Two Adventurers for Christ

by Kathryn van der Pol

This snapshot depicts one night of drone attacks in Ukraine (yellow) as well as missile attacks (blue and red) from July. The striped area in the east is the Russian occupied area of Ukraine. The black to the east of the occupied area is Russia. "This is happening in Ukraine every single night. Ninety five percent of the drones are targeting civilians--mostly apartment complexes, but also hospitals, schools, places of worship. Only five percent are military targets." said Bill Rigsby, Pastor and Mission worker in Ukraine. See KNOWABLETRUTH.com

“We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.

“We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed but not driven to despair. We are hunted down but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.” II COR 4:7-11 NLT

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to interview local Brenhamites, Ann McCulloch and Bill Rigsby. Both came to our home to attend A Faith Under Siege, a new film documenting the Russians’ destruction of over 650 evangelical churches in Ukraine since 2022. We showed the film in early July, and we plan to show it again this August. Bill and Ann are good friends because of Ukraine. It was providential that the day we showed the film, Bill had been home from Ukraine only a few weeks. Ann had thought to invite him, and I was so touched when Bill called and asked me, “Do you have space for me?”

I learned that day that both Ann and Bill had traveled to Ukraine (many years apart) to do mission work. For that reason, I became determined to learn more about their experiences and perspective on the war and share them with you. This will be a multi-part series.

From their stories, God has truly been using them “like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure.”  Ann visited Ukraine with her husband in 1991, just after the “collapse” of the Soviet Union. Bill has recently returned from Ukraine having been there off and on for over 18 months since the war began in 2022.

Ann and her husband, also named Bill, were on a mission trip through Campus Crusade with Josh McDowell to share the gospel. They had brought McDowell’s book, More than a Carpenter to share with fellow Ukrainians. Ann said, “Our mission was a group of 400 and only 40 of us were married couples, and the rest were college kids. You know, it was wonderful, and we were able to pass out More Than A Carpenter everywhere we went. And it was such a fertile field. They were eager.”

Ann’s husband was a Harris County judge by profession but in Ukraine, Ann loved seeing him evangelize. “Bill was not an evangelist by gifting, but when he was in Gorky Park, he was the greatest evangelist, and it was a joy to watch him work.” What a contrast from the quiet astute judge.

One of her fondest memories was a scavenger hunt. McDowell had sent them to visit a grocery store in Kiev, equivalent to an HEB. Ann said, “They wanted us to see how little the people had. We were given a list of items. We were looking through a store like HEB, and the shelves were just bare. We would be looking for whatever, and it wasn’t there.”

At a dinner on the last night of their stay in Ukraine, McDowell challenged them. “I want you to go upstairs and decide anything you don't need. He said, You can go to Foley's, Macy's, whatever Monday morning and replenish whatever clothes or shoes you don't need, and we're going to make piles here in the lobby of the hotel!”

Ann went through her suitcase, pulled out her clothes and shoes. “Oh, wow,” she said. “Everything I looked at I thought, ‘I can buy this next week, you know.’”  The next morning there were mounds of clothes and shoes covering the lobby floor. “That was awesome,” she recalled.

So Ann and her husband, along with many others planted seeds of faith that took root, so that by the time Russia invaded Ukraine thirty years later on February 24, 2022, about 5% of Ukrainians, mostly younger people, had become evangelical Christians. With a total population of 40,000,000, this amounts to about two million.

So, now the faith of the Ukrainians is under considerable siege.

Ukraine is not only the breadbasket of Europe and Africa, but also the Bible belt of Europe. When one adds all the Christian groups (Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic being the larger percentages), there are more Christians attending church and worshipping God in Ukraine that in any country stretching from Great Britain to Russia.

This is why Russia is hell bent on destroying Ukraine. The Ukrainian people look to God as their savior, not the Russian state.

So learned Bill Rigsby.

Nothing in his background particularly prepared him for spending 18 months of his life in Ukraine, yet his life story makes his mission work in Ukraine a pinnacle step in his faith journey.

Bill grew up as a son of parents in the oil and gas industry. He spent his early childhood in Latin America and his later childhood in Indonesia. As a child, he used to think in Spanish. He returned to the United States for college, but with the travelers’ bug well developed in his genes, he headed to Latin America after graduation. He married his doctor in Venezuela and is now the father of five. As a mechanical engineer, he worked on massive glass projects in South America and elsewhere. He said that he studied engineering not out of a love of the science, but to train his mind in solving problems.

Spiritually, Bill said growing up, “I spent a lot of years confused about who God was. All my friends were Buddhist, Daoist, or Muslim. But I wanted to take my kids back there and share that experience of living abroad with them.” So, he and his wife returned to Indonesia where Bill had lived as a child. There he worked with Chinese and Malaysian government again on massive infrastructure projects.

So after a few years in the glass business, Bill got out after some horrible, personal security experiences there.

 Bill said, “I thought, you know, there's got to be an industry around that helps people solve those kinds of security problems. So I looked into starting my own business, and came across a couple of guys, and the three of us, in fact, started a security surveillance contracting business working overseas. And that was an immensely successful enterprise. The Lord just opened door after door after door. We did a lot of national border security, kind of like Trump's wall, but with technology. We didn't do major construction. We used technology from radar to cameras to infrared to fiber optics, using lots and lots of different technologies to build security systems, implementing security systems for large infrastructure projects, airports and military bases and national borders.”

Then, one day, he was done. “God called me back to the states. So I walked away from that company, came back to the States, and started helping my children, who were in third, fourth, fifth grade, learn what it means to be an American. So, we moved to Brenham, Texas from Singapore.”

Bill was the ultimate BOB.

After building another successful technology business with his brother in Houston, Bill received a calling to go to seminary. He attended Southwestern Theological Seminary, graduating six years ago.

His reasons for going to seminary were not typical. He wanted to make sure he understood the Bible correctly to bring his non-Christian friends to the Lord.

Bill said, “You know, the real reason why I felt called to go to seminary because God laid on my heart, a list of 43 people from my past, people from high school or from my business contacts, former employees, former clients, customers, you know, associates, whatever, all non-Christians.

“And in all my years of dealing with these people, everybody knew I was Christian. I had my Bible that I took with me, and I knew they were Muslim, Daoist, Buddhist. Live and let live. That wasn't what connected us. What connected us was our business or school or a shared experience of some kind.

“But I wanted to reconnect with them, all 43 of these people, I had a very loving, respectful, almost familial relationship with some of them.

“Some I hadn't talked to for a number of years. So I had to find them and get back in contact with them. So I did. And I found all of them. Then I went to see all of them. I visited all 43 wherever they were, in China, Taiwan, or Singapore, Indonesia. Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, wherever they were.

“Uh, my wife was kind of mad, not mad, but she was insisting, “Could you just send them an email or have a phone call.?’”

 Bill had to see them in person.

He explained, “So now, you know that Christ found me where I am and where I was, and that's what he calls us to do. So I went and took each one of them a Bible, sat down to share the gospel. I told them, ‘I want to change the dynamic of our relationship to one of a shared faith and not just some shared experience.’ “

It took Bill three years to achieve this. He had attended seminary to make sure he had the gospel right. He didn’t want to misrepresent anything to his dear friends. That was what really drew him to seminary. He described his time at seminary as an honor and a privilege.

Bill added, “But after I checked that 43rd person off of that list, I felt like a millstone had been taken off my neck.” But Bill wasn’t done. He said, “Now there's 8 billion more of them out there that I'm free to go talk to and that's what I've been doing ever since.”

Then the unexpected happened.

Two days after the Russians invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, a man, appeared at the foot of Bill’s bed.

Bill said, “I was in bed. The lights were still on. My wife was still roaming around the kitchen. I could hear her banging and clanging, but I was going to sleep. And I still don't know for sure if I was asleep or if I was awake, but it was as if a man walked into my bedroom and stood by my bed and said, ‘I want you to go to Ukraine and serve and encourage my people.’ I opened my eyes, sat up and I thought, ‘Man, was I dreaming? What was that?’

Of course, there's nobody there, but Bill is having trouble going back to sleep.

He goes on, “I laid there in a quandary, thinking, wow, that was really strange. Because, man, I heard that. But that just violated every belief that I had about how God speaks to us. That can't be, but I'm not making this up. Was I dreaming that? What was that?

“So as I'm lying on the bed, looking up at my ceiling, I say, ‘You know, God, if that was you, that was strange. You've never spoken to me like that, but if that was you, and I'm not convinced that it was, but if that was you, you must have been talking to somebody else. You couldn't have been talking to me.

“Let me give you the list of reasons like Abraham and Sarah did about having a kid. I've never been there. I don't know how to speak Ukrainian. I've been to a lot of places. I've been to more than 100 countries in my life. I have traveled my whole life, but I've never been there. I don't speak any Slavic language. I don't speak Russian, I don't know their geography. I don't know their history. I don't know their culture. There are so many things that I don't know.

“Besides that, I don't have family there, and my blood is not Ukrainian. You must have been talking to somebody else, or this is a figment of my imagination.

 “I roll over and I go back to sleep.

“About 15 minutes before my alarm goes off the next morning, the same man walks back into my room.

“He stands right beside my bed and calls my name, ‘Bill, I am talking to you. I want you to go serve and encourage my people. You have people there because they're my people. You have family there because they're my family.

“To this day, I don't know what that was, but that wasn't a dream. I said, ‘Okay, wow! I guess I got to get a plane ticket to go to Poland. And when I get to Poland, I'll turn east and go east, and I'll find Ukraine over there somewhere.’”

And that is how Bill ended up in Ukraine.

This is the end of Part 1.