ross naylor-tatterson's testimony

Who’d a thunk it? I am planting a church in the USA.

 

I grew up in a little country mining town in the southeastern part of Australia. Mum was a cook in a hospital and dad was a butcher, boilermaker, and local champion football player. My dad became a Christian in a “pub” when a Salvation Army officer came in selling their newspapers and sharing the Way into the kingdom with anyone who would listen. Well, my dad did listen and did turn his life over to Christ. This all happened about 10 months before I was born. I was dedicated at the age of six weeks in a Salvation Army service. My dad specifically prayed that the Lord would call me into His ministry. Over the years, my parents moved town and away from the community of faith that they had come to know the Lord in. I started attending another church, but the passion and fire wasn’t there and we started to wane in our faith. By the time I was entering teenage years, I had reached the conclusion that God,perhaps, wasn’t real.

 

I was quite a naughty boy and loved to play practical jokes on my sisters, teachers, and friends. I often got into big time trouble when these jokes backfired! Just ask me about “the sheep’s eyeballs” one day!!!  When I was around the age of 13, two of my peers – one a girl who I hated in my home economic class, and the patrol leader of the scout troop I attended (who hated me) – both had transforming encounters with the Lord Jesus. It was so confusing when these two people started to reach out in love toward me.

 

Independently from each other, they had surrendered their lives to Jesus over the same summer. I was, at first, very skeptical of their change, but it was real … very real … and it brought me to a point of crying out to God and asking Him if He was real for me too. Wow! Did he ever answer that prayer! At that time, I believe he was beginning to answer the prayer that my dad had prayed 13 years earlier.

 

It was the 1970s and I was a Jesus freak now. I played my guitar, burnt candles
and incense, and dressed like a hippy that loved Jesus, complete with love beads
and an “afro” hairstyle that bounced as I walked. We did street evangelism in our
little country town and ran a coffee house ministry – same thing that kids like us
were doing all over the Western world in those days. Many people got saved
during these days. Going to college, or “uni” as we said in Australia, was out of the
question for me because I believed what Larry Norman and Barry McGuire were
singing: “Jesus is coming back some day” and that day would be very soon. The
song, “I wish we’d all been ready,” told me we had a job to do that was more
important than going on to higher education. We had to save the world. So it was
out of that background that I came into contact with Youth With A Mission (YWAM) and signed up to do a six month Discipleship Training School in Auckland, New Zealand.

Those six months turned in to 10 and a half years. During that time, I got ruined for the ordinary. As I reflect on those years, key things I learned seem to stand out to me, like teachings on: The Father Heart of God, Hearing God’s Voice, Repentance - The Joy Filled Life, God’s Heart for the Nations, Intimacy in Worship, the Power of Humility, Principles of Leadership, Pursuing Right Relationship with God, others and myself.  If you know me, you will often still hear me speaking about these things.

 

Those 10 and half years were spent based in New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. However, you must understand that I would travel from those bases frequently on outreaches to speak in YWAM schools, and to be a student in some. I traveled extensively in the Asia Pacific countries, but I also traveled on at least three YWAM communication teams, each team for three months all around the USA ,and one communication team that went through Europe. I truly became a global Christian.

 

The most significant thing that happened during this time was meeting my wife, Barbara. We actually met at the Singapore airport in 1982. I was on the Singapore base and she was working in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong. She had come with a large group of YWAMers from the Hong Kong base to Singapore for an outreach that was starting from our base. I knew the moment I saw her that she was special.

 

When I arrived back to my room from the Singapore airport that day, my roommate told me that he thought I really liked one of those girls.  Earlier that day, he had stood from the second floor balcony, watching us all.  As I entered the second floor room, he asked me, “That’s the girl, right?” as he pointed down to Barbara. I said, “How did you know?” He then pointed to another girl in the crowd. “You see the girl wearing pink? That is the girl I am going to marry and you will marry the girl you met today.”

 

I thought he was mad! I had not even spoken to Barbara by this stage. But three and half years later, I did marry Barbara. Four and half years later he married the girl wearing pink. I perceive a prophet as my roommate. Barb and I traveled on a few teams together before we were married in Hong Kong on February 14, 1986.  We then led a couple teams together after we were married. 

 

In Hong Kong, in July of 1987, our first daughter, Jessica, was born. Soon after her birth, we left YWAM to go back to Australia, where I finally went to college and ended up with a business degree followed by a post graduate degree in education.

 

Later, I eventually joined the Vineyard as a children’s ministry pastor in Perth, Western Australia, in 1991, and then in 2000 we moved to the USA to join Lakeshore Vineyard Church, where I served as the associate pastor here in Holland. Ironically, my wife is from St. Joseph, MI! In May of 2005, we were blessed and released to plant a new Vineyard church on the north side of Holland. In January of 2006, we went public with our new church: withoutwallsvineyard!!

 

-Ross Naylor-Tatterson