My journey to and through the Baptist Bible Tribune
by Keith Bassham
When I received my first impressions of a call to ministry at the age of 16, I had only been a part of the family of God a few months. Between the time of my conversion and the call, our church had gone through a change of pastors, and I was experiencing some changes myself.
My original impetus for attending church in the first place had disappeared when her pastor father migrated to a larger church a few hundred miles away. Our short romance, one-sided it turned out, had already ended anyway, and so my object of focus at church had taken a more serious turn. Our new pastor was very much interested in our youth group, though he was puzzled by the relatively large group of young men and women, boys and girls really, who had declared they had been called to ministry.
Eventually, I realized that was largely a fad and peer-based response among the group, but as a newcomer I was barely aware. It turns out that a year or so before, the church youth had taken a trip to visit missionaries in Mexico, and the missionary family had a teen-aged son. This young man, reportedly very attractive, had apparently inspired several female camp attendees to place themselves in God’s service without reservation. All the girls involved appeared to have been called to Mexico. And the young men in the group were equally seized with all this newfound spiritual interest on the part of the girls, and that is how it was that nearly everyone in my youth group had been called to ministry.
As a relative newbie, I may have been affected by some of the enthusiasm (though it had waned a little), but the call I was sensing was not connected to a fleshly person; nor was it a flash of lightning so much as it was a continual drumbeat. Therefore, after several weeks of listening to the drumbeat, I made the decision for ministry.
But to do what in that ministry? My version of the Mexico pseudo-call took the form of a missionary to France who presented his field in my church shortly after I announced my call. I determined I would be a missionary, and not just any kind of missionary, but a missionary to France. And that was my testimony — and honestly, my plan — for several months after. I discovered long ago that people often invent the voice of God for something they have really just cooked up for themselves. “I will be a missionary” may sound noble in itself, but when intoned as “God has called me to be a missionary,” well, who is going to argue the point? No one did in my case, and since no one did, I eventually had to argue it myself. Better to admit you are on the wrong path and to get on a good one than to persist in a wrong course and to commit spiritual fraud to boot. The Bible has several examples of people who attempt that kind of fraud, and it never works out well for them. And so I had to eventually admit that France was a whim, a voice of my own and not God.
While I was talking to and listening to myself, God was at work putting the pieces of my future, and especially these past 20 years, in place outside both my view and earshot. My church was Temple Baptist Church in Dumas, TX. I was a junior in Dumas High School, taking Journalism 1 and assisting the editor of The Demon Tale (seriously, that was the name of the school’s newspaper). A classmate and a fellow church member showed me a copy of a newspaper called the Baptist Bible Tribune. I asked what it was about. I don’t recall whether it had come to the church or to her home, but she explained it was the newspaper for the churches in fellowship with Temple Baptist. We spent a few moments glancing at it before class began, and then she said, “Think. You could be the editor of this some day.”
I took little notice of her comment that day, and I was only reminded of it much later. After all, editing newspapers can hardly be called legitimate ministry — or so my thinking was at the time. Nevertheless, I stayed with The Demon Tale through my senior year and won some editorial writing contests. I placed first across all divisions in my last state contest in Texas, but five years later I was leaving Baptist Bible College and heading for my first post-graduation ministry assignment. By the end of that year (1976), I was pastoring and publishing some in a local paper.
Twenty years of pastoral work followed, and in each venue, I wrote and managed to publish some of what I wrote. In the early 80s, as the Oklahoma BBF secretary, I was asked to begin a newsletter we called The Pastors Letter. It gained a following and some of my articles caught the notice of James Combs at the Baptist Bible Tribune. Among the newsletter’s recipients was Mike Randall, who at the time was vice president of Baptist Bible College. We had had brief contacts with one another, and when he became the editor of the Tribune in 1995, he asked me to join him as an assistant editor.
I saw to it that my office was next to Mr. Randall’s, and I learned all I could from him and 10-year Tribune veteran Tom Harper. Seven very short years later, BBC trustees made Mike Randall the college president, and he graciously recommended to the Fellowship that I succeed him at the editor’s post at the Tribune. And that is the brief story of my journey to the Tribune.
Now, I have omitted many details and names, and the path was not a straight one, just as no life path is. But I have often used the story of Jesus and Nicodemus to demonstrate that my story is not merely one of circumstance, coincident, and fortuition — right place, right time, right people, etc. As I wrote above, God was doing things away from my eyesight and earshot. The young lady in my journalism class spoke more than she knew.
Near the end of their conversation, Jesus told Nicodemus that the Spirit was much like the wind. It is an easy concept since the words for spirit and wind are the same whether in Aramaic (ruach in the spoken language Jesus was likely using) or Greek (pneuma in the written record’s language). Jesus said the wind blows where it wants, and you can hear the sound of it, but you cannot tell where it is coming from, nor can you know where it is going. Such is true, he goes on, of everyone who is born of the Spirit.
I believe the wind of God began blowing through my life years before my first conscious encounter with Him. Consider my school friend who led me to Christ, Joe Carrell, whom I met in the sixth grade because we “coincidentally” sat next to one another in an all-school band. And the wind continued to blow after my conversion. Later, one of Joe’s friends at BBC became a close friend to me, and still later that close friend was instrumental in my moving to Oklahoma after my time in Canada, and that move brought me into the Oklahoma Fellowship circle that included Dave Hardy, who made me his assistant pastor, and who hosted Mike Randall one weekend where we met and began to form a friendship that eventually brought me to the Tribune.
The wind of God — you cannot tell where it is coming from, nor can you tell where it is going. I believe at a time such as this, when the world is going through such turmoil, and when our nation is being rocked to its core, and for me personally, in the midst of major transition, it is important we experience the truth of the wind of God.
That wind of God will take you places neither you nor anyone around you may have even vaguely anticipated. And those places can be filled with joy. It is true that our dreams, and thus our prayers, may be too small. God may have something in mind for you far greater than you can imagine.
And those places can be filled with challenge, as the wind of God may take you where you would not have chosen on your own. I could fill this magazine with stories of God’s leading a very reluctant Keith Bassham down a path he would never have chosen. But a stubborn refusal to go down those paths will often do you hurt.
There are so many opportunities to do ministry today, and the need for competency in areas that at one time seemed unrelated to ministry, if anything, is even greater. To anyone seeking God’s will for a vocation, I would say take all you have and are and place it at God’s disposal. Do not wait for “a call” that may never come because you have already determined what that call looks like. Rather, you should volunteer, and find ways to use your giftedness and abilities to serve God and others. Raise the sail, and allow God’s wind to take you where He will.