Interview with Pastor Rick, Grace Baptist Church

 

Interview with Pastor Rick

Grace Baptist Church

Washington, Utah

 

Interview takes place in Pastor Rick’s office at the church

August 19, 2015

 

Matt:       This is Pastor Rick of the Grace Baptist Church in Washington, Utah.  The first basic question, Pastor, is if you could tell me a bit of your biography.  How did you end up here at Grace Baptist Church in Washington, Utah?  You can go back pretty far, to your childhood if you want.

Pastor Rick:  I grew up in Western Michigan.  Was born in a hospital just two blocks from that lake.  I grew up in a family that was very much church oriented.  My parents were very involved in our small country church, Bible Church, not a Baptist.  For me, my walk with God started around six years old.  I can still vividly remember, approximately the first grade, in Sunday School the teacher was talking about heaven and hell.  She had made it clear that, as the scriptures say, that the Bible says that all are sinners, we’ve all fallen short of God’s standard of holiness.  I understood that at age six.  She explained that Jesus came to the earth a preexistent Son of God that had been eternal, but he came to the earth as a man and was born in Bethlehem, you know that story.  He eventually died on the cross for the sins of the whole world as the New Testament points out over and over and over and over again.  She made it clear that there is a remedy for sin nature that automatically separates all of us from God.  In other words our sin nature, when we’re born, which we got from Adam, the first man, is our human destruction to hell.  The Bible speaks of being born again and being saved, various terms, justified, redeemed, born again, all these different terms that speak about a new life that we have in Christ by accepting his death on the cross and his subsequent resurrection as the means of our salvation.  In other words, he paid the penalty for our sins.  The Bible speaks of the fact that men in themselves can do nothing by their good works, by being a good person, giving money, getting baptized, church membership, none of those things can make a man worthy of heaven.  It’s all based on Jesus’ death and resurrection.  So at age six she made hell seem like a scary place.  I remember that.  I remember after one particular Sunday, she led in prayer and I silently prayed, I confessed my own personal sins to God and asked Him to forgive me through Jesus’ death and resurrection.

So at age six I got saved.  It didn’t really mean a whole lot to me.  Obviously I wasn’t a terrible sinner at that age, but it became meaningful to me when I was fourteen, my father passed away from a heart attack very sudden, very unexpected, and I began to sense that God had something for me that’s just not a common thing.  I figured that it was God reaching out to me in a very different kind of way.  I didn’t know what. it meant at that time.

Well, when I was 18, 19, 20 years old, after high school I went to college for a year and I was dissatisfied about it, for about a year, year and a half.  I’d gotten a job. . .

M:    Is this still in Western Michigan?

PR:   . . .Just feeling like I was alone.  I was never much of a dater.  I was shy.  I think I developed a bad attitude, poor self-image after my father died for some reason.  I never dated much.  I was a loner, at least after high school when my friends started going to college.  I flunked out in about a year.  I didn’t know what I was doing or where I was going.

      After about a year, year and a half, I tried different things to try to make up for the void in my life and nothing seemed to work.  Then I met my future wife.  We started dating.  Our first date was actually in her Baptist Church.  It was a huge, like, 1,000 member church in Muskegon, the big town.  Muskegon is just up from where I lived.

M:    What was the name of your town?

PR:   Fruit Port.

      We started dating pretty much regularly.  We fell in love.  Less than a year later we were married.  But before we got married I was starting to find some spiritual revival in her church because the pastor was very much a good teacher.  Our church, that I grew up in was more doctrinally related like, “Thus saith the lord.”  And this particular Baptist Church, which most of them are that way, was very practical, “This is how the Bible relates to your life.”  I hadn’t heard a lot about that, so I really began to grow in my faith, gain strength in my Christian faith.  It’s not like it ever deserted me or I ever wanted to not appreciate it.  It’s just that for awhile it wasn’t very meaningful to me.  My church had kind of had a couple splits and it was just a handful of people, I was about the only one my age.  All that played into it.

      So after we were married, my wife and I started getting involved with a junior high youth program teaching Sunday School to them.

M:    Through the Baptist Church?

PR:   Through her own church.  She grew up there.  We got involved in an Awana Ministry, which is like a Christian Boy Scouts.  It stands for “Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed,” 2 Timothy 2:15.  That was a Tuesday night program for elementary kids.  We got involved as leaders in that.  And we got more involved with. . .I became a Deacon in the church, eventually.  Through that my secular job, I was working for General Telephone at that time, started to seem less and less appealing and I began to sense that God was leading me to something else.  Really, I didn’t know it at that time, but I was being called into the ministry through all that Christian service.  I was convicted that I needed to  go to Bible College to fulfill what God was leading me to.  Through Bible College we moved to Pennsylvania, near Scranton, Baptist Bible College.

M:    That’s what it’s called?

PR:   Well, it was.  They just changed it.  Now it’s Summit University.  Clark Summit is that name of the town.  A lot of these colleges are taking the “Baptist” out anymore because they don’t want to . . .it’s politically not as acceptable.  I’m not in favor of that at all, but they didn’t ask me.

      The point is that when I went to that college, actually they made me proud to be a Baptist.  I understood it before, but not having been raised that way, getting that education made me proud of being a Baptist.  That’s why it stunned me this year when they decided to do that, what they did at that university.

      When we were done with that we moved back to Michigan.  I was thinking I was maybe going to be a youth pastor.  A lot of bigger churches have multi-pastor staffs.  We have youth pastors in our home church.  That’s what I thought at the time.

M:    What’s the name of the Baptist Church in Michigan?

PR:   Calvary Baptist Church and they, too, about ten years ago took the “Baptist” out and became Calvary Church.  So they kind of deserted that Baptist heritage.  And that’s a whole ‘nother story.

      We were looking for a ministry.  We found out that if you know people it helps.  We didn’t know anybody.  We had, the college would send out our resume to churches that they knew of.  In our home church, they supported a Baptist Missionary here in Utah who had been up in Orem, Utah, for several years before that.  He made it known that he was looking for someone to help him.  He belonged to a mission agency out of Cleveland, Ohio, called Baptist Mid-Missions.

M:    A mission agency?

PR:   That is an agency that sends out missionaries all around the world, and it helps that local church, like our home church, to do all the government stuff and taxes, all the red tape.  That’s what they do.

M:    This one is specific to the Baptist Church.

PR:   Yes.  And it was called Baptist Mid-Missions.  It still is.  We joined up with them after our home church ordained me.  And ordination is your home church’s acceptance of your calling, having seen you in action they approve and ordain you into the ministry.  So that happened about the same time.

M:    You can take that ordination with you to other places.

PR:   Right.  It’s right up there [on his wall, like a diploma].

      So what happened is they made it possible for us to fly out to Orem and spend a couple weeks with him.  He was, at that time, planning on coming down here from Orem.  The reason why is that his church up there was almost self-supporting.  Missionaries have their own support.  In Baptist circles they have different churches support them financially and before they can go to the field wherever that might be they have to achieve a certain amount or level of monthly income in order to survive.

M:    Through your home church?

PR:   They support you.  That’s part of it.  But then you go around to different churches to present your ministry and a lot of them take you on and support you for so much every month, out of their missionary fund.

M:    Which is provided the congregants.

PR:   The people.  A lot of those churches, depending on the size, some of them have a few missionaries that they support, some of them have 20 or 30.  Sometimes they support you for $50, maybe $100 per month.  They send it to the mission that becomes your employer, IRS-wise.

M:    So you go around and try to get a bunch of different churches. . .

PR:   You try to line up different churches to speak in and share what God has laid on your heart.

M:    So $50 or $100 from this one and $50 or $100 from that one.

PR:   Right.  We did that for two years to get that income before we came here.  While we were in Orem we came down to St. George and checked it out for a day.  We decided that it was God’s will for us to work with him.  So after the two years of raising finances, they call it deputation . . .

M:    This is in Michigan or Orem?

PR:   In Michigan.  But we did get into Ohio and Pennsylvania.  It’s all Baptist Churches, we weren’t interested in money from other denominations that had different beliefs.

M:    So, on a weekend you and your wife would drive down to a Baptist Church somewhere else in Michigan or maybe North Indiana or . . .

PR:   Yep.  And I was working at that time.

M:    And you set it up ahead of time and they let you give a service. . .

PR:   What we did at that time, we had a slide presentation, not they have PowerPoint and computers and the whole bit, but at that time we showed slides to their whole church, and preached and sometimes they had missionary conferences for a few days where every night they’d have a service and invite missionaries that they support or some that are looking for support come in and do their thing.  After you’ve been there a lot of times they’ll decide “maybe we want to take this family on for support.”

      I will tell you, one of the biggest things we did on deputation was to show the Godmaker film.  Are you familiar with that?

M:    I’m not familiar with it.  It’s called Godmaker?

PR:   God Makers.  It came out in the early ‘80s and it was blasphemy to the Mormon Church because it was a Christian film put out by ex-Mormons who had accepted Christianity.  They put out this film about what Mormons believe because, I found out in our travels that hardly anybody knew what Mormons were about.  In the Midwest we found out there were all kinds of what used to be the Reformed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  So I learned some about them and what happened after Joseph Smith died.

      Because we had this film, it was a powerful tool for us to gain support, really.  We got our support.  That film is almost obsolete now.  We got our support and by that time that pastor was down here.  Grace Baptist Church had been in existence six months before we got here but they didn’t have a building.  We used to meet in. . .down in Washington they have that building on the corner that used to be a school, it’s now a museum.  We met there at first.  We’ve been next door in the clubhouse next door while this church was being built.  The RV Park next door.  That’s their clubhouse.  It’s on the other side of the fence.  There are two buildings over there.  We had a few baptisms in their pool, that kind of thing.  And we met in the Star Nursery, used to be a cotton mill, for awhile.

M:    What’s the name of the other guy?

PR:   Mike Bardon.  He is now somewhere over by Ephraim.  I got here in 1986, in October it’ll be 29 years.  Our building was built between August and December of ’88.  This building.  After the building was completed, our first service was the Sunday before Christmas that year.  The following May, he and his wife left the area here, they went to somewhere in the middle of Utah.  They wanted to start another church.  His wife contacted a disease and part of the cure is to leave the area that you’re at.  At that time I became the official pastor.  That was in ’89.

M:    Washington was really small then.

PR:   St. George, too.  There was no mall.  A lot of things are different.

      So that’s how I got here.

M:    When we give our donations in church, you divide that up into different things?

PR:   We have a budget.  We’re incorporated.  We have so much that we need to take in, on average, every week.

M:    I’ve seen that in your program.  Do you support missionaries?

PR:   We do not, really.  No.  What we kind of do is try to help those locally that have needs.  We get a lot of people, most of them have some sort of association with us.  They have so many needs because of the economy and some of them are young families.  That’s kind of our mission budget.  They give a certain amount to me.  It’s not enough for me to sustain a living, that’s why I work.

M:    What work do you do?

PR:   I work for two hospice agencies as chaplain.  I just started working the second one a year ago this month.  Both of them are very much part time.  So between three jobs, I live.  My wife works also, for Beehive Homes as activities person.  That’s how we get our income.

M:    And you’ve been here almost thirty years.

PR:   Yep.  Getting on there.

M:    How has the church changed in those thirty years?

PR:   Not a lot.  We have taken a lot of . . .we take a lot of pride it not changing.  You’ll notice we sing what are referred to as the old hymns of the faith.  We’re not into contemporary Christian music, worship bands, the worship groups they have up front, that sort of thing.  Obviously we don’t do that, you’ve seen that.  We’re still old fashion.  A lot of times when we talk about ourselves we describe ourselves as a Little House on the Prairie kind of church.  Family-oriented, more or less.  I’m not saying the others aren’t that way, I’m just saying that we’re different.

M:    It’s very cozy and family feeling.  At Bible Study the other night there are kids in the hallway.  It’s almost like you’re grandma and grandpa’s house.

PR:   That’s kind of the way we like it.  We’ve never been very big, because the current trend is contemporary rock music.  We’re just not into that.

M:    This is the way I’ve been thinking about things as I’ve been going to different churches, there are the traditional institutional churches, like Catholics or the Episcopalians or the Lutherans, and you go to one of those churches and there’s all the symbolism, they wear the outfits, pretty traditional hymns and such.  Then you go to the more contemporary Bible Churches and they have the band up there and the pastor is dressed in contemporary clothes.  You guys seem somewhere in the middle.

PR:   I can understand why you’d say that, it’s true.  Baptists historically are, if I may use the term, anti-clerical.  We don’t go in for the word clergy.  That represents kind of a higher class of Christian that wears robes and sets them apart from everybody else.  Baptists historically have not been that way.  The pastor is no more blessed than anybody else.  The only difference is he’s called of God to be a pastor.  The Bible does speak of giving him honor because of that.  But not because he’s more spiritual or anything else.  The thing is that in modern Christianity a lot of churches have forsaken a lot of the truths of the bible.  A lot of denominations have real battles within them over years, going back to the last couple of hundred years, but especially the last hundred years, between modernism and liberals compared to the traditionalists.  The difference is that a lot of them have, you know, they don’t believe that the Bible is the entire word of God.  They don’t hold to some of the truths; they’ve changed their minds about creation.

M:    Like the Episcopalians?

PR:   A lot of them.  I won’t say any in particular, cuz I don’t always know.  Just about every major denomination has had to deal with these issues.  Years ago it was the evolution thing versus creationism and the battle for the Bible which is whether the Bible is the entire word of God with no mistakes.  A lot of them don’t believe that any more.  And then the current trend towards accepting homosexuals and even women ministers, they’re having more of that in the LDS Church lately, they’re raising their voices in some ways to that.  All these issues that are social and the Church has to deal with them.  What the social world doesn’t understand, or the world in general, is that, at least for churches like ours, I can’t speak for all of them, our stand is on the Bible.  It is the absolute standard of authority that we believe and base everything on.  So when the Bible says something negative about a current issue then that’s our stand.  It’s never going to change.

M:    Do different Baptist Churches has different interpretations?

PR:   Yeah.  There’s different Baptist groups.  The Southern Baptists is a convention.  They have more of a denomination type thing whereas we’re strictly independent, we’re not tied to any denomination or association.  There’s different Baptist groups that are more strict.  Have you ever heard of Bob Jones University?

M:    I have.

PR:   I don’t know about the current trend, but they have always been very strict.  For example, boys and girls have to be a certain distance from each other if they walk down the same sidewalk.  Things like that. Standards is what we’re talking about.  And it’s always been that way.

Different Baptists, some of them believe the King James Version of the Bible is the only Bible there is, period.  Most Baptist churches have gone to some of the newer, modern versions.  Obviously we have not.  We’ve stuck with the King James, that’s my personal preference.  So there’s a lot of different Baptist groups that have different ideas.

M:    Earlier you made a distinction. . .you said growing up you went to a Bible Church, not a Baptist Church.  What’s that distinction?

PR:   The difference in that one, it’s not like the one that’s over here in Washington, Southland Bible.  This one is almost like Baptists in just about everything except they didn’t baptize.  They were very much opposed to water baptism.  And they have Bible reasons for believing that.  They have a gospel, I mean a fellowship of churches that believe that way nation-wide.  So it’s very Baptistic in some ways but not in that way which is the main thing, obviously, main difference between them and a Baptist Church.  Being part of that church was not that different when I started going to my wife’s Baptist Church.  But I did have to change gears and change my views on things because the Baptist Church I was taught things that I had heard preaching against, mainly water baptisms.

M:    And that is where “Baptist” comes from, right?  The name?

PR:   Right.  Immersion.  So I changed my view on that.  I was actually baptized by water before we were even married after I had been going there for several months.  It made sense so I did it.

      One thing, though, you were talking about a lot of the things that these different churches have in common, all of them pretty much agree, I just want to say this, on the person of Jesus.  We all agree on the basic gospel as far as his death and resurrection.  Real Christianity, you know, no Baptist would say, “I’m going to go to heaven because I’m a Baptist.”  They would say, “I’m going to heaven because I’m a Christian, or Born Again,” or whatever word you want to use.  The whole idea of Christianity is just not religion, which many times is defined as man seeking God, where Christianity is God seeking man, but Christianity really is a relationship between a person and Christ.  In the Bible we’re told to have a standard of living that would be pleasing to Him and we’re told, that being in the Bible, as much as we can, will make us more in His image, as far as our practices in everyday life.  That’s why here we emphasize the Bible and teach the Bible because the Bible does speak of itself as being the means by which a person can become more like Christ.  That’s the Earthly goal is to be like Him as we go about our business in whatever job or occupation you may have.  That’s why we put so much emphasis on the Bible, because here we believe it’s not just God’s word, it’s a standard of living and also our only means of knowing how to please Him.  That’s the difference.  I don’t look at it as religion because of the fact, occasionally I’m called religious or something like that and I understand what they’re saying, but if that’s all I was I wouldn’t be a Christian.  There’s a lot of religions that don’t have anything to do with Christ, or they’re misguided in their views of Christ cuz they don’t really believe the Bible.  And may I say also one of the differences here and a lot of other denominations, is that we believe the Bible is to be understood literally, interpreted literally.  Most of the other denominations do not do that.  They have a different form of theology that came from Luther and Calvin and some of the reformers that is a different interpretation of the Bible generally than the Baptistic view and even the Bible Church view and some of the other churches.  That’s the difference between some of the denominations is how they interpret the Bible.  I’ve been taught my whole life to interpret it in a literal view, recognizing it has figures of speech and metaphors and things like that, obviously.  That’s how we read it.

M:    Does that literalism change in different versions of the Bible?

PR:   It’s not that so much, although some versions, like the New International version that’s so popular nowadays, it’s a paraphrase.  In other words, it’s not a literal translation, but it’s a paraphrase.  There are a couple other versions that are very true to the original manuscripts which are Hebrew and Greek, between the Old and the New, and they’re accurate as far as that goes.  There are some, as I said, Baptist Churches that have a King James only mentality, that it’s the only Bible.  I am not that way.  If somebody wants to use another version that’s between them and God.  But, for me, I love the King James.

M:    Is the Baptist Church a Protestant Church?

PR:   Technically not.  Most of the time we’re thought of that way because if you’re not Catholic you’re Protestant.  Actually in the Reformation era the reformers were persecuting the Anabaptists, the pre-Baptist churches were called Anabaptists, they were persecuting them because they insisted on baptizing people after they got saved and not as babies or as infants.  And again were going back to interpreting the Bible differently.  The reformers were even persecuting what became known as Baptists.

M:    Tell me what Anabaptist means.

PR:   I don’t know what it exactly means, but it’s what Baptists were called before they were called Baptists.  It goes back to the Middle Ages and the Reformation.  Historically, there’s always been Christians who have believed Baptist doctrine, even in the Dark Ages, and were not part of the Catholic Church.  It was Luther that made the biggest impact.  After him other reformers picked up his mantle, so to speak, and brought about the changes that needed to be made.

Baptists technically are not really Protestant.

M:    Because . . .

PR:   Because we’re not really in the same theological camp as the rest of them.

M:    Baptists, when it comes to baptism, believe you have to make a conscious choice, is that right?

PR:   Right.  It’s because that in the Scriptures, and I’m not talking about John the Baptist and his baptism cuz that has nothing to do with Christianity.  In the early Church, the Book of Acts and the Epistles, people were saved first and then they were baptized as a testimony of their faith.  The reformers would baptize infants and youngsters without any knowledge of what the Gospel is or Word of God or anything else.  That’s the difference between Baptists and a lot of the other denominations.

M:    Later baptisms.

PR:   Right.  Upon your profession of faith we baptize people.

M:    Saved first.

PR:   Right.

M:    So what is the purpose of the baptism.

PR:   It’s to identify with the Lord Jesus and his death, burial, and resurrection.  That comes from the Book of Romans, Chapter 6.  To identify with Him and kind of make a public testimony of your faith.

M:    Is that your pool back there?

PR:   We do.  We have a tub.  I’ve always thought it would be cool to do it in a lake somewhere but a lot of them around here have muddy bottoms, clay bottoms, and are pretty slick, and a lot of them are seniors and they don’t want to do that anyway.  We use to do them in pools before we got this building.  It’s not where you do it but it’s how you do it and when you do it.  The immersion part is very important unlike some that sprinkle and things like that.  Everything is done with a purpose because that’s what we believe the Bible teaches.

M:    And it’s important to have witnesses to the baptism?

PR:   It’s what we refer to as an ordinance at a local church, not a sacrament.  There’s a difference between that.  Because it’s an ordinance of a local church it’s sanctioned by the local church and ordained by the local church, in other words I don’t baptize people on my own.  I would never do it apart from the knowledge and the okay of this church.  In Baptist circles, not all of them, but most Baptists, when you get Baptized you become a member of the church, also.  But not before.

M:    What are you called before?

PR:   Not before they get baptized.  They can be saved but until they get baptized they are not eligible to become a member.  The only reason for that is because baptism was the fundamental truth taught by the Lord as the next thing after you’re salvation.  To be saved and then baptized.  Therefore, to become a member of a church, which doesn’t guarantee anything eternally, it’s just God’s way of working, He workds through local churches, in order to be a member you have to baptized based on His instruction.

M:    If you’ve been baptized and become a member of one church, let’s say you move from Washington to Seattle, can you take that membership with you?

PR:   Our constitution allows, and most Baptist Churches do that as well, for people that have moved here that have already been baptized, we don’t believe you have to do it more than once, just like you don’t have to be saved more than once, we accept by Letter of Transfer their membership and their Christian experience in that other church wherever it may be.

M:    What if they got baptized in something that wasn’t a Baptist Church?

PR:   If the church believes in the same idea of baptism as we do it’s okay.  If they’ve been immersed, it they believe that it’s a testimony and identification with Christ, then that’s okay.  We call it “Membership by Christian Experience.”  There’s room for them in our church, too.  Some people, to be honest. . .We’ve had a few people here that have gotten baptized when they were young and, for one reason or another, it wasn’t real meaningful to them, or maybe they decided it was later after that they even got saved, maybe.  We’ve rebaptized a few people because they felt like it would be more meaningful.  We want to be a blessing where we can.

M:    You say you haven’t changed much over the thirty years that you’ve been here, and this is one of the arguments that some of these other churches make, say South Mountain Community Church, the reason they call themselves more contemporary, they say, “Look at some of the more traditional churches, all there congregation are old.  In ten years they’re going to be gone because they’re all going to die.  They’re not attracting young people.  That’s why we have the rock and roll band the neon cross.”

PR:   We understand all that.  We understand that as far as the world, we’re set apart from it in practice as well as belief.  So we don’t have anything here to attract people other than the Word of God itself.  People aren’t going to come here just to sing hymns.  The people that come here love the Word of God and what they can get here that way.  They appreciate it.  We have nothing to . . .We’re not interested in attracting people through entertainment or the circus or whatever you want to call it that a lot of churches seem to be doing to get people to come.  The Word of God is, the Bible teaches us that the Gospel itself is foolish to those who don’t know Christ.  It says that definitely to the Corinthians, which wasn’t far from Athens which was the center of culture in the ancient world.  It basically says that the unsaved mind cannot understand the things of God.  The whole purpose of church, then, is primarily for believers.  A lot of these churches probably wouldn’t agree with that.  That’s why they do what they can to get people to come.  We’re not interested in advertising in the sense of selling ourselves.  We’re not interested in that.  If we can get people to commit to Christ out and about where we live and work then they’ll come in and they’ll be able to find the spiritual sustenance to grow and be fruitful and the whole bit.  We’re not trying to attract unsaved people.  If they come in on their own, even like yourself, that’s great.  God bless you.  But it’s not like we’re reaching out and trying to program our whole church to attract them because that’s not even Biblical.

M:    So you’re not, and I’m ignorant, evangelical?  Or are you?

PR:   That’s a broad term.  Evangelical, to me, is a movement that emphasizes the unity of all Christian churches.  Whereas fundamental, that’s what we would be, believe that while the Bible teaches not to even associate with those who digress from God’s word.  We’ve been called separatists, we’ve been called . . .Because we’re not involved with traditional other churches and a lot of cooperation, different ways of cooperating with each other, the fundamental churches in general have been picked apart because of that.  The Evangelical Church is so broad that they’ll say, “We don’t care if you don’t believe the Bible.”  Where fundamentalists would say, “If you don’t believe the Bible as true in what it says, very, very definitely what it says, then you’re wrong.”  Where the Evangelical Church would say, “We’ll agree to disagree.”  That’s a poor way of saying it.  Again, evangelical is such a broad word.

M:    It seems that evangelical connotes the idea of actively going out and recruiting new members.

PR:   Not recruiting.  There’s the rub, because the word “evangelize” means to witness.  We are told, and we do that.  But it’s become a catch term.  Evangelical, in the last 50 years. . .Another word has come up called neo-evangelical.  It’s based on the church fitting in more with the culture in various ways, and fundamentalist is known as more of a strictly Bible, whereas the evangelicals are more culture related and culturally concerned, maybe, then, what fundamentalists would traditionally be.  It’s not something I think a lot about every day, so it’s hard to even define it.

      As far as evangelizing, that’s about good Bible word, and it speaks of witnessing.  We’re not recruiting for the sake of getting people to come, we’re interested in souls, like deep inside you, your soul.  We want people like you to be saved so you can eternal life and go to heaven.  We believe that through Christ is the only way to go to heaven.  It’s not a church or belief or a doctrine or anything else.  It’s strictly a saved or, as you said, born again relationship with Christ and that’s it.  We will, by any means, look for opportunities to share that with people, that they need to know Christ.

M:    The Baptist Church doesn’t have a missionary program like the LDS Church, right?

PR:   They do.  I talked to you about that.  It’s just not centered around one church.  In other words, this agency, like Baptist Mid-Missions that I was speaking of that is headquartered in Cleveland, and churches from all over the country and Canada and other places have missionaries that are associated with that agency.  When they gain money, like I said, they get churches to support them, it all goes to the agency, and they funnel it to every missionary every month.  They’re all over the world being missionaries.  We are told to be missionaries at home as well, right where we are.  We consider all of us to be missionaries, per se.  These missionaries I’m talking about are lifetime missionaries, they don’t just go out for two years like is popular here.

M:    So it’s a different idea than the LDS Church.

PR:   Different process.  Here, young people that for a couple years. . .

M:    It’s very much an expectation, right?

PR:   It is in their church.  Most churches are training their kids to be missionary minded, to be evangelizing minded.  In other words, being a witness.  I can remember when I was just a little guy, I played a 45 rpm record of George Beverley Shea singing “The Old Rugged Cross,” my best friend who happened to be Catholic, he was appalled.  Didn’t like it.  I thought, “How can it be possible that anybody,” at age 8 when I thought this, “how anybody couldn’t like that song.”  It was my first instance in sharing my faith.

M:    That’s what you mean by witnessing?

PR:   Yeah.  Sharing your faith.  Sharing what the Word of God says about being saved and going to heaven.  Our desire is, God’s desire, too, is that all of us get saved.  His desire is for all of us to have a relationship with Him.

      So we are missionary minded.  It’s just that with our budget we have a hard time affording to send, you know, to help somebody somewhere else.  But we try to do what we can locally.

M:    How is it been?  You have a unique experience running a Baptist Church in Southern Utah.  A place that, especially, 30 years ago was even more. . .

PR:   Not as many other churches.

M:    Have you run into any struggles with that, in a predominately LDS culture?

PR:   No.  Not really. 

M:    You had enough people when you got here to start the church.

PR:   Yeah.  We’ve seen miracles.  We borrowed a lot of money to build the building.  Not compared to today, but then it was a lot of money.  We saw that paid off with a big miracle offering over ten years ago.  We determined we didn’t want to be in debt anymore.  We felt it was a vow to do so and we had a onetime offering who gave plenty of money to pay off the debt.  Just about everything we have in the building has been donated, like the pulpit, the communion table, piano, originally our lawn out front which gone to pot this year, all that grass came from across the street for free.  Stuff like that.  We’ve seen God working a lot of things out for us along the way.  Even the pews have were free a couple years ago.

When you see all that stuff it encourages you to keep going and do what you can.  We’re no different than anybody else in that we’re all people.  We’re all human and we all go through things and struggles and good times and bad times and in between times.  The only difference is that those of us that know the Lord are encouraged and comforted by Him in ways that other people probably wouldn’t understand.

But in the same way, like I said, we’re all in the same boat.  There’s been a lot of talk lately about, I don’t know if you’ve heard much about the blood moon prophecies and things like that in recent culture.  There’s been books written about the blood moon that’s coming up in September and every time that comes up, about every certain number of years, there’s some big event that happens, usually concerning Israel.  There are books written that maybe this is beginning of the Revelation/Apocalypse and all that.  Different things with the Mayan calendar, Omega Code, various things like that that have come out over the years have all been flash in the pans.  They come and go and then they’re forgotten.  I imagine this current phenomena will be, too.

On the other hand, if it did happen, it wouldn’t surprise me, cuz we’ve seen a lot of Biblical prophecy coming true in my lifetime that were spoken of by Jesus a long time ago.  A lot of it is coming to pass in my lifetime.  It’s a pretty exciting time to live in that sense.  The only question is, How long will it keep going?  That’s what nobody knows.

M:    And God’s time might be different than our time.

PR:   It definitely is different.  Even though we see signs of the times in certain things, we still don’t know how long this could seemingly drag on.  It could last for a long time.

M:    Most generations see certain signs, right?

PR:   Right.  Even in the 1^st Century writers of some of the New Testament Epistles spoke of themselves being in the, quote/unquote, last days.  I think the last days started when Jesus went back to heaven, myself.  I think there is scriptural evidence for that in the New Testament.  As we’ve gone on we’ve seen things like Israel becoming a nation in 1948, it was huge.  That’s a Biblical prophecy come to pass.  The fact that they’re still here, they’ve had successful wars in the last fifty/sixty years.  God’s hand seems to be upon them.  All that is Biblical, Old Testament prophecy coming to pass.  It makes a lot of people believe that maybe the current events are significant in that way.  I’ve always, not, been skeptical but just skeptical of what people say and some of what they believe and why believe it but, like I said, nothing would surprise me if Rapture occurred tomorrow, a lot of us wouldn’t be here anymore, we’d be in heaven.

M:    I liked your Bible Study talk the other night, the people in the Old Testament.  That’s faith.

PR:   That is so amazing, what they accomplished with so little.  The New Testament speaks of the Law of Moses which they operated under religiously, as just a shadow of reality.  Literally.  And yet they still accomplished what they did.  Like I said the other night it makes me wonder why we, which have so much more through Christ as outlined in the New Testament, why we aren’t doing even more so than they did.

M:    Makes us a little lazy.

PR:   I think that’s an attitude that isn’t maybe a conscious one a lot of times, but it’s imbedded.  “I’m safe, I’m going to heaven.”  That’s been a lot of criticism of people that believe we’re saved by faith, not by works, because it means you can pretty much say, “Hey, I’m saved.  I can do whatever I want.”  Which is directly against the Word of God.  Nobody that’s saved would believe that at all.  But we do have a lot of freedom to work out our salvation in the sense of practicing it.  We have a lot of freedom.  We don’t have a Prophet or a Pope or a President or anybody else telling us “This is what you have to believe and how you live” and all that.  We go strictly, like I said, by the Bible.

M:    It’s between you and god.

PR:   Right.  Which is anti-denominationalism, I suppose.  That’s how we interpret the Bible.  It’s been a great experience.  In recent years, as I’ve gotten a little bit older, my experience in my faith has been so much more rich because of the fact that I’ve, in several different ways, it’s even kind of hard for me to talk about it, I’ve grown so much closer to the Lord.  It’s been amazing.  Several years ago, for an example, seven or eight years ago, I wish I would’ve kept track being an amateur historian I’m almost ashamed that I can’t nail it down, I began to sense that my prayers were going nowhere.  In that time. . .We have one Deacon, he was the young man that was up front on Sunday.  We pray every Saturday.  Seven or eight years ago I was sensing that my prayers were just a bunch of words, not a whole lot.  I wondered sometimes if they went any higher than the sound of my voice.    So I began to study a little bit more about prayer and the Bible is just full of information all the way through about that subject.  I began to actually ask God to give me the words to pray so that I wouldn’t, in my way of thinking, waste words.  That I would feel like I was actually praying what God wanted me to pray, instead of a rote saying words and things like that which are totally meaningless, or repeating words or phrases all the time that we have a tendency to do sometimes.  I didn’t want to be that way, I didn’t want to pray that way.  God opened up my eyes, so to speak, to be able to learn some things about prayer that made it a whole lot meaningful.

      Not long after that, just as a matter of studying the Bible mostly for my messages here, I can’t really explain it in so many words but it seems like the Bible itself became more real, more of a life changer.  It’s not like it hadn’t affected my life before, but in a fresh way.  Revival is a word we use sometimes.  I’m saying it was more than that, it was more of a . . .What happened practically speaking is that different words, sometimes a verse but sometimes even words would be like neon signs on the pages that seemed to come out of the page and hit me between the eyes, became very real and meaningful in ways that I never experienced before.

      This last May we went to Illinois.  We went to a mission conference that my wife and I actually joined up with at that time, not the Church, but my wife and I.  It’s called CUME Baptist Ministries and it’s a committee on missionary evangelism.  There’s only like 20 missionaries in the group.  It’s out of Pontiac, Illinois.  Most of them are evangelists where they do travel around the churches like Billy Graham kind of thing.  But local churches, not stadiums.  They’d share the Gospel and, you know, people would grow in the Lord and they’d get saved, and things like that.  Most of them are that, but they recently changed gears and they have regular pastors like myself.  We wanted to do that because we have a couple churches that support us financially, back in Michigan.  It gives us a little bit of an agency who’s an authority over us financially, who we feel more accountable to now.  This just happened in May.

      While we were there, they had this conference for 3 days, Sunday to Wednesday.  Every night and during the day they had one of the missionary speakers do a sermon.  They had a regular church service every night.  Through that God just illuminated my life, made my faith so much more real than even before, like I was saying, a few years before.  I’ve just not been the same ever since.  My study habits have changed, I haven’t picked up a Civil War book in 3 months, which for me is the fifth grade the last time I did that.  It’s not like I don’t care for it or like it, it’s just . . .I’ve just been more engrossed in the Bible, to be honest.  I’m not trying sound corny or weird, I’m just telling you it’s been a real experience.  It’s been so much better for me.  I’ve been told that my messages reflect that, before I went compared to after.  I don’t know for sure, but I’m just kind of praising the Lord right now, for lack of a better way to say it.