James Pence:  

Well, it's been 41 years since I graduated. How do you summarize that many years without writing a long, mostly boring memoir? I'll try to just hit the highlights. After graduating, I moved to Texas where I attended LeTourneau College and then Dallas Bible College. At DBC, I met my best friend and the love of my life, Laurel, a missionary kid who grew up in Peru, South America. When I got out of college, I moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana and became the youth pastor at Lake Charles Bible Church. Most notable during that time was that I got interested in doing performance chalk artistry as part of my ministry to youth. (I draw a picture on a 4'x3' standing easel before an audience, and at the end I turn on a black light, which reveals a totally different picture.) After two years at LCBC, I became the director of Camp Pearl, a youth camp in Reeves, Louisiana. Laurel and I got married just before my first summer as a camp director. Four years later (1984), we left the camp and spent a year in Baton Rouge, LA, where I worked with a Christian TV and radio production company. It wasn't a particularly good fit, so one year later we moved to north Texas, where I became the pastor of Fellowship Bible Church in Greenville. We stayed there for 15 years. A lot happened during my time at FBC Greenville. In 1987, we lost our first child Michelle when she was a week old. She had a genetic condition called monosomy q-13; basically half of the 13th chromosome was lost at conception and it created too many physical anomalies for her to survive. A few years later (1989) God blessed us with a son, Christopher, and in 1993, a ...Expand for more