A TESTIMONY
OF A GENTILE CHURCH
STANDING WITH ISRAEL
I have never lived farther than five miles of where I live today. As a fifty-year-old man I have watched my home, rural Johnson County, Texas, change from a farming community to a growing suburb south of Dallas/Ft Worth. In all my young days, I had never placed a value on the importance of standing with Israel. It wasn't a part of our southwestern culture. However, when I became a follower of Jesus, all of that changed. I learned very quickly that I am not just a resident of Texas but a resident of heaven who lives in Texas. If I was going to follow Him, Israel would have to become big in my heart.
That was in 1986 and I was only 19 years old. Nine years later, my young wife and I founded a church we called Open Door. We modeled it after the church of Philadelphia in the Bible, because we were sort of born breach. We started off as a food outreach and then later started church services. Our heart for reaching the lost, feeding the hungry and helping the hurt was a primary emphasis and continues today at Open Door. Our food bank became very successful and before we even realized it, we were responsible for over 1700 orphans in seven different orphanages on 4 different continents—all this from a church of less than 200 people.
Like any breach birth, there was a very scary and painful time. With such a small and poor congregation, we struggled to maintain these ministries and creatively met our financial obstacles. Leanna and I mortgaged our home seven times between 1995 and 2011 in order to grow our food bank and maintain our orphanages. There was no financial victory in our church for over 16 years. We literally were in survival mode and many times without even the basics of electricity. All the while, we fed tens of thousands of people every year and cared for thousands of children throughout the world.
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