Pastor Strickland's Testimony

            When I was five years old my family stopped going to church because of racial discrimination.  When I was nine years old I went to church on a church bus and heard the Gospel. But I did not get saved and eventually quit going.

            When I was fifteen I wanted to be like the witch in the TV show “Bewitched” so I started studying the occults and praying to demons.  When they started to become real, I remembered going to that church on the bus and hearing about God & the Devil and Heaven & Hell.  I knew I was on the wrong side and needed to find God, so I went to church with my mom at Northgate Baptist Church in Northgate California.  That day, November 20th 1977 I was saved and my life has never been the same!  Within a year all my friends, except one, had received Christ as their personal Saviour. 

I then went into the US Army and found it hard to find a fundamental church because I didn’t know what a fundamental church was called.  My church was a Baptist church, but I found that Baptist churches are not all the same. One soldier asked me to go to church with him and he seemed to have great zeal for the Lord, so I went.  The church service was a prayer that lasted two hours with screaming, fainting, and all sorts of confusion.  This stopped me from trying different churches for a long time.

I was stationed in Korea where I met and married my wife.  I was later stationed in Germany where two ladies knocked on our door from Faith Baptist Church.  I remembered knocking on doors at my old church and decided to go to see if they were a straight church.  Missionary Jim Aguiar was the missionary pastor there who helped me grow in the Lord.

While I was stationed at Fort Hood, my unit was deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Storm.  In the evenings I would go on top of my truck and pray.  One evening God began breaking my heart for not going soul-winning.  I could see for miles and miles; out in the desert there were clusters of lights where thousands of soldiers were positioned, ready to go fight.  I realized that while at home I had not done my job by trying to lead them to the Lord, and in a few days they would be possibly going to their death and hell forever.  I surrendered myself to the Lord for His will in my life.

After fourteen years of service I separated from the Army, and went to Fairhaven Baptist College in Chesterton, IN.  I wanted to be a missionary on the west coast, but the Lord called me back to Killeen, Texas to work in a church here.  So I did faithfully until the Lord called me to start Charity Baptist Church, where I am currently serving Him.

My life’s verse is Psalm 24:1 “The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein”.  I am God’s; you are God’s; everything is God’s.  It is sin and self-will that separates us from a loving and faithful God.