- Hey everybody, Pastor Steven Anderson here
from Faith Forward Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona,
with part 11 of my life story.
So as I said in the last video, on December 25th, 2005,
I started Faith Forward Baptist Church.
Throughout 2006, we continued to meet in my house.
The average attendance was 10 people on Sunday morning.
On good days, we'd be in the 20s, but that was the average.
There were a lot of ups and downs.
A lot of people came and went,
but it was a small group in those days.
And I was disappointed because I thought
that the church would grow a lot faster.
I didn't expect it to take that long
to get it off the ground.
But one thing I was pleasantly surprised by
was that even in 2006,
huge numbers of people started listening
to my sermons online,
which is something that I did not expect at all.
So the first couple of months,
I didn't even record the sermons.
But then after a couple of months, I went to Radio Shack,
bought this little cheap recording device that I used,
and I just recorded audio only
and put it on the church website.
And the rationale was not that people would listen online,
it was to advertise the church to locals.
That was the whole thought,
was that if I knock on somebody's door,
give them the gospel, leave them with the invite,
or just, you know, they're not home
and I leave it on the door.
If they go to the website and find the preaching,
hopefully they'll listen to the preaching,
like it, and wanna come to church.
That was the whole point.
And so, you know, when I started hearing from people
all over the country and all over the world
that were listening to my sermons,
that really blew me away.
And I thought, wow, this is really cool, you know,
that I'm reaching these people in other places.
I got a call from a guy in Brazil
that was listening to my sermons.
I got a call from a guy in the Shetland Islands.
So that really blew me away
that my sermons were reaching that far.
And so by the end of 2006, 10,000 MP3s
were being downloaded from our church website per month.
So already in '06, you know,
just a huge number of people were just listening to audios,
no video.
And so that was really cool.
So on May 21st, 2006,
I preached a sermon against the pre-trib rapture.
And I was a little apprehensive to preach it
because the church was already really small
and there were a couple of people in the church
that were coming from an IFB background.
And so I was concerned that maybe they'd be really married
to the pre-trib doctrine and that I would offend them.
And you know, when your church is tiny,
you don't want to lose people.
But ultimately I just decided, you know,
I'm not going to censor the word of God
because I thought, well, I can just preach it later.
But I was like, no, I don't want to go down that road
of just, you know, holding back on truth.
This is truth that needs to be preached.
I'm going to go ahead and preach it.
So I ended up preaching it and it ended up offending no one.
Like nobody left the church over it at all.
Everybody liked it.
Everybody was cool with it.
But Pastor Nichols, he ended up hearing the sermon
because someone heard it and passed it on to him
within a few weeks and so he ended up
just totally breaking fellowship with me over that issue.
That was just a huge deal breaker for him.
And then later he would go on to like rewrite history
and claim that he had nothing to do with me
starting the church in Phoenix and everything.
And I'm not gonna go into that here
because I've already done a rebuttal video
where I totally prove him wrong and show all the evidence.
And I also did a really in-depth blog post
where I show his claims and just they're easily refuted.
Anybody with two brain cells to rub together
can read that blog post, look at the evidence
and see who's telling the truth.
But anyway, he ended up breaking fellowship over that issue.
In 2006, also we had our first soul-winning marathon,
like we used that term.
I don't really know where I got that term,
but I remember putting it in the bulletin
and having like a little clip art
of these marathon runners and soul-winning marathon.
It was just basically a big soul-winning weekend
where we went out soul-winning all day
and there were very few people participating,
but we would go on to use that terminology
to have many more events in the future like that.
So in 2007, the number of sermons
being downloaded per month went up
from like 10,000 to 20,000.
So that really continued to take off.
And my sister in 2007 told me about YouTube
and I was like, what's YouTube?
I'd never even heard of it
because YouTube was invented in April of 2005.
But even in 2007, most people still weren't using it
or hadn't heard of it.
So when she told me about it,
my first reaction was like,
why would anyone watch a sermon?
Like, isn't a sermon something you just listen to?
Audio, like why would anyone want a video of a sermon?
I didn't understand it.
To be honest, in some ways,
I still don't quite understand that.
But I went ahead and just followed her advice
and started putting my preaching on YouTube.
So the first thing I did was
I just made a slideshow of pictures of Billy Graham,
and I put up a clip from my sermon,
Why Billy Graham's Going to Hell.
And at this time, you could only put videos on YouTube
that were 10 minutes or less.
So I put up a seven-minute clip
of me preaching against Billy Graham
with just a slideshow of photos,
and that video ended up getting over a million views
in a short amount of time.
Then I put up another one with just a slideshow
of Joel Osteen and me preaching against Joel Osteen.
That went on getting like over two million views.
So I had just some big videos on YouTube right away.
I started putting up a lot of short clips of my preaching.
And then sometimes I would even put up a full sermon
just broken down into 10 minute increments
like part one, part two, part three, part four, part five.
And right away I got a lot of action on YouTube.
Part of the reason was just that there wasn't really
a whole lot of preaching on YouTube.
And so I kind of got in there early.
And for many years, I really dominated the search engine
for like Baptist preaching, Baptist sermon, KJV preaching.
All those search terms, like if you went on,
there was a time when if you went on YouTube
and just typed in Baptist preaching or Baptist sermons,
like almost the whole first page was my stuff
'cause I was just putting out so much material
and it was a material that a lot of people liked.
And it got a lot of people's attention.
And so I started having, you know, success on YouTube,
even in 2007.
So one particular video went mega viral in 2007,
and it was the clip from my sermon
called "Him That Pissed Against the Wall."
Now that's not a title of a sermon, okay?
I preached like an hour and 15 minute sermon.
This was just a four minute clip
where I talked about this subject
because later people would go on to say
that I preached an entire sermon about men standing up
to take a piss.
But actually it was only four minutes, you know,
excerpt from a sermon.
And when I uploaded this clip,
I didn't really think anything of it.
It was just, you know,
I'm putting up all these clips of preaching.
I thought it was an interesting point that I made.
So I was like, oh,
this will make its own little video or whatever.
Little did I know it was gonna become an internet phenomenon.
And at its peak,
it was the number 10 most blogged video in the world.
And keep in mind, this is like across the spectrum.
I mean, all videos, whether it's Hollywood stuff,
you know, famous musicians and whatever.
I mean, just in the entire world on the planet,
this was the number 10 most blogged video
for like a week and a half or something.
So it just went mega viral, it was internet phenomenon.
And just to give you a feeling
for how widespread this video was,
Pastor Jimenez at the time was in the air for,
I mean, he wasn't a pastor then.
He isn't one now either.
But Roger Jimenez was in the Air Force at that time.
And his commanding officer came up to him in the locker room
and just said, Jimenez.
And he's like, yes, sir.
And he's just like, I pissed standing up.
And the reason that he said this to him
was because he had put two and two together.
Roger Jimenez had been a guest preacher
at our church at this point, three, four times.
And so this guy had obviously put that together
that he knew the guy in the video that had preached this.
And so Roger Jimenez is kind of taken aback by that,
locker room statement.
And so he just said, oh, well, that's good
because not everyone does.
Then a couple of days later, the commander of the whole base,
and I think this guy was over like 18,000 troops
or something, walks up to Jimenez and says,
are you on YouTube?
And he said that he was.
And it turned out that, oh, you must know
how to make videos and stuff.
Of course, anybody who knows Roger Jimenez
knows that he's not a technology guy.
He's always been a Luddite.
And he was kind of like always the last person
to have like computers, smartphone, technology.
He never used that stuff, was good at it.
But he ended up doing like a Tom Sawyer
where he'd get other people to whitewash the fence for him.
So he ended up being the spokesman in the video,
but he ended up finding other guys
that knew how to like film it and edit it
and put it online and stuff like that.
But I bring that up just to show you
how big of a internet phenomenon that video,
"Him That Pissed Against the Wall"
was just many millions of views, it was huge.
So in early 2007, my daughter was born,
February 14th to be exact,
and we're still meeting in the house at this time
as a church and my wife was gonna have a home birth.
And so she's in labor on a Wednesday.
So we have the Wednesday night service coming,
but you never know with labor,
she wasn't really in super active labor.
So we didn't really know, is this gonna speed up?
Is this gonna slow down?
So I was really torn about, do I need to cancel church?
What are we gonna do here?
So I ended up deciding on a compromise.
I said, well, you know what we'll do
is we'll just have church in the backyard
because then we can start setting up the birth tub
and getting everything ready in the house for the birth
and the midwife can come over and all that.
But then I'll just have church
on the patio in the backyard.
And of course we live in a desert.
So you'd think that it's not gonna rain,
but of course it just had to rain that day.
And not only did it rain,
but it was like driving rain, blowing sideways.
We were under a patio cover,
but then it just started raining during the sermon
and just water started blowing in sideways.
So I was super stressed out.
My wife's inside.
I don't know if she's going into labor or not.
Rains blowing on me.
I ended up cutting the sermon short.
It was the Revelation 7 sermon on Wednesday night.
And I think I only preached for like 35 minutes or something.
Soon as the sermon was over, I'm like,
you guys all need to leave right now.
So I kicked everybody out real quick.
And my wife ended up giving birth like two hours later
or something like that.
So that was our first girl
because our first three children were boys.
And then once we had a girl,
then everybody would say to us like,
oh, you're going to stop now, right?
You know, you were just waiting for your girl.
You had the three boys.
Now you got your girl.
Now you can stop.
That's what everybody said to us.
Of course, we did not stop.
And we ended up having 12 total.
So in May of 2007,
we ended up getting into our first church building.
Not because we had outgrown the house,
because the most people that we ever had in the house
was 29 people in attendance.
But we were just sick of having church in our house
because it was just such a hardship.
We had to give up our entire living room area.
We couldn't have any furniture in it.
And we had to keep everything all ready
for church all the time.
And so we wanted to just get a sofa
and enjoy that part of our house
and just not have the stress of everybody coming over
and trashing the bathrooms
and all the work that went into having church in the house.
So we just decided to get into a building
after a year and a half in the house.
So I think it was like May 30th or so.
We got into our first church building.
It was just a little 700 square foot office space.
But we would continue meeting in that office space
for the next 18 and a half years.
We just kept getting bigger space in the same complex.
And so we ended up growing eventually to like,
you know, 13,000 square feet of space in that parking lot.
So in 2007, I wasn't on Facebook or anything,
but there was this social media platform called Ning, okay?
And so there was sort of like a Faithful Word Baptist Church
listeners group that was on this thing called Ning.
And it was sort of like what today
the FWBC listeners group on Facebook would be.
So, you know, it had like hundreds and hundreds of people
on there that listened to preaching
from Faithful Word Baptist Church.
I want to say it started around like 2007.
It was definitely going strong in 2008.
And so at the time I was working a job
where I would end up traveling a lot for my job.
So I was doing fire alarms all over the place,
not just Arizona and California, but all over America.
And so at this time I was driving like 75,000 miles a year.
I was also flying almost every week.
I think I averaged like four legs a week as far as flying.
Most of the time I'd end up being completely gone
for like half the week and then I'd be home
for the other half of the week.
And then when I'm home, I could do the paperwork
and kind of like business side and being with my family
and doing church stuff.
And then the other half of the week,
I would just be like working day and night,
just crazy schedule out in the field,
actually doing the fire alarm work.
And I'd be traveling all over America.
But the one good thing about this is that sometimes
I'd get to do fun stuff when I would travel
different places once I finished my work.
And sometimes I would get together
with faithful word listeners in those early days
of '07, '08, that period.
And just go out to eat or whatever,
like, "Hey, I'm gonna be in your area.
"Let's go out to eat."
Just 'cause I'm bored and whatever
after I'm finished working.
So I got to meet up with different listeners and stuff.
Well, there were a bunch of listeners
that lived in Morgantown, West Virginia.
They were going to the university there.
One of them was Brother Matthew Stuckey,
who's of course today Pastor Matthew Stuckey
in the Philippines.
And he's doing a great job over there.
All kinds of soul winning and preaching in schools
and he's founded several churches and everything.
But God, he's still going strong.
So I ended up getting together with these guys
in Washington, DC.
But let me back up before that and tell you
that around this time, I got into Ron Paul, okay?
And so I'm driving around Phoenix
and seeing all these Ron Paul signs.
I didn't even know what it was.
I thought it was a musician.
I thought this was like a rock band or something.
But then I just kept saying, Ron Paul, Ron Paul,
Ron Paul, and I didn't know what it meant.
Finally, I just Googled it 'cause I was just curious,
like what is Ron Paul?
'Cause the signs literally said, Google Ron Paul.
So I Googled it and it turned out he's a politician.
I was just like, oh, I'm not interested in that.
I just kind of blew it off.
Then later I saw a sign that said, Ron Paul, 1776 in 2008.
So that kind of got my attention.
I was like, well, man,
maybe I should look into this Ron Paul guy.
So I ended up looking into him
and really liking a lot of the stuff that he stood for.
He seemed like kind of just a once in a lifetime
candidate.
And I got really enthusiastic about Ron Paul
and I was supporting Ron Paul.
I donated to his campaign.
I got super into it.
Somebody gave me a DVD of data
of just videos of Ron Paul making speeches
and also all of the Republican debates
with everyone cut out except Ron Paul,
which by the way is the right way
to watch a Republican debate.
You just cut out all the neocon establishment bozos
and just listen to the Ron Paul guy.
So I listened to so much Ron Paul.
He really educated me politically
and I really bought into his philosophies
of economics and foreign policy
and kind of the more libertarian side
of being a Republican.
And so I got super into Ron Paul,
but it wasn't something that I preached about
or pushed from the pulpit
because, you know, Ron Paul wasn't perfect
and I didn't really mix those things.
It was more just something in my personal life
that I believed in.
And so I was gonna go to this Ron Paul March
in Washington DC on July 12th, 2008.
So I ended up getting some jobs in that area
so that I could, you know,
basically go there on the company dime,
do fire alarm work,
and then go to this Ron Paul March that I wanted to go to.
So I called up the crew out in Morgantown,
and I said, "Hey guys, I'm gonna be in Washington, D.C.
"and, you know, we can meet up and hang out
"'cause I'm gonna be working on these days,
"but then on Saturday, I'm gonna be available.
"Let's get together for breakfast.
"Let's check out some of the sites of the Capitol."
So they're like, "Yeah, sure."
I think it was like a few hours away or whatever.
So I told them, I said, "Well, you know,
"meet me for breakfast."
I decided to kind of play a joke on them
or play a prank on them in a sense.
So I said, "Meet up with me for breakfast."
And then after I said,
"There's this thing I have to do for like a half hour."
And then I said, "After that, you know,
"we'll go tour the sites and the museums and stuff."
So we get together and have breakfast.
And then I just take them to the Ron Paul rally
without telling them what it was or where we were going.
And this thing had like, I think 10 or 12,000 people.
So, you know, we're just kind of walking over to this thing.
I said, "Oh yeah, it's just a quick thing I need to do.
"It's gonna take 30 minutes."
Next thing they know,
I've just marched them into this group of like 10,000 people
and people are just putting signs in our hands.
Ron Paul Revolution.
And so they were just issued signs.
And next thing they know,
they're just marching down the street
and we're all yelling, "Ron Paul Revolution."
You know, and all these different chants and slogans
and waving the signs.
And they're good sports.
You know, they just went along with it.
They just grabbed a sign, "Ha ha, let's go."
And then, you know, when all of a sudden done,
they're like, "Who's Ron Paul?"
They didn't even know who Ron Paul was.
You know, like I was just a few months earlier.
So it was hilarious because we were just kind of joking
about what if someone would have interviewed them.
Like, "So, why are you here today?"
And they're just like, "I don't know, man.
I just walked off, somebody shoved this sign in my hand,
and I don't know, let's go."
So they marched with Ron Paul,
even though they didn't even know who that was.
So that was pretty cool.
Well, ultimately, Stuckey ended up moving out to Arizona,
and Pastor Matthew Stuckey ended up being our first employee
at Faithful Word Baptist Church,
because my job was really demanding,
and I couldn't really do a lot with the church
and work my job, and I couldn't really scale back my job.
It was kind of on or off.
So I decided, well, maybe I could hire somebody
to help out with the church,
and then that could make things a little bit easier for me
to balance being a pastor and working and everything.
So I ended up hiring Brother Stuckey,
and I told him, I said, look, you know,
I can guarantee you six months
because we'd come into some money,
but obviously our church is small.
And I said, I don't really know what's gonna happen
in the end of six months,
but I can guarantee you a job for six months,
and then we'll have to like reevaluate
and see where we're at.
So he ended up working for me for six months at the church.
And at the end of the six months,
there had been like a major economic downturn.
So even though our church was growing,
the offerings went down.
And so at the end of the six months,
we didn't really have the money to keep them on.
And so I came to him and I said,
"Hey, I don't know if we're gonna be able
to make this work financially."
And he told me, he said, "Don't even worry about it
because I'm kind of burned out on the job anyway.
And so it's probably best if I just get a job
somewhere else.
That way it's not a strain on the church financially."
So that just kind of worked out for the best for everybody.
And part of the reason that he was burned out,
it was really my fault because I had given him a schedule
that was a little bit unrealistic
because part of his schedule was to go soul winning
five days a week for five hours a day,
which obviously that's pretty grueling
because soul winning is pretty exhausting.
Doing it for five hours a day,
five days a week is totally not sustainable.
I mean, I certainly wouldn't be able to sustain that.
And so he did that.
And then, you know, the other,
I think he worked like 40 hours or something.
So I think that the other 15 hours,
he's doing, you know, other just menial things.
But, you know, the soul winning part of it was grueling,
but, you know, I wanted him out there
knocking a lot of doors and doing a lot of soul winning
just because, you know, our church's biggest need was growth
'cause we were still really small.
Like in 2008, we were running like 30.
You know, we pretty much averaged 10 in 2006,
20 in 2007, 30 in 2008, 40 in 2009.
That's how the growth was early in those days.
So I can see why he was burned out after six months.
You know, that was just my kind of naivety.
I was obviously young and still learning.
And so that was a little bit rough of a schedule
to have him doing that.
So anyway, at the end of six months,
he ended up no longer working for our church.
But speaking of Brother Stuckey,
around the same time, like end of 2008, beginning of 2009,
somewhere around that time,
we ended up throwing out our first weirdo sycophants ever
with his family that had been coming to the church.
And Brother Stuckey was,
the reason I bring up Brother Stuckey
is because he was like renting a room from them, okay?
So they had some space for rent
and that's where he was staying.
And so these people,
we thought that they were just really dedicated
church members and that they just really loved our church
and everything.
Looking back, it's easy to see
that they were just flatterers big time
and that they were really flattering me.
But back then I was naive and so I didn't really recognize
that from what it was.
I just thought that they just really loved our church
and they just thought I was a great preacher
and that they just really liked me.
But we ended up finding out what they were doing,
which was that there'd be people that would come
on Sunday morning and they would be really enthusiastic
about the church and they'd just be talking
about how they're gonna come back
and then they would just not come back.
And it was always like, man, why are people like that?
Like, why do these people act like they love it
and they're so excited, see you next Sunday,
and then they just don't come back.
Well, we found out that what this woman had been doing
was she would get their phone number
of new people and visitors and stuff,
and then she would call them up on the phone
and talk crap about the church.
Meanwhile, to my face, we're just the greatest thing ever
and church is so wonderful,
but she was talking all kinds of smack about us
behind our back.
And then we ended up finding out
that they had been thrown out of a bunch of other churches.
They're just these weird infiltrators.
And so we ended up confronting them on a Sunday night
and throwing them out of the church.
It was really the first time
that we like threw people out of the church.
The closest thing to throwing people out was in 2006,
there was a couple that we got saved and in church,
and then they ended up, you know,
they were living in fornication.
And so we gave them time, you know,
I preached about it and kind of gave them time to grow.
But after like a month, month and a half,
I confronted them and said,
"Hey, you know, you can't come to the church
and be living in fornication.
You either need to stop living together, get married,
or you can't come to the church."
So they quit coming to the church.
So, you know, so I guess we threw them out for fornication,
but it was, you know, it was just very gently done.
This was the first time that we had to like throw people out.
And, you know, I compared notes with Brother Stuckey
because Brother Stuckey was, you know,
staying on their property and so forth.
And it was just so weird how much they had lied
because they had told me that neither of them
had ever been married before.
And they told me this repeatedly.
And then they told him a totally different story.
They told Brother Stuckey that they had, you know,
both been divorced and remarried
and that his ex-wife was a lesbian, all these wild things.
And so we ended up finding out all this crazy stuff
about them after the fact.
And as soon as we threw them out,
they showed their true colors fast.
Like right away, they're just quoting other versions
than the King James, even though they had claimed,
"Oh yeah, we're King James only and everything."
They're quoting other versions the next day.
In fact, the guy had said
that the reason that he started coming to the church,
the first sermon he ever heard
was why Billy Graham's going to hell
and he just loved that sermon
and then he's just hooked on the preaching.
As soon as he gets thrown out, he's criticizing me saying,
"Can you believe Pastor Anderson
speaks against such a godly man as Billy Graham?"
Like just the exact opposite.
So this was really surreal for me
because I'd never experienced it before.
Obviously I've experienced it many times since.
Just these weird sycophantic freaks that infiltrate.
But this was the first time
and this was kind of mind blowing.
One of those things that you kind of have to see it
to believe it.
And so the way these people just did an absolute 180.
As soon as they were thrown out,
Billy Graham's wonderful, quoting other versions.
And then they made an entire website
about my wife being a witch.
And I'm not saying like calling her a witch as in,
"Oh, she's a mean person."
Like that she's literally casting spells and doing black magic
or something like that.
So it was just really bizarre.
And so we ended up throwing them out.
So in 2008, that happened maybe toward the end,
maybe beginning of '09, somewhere around there.
So another important thing that happened around this time
was my daughter Rebecca was born in October.
So that's another story because on October 19th,
I had found in my Bible reading Jonah 3 10.
And I saw Jonah 3 10 and I was like,
wow, this is such a great verse to show
that turning from your sins is works.
And so I was super excited about it.
And I had written this sermon
that I really wanted to preach called
one, two, three, repent after me.
And then my wife goes into labor on that Sunday,
but she was only in the early stages of labor
and she tends to be in labor for a long time.
So I was like, ah, should I stay home?
Should I preach?
Is she gonna get birth, you know, during the service?
What's going on?
And I really wanted to preach.
I was really excited about preaching this morning sermon.
Like I did not wanna stay home.
So I ended up just going for it and preaching the sermon
because I was like, I don't think she's gonna give birth
in the next few hours.
So I preached the sermon on Sunday morning.
She didn't give birth.
And then in the evening service, I did stay home
so I could be with her during labor and everything.
So I had someone else fill in on that Sunday night,
but she didn't end up giving birth
until like one or two in the morning.
So it ended up being October 20th that my daughter was born.
So then 2009, a big incident happened in April of 2009.
By then I already had like tons of viewers on YouTube,
like millions and millions of views on YouTube
and just still 20,000 MP3s a month as far as audio.
But the thing that really blew up
was the Border Patrol incident that happened
on April 15th, 2009.
Now I'm not gonna go into that story here
because again, it's already been told.
And so there's a documentary that I made
called "Failure to Obey."
And that "Failure to Obey" documentary
goes into great detail on the subject
of the Border Patrol incident.
So there's no reason to repeat it here.
If you're not familiar with it,
you can go watch that "Failure to Obey" doc.
But as a result of that, I was on TV interviews
and then I ended up just doing radio interviews
for like the next month straight.
Like every day I would do a live radio interview
for like an hour or something on average.
So I literally did like 30 some interviews, radio,
I did TV stuff, I was on the Alex Jones show.
After like a month, I mean the requests were still coming in,
I could still keep doing interviews about it,
but I ended up just saying like, I'm sick of this,
I'm done telling this story.
That's why I'm not telling it here, I'm sick of telling it.
You know, I was just like, I'm not just gonna talk
about this for the rest of my life.
Talked about it enough, I'm done, time to move on.
But the interesting thing with that was that,
you know, the media was on my side.
You know, they were positively interviewing me
about these things, but just about five months later,
I would go viral in the media again,
this time totally negative.
So it was kind of funny in 2009,
I got to experience both sides.
I got to experience all the reporters
and interviews loving me versus later in the year
with the Obama sermon that I preached,
then, you know, everybody was attacking me in the media.
And so it was very negative media attention
from CNN and MSNBC and just, you know,
everybody under the sun.
But I'm gonna talk about that in the next video.
God bless and have a great day.