Baptist DISTINCTIVE: An Adam Mykonos Mystery (The Adam Myknonos Mystries) by Thomas Gillen Page A

a role, same as Pastor Luke does over at Guiding Light.   Real fact is that Dr. Longstreet and those
folks up there didn’t want a soul winning church, they wanted a fellowship
church and then they went and hired a soul winning pastor, made no sense.”
    We had arrived at our first house, as we
rang the doorbell I thought of what Joshua had written ‘we four and no more.’ A
man in a red jogging suit answered the door.
    “Hi Sir, my name is Adam and this in my
friend Stan,   our church is participating
in an official survey on religion in America, its eight simple questions take
about two minutes of your time, the first question is what’s your first name?”
    And so it went.

    Coda
Four
    I believe that the greatest purpose of a church is
to win souls.
    It is deep in my heart that the Great Commission to
go and make disciples of all the world applies today as much as it did when
Jesus first gave it to the eleven. A church can grow in size and money like
Calvary did before I got there, but if it is not winning souls then it is not fulfilling
its purpose.
    Do I believe that all of the people we visited
during my tenure at Calvary were saved? Maybe, that is not for me to decided,
my job, your job and most importantly a church’s job is to be an ambassador for
Christ, to go out and give every person a clear chance to hear the Gospel. That
was why we opened the Christian School as an opportunity to present the Gospel
to the young. I made sure that it was designed to give away as many
scholarships as we could possibly afford in order to allow those children who
would not normally be able to attend to do so, of course that made me no
friends within the old guard. Nor did the radio station.
    It may seem at first as if everyone would be happy
about a radio station. You would think that having the name of your church
associated with a high powered Christian Station, an FM one at that, would
please everybody. But they weren’t. While the station had the power to reach a
wide area of lost souls, and by joining the CFB and getting our programming
from Ryder’s company we greatly increased out presence on the air, the station
itself cost us a lot of money. Since the entire network is pledge driven,
commercial free, we were always in the red. So I did what I thought was necessary
and with the implicit permission of the deacons board, I borrowed money from
the general church funds. Each quarter when the Station came in under budget I simply
moved money over.
    Understand Brother Adam I was sure of two things,
one that we were reaching souls and two that if the Lord wanted the work to
continue He would make it happen. But my confidence was not shared by Dr.
Longstreet and his people and each time I needed to reach into general funds to
propel the radio station forward they raised sterner and sterner objections .

    Chapter
Nine
    An hour later we were finished and leaving
Smithsburg. Stan would drop me off at the diner and then Rita and I would take
her car to dinner and eventually home. Lighthouse Diner, along with my shop and
the Fireside restaurant are all located near the Valley Mall where Halfway Blvd
meets Wiesel Blvd. Stan and I had been in Smithsburg, we could get over to the
mall area by taking 70 to 81 or by cutting down Jefferson and though town to
Burhans and over to Wiesel. The choice was one of the Highways or through town
and like most people from the county Stan was equally comfortable with either
route.
    As a Christian I do not believe in luck,
good or bad, all things are in God’s plan. And so it was God’s plan for us to
take Jefferson and then cut over to Franklin as we went through downtown,
though neither Stan nor I would be consciously aware of that choice.
    We drove up Franklin past address one
hundred the county Parole Office, a place I was glad to say I was no longer
familiar with and down past the county commuter hub on our left. On the right
hand side was a small grocery store. In New York we would have