Portland: The Seed Bed

Well, good afternoon to all of you on such a memorable occasion as an 80th anniversary. Listening to the production that Nathan and Fred put together, a very delightful walk through some of the stories of individuals with a history here. I think all of us are aware that the 50s and the 40s, the very early years, this church is old enough that some of the early memories, those generations have come and they have gone, and we who are younger have taken their place. An 80th anniversary, or any anniversary of length, is a milestone. And milestones are times for both remembering and reflecting, which we have done. I'd like to thank the choir also for simply punctuating that with a very appropriate and lovely song. When I found out that I was assigned for one of the splits today, you go through the normal routine of, well, my wife and I are Johnny-come-latelies when it comes to an 80-year congregation. We're looking at 19 years and a month from now. That's just a fraction. And so the question of what to speak on, always a little bit of a challenge, and yet, as I said, milestones, I think, drive the focus of any message on a time like this. At a time like this, it's only proper to recognize the work of pioneers. In this case, Herbert W. and Loma D. Armstrong, since without their work, none of us would be here. You know, it's interesting when we get so busy with our lives and so busy with the generations, there are times to stop and just say, okay, everyone has a pedigree. We've entered a time where it seems to be very much in vogue for people to go to places like Ancestry.com or places like that to find out, well, where did I come from? What's my pedigree? I know my parents and my grandparents, and after that, it starts getting foggy. Well, this is a time to look at pedigree. We're an interesting organization, not a congregation, but we're an interesting organization. In the world of American religion, there are many bodies who have memorialized their founding – their founder. Names like L.N.G. White, Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith – they're institutionalized. They represent the founding of bodies, religious bodies. We're not as much inclined that way. And, in fact, if we are inclined, it's probably more simply to get on with what we're doing and not spend a lot of time in that area. But at an 80th anniversary, it's a time to stop and reflect upon the fact that every single solitary one of us here would not be here were it not for the work of two people, that God starts everything somewhere. And if God had chosen to call any of us by some other circuit, well, he could have done so, but he didn't. This is a body that represents a calling that, by pedigree, all go back to the work of two people. I am reminded in that context of a couple of statements the Apostle Paul made to the congregation in the city of Corinth. And I'd like to read those to you.

1 Corinthians chapter 3.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 3, the Apostle Paul made the following comment. He said, Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos? In the course of this morning, or in the course of the first half of this service, we've heard a series of names of individuals in different decades who have served in this area. And Paul is talking to a congregation, and he says, Well, who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers, through whom you believed as the Lord gave to each one?

Paul said, I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each one will receive his own reward according to his own labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field. You are God's building. Those of you that are sitting here are God's field. You are God's building. Paul went on to say in the next chapter, chapter 4, verses 14 and 15, he said, I do not write these things to shame you, but as my beloved children I warn you.

So he was, you know, Corinth had a problem, and that's not where we're going, but he wanted to remind them of something relevant to this celebration. He said, For though you might have 10,000 instructors in Christ, yet you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel. So he said, you know, over time and over history you may have a very long string of men who have served as elders, men who have served as associate pastors, men who have served as pastors.

But he said, the nature of things is simple. There's only one individual who can claim to be the one that God started working with in your case. And so in the case of Portland, it is very appropriate for us to consider those two scriptures. In 1995, a delegation from the United Church of God was invited to the Seventh of the Adventist World Headquarters, just outside of Washington, D.C.

And they were invited to discuss what events brought about the formation of the United Church of God. And as we sat around their boardroom table in conversation, one of the leaders of the Adventist Church made the following comment. He said, Herbert W. Armstrong did more to make the Seventh-day Sabbath known than any other man in the 20th century. I thought, how interesting!

We, in terms of size, are miniscule compared to the size of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. And yet, sitting there with their world leaders, they were not the least bit bashful about saying, do you, you whose pedigree goes back to that point, do you realize that the one through whom God chose to call you did more than any other single individual in this last century to make known the Sabbath day?

It wasn't on the table for discussion, but I can say to you that the same exact thing could have been said replacing the annual Holy Days with the Sabbath. And the very same thing could be said about several components of end-time prophecy.

All of these were a part of their work. While we're here specifically to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Portland congregation, I'd like to take you back to something more monumental. The first congregation of what was to become, first of all, the Radio Church of God and then the Worldwide Church of God, was started in Eugene on October the 21st in 1933.

But the seed for it, and not just the seed for it, but the seed for all the congregations around the world, was tilled and planted in Portland, Oregon, nearly a decade before the official start of the Portland congregation. Your heritage goes beyond the first Sabbath service here in Portland, almost a decade. I believe that the most appropriate message for the 80th anniversary is to walk you through Portland's role in the birth of this phase of the church. The beauty of this story is that Herbert and Loma Armstrong's story is the same as each and every faithful member's story. Only the dates and the circumstances are different. So in sharing their account, it literally is a walk through each and every one of our lives and our callings.

There were snippets in the video of those components, of how God calls us, how God brought us here, how He gave us the opportunity to be a part of this church.

When Herbert W. Armstrong and Loma Dylan Armstrong married in 1918 in Chicago, Illinois, both of their families already had put down roots in the Northwest. Mr. Herbert Armstrong's parents had moved to Salem, Oregon in 1912, when he was 20 years old, and Loma Dylan had an uncle named Richard Talboy, who had migrated to Oregon even earlier in 1905. Richard had migrated in 1905, had then gone down to Stanford University, after Stanford had gone back to Drake University and came back to establish a law practice here in Portland, Oregon. And so both sides of the family, in 1924, when they made their first trip across the Rocky Mountains, already had well-established family roots. The senior Armstrong's in Salem and Richard Talboy in Portland. If you read the autobiography, Mr. Armstrong's business had gotten stale in Iowa in the early-mid-1920s, and Mrs. Armstrong suggested that they take a vacation because it looked like he was in a rut. And he said, well, I can't afford it. And Mrs. Armstrong said, well, my sister Bertha is teaching. She's a schoolteacher. She can chip in, and my brother Walter, he can chip in. And if we all pull it together, we can go out to Oregon to visit the family. So they piled the Model T with six people. In those days, there were no motels, all the bedding, cooking utensils, and a cook stove, a tent. Oh, and by the way, a Model T didn't have a trunk. And they set off for Oregon at the grand speed of 20 miles an hour, making 200 miles a day. It was an 18-day trip from Iowa to the Armstrong's house in Salem. And quite a memorable trip in terms of their life, as many as nine blowouts in a mile at one stretch. In those days, you simply brought your patching kit, took off the tire, rubbed it down, put the cement on, and put on the patch, brought it back up again. But in the summer of 1924, they arrived in Salem, Oregon, for their two-week vacation. Mr. Armstrong recounts in his autobiography that Mrs. Armstrong, when the conversation came up about a two-week vacation, had nudged somebody and said, in essence, he doesn't know it, but he's not going back. And they never did. The younger brother and sister, Bertha and Walter, after two weeks, got back in Walter's Model T, headed back to Iowa, and the Armstrongs were now residents of the area. After a couple of weeks of vacationing with his parents in Salem, Herbert and Loma drove up to Portland to visit her uncle Richard, as I said, who was a Portland attorney. And the next day, he invited Mr. Armstrong to join him. He had business at the Clark County Courthouse. And so, he said, you know, I can mark off another state that I've never been in. So, he jumped in the car with him. They crossed the Columbia River Bridge. And the first thing Mr. Armstrong saw crossing the bridge was the Vancouver Columbian newspaper building. Told his wife's uncle, drop me off at the Columbian while you're at the courthouse, and then come back and pick me up. And when he came back and picked him up, Mr. Armstrong had hired himself to the Columbian on a six-month advertising contract. And so, for six months, he worked for the Columbian newspaper, his very first job in the Northwest. And when those six months were over, being an advertising man, he went on from there to a series of advertising contracts, all in Vancouver. First of all, to take a clothier in Vancouver whose stock was out of date, convince him to turn it over and bring his inventory more up-to-date, contacted Hartshafter and Marks in Chicago to work with him. On from there to a hardware store, then the largest department drug store in Vancouver, a furniture store, a jewelry store, a dry goods store, all of these working with them as an advertising and merchandising advisor. But out of all of those, the most profitable was the Vancouver Laundry.

In the contract with the Vancouver Laundry, Mr. Armstrong saw an opening that had nowhere to go but up. And his contract with the Vancouver Laundry led to contracts with laundries in every major city in Oregon and Washington. From Eugene and Salem to Tacoma and Seattle to Walla Walla and Spokane, they had contracts with one laundry, one major laundry in each of those cities, and could see nothing but blue sky ahead. In fact, the projections were for incomes and salaries. They were absolutely staggering. And just as things were reaching that place where it looked like, as I said, there was no place to go but up, news came to them because the laundry industry was one that had a very strong national association. And the news came to them that an advertising agent had gone to the headquarters of the Laundrymen's Association in Indianapolis and had secured a nationwide contract with all the laundries in the nation. And in the time it takes to blink an eye, what looked like a phenomenal business disappeared. Mr. Armstrong kept one laundry in Portland, which paid him $50 a month, and that was the sole income of the family. It was here that the Armstrong's story and our stories merge. Mrs. Armstrong, on a visit down to his parents in Salem, spent an afternoon with one of the neighbors and Mrs. Runcorn. And in the course of that afternoon, they began talking about days of worship. Enloma asked about the Sabbath, and Mrs. Runcorn is a very wise lady, rather than preaching to her, rather than giving her a bottom line, rather than telling her the facts of life, sat down with her, gave Mrs. Armstrong a Bible, and then started telling her which scriptures to turn to. And as she turned from scripture to scripture to scripture to scripture to scripture, she reached the place where she said, I have never seen this. Saturday is God's Sabbath.

And she went home, home, the parents' home where they were visiting, greatly elated, to tell Mr. Armstrong that she had just found out that Saturday is the Sabbath, and they should keep it. I'm going to read to you three times during this message, directly from the autobiography, because there's really no way of telling their story as well as they tell their story.

Mr. Armstrong says on page 281, he talks about the laundry business coming completely out from under their feet, he says, my morale was fast descending to sub-basement. I was not so cocky or self-confident now. I was being softened for the unconditional surrender to God. He then recounts Mrs. Armstrong's encounter with Mrs. Runcorn. And when it was over, it says, a minute or so later, Mrs. Armstrong came bursting into my parents' home shouting, the good news to me! My jaw dropped. This was the worst news I had ever heard. My wife gone into religious fanaticism. Are you crazy? I asked incredulously. No, I was never more sure of the truth in my life, she responded with enthusiasm. Indeed, I thought she had lost her mind. She certainly was crazy, deciding to keep Saturday for Sunday. Now look, Loma, I said sternly. I simply am not going to tolerate any such religious fanaticism in our family. You have to give that up right here and now. But she wouldn't. Week after week we argued. I reminded her the Bible said a wife must be obedient to her husband. Yes, in the Lord. But not out of the Lord. She came back. And the Bible says we must obey God rather than man. Religion is a private and personal matter, and God gives me free right to obey Him. I thought I could not tolerate such humiliation. Nothing had ever hit me where it hurt so much. Right smack in the heart of my pride and conceit and vanity. And this mortifying blow had to fall on top of confidence-crushing financial reverses. Why, what would my friends say? What would former business acquaintances think? Look, Loma, I said in desperation, you can't tell me that all these churches have been wrong all these hundreds of years. Why aren't these all-Christ churches? Aren't they all Christian? And then came back Mrs. Armstrong. Why do they all disagree in their doctrines? Why does everyone teach something different than every other one? Well, they all seem to teach the same thing about Sunday, being the right day for going to church. I don't know where it is in the Bible, but I know it's there. All these churches can't be wrong. I know it's in the Bible. I know the Bible says that Sunday is the day for Christians, and Saturday is for the Jews. I think you all know what happened at that point in time. Though God was progressively letting the air out of his ego and his vanity, this was the very early stage, and there was still a lot of air in that balloon. And so he simply told Mrs. Armstrong, I'll prove you wrong. And when I do, will you then give up this nonsense? And she let him know that when you prove me wrong out of the Bible, I'll give up this nonsense.

As I said, brethren, this is where the Armstrong story and our stories merge.

If we walked around this congregation and asked, where were the battle lines drawn for those of you who are first generation, and many of you who are second or third generation, these same lines end up not in the same, I don't know what to say, original way, but they will happen with a professor or a teacher that says, look, I'm not giving you latitude, or an employer that says, this is what you do, or there's the door. The story is the story is the story. God's story has been true as long as there has been a church. And when I look out over this body, and I look at 80 years, there is a tremendous amount of faithfulness and endurance sitting in this room. So it is in that respect that one story is the same as the other story, only the incidentals change.

Mr. Armstrong began his first serious study of the Bible in the fall of 1926. So that was the time they had arrived in the summer for that two-week vacation. And thanks to the Columbian and then several Vancouver businesses, Mr. Armstrong had a string of things that kept him employed until the bottom fell out of the laundry contract in the fall of 26. And now it was time to roll up his sleeves, take on the challenge, and let Mrs. Armstrong know that this crazy lady in Salem had misled her and she was totally completely wrong.

Now, while that was his first focus, that was the first gauntlet to be cast down in that very same time period Walter and Bertha, Mrs. Armstrong's younger brother and sister, along with their father. And since they had returned, Walter had gotten married. So Walter and his wife, Hertha, and his sister Bertha and their father all returned to settle in. And Hertha was educated, and she began to engage Mr. Armstrong in a conversation about evolution, which he believed in thoroughly and he didn't believe in at all. And she cut his pride again by saying, look, Herbert, every educated person knows that evolution is a fact. Which basically was to say, look, ignoramus, what's wrong with you? And so now he had two gauntlets thrown down, and both of them basically at the same time. The double challenge of the Sabbath and evolution literally provoked months of intensive study. As he said, that one laundry contract took him a minute of 30 minutes a month to maintain, and that was his sole source of employment. And so he had nothing on his hands but time. The Portland Public Library that you saw on the screen as a part of the preliminary, as Mr. Sexton was talking, became Mr. Armstrong's home away from home. In fact, I think you could probably say that he spent as much time at the library, almost as much time at the library, as he spent at home. Because he talked about arriving at the library and standing until the door opened in the morning, and they ushered him out at 9 p.m. when they closed the doors. And then he went home to study further until his wife said, Herbert, it's time to come to bed. And he said, oftentimes, that was one o'clock in the morning. You can count up seven days a week or six days a week, in this case, Monday through Saturday, from opening time to 9 p.m. plus home time. The math says that there were thousands of hours they were spent poring over every conceivable document, book, and author related to the subject of the Sabbath and evolution. It didn't take too long before evolution spilled over very quickly to the obvious that somebody who believed totally in evolution, totally in evolution, not the mishmash that we see so often under the umbrella of theistic evolution, but those who believed totally in evolution did not believe in the existence of God. And Mr. Armstrong found that one thing led to another. He said, if I'm going to start at the bottom, I have to start with the question of, does God exist? And is the Bible his inspired word? And so all of this was on the table. All of it a very necessary foundation. I remember as a young man of 19 working in the fulfillment center at Pasadena, and among the most requested booklets in our entire inventory were, Why Were You Born?, Does God Exist?, Proof of the Bible. These were in the top five. The various areas that God had stuck his nose in as a result of the challenge. I'll read further.

He said, and so it came about that very early in this study of evolution and of the Bible, actual doubts came into my mind as to the existence of God. In a very real sense, this was a good thing. I believe God himself was directing it. I had always assumed the existence of God because I'd been taught it from childhood. I'd grown up in Sunday school. I simply took it for granted. Now, suddenly I realized I had never proved whether there is a God. Since the existence of God is the very first basis for religious belief and authority, and since the inspiration of the Bible by such a God as his revelation to mankind is the secondary and companion basis for faith and practice, I realized that the place to start was to prove whether God exists and whether the holy Bible is His word. I had nothing but time on my hands. I rose early and studied. Most mornings I was standing at the front entrance of the public library when its doors were open, and most evenings I was chased out of the library at 9 p.m. closing time. Most nights I continued study at home until my wife, at 1 a.m. or later, would waken from her sleep and urge me to break off and get to bed. He goes on to say, But do not suppose I quickly or easily came to accept the seventh-day Sabbath as the truth of the Bible. I spent six solid months of virtual night and day, seven-day-a-week study in research, in a determined effort to find just the opposite. I searched in vain for an authority in the Bible to establish Sunday as the day of Christian worship. I even studied Greek sufficiently to run down every possible, questionable text in the original Greek. I studied the commentaries. I studied the lexicons. I studied Robertson's grammar of the Greek New Testament. And then I studied history. I delved into the encyclopedias, the Britannica, the America, and several religious encyclopedias. I searched the Jewish encyclopedia and the Catholic encyclopedia. I read Gibbon's decline and follow the Roman Empire, especially as chapter 15, dealing with the religious history of the first 400 years of the church. I left no stone unturned. I found clever arguments. I will confess that so eager was I to overthrow this Sabbath belief of my wife at one point in this intensive study, I believed I might possibly have been able to use arguments to confuse and upset my wife on the Sabbath question. But I knew these arguments were not honest. I could not deliberately try to deceive my wife with dishonest arguments. The temptation was immediately pushed aside. I know now she could not have been deceived. Finally, after six months, the truth had become crystal clear. At last I knew what was the truth. Once again, God had taken me to a licking.

You know, Mr. Armstrong was very candid about being a prideful, stubborn individual, and that he got up every time he was knocked down and continued on until he got knocked down again. And this is simply one of those cases where he said, well, I got taken out behind the woodshed. My wife was right. I was totally, completely wrong. I have buried myself in study.

And I was wrong. To his credit, he was ethical enough not to play the game of saying, I can sandbag and confuse the issue to the place where she might not be able to answer it, but not honestly.

Once more, our stories emerged, but for many of us, his writing and the work he did to prove things to himself became our assistance. You know, we all went through the same thing. I don't know what your stories were. I have shared with you before, driving over Cabbage Hill and down through College Place to Walla Walla, where my maternal grandparents lived, and asking my parents while I was probably five or six years old, because I stood in the back seat as we drove through on Saturday, and I saw all these people in College Place or Oregon all dressed up like we are going to church. And I asked my mother, Mama, why are they going to church today? And having her turn back and look at me and say, Bobby, and she was genuine and sincere and non-condemning, but she said, Bobby, they don't know any better. And every time we went through College Place on Saturday, I remember as a boy shaking my head, thinking, these poor people don't know any better.

And then the day came that God knocked on the side of our head, and he said, they know quite well. You don't know any better.

We've all had our challenges. We all had a starting place where something doctrinally hit us in the face, and we said, that can't be. I know that's not right.

You know, Mr. Armstrong did an awful lot of paving for us because a lot of us co-opted our study. We would read a booklet from then the radio or Worldwide Church of God along with those reference books that we could pick up to study the subject even further. All of us walking doctrine by doctrine by doctrine by doctrine through those doctrines. Those of you that are on the earlier side, you remember the early programs where over and over and over again, Mr. Armstrong would say, blow the dust off your Bible. Open it up. Prove it from the Bible. I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of times over all the radio broadcasts and over all the presentations those words were spoken by him. Blow the dust off your Bible. Open your Bible. Prove these things from your Bible. You took that challenge. You know, an 80th anniversary is a celebration for everyone from the first two who were used to plant it to everyone who is still a survivor and one who endures. God did to him what he has done to all of us. Walked him progressively through the challenges that we have to face in order to make a full and complete surrender to God. While he spent from nine hours a day at the Portland Library proving God's position on the issues that we have discussed, he was also with an increasing awareness of the seventh day being the Sabbath that God commanded to be worshipped and increasing understanding that evolution was nothing more than an effort of vain men to cast God aside. He was having to face the biggest issue in every person's life no matter what generation he or she comes from. Popularity. Acceptance.

Respect. There's not a living human being unless they are just simply contrary to the core when God calls them that doesn't have to consider what is this going to do with my friendships? What is this going to do with my popularity? What is this going to do in the relationship with people that I want to respect me and they're now going to look at me the same way Mr. Armstrong looked at Loma when she said I have found the greatest news possible and he said are you crazy? Are you absolutely insane?

The headwag that says it's too bad you're so spiritually misguided. I love you, but you're out of step. You don't know and I'll pray for you.

His challenge was massive. I don't know if you could say it was greater than ours or not, but I remember as a college student sitting with Mr. Armstrong as an instructor and a number of times simply saying to us as students, he said, you know, I did not covet wealth. He said what I coveted was to be seen as important by important men. He said money was secondary. I wanted to be seen as important to important men. This is the worst place on the face of the earth you can go if that's what you're looking for.

When they find out, as all of us have learned, that I'm sorry I don't work between Friday night sundown and Saturday night sundown. No, I'm not Jewish, but I do keep tabernacles and pass over and Pentecost and I'm gone for a week and this is not negotiable. It's not a one-year thing. I'm sorry it is an every-year thing.

If your greatest goal in life is popularity and acceptance, this is not the place to be. At the time we were called, God's process was the same for all of us, exposing us progressively to truths we had not known, watching to see if we would accept them and obey them. To their credit, Herbert and Loma Armstrong were faithful to the end. And, as I said, you are a living testimony to the ongoing faithfulness, having lived through challenges that have been thrown in front of you by Satan from the time of calling to this day. We all could share the war stories, but the beauty of it is you are all survivors. Portland was the incubator for this phase of God's work. Surrender, which was where all of this was going, was still down the road. It's just a little ways. Starting with Mrs. Runcorn, starting with Loma's challenge, starting with six months at the library, all of this punctuated by God keeping him financially right at the edge of total destitution. It was the kind of incubator that really was needed.

Armstrong put it this way. He said, It was humiliating to have to admit my wife had been right and I had been wrong in the most serious argument that ever came between us. It was shocking, disillusioning, to learn after intensive study of the Bible for the first time that what I had been taught from a child in Sunday school was in so many basic points the very opposite of what the Bible plainly states. My wife had taken up with a religious doctrine, which to me had been disgraceful fanaticism. She said she found it in the Bible. I had argued. I had commanded her to drop this ridiculous nonsense. I had said to her she was crazy. Finally, I had entered into an intensive study of the Bible for the very first time in my life. I was determined to prove her wrong, for her new belief in practice was contrary to the orthodox teachings that I was accustomed to. My study started early morning, lasted until 1 to 2 a.m. for six months. But to my utter disappointment, I found that the teachings and practices were not based on the Bible. They had originated as research and history had revealed in paganism. Numerous Bible prophecies foretold it. The amazing, unbelievable truth was the source of these popular beliefs and practices was quite largely paganism and human reasoning and custom, not the Bible.

The argument was over a point of obedience to God. The opening of my eyes to the truth brought me to the crossroad of my life. To accept it meant to throw in my lot with a class of humble and unpretentious people. And here was a man that said, what I really want out of life is to be important to important people. And I'm finding myself that I will throw my lot in with people who are not trying to be important. They are unpretentious in their living. They are humble people.

He said it meant a total change of life. It meant real repentance, for now I saw that I had been breaking God's law. I had been rebelling against God. It meant turning around and going the way of God, the way of His Bible, living according to every word in the Bible instead of according to the ways of society. He says I was at a crossroad, but I had been beaten down. God had brought that about, though I didn't realize it then. This made surrender less difficult, repeated business reverses, failure after failure, had destroyed self-confidence. I was broken in spirit. The self in me didn't want to die. It wanted to try to get up from ignominious defeat and try once more to tread the broad and popular way of vanity, but I knew that way was wrong, and I knew its ultimate result was death. It was truly a battle for life, a life-and-death struggle, and in the end I lost a battle, as I had been losing all worldly battles in recent years. I told God I was a burnt-out hunk of junk. In final desperation I threw myself on His mercy. If He could use my life, I would give it to Him, not in physical suicide, but as a living sacrifice to use as He willed. It was worth nothing to me any longer. Jesus Christ had bought and paid for my life by His death. It really belonged to Him, and now I told Him He could have it. From then on, this defeated, no good life of mine was God's, and I didn't see how it could be worth anything to Him, but it was His to use as an instrument if He thought He could use it.

This surrender to God, this repentance, this giving up of the world of friends and associates and everything, was the most bitter pill I ever swallowed. Yet it was the only medicine in all my life that ever brought a healing. For I actually began to realize that I was finding joy beyond words to describe in this total defeat. I had actually found joy in the study of the Bible, in the discovery of new truths, there heretofore hidden from my consciousness, and in surrendering to God in complete repentance. I found unspeakable joy in accepting Jesus Christ as personal Savior and my present High Priest. Somehow I began to realize a new fellowship and friendship had come into my life. I began to be conscious of a conduct and fellowship with Christ and with God the Father. When I read and studied the Bible, God was talking to me, and now I loved to listen. I began to pray, and I knew that in prayer I was talking with God, and I was not yet very well acquainted with God, but one gets to be better acquainted with another by constant contact and continuous conversation. You know, you have to have a point where there's a watershed and you say, okay, it's either I'm either going down this side or I'm going down to that side, and in that particular account he made his commitment. You know, at the time of commitment there's still a lot to learn, and there are tests and there are trials. The very famous account of Mrs. Armstrong literally being on death's doorstep was a part of that continuing training. She had been bitten by a dog in the summer of 1927, was followed by tonsillitis. She then got blood poisoning from a rose thorn, and the tonsillitis turned into quincy. And the doctor said she literally is going to die, and the neighbor lady told him about a man who would pray for her down at the tabernacle near Sandy in 82nd. The Armstrong's lived on Klicitat Street, just a block or so off of Sandy, and Mr. Armstrong recounts it was probably the hottest day of the year that year, mid-August. He walked the mile down to the tabernacle, and the man came back. And those of you who have heard the story or read the story realize that that evening when he came, and they talked about healing, and he explained it, and Mr. Armstrong said he gave about a minute's prayer. And he left. That night, Mrs. Armstrong slept soundly till 11 o'clock the next morning. She got up, got dressed, was fine. Tremendous lesson. As I said, this was the incubator. This was the place where as God was doing the teaching. This was the place where the teaching was being done. There are residents just north of us, not that very far off of Sandy. A year following this, Mr. Armstrong, or a little bit after this, rather, Mr. Armstrong was baptized, looking my notes. Baptism on May of 1927.

Then began the look for the true church. With the parents living down at Salem and Mrs. Rancorn, they had gone to services a couple of times down that direction. But probably, of all the people connected with that church, an older, feisty gentleman by the name of Hobbes was his greatest supporter and defender. And Mr. Hobbes lived somewhere between Oregon City and Malala. And so the Armstrongs, after his baptism, took the electric line if they had fair enough to get them there and went up to Oregon City. And then he walked up the hill that all of us drive up now, somewhere on the Malala Road, where there was a Seventh-day Church of God, or a Church for God Seventh-day, where Mr. Hobbes attended. And from baptism in 1927, this was basically what they would have called their home church. So from 1928, actually, they were on and off back and forth to Salem because the folks were there and attended there. But once they settled in, beginning in 1928, they took the electric line out to Oregon City and then hiked up the hill to Malala Road and attended services there. 1929, they moved from Clickitat Street across Sandy Boulevard onto 75th Street, which was just a little bit north of Sandy, and they lived there until 1930. This was the Depression time. Finding any job was horrendous. Mr. Armstrong got a chance to peddle pots and pans for the Wherever Company, and they took him on, hired him. After hiring him, looked at their territories and said, you know what? When we look at the territories, where we need somebody is in the Salem district. And so they were falling behind on the rent. They didn't have the money to stay in their home on 75th Street, so they packed their bags, moved down to Salem, and moved in with his mom and dad in 1930. And from 1930 onward, Salem and Eugene pick up the history of their development until the founding of the, I think it was the Furbut Church on October the 21st, 1933. So as we look back at the 80th anniversary of the existence of this congregation, I think it's equally important to realize that God had used this as a seedbed almost a decade before this congregation was officially started. From a, what was supposed to be a two-week vacation to see the folks, turn to a period where God said, it's time for me to knock on your door and see how you're going to respond. And from 24 to 1930, when they finally moved off of 75th Street in Portland down to Salem to live with the folks, this was the time when God conditioned, challenged, taught, answered prayers, gave guidance, and set the foundation, not just for this church or the Eugene Church, but all the congregations that have formed and been bred as a result of their work.