In 2003 my mother was found to have 4th stage cancer. She had received treatment for arthritis but an x-ray revealed there was a tumor that had eaten through her femur. The Small Cell Carcinoma was in her liver, lungs, femur, and scapula. We moved home to the farm to assist her and prepare for the end. Praise God, she pulled through and has been cancer free for7 years. While we were back in Tennessee, Tony Hutson asked me to work at Middle Tennessee Baptist Church. Whenever he came to Madison Baptist to preach at our Super Conference we would talk about Bluegrass music and crazy ministry ideas I was working on in Alabama. He knew of the success we had in ministry and wanted to use cultivate some of the ideas there in Murfreesboro.
Once I started at the church, the first project we were going to do was a friend day to achieve a high attendance Sunday. I had over 30 visitors which included the staff of Gibson Music form the Opry Mills Mall where Danny Roberts was the store manager. He and I played music together from 1981-1986. We formed a band I named “The New Tradition” and made an Album and one cassette tape. I left the band in 1996 to attend Bible College. The result of this friend day was essentially the amount of income needed to pay my salary. Arnold Riggs was a man I had prayed to be saved for 20 years. He came that morning and was gloriously saved.
Over the next few weeks and months it was evident the blessings of God were being poured out on our lives. We lived near all of our parents and the children were able to spend time with them. I gave Tony a wild idea that was meant to be two fold. We had 15 busses and I asked if I could turn one of them into a driving bilboard/Hotrod bus. The first bus was just to help the people see its effectiveness as advertisement and the other bus would serve as a Trojan Horse to inflitrate the car shows, race ways, and news media. The 2nd bus would actuall have the 1500 horse power engine and the interior would serve as a presentation room of the gospel and church's ministry (M.E.) I built a Hot Rod bus and contacted Guinness Book of World Records concerning its registration. They wanted me to register it with the National Hotrod Association and then they would be interested in promoting a National Hot Rod Church Bus race as a media event. Daryl Waldrop was a friend of Less Butler our piano player and he was convinced he could get Daryl to drive it for us. There will be more on this Bus later on this website.
In addition to the bus idea, I took the old ford van we were going to give away and turned it into an Ice Cream truck. I purchased a small freezer, wired in a 1400w inverter with an extra car battery, and added a small CD player with speakers. The paint job looked as if it were a rolling ice cube. At that time, I was working with the bus ministry and the van was a great way to sign up new riders. Essentially, we gave away the ice cream to those who would sign up to ride the church bus. Look for photos on slide show.
Gibson music gave me a $10,000 dollar banjo to play in the services and I was able to once again play music every Sunday with my old friend Danny Roberts his wife Andréa. This bluegrass band played each Sunday along with Less Butler (form Solid Gospel Music Radio in Nashville) on a piano that belonged to Elvis. There were people visiting almost every Sunday form other churches just to see a sample of our music. Gipson also gave Tony an expensive mandolin to strum along with us from time to time. Jacky and Cindy Pierce were two more musicians that joined the church and Jackie became the music leader shortly after we left to work for Creation Science Evangelism. At our Teen Camp Meeting Gail Russ, who had recorded my gospel trio “New Grace” back in 1990 was able to hear the impact bluegrass music could have on teens and church services. This was fulfilling to me because in 1990 the formal music crowd associated with Faith Music Missions shunned “New Grace” because of the bluegrass and southern gospel sound. I had told them that the Lord would use it some day and as soon as “Oh Brother Where art Thou” came out in the theaters bluegrass became huge in the music market. But, Christianity was left behind in the dust because there was no contemporary bluegrass music recorded that was not mixed in with a compilation of other secular songs. And by the way, the shunning of “New Grace” hindered the work of the Lord among teens and churches. I, Andy Oneal, and John Stemberg traveled through 11 states in 1990 singing and doing skits. We saw many salvation decision and people surrender to full-time ministry. I’ll put more about New Grace on another page.
Then we started talk about VBS. MTBC had never held a VBS and Tony gave me 60 days to promote and organize the VBS. It was hard but he trusted me to put something together that would work. Tony wanted to spend a lot of money on promotion but I convinced him to let me design something that would promote itself. I started work on a 16 foot Dinosaur head made of expanding foam. I used a weed-eater to carve some of the features. This was all done in a week and hung on the front of the church. I carved foam blocks to look as if the bricks were knocked off the front of the building where the Dinosaur stuck its head out the wall. I had told Tony that the only way to get an article or picture on the front page of the paper was to either do something really bad or something really good. A few days later the front page of the Murfreesboro news paper had a 5x9 photo of the Dinosaur head and the caption was the ultimate advertisement for our VBS. From the average numbers of our bus ministry we expected to have around 250 to 300 in attendance for our VBS. The first night… we had over 470 come in on the busses. Praise God! There were 89 children and teens that got saved in those 4 days. Something awesome was going on at MTBC.
More to come....
