Harbor Baptist Church

Introduction

Before I became a believer at the fitful age of seventeen, I was raised in a non-Christian home, never having been exposed to the Bible let alone even the name of Jesus. My mother professed to be a Christian but would only occasionally go to church. My father did not speak about religion (or speak much at all). He was simply not interested in biblical or supernatural things and, of the few things he ever commented about God, was to flippantly say, “I would be afraid to step through the doors of any church out of fear the roof might fall in on me.” 

Yet, despite this spiritually bankrupt environment, I was still a child with a deep interest in spiritual things. I endlessly questioned everyone and everything around me and was convinced at an early age that there was something fundamentally wrong with reality itself and this world we live in. Somehow, I just instinctively knew things as they were were not as they were supposed to be. And I was desperate to find an escape from it all.

By the time I reached junior high, due to a dangerous concoction of teenage angst, unfiltered access to television, an overactive imagination, and a healthy rage against just about everything, I became deeply immersed in the occult. By eighth grade, I was a professing Satanist, and this started me down a road that I quickly could not recover from on my own. Because of the difficulties my chosen beliefs caused at school, some diversion efforts by my teachers and parents soon landed me in forced counseling, where I struggled to find a better voice for what I was trying to say. It was not long before Satanism and the occult fell away, and another religion manifested itself; in high school, I became a devout Buddhist. 

By the time I was ready to graduate, I was seriously considering entering a Buddhist monastery and opening a martial arts and meditation center. I was still very determined to find an escape from the sufferings and vagaries of life, from the delusions that I was persuaded were manifesting themselves as the world around me. I was thoroughly convinced that my choices were either to escape or be reincarnated and live life all over again; something I did not want to do. 

But, as I was preparing to step out into a worldview I was certain was the answer to all of life’s woes, my entire understanding of the world and reality was turned upside down. Late one night, while sitting in a hospital room with my girlfriend asleep in the hospital bed (that is another providential story), a Gideon Bible peculiarly found its way into my hands. As I opened it and started randomly turning pages, I landed on 2 Peter 2. By the time I finished reading that little chapter, I found myself on a precipice overlooking all of life and death and all eternity, the scales from my eyes having been fully and irrevocably removed, and that night I was radically and profoundly transformed from the deceptions of a karmic world to one where – somehow, regardless of whether or not I wanted to believe it – God was real and the message of the Bible was true. The next several days and weeks to follow I found the old life I had relied on for years had unceremoniously abandoned me. I could no longer sit in meditation. I could no longer train in the martial arts. I no longer was certain of the things I had been so sure of before. Instead, God gave me an inexplicable faith in him. I walked away, surrendering what had been the sum total of my efforts in childhood. I laid down everything I had ever known and was given instead a knowledge and understanding that was inexplicably confusing and bewildering. And, yet I simply couldn’t help but to know what was true from that day forward and could not deny it.

It was not long after this experience in that hospital room that I enlisted in the United States Army and was thrown headlong into yet another foreign world. I was confused and on the ropes. I floundered and had difficulty just keeping my feet on solid ground. But everywhere I went through Basic Training and later through specialized schooling, I carried with me a small pocket New Testament that I read every chance I could get. By the time a year was over I was living at my first duty assignment in Texas, where I first understood truly who Jesus was and where I came to know him intimately as my redeemer and could profess him as my Lord and it was here where I first believed God raised Jesus from the dead. But, of course, this was not the end of the story. Within two years of my enlistment, God once again uprooted my life and this time cast me across a great sea, to a completely foreign land, where I would live for the remaining two years of my enlistment, working as a supply manager in support of an Air Traffic Control Unit in Germany.

Those two years were a unique period in my life. It was here that God reshaped me into a different person entirely, a new creature, both spiritually and theologically. He molded me and formed a new foundation from which to build, and within the haze and cacophony of other influences in life, he established me. Amidst and despite all the confusion and doubt, he rooted and moored me not only in the truth of the Bible but also simultaneously implanted in me an insatiable and unquenchable thirst for His Word.

Once arriving in-country, I was placed in a barracks that just so happened to have several other believing single soldiers. We quickly befriended one another, and a chance encounter with a civilian contractor the first day I arrived, had me within one week preparing to be baptized at a tiny missionary Baptist Church that met over a bar in the tiny village of Marktbergel Germany. It was here in this little church a world away from everything I had ever known or called my own that God began to teach me and showed me what it meant to be a vessel of mercy and to be called by Him to grace. One of the men of the church, David Smith, a sergeant in the US Air Force, began to disciple me during those subsequent two years. Every week at church I would give him a handwritten letter detailing all the theologically and biblically related questions I had discovered from my reading, and he would exchange this with his handwritten responses to my previous week’s questions.  He also began giving me several cassette tapes along with each week’s letter. These tapes were part of a subscription he called K-Rations from a ministry known as Koinonia House.

This was my first exposure to Chuck Missler and his teachings. But, during those two years, reading through the Bible book by book multiple times over, along with listening to those tapes, my world and mind were opened to Christ in a way I could not have previously imagined, and illuminated the Bible for me in a way that changed me forever. They set me on a course I could not alter, and I would consume every word Dr. Missler spoke, listening to him as I fell asleep each night, after I got home from work each day, and throughout my week. Soon several of us from the barracks started gathering at the local library to discuss in-depth theological topics and questions we each had, and learning about God and the Bible (this was before the age of the internet). By the end of my time in Germany, I had marked up my Bible from cover to cover to the point that the binding started to fall apart. I had also taken Dr. Missler’s advice and had started several informal weekly Bible studies for others in the barracks and out in the community. It was the very best spiritual and theological formation I could have ever received, the core always being under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, working through great mentors and elders and teachers.

Over the Years

After finishing my enlistment in 1997, I excitedly exited the military and returned to my home state of Oregon, full of a desire to serve Christ and his church. Though my reentry into civilian life was a bit rocky, and I did suffer from disillusionment with the realities, limitations, and hesitancy of the modern church, I did spend the remainder of my 20s serving in various capacities in different local assemblies, relying heavily on what I had learned from my time in Germany, and Koinonia House in particular.  During my 30s I served primarily in local house churches, even hosting one in our home for five years.

My 40s, though, found a new draw for me due to abrupt changes in my personal life. I began feeling a conviction that I needed to return and finish formal academic studies, though I had no idea at the time what kind of career I might pursue or where God might be leading me. After an extensive search, much handwringing, soul searching, and prayer, I settled on a program, enrolled, and eventually graduated with a master’s degree in theological studies from Nations University. Shortly thereafter, I found a doctorate program at Forge Theological Seminary that seemed to fit my research interests, and I completed a Th.D. in Christian Philosophy in 2021.

But, by this point in my life, circumstances had led me to believe I would be spending the rest of my time on earth alone, on a tiny slice of my own personal paradise on the shores of a pristine lake on the Oregon Coast, living as an idiorhythmic, privately vowed monastic. After graduating from seminary, though, God quickly began to impress upon me the need to “fill in the gaps” left from my formal educational training. It was about this same time I discovered Koinonia Institute had just become free and so I immediately enrolled in the program. Throughout this process, God was also pricking my heart with another certainty. In no uncertain terms, he made it clear: not only would my single life be ending abruptly, but I needed to seriously and soberly “prepare myself for a future wife.”

After a short, miraculous three months, I found myself newly married to a wonderful Christian woman (something I never dreamed would ever happen to me) and father to ten adopted children ranging in ages from two to twenty-eight! Over the next year, I scrambled just to keep up with my new responsibilities as a husband, as we began serving at Harbor Baptist Church, and continued my studies at Koinonia Institute, utilizing it as a post-doc research and study program. I became a Student Assistant at Koinonia Institute in 2021, and, today, I am closing in on finishing the Silver level at KI and making final preparations to complete Gold.

Current Progress (Toward Full-Time Ministry)

But, as God continued to work with me, I began to get the sense that He was preparing me for something greater than what I was willingly allowing room for in my life. In fact, through the coursework at Koinonia Institute and much prayer and supplication, I discovered that God was taking a hobby I had been quietly (and secretly) laboring on over the last several years and gave it a life of its own. Back in 2009, for various reasons, I started writing fiction again (something I hadn’t done since high school). This hobby produced several “secular” self-published supernatural suspense novels focusing on the likes of witches, serial killers, and ghosts. But abruptly and rather dramatically, the stories I wrote began to morph and change. Connections between the different worlds formed, links between different characters, and different scenes coalesced. Before long, I found myself writing about spiritual and theological subjects, about the broken and fallen human condition we all must endure, and about how God uses these broken vessels to reach the lost and save those who would turn and repent and put their trust in Him.

Through my studies and practicums at Koinonia Institute, and with the unshakable support of my wife, that hobby is now being reshaped and remolded into a peculiar and bizarre ministry. Fast forward to today, three years after starting my official KI journey (30+ years after initially being exposed to Dr. Missler’s teachings), I have started the process of bringing a new ministry to life with a clear vision from God of where my wife and I will be heading in our work, what we are being called to do for our church, and what he just might possibly be doing with the rest of our lives.

We can now see over forty book ideas for the future of our fledgling ministry, all interconnected by theme and character roster, funneling the reader through stories of individuals plunged into dire situations that spark questions that too often the church is unable or unwilling to answer, ultimately leading our audience to the precipice and the realities of who God is and who we are with and without Him. We envision the future development of “workbook” courses that can be used to explore these questions and topics in much greater detail and discuss directly with the reader more in-depth philosophical and theological matters that spring from the overarching themes of the novels themselves. This will, God-willing, include the additional development of an online community where we can utilize all the books and workbooks as course material for live online classes, where readers and students will be able to engage in robust discussions and wrestle with popular ideas about reality and our very existence.

I have personally been given a burden to reach those for Christ who, when asked on an application “What is your religious preference?” would mark the box “none.” [1] My hope is this writing effort will be used by God, through the stories and the characters, to reach those who are on the fringes of society, those who feel as if they are outcasts, forgotten, who are possibly immersed in the occult, who consider themselves spiritual but would never think of themselves as Christian or religious. I labor to find those being drawn by God to Christ who are invisible to modern Christianity, to do so with the power of the pen and through the imagination of a storyteller. I desire to embrace the weird, the strange, and the spooky – all on behalf of Christ – that I might do my part in the salvation of whomever the Father is calling to a saving grace in Jesus (1 Corinthians 9:19–24). As Dr. Missler often states in his lectures, “if you’ve been to a Chuck Missler Bible study, you are no longer a normal, well-adjusted Bible student” [2] and I believe these are the kind of people God is calling me to minister to.

Conclusion

It is a new horizon set before us as my wife and I step out in faith and walk together, listening intently to the Holy Spirit as he directs and guides our path. We don’t know exactly what will occur. We don’t know what challenges have been or will be set before us, challenges that he has predestined to resist us so that, by God’s power and mercy, we might overcome. But I do know, with the firm foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ being our chief cornerstone, we embrace our call and our giftings and take that unshakable step of faith into the unknown and unknowable. This has, in and of itself, been a miracle in the making. Looking back on where we’ve come from and where He now has us going, we thank our God, and we thank our Lord for saving both of us and equipping us for this, our reasonable service. We will always be grateful and indebted to the ministry and teachings of Dr. Chuck Missler and all those who serve at Koinonia House and the Koinonia Institute. And we are comforted by the knowledge that God has called us to Harbor Baptist Church to serve in whatever capacity he might see fit.

We now go forward into the fray and serve atop your shoulders. Know that it is your work and faith that holds us up as we endeavor to bring good works into the Kingdom of our God and we both forever thank you for your service in Christ. As Paul stated, “I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12-14).

May it all be for the glory of our King.

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[1] Stetzer, E. (2021) What you need to know about reaching the nones, OutreachMagazine.com. Available at: https://outreachmagazine.com/features/evangelism/62930-what-you-need-to-know-about-reaching-the-nones.html (Accessed: 09 January 2024).

[2] Missler, C. (2023) The Feast of First Fruits. Chuck Missler, Koinonia House. Available at: https://www.khouse.org/articles/2023/1453/ (Accessed: 09 January 2024).