Minister to Minister Part 1 – Gene’s testimony

Now, I think I told you that to tell you this. When I got home, I didn’t think my wife knows this story. When I got home, I enrolled in Southwestern, and Helen and I planned to certainly investigate to its fullest the possibility of going to a mission field. And I can still remember the people’s names, and I’m fighting hard to not tell you who they were, but the mission board sent their people there to Southwestern, and I remember talking to the lady. She came, and I said, “I want to talk with you.” I had my arm around her, and I’m 20 now, and I said, “Do you realize what’s going on in Israel with our missionaries? Do you know what’s going on in Italy with our missionaries?” She didn’t say anything, and honest to goodness, I was just a kid, I didn’t know up from down, and I thought, you know, she’d be fascinated with this kind of thing. I mean, surely it would go and tear the whole thing apart, and it’d all be put back together again because no one knew. She didn’t have much to say to me. Well, I was interviewed, and Helen was interviewed together. It so happened I lived in that building, and I was a janitor for that building, and that night it was my duty to clean that building, including the room in which I was interviewed. And there, sitting on the desk, were all the notes of all the applicants or mission positions.

Do you think the Lord’s going to forgive me for what I did? I didn’t have the nerve to read it, but I know that at the top of the page, they had, right above the name, at the very top, it said excellent, above average, good, below average, and poor. And I walked over and looked, and the X on mine was marked “Poor.” I want you to know something: I’m really grateful that I was a janitor at that place. I really felt, well, Gene, if that’s how they feel about you, then well, I don’t know how you would have felt? Persona non grata, I was not really welcome there.

There are so many things to tell you about that. By the way, I have no bad memories of Southwestern, and I have nothing to say in criticism of that place. I enjoyed every minute of it, loved it. It took me five years to get over going there; it turned me from a Christian to a Baptist preacher. I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive them for that because I don’t want to be a Baptist preacher. I want to be a Christian, and that’s what I want to be.

While I was at Southwestern, I became a pastor. Now, I recently did a first draft of a book called “The Church in Crisis,” in which I spend the first two or three chapters telling stories about splits I saw in Baptist churches before I got converted. I was present; my mama dragged me to those meetings, you know. Now I am a Baptist pastor. In fact, I won the honor of being one of the outstanding; I got a certificate to prove this, one of the outstanding rural and village pastors in the state of Texas, the first year it was ever given. In fact, our church came in second, and the second church I pastored was the one that came in first. Do they still do that? They still get there right away, okay.

Have you ever been a pastor of a Baptist church? How many of you have pastored a Baptist church? I want to see your hand. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. I’m going to tell you quite frankly, brothers, if I were a Baptist pastor, what I would do. Come Easter, I would give it up for Lent. Yes, or I would shoot myself. My dear brother, you are in the most unscriptural, indefensible from a scriptural viewpoint situation that anybody could ever conjure up. It ain’t in the New Testament, not by a long shot. Try to find it, go home, and try to find it. I got it; in Ephesians, it says pastor. I’m not talking about an obscure passage in Ephesians. I’m talking about in the New Testament; there simply isn’t any such thing.

Brothers, I would not go through the agonies and turmoils that you go through as a minister for anything on earth, and God never intended for you to be in such a mess; it’s not in His cards. It’s not in His way. It is an invention born in the reformation, and you have become part of it without even realizing it. You didn’t start it, but it is not. I am going to repeat emphatically, it is not in the New Testament, and if you can find it there, well, I know you can’t find it there. I don’t know a whole lot about much, but I know a great deal about first-century Christian history. There is no such thing.

Now, that may not bother you. Eventually, that was to greatly bother me. Anyway, I was in a Baptist church that had an annual call. Have any of you ever been pastor of a church with an annual call? Let me see your hands if you have. You have? Do they still do that to people? Surely, they got rid of that, didn’t they? I think they do. That is the most awful thing that can be done every year, man. They decide whether they’re going to keep you or throw you out.

One of the turning points of my life was the third year, when the gentleman who always threw him out decided my time was up, and he moderated the meeting, and he knew what he was doing. You want to hear this story? This is wild. They called for a vote, and I was not there, and the reason was that I had a flat tire outside, and a young brother was out there helping me. I wasn’t in the meeting putting my tire on, so I could get out of that place. So, they had to vote again. By that time, the tire had been put back on, and I don’t know what happened, but somebody switched their vote, and brothers, I won by two votes.

What a way to live. What a way to live. Well, I have something to tell you. You’re still on annual call. You know good and well you’re still on annual call. You’re not going to do it. (laughing in the audience) Listen, every bone in me is Baptist theological through and through. I don’t know anything except Baptist theology, but I back off on one thing, and that’s the Baptist church government. They have no business holding you captive like that, but the whole problem is not in that. The whole problem is in the birth and concept of what a church is, and herein we could do a little revising.

My second pastorate, just like your second pastorate. When you got through preaching all the good sermons and then the medium sermons, and you got down to your poor sermons, you remember? And then it was time to go. But things were building in me. I have memories, simple little memories of simple little things that a young, simple brother began to get just slightly worried about. Why did we call it an orphanage when there was not a single orphan there? They don’t call it that anymore, do they? They changed the name. I think that they were still at that time promoting the idea that it was for orphans, which greatly disturbed me.

I remember the time that I found out that there was a dear lady in Houston, Texas, who had a million dollars that she wanted to give to a Bible School. I was one of only two people who knew. She had had a great-grandfather or a grandfather who had been a circuit rider on the Baptist circuit back in the frontier days. She was a very ancient woman; she wanted to start Bible school to send out young preachers who would go out on horses or whatever her concept was and go out and preach.

You know, brothers, I want you to know that I’m flatfootedly ashamed of what Baptists did to get that million dollars. They knew that they couldn’t start a Bible School with it. They had convinced her to give that to a certain school to put up a building, which was not what she wanted to do. And you’re ashamed, too; we’re both ashamed of that. The only problem is, I wonder how much more you know of that which is troubling you or ought to be troubling you. And if it is not troubling you, why isn’t it troubling you?