Part Three: Boot Camp
After college I was sure God wanted me in evangelism. I tired to get meetings for a year but was not successful. There was no need for a 25 year old evangelist. We finally moved to Pensacola, where my wife was from, and I took a job with her dad. Stephanie’s father was in construction, and I can say it was a learning experience. Mostly what I learned from the experience showed me clearly that I was not meant to be a construction worker. I tried to find a church where we could be of service. We helped out in Stephanie’s home church for a while but finally settled in a little church in the country. We helped Pastor Terri Pergl for two years until he moved on to a larger work in Memphis. After that I decided it was time to get serious for the Lord. I spent some time praying about which direction to go: Northeast or West. I wrote two schools about coming as a student for master’s work and received a reply from the one in the West: the San Francisco Baptist Theological Seminary in downtown San Francisco. I had told them of my desire to get a master’s degree and start a church after that. They even helped me get a job in a Christian School across the bay in Hayward, California.
Early that summer of 1985, we sold most of our stuff, packed up everything else we could carry and headed out on our first missionary journey. I have often said we could not have come to Moldova if first we had not gone to California; California was the education I needed. I worked in the Christian school at Fairway Park Baptist Church under Pastor Dean Goddard, who is now with the Lord. At the same time I was working on my MA in San Francisco. We really loved it there and would have stayed at the school in Hayward, except God had other plans.
At the end of my second year there in Hayward, God opened the door for me to work in a Korean church in the center of San Francisco. I was asked to go there by Dr. Innas from the seminary. The church was losing its young people because they spoke better English and not much Korean and their parents and the church members spoke mostly Korean. Most of the youth had been born in America and were basically American youth. It was a challenge at first due to the hardness of their hearts to the Gospel and the difference in culture. However, soon after I arrived many of the youth accepted the Lord at a youth camp I ran for them. God had put me in a different culture and given me a blessed ministry right in the mist of His preparing us to go over seas. The Korean pastor offered me a full time ministry with his church. The offer was very tempting, but neither I nor my wife had peace about it. In the end we went ahead with plans to find an area of Northern California in which to start a church. We went back several times to work with the Koreans. We ran a camp for them and invited other Korean churches from the Bay area to come. We saw hundreds saved and many lives changed forever. At that time in my life it was the most blessed thing I had ever been a part of. It was in reality a touch of revival. In the difficult years I was yet to experience I would think back on that blessed time with the Koreans and remember: God has used me; God wants to use me. The Lord just needed to do more fine tuning of His servant.
In the late summer of ‘88 we moved to Sacramento, California, to work with Dr. Harvey Seidel of Baptist Church Planting West. Our goal was to get a new church plant off the ground there. We had some success early on, but the church seemed to never really get going. At one point we had over 100 in a service. People were getting saved but there were problems: we had some members of the fold who were discontent; they had been discontent in every church they had been a part of for years. When we finally thought the church was stabilizing, they split the church and went to a new church plant north of us. The same folks that split us ruined the new church plant six months after it started. The split was very quick: one Sunday we had 85-90 people coming; the next week there were 45-50 of us. These were hard times for the church and for me personally, but I was going through “the school of hard knocks,” which I needed. God was getting us ready for future ministries.
I was determined to rebuild the church; this time with the right kind of people. However, for the next year or so I was constantly being set back, and it became apparent to me that God was not blessing the work. After three years in Sacramento, I began to sense that God had a change of direction for us, but I had no idea what the direction was. I approached my wife about leaving California, but she was not for leaving. Another problem we were having was salary. The church just could not support us, and what little support Brother Seidel had helped me raise from other churches was drying up. I couldn’t get a good job while working the church and resorted to pizza delivery and part time jobs. I was starting to go into personal debt.
After a few months I had a men’s retreat planned, and I left for the weekend. The retreat was such a disaster that I sent the men home a day early. When I arrived home, it was to blackened hallways and evidence of a kitchen fire. My wife ran to me and just cried. I could see that something on the stove had caught fire. After assuring me that every one was alright she said to me, “Eric, you’re right; it’s time to leave”. I resigned the church that Sunday with a month’s notice and started the process of settling the church and moving my family. There was a nearby Baptist church that had recently hired a nice young pastor that was willing to take our folks. Sadly, many of our people would never really join and help the new church there. I had also accumulated $5,000 of debt trying to support my family and sometimes paying church bills with my credit card. Within one month of my resignation God had removed the debt, and I was able to take most of our things back East. Honestly, this was a low point in my life. I felt like a failure and others treated me like one. God had not yet shown me what was to come, but God’s best for us was about to begin.
The time with Koreans had shown me that God could use me in His service. The time in Sacramento just knocked about all the pride out of me. When I was in Greenville years before, I sat under Pastor John Vaughn’s ministry at Faith Baptist Church. Pastor Vaughn was a man who had gone through many trials. He preached a series of messages on brokenness. I remembered something he said, “God can not use what He has not broken.” Upon leaving California, I was nearly broken.
