Getting Started and First Disappointment

After I acknowledged the call to preach, I was licensed to the ministry by Philadelphia Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, my home church. Opportunities to preach soon opened. Newly married and without any real training it was a time of learning by experience. I had just started by sophomore year at Arkansas State University, a secular school and really had no one to teach me about preaching or the ways of churches.

One of the main sources of preaching opportunities was Carl Bunch, the Associational Missionary of the Mt. Zion Baptist Association. He would often call me on Saturday nights and ask me to preach in one of the many rural churches in the association. It didn't take long to learn the importance and necessity of preparing ahead of time and being ready at all times.

One Saturday evening Carl called as said, "There is a church that needs to call you as their pastor. I've arranged for you to preach in view of a call tomorrow morning." Having no idea that this isn't the way something so paramount as going to pastor a church is done, Janet and I drove out to the Red Baptist Church the next morning. The church was located on a sand dune in the middle of a cotton field with only a winding sand driveway off the highway.

The church turned out to be composed of an extended family of fifteen people. After I preached the deacon patriarch asked us to step outside while they voted. Janet and I left and stood outside. It was an awkward and uncomfortable feeling and the ten minutes seemed to be hours. Finally the deacon came outside and said, "Son, we just voted to close the doors of the church." They had disbanded. There were not any other words so Janet and I left.

How do you describe the feelings? I was deflated, hurt by rejection, and unsure of what had just happened. But, it would not be too many weeks before I learned the first of many lessons on the disappointment of man and the over riding providence of God. When things don't turn out the way we envisioned or wanted, even in hurt or rejection, God is often closing a door because in His purposes there is something much greater awaiting. Not greater in a human sense, but greater for our good and his glory. I was about to learn my first object lesson in the reality of Romans 8:28-39.