Recently Colene and I attended a memorial service for Pastor Charles McHatton . Dr. McHatton pastored the first church I attended after being saved. He also performed the marriage ceremony for Colene and me, and dedicated Heather, our oldest daughter. He had a profound impact on our lives.
During the service a number of pastors shared the impact he had on their lives. I remembered when most of these guys gave their hearts to Christ. Also I grew in grace and power with them through the church bible college we all attended.
Listening to them caused me to recount many of those early impact-full days. Some of those items that flooded my mind that evening were:
- No matter what he preached, people always went forward for salvation. It seemed always more than a dozen.
- Pastor McHatton was never soft on sin. His sayings such as “you can’t play fast and loose with God,” still ring in my heart and divert me from sin.
- He was considered the Pastor’s Pastor. He counseled many pastors in the Valley.
- At the downtown Phoenix 1st Baptist Church, which we rented for more than a year during construction of our building, I witnessed several occasions when people wondered in off the street moaning and pleading to be saved.
- I heard prophetic words of such detail that husbands were singled out for ignoring their honey by putting off fixing a broken kitchen screen door. Church was scary. We always confessed our sins or anything resembling sin before entering the church doors. If God remembered our sins no more surely the Spirit would honor the promise.
- I saw occult items brought and abandoned before the pastoral team. What a eerie, but liberating feeling we experienced as they were destroyed.
- I saw demon possessed people attack the pastor on several occasions.
- I saw demons cast out of people and their lives transformed.
- I participated in casting out demons. Observation… In the Gospels and the book of Acts casting out demons was a given. My question is, where have all the demons gone? How would we explain this to the seekers and those predisposed to predictability and outcome control. What would our fully reformed brothers think of us?
- The only supernatural things I did not personally experience my first three years as a Christian was raising the dead, and not succumbing to eating deadly things. Although surviving my diet as a young single man may cause me to reconsider that miracle.
- Weekly people were healed of diseases and many were verifiable like healing of blind eyes and deaf ears. McHatton would always tell us “healing is the children’s bread”
- Communion services not only brought historical understanding and enlightened remorse of sin but physical healing, prophetic direction and encouragement. It was a life changing experience for all.
- Men were set apart, sometimes the least likely, through the prophetic word and laying on of hands.
- I learned and experienced that spiritual gifts could be transferred / activated through the laying on of hands. Prophesy, word of knowledge and wisdom were activated in my life at that time through the hands of evangelist Ray Blumenfeld.
- I remember one evening a group of young people including myself were being prayed for by brother Ray. There was such a force present like a mighty wind that it slid the people around me back and many fell to the ground. Being in the middle of this I knew it was not emotionalism but the presence of the Holy Spirit made tangible.
- One evening while brother Ray was waxing eloquent he accidentally spit on a lady in the front roll. Without missing a beat he pulled his hanky wiped it off her and then, with great tongue in check, stated it was anointed.
- Pastor McHatton prophesied over Colene and I during our wedding ceremony. The gist was we would be a light to families helping them raise their children during dark days. Colene and I wondered where this was coming from and thought that McHatton surely missed the mark that time. During our pre-marriage counseling we told him that neither of us desired children. We wanted to be totally dedicated to the Lord’s work. Who would have thought that a decade later Colene and I would embark on ministry to the home schooling community. The rest is history.
- Water Baptism was done in church and was accompanied by prophesy, word of knowledge and wisdom and healings. A convert of mine from SRP was delivered from smoking while watching the water baptism of another.
- Within this dynamic environment I was first introduced to reformed teaching through young Pastor Gary Kinnaman under the approving eye of Pastor McHatton.
- Pastor McHatton and Gary Kinnaman were men of the word. They preached and taught systematically the great doctrines of the faith.
- While at the altar during the finale of an evening service God spoke to me and pointed out my future wife in the crowd of 700 people. Before that evening was over two different men approached me with prophetic words confirming mine. …. And God did not neglect to talk to her.
- During the revival heat of one evening meeting at the Baptist Church Brian Rudd, prison convert turned evangelist, singled me out of 700 people and asked if he knew me from prison. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough he further asked if I was “the guy who was in there for rape.” I assured him I was not that man. Without missing a beat he connected right back to his sermon. Wow, there went my courtship opportunities at that church. Good thing Colene was not present at that meeting. Anyway that night we all had a good laugh. Brian recognized he had many rough edges… he would explain it that it made it harder for him to slip out of God’s hand. I was never certain if that was a concession of weakness or an excuse for sin.
In those days Church was anything but “safe”. Although it was totally unpredictable, scary, and bombastic it was never dull. I would never think of missing a Sunday service. Even in its simple, unadulterated raw form it proved to be life changing and sustaining. This was evident at the memorial service which was full of grateful saints still involved in local churches, actively pursing Christ and impacting their world because of the ministry of Charles E. McHatton.
Although Colene and I have no desire to embrace that Pentecostal / charismatic culture of yesterday, we fondly remember and proudly acknowledge its positive impact on our lives and our children who we raised in its reflected glow. The church of today owes much to those pioneers of yesterday and would do well to remember that God is better felt than telt.” With today’s prosperous churches we may no longer need to say silver and gold have I none, but can we proclaim rise take up your bed and walk?
