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Editor’s note: Ken Wells is senior pastor of Northview Baptist Church in Lewisville. He recently shared part of his testimony with the Texan’s Gary Ledbetter.
I
n 1980, I was working in a grocery store when I got a call from my wife’s home church asking if I would preach for their homecoming. I said, “Sure.” I did, and then a few months later, the pastor came into the store where I was assistant manager, saying, “Hey, would you fill in for me this coming Sunday? I’m going to go hunting.” I’d been to Bible college and was comfortable doing that. It turns out his hunting trip was hunting a new church.
Well, he came back, resigned, and took a church in Oklahoma. The church immediately called me, and I was just 23. I’d only been married for a few months, and I had been on a staff in a small church. I probably had more students in my student ministry than in that little church [Northview Baptist Church in Lewisville] had counting everybody. I said, “Well, y’all need to find somebody older.” I figured somebody like who I am now, in their 50s or 60s.
The church had been through some rough times, so they did look at some other men. They had two or three other pastors come in and preach for them. Finally, about January of ’81, they called me and said, “Look, we knew back in August you’d be our next pastor.”
Well, now I had 20 people, and they handed me a lot of keys that nobody knew what they went to. They said, “We think this one opens the front door.” They said yes, I said yes. Then I said, “By the way, am I going to get paid? I hadn’t asked the question; I just assumed God was going to take care of me. They said, “Well, we have $50 a week and there’s an old house down the street, but we don’t have any money to fix it up. If you want to fix it up, you’re welcome to move into it, but we do have $50 a week. We suggest you keep your full-time grocery job.” The 20 people at Northview were doing all they could just to keep the doors open. The bank was even threatening to foreclose.
But by May, we had raised the money to pay off the loan and burn the note. Our next highlight was to begin giving to missions, just 3% to the association at first. But from that business meeting, for the next 13 weeks in a row, we had somebody saved, baptized, or join the church. They had not seen that in years and years. I credit the fact that we stepped out in faith and said, “We’re going to support missions.” We did, and God blessed it.
“My ministry verse is 1 Timothy 1:12: ‘I thank Him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because He judged me faithful, appointing me to His service.’ I think the idea is to remain faithful.”
It was very exciting during those times. Obviously we didn’t just grow by leaps and bounds. As you hear at some churches, the pastor gets there and it goes from 0 to 200 people in a year. We didn’t do that, but we got to where we were hitting 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 pretty regularly. We were bumping that 100 mark—that magic 100 mark. But we were starting to do that fairly regularly. It was good.
It got so that I had to quit my grocery store job, my main source of income. At that point, I began to substitute in the local school system until the church was ready to support us full time.
That was 45 years ago this February. This is the only church I’ve pastored. We’ve seen Northview go through a lot of changes. Through the years, we’ve added a 500-seat auditorium. We’ve finished, a few years ago, 25,000 square feet of education space. I remember when I came, the church was looking for $500 or $600 a Sunday to keep the budget going.
We’ve also added a Hispanic church that is running around 250 each Sunday—I think they baptized more than we did last year. Our church reaches probably 700 families though a ministry that provides clothing and food that started in a house we bought across the street and now has spread to five locations in Denton, Carrollton, and our own Lewisville.
In February, I announced my retirement to be effective in May. My wife Teresa and I are staying at Northview—our kids are here, our grandkids (three, with one on the way), my mother-in-law lives right next door to the church, and Lewisville is our hometown. I hope to continue as chaplain for our fire and police departments, a role I’ve enjoyed for nearly 45 years as well.
My ministry verse is 1 Timothy 1:12: “I thank Him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because He judged me faithful, appointing me to His service.” I think the idea is to remain faithful.
