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May 29, 2009

God gets his man

By Dave Schultz

Chris and Stephanie Prater and their children — clockwise from lower left, Emily, Michaela, Allison, and Nikolas — are headed to South Dakota early next month. Chris Prater is being ordained Sunday morning at First Baptist Church. (Photo by Dave Schultz)

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
— From “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

By DAVE SCHULTZ
Chris Prater tried to run away from God. It didn’t work.
Prater’s itinerary took him to the U.S. Marine Corps, business college, and a three-month stretch in the Wells County Jail. Showing a change of heart, he’s preparing for a change of life. He has felt God’s calling to Ipswich, S.D., and he and his family are on their way there in a little over a week as he enters the ministry. He’ll be the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ipswich.
Prater’s roundabout route to the ministry began in high school, where he first felt a call, a pull, a yearning. God had something he wanted him to do.
Oh, no, not me, he said.
He entered the Marine Corps. When training camp started to get intense, the drill instructor came into the barracks. “Who are my Baptists?” he bellowed. Prater, apprehensively, ‘fessed up. He raised his hand. “Great,” the drill instructor said. “You can pray for us, every night.”
Sunday morning, the platoon went to church. He was greeted by the chaplain. The chaplain had need of his services, as an assistant. The drill instructor had said he had a Baptist boy doing his praying.
Prater realized this running from God thing wasn’t going very well. He was pursued, as surely as a fugitive is pursued, by the hound of heaven.
His stint in the Marine Corps was cut short by a motor vehicle accident. Hospitalized after the crash, he spent some time in a room by himself. Eventually an older man was moved into the bed next to him.
“They had pulled the curtain, so I never knew anything about him or what he was in the hospital for,” Prater said. “But he read his Bible, out loud, every night, and he read the same passage every night — Isaiah 6:8: ‘I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, Here am I; send me.’”
That eventually became one of Prater’s favorite Bible verses, but he wasn’t thinking along those lines at that time. He had his mind elsewhere.
The accident occurred in 1994. He and his wife, Stephanie, married in 1996. After a year and a half of light duty in the Marines, he was discharged Feb. 1, 1996.
The Praters went to International Business College. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business management, specializing in accounting. He got a job at a Bluffton hardware store, and his frustration with life, with God, led him to make some wrong choices. One of those choices was theft; he was sentenced Feb. 4, 2002, to three months in jail and three years on probation.
Prater, at first, figured this what what he deserved.
“I knew God was still dealing with me,” he said. “I said, ‘Look at what I’m doing, God. You don’t want me.’”
He now realizes he was wrong. He became convinced of that one night, probably in late April of 2002, shortly before he was due to get out of jail. He was destined for the ministry.
“I was laying on my bunk in my cell, and I heard a voice, as plain as you and me talking here,” he said. “God said, ‘If I could use the shepherd boy to slay the giant, if I could use the adulterous murderer David to be king of Israel, if I could use the murderer Moses to lead my people, what makes you think that you’re worse than any of them?”
It was hard to argue with that kind of logic, Prater said. When he got out, he talked to the minister of the First Baptist Church. He’d been attending services at First Baptist since 2001, and he found Bud Abrams eager to help.
As it turns out, the American Baptist Church has a church leadership training program. Two years in the program gets an individual a certificate of church leadership; a third year gets an individual a diploma in pastoral studies.
Prater went above and beyond. He enrolled in Christian Theological Seminary at Butler University in Indianapolis, finishing up this year. He’s prepared for the ministry, and now, First Baptist Church is prepared to ordain him during the 10:15 a.m. service Sunday at the church. The ordination council of the American Baptist
He will present a farewell sermon at the church the next Sunday, June 7. After that, he and his children — Michaela, Allison, Nikolas, and Emily — will take off for South Dakota, accompanied by his mother. Stephanie works for an airline; she’ll be transferring to the regional airport in Aberdeen, S.D., and will rejoin her family.
He’s been approved by the ordination council of the American Baptist Churches of Indiana and Kentucky. He’s ready, he says, for the next step.
“Since that day in the cell, I haven’t looked back,” he said. “I use that as sermon illustrations. I have told my whole story.
“The church in Ipswich knows about it. Their response was, ‘None of us is perfect. We don’t expect a perfect minister.’”
They’re getting Chris Prater. Imperfect, pursued by the hound of heaven.
daves@news-banner.com

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