For a dozen years, from 1974 through 1986, I was a Baptist minister, and for part of that time I was a missionary in France. During my association with the Baptists, I learned how to study the Bible and how to apply its counsel and admonitions to my life. I learned how to teach it to my children and to others through sermons and personal visits in homes. I learned how to give a public testimony of my faith, in the streets and before large congregations and to student bodies at Los Angeles Baptist College and at Biola University.
I performed many marriages and funerals. I learned how to rejoice with the joyful and how to console the sorrowful. I was a visitation pastor for a large Baptist congregation in Southern California and spent much time with the sick and the dying before leaving for missionary work in France. I learned how to turn people’s thoughts upwards, toward a God who cares for and loves us. Most of all I learned how to be faithful to the Word of God, to not fear men, to stand up for my convictions.
This point needs explanation because of my background and my consuming desire and quest for truth. After 16 years of floundering in the darkness in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I “turned my life over to the Lord Jesus Christ.” This was in January 1973, and it remains a moment of great importance to me.
At last I realized I had a Savior who as God loved me enough to die for me. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had made me lose faith in that truth when they lured me out of the Catholic Church of my upbringing. Following up on what I learned from Scripture, I broke fellowship with the Witnesses’ organization. The price was high–no one likes to lose his best friends and a good reputation.
By 1973 I was looking for a Church that practiced what I thought the Bible taught. I had learned in the Jehovah’s Witnesses that I was to prove every idea by showing a Bible verse for it. It seemed to me that the Baptists were the people who adhered the closest to the Book.
Because of my intense desire to give my life more completely to God and to his service, I accepted a call to the ministry in 1974 and was ordained in 1975 by the First Baptist Church of Van Nuys, California (membership then about 10,000). I furthered my education by taking courses at Talbot Theological Seminary and Los Angeles Baptist College.
In March 1978 my wife and I left the States to serve as missionaries in France, and a long period of learning and growth began. From a happy time of effective ministry in California we would come to experience a time of trial and difficulty. Still, the difficulties would prove beneficial for us. They would cause us to depend more upon the Lord and to seek out wisdom from above (Jas. 1:5, 17-18).
The first difficult lesson we had to learn was concerning missions and missionaries, and we wouldn’t learn all we needed to know from our first experience. We went to France to work in cooperation with an interdenominational fellowship called the Capernway Missionary Fellowship of Torchbearers; its headquarters is in England. We loved the teaching of the founder, Major Ian Thomas, and his emphasis on living a Christ-centered life. He taught us to look to the Savior to do through us what we could never do on our own.
We signed up with Caperway Missionary Fellowship because we didn’t want to be locked into a narrow, denominational mission. Although we worked as Baptist missionaries and had many Baptist people and churches supporting us, we really weren’t doing a Baptist work. We worked to build an interdenominational fellowship, called the Bible Center, in Biarritz, France.
This is where our first difficulties began. We asked ourselves, “What are we baptizing people into, a church or a fellowship?” Some of the people who worked with us had been baptized as Catholics or as Anglicans. One youth worker on our team was a Quaker; she had never been baptized and didn’t see the need for it at all. Another was a Presbyterian, a third an Anglican; they had differing ideas about baptism.
Some of us believed in the eternal security of the believer (“once saved always saved”), others didn’t. Some of us had been baptized by immersion, others by sprinkling or pouring. How were my wife and I, as Baptists, going to be able to insist that only those who had been baptized by immersion were properly baptized?
Some in the fellowship (and visitors also) expected to share in the communion service. During the absence of the “head man,” an ordained Baptist minister, I told the people during a sermon that it was right that they should want to participate in the communion service, but they should also realize that baptism comes before communion and that it is by baptism that we enter the church. If someone hasn’t been “properly” baptized, he should refrain from coming to the communion table. When the senior pastor got back, he heard about this and didn’t like it. I had offended some of his long-time friends.
There were other Protestant churches in Biarritz (Anglican, Plymouth Brethren, Pentecostal). Two kilometers away, in Bayonne, there were a Reformed Church (known in the U.S. as the Presbyterian Church) and also an English Baptist pastor struggling to start a church. So there we were, all these churches and groups competing with one another for members! Of course our new converts would have to come from the Catholic population. That was okay though–Catholics were fair game. We didn’t believe they were saved. A saved Catholic was a rare item. Such a thing would be possible by God’s infinite grace, but it would be wrong for a Catholic who really trusted Christ for his salvation to remain in the Catholic Church because of its idolatry and false doctrines. That is what my wife and I believed, and that is why we had been sent to France, a culturally Catholic country: to evangelize Catholics and to build true New Testament churches founded upon Christ the Rock and according to the Bible.
We stayed six months in Biarritz. Several things had been bothering me, and I was looking and praying for a sign from the Lord; I desired a clear indication of what I should do. The sign was not long in coming.
Summer was always the big season for evangelism. We were assisted by temporary workers from other countries, the weather was good, and the town was full of tourists. (Biarritz is a tourist spot in the southwestern corner of France, and there are nice beaches all the way to the Spanish border.)
We were to conclude our summer campaign with a communion service. I was wary of the idea, but our pastor wanted to emphasize our oneness and our fellowship with Christ. So there we were, Lutherans, Anglicans, Reformed, Quakers, all gathered in the meeting place. I was edgy and wondered whether I should participate.
As I was praying about it, the pastor interrupted, saying he knew of a wartime incident in which the Navy chaplain didn’t have any grape juice for the communion service and so told the sailors that, since communion was only a symbol, he would use orange juice instead.
Why was the pastor telling me this? He explained that our grape juice had been drunk the night before by a worker who lived in the building. The pastor now had an emergency on his hands, just like the chaplain on board ship. So he told us we would have apple juice for communion–apple juice to symbolize the blood of Christ. At this point, I received my sign. I told Monique, my wife, “Let’s get out of here.” We got up and left.
Later in the evening I called the pastor. He asked why we had left during the service. After explaining to him what I had felt, he told me that I had no reason to be upset. As it turned out, the group ended up using wine because a visiting French Baptist, upon hearing what I had heard, went out to his car and got a bottle he had there. So the pastor was obliged to use wine, which he would normally have avoided, being an American Baptist. He said my problem was that I was too sensitive about this since I had been raised a Catholic; I was taking things “too sacramentally.” But it was a matter of conscience, and I felt obliged to leave.
After separating from this work, I decided to associate with the Brethren group in Biarritz. I enjoyed the people and the humility and love they manifested for the Lord. The change of duties gave me an opportunity to examine my beliefs at leisure and in depth. I began daily Bible study that lasted two to three hours. I studied the history of Christianity. After six months we left for another town in the Pyrenees to see what we could get started on our own.
My reading and questioning continued and led me to seek fellowship with the Baptist Mid-Missions. Through contact with other Baptist missionaries I had realized that I was really a Baptist’s Baptist after all. I believed we had the best explanation for everything and the best form of church government. We believed in the fundamentals (we wore the Fundamentalist label proudly), we wanted to take a strong stand against ecclesiastical compromise, and we insisted on severing ecumenical ties. We were aggressive in missionary work and in church building.
As my studies continued I felt the need for solidarity, for working and living together with others of like purpose. (Kind of like the Catholics, I told someone.) Working in isolation as we did for eight years was not good. Our rural region in the south of France was agricultural, and the people were traditional in their culture and Catholic faith. Even if they didn’t practice much, they considered themselves Catholics and were wary of Protestant groups.
We tried everything we could think of to get going on our own. We brought in outside groups to help us. We passed out tracts in the streets and set up a stand in the market place. We opened a store-front church in town and placed a Bible in the window. We took out newspaper announcements about our meetings, Bible studies, movies, and special speakers. We even organized a big public exposition on the Bible and invited the town’s personalities. The results were uniformly discouraging.
I had opportunities to visit a Benedictine monastery called Notre Dame de Belloc; it is not far from Bayonne. The region is peaceful with beautiful trees, the hills are dotted with sheep, and the monks, many of whom are Basque, make a delicious cheese from sheep milk. I was naive enough to think I could evangelize these monks. I showed Billy Graham films on the pretext of ecumenism.
While working with one of them–today one of my best friends–I asked him to give me his testimony. After explaining to me his experience with God and how he entered the monastery (he had been trained as a doctor), I told him that the difference between us was that while he hoped to go to heaven, I knew I was going to heaven. I had my faith founded upon the Savior, Jesus, whereas he seemed to be hoping in Christ plus the Church and the sacraments.
Two things impressed me during my visits to the monastery: the monks’ quiet assurance in the historicity of their tradition and the beauty of the liturgy. The liturgy spoke to my heart and to my memory, reminding me of my upbringing in the Catholic Church. I recalled hymns in Latin and in English. I had read Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church and many works on Church history, and I longed for a tradition, something anchored in time. I didn’t like the idea of a multitude of churches, each pastor following his own interpretation of his denomination’s confession of faith. I couldn’t see God as the author of confusion (1 Cor. 14:33).
Bothered by all this, questioning my bona fides, I was rebaptized and reordained in a different Baptist Church. My questions on eschatology and Church history were growing. I rechecked commentaries on baptism and particular passages in the New Testament. It seemed from a straight reading of the Greek text that baptism might actually do something. It might not just be “only a symbol of one’s desire to follow Jesus.”
By 1986 we were living in Perpignan, near the Spanish border at the other end of the Pyrenees. In the fall I made three retreats at a Benedictine monastery in the Basque country. I can’t relate that story here, but will say that in my heart, after only the first visit, I came back to the Church that Jesus founded, the Church into which I was baptized in November 1939. Our bishop in France, Jean Chabbert, received our entire family into the Church in September 1987. One of those he baptized, my son Daniel, is studying for the priesthood in Salamanca, Spain. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” goes the hymn. Our Baptist hope has become a Catholic hope.