Agape Baptist Church

Bill with Rev. Chung and his wife at Agape Baptist Church — the church plant where he served as a volunteer youth pastor. Behind them, a banner announces 70 Days of Praying in One Accord for Church Property, dawn and evening, March 3 to May 11, 1986.

A young congregation without a building of its own, praying together — not for comfort, but for a place to stand. Seventy days is a long time to keep asking for the same thing. It says something about a church that it was willing to.

Bill was a foreigner inside someone else's church plant, given a role — youth pastor — in a story that wasn't his to begin with. He stood at the pulpit that day the way he'd stand in a hundred rooms like it over the following decades: not as the one leading the prayer, but as someone who'd been let in on it.

A small wooden cross is just visible in the shadows behind them. An open Bible sits on the pulpit between the three of them. Whatever came of the seventy days, this is what the asking looked like.

The church was praying for a building. Bill was learning what it means to pray for something you cannot yet see.