Pastor Ken & Donna Schultz's Testimony
I was born and raised in Missoula, Montana and lived there until coming to pastor Emmanuel Baptist Church in September of 2004.
I was raised by good, moral, but unsaved parents. When I was eighteen, my older brother who had trusted Christ a few years earlier, invited me to attend a special meeting being held in his church. I went to church on a Monday evening with him and his family, and I heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ for the very first time. Up to that time, I had only been in church one other time when I was about six years old. That night I heard that I was a sinner who deserved to spend eternity in the Lake of Fire. I also heard that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sin, and was told in the message that I needed to turn from my sin and trust Jesus Christ as my own Savior. At the close of the service I responded to the invitation to come to Christ, and the Pastor and my brother showed me from the Bible how to trust Jesus as my Savior; that was in August of 1984. Jesus saved me from my sin and began to change my life. II Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ Jesus: he is a new creature, old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” My life is a testimony of the truth of that verse. God has changed my life, and I can say with the psalmist, “He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings” (Psalms 40:2).
Within the year, God allowed me to begin working in Florence Baptist Church’s bus ministry and other children’s ministries. It was at Florence Baptist Church that I began to grow in the Word of God, and to have a burden for souls. The Apostle Paul said, “For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead:” (2 Corinthians 5:14). For many years I continued to serve the Lord as a layman at Florence Baptist Church. I began to feel the call of God on my life to be a full-time preacher of the Gospel.
In 1987 I met Donna Koenig, and after six years of friendship, we were married in May of 1993. God has given me a faithful and Godly wife who in every way is a helpmeet to her husband. Although raised in a religious home, she had never seen herself as a sinner, deserving of hell, and in need of personally trusting Christ as her Savior. As a senior in high school, she was saved after reading a gospel tract given her by a fellow classmate. Realizing for the first time that, though she was a “good, moral, and religious person”, she was indeed a sinner who needed to be saved.
In coming to Emmanuel Baptist church, we found a group of people well trained in their understanding and use of the Bible. We came to a church that is mission-minded at home and abroad with a firm commitment to the Word of God and the principles found therein. It is my desire as Pastor that we as a church family might continue “perfecting the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ:” (Ephesians 4:12, 13). We invite you to worship and serve with us, Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory.
