different. This one thing helped me to strive to be like them and to think for myself--to come to my own conclusions. It caused me to truly examine what was being taught and accept, or reject it based upon my own study. I continue to this day to be that kind of student of God's Word. I am not afraid to challenge any and all teaching, no matter who it comes from. I come to my own conclusions, and I am comfortable with those conclusions because I strive not to base them on what I think, but on what I've studied.
Ted Kell also had a great influence upon me. It wasn't the same kind of impact of Richard and Jim. Ted's impact upon me was his spirituality. His lessons and his personal life were rich in relationship with Jesus. I went on a campaign with him to a town somewhere in Texas. It gave me opportunity to get up close to him. His personal relationship with God was very impressive. I was able to see that it's not always about knowledge of God's Word--the Bible, but really about knowledge of God's Word--Jesus. It helped me to understand that the Book is really only a tool to get us to that relationship with Jesus. Over the years I have been reminded of this as I have met many who had a keen knowledge of the Book but had no relationship with the one about whom the Book speaks.
1974 A brief mission to India.
Becky and I had been married less than a year, and I was still a student when we decided to go to India on a Campaign Sunset had organized. Sunset took the responsibility of the school of preaching in Madras, India and was looking for students who were willing to travel there for an evaluation of the Indian preachers who had been trained by the Madras school.
We teamed up with another couple about our age named Jene and Marilyn Buckaloo. We were assigned a village about 100 miles from Madras, called Arkonam. It was a town with unpaved streets to which the village was attached. We acquired a hotel room in town. The village was a village of untouchables just across the train tracks. We traveled across the train tracks every day to teach classes. Sunset had arranged to have about fifty preachers (who had been trained in the Madras School of Preaching) to travel to Arkonam for training. We were to be there for two months.
The hotel room was simply a bare room with concrete walls and floor. It was about a 20' by 20' room. It had no other furniture than two wooden cots with thin pads for mattresses. There were bars on the windows and no glass. If we wanted privacy we could close the shutters. The toilet was a small room attached with a hole in the floor. They didn’t use toilet paper so we brought our own—which was constantly stopping up their sewer. The room had a ceiling fan which was our only relief from the heat. Nights were especially difficult. We would have the fan going full blast. In the middle of the night, the electricity would shut off for about two hours. Becky and I would wake up as soon as the fan stopped. We would lay there awake, sweating in the dark until they turned the electricity back on. There was no running water in the room. They provided a bucket of water each day for us to bathe with, drink from, and flush the toilet with. We had to boil our water before we could drink it. We brought a Bunsen burning with us for that purpose. We carried Visine eye droppers full of Clorox Bleach for times when we didn’t have access to our boiled water. A drop of bleach would purify a glass of water. It worked well, but we began to smell like a washing machine. In spite of using the drops, I became very ill for several days where I lost around fifteen pounds.
Just stepping outside our hotel room was an adventure. We were well off the tourist tack, and our light skin made us stand out. When we walked down the street you would have thought a parade had come to town. There was always a group of kids mobbing around us with their hands out, seeking a coins. We would also encounter beggars who were truly destitute and in need of help. We would see every kind of disease you usually only read about but never see—Elephantitus (which is a particularly horrible looking disease), Leprosy, and deformities of all sorts.
When we left our hotel room, the sights, sounds, and smells were, in themselves, an adventure. I did come to enjoy walking by restaurants and grocery stores. The smell of the rich Indian spices gave a welcome relief to some of the other smells, which I’ve already alluded to. Before we went to India, I wasn’t particularly fond of the smell of curry. That changed. I love the smell of curry and all the Indian spices. I also love Indian food. It’s one of my favorite cuisines. They had something for breakfast that we liked very much. It was scrambled eggs and some kind of hamburger meat. It had a nice spice to it. We liked it so much we ate it every day for breakfast until we left. The day we left we asked what it was, thinking we might like to reproduce it in the States. They finally found someone to tell us in English that it was pig brains and eggs! Needless to say, Becky decided we would NOT reproduce it at home.
India was our first real ministry experience and it caused us both to realize we had a heart for foreign missions. From that time we made the commitment to do mission work somewhere outside the United States. Since Becky's family had spent a couple of years in Greece when she was a teenager, and could speak some Greek, we decided to commit to Athens as our country of destination as missionaries.
1975-1984 Mission work in Athens, Greece.
Upon graduating from Sunset in 1974, Becky and I were committed to following through with our plans. One year after graduating, we moved to Athens. We were young (27 and 25) with a three-month-old baby girl--my parent's first grandchild (what were we thinking?). A couple from our class, Dennis and Betty Doke, committed to going with us. We decided we would give three years. What I hadn't realized that it would take three years just to learn to be able to communicate in the Greek language. After those three years, Dennis and Betty were committed to keeping their three year arrangement and moved to Cyprus to work with another couple. Becky and I stayed in Athens to continue our work with Bobbis and Mary Evdoxiades, a Greek couple who had graduated from Whites Ferry Road School of Preaching.
The three of us--the Dokes, Evdoxiades, and Becky and I teamed up in the beginning to start a church in Glyfada, a suburb of Athens. By the end of those initial three years we had a small church of about twenty members, counting the missionary families. The work was very slow. Because the national religion is Greek Orthodoxy, being Greek Orthodox was synonymous with being Greek. Changing religion was like denying their heritage and unpatriotic. Conversions were tough. We could get most to agree with our studies with them, but they were not willing to give up their families and friends. We would usually baptize one or two a year. I remember an 18 year old girl named Vicky Baduna was baptized at one of our Mediterranean Lectureships. She was very excited and went home to tell her family the good news. Upon hearing of her conversion they began to beat her. They beat her so severely it put her in the hospital. Over the years they all converted. I asked them why in the world they beat her so severely. They said they thought that she had a demon and the way to get rid of the demon was to beat it out of her.
One of the greatest benefits to me personally of living in Greece was learning the Greek language. Nine years there caused me to become fluent in the Greek language, which means dreaming and thinking in Greek, which is truly a blessing as I study the New Testament. I have seen the frequent mistakes scholars make as they approach the New Testament Greek from a grammatical basis. If I were responsible for training Bible Scholars, I would want them to spend time learning to communicate in Greek and Hebrew. Then moving to the grammar would be a simple move--as it was when we learned English beginning as a child then into adulthood. From what I understand, old scholars of the Bible would have to write their dissertations for a doctorate in New Testament Greek, or Old Testament Hebrew, which would certainly require more than a simple grammatical understand of the language. It's a shame that is no longer required:-)
Learning to speak Greek caused me to understand that words generally are nothing more than containers into which meanings are poured. Today's approaches to Bible words are too static. Which leads to more errors. We learn a meaning for a word and apply that meaning wherever the word is found. We don't take that approach in the English language, and it's not done in any living language today. Words are intended to be used with the capability of broad meanings depending upon the context in which they are found. This has caused me to strive to be a better student of context for definitions rather than relying solely on lexicographers. Lexicographers usually are lacking in their understanding of the influences of culture on the meanings of words.
That is another benefit I gained from living in Greece--realizing the influence of culture on how one thinks and communicates. Culture becomes the context that determines the meanings of words. The same comments or actions in Greece, usually won't have the same meaning in America, or anywhere else other than Greece. Joseph Shulam, a Messianic Jew living in Jerusalem, helped me to understand the extent to which the Bible itself is couched in the Jewish language and culture of the past. The Jews who wrote it influence even the Greek of the New Testament. Approaching the Bible with the Second Century culture and language of Gentiles opens the door to a shallow understanding of what it being said. Oh, we can understand the basic message, which is all that is necessary for salvation and worshipping God. That must have been God's intention all along in order to reach the Gentiles. But, I have learned there is so much more. This has enriched my own studies and understanding of God's Word.
After years of studying everything I could get my hands on about First Century Hermeneutic concerning Messiah, I wrote a book called The Moses Connection in John's Gospel, published in 1997. This book has opened many doors for me. I have lectured on it at Oklahoma Christian Lectures, and have taught it to the Gospel of John class as a guest professor. I continue to receive requests for the book from around the world, and I continue to get good reviews on it. I am proudest of the reviews I received from the two men who's opinions I respected the most, my old mentors, Jim McGuiggan and Richard Rogers. Richard became a strong advocate for me and strove to help me get the book published. Jim, who I consider a brilliant Bible Scholar, was very complimentary about the book and told me he had learned some things from it. He also encouraged me to get the book published. If I never sold a single book, receiving their stamp of approval was worth all the study and work I did to write the book.
Returning to the importance of culture, it was substantiated to me over the years that I worked in Athens by the many travels I went on, and the work I was able to do in various parts of the world. I was able to travel regularly to the rest of Europe where I spoke in numerous lectureships, and got to spend time with many foreign missionaries. I was able to observe how different their cultures were and how it impacted their own understanding of God's Word.
Once I was invited to Saudi Arabia to preach and teach for the church meeting on the ARAMCO compound in Dhahran. They did the research on this and determined that I was the second preacher of the Gospel to be permitted into the country, for the purpose of preaching the Gospel, since the time of Mohammed. They said that Everett Huffard Sr. was the first. Becky and I were there for three weeks. I was able to roam the streets freely and observe their culture. The Greek culture was different from that of the rest of Europe, but the Saudi culture was vastly different from all of those in Europe. I found this to be true when I traveled to anywhere in the East--Turkey and Israel. I've said all of this is to emphasis the importance of understanding a culture in order to understand it's words and actions, and how they understand the Bible.
When we left Athens to return to the States, we left behind a church of about 30 people. We had worked hard at preparing them for our departure by teaching them to do the various jobs we had been doing of preaching and teaching. The men of the congregation had gotten good at preaching, teaching and song leading. We always made decisions with the church and allowed them to vote on what they wanted to do. So, when I left, I felt they were able to continue without me. And they did for about three years. Bobbis got tired of working alone and decided to join with Dinos Zanetos in working with the church that met in downtown Athens. The whole church moved with Bobbis. Most of those members still worship in one of the two churches in Athens today, and I get to see them every year when I return there. It pleases me that they are the ones who teach and preach when those preachers are absent.
1984 Return to Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City is where I was raised. My parents and sisters lived there. So, we decided to move there when we left Athens. I was not expecting what I found when we arrived home--reverse culture shock. It turned out to be worse than the culture shock we experienced when going to Greece. Culture shock is when a person looses their familiar Qs. What I've understood is that familiar Qs are the unspoken ways of communicating. For example, when someone invites you to go somewhere with them, but something tells you they are only being polite and not really wanting you to go with them. It's not what's said, it's body language, tone of voice, etc. This is another one of those cultural issues I was alluding to earlier. When you loose your familiar Qs, you don't know how you stand with people. You don't understand whether you are accepted or rejected. It causes a person to become emotionally troubled. Culture shock happens whenever a person's culture changes. Even when you understand the language, if you don't understand what they mean when they relate to you, you will experience culture shock.
Reverse culture shock is when a person returns home to unexpectedly find that his own culture has changed and become foreign to him. They aren't telling the same jokes, dressing the same, using the same idioms, valuing the same things they did when he lived there before. He doesn't find what he expected to find. Instead he is a foreigner in his own country. That is what we experienced when we returned to the States. The greatest problem, I think, is that it was totally unexpected. We didn't know what was happening to us. All we knew is we were all (my family of four) emotionally upset all of the time and didn't know why. It took about three or four years to get back to what we would consider normal.
I believe this experience with, and understanding of culture has prepared me for the various works I continue to do with foreign people. Each year, for the last 12 years, I have taken a team of our members to Guyana, South America to conduct a medical mission. Also, I am an adjunct professor at Oklahoma Christian University teaching Introduction to the Bible for foreign students. And I also continue to go to Athens, Greece where I teach in the Sunset branch school. All of these bring me into a work with foreign people of different cultures. I believe God has equipped me to be able to uniquely connect with foreign peoples. I enjoy doing this immensely. The foreign people I meet and interact with respond well to me, and I believe it is because I respect their cultural differences. I am able to embrace their culture even when it differs from that of my own. They sense this and it opens a door for us to interact.
1984 to 2018, The Northwest Church of Christ.
During the time of trying to re-adjust to my own culture, I found a church in Oklahoma City that was willing to take me in as a young inexperience (in local work) minister. I have been with this church since my return from Greece in 1984, and continue to enjoy a great relationship with them. As I have already mentioned above, my own emphasis on the grace of God has left its imprint on the congregation. The way the congregation relates to one another and to those of the world has been impacted by my teaching. My constant pursuit of a deeper understanding of God's Word has also had it's impact as I see the members with a better understanding of God's Word as they are comfortable with exploring the cultural context of God's Word. The occasional teaching I do that is outside of the box doesn't scare them now, as it did in the beginning of my ministry with them twenty-three years ago.
The congregation and the leadership have a great deal of confidence in my understanding of God's Word. And I enjoy a great relationship of trust and respect with them. I urge them regularly to do their own study because I could be mistaken in my understanding of God's Word. I have tried to instill in them that it's okay to disagree as long as it is done in love. They don't seem to have a problem in doing so. When they challenge something I'm teaching or preaching, I allow them to do so and I allow them their opinion without much argument. We just disagree and that's okay. If, however, I deem it to be about a serious doctrinal issue, I enter into a more serious debate, insisting we accept God's Word when it's clear, still in a spirit of love. I believe this is healthy.
Being close to a Christian University has provided me with the opportunity of mentoring young ministers. Northwest always has one on staff. I have had the privilege of training several who have become successful preachers today. They continue to call me to discuss books they are reading and studies they are personally doing. They will continue to seek advice in how to deal with the various issues young ministers face. When they were working with me, I always develop a close friendship with them. A book that had a huge impact on how I disciple others is called The Master Plan of Evangelism. I learned from this book that Jesus got close and personal to his disciples letting them see how he lived and acted by spending all his time with them. They traveled with him, ate with him, camped with him. They virtually lived with him for three years. I try to do as much as I can to give myself to someone I'm mentoring. He learns to study the way I do. He learns to teach and preach the way I do. He learns to lead the way I do. Of course his own personality eventually does surface.
It is comical, sometimes the way these guys I've mentored like to tease me. I have certain idiomatic expressions that I always seem to say in the same situations. These guys are with me enough that they learn them and have come to call them "dayisms". When they get together, like at the Tulsa Workshop, and we are all hanging out together, one of them might accidentally say a "dayism". The others will make fun of him for it and call him a "dayist" (another pun they enjoy). We all get a great laugh from it and love to tease each other. I believe this is fundamental to mentoring.
I have found that to be effective in training a disciple for the ministry they must want to be like you, but they must feel comfortable enough with you to have fun with you, to enjoy spending a lot of time with you. They must feel comfortable enough to disagree, knowing it will lead to a meaningful study and lively debate in which they might actually prove their point. And when they do, instead of finding me defensive they find me congratulating them and bragging on them to others. This causes them to study more as they look forward to teaching me something. One of the men I trained is Joel Dalrymple. He is now preaching for the Jax Beach Church of Christ in Jacksonville, Florida. They team up with our church each year to go to Guyana. Their elders have thanked me for the training I have given to Joel. I remember one of the elders asked Joel, in my presence, what he liked about my mentoring of him. He said that though he considered me more knowledgeable than he, I was willing to learn from him. I felt that was a great compliment. God has blessed me to have mentored several young men over the last 20 years. I am currently mentoring a young man. I enjoy this part of my ministry a great deal.
The thing I strive to impart to interns is to first be a good student of God's Word because people are changed by God's Word and not by man's wisdom, or his great ability to preach. I stress upon them to exude the love, grace and mercy of God so that people will experience it just by being around them. I teach them to strive to surround themselves with people more talented than themselves; to use the gifts of others by building teams of gifted people to help them do the work of the Lord--learn how to delegate. I teach them to always follow what the Bible says when they are faced with tough situations, and to make sure they are not dealing with a crisis with their own wisdom, but, rather, with God's. I teach them to train other young men, as they have been trained.
As I have said elsewhere, I am happier now than I have ever been in my ministry. God is so good and has provided me with all of these things I love about my ministry. This isn't to say that I am complete--that there is no room for improvement. There is much room for improvement. I have been speaking primarily of my successes, of the things that I have experienced that have made me who I am and have impacted my ministry. If I were to begin now discussing those shortcomings this already lengthy paper would become a book. I am very aware of my many shortcomings. I guess that's why I need a Savior. That's why I am compelled to hardily embrace the grace of God.
As I consider the question “The kind of person, minister, teacher and family leader (if married and a parent) that I want to be......” I would have to say that it is still the same as it was 35 years ago when I was a young minister and the same question was posed to me. "I want to be the kind of teacher and preacher that people want to learn from; that as a result of hearing me preach and teach they will love God more and have greater faith."
My Prayer
Father, thank you for being so good. You have been better to me than I deserve. Thank you for calling me out of darkness. I was totally lost and without hope. I was like an animal with no understanding or moral goodness. Everything I have become that is good is because of you. I bow at your throne and cast my crown at your feet because it is yours. Thank you for blessing me beyond my abilities. I deserve nothing but death from you, and instead you have given me everything. You have heard all of my prayers since the time I first bowed my knee at the name of Jesus. I want for nothing. You have supplied my needs abundantly, overflowing and running over. I know that all that has come about in my life, both the joy and the pain, are from you for my making. Thank you for those experiences. It is who you have made me to be, to be used to your glory. I pray you will not be disappointed in the vessel I have become.
I love you, Father, because you have loved me so much. I know I don't always live as though I love you. I know I fail to be all you want me to be. I fail to be all I want to be for you. I'm sorry my sins were so bad that they caused the suffering of Jesus. Thank you for loving me so much to die for me. Thank you for your grace that saves me from my failures. Thank you, Father, that you are judging me based upon who I want to be for you, rather than my ability, or inability to live up to who I want to be for you. Father, I pray you will continue to strive with me. Fill me with your Spirit. Help me to be the person you want me to be. Help me to be a preacher and teacher who will cause people to love you more and have greater faith in you. In the name of my Savior I come to you with this prayer.
