Ron William's Testimony

    I was raised in a Christian home.  My Mother led me to the Lord when I was six years old.  From an early age, I felt God’s call to preach; but as I got older, I ignored Him and felt that just going to church was enough.
    After High School, I enlisted in The United States Air Force and drifted away from church.  While I was stationed in England, I met and married Deborah.  She had grown up in The Church of England, but had never been told that she needed to accept Christ as her personal Savior.
    In 1979, I was transferred to San Antonio, Texas, which is where I was from.  Here Debi and I both began to go to church with my parents.  Debi was saved shortly after we started attending church.  We began to get more involved in the church and doing The Lord’s work.  We also started praying that God would send someone to England to witness to Debi’s family and to our friends there.  Through this praying, we felt God was calling us to go as missionaries.
    We moved to Arlington, Texas and enrolled in Arlington Baptist College in 1982.  I earned my Bachelors degree and Debi took mission courses.  I graduated in 1986 and after a short deputation we left for England.  God blessed our work in England and we were able to start a church in the town of Raunds.  Many were saved and baptized.
    Due to a split in the World Baptist Fellowship, we lost over 60% of our support and were eventually forced to return to America.  We came back disillusioned, hurt, and angry.  We tried to find a church, but could not.  We stopped going to church, but continued to read the Bible and pray.
    The Bible tells us that if God loves you and you are not doing what he wants you to do He will chastise you.  We found this to be true.  I had accepted a very high paying job with A. T. & T. and we became very materialistic.  God kept trying to get us back into church and we kept ignoring Him.  Finally, God did chastise us.  I went through 2 back surgeries and surgery on both knees in the space of 3 years.  Because of this, I also lost my job.  Through this pain and suffering, God got it through to us that we were suppose to be in church and serving Him.
    We joined Grace Baptist Temple; Rev. Dennis L. Isbell was our pastor.  As we got more and more involved in the church, I continued to feel more and more sure that God still wanted me to preach.  Debi did not want to have anything to do with the idea of working full time in the ministry.  She was still bitter about what had happened before and was unwilling to risk going through that again.  After speaking with Pastor Isbell, we both began to pray that God would make us be willing to do what He wanted us to do, whatever it was.  Whether it was being in the ministry or just serving through the church, we wanted to be willing to do His will.
    Shortly after we began to pray this way, God answered us.  We had never thought about Kenya, but through Greg and Michelle Windell presenting their calling to our church, we both felt an immediate and strong call to surrender to go to Kenya.  Not only did Debi and I feel this call, but Michelle our 14-year-old daughter also felt the call.  When after much praying together, Debi and I told her we felt called to be missionaries to Kenya, she said that from the time Bro. Windell had preached she had felt that we should go to Kenya to witness to the people there.
    We are now, as a family firmly rooted and determined that Kenya is where God wants us to be, and preaching The Gospel and planting New Testament Churches is what He wants us to do.