To culminate that, I realized we've had so many people taking steps of faith—more than I've ever seen in my 15 years of ministry—and I just felt like we needed a weekend where we helped these people take a next step of baptism. So we did a message on baptism, and we actually ended the service about 20 minutes early. We did a 40-minute service, pretty much did a couple songs, then I got up and taught about baptism. We handed people black plastic bags to put in their cars—they were going to be wet because I was challenging them to get baptized in their clothes right then. And we had some pools outside. I just went down a whole list of people's excuses, tried to remove those excuses, and we saw well over 1,200 adults get baptized that weekend.
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It was unbelievable. The message was not highly motivational. It was pretty matter-of-fact. I had them come down front and led them in a confession of faith, then we exited out to be baptized. We did one more song in the church while they all got ready, and then the whole church exited out together around these baptismal pools to see it happen.
To see the people—I mean, big, burly biker guys, guys you wouldn't want to meet in the alley at night; tough guys coming down front, tears in their eyes—it was truly just a move of God's Spirit. There's nothing else I could attribute it to. And the change has just continued on in a really significant way over the last month.
Preaching: If we were to come and visit your church on a typical Sunday, what it would be like?Wilhite: I think you'd walk in and find it very friendly, very eclectic, very demographically diverse—from young adults to seniors—very racially diverse. Our largest population would be Caucasian, but then Hispanic, African-American. That is a picture of Las Vegas. You'd hear a great band, great music, very culturally kind of tuned-in; but you'd also, I hope, walk away feeling like you had heard the Word of God taught clearly and with passion, that the Bible was clearly the source and the guide for everything that this church does. And I would hope you'd walk away and feel that we're not compromising in any way the core message and the core teaching. We're actually contending for the faith once for all entrusted to God's holy people.
Preaching: Well, tell me about your approach to preaching. Wilhite: I preach in series, usually three to six weeks long. The longer I've been in the Las Vegas valley, the more aware I've become of the absolute biblical illiteracy that exists in our culture and certainly in our area. I will almost always teach
exegetically from one passage of the Bible. Our people don't have the ability, the tools, many of them, to turn here and turn over there; so I work really hard to kind of anchor into one scriptural passage, have everybody turn to one place in their Bibles and stay there. And that's become a huge value for me.
If you rewound the clock five years, I was way more topically oriented. I was kind of all over the map, and it hit me one day that so many of our people are coming to faith. Las Vegas is a very transient community. Many of them will move on. If I don't at least get them familiar with their Bibles, help them bring their Bibles, open their Bibles up, learn to not be afraid of it, learn to look at a passage and understand what it means, then I have really failed them as a pastor.
