So, I went from the second grade through 12th grade in Tallahassee. My dad was over the parks and recreation for the city of Biloxi and Tallahassee and then Memphis and then Los Angeles. So that’s how we got out to L.A.
My parents tried different churches. They went to the Methodist church for a while, but I had one grandmother that was Christian Science.
So we were going to the Christian Science church, but then my youngest brother was born with Down Syndrome. And of course, Christian Science says there’s no such thing as sickness or disease or disabilities. And their insurance agent had witnessed to them and the pastor of First Baptist Church, Tallahassee, C.A. Roberts, came to my house and led my parents to the Lord.
So, when I was 12, we went from Christian Science to a Southern Baptist church, which was a big, big shift. I went to training union, choir practice, Wednesday night, Sunday morning, Sunday night, everything.
I was a pretty good kid, but I determined I was an atheist, and it wasn’t until I graduated high school, went to Memphis State, now University of Memphis, that a guy shared Christ with me as a college peer. And that’s how I became a believer.
Will you tell us about your call to ministry?
I never thought about being a minister at all. I was going to be a lawyer. After I was saved in college, I had already committed to go into the Air Force. So, I went to pilot training. I was there for about eight months, and I got hurt. I had a T-37 canopy come down and almost decapitate me. I couldn’t turn my neck at all for a while.
So, I went into air traffic control, and they sent me to Alaska and then on to Miami. I had orders to go to Vietnam. Four days before I was to leave to fly to Vietnam, the war ended. I was very happy.
While I was in King Salmon, Alaska, my first job in the ministry was as youth director for Don Rollins, who was a Home Mission Board missionary. He had a dogsled team. He had an aircraft that had pontoons and skis. He was a tough guy. He told me that he had to learn to lose to the Native Americans because he could beat them in dogsled, and they didn’t like that because he was from Florida. But he had contextualized himself to the point where he could do anything. He shot moose and caribou and all that kind of stuff.
But in the military, I was one of 20 officers with 400 enlisted men, the military would not let him come on base. I knew the most about the Bible, even though I had only been a Christian for two or three years. They wanted me to preach, so I started preaching. It was a little bitty chapel that was probably three times the size of this room. I did that every Sunday morning for a year. Then I went off base for their service. God called me to preach through that. So we went to Dallas Theological Seminary because none of the Southern Baptist seminaries were conservative because this was 1975. After two years at Dallas, I transferred to Southwestern.
