Would you tell us about your family?
I met my wife while I was a student in seminary. She had grown up in El Paso, Texas, born in Lubbock, then moved to El Paso, and then she and her family moved to Phoenix when she was 16. She was a member of North Phoenix Baptist Church with her family.
We got married in Dallas by W.A. Criswell. We have three children.
Wait. You were married by W.A. Criswell and ordained by Adrian Rogers?
Yeah. What can you say? It’s kind of funny.
The year my wife and I got married, my parents moved to L.A. My father was the general manager of parks and recreation of the city of Los Angeles. So we went to California and met with Stan White, the [director of missions] at the L.A. Baptist Association, who was the son of K. Owen White, one of the [SBC] presidents before the Conservative Resurgence. The people at Monterey Park had me as their full-time pastor.
That’s how we got up to California. Because I felt like, after going to Dallas and Southwestern, there were too many people in the South. I grew up in the Deep South, and I loved the Deep South, especially southern food.
But I felt like there were really enough pastors and churches there because you’d have 40 pastoral candidates for a single position. In California, it’s much different.
The messengers [this year in Anaheim] are going to find that the California churches are conservative. The reason they’re conservative is because they’re fighting the culture tooth and nail, and they know what they believe. Now there’s a few that will be a bit different, but they’re not any more different than some of the ones in the South that are kind of different now, too.
What are a few things every church must get right?
So, I’m visioning it has great worship with expository preaching. I teach in my books you can do expository preaching on the mission field. So I teach nationals in all of the countries that I’ve worked how to just go verse by verse through the Bible.
A focus on missions and evangelism, too.
