The Tulsa Experiment

When we evangelized the "traditional" way, we had a very difficult time getting a continual flow of lost and hurting people to keep coming to a church that we had held a revival at, after we left.  The reason of course was because the "system" was broken.  You cannot combat decades of misconception and drifting from the cause and indoctrination against truths, with 5 to 12 nights of preaching different.  And even when we could get something really going, it generally didn't last very long after we left.  I slowly began to realize that many churches do not have a culture for reaching, winning and discipling the masses.  The second part to that is that each church was not near as interested in growing God's kingdom as they were just growing their church.  When we "got off the field", we founded HMA.  We did it with the intent and purpose of trying a whole different kind of experiment.

The point and purpose of HMA was to take one area and create an opposite culture.  A culture of Bible believing, very conservative churches and interject or find and promote, a strand of outreach, soul winning, discipleship and continual growth for The Kingdom, growing in and out and around them to the point that it began to take root and change the mindset of the churches.  A change that would take us from, pressure from our peers and pressure from the Pastors to, pressure from our conscience and pressure from the Holy Ghost and pressure from the Hoy Scriptures.

This picture is of Rev. Jimmy Radcliffe and a man named Darrel.  Darrel is a new symbol of that new culture.  My family and many, many others have worked long and hard in our chosen area of experiment.  Together, hundreds of people, in and out of a half dozen or more churches, with the cooperation of hundreds of people locally and the prayers and finances of thousands of people around the globe, have begun to create the right Biblical atmosphere by the grace of God.

Let me attempt to tell the story.  HMA started in downtown Tulsa almost 10 years ago now.  Darrel became homeless shortly after that for the first time.  He attended our services, ate our meals, prayed at our altars and got rides in our vans.  Ministers such as Earl Wayne Krumsiek and Art Hartman dealt with him in the very beginning.  Service were held in at least 6 different churches during the time that we have worked of and on with Darrel.  He has done better and worse over the years but had gradually done much better.  He recently took a very dark turn for the worse.

Darrel ended up living full time a park by the river, just out on the ground.  A traveling tent revival came by and Brother Radcliffe was maintaining and watching the tent during the day and met Darrel. Brother Jimmy and Rev. Davy Boggs, whose tent meeting it was, prayed with Darrel, talked him out of his alcohol and gave him some water.  Darrel came to tent meeting at lease a couple nights in a row and prayed at the altar.  As Brother Jimmy continued to try to work with him, it became apparent that he would need more than what they would be able to give him before they moved on.  He contacted me and asked if he could bring Darrel by my office.  When he did, something amazing happened.

He already knew the other guys that we were working with in our program.  When I came down to meet him, he exclaimed, "Pastor Todd!"  And gave me a big hug.  "I have missed you and your services."  He said.  We have tried to stay up with him for the last couple of weeks.  We are again in the process of getting him in contact with a man that can give him a job and also with an adult rehabilitation facility where he can live for free for the first 6 months that is run by an intense bunch of Christian men.

Here is the point.  Darrel and many like him, will probably never make it just because one church happens to cross their path one time and bring them to one controlled event.  But Darrel has a good chance of making it because in the greater Tulsa area, he has now been touched by the ministries of Darrel Toliver, Earl Wayne Krumsiek, Matthew Castleberry, Leon Rich, Derek Rich, Robbie Reed, Doug Hash, Ronnie Thompson, Harold Byler, Kurt Beauford, Phil Moreino, Jimmy Ferrel, Tommy Ferrel and many, many more.  He has been to church at HMA Outreach, Bethany Outreach, Bethany Holiness Church, Hilldale Holiness Church, Hale Pentecostal Church, South Mission Free Holiness Church, City Reach tent revival and possibly even Sapulpa Camp Meeting and Hope Tabernacle.  He has eaten food, worn clothes, received counseling and prayer and work and help that was paid for by donors from Shawnee, OK, Tatum, TX, Hampton, VA, Arbuckle, CA, Toledo, OH, Bay Minette, AL, Pensacola, FL, Caldwell, ID, Douglas, GA and on and on and on...

This experiment has a loooonnngggggggg way to go.  But Darrel is proof that it is working.  I am NOT taking credit for this, merely pointing it out because I probably have the more complete vantage point.  God bless everyone involved in the Tulsa, OK HMA, Bethany Holiness Church and her fellowshipping churches and City Reach (The Rev. Davy Boggs Family) and all similar experiments and the spreading of the teachings of such experiments, around the country and even now around the world.  You that are not involved...You can get involved, or you can do it yourself.  Right where you are at.  Trust me, if it can be done here, it can be done anywhere!!!  ;)

Get involved by checking us out at HolinessMissionsToAmerica.com    You can learn, study, contact us or donate.


Your humble servant,
Rev. D. Todd Sloggett

What about hermaphrodites?

OK people, here we go again.  I receive so many questions from so many teenagers, young married people, new converts, backsliders, young ministers and pastors, that there is no way that I can completely answer every one of them.  I have had a bit of an unwritten rule lately just to help me keep up.  I try to say “something” to every inquiry but once I receive the same basic question 3 times, I take it on.  This is one of those.  

     The question comes from 3 different young, married, very conservative, Christian people.  One in South Georgia, one in Virginia and one in Central California.  

The basic question is about all of this transgender stuff.  In the process of trying to defend a “two sex society”, (male and female), young Christians (and older ones, I’m sure), are being bombarded with the question of hermaphrodites.  They are born with both male and female parts.  So how do they know what gender they are?  And, if God doesn’t make mistakes then why are they born this way?  BIG TOPIC.  

I in nowise claim to be a doctor, or even a biblical expert on something like this.  I feel very inadequate to answer this but I feel the need to at least explain what I know.  I really doubt that I will convince any nay-sayers with this answer but I do intend to accomplish at least 2 things.  #1 Help enforce true doctrine and Christian principles for others to have at least some clarity with and #2 NOT leave this generation of Conservative, Pentecostal young people without a voice and some available Q and A interaction.  Too many have been told too many times to “believe what you are told and don’t ask questions”.  

First of all we must understand that God is all knowing, all understanding, all powerful, etc.  If that is true, it applies very much to this question.  The first way that it applies is that God can know things that we do not.  Everyone is trying so hard to fully explain everything about God so that we can fully believe in God.  This makes no sense.  If we can fully define, explain and understand Him then how can He be God?  What happens is, the first time we come up against something that cannot be fully understood by our faith, we are supposed to discard our belief.  Here is my rule.  “Even in situations where God cannot be fully explained, I cannot remove God from the equation.”  

For example:  I believe that God is the creator of all life.  The Bible teaches me that God holds the power to create life and breathe the breath of life and He always reserves that power for himself.  Because of that (and other things) I am 100% anti-abortion.  Abortion is a very difficult thing to be FOR and argue successfully for.  Because of that, the pro-abortion people generally grasp for the only few things that can help make their argument to seem to have any validity.  Like, “What about in the case of rape and incest?”  They reference a tiny, small percent of a percent of all abortion cases and argue that they are the reason for ALL abortions.  Making a case against the Christian belief by saying, “Rape is a sin and Incest is a sin so why would God allow that to happen or want that baby to be born?  Surely God wasn’t involved in that was He?”  

The answer must be that rape is horrible, incest is terrible and disgusting and I cannot imaging how God got a life out of that BUT God allowed that life to begin, He must have a plan for that life and life cannot exist without God and we are still not allowed to destroy that life just because we don’t understand God’s part in it.  

The discussion is very similar with hamaphrodites.  With possibly a little different added ingredient.  Again, the discussion is about society in general.  Men being born men and staying men and women being born women and staying women, etc.  Again, the other side takes the tiniest microscopic sample of the whole and tries to make an entire cultural issue on a sliver of a percentage of the people involved.  The reason they do this of course is because they generally have no good, fair, scientific and or logical reasoning for the major factors in the discussion.  Again, we cannot fully explain how or why God would let this happen but, again, we cannot dismiss God every time that we do not understand Him.  If we treated each other the way that we want to treat God in this case, men would never have anything to do with women again and vice versa.  Because we can never fully understand each other.  And again, we already believe that God created and intended a two sex society.  In the Bible he created them different, gave them different roles, commanded that they dress different, keep their hair different and on and on.  He intends a two sex society and anything that we do to circumvent that is against anti-God.  

Now, if we want to delve into the possibilities of how and why these things COULD be happing we can do so.  I will give some rules that I use in trying to determine what I believe about such things.  

I never allow speculation to be used as fact

All that I do know about God always outweighs what I don’t know about God

I do not try to come to a final provable conclusion about everything because some things do not have one

It is not only important to state what you do know but it is also important to state what you don’t know

When you come to a reasonable and possible conclusion…call it what it is…a reasonable and possible conclusion.  Not a fact but a fair possibility 

With all of this in mind, and after a couple weeks of study.  Biblical, scientific and opinion.  I have come to a decision.  

#1 God did not make people that way as part of his plan or on purpose.  That would defy everything that we already know about God.

#2  It is possible that God created the laws and rules of nature and holds us by His power to bounce around and do the things within those boundaries that we are going to do and generally intervenes only when He is asked to by His children.  Thus incest, inbreeding, self poisoning culture, taking all kinds of radiation, eating foods that are not supposed to be ingested and cause cancer, etc.  Could very well “cause” these deformities.  It cannot be a flaw of God that people refuse to listen to Him and affect generations to come.   That is as ignorant as the fat guy bringing a lawsuit against McDonald’s for making him fat.  

This world of “Nothing is my fault, I’m a victim, the world owes me and there is a good explanation for everything that I do that is bad” seems to play into this idea that we must accept killing babies because we won’t crack down on rapists, we must we must accept transgenders because we don’t have a moral code and any deformity or deficiency in our society is God’s fault, no matter how arrogant, bullheaded, selfish and sinful we are, because He made us….Is insane!  And do not forget that these arguments that tend to trip up the Christian Conservative are almost always less than one percent of the people that the debate is about.  That should be your first red flag.  If that is their debate, just say, “I don’t have an answer for that right now but let’s talk about the majority of these people.”  They generally can’t.

I have no problem with a hermaphrodite being whatever they were medically chosen to be after birth.  I'm not even sure that I have a problem with them "feeling" like the wrong decision was made for them.  But I am not going to use their plight as a platform to change our entire culture on.  And I am definitely not going to "blame God" for yet another problem with our society when we won't listen to Him on everything else.   

As if this topic isn’t controversial enough.  I will give you one more thing to think about when attempting to Biblically answer this question as to why these babies might be deformed this way.  Read Exodus 34:7…

Your humble servant, 

Rev. D. Todd Sloggett

HMA Conference 2016

Going "Looking For Trouble"

WELCOME TO A MOMENT IN THE LIFE OF HMA:

Almost everyday I leave my office for anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours, driving around town doing errands such as, getting the mail, sending out ministry packets, making deposits, etc. I still do this myself because I like to drive around the blocks of Sapulpa, LOOKING FOR SOULS. Because I am SPECIFICALLY LOOKING FOR THEM, I usually find them. Today was no different. 

While making my rounds looking for troubled teens to talk to, drug addicts to befriend, belligerent people to pray for...I happened to notice young boy. At first I didn't know that he was a young boy because of his appearance. He is Native American, about 15 or 16 years old, had the mentality of about an 11 or 12 year old and the body of an offensive lineman for the Green Bay Packers. He was rough, shabby and high on something.      

I watched him walk around for awhile and appear to beg for some money here and there and I finally got the chance to approach him. The conversation went very close to this:

Boy: Hi sir, Can you help me.

Me: What can I do for you.

Boy: I have no food.

Me: That's terrible. Get in my truck and I will take you to get some food. 

Boy: (Hesitated) OK. (He didn't want to let this gullible guy go but he had to figure something out so that he could get money out of me, so he went with me)

There was a bunch of "What's your name? How old are you" Where do you live? Blah blah blah. He lied over and over. He even changed his name...TWICE! When we got to the store I told him to pick something out to eat and drink. He said that what he really needed was groceries but they were cheaper other places and he didn't want to waste my money. hint, wink. I told him that I didn't give people money and asked him if he wanted something to eat? He wandered around and picked out some chicken nuggets and a drink. Don't forget this guy is almost 300lbs and a teenager. I asked if that was all he was going to get and that is when it started to go down. 

Keeping our conversation right out in the middle of the store (so as to cause me to want to just get out of the situation rather than be embarrassed...He obviously doesn't know me) He gets much louder and says stuff like, "You don't care if I'm hungry or not, I don't even have any electricity, can't you just give me a dollar?!" 

I replied, "How dare you! How dare you try to embarrass me. I'm the guy that is trying to help you. You have recently gotten addicted to drugs, you are half high right now, you have been lying to me for 20 minutes, the only reason I brought you down here is to have this conversation with you and I was still willing to buy your food, you are being stubborn, ungrateful and you are embarrassing yourself son, not me. Where are your parents, how do you think you are going to get off of these drugs?.........The boy started crying.

Me: Putting my arm around his huge, sweaty, smelly shoulder, "Let me help you?" 

Boy: Still crying, "How Mr."

Me: "First let me pray with you." We prayed. 

Boy: "Now what Sir."

Now for me speech that I deemed possibly worthy to post:

Well, I'm going to take you home and check out your environment. I am going to re-ask you a lot of the questions that you lied to me about before. I am going to get your number and give you mine. I am going to call you tomorrow and you probably won't answer. I will drive by to check on you and you won't be around. After a couple days you will call me and ask for help. I will pray with you again and tell you that I still won't give you any money but I CAN HELP YOU. I can give you work and friendship and Godly advice and rides to church...and you will try to act like you want it but you probably won't. 

After a few more days I will see you in town and pull up and talk to you and tell you about a special church service coming up and you won't want to go. You will ask for a pop or a sandwich or a pack of cigarettes and I will get you some food again and then you will just wander off. You will call me a couple times high or drunk in the middle of the night and I will answer the first couple of times hoping that it is the answer to my prayers and you are ready...but you won't be. The next couple times that you call me at 2:45am I won't answer. I will call you back the next morning and yo won't answer. 

I will see you or hear from yo again and you will tell me that you tried to call but I wouldn't answer and you were at rock bottom and really needed help and I will tell you that we have been in contact with each other 25 times and you never really want the help that I have and if you are really at rock bottom at 2:45am, you will still be there at 8am. If not, then you were just drunk and my family and I need our sleep as much as possible to help all the people that are willing to receive it and we still pray that you will eventually receive it to. (The it being Him). 

You will begin to run out of options and you will ask for a job and I will give you one and you will be terrible at it but we will keep you around to be able to feed you, counsel you and try to rebuild the basics of getting out of bed, following a clock, following orders, etc. in you. Most importantly we will be able to continue to tell you about and show you the love of Jesus. You will start to break down and ask to go to church and we will take you. You may get saved and "hit the rock" the first time and God will do amazing miracles for you right from the start. But most likely that is not what is going to happen. 

You will go to church and go to the altar and try to pray but never really surrender and keep coming to work and coming to church some but be stuck trying to serve God from your own physical and mental abilities and it will be miserable. You will get caught telling a lie or smoking some dope or trying to steal from me or something and I will confront you very aggressively. You will get so mad and try your best to take it out on me and cuss me and threaten me but it will be so hard to do because you will remember our first fight in the store and your conscience will tell you that I am the one loving you and helping you and taking care of you when no one else will. You have burned every bridge and you will feel no other choice than to burn this one too. You will leave me. 

You will try to be an partying addict and you won't have enough money and you will all of a sudden have too much conscience because of all of the preaching and teaching that you have heard in the last several weeks and months. You will again try to serve God on your own and it won't work. You will want to go back to church but you will have all kinds of excuses like, "those people were always judging me and looking down on me", (and some of them were), but nothing will work for you. You will get more and more miserable, you may end up in a shelter, in a gang or in the county jail, you may attempt suicide but all of your efforts will eventually drive you to absolute hopelessness...EXCEPT....for the hope that we told you that you have in CHRIST JESUS...and you will call me or run to a church in what ever town that you end up in...And that dear friend is what I am trying to get to. 

I am here, looking for you, to go through all of this rigamarole with you, in hopes of seeing you through all of this, so that you can get to the place where you are MISERABLE enough and INFORMED enough...TO GET SAVED AND SEE JESUS FIX WHAT'S BROKEN, HEAL WHAT'S WRONG, FREE WHAT'S BOUND AND USE WHAT'S LEFT TO HIS GLORY. (I'm out of breathe, the store clerk is staring at me, there is a long silence)

Boy: Please, please help me. 

Me: Yes sir. (We ate, took him back, got his real info, and in faith I told him that YOU would be praying for him.) 

I love my life....................

P.S. On the way out, the store clerk said, "How did you know to give that answer?" To which I quipped, "This ain't my first Rodeo :))"

This is the opinions of Rev. D. Todd Sloggett as used in ministry to the Least, the Last and the Lost.  To understand more about our ministries, visit us at www.holinessmissionstoamerica.com.  Contact me at toddsloggett@holinessmissionstoamerica.com or contact us or donate to our ministries at HMA PO Box 12 Sapulpa, OK 74067.  

Responsibility to Our Youth

 READERS:  I am in the process of using a bunch of questions that I have been asked on Facebook, to answer them as blog posts.  They will be very controversial in some cases and I do not claim to be always right.  But I am always sincere and I do care.  Pray for me and I hope you enjoy and are blessed, encouraged, edified and or challenged.   

   
     I am very much FOR defending the preacher, the ministry, the pulpit, the position, the calling and the anointing BUT please, people, STOP defending the ignorant things that some of us say. 

     If your children get upset at or question when a minister PREACHES something that cannot be backed up with scripture, DO NOT scold the kid. TEACH them that the ministry is important, is of God, men make mistakes and be careful to not attack or get offended. BUT ALSO TEACH THEM that every time a man of God says something in the pulpit that it is not necessarily the gospel truth. Let them speak their minds to you, hear their side of what is going on. If you try to MAKE every young person accept every goofy thing that is said in the pulpit you will destroy them AND destroy their confidence in YOU AND THE MINISTRY. 

     These kids are far smarter than we often give them credit for. They get it!!! When we say "Bring your lost friends, we want to help them" and then they bring them and we preach about "if you have Facebook you can't have the Holy Ghost" and "for or against neckties" or "for or against panty hose or leggings" or "spiked hair is queer" and their friends leave, not under conviction, not helped with their addictions, just confused and probably scared or angry. They get it! If you want this generation to make it, don't encourage them to, take them to and pay for them to attend services where knuckleheads spew things that are not even meant to help them but are rather meant to "make a place or a name" for the man saying them and then get upset with the kids if they don't agree with it or didn't get help from it. 

     How are you going to teach this next generation about rebellion and submission to the Bible if you don't differentiate between real rebellion and honest confusion or submission to God and submission to a man, a group or a "way"? I hear a lot of church folks complaining about the youth but then we feed them a bunch of junk again and when they sincerely try to figure out what is right and what is wrong....we rebuke them for "questioning the preacher". 

     Again, I am TOTALLY AGAINST speaking out directly against a man of God, but I am not going to try to force my children or any others that I have influence over to keep quiet and not try to help influence their generation to do better than mine. I am VERY PROUD OF OUR CHILDREN and I respect their opinions greatly. 

     Two quick examples. #1 One of our children went to a large youth camp this year and (as always) we discussed it when they came back. My child said, "The fellowship was great. Most of the preaching was very good, convicting and encouraging. I prayed and got help. There was the normal stupid stuff though too. Guys getting up there and preaching their personal convictions at a camp with people from “supposedly” every walk of life. Why do they do that Dad? Why do they put those same guys up there knowing that they will do that and we will have to sit through it and then some of my friends will get mad and complain and use that as an excuse to not stay in good, blah blah. Don't they know? Don’t the Pastors and people running the meetings know?" See, they get it! The only ones pretending that it's not really happening sometimes are us “adults”. #2 One of my children went to a different large youth camp this year and came back and (as always) we discussed it. My child said an amazing and insightful thing. "That was an awesome camp Dad. It was for all of the kids that would get killed at all the other camps that you let us go to." Think about it. Think long and hard about it. 

     This is not meant to attack or target any person or group of persons. I literally love everybody. I know that I risk getting crucified AGAIN over this but I can't help but say it for 2 reasons. #1 We all go through these things every single year and then there is a bombardment of gossip, phone calls, whispering conversation in huddles at the back of the church, just before and just after service...but if anybody dare say anything publicly then that person gets scolded and attacked for "saying the things that we were already thinking or saying in private". Come on people. Let's all grow up together. #2 Somebody has to stand up for the GOOD kids. If the kids are being punks and looking for excuses then they will ultimately get what they deserve BUT there are A LOT OF GOOD KIDS THAT ARE GETTING THROWN UNDER THE BUS for not understanding and not going along with all the stupid rhetoric that comes across our pulpits at times. I hope you young people realize that I am throwing myself to the wolves for you....again....;)). 

     I am FOR the preachers, for the youth camps, for the youth camp board Members and directors, I am FOR the youth group leaders and the parents and the Pastor's. If you know me, you know this to be true. But I am not for political, pulpit posturing at the cost of young lives. There is a lot going around right now, so if I said something that appears to target any particular person, I apologize in advance. This is not a hit or a push back on any particular individual or group. I have made plenty of my share of stupid mistakes, even and especially in the pulpit. To this day I am very glad for Godly people that questioned me and challenged me to see my mistakes and correct them.

     Lastly I want to say this. DO NOT use this post as a chance to comment all of your hate and past bad experiences and attack one another or attempt to defend me if someone attacks me. I rarely delete comments unless they are super ugly but I will delete comments on this post. God bless everyone! 

This is the opinions of Rev. D. Todd Sloggett as used in ministry to the Least, the Last and the Lost.  To understand more about our ministries, visit us at www.holinessmissionstoamerica.com.  Contact me at toddsloggett@holinessmissionstoamerica.com or contact us or donate to our ministries at HMA PO Box 12 Sapulpa, OK 74067.