Fancy Finds eases transition for new adventure

I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning . . . I have purposed it, I will also do it - Isaiah 46:9-11

Twenty-year-old Charles Pollard knew nothing about pastoring a church. So when called to a church on its last leg in a dusty Arizona town in the late fifties, he built the congregation by sharing the sweetest name he knew with the roughest and toughest people he could find.

“I visited the prisons and hospitals, and every Tuesday and Thursday, after the family went to bed, I visited the bars. I built that congregation from the bars mostly. After they joined the church, I’d go out with them and teach them to witness.” Now, at 80 years of age, Charles still remembers one convert’s unique gospel message: “Brother, do you wanna die and go to hell and fry like a sausage?”

But building a church at twenty in a rugged western town wasn’t even Charles’ first ministry challenge. Prior to that, he began a mission to migrant workers in Arizona’s Rainbow Valley. There, he confronted child abuse, murder, alcoholism, starvation and inhumane living conditions. He had successes there, but soon realized he needed ministry training. “The migrant workers were treated terribly. Emotionally, I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Charles and Barbara Pollard paid some dues those early years, attending college, pastoring a church, and raising two little girls in a 20-foot trailer. “I wanted more than anything in the world to be a good daddy, but I could hardly feed them. I told God, ‘These girls are yours.’ He quickly spoke back, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure they are mine?”

Charles was learning to fully trust God with the lives of his family. Soon, he saw an ad in the paper for a plumber. He knew nothing about plumbing either—but got the job and began a trade that would see him and Barbara through college and supplement their income for many years.

The two little Pollard girls, belonging to God, did not starve. Now grandmot