Minister to Minister Part 1 – Gene Edwards Shares His Testimony and Journey Beyond Organized Religion

Well, my testimony. My grandmothers on both sides, my mother and my father, all Southern Baptists. I was asking Jack last night how long he’d been a Baptist. I’ve been a Baptist longer than he has. He’s been a Christian longer than I have. I became a Baptist when I was six or seven years old. First Baptist church in Bay City, Texas. I became a Christian in my junior year in college at the age of 17, and I think I’ll start there.

You know, I think some of you have had this experience, something that happened to you when you were quite young that marked you and maybe even has gotten in your way ever since then, and that happened at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas, in the year 1950. Now, if you remember 1948 through 1952, there was a revival in America, and it was the beginning of the Billy Graham ministry, and many of us this age were either converted or greatly affected in that time. I was converted at that time, and that was the first touch of the Spirit of God I saw in America. Another one came exactly 20 years later, and most of you remember that one, do you not? 68 through 72, Okay.

I was converted, this was the time of the youth revival movement born at …University, and brought forth a lot of young names, most of whom I don’t know what happened to them. But that revival hit my campus in a very unique way, and it happened this way.

The Baptist student director married a Baptist preacher, and the Baptist student union was suddenly left without a director. We sneaked off and got the keys to the building. It was a house across from the university, just a home, and we began holding our own meetings there, and nobody ever found that out. There were about 20 or 25 of us, we were all around 18 years old, 19 maybe, I don’t think anybody 20. And the Spirit of the Lord did something among us, and we were over there constantly holding meetings. And at that age, you don’t have leaders. And we were praying, and we were preaching, and we were hallelujahing, and we had one meeting there, and we all remember the date – it was August 1st, 1950. Everybody who was there will be remembered as long as we live. We were visited by the Lord. And just recently, someone in that group sent a diary notation of that night I had never seen. And the brother who wrote it was my roommate at that time. And it said in there, as he walked outside, he said, “My roommate Gene Edwards said, I wonder ultimately what’s going to come out of it.” And it’s still coming because I never shook that summer.

We used to go out to the park and sing until the wee hours of the night, just holding on to one another and loving one another. That was one of my very first experiences of being a Christian. Now, I’m going to tell you what was happening to us. We were having a spontaneous experience of church life, which always dies; it cannot go on. Mark it down, it always dies. If you don’t know that, you will be in for great disappointment, especially you young men, and it died the day they hired a new Baptist Student director, and it was at that time that I met the system for the first time.

Two or three of us went over and talked to this lady and told her, you know, this is how we’ve been doing it, and they chose me to be the spokesman to talk to her, and it was really interesting.  A few weeks later, they chose offices for the Baptist students for the coming year, and there must be a hundred offices, and there were only 25 people, and some of us had one, two, three, four, and five offices. There was one person who didn’t get a single office. I bet you can’t guess who it was. 17 years old, that was my first encounter with “it”.

A lot of things happened that were glorious in those days. I surrendered to preach the day after I finished college, and on Monday morning, I went to Southwestern and enrolled. I was there for one semester, and then I was graciously given the opportunity by the foreign mission board in Richmond, Virginia, if you don’t know where it’s located, to go to a new seminary in Switzerland. It was called the Rüschlikon Zurich Baptist Theological Seminary. Do you know about it? It was an international school. I was there the second year. Each year, they tried to send one American representative during those years. A lot of things happened to me over there, too. I helped start with another young man whose name was ???; we started four little Baptist preaching stations in southern Germany, going out and preaching every weekend.

Something happened to me that I don’t think I fully understood until years later. Most of the courses I took there that year, I did it on purpose. I took courses in Anabaptist history. Now, you’ve got to remember something. I’m only 19 years old, and at 19, you can get a lot of mixed messages, and I studied Anabaptist history and came out of there knowing it about as well as a human could know it. I think most of you probably have forgotten your heritage. I’ve stood where those men died. They were called the Radicals of the Reformation. No one listened to them, and I was taught in my class by Dr. John Alan Moore that I was the son of those men. And it got into my head that I didn’t belong in the religious system, that I was part of the radical movement of the Reformation at the age of 19. Now, you can be that dumb, and I was. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? I really believed that’s what I was: someone outside the tradition of the Reformation, and it stuck in my head. I don’t guess I ever recovered from it.

Another vivid memory I have and that was the memory of going to the Holy Lands and spending the summer in the Holy Lands in Italy and at the age of 19 meeting missionaries. Now, this is, let me stop here, brothers. I had to think hard to remember all this stuff. And one of the reasons I’ve never discussed it, not even with Helen, is because I’ve never felt it important. But I’m trying to remember what got me out of the organized church, and these are some of the influences, and I think you’re going to understand. But if you ever think that these things dog me, just don’t. I’ll tell you eventually what really got me out. I’m simply remembering some of those early influences. I’m going to tell you something else. Anything I tell you tonight, you can top. Is that not true? I’ll bet you can top it. I don’t care what kind of wild story I tell you; you can tell me a better one. The problem is, what are you going to do with that? What are we going to do with the same experiences that I had?

Well, at 19, missionaries aren’t really careful when they’re around you. This is not like Baker James Coffin came flying through. This is some 19-year-old kid they’ll never see again. And I picked up on more stuff living with missionaries from one end of the holy lands to the other, and I was a little shocked. I remember very vividly one of the sisters, one of the Christian missionary women, and they’d been there about three months, and she was having a coke fit, and she got me in a room and made me swear that when I got home, I’d send her some Coca-Cola syrup because she had to have a Coca-Cola. There were none in Israel, and something in me was saying that was not exactly my image of a missionary.

Oh, I guess I’m going to really chance one here now, and I’m going to tell you that I also went to what was probably, and I say this in all gentleness. I really don’t know much about the problems y’all are having in the convention right now, and I can tell you I am monumentally disinterested. But I probably did go to the only ranked liberal seminary that southern to Southern Baptists feed their money into, and that was Rüschlikon. And I’ve never said that publicly in my life. I mean there my roommate doubted the resurrection. It was a high German theological training, and my roommate has been teaching at Rüschlikon now for nearly 30 years, and he’s worse now than he was then.

My faith was shaken at Rüschlikon for about 24 hours and I really didn’t want to not believe in scripture and I decided there had to be some other view than what I was being taught and I found a book by a grand Dutch scholar on the Pentateuch which he was defending the inspiration of the Pentateuch and I read that thing in my room and it was absolutely incredible for this 19-year-old kid. I put that book down, I said, “Well, if the conservative view can defend the Pentateuch that perfectly, then I figure they can defend all the rest of it, too. And I have never had a question about the scripture since that hour. I didn’t want to be one of those people, and I was going to find some way to be convinced that I didn’t have to be.