NEW CASTLE, Delaware (BRN)—A year ago, First Baptist Church of Delaware lost its pastor, staff members were divided, and the church was about a month away from closing because of massive debt. But the church had good lay leaders who were looking for God to come in and do something in a mighty way.
“It was a very traumatic time. It was not an easy transition at all,” said Ron Larson, whom the church asked to be their interim pastor. He had been consulting with the church in a part-time position, traveling back and forth from his home in West Virginia, for about a year before the pastor left. His first instinct was to “run” because he really loved consulting and had vowed to never be a senior pastor again.
“And yet what we saw God do in that next 90 days!” he exclaimed, recounting what happened after he challenged the church to 90 days of seeking God.
Before the pandemic, “people started coming together in the sanctuary… and not just praying, but really desperately crying out for God,” he said. “Desperation became our new motto.”
“I told the people: You don’t need a baptism of the Holy Spirit. You need a baptism of desperation and not a desperation for the church, but desperation for God. And so we spent 90 days on our faces, snot on the carpet, tears flowing, people being broken, good people becoming great people of God, lost people discovering Jesus, people being filled with God’s Spirit and going out for the first times in their life.”
He shared how an 80-year-old man who had been a Christian for 50-some years was so challenged by the desperation of the moment that he went out and led a young millennial man to Jesus Christ. Those kinds of stories begin to be told and coupled with the desperation of the people and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, God began to move.
Larson said people started coming to the altar even before the invitation started, rushing down, laying down, almost in a prostate position, and staying there.
“In fact, I was trying to close the service and people would not move. I’m talking about invitations that would go as long as the sermon would go, and that’s when I knew that something special was happening here,” he said.
“That’s when I knew that a page was being turned in the history of this church.”
What compelled all of this to happen? Larson said he thought it was the tragic nature of losing a pastor who had been there eight and a half years, the way that they lost him and people just re-evaluating their whole ability to trust and whether even God could be trusted.
“I think what happened was the people simply got so hungry to see the Spirit come down upon this church that they stayed before God until God responded.”
He explained, this wasn’t just a “Let’s come on Wednesday night and pray for 20 minutes” or “Let’s pray for Aunt Bertha’s hysterectomy or Uncle Bob’s infected toe fungus.”
It was people standing up confessing bitterness, calling out their sin before God, and getting right.
“I mean, you have one person do that, and then somebody else follows that, and then a couple more people start talking, and then married couples start coming to the altar saying we haven’t even talked in months, and we’ve got to get this right before God,” he described.
“The catalyst was desperation, and then when desperation stayed before God long enough, then that passion to see God, then God’s Spirit begin to move. It really was God’s Spirit. It wasn’t the preaching, it wasn’t the music. It was just the Spirit of God compelling people to get the junk out of their lives and get clean before Him.”
Larson said, after being in ministry for 41 years, he’s seen great things happen before, but he’s “also had the spiritual snot beat out of” him. And he said it probably affected him more than he knew.
“It gave me sort of a caustic nature that things aren’t going to change,” he admitted.
But seeing God’s Spirit move, seeing young people, 18-28 year olds, coming to the church again ready to receive God’s Word and wanting more than just cute little sermons has given Larson “a fresh fire and passion for the church.”
“I have sort of fallen back in love,” he said. “I never had any problems with the Groom. I had some issues with [those] He married.”
Larson said he was among those kneeling at the altar, saying, “God, I’ve got to get right.’”
“I wasn’t praying for anybody else. I was praying for me. I didn’t want to be under judgment. I didn’t want to be one of those that says, ‘Hey, you can bless everybody else with revival and get them changed, but don’t mess with me.’
“I knew I wasn’t right. I knew that I had issues in my heart—hurts from the past … bitterness from what people have done–that if I didn’t get it out, it was going to become a root that kept the fruit from being sustained at the church. I knew if the preacher didn’t get right, the people weren’t going to get right.”
Over around 11 months, the church grew from its dwindled-down size of less than a hundred people to close to 300 people. The church had already baptized more people in January and February than the previous year put together. People were stepping up to serve, and people were getting happy and getting holy at the same time, he said.
Then, COVID-19 happened.
Right away, Larson gathered several “smart people” and asked, “How can we keep the fire going?” They quickly put everything online and increased the intensity of their Wednesday night gatherings. They started 20-21 online small groups.
After learning people were clicking off about 45-55 minutes into the service, they reduced the length of the service and made worship a little tighter and a little shorter. But they kept their prayer and invitation time.
As a result, attendance quadrupled, and people who were viewing their church for the first time were getting saved.
“It was just nuts,” he said.
Now the church is continuing their online offerings, all while navigating the new normal as they work through reopening their sanctuary. To Larson’s great delight, the energy and passion are still very real.
In fact, he baptized seven more people this weekend.
When asked, he offered three pieces of advice to other pastors:
“Number One: You cannot neglect your own personal passion time with God every day… I’m talking about extended passionate times with God. God doesn’t do great, exciting things every day. We all know that, but if you’re not staying before God until He speaks or shows you something, you’re going to miss a lot of what God wants to do.”
Two: You better have a brother or sister who can be a fire lighter in your life because it’s very lonely at the top, he said.
Three: you need to detox your life. There are people who don’t need to be in your life. “I’ve learned in my years of ministry that I allowed too many toxic people to stay around me too long,” he said. “I can be their shepherd if they need me, but I don’t have to have coffee with them!”
He added, there are not a lot of people who will tell you thank you or to pour deep encouragement into your life.
“So you better have three or four people that are doing that, and you need to detox from three or four people if they’re doing too much of the other,” he said.
“I just want to say that there’s ever a time we need a state convention, it is now. Man, we really do need each other, and I’m telling you, watching people work together is phenomenal. There’s something about that what it does to your heart!
“It’s all about the Kingdom,” he said.
Editor’s Note: Speaking of Kingdom, Antonio Valle, First Baptist Church of Delaware’s worship leader, will lead worship at the Baptist Resource Network’s November 5-6 annual meeting, themed Kingdom Vision. Stay tuned for more exciting details!
