Chad’s Salvation Testimony
Though my mother took me to church when I was very young, she became offended by something the pastor did and stopped going to church for several years. Then, when I was about ten, a friend invited me to attend a Tuesday-night children’s program at First Baptist Church in Amboy, IL. I became a regular rider on the church bus on both Tuesday nights and Sunday mornings. In November of 1988, God began to convict me of my need to be saved. As a result of the preaching I was hearing, I began to wonder if I was good enough to go to Heaven. I can remember trying to judge my public school classmates to discern which ones were going to make it to Heaven, of course I figured I was among those good enough. Then I remember the youth pastor telling us that salvation was by faith, so I determined to really believe that I was going to Heaven. I can remember very clearly the youth pastor preaching on the fact that there are sins of omission as well as sins of commission. I don’t recall exactly what was preached the night I first raised my hand, but I know I finally realized that I needed to be saved. I raised my hand one Tuesday night that I wanted to know more about salvation but was too bashful to actually get out of my seat at invitation time. The following week, November 8, 1988, God was drawing mightily and I responded. I not only raised my hand, but got out of my seat and was taken from the church basement where the preaching had taken place to the back of the church auditorium. There an older gentleman took the Scriptures and showed me how to be saved and, with tears in my eyes, I trusted Christ to save me. When I arrived at home, I knew I needed to tell my mother that I had been saved. I will never forget how she hugged me and cried as she realized her need to get back into church and bring my siblings up in the knowledge of the Lord.
LeeAnne’s Salvation Testimony
My first experience with church growing up was as a “bus kid.” My family often moved, but in each new area, my mom would find a church with a bus ministry and take us there for the first few times and then arrange for us to continue to be picked up. At first it was Methodist and Lutheran churches. I even got sprinkled when I was about 5 years old. When we moved to Southern California, though, we started riding the bus to a Baptist church and my older sister and I came to understand that Baptists churches were where we belonged. We would go on to ride buses to churches in California, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky before my sister married a preacher and I moved in with them in Illinois.
When I was eight, I realized that my sprinkling was not a Biblical baptism because the Bible teaches immersion and so was baptized, though I had not really understood salvation. Then, when I was twelve, I attended a Bible camp and God convicted my heart that I was not saved. I responded to the invitation but the worker only shared her testimony and didn’t really explain from the Scriptures how to know that you are saved. I went ahead and got baptized again. Two more times I came under conviction at different times and different churches, made a profession of faith and got baptized.
Finally, during a revival meeting when I was eighteen, I was convicted again of my need for salvation. By this time, I had gotten involved in door-to-door soul-winning and had been through training on how to share the gospel; so, when I came to the altar, I did not need a lot of explanation. I turned to the Lord and received Him as my Lord and Savior and finally got my salvation nailed down. I was finally able to receive Biblical baptism.
Though I was not assured of my salvation at the time, God worked in my heart to surrender to be a pastor’s or missionary’s wife at a Preaching Conference that I attended with my youth group during my sophomore year of high school. Though my salvation was settled later, this became a guiding conviction in my heart.
Surrender and Call to Preach
Though I was saved at age ten, I did not develop a consistent walk with God for several years. As a young teen, I was greatly influenced by worldly friends and was not a very strong testimony for the Lord, but God was not going to let me go my own way. During summer camp the year that I turned sixteen, God really moved in my heart and I made definite decisions to follow Him. As I developed the habits of serious Bible-reading and prayer, God began to stir up a desire to preach. Finally, God used Jeremiah 20:9 to confirm to my heart that He indeed desired to use me as a preacher. As the decision about where to go to college drew near, I had narrowed the decision down to two colleges. My youth director counseled me that if I was going to be an evangelist then I should go to the one, but if I was going to be a pastor I should go to Fairhaven Baptist College in Chesterton, IN.
I went to Fairhaven and it was there that God really began to stir my heart with a vision of planting churches. It was also at Fairhaven that my father was saved. One of the added advantages of Fairhaven was that it was only a couple hours from home. This allowed my parents to occasionally visit and my dad was even willing to attend church with us. After God saved him, Dad went on to become a bus captain, deacon, and treasurer at the church in Amboy where he served faithfully until his death in 2019, shortly after we moved to Oceanside.
Ministry Experience
During my Junior year of Bible college, I was allowed to travel home on weekends to work in the church in Amboy. This allowed me to take over the youth group ministry and start a bus route to the nearby city of Mendota, IL. We would enjoy God’s blessings on these ministries for nine years all together and many of the youth that we worked with (even bus kids) are now serving in churches and some are in full-time ministry. During my time in Amboy, I also had the joy of conducting the choir, running the junior church program, and eventually running the Reformers Unanimous addictions program.
Through this time, my desire to be involved in church planting only grew. Then, our pastor, Rocky Fritz began to feel a burden for church planting as well. Soon our church began evangelizing in a town about thirty minutes away and conducting an afternoon Bible study. After about a year, in the summer of 2007, we were given responsibility to begin Sunday morning services as a step toward organizing a church. We continued to evangelize and preach and by the end of September had twelve baptized believers that were willing to unite as a church and Heritage Baptist Church of Princeton, IL was born.
God richly blessed this young church plant. When we were only about two months old, God allowed us to purchase our own building and we held our first service there the first week of December. That spring, we conducted an “Open House Sunday” with a new record of over 60 people in attendance. We would go on to pastor the church for twelve years and see people saved, baptized and discipled. When we left, the church was not large, but had a solid group of believers who are willing to live separated lives and continue to reach the area with the gospel. We did our best to help the church find a new pastor before we left, but God wanted them to be able to do it without me. About two months after we moved away, the church was able to install a new pastor that continues to lead the church forward.
Education
I graduated from Fairhaven Baptist College in 2000 with a Pastoral Theology/Greek major. While pastoring in Princeton, I also earned a Masters of Arts in Bible from Fairhaven in 2013.
Move to California
Shortly after college, a friend of mine shared with me the need of California. I was shown a list of cities with 100,000 people or more that had no good, Bible-believing, Baptist churches. When the opportunity to visit California for a vacation arose, the most lasting memory was time spent with a friend as we discussed the need for laborers in this populous region. This burden would at times be placed on the proverbial, “back burner” as God gave me other ministries to participate in, but time and again my thoughts would turn to the needs of that state.
Just a couple years into our labor in Princeton, LeeAnne began to develop some painful health issues. After bouncing around to various doctors, her symptoms finally progressed to the point that it became clear to her rheumatologist that she had rheumatoid arthritis (a condition where one’s immune system attacks their joints). As he began to treat this condition, it became clear that she also had pain from fibromyalgia. Over the years, the doctor has had a good amount of success in keeping the arthritis under control, but other health issues also developed. The fall and winter were especially hard on her and almost every year she would spend months bed-ridden. One spring when she was unable to attend a conference with me, an older pastor advised me to consider moving to a more moderate climate. This thought stuck with me and, along with the advice of my own pastor years before that I was suited for pastoring in a larger city, began to push me to seriously pray about leaving Illinois to minister in California. Over the next couple of years, we worked to strengthen the church in Princeton in every way we could and waited for God’s timing. Finally, in the spring of 2019, during a time of fasting and prayer, God enabled me to see that the church in Princeton was capable of surviving without me and it was time to pack for California. Around the same time, God allowed me to meet Dr. Philip Clark at a preaching conference. He was in need of an assistant pastor in the city of Oceanside, CA. God knit our hearts immediately and as we prayed, it became increasingly clear that this would be our next ministry stop.
We arrived in Oceanside in August of 2019 and began to busy ourselves in various aspects of ministry. The church had recently moved into a new building. During the transition, the church was renting facilities for several months and unable to conduct all of its former ministries. We were able to restart a Sunday School class for young married couples, help to restart Bible institute classes, and help in the restarting of the junior church and bus ministries. The timing of our arrival also proved providential as Pastor Clark suffered a stroke not long after our arrival and was out of commission for a few months. God enabled me to step in and help keep things moving forward during this time. During the Covid slowdown, I was able to put on my handy-man hat and put my feeble skills to use in helping with several remodeling projects. After we were here for about two years, our principal resigned to move to Alaska and I had the opportunity to take on the role of school principal.
Call to Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara is a city that has been brought to my attention in various ways and at various times. Before we agreed to come work in Oceanside, it was Santa Barbara that was prominent in our hearts as we prayed about starting a church. After we had been here about a year, my wife and I had the opportunity to make a brief stop in Santa Barbara on our way back from an anniversary get-away. We simply fell in love with the town and God began to stir that church-planting desire again. Then a year later, we actually had a man visit the church on Oceanside from Santa Barbara (approximately 3 hours away) for a special conference. During the conference he mentioned the need for a good church in Santa Barbara and the wheels in my mind began to turn again. So for the next nine months, I endeavored to focus on the work I had to do in Oceanside, but that burden and desire continued to grow until I finally sat down to talk with Pastor Clark. He agreed that we should go and we immediately began preparation to go on deputation.
Mission Statement
It is our firm belief that God is leading us in the direction of Santa Barbara, CA for the express purpose of establishing a strong Independent Baptist Church. In order to accomplish this, we intend to focus our efforts on fulfilling the Great Commission by preaching the gospel door-to-door and laboring to thoroughly disciple those who receive the Gospel message. It is our goal to raise sufficient support to be able to focus on this labor full-time with the hope that after three years the support can begin to taper off as the new church moves toward self-support.