The Good Hand Of Our God: The Story Of Gbc (15th Anniversary Sunday 2019)

During this time, we were looking for a German bank who would loan a little church of about 50 transient military members 170,000€. Sparkasse Bank, with whom we had our accounts, looked at us incredulously and flat-out turned us away. We asked around at different banks, all with the same response.

But God was working behind the scenes in several other ways. Awhile prior to our even looking for a building, we had gone to see the pastor of what was then New Covenant Fellowship, the blue metal building down in Vilseck. Since no building had suited our needs up to that point, we had considered just buying a plot of land and having a builder put up a similar metal building. The pastor wasn’t sure if he wanted to help us by giving us his builder’s information, us being Baptist and all, and being perhaps potential competition to their work!

But it “just so happened” that he had been in Wiesbaden back when I was pastoring there in the 1980s and his daughter had been in our Christian school. Instantly, suspicion turned to trust and he gave us his builder’s information. When we met with the builder, we discussed a metal building, because remember, we didn’t even know about this building yet, so we were thinking new construction.

But in that meeting, he asked how we were going to finance it. I told him that we hadn’t figured that out yet, and asked if he have any ideas? He said, “Well, I just ‘happen’ to be good friends with the man who arranged the loan for New Covenant. They’ve been very regular in their payments and I think he might be interested in arranging a loan.” He was, and we gave our pitch to this guy, and he thought we were a safe bet. He called around and was able to arrange a loan for us with Raiffeisenbank.

So finally, in July 2006 we purchased this building. The next step was to take possession and then remodel the building. At that point we had no funds and only about 60 members and regular attenders. I had sought donations from a couple of foundations that raised money to help new churches get off the ground, and they gave us about $30,000 in total. BIMI had also agreed to raise money from our donors and other BIMI donors as well. I was anxious to take possession and start remodeling.

But to our surprise, we found out that we had to honor the contract the trade school had, which would go through August of 2007—14 months. I was disappointed, but God had it planned all along. For the 14 months the school paid almost double our mortgage, enabling us to pour all our offerings above operating expenses directly into our remodeling fund. We couldn’t fill the building anyway, so we set up church in what is now the fellowship room, and we saw that it was really the good hand of God upon us.

In the meantime, that 6-month deadline was looming on our $50,000 loan. We prayed and prayed and then I called Dr. Kennard, and asked him if he thought he could arrange a separate loan to pay back this investor and us pay the loan off over time. He said, “Chuck, listen to this. I just ‘happened’ to get a call from Jim Whitted.”