The Journey Continues

We made very short work of finding a new church. We visited one church with some friends, but we were not sure we felt quite right about it. Our children also did not like the children's ministries as well as they had others, so we continued our search.

We attended services in a community gymnasium which was the temporary quarters for another church while they were building a new building. It was what would probably be called a conservative, evangelical church. We were impressed when the pastor showed up at our door the following Monday evening to thank us for attending services the previous day. We expressed some of our concerns about the church doctrine, especially the fact that, while not unfriendly to the present day workings of the Holy Spirit, they did not seem to give Him is proper place either. The pastor assured us that we would have no doctrinal problems at his church because the church did not really have any official doctrine (sic). He also said he had grown up attending an Assemblies of God church. If memory serves me, he had also studied at Southern California College, now Vanguard University, which is affiliated with the Assemblies of God. What we were later to learn is that a fair percentage of the congregation, and most of the leadership including the pastor had no experience with the present day working of the Holy Spirit. Many were even hostile toward the concept.

Our children fell in love with the children's pastors, Michael and Debra Laflin, so we settled in and tried to discern what we should do. We were involved in many of the church ministries over the next several years including teaching Sunday School, facilitating Women's Ministries and being on the leading edge of a new counseling ministry the church started while we were there. When the time came for the church to add a staff minister, it would have seemed I was a good fit. According to two, credible witnesses, the pastor would not allow my name to be considered. There had been allegations that I had made three women in the congregation uncomfortable. There was no identification of the women or were any specific actions on my part stated, but unbeknownst to me, those allegations would haunt me to the present day. I suppose I did not help myself by telling him I thought the Lord might be telling me that I would one day lead that church. Obviously that has not happened to this point and it still seems like a very long shot that it will. However, when the pastor offered to pay for me to have an appointment with a Christian psychologist to see if he could discover why I thought I was hearing from God, I realized there was no longer any point in further communication with him about ministry in that church.

About a year before we left that church, I became the victim of a downsizing in the Financial Planning Department of the Christian Broadcasting Network after only eight months of employment. I would remain largely unemployed for the next four years due mostly to the local ecomony. I did various jobs that turned out to be more temporary than I had hoped. The Lord put it on my heart to write some teaching letters which I entitled "The Rising Sun" from Malachi 4:2, which says, "But to you who fear My name, The Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings..." Those letters became my ministry and teaching outlet. I was careful to make sure the pastor and his staff members received copies of the letters so there would be no allegations of my teaching errant doctrine or attempting to undermine anything the pastor was teaching. I never did receive any feedback from the staff regarding the letters.

An old friend of mine had assumed the position of District Supervisor of the Foursquare Churches in our area. It seemed good to meet with him and see if he could give any insight as to why God had called us to Santa Maria. As we were talking in his office, he asked how large Santa Maria was. I indicated I supposed with the surrounding county area there were probably close to 100,000 people. He said to me that was a large enough population to justify another Foursquare Church. That as a totally unexpected statement. I told him the current Foursquare pastor would never allow another church in his backyard. He assured me that it would be his decision. I left his office pondering the idea and telling him that we would discuss and pray over the idea and get back to him.

We did pray and discuss and ponder the idea of planting another church, our first experience having not been totally unfortunate. We also discussed the idea with the founding pastor of the Santa Maria Foursquare Church, long since retired. He agreed the current pastor would not allow that to happen, but I had the assurance of the district supervisor that it could indeed be done. I called the supervisor and told him we had decided we would like to plant the Sunrise Foursquare Church. He quickly reigned me in telling me that he would need letters of recommendation before that would be a possibility. I complied and had three pastors write him letters. In the meantime, I began contacting people and contracting a building to meet in. He received the letters, but said he needed more current recommendations. We had only been to two churches over the last seven years. One of those pastors wanted me to see a psychologist and the other would not be happy about another Foursquare Church in Santa Maria, I strongly felt it would be no use to ask them for recommendations, but did ask one of them anyway. He declined and the possibility of planting another Foursquare church withered and died.

Since we had already begun the process of planting a church, we forged ahead and did begin meeting as Sunrise Ministries. To say it was a struggle would be a slight understatement. We did see thirteen people make first time decisions for the Lord in the nearly two years of the church's existence and baptized fourteen people in water. The church began to grow and after the first year we had over forty people in regular attendance on any given Sunday morning. Then inexplicibly, three families moved out of the area over the course of about a month. Those families represented nearly a quarter of the congregation. The death knell came not a long time thereafter when one man in the church took it upon himself to let everyone know how poorly I was doing as a pastor and how bad my doctrine was. In my defense, this man thought that because the first page in his King James Bible proclaimed it as "The Authorized Version" it was the only English version of the Bible God had authorized. The fledgling church could not endure that sort of divisiveness and we decided to close the doors the day no one came to church except our family.