The Gospel of Relationship

Most testimonies are the story of one life turning. This one is the story of four generations of a family that would not stop reaching for the next one.

This week on Paths to Glory, we sit with a man whose ministry has now spanned fifty years — and every one of those years traces back to a brush arbor meeting in a field in Indiana almost a hundred years ago. Two great-grandmothers who came home full of the Holy Ghost. A grandfather who built a church in his own garage. A mother who prayed for a hardheaded son for twelve years — and then, when that prayer did not bring him home, quietly began praying for a wife who would.

Hers is not the only prayer God answered.

What follows is a life shaped by everyone who bothered to build a relationship with a man who did not yet know he needed one — a pastor who asked one honest question at a peeling-paint door, a congregation that made a stranger feel like a son, a bus route he ran the first weekend after he received the Holy Ghost, and a Bible study his wife started with a sixteen-year-old girl who answered the door with a toddler in diapers on her hip.

The toddler grew up.

He is pastoring a church of his own now.

And the man who was once the hardheaded son, at seventy-seven, is still the first one at the door of the sanctuary he serves — greeting strangers the way strangers once greeted him.

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If you’re enjoying Paths to Glory, be sure to check out our two other podcasts!

Paths to Glory Kenya shares powerful stories of faith and transformation from the heart of Africa — voices of hope, revival, and purpose.

And for the young — and the young at heart — don’t miss The Jones Family Chronicles, a fun, faith-filled adventure series for the whole family.

You can find Paths to Glory Kenya and The Jones Family Chronicles

The song "Paths to Glory" created with Udio and written by Roy Allison IV.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 1:16

Everyone has a story. That story is your path. A path filled with trials, triumphs, transformations, and miracles. Welcome to Paths to Glory, where we dive deep into the extraordinary narratives of those who have had their darkest moments turned into beacons of hope. Each episode unveils the raw, heartful stories of redemption and renewal, showcasing the awesome power of God. Prepare to be moved, inspired and reminded. But no path is beyond redemption. Now join us and let these powerful stories illuminate your own happy. It begins almost a hundred years ago in a field in Indiana. Under a brush arbor, one of those thrown-together canopies of poles and branches that early Pentecostals put up wherever they could gather people. Two great-grandmothers and a great uncle of the man we are sitting with sat listening to a preacher whose name would echo down through apostolic history. It was the late 1920s, or perhaps the early 30s. Nobody in the family is entirely sure of the year anymore. What they are sure of is what happened there. Those three came home full of the Holy Ghost, and they were baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. They went to work on the next generation. Before long, his grandmother and grandfather were both filled with the Holy Ghost as well. His grandfather was so moved by what had happened to him that he built a large garage behind his house in southern Indiana, putting an oil-burning furnace in the middle of the floor to warm it in the winter, and started a church out of it. He preached straight as an arrow. He would tell you in his day that if you kept aspirin in your medicine cabinet, you didn't have enough faith. He pastored the church that began in his own garage for nearly 70 years. He was in his late 80s when he finally stepped down. That is a fire when it starts in a family that does not burn out easily. His mother traveled back to her father's house one summer with her two daughters. They came home full of the Holy Ghost, all three of them. His father, a career military man, stationed at one naval base after another up and down the California coast, did not escape a house full of praying women. Not long after he prayed through as well. The whole family was in, every one of them, that is, except the son. He was the older brother. He was, in his mother's own careful language, an unruly boy. He came up through the hippie generation. He believed the things he believed strongly, and if you got anything into his head, he could not get it back out. He knew from the very structure of his childhood exactly what his family believed. He watched them go to church, he went occasionally for a Mother's Day or when there was no other gracious way to decline. He felt the Holy Ghost when he was in the building, he felt conviction, but he never yielded. His mother, who by every account knew how to pray, prayed for him for twelve years. Twelve years. She interceded, she travailed, she got a hold of God in the way old Pentecostal mothers used to, and she did not see the answer she was praying for. So, and this is the pivot in this whole story. The moment the whole family's direction began to bend, she started praying a different prayer. She stopped asking God to bring her son into truth. And she started asking God to bring him a wife who was hungry for it. The wife came. She was a faithful young woman from another tradition, Methodist, involved in her church her whole life. Not remotely the kind of woman you would expect to become a doorway. And when his mother began talking to her quietly, gently, about the message of Acts chapter 2, verse 38, she did not push it away. She got interested. He tried to discourage the conversations because he knew exactly where they would lead. His brother-in-law, a pastor of an apostolic church nearby, offered them a Bible study. His wife said yes. Two or three lessons in, she was beginning to lean forward in her chair. Then he did what a lot of men do when the walls of a small town begin to close in. He took a job transfer. He was at that point the fair-haired boy of a large newspaper corporation. Circulation director, on track for the corporate office. The transfer moved them 50 or 60 miles away. They had just bought a new house. They hadn't even unpacked the boxes. He left them packed. He sold the house. He rented a place in the new city, and he breathed a long, slow breath of relief. His mother could still pray for him. He just couldn't hear it anymore. And here is where his mother's twelve years of prayer and the wife those prayers had produced, and everything the great-grandmothers had received in that Indiana field quietly landed on his doorstep. His mother showed up at that new house the day they moved in. There's a church in town nearby. I'd like to take you to it. His wife said yes before he even finished exhaling. He said without much enthusiasm, well, I guess so. They pulled into the parking lot of a small building the following Sunday. 1976 or thereabouts. The sign above the door said simply Jesus' name. Two words. The paint on those two words was peeling off in strips. There were bullet holes in the block wall of the parking lot, and he sat in the car looking at it and thinking honestly that he was not sure about this at all. He walked in anyway. And inside of the building, it was nothing like on the outside. He would tell you all these decades later that the people inside that room made a friend out of him in five minutes. The older couples treated him like their son. The chairs, old hard back theater seats, did not quite fill the sanctuary. There were fewer than forty of them in the whole place. The pastor came to shake his hand, and the first question that pastor asked him was one no one had ever asked him before. Have you been baptized in the name of Jesus Christ? He said, he didn't even know what that was. The pastor smiled and said, Well, we're gonna take care of that. Two services later, he was on his knees at that altar with red hot tears streaming down his face, repenting for the first time in his life, asking God to be merciful, asking God to forgive. His wife had repented before him. She had always been more tender than he was. And that week, pastor baptized them both in the name of Jesus Christ. The Holy Ghost was still on its way. There was a crusade nearby at a high school auditorium. The pastor told him he was going. An evangelist from Texas was preaching. He would tell you honestly that he cannot remember a word of the sermon that first night. He remembers only that the presence of God was in the room. At the altar call, the evangelist asked anyone who wanted the Holy Ghost to raise a hand. Well, he raised his hand just barely in case anyone was watching. The preacher saw him anyway. You, you right there. Get out in the aisle. He got out in the aisle. Now, he's not a tall man. And when the preacher called for anyone with the Holy Ghost to gather around him, several men gathered around. They took his hands, they raised his arms, and they began to pray around him in Jesus' name. Before he knew what was happening, they were lifting him gently off the ground and setting him back down again. And they did this over and over as they were praying for him. He could think of no spiritual thing to say. So he said the only thing that he had. He said, God, if there is a Holy Ghost, fill me with it. Still going up and down. He went up one time a sinner, and the next time his feet came back down, he was a saint. God had filled him with the Holy Ghost that night, right there in the aisle. Years later he would laugh about it and say that in the old days sometimes you got the Holy Ghost in self-defense. His wife received the Holy Ghost the last night of that same crusade. Timid as she was, the evangelist went down the line praying in Jesus' name for each one. When he reached his wife, she rose up on her toes like a ballerina and almost came out of her shoes. She was filled. And that is where the ministry that has now spanned 50 years quietly began. And it began the very next weekend. Because that first weekend, as a Holy Ghost-filled man, he was already out on the bus route, knocking on doors, inviting strangers to the church that had just made him feel like family. The pastor took him under his wing. Older couples took him and his wife into their homes for Sunday dinners. They talked oneness in those living rooms. They talked the word. They talked about the last person who would come to church and what God was doing in them. He was hungry, and he was being fed everywhere he went. A single month after receiving the Holy Ghost, that pastor put him in front of a Sunday school class. Adolescent girls of all things. The girls rolled their eyes at his first lesson. And then he got down on his knees and he asked God, instead of the commentaries, to give him what to say. Some of those girls are grandmothers now. Some of them still keep in touch. Less than a year later, the small building with the peeling sign became too small. The congregation bought a former Quaker meeting house in a nearby city, cut a wall out behind the platform, put in a heated baptistry, because there would be no shortage of people to baptize in Jesus' name. They grew from 40 to more than 300, ran five buses and two vans. One Sunday, over 1,100 people were in and around that building in a single service. He became the Sunday School superintendent, then the assistant pastor. He held that post for eight years and oversaw every department in the church except, as he will tell you with a grin, the ladies' auxiliary only because he didn't want to make peanut brittle. Then his brother-in-law asked him to come and help build another work in another town. And he went. He stayed there ten years. A single Bible study his wife started with a young single mother grew into a study of that woman's entire family. Twenty-five people at one time in a living room. And all but one of whom ended up repenting, receiving the Holy Ghost, and being baptized in Jesus' name. Then he went to Texas to pastor his own church. And after a while God told him quietly that his time there was finished, and he obeyed, though it broke his heart to leave. Then he came back to the West Coast and served as an associate pastor for 20 more years. Every time the title changed, one thing did not. He would tell you plainly, sitting across from me now, that position has never mattered to him. Passion has. He has never been interested in being what he calls a pew warmer. He's never cared what someone called him. He has cared from the first weekend on that bus route to the current pulpit he serves beside about only one thing. Souls. He has taught, by his own careful reckoning, hundreds of Bible studies over these fifty years. He has won a good portion of them. He's taken new converts to lunch. He's counseled across a desk. He has sat with people in their crisis. He has done what a saint whose name he no longer even remembers once did for him. Walked up to a stranger and treated him like a son. And out of all of that, one theological phrase has settled to the top of his life. He calls it the gospel of relationship. Because if we don't have a relationship with people, they will never trust us. And if they won't trust us, they won't trust what we tell them. He's watched too many souls receive the Holy Ghost on a Sunday and disappear by the following Wednesday. Not for lack of doctrine, for lack of anyone to sit next to. There is a study, he cites now, that a visitor who does not know three people by name in a church by their sixth visit will not come back a seventh time. He treats that number the way another kind of man might treat a business metric. It's the difference, he believes, between a saint who stays and a saint the enemy quietly picks off. He is 77 years old this year. He can't spend 20 and 30 hours a week in the heat anymore. He can't do the bus routes he used to run. But every single time a stranger walks through the door of the church he now serves in, he can be the first person there. He greets them, he walks them, if they'll come, into the new converts class. He introduces them to a family, he treats them in every way he still knows how, the way he was treated in a building with appealing sign and a bullet hole parking lot nearly 50 years ago. God told him something before he ever moved to the church where he serves now, that the last ten years of his life would be more productive than all the previous years combined. He does not know how to explain it, except that he has watched hundreds come to God in this season. And then there is one more story he wanted to tell. Years ago, back in the days of the church in Azusa with the buses, his wife was out on outreach with the other ladies, knocked on the door of a house she had never seen. A young woman opened the door, 16 years old, with a toddler on her hip. The toddler was still in diapers. His wife offered a Bible study. The young woman said yes. Her boyfriend, the child's father, sat in on the Bible studies as well. They repented, they were married, they received the Holy Ghost and were baptized in the name of Jesus. The toddler who was in diapers the day his wife walked up that porch is now, all these years later, pastoring a church of his own not far from where the story began. Which is really the shape of this whole testimony. From a brush arbor in Indiana in the late 20s, to two great-grandmothers who came home full of the Holy Ghost, to a grandfather who built a church in his garage, to a mother who prayed twelve years for a hard-headed son, to a wife who was prayed into being on his behalf, to a pastor who asked one honest question at a door, to a congregation that made a stranger feel like a son, to a Bible study that produced a baby who grew up to pastor. Every single moment came in through a relationship somebody was willing to build. He has been one of the first to greet strangers for fifty years. Still is. This Sunday and next, one of the first ones there. And this story? Well, it's yours, Reverend Sylvestri. And this is your path to glory. Growing up. No church.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Where did you grow up? We grow all over the country. Wherever you were in California. And we were all four years apart. We were all four years apart. I'm four years older than my next sister. Four years older than my youngest sister. That's amazing. That's amazing. But church, any any church? I can't even give you the year. It had to be the twenties or thirties. My great-grandmother, two great-grandmothers on my mother's parents' side, and my great uncle uh went to a brush arbor meeting in Newcastle, Indiana. And Robert Otis Bayer preached the meeting. He is elder Robert Bayer's father. He pastored in Muncie, Indiana. At that meeting, they received the baptism of the Holy Ghost. They were baptized in Jesus' name, probably in the late 20s, early 30s. And then they worked on my grandmother and grandfather. That's my mother's mom and dad. And it wasn't long before they received the Holy Ghost. My grandfather became so motivated by the Holy Ghost that he got, he built a huge garage on the back of his property and started a church in Bedford, Indiana. He just started in the garage with a big uh wood furnace, oil burning furnace in the middle of the floor to keep the place warm. And uh he built a church in Bedford. He preached it as straight as an arrow. Uh grandpa believed if you had aspirin in your medicine cabinet, you didn't have faith. He was as boy times have changed, haven't they? It has. He was originally with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Jesus Christ. And uh later, when they merged with the Pentecostal Church Incorporated to become the United Pentecostal church, he was licensed in the UPC. And he pastored until he was almost 90. And so that was your grandparents? That was my grandparents. Okay. My mother went back to visit my grandpa one summer with both my sisters. And they came home full of the Holy Ghost. All three of them. All three of them. And when they came home, uh my dad was not going to escape. Mama knew how to pray. She was a prayer warrior. She could intercede, she could travail, uh, she could get a hold of God. And it wasn't long before my dad prayed through and received the Holy Ghost. And uh they began to attend Vernon Barclays Church in uh Ventura, California.

SPEAKER_03 25:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 25:48

And uh Kenneth Fields came to build a home missions work in Oxnard, the city where we lived, and they asked Brother Barclay's permission to go and help him build the church, and they did. Built a church in Oxnard. There's a building there today, uh, and still going. And then my mom went back to the prayer room and started praying for me. I was a pretty unruly kid, uh, came out of a hippie generation.

SPEAKER_03 26:16

So you did not. So your sister's your mom, they come back, your dad gets the Holy Ghost.

SPEAKER_00 26:23

I had not been in church.

SPEAKER_03 26:24

And had not been, and and then it took some time.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

It it took my mother probably twelve years of praying for me.

SPEAKER_03 26:34

So you were the hard-headed one of the children.

SPEAKER_00 26:36

I was very what I believe, I believe strongly.

SPEAKER_03 26:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

If you ever get it in my head, you can't get it out. And uh she prayed for me for quite some time. I went to a service or two for Mother's Day. Uh, never would yield. I felt the Holy Ghost, I felt conviction, but I never would surrender. And uh my mother decided to start praying in a different way. Instead of praying for God to bring me in, she started praying that God would give me a wife that was hungry for God.

SPEAKER_03 27:08

Well, if she wasn't gonna get it one way, she's gonna work work around it.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

Mama knew how to pray.

SPEAKER_03 27:13

And it worked.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

And uh when I married my wife, she was a faithful Methodist girl, but she was involved in church most of her life. And uh when she started talking to my mom, I tried to discourage her from talking to mom because mom was full of the Holy Ghost, and she was going to tell her about this Acts 238 message. My wife began to hear it, became interested in it. My brother-in-law, married to my oldest sister, uh pastored a church in Santa Paula, UPC church, and he offered uh us a Bible study. So my wife said, yes, I'd like that. So we started a Bible study. We went through two or three lessons, and she was getting interested. And I got a job transfer that moved me about 50, 60 miles away. Uh, I was circulation manager for a newspaper in Oxnard. Uh, I became the circulation director for the largest newspaper this corporation had in the San Gabriel Valley. It was quite a step up. They had me headed for the corporate office, fair-haired boy. And I got there and it was a mess. Uh I was still young. I was determined to fight it out. But we finally sold our home. We just bought a home in Oxnard, just bought it near Oxnard College, and hadn't even got the boxes unpacked when I got the job transfer. So we left the boxes packed, put the stuff we had taken out, repacked, got the home sold, moved to the the city of Kubina in the San Gabriel Valley, rented a home, and uh I breathed a breath of relief, say relief saying, I've gotten away from this conviction. Mom can still pray for me, but I dan I can't hear it now.

SPEAKER_03 29:11

Then you got your wife away from her.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

Yes. So who showed up at our door as soon as we moved in? Mom was at the door. She said, There's a church in Baldwin Park I'd like to take you to. And my wife immediately jumped and said, Yes. And I said, Well, I guess. Uh, wasn't all that enthused about it. So we went to church that Sunday morning, and it was the oldest Jesus name work on the West Coast. And uh when we got there, the the sign above the door said, Jesus Name. That's all it said. And the Jesus name was peeling off and hanging down. The paint was coming loose over the door. And I'm thinking, boy, I'm not sure about this. And then I'm looking in the parking lot, and there's bullet holes in the block wall in the parking lot at that church. What year was this, you think? 76, 77. Okay. So we went inside, and isn't it amazing that the inside is entirely different than the outside? The people there were so friendly. They made a friend out of me the first five minutes I walked in. Did they really make me feel like I'd been there all of my life? The oldest friend that they had ever had, and uh some of the older couples made me feel like I was their son. They they made me feel good, and we didn't have old uh hard uh wood theater seats, and he opened up a side wall to put another dozen chairs out. We didn't have 40 chairs in the building. And uh when we got there, his first question to me was Have you been baptized in Jesus' name? When I said, What was what is that? Uh he said, We're gonna take care of that. So it was only a couple of services later he got down beside me at the altar and we began to pray and talk to God and red hot tears streaming down my face as I'm repenting of my sins, asking God to forgive me, be merciful to me. And uh that night I felt like God had forgiven me my sins. Of course, my wife had taken care of that before me. She's pretty tender and sensitive. Had she already received the Holy Ghost? She hadn't. She hadn't? Okay. She hadn't. Okay. We were just starting this church experience. Okay. Brand new people walking in the door. And she didn't know that much about it. I knew some of it, but I never really talked to mom about it. Uh or grandpa. I I just wasn't uh they start talking about it, I would leave. I would head the other direction. So after we prayed through that very next service, he baptized my wife and I in Jesus' name. Didn't get the Holy Ghost in the local church in the next week or so. So there was a crusade coming up at Whittier High School Auditorium. And he said, We're going to that. And Pastor said, I want you to go. I said, Okay. So we went to the crusade, and uh Brother Royce Elms from Amarilla, Texas, was preaching. And that first night, after he was preaching, I can be honest with you and say, I can't remember what he preached in one ear, out the other, but I could feel the presence of God in that building. God was dealing with me, even though I don't remember all the words he used. So at the end, he made an altar call. He said, Anybody want the Holy Ghost? Raise your hand. So I raised my hand, very small, not so a lot of people could see. And he saw me and he said, Yeah, you right there, you. Get out in the aisle. So I got out in the aisle. And I'm thinking, what is he going to want me to do?

SPEAKER_03 33:23

This is a crusade. There's several churches involved. A number of churches. Yes. Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:28

And uh I got out in the aisle and he said, Is anybody over in that section by him got the Holy Ghost? And a number of men raised their hand. And he said, Get out there around him. So I'm thinking, well, I wonder what's going to happen. And he said, I want you to raise your hands and close your eyes. And I want you to begin to praise and worship and talk to God. Of course, I'm a sinner. I don't know all the right words to say. Trying to think of something spiritual to say. The words aren't coming out just exactly right. With my hands raised, I felt someone grab my right arm and my left arm.

SPEAKER_03 34:03

First time that had ever happened to you?

SPEAKER_00 34:04

First time I'd been in the aisle to pray.

SPEAKER_03 34:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

And I didn't open my eyes to see who it was. It's whoever those men were standing around me. And before I knew it, they were lifting me off the ground and putting me back down. My feet only touch the ground occasionally. I'm not a real tall man, so they could do that. And as I began to go up and down, and I hear them praying around me, I began to be motivated to be passionate about this. God, if there is a Holy Ghost, fill me with it. One time I went up, I don't know how many times it was, but one time I went up a sinner. And the next time my feet touched the floor, I was a saint. God had filled me with the Holy Ghost. Uh that night with men jerking my arms out of socket. Uh sometimes in the early years, you got the Holy Ghost in self-defense.

SPEAKER_03 34:59

That is the truth. That's why I'm giggling. I've seen it.

SPEAKER_00 35:03

People pounding on your back, messing up your hair, stomping on you under the pew. I mean, you can't giving you a massage. Uh, but I got the Holy Ghost. And my wife didn't get the Holy Ghost that night. So the last night of the crusade, uh, after he preached, he said, Is there anybody here that does not have the Holy Ghost yet? And you want it? And there were about five or six people still there. He said, I want you to come to the platform. So my wife is kind of a timid person. She's not wanting to get up and make a scene of herself in front of everybody. But I had to keep encouraging, going up, going up, going the Holy Ghost, go up there. So she got up on the platform, he lined them all up, and he just started going down the line, praying for him in Jesus' name. But he got to my wife, she like a ballerina, was going up on her toes and back down on her feet, up on her toes. She almost came out of her shoes. God filled her with the Holy Ghost that night in that line. And uh, it's never been the same again. It has been a wonderful experience in March. It will be 50 years.

SPEAKER_03 36:12

That's amazing. Thank God. Uh now that now that I've heard that, tell me how the church treated the both of you.

SPEAKER_00 36:26

Wow. Uh they treated us like we were someone special and we were really nothing. And you went back to the Kofina church. Yeah. Well, the church was still in Baldwin Park. Yeah. Something a number of things began to happen. Uh first, that first weekend I had the Holy Ghost, I was out with the bus route, knocking on doors, inviting people to church.

SPEAKER_03 36:54

Did you ever think before that that you would do something like that?

SPEAKER_00 36:59

Believe it or not, when I first went to college, they had a I forget what they call an interest test, a personality interest test. Uh you answering questions and based on your answers, what career you would be most compatible with based on your interests. Yes. Okay. And when it came to the end of mine, they gave me the result and said, you're either going to be a forest ranger or a preacher. That's what they told you. That's what they told me. And I had no idea. I didn't know I had anything in common with a preacher, a forest ranger or a preacher. And I would didn't become a forest ranger, but God made me a preacher. Yeah. But uh I never told my wife that or my mom, because she would have recorded that she would have been on that uh right away. But uh they treated us very well. We were very close to our pastor. Uh they took us under their wing. Uh now tell me what that means to you. When you say they took us under their wing, they were there during every trial, every problem, every child that we had. Uh I had an excellent job. I can't say that I was in prison, had tattoos, and had a bunch of problems. I had a good job. I was a clean kid. I'd gotten over all my youth. Didn't have any vices, didn't you? No, I really didn't. My wife and I, uh, once I had gotten the Holy Ghost, it separated us from all of the previous friends. I had that did drugs and were drunks. Okay. Now wait a second.

SPEAKER_03 38:33

So what separated you from all those friends? When I was married, I wasn't single anymore. Okay. And it was before the Holy Ghost. Before the Holy Ghost. It was just a I I have to have different friends. I'm a married man now.

SPEAKER_00 38:49

Oh, well, it was a commitment to build my marriage, not just my friendships.

SPEAKER_03 38:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

Perfect. And it didn't mean that we were perfect. We had our struggles and our disagreements. It was just life. But uh people in the church took me in. They took me out to eat with them on Sundays. Uh, my pastor's favorite saying was, let's go get a wiener dog at uh at uh Wienersnitzel. Yeah. And I said, Well, if that's where you want to go, he never ate a wiener in his life, but that was just his way of saying, Let's go eat. He wouldn't go there, you'd go somewhere else. Yeah, he would. He would he just, or let's go to K Row's. Go to K Row's. So we we spent time together.

SPEAKER_03 39:32

And uh So you really the two of you really got taken in by the church people.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

The church made a supreme effort. Why? I don't know. We weren't that special. We were just people. I had a good job. Could it be that that you really weren't that special, but that was just the way those people are? They made me feel that way. Yeah. Even though I I didn't feel like I was special. Sure. They made me feel special. And then there were young families that uh they began to fellowship uh and incorporated us in their fellowship. Uh there are many times we'd go over to their house. Uh they already had children we didn't yet. But when we go to their house for fellowship, didn't talk about the things of the world. We talked about oneness, the word of God, uh, about uh this infilling of the Holy Ghost, people, new people coming to church and praying through.

SPEAKER_03 40:33

So you weren't just learning about the word of God when you were at church. No.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

It was everywhere we went.

SPEAKER_03 40:40

It was a constant, it was a learning by immersion.

SPEAKER_00 40:43

You were Absolutely. Absolutely, because that's what we talked about. I was hungry to know more about the Bible, and we discussed it. We discussed it. What did you find in the Bible? What has God been telling you recently? So that our fellowship was based around that. Uh and uh preaching was very good. He's an excellent preacher and teacher doctrinally. And not long after that, and I would never recommend it to anybody. If I was a pastor, I wouldn't do it. But a month after I got the Holy Ghost, he had me teaching the Sunday school class. I I don't know why he did that. He came to me one time and I said, What have I got in common? He had me teaching adolescent girls. That was my class.

SPEAKER_02 41:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

I said, What have I got in common with adolescent girls? He said, The only thing you got in common is they have a crush on you. You'll be able to tell them anything and they'll listen to you. I basically he saw I had influence with the younger ladies. That's exactly what it was. Though I didn't know I did, he saw it, and I taught the the adolescent girls and then the teenage girls, and then there's no teacher for the boys. The boys came into my class too. We had the largest class in Sunday school. Um and I don't know how we did it. I taught the first lesson, and the girls rolled their eyes. Do you remember what you taught the first time? I don't remember exactly. I just know whatever it was, they weren't interested. They uh they they give you the the you know the young girl's eye roll and and uh you know start chirping with each other. Well, what's what's he doing? I mean, I studied, I went to the commentaries, I did everything I could do to get my message across, and I didn't even get two paragraphs in and they'd already lost interest.

SPEAKER_03 42:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

So I realized I would have to change that. I got down on my knees, began to pray.

SPEAKER_03 42:35

Oh, there's a novel idea.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

Yeah, and and not the commentary, but God gave me things to teach those young ladies where we built quite a relationship with them over the years. Uh and some of them still, I see them at various meetings, they are in contact with me today. Makes me feel old because they're introducing me to their children and grandchildren. Yeah, exactly. And I feel like, wow, that's that's a ways down the road. But uh I taught Sunday school from the beginning, shortly after we got in church less than one year, we moved to the building in Baldwin Park. We bought a church in Azusa, the city of Azusa.

SPEAKER_03 43:16

Now that when when you say we, the church.

SPEAKER_00 43:20

The church there, the Baldwin Park Church bought a soldier sold their old building, bought a new building, was a Quaker church, and their congregation dwindled down where they didn't need that building anymore. They rented a storefront and we bought their building.

SPEAKER_03 43:36

Okay. Now, for for a lot of our listeners that may not understand the historical reference of Azusa as it pertains to Oneness Pentecostal.

SPEAKER_00 43:50

Yeah. Azusa Street is in downtown LA. It was the early days of the outpouring of the Holy Ghost. Uh, it was in within walking distance of the train station. People could feel the Holy Ghost tugging on them at Union Station. And it was probably a mile or a mile and a quarter to Azusa Street in that horse stable. And they weren't coming to go to church. They just were drawn there by the Spirit. They felt it. When they walked in, nobody was preaching. Everybody had their head buried in an orange crate and they were praying. And God poured out the Holy Ghost without measure.

SPEAKER_03 44:33

And that is the place or the area where the that it's the city is named after that. Correct.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

And so was there a church? Was there a oneness Pentecostal church in Azusa at the time? There was not. Okay. We were the only oneness church there. And uh when we bought the building, it would seat to 200 people. Now, this came about a year after you got hold of it. Okay. He met with the men in the back room and said, There's a chance to sell this property and buy the other one. Can we do this? Do you feel like we can give enough and produce the income to buy this building? Well, everybody said, Yeah, we can do it.

SPEAKER_03 45:15

Was it that way? Everybody was like, let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 45:17

Everybody was in favor of it because that building was so small. And we this is the one with the paint hanging off of the building in Ball and Park with bullet holes in the paint peeling. So we sold that building, bought the building there. They did not have a baptismal tank. We asked the pastor. I said, Well, how this is a Quaker pastor. We asked him, How do you baptize your people? He says, We don't baptize them, we dry clean them. So we immediately cut out the back wall behind the platform, put in a heated baptistry because we intend to baptize people in Jesus. Sure. And there was not a service that that water wasn't heated and ready.

SPEAKER_03 45:58

And how many people in the church when you made the move and you moved into the building? What would you say the congregation was?

SPEAKER_00 46:03

From 40, we might have been up to a hundred people. Okay. So we had lots of elbow room, plenty of room to run the aisles, uh, and we had a vestibule in the back. So it was really good. And we had apostolic revival. And what did you do for outreach? Buses. We ran two buses. Five buses and two vans.

SPEAKER_03 46:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

And uh we had some contests where we challenged other churches. I was a Sunday school superintendent there in Azusa during the time that we had 1,100 people in and around that building in one service. We had a bunch of them outside in a tent, and we had the rest inside the building, standing room only.

SPEAKER_03 46:50

Is it safe to say that you are a proponent of bus outreach?

SPEAKER_00 46:56

I have won so many families from bus outreach. Yeah. That I if you don't know what else to do, if you're not good at knocking on the doors, getting a Bible study, win the kids, and they will win their parents. Yeah. I've won a number of families off the bus.

SPEAKER_02 47:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:13

And it's just an open door. If their kids are attending, they consider that their church. Yeah, absolutely. So uh that it keeps many other churches away from the door. No, no, we've got a church. My kids go to a church. So we ran uh five buses, two vans for many years. We ran a lot of people. That church in the new building, we had to knock out the back wall. Of course, we know about that, BPC. And had to knock out the back wall. We didn't have a vestibule any longer. We put chairs all the way to the back. Chairs down the aisle.

SPEAKER_03 47:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:49

We were running over 300 people in a building that seated 200 and 200.

SPEAKER_03 47:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

So we had to start taking the children out of church and start a children's church for them in our Sunday school area.

SPEAKER_03 48:05

Now, let me let me pause you just a second. So, what is your role? What has happened to you in this length of time? You're still just the Sunday school superintendent? You're just a good solid saint in the church?

SPEAKER_00 48:17

Uh for about eight years, I was the assistant pastor.

SPEAKER_03 48:22

And that came about after how long of being in the church? A year or two. Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 48:27

Not long. Okay. Once again, I don't know why he did it that way.

SPEAKER_03 48:30

Well, it was because your personality test said you only had two choices. It was either that or a forest ranger.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

He never saw the personality test. Maybe God showed it to him. But uh, I was the assistant pastor there for at least eight years. During the time I was there, I oversaw every department the church had except the ladies' auxiliary. I didn't want to make you not very well. So I oversaw every other department. I helped them start a Christian school.

SPEAKER_03 48:59

Okay, so I'm still going to stop you again because I'm going to go back. Was there, because you've made it sound very natural, it was basically you got the Holy Ghost and you started working.

unknown 49:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:13

You started knocking doors, you just got interested in in Sunday school. Was there this big fire from heaven calling? Or was the work did the work that you were doing just turn into what you what became that calling?

SPEAKER_00 49:34

I would say the work that I was doing led to the calling.

SPEAKER_03 49:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 49:39

Uh I was very soul conscious. I wanted to see people experience what I had experienced. So I wanted to find every way possible. And of course, all during this time, we were home Bible study teachers. If somebody wanted home Bible study, we were there. Uh we taught, we have taught over the years hundreds of home Bible studies. Can't say I've won every one of them, sure, but I've won a good portion of them. If they'll let me come to their house long enough, I'll get the truth into them. And uh many of them were children from the bus route that I got in the house through the children and began to teach the parents.

SPEAKER_02 50:21

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 50:22

So that uh the calling was a result of just the labor. When I could go to the altar, I could think about people I wanted to win to God, people I wanted to see touched by God.

SPEAKER_03 50:33

It's safe to say that having a burden for souls is kind of a prerequisite for this work.

SPEAKER_00 50:40

If you don't have a burden for souls, you'll never be a preacher. Well, you might be a preacher, but you'll you'll never be a pastor. During that time, there was one Bible study that opened up. I don't know. It just somebody that came to church that day and told my wife, let's get a Bible study. One Bible study. One Bible study, and it became a Bible study with her mother and father. It became a Bible study with her mother, father, and her sister, mother, father, sister, and other sister, mother and father, sister, uh, brother, and and his wife, uh, what started as one Bible study with a single parent became a Bible study of about 25 people in the living room.

SPEAKER_03 51:21

Oh, really? All at one time.

SPEAKER_00 51:22

All at one time.

SPEAKER_03 51:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 51:24

It just kept developing. And they'd say, can we go? Can we go? I said, Sure, come ahead. So from that Bible study, they all except one, all, repented of their sins, received the Holy Ghost for baptized in Jesus' name, all 25. So that just added 25 more to the 75. Got a hundred.

SPEAKER_03 51:44

So we talked about something earlier that I want to touch on um briefly. So there clearly is more to winning a soul than getting them to the altar and them receiving the Holy Ghost.

SPEAKER_00 52:05

Absolutely. You know what this is? It's a gospel of relationship.

SPEAKER_03 52:10

There it is.

SPEAKER_00 52:11

If we don't have a relationship with people, they will never trust us. If they don't trust us, they'll never trust what we tell them. It's getting the body involved in the life of the church, uh, getting people concerned about people. I care about them. I don't want them to be lost. I don't want them to struggle. Uh if we don't build relationships, a study showed many years ago that a visitor that comes to a church, if they don't know at least three people by name by the time they visited half a dozen times, they'll never be back.

SPEAKER_03 52:53

That's a great statistic. I mean, that that makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_00 52:57

Yeah, that's why you go out of your way to introduce them to other people, have other people go meet them. Why? Come and sit with me. I want you to sit up here. This is a good place. I want you beside me. We want you in this church. And if they feel that, they'll never leave.

SPEAKER_03 53:15

So I'm gonna ask this. I do with everybody, but is there something that we haven't talked about that you want to talk about?

SPEAKER_00 53:23

Uh probably one of the most impacting ones in our life has been my wife was out on outreach in Azusa. With the other ladies, they'd come and pray one day a week and go out and knock on doors. While she was on outreach, she knocked on the door of a 16-year-old young lady who had a toddler in diapers there with her. And again to talk to her about the Lord and seeing if she couldn't get her interest in the Bible study. Well, she agreed to a Bible study, and then her boyfriend, who she not was not married to, set in the Bible study also. It was their child, so they had been living together for some time. And she was only 16. Sure. She had to have that child at 14 and a half, 15 years old. And uh we began to teach them a Bible study, and it wasn't long until they repented of their sins. We got them married, got them full of the Holy Ghost, baptized in Jesus' name. And years later, now that baby that was in diapers is pastoring a church in Pomona, California. Unbelievable. Did we know? No. Nobody knew. God knew. But that baby in diapers, to this day, he still calls me. He's pastoring a good work in Pomona. He's part of Brother Fraser's group. And that is a miraculous story to me. The things that could have come in that young man's life had God not intervened.

SPEAKER_03 55:14

You've been listening to the Paths to Glory Podcast. To contact us, send your emails to Paths to Glory Podcast at gmail.com. We all travel different paths, so it's important that we remember Proverbs 3, 5 through 6. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto your own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths. Our paths to glory. Thank you for joining us.