I owe much of my pastoral "style" to my mentor, Leroy Blankenship.  His first advice was telling me to organize my sermons by keeping them in a binder notebook where they can easily be retrieved for later use.  It was from his tutelage that I gained a respect for knowing that sometimes what may seem a lack luster sermon or message can be enhanced through more study (and more prayer) and re-used, so to speak.

I look back now, and think how great it would have been to have a word processor or a computer back then ... I had a typewriter at least, so I didn't have to insert mere handwritten notes into my binder.  Years later those binders that I had filed away my sermons in,  were destroyed through water damage ... nothing but moldy pages stuck together.

I digress ... My wife and I had been pretty much serving as associate pastors in the Sunnyside Church of God.  Since I had experience in the Royal Rangers boys program, I decided to charter an "Outpost" in that particular local church.  Sandee was heavily involved in children's church and trying to get a choir going.  She was the church's pianist and was asked on numerous occasions by Pastor Blankenship to sing solos.

Occasionally, I was asked to serve as guest speaker for various churches in the State of Washington.  Sandee and I would travel in our little Datsun 1200 which got around 42 miles per gallon of gas. With its ten gallon capacity gas tank, we could pretty much drive to any part of the state and almost back home again on the one tank of gas.

I would preach in the service, or services if it was for a complete Sunday, and Sandee would sing and play the piano.  It was amazing, though, to think that when we were asked to fill in for a pastor that was absent, usually that pastor's wife was also the church pianist.  As you can imagine, we were welcomed with open arms.  I was so zealous for God, I would jump at the first opportunity to preach ... no matter where we went.

Christ stated, "Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor" (Matthew 13:57). Such was the case for Sandee and I in Sunnyside, we both grew up there and it was definitely getting to the point where we needed to leave Sunnyside and go elsewhere to minister.  We chose Grandview, which when you really think about it, it wan't really far enough away from "home".  Grandview and Sunnyside are only six miles from each other traveling along highway 12 in the Yakima Valley.

It was sort of ideal to some degree, because we both had to  continue work in secular jobs due to the fact the church wasn't large enough to support a fulltime pastor.  Our secular "job" was a printing business that Sandee and I owned in Sunnyside.  Another thing was that we had family in Sunnyside, my parents and three siblings at home there.  Another brother and his wife lived there also.  Sandee's widowed mother was also there, too, and none of her nearest relatives were close enough to give any support or fellowship for her. So it just would not have been right to abandon those responsibilities.

I appreciate the Church of God and my heritage with that organization, but it has the flaw of not providing the financial support for the struggling churches and the pastors that are expected to shepherd them.  I look back now and think how we could have benefited from the Church of God State Offices in Washington merely providing us a means to serve one year without having to struggle being a fulltime pastor and required to have a fulltime secular job to meet our financial obligations.  In a ten year period, I was the 10th pastor to serve there. We served as pastors of the Grandview Church of God for three and a half years, so you can imagine the problems that this poor church was facing ... getting a different pastor every six to 9 months ... it's no wonder that it was not growing.

We preached three sermons each Sunday (one of those was a special church service out at Walnut Grove Nursing Home), I taught the adult Sunday school class, and taught a Bible study class on Wednesday evenings. Sandee directed the youth choir and taught a Sunday School class for the youth and a Wednesday evening Bible class as well ... pretty much the same as any other active pastor and wife team would do.  But we had to work 50+ hours per week in a secular job, besides our normal pastoral duties.  The "salary" that we received from the church so so minimal, we just turned around and donated back to the church.

We were able to finish off the basement of the church to make it usable for classrooms and a fellowship hall.  We purchased brand new padded church pews for the sanctuary and were listed for three years in a row as the "fastest growing Church of God in Washington State".