The next fifteen years after the commissioning ceremony were not what we expected, but they were what we needed. The word “minister” literally means “slave,” and Calvary Chapel pastors often joke around about calling their schools of ministry “Calvary Chapel School of Slavery.” There are aspects of ministry that seem very hard, and a pastor must spend many hours in prayer in order to not lose focus.
When viewing a congregation, whose sheep are they, anyway? They are not the pastor’s sheep – they are the Lord’s. A pastor is a slave, and his job is to feed the Master’s sheep. That may not seem to be a glamorous lifestyle, but when you embrace it, it is life-changing.
The first thing we did in terms of active outreach was to schedule a community memorial service in Burrows for the people who died on 9/11. That was the Sunday afternoon after the tragedy – September 16. We figured people would be home from church by then if they already had a church home, and if they didn’t, they would at least be awake.
We rented the new fire station, which had become the new community center, and we had a full house. We sang some songs and Eric spoke about the brave first responders and how sad it was for all of us that so many lives had been lost in the attack. He preached the Gospel of Christ and the need for forgiveness of sins, and we prayed. Then it was over, and we put all the chairs back in place. And we mentioned to anyone who cared, that we were a new church and would be there next Sunday in the same place.
It was a simple service, and our kids all helped one way or another. A fellow named Duane followed us home and knocked on the door. He was a crusty old Vietnam veteran with his two bottom incisors missing, but he liked our family a lot and he wanted to find out where we lived. So we invited him in.
I don’t remember where Duane lived at the time, but shortly after that, he moved in across the street from us in the little apartment in the back of the General Store. He was a lonely guy, and loved being around all the kids, so sometimes he just came over unannounced, just to talk. We kept an eye on him just in case it turned out he was secretly a pedophile or something, but he was safe. The most valuable thing he owned was a Marilyn Monroe pool cue, but he had great experience at sourcing dependable but inexpensive used vehicles for our family.
Sometimes Joanne joined us. She was an older mentally-challenged single adult who also loved kids and lived in a trailer behind our house with her older sister Betty. She had a bicycle and would follow the kids around Burrows wanting them to play with her. And they didn’t mind because everybody loved Joanne! We gave her coloring pages and word searches from the Sunday School classes.
Sometimes we had a couple of local kids come to our church, but it appeared that even if they really wanted to go to church with us, and sometimes they did, though their parents didn’t fully trust a church that met at a fire station. Sometimes we just had a service out in the yard and sang as loudly as we could. But we continued to rent that fire station so we could have services outside our home. At least we did until the inability of the furnace there to keep up with the cold meant that we had a rather chilly Christmas pageant, especially those who were dressed as angels. (The angels wore coats that year.)
So later (since the fire station was so cold) we met in our living room. The parents of the kids’ friends must have thought that a real church was a large structure with stained glass windows. At least that was the impression we got, and we were pretty self-conscious that it was mostly just our family, meeting in our living room.
We brought 14-year-old Chris to Calvary Chapel Lafayette on Saturday mornings, where Steve Goodrich, the main worship leader at the time, held a band practice each week. Chris would sit in the front row and watch, and try to mimic what he was seeing the band do, using his dad’s guitar. He learned some basic technique pretty quickly and kept copies of the songs he was learning. Steve helped him and answered his questions after the practice. And eventually, Duane bought him his first guitar.
But Chris was impatient for our little church to grow. On Sundays, he stood by the front door and the rest of us occupied every chair we had, in a circle around the room. Sometimes the kids groaned at being told they were supposed to stand to sing because “it’s just our house, not really church.” And once, Chris broke down in the middle of the worship time and told us that when he was 18, if our church didn’t grow, he was going to Calvary Lafayette. It was a challenge. We knew the kids missed their friends and so did we. But we were there for a reason, and we needed to see this through.
Still, once a month, we would take our little congregation and visit another church, usually Calvary Lafayette, so that we could connect with the Body of Christ more, as we waited for God to grow our church. Once, we visited the Horizon church in Kokomo. This is a mostly biker church that was an offshoot of Horizon Fellowship in Indianapolis, which was a church plant from the San Diego Horizon, which was an affiliate of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa. (That process, by the way, is how we ended up with so many Calvary Chapel churches in so short a time.)
The Kokomo church’s pastor, Will Mills, had a long shaggy beard and worked in a factory during the week. He had to work there most Sundays, so he took his “lunch hour” to preach the sermon and then went back to work. His church was meeting in what used to be a bar where someone had been murdered, next door to a strip club (okay, a "Gentlemen's Club"). Some Sundays, half of that church would be missing, because they would all go on a ride with a non-Christian biker club, for the express purpose of meeting its members and being a witness. I’d never been to church with so much black leather and studs! But... they had people!
So it was hard for me not to be jealous when we saw people filing into church buildings on Sunday mornings. Even Burrows Presbyterian Church had several cars parked around it. And while we were still holding services in our home, another church sprang up in Burrows, which also started at the Fire Station, but quickly grew to the point where the pastor had a small building constructed in his backyard. We looked up Whirlwind International on the internet and found out they specialized in interpretive worship dancing with fancy flags. So… it was more exciting than our church, I guess. People who had turned us down were seen frequenting the new church, and I remember fighting back Envy, a very real temptation.
Eric would tell people who asked, that we had a little church with nine members. That was the eight of us plus Duane. Calvary Chapel Outreach Ministries emailed back when I sent them a discouraged letter one time, and told us that “it takes time to prepare the fallow ground.”
Then *Philip found out about us (*not his real name). Philip had a girlfriend named Heidi and another friend named Sheila. Heidi was a gifted violinist, and Sheila was a young Methodist youth pastor. The three of them, plus Eric and me and our older kids, met together, earnestly prayed in the Spirit, and believed God for the new Calvary Chapel church in Carroll County to grow.
We developed a strategy that involved Philip buying a particular rather rundown historical building located at one of the two stop lights in Delphi, on the courthouse square. In early 2003, Sheila’s youth group decided to come and lay hands on this three-story building and anoint it. So we believed it would eventually house our church on Sunday mornings, a coffeehouse ministry on Friday nights, a Calvary Radio station at the top, and Philip’s living quarters in the middle.
Philip set about making money, working for a Purdue professor we knew, as he developed a world-renowned computer model to measure the odor plume of hog farms. Yes, that was a smelly job! But he didn’t mind very much – he was sacrificing for the vision. Then, when one of our relatives died, we contributed a sizable chunk of money towards the purchase of the building, with the understanding that we could hold services and run the coffeehouse for about two years there without making any additional payments. That gave Philip enough cash to buy the building.
Heidi’s job was to schedule the bands, and Eric was the pastor in charge. The kids and I always came to sell snacks, talk with the customers, share the Gospel if it came up, and supervise things in general. It wasn’t till we actually had the ministry up and running that realized none of us could make coffee. But no matter – who actually needed coffee?
Chris and Susie at The Well
We began by meeting with area churches, to establish relationships with them, and to assure them that sending their youth to The Well on Friday nights would be a safe place for them. Even though this ministry met in what was our storefront church building, we told other pastors that if they sent workers into the field, too, they could share the Gospel with the teens who would come there to hear the bands, and then they could invite them to their church. Sheila’s Methodist youth group showed up pretty often to that end.
We heard that every time a Calvary Radio station began broadcasting in a community, people would hear teachings on the radio, become comfortable with the Calvary Chapel doctrine, and flock to the local church to hear more. We were convinced that if we were able to start a radio station, we would have a megachurch, and a real salary to go with it. Add that to all the young converts from The Well, and we were on our way!
We opened in August of 2003. And, our church did grow and expand some at this location. We had a Calvary Chapel neon dove logo made and put it in the window.
The original neon dove still hangs in Eric’s office.
We had mostly teen girls after a while, and Duane was in seventh heaven. Many of those girls also came to our church because they had a crush on Chris, who was getting pretty good on the guitar. Chris and his sisters formed a band that played pretty often at The Well, that we named The Neon Dove.
Neon Dove promotional pic
There was real ministry happening on Friday nights, nobody doubted that. We stayed until everyone went home, but sometimes they didn’t go home. Sometimes people needed to talk. And we stayed and ministered, and people got saved. Some were hardened atheists and others had been into serious stuff like paganism – yes, there was a good sized pagan influence at Delphi High School. Sometimes the people who walked in for a soft drink and a band concert weren’t even teenagers! Those who were, usually graduated from high school and moved away, but some stuck with us.
During that time, we applied for affiliation with Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, became a corporation and obtained our 501c3 non-profit status, and were running about 30-40 people on Sunday mornings. We had Passover Seders, Vacation Bible School during the summer, water bottle evangelistic outreaches during the Old Settler’s Festival in Delphi, a small choir, and Christmas programs. Our family sang for special occasions as Chris got better on guitar, Valerie played the djembe, and Heidi taught Susie how to play the violin.
We were glad Eric had another job on the side so that we didn’t “have to” have older people with good jobs at our church, tithing. But it would have been nice! The books we sold in our business were never quite enough. We just kept praying God would multiply our church so we could live off that income. We did have some people who loved us who went to our church (when they weren’t being difficult) but we began to suffer from burnout. We never could understand why some people who lived in Delphi actually drove the distance to Calvary Chapel Lafayette rather than going to our church just down the street from their house.
Eric became more confident as a pastor-teacher and was soon ordained by Calvary Lafayette. And we went to the CC Pastors Conferences in October and felt more at home all the time. The Lord was growing us in ministry and in numbers, but not to the point where we could pay the pastor, and never enough to run a radio station.
After a couple years of non-stop ministry, we found that the Haley’s were the only ones who were coming to The Well to do that work.
This is Eric and me, taking a break from the work.
Even Sheila and Heidi dropped off, and Philip was being difficult. Some locals were using our building to meet their contacts and deal in drugs. Some kids were telling their parents they were going to The Well, and then after they were dropped off, they would hang out on the street and get in trouble. We decided it was probably time to move on to another facility and disciple those we had won to the Lord more fully.
The last straw was when Philip got mad at us because our church, as his tenants, wrote stuff in sidewalk chalk around the building when we had a rummage sale, and then he told us we were not allowed to put a nativity set in the window because that was idolatry. It was time to go. God was moving us on to Phase II.
Looking back, we can see what could have appeared to be failure. We quit running The Well after only two years, and the police weren’t happy with us because we attracted certain elements of society that caused problems for them. But it was during this phase that we met dear people we never would have known otherwise. One was our granddaughter Rori’s mother, whom we met because she had dragged her sister in so we could talk her out of being a pagan. We are very good friends with this wayward sister now, and Rori is a huge blessing! Another was a young couple who really wanted to be involved in ministry, so we helped them get started in being trained in the Scriptures, ordained the husband, and sent them to Germany as missionaries.
“Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers through whom you believed, as the Lord gave to each one? I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase.
“Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each one will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God's fellow workers; you are God's field...”
~1 Cor. 3:5-9
Do you believe in Divine Appointments? I do! Sometimes, when someone crosses our path, we are able to share the Gospel, lead them in the Sinner’s Prayer, and know they are truly saved. But usually, we are just called to plant a seed, or to water a seed someone else planted. The Lord gives the increase in His good time. We have had several occasions where someone, years later, told us that they were first introduced to the Gospel message at the Well, and now they were in ministry in another state, still serving the Lord. Or better yet, we would hear the news that a hardened atheist such as Ransom was, who harassed us each time he came to The Well, never could get the Gospel out of his mind, and finally received Christ later, as did his parents.
Me? I had to really understand passages in the Scripture that dealt with fellow leaders and churches, and realize we were not in competition – we were working towards the same end, the salvation of the World. I think I’m getting better at that.
And I had to understand how much God loves people. People are not the problem. People are the mission.
Lord God, you have placed us on earth, planted us where we are, moved us from place to place as needed according to your Divine plan, and introduced us to people and circumstances that challenge us, grow us, and give us opportunities to serve. Let us never take that service lightly, for you are our Master, and Your will and Your plan are perfect, even if we are not. Use us as You will. Let us learn to say with conviction, “Here I am; send me!”
In Jesus’ Name, Amen
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