Our first six months on ‘the outside’ was a time of many, rapid changes.
It was during this time that Paul felt called to start a church in Jenks, OK.
Jenks is a small, thriving community with a large and very excellent public school system. It is located forty minutes on the other side of Tulsa from our former church.
We got busy right away employing the efforts and skills we acquired after having started a church from scratch nineteen years before. Good things began to happen despite the fact we were still in a state of shock and confusion.
It wasn’t long before we realized we could not continue working in that little church. It just wasn’t going to work.
There were several reasons for this, but the most important reason was that our older children still living at home were becoming increasingly unhappy there.
The sadness of leaving the comfortably sized church, youth group, family, friends and all the activities of which they were so accustomed were too profoundly and negatively intense.
After having an emotional, heart-to-heart conversation with our oldest daughter still living at home at the time, Paul and I decided we were no longer going to put ministry decisions over the emotional/spiritual well-being of our kids....for any reason.
So. from that heart-to-heart exchange with our daughter, we decided to explore joining Eastland Baptist Church.
Eastland had been a prominent, thriving church in East Tulsa for years before we planted our former church. We attended many youth rallies as well as youth activities and home school activities. They were still a very conservative, Independent Fundament Baptist Church.
We knew the pastor and knew a good number of the members. They also had a large, active youth group and my older kids knew some of the Eastland kids.
In a meeting with the pastor, Dave Hardy, Paul revealed our desire to join there, and he graciously accepted us.
He also agreed to sponsor our efforts to start a church If we would agree to continue there for at least a year so that his congregation would get to know us.
It was exactly what we needed at the time. We will be forever grateful for his and Grace’s comfort, kindness and willingness to embrace us and our vision.
Paul was assigned an adult Sunday School class. Our teen and younger children immediately found new friends and the two years we served there was an incredibly healing time for us.
But to be completely honest, our beliefs were emigrating away from fundamentalist beliefs and practices while Eastland seemed to be headed toward more conservative fundamental beliefs and practices.
Years before, Pastor Dave Hardy along with Pastor Sam Davison former president of Baptist Bible Fellowship International separated from the more progressive Baptist Bible Fellowship of Springfield, Missouri and spearheaded the establishment of the more conservative Heartland Baptist Bible College and its affiliated Fellowship in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Our roots were in the Baptist Bible Fellowship and College in Springfield. We were on our way back to our roots.
Pastor Hardy was retiring. Pastor Dorrell was taking his place as senior pastor. We were ships passing each other but going in opposite directions...at least at that time.
So, once our time there was ended and we moved on to our new ministry, Eastland sponsored us as promised but unfortunately our involvement with them fizzled. It was our hope that our kids could continue to be involved with their teens but there was no way they would be subjected to the strict rules, dress codes and other high expectations reminiscent of their former church.
It was during this time we updated our house in Broken Arrow and put it on the market.
Paul’s dad completely supported our leaving the church. He was against our working there with his daughter and her husband in the first place.
He wrote Paul and told him to find a considerable amount of property to buy because he was finally ready to retire as missionary and come back to the states to live.
It had always been his dream, before becoming a missionary, to be a farmer and cattleman.
Just before our Broken Arrow house sold, we found eighty acres of beautiful property in Jenks. This property consisted of one spacious, move-in ready house, another gutted house that we could remodel, three hundred pecan trees, several ponds, wildlife and more all at an extremely reasonable price.
Not only was it an ideal space for his dad's farming and ranching dreams but there was room to fence off ample space for his mother to safely roam.
Our initial plan was to remodel the smaller house that had already been gutted for Paul’s parents and our family would live in the other house. We were delighted by the prospects of his parents moving right next door to us after most of our adult years living an ocean apart.
Our kids would so enjoy having their grandparents close by for the first time ever, which was icing on the cake!
All our plans were working out beautifully, until Paul’s dad, as he had before, changed his mind.
Each time he decided he would come home and retire, he always came back to the promise he made to God as a young man, "He would preach until he died."
He remained in Korea as missionary until he died in 2010 but he continued to support us in various ways the rest of his life. Paul’s mother had previously passed away, in her husband’s, arms in 2006.
We had lived in Broken Arrow for twenty-two years by this time.
From the day we left the church and onward, we were completely alone in that city.
If we saw someone from the church in the grocery store or in any other public place, they would avoid us or noticeably turn away.
Since our only connection to that city was the church, there was nothing in that place that felt like home to us anymore. We did not know a ‘Broken Arrow’ outside of church and church family.
We had no friends there anymore except for a very few young adults who had once been in our youth group. Even they were cautious about associating with us.
Every restaurant, every park, every store, every Quick Trip, every street we drove down-- literally every space we occupied or visited felt like it belonged to a history too painful to remember.
Our only family was the church family who had excommunicated us.
So, beginning a new life meant leaving it all and moving to a whole new place with all new scenery, new stores, new public places, and a new church family.
Out with the old, in with the new.
Paul said it felt for him like he was being reborn every time he crossed the Arkansas river bridge that that took us in the direction of our new home.
We celebrated our first Thanksgiving in our new city and our new home in November 2001.
It was a solemn occasion, but we were extraordinarily happy with our accomplishment.
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Paul with his parents at his dad's favorite restaurant in Korea, Burger King. |
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