My name is Bill Welzien. After I started ministering at Mallory Square some almost 32 years ago, people on the pier began to call me Bible Bill. I came to Key West originally as a long-haired hippie. About 1972 was the first time I came to Key West. I hitchhiked here, spent a few weeks down here. And I remember being very empty because, you know, as a hippie, you were looking for something and you wanted to be something. But in my case, I didn't know what the point of life was. I remember going to Mallory Square and feeling quite empty. I was raised on the south side of Chicago, in the city limits. I was a Roman Catholic. So from kindergarten through eight years of grammar school, I was in Catholic schools with the nuns, the sisters teaching me. Then my four years of high school, I went to a Roman Catholic preparatory seminary to be prepared to become a Roman Catholic priest. It was an all-boys school in Chicago called Quigley. After four years of high school, I didn't feel I had any real call, vocation. It was a very difficult thing for me to tell my mother and my grandmother that I didn't want to pursue the priesthood. That was the end of high school. I went to two years to college. That took me from 18 to 20. And then, as I mentioned a bit ago, I went into my hippie phase from the age of 20 to 24. And the hippie phase was just exploring all kinds of religious thought, ideas, philosophies. I've been to meetings with the Hare Krishnas, followers of this guy who was reputed to be the perfect 16-year-old master, and all of the Beatles stuff with them following the guru Maharashi, Mahesh Yogi. And I had this desire to go to India. I was going to go to India with the view I was going to find a guru. some yogi, maybe he could inform me as to the meaning and purpose of life. Well, I eventually got over to Europe, and it was when I was in Europe that I made my way to Israel. Like I mentioned, I was hitchhiking for four years, from 1970 to 1974. I was in the desert of Jordan. I was by myself, and I was standing there in the desert, it was the end of June, it was 1974, it must have been 110 degrees, no shade anywhere, I was trying to hitchhike back to Oman, and I was standing there, I had dysentery, I was sick, quite sick, and I was standing there thinking to myself, you know, I call myself a truth seeker, but when anybody speaks to me about Jesus Christ and my need to repent and trust Him, I don't want to listen to that. And I wondered to myself, why is it if they talked about Buddha or Mohammed or any philosophy of life, I was eager to get involved. When they talked to me about my need to trust in Jesus Christ and Him alone, I didn't want to hear that. A verse came to my mind, a verse that was quoted to me many, many times. The verse was John 14, 6. which says, Jesus speaking, I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. I hated that verse with a passion. And I thought to myself, why is it anything else goes, but not these words of Jesus? And I said, you call yourself a truth seeker. Maybe Jesus is telling the truth here. And so I offered up what I today would call a prayer, but didn't think of it as a prayer then. I said, Jesus, if you're the way, I want to know the way. If you're the truth, I want to know the truth. If you're the life, I'm tired of just existing. I want to know life. If you can take me to the Father, please do so. I was 24 years old at that point. And I believe that's when I was converted. All by myself, but there had been Many years worth of Christians, as I hitchhiked around the United States, Canada, and then into Europe, and then into the Middle East, who talked to me about the gospel. I met a young Dutch man named John Pex. Then he says, well, I'm going to go to the old city of Jerusalem. He says, yeah, I don't know anybody around here. So I'm walking with John, and he begins to hand out these gospel tracts to people. I thought, this guy's crazy. What is this all about? He would talk to them about the Lord Jesus right there, total strangers. So I stayed about 20 paces behind John, because I didn't want anybody to think that I was with him. But John was a very vibrant witness for the Lord, a great evangelist, still is. and so that's where I learned how to do street ministry and I learned how to use my Bible because John would answer people by saying well let's look in the scriptures and let's see what the Bible says about that so I learned to try to answer people with scripture If I don't have it open, if they said, is that really in the Bible? I trained myself to be able to turn to the passage and say, well, here it is. Not take my word for it. It's in the Bible. And then I started going to the old city of Jerusalem by myself. And that was terrifying. John Pex, Judy Gelblum, and I, we went to hand out tracks. We had these Arab tracks. And we went out to hand out the Arab tracts, and most of the Arabs are Muslims. We went to the city of Gaza. Today, there's a big wall that separates Gaza from the rest of Israel. But back in this day, this is 1974, there wasn't a wall there. Gaza was still part of Israel, but it was primarily inhabited by Muslims. So we went over there. We took a bus there. We got out. We had bags of, I mean, bags of tracts. We must have had a couple thousand tracts. We started handing them out. You would have thought we were handing out $100 bills. I mean, we were mobbed by these Muslims coming. They took them out of our hands. We handed out a couple thousand tracts in minutes. So now, we were walking down We still had a handful of tracks left and we're walking down a road. John and Judy were on one side, I was on the other side. And I heard these footsteps coming up behind me. And there were a couple of these radical Muslims who jumped on me. They started beating me up. They tried to grab this bag away from me. I just pulled away from them, and I got away from them, and I ran back across the street where John and Judy were. They were up ahead from me. Well then, a short time later, I heard these footsteps behind us again. They jumped on me, and I'm down in the fetal position with the tracks held tightly so that they couldn't pull them away from me. John was getting ready to get into a fight with these guys. And just then, we were in front of a barber shop. The barber came out with a straight edge razor. He's waving the razor, yelling at them in Arabic. And the fellow who he was shaving came out with the shaving, the bib they put on the guy, and the foam on his face. And they scared these guys away. So that was a time. I got a bloody nose and a torn shirt from that one. But I praise God that he allowed me, as a very young Christian, to have that kind of experience. I am a guy who barely made it through school. It wasn't until I got converted that I really started to become more academic. I'm not an academic person by nature. I think before I was converted at the age of 24, I maybe read a total of five books, whole books from beginning to end my whole life. I was a guy who wanted to get up and move around, not a guy who wanted to sit down and read and study. The people that I studied the Bible with in the very beginning, the lady in the couple, Rinna and Clifford Jake, Rinna said to me, she said, if you learn one Bible verse, use it. And if you use it, God will give you two. She said, when you know two Bible verses, use it, because God will give you four. So you learn four Bible verses, use them. God will give you eight. You learn eight, use them. God will give you 16. And it's that kind of thing. When I first went out to hand out the first tract I handed out, after I was going out with John and Judy for a period of time, several months, they took a trip to the south of Israel. I went to the old city of Jerusalem. I was filled again with apprehension. And I had a cheat sheet I put together. I need to know this verse for that question, that verse for that question. I'm walking through and I'm thinking, Lord, I'm happy to be a Christian, but I don't really want to do this. I prefer to go home and crawl under the bed and just not deal with the public. And I'm walking through this field. I get to the old city of Jerusalem. And there were two fellas inside the gate. They were talking with one another. First two people I saw took a deep breath, says, okay, Lord, I'm gonna go up there and offer them a gospel tract. I handed this individual, I says, here's a little paper here you might wanna read. He took the paper, he looked at it. He looked at me, he looked at the paper, he looked at me. He took the paper, the gospel tract, he crumpled it up. He threw it on the ground. He stomped on it. I was ready to run home. And then I thought, I don't want to give the devil a victory. So I says, okay, Lord, I'm willing to take another shot at this. I'm on another track. Person took it, thanked me. About 10 minutes, 15 minutes into this, the long hair European guy, I gave him the gospel tract. He said, what's this? I said, well, it's a little tract that talks about Jesus and how we can find forgiveness of sins and begin to experience the fullness of life. And he says, oh, he says, you're a Christian? I said, I'm a believer in the Lord Jesus. And he asked me a couple of questions. And these were, to me, like, I didn't know too much about the Bible, but I knew enough to answer these two questions. And he said to me, Wow, how long did you say you're studying the Bible? Man, you seem to be pretty knowledgeable in it. The Lord knows how to encourage his people. So I was very encouraged by that. By the time I finished handing out the tracts that I had, I got back to the apartment. I was walking three feet off the ground. I started out filled with my own self-consciousness. What are people going to think of me? What are people going to say? When am I going to get stumped? It was all about me in this. But the more I went to do the Lord's work, soon I forgot about myself and I got caught up in Him. And then I found incredible freedom. And I think that's a challenge that all of us as Christians have to face. We sit on our hands. We think we don't know enough. We think if we get out there, someone will ask us something we can't answer. We have all these preconceived fears in our mind. So I'm an ordinary person who's learned that God is an extraordinary God. And everybody in the Bible is only ordinary people too. There's only one person in the whole Bible that's called an evangelist. The name is Philip. Philip the Evangelist. He's the one who went to Samaria and he spoke to the Samaritans, and then he was caught up in the spirit, and he spoke to the Ethiopian eunuch. Later on, the apostle Paul visits him in his hometown. He had some daughters who were prophetesses, and he's called Philip the Evangelist. The Apostle Paul told Timothy to do the work of an evangelist. Timothy was a pastor, and he was called to do the work of an evangelist in 2 Timothy chapter 4. And then we see in Ephesians chapter 4 that there were certain gifts given to the church, and the gifts that are listed by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4 are these. He gave the apostles and prophets, the evangelists, shepherds, and teachers. Why? To equip the saints for the work of ministry to the building up the body of Christ. An evangelist is an ongoing gift. Not everybody is an evangelist. We're all witnesses, but we should be praying for opportunities to share the gospel with others. That doesn't mean that you have the gift of evangelism, which is a particular gift. Buddhist, yeah. But we need a savior. That's the key. And Jesus... You gotta save yourself before you can save anybody else. That's what people think. There's a lot of people in religion who think they can save themselves. But Jesus Christ is a friend of sinners. Alright, I'll just leave you with that. Jesus Christ is a friend of sinners. He did things for us that no Buddha ever did. But, you know, look through that little booklet when you get some time. Thank you very much. I'm glad we had a chat. See, not everybody has the same gifts. We all have the same Lord. If we're believers, then we're true disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. And everybody has their own particular mission field. There were people who witnessed to me before I was a believer. People who gave me lifts and cars. little old woman when I was in Ottawa, Ontario in Canada I was with a friend of mine named John Euler and Again, we're these long hair hippies And there was a little old woman who was pulling this Basket behind her with groceries in it and she came up to us and she said Boys, boys, you need Jesus, you need Jesus. That woman never went to Bible school. That woman never went to seminary. She was an ordinary woman who was concerned about these two fellas, these hippie looking fellas, and pleaded with us, telling us that we needed Jesus. That's some 44 years ago, 45 years ago, that I met that woman. I couldn't pick her out of a lineup. But when somebody speaks up for the Lord Jesus Christ, their labor's never in vain. There's power in the name of Jesus. When God's word goes out, it never comes back vain or void or empty. And so we need to pray, Father, give me a Christ-like passion for the lost. There were three things I see that were paramount in Jesus's life. The glory of the Father. I should be concerned about the glory of my Heavenly Father. Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost. He had a passion for the lost. And the Apostle Paul tells us in Ephesians 5, 25 that Christ loved the church and he gave himself up for the church So I want to know my father and I want to love him and I want to exalt him I Don't want to have a Christlike burden for the lost to be and that's something we pray for I Think that the bottom line is that we all have to really be serious about seeking first Matthew 6 33 seek first God's kingdom and Find out what God's priorities are and make those your priorities, prayerfully so. Seek first God's kingdom and His righteousness and what? The details fall into place. I have to pursue the Lord, that's got to be my main concern. Jesus said to Peter and Andrew, James and John, follow me. That was to be their main duty. Follow the Lord Jesus, and He would make them fishers of men. They didn't make themselves fishers of men. They were content in following the Lord, being with Him, fellowshipping with Him, watching what He did, listening to what He said, imbibing everything that could be imbibed about Him. So when I graduated from Moody, I was planning to come back to Key West with my wife. And we left Moody with three young children. August of 1986, I began the ministry at Mallory Square with the easel. And when I went down there, I thought to myself, I need to fit in with what's happening here. I don't want to come in and throw a wet blanket on the sunset celebration, being an obnoxious Christian yelling at people. I learned the technique of the easel evangelism. I learned it from the open air campaigners. I learned how to do this box lettering, ladder lettering we call it. I thought to myself, I need to be creative. I need to be succinct because I don't have a lot of time in these presentations at the pier. I need to be biblically sound. I need to be pleasant. And so I started putting these things together, and I came up with some messages that I began to preach at the pier. Usually I have to one side of me a high wire walker. He's only 20 paces away from me. On the other side, another 20 paces to my right, I have, or my left, I have a sword swallower. I also have to think in terms of what the Apostle Paul says, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power, put on the whole armor of God. Then he goes on to say that we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and cosmic forces and the heavenly places. So, I meet opposition, but I realize that the people that are opposing me are under the sway and the influence of the prince of the power of the air. And someone wants to come up and they get my face. Oh man, you don't know what you're talking about. The Bible's full of errors. You're full of baloney. What I've learned to do in the process of time is to listen to people. Let them vent. Let them get the steam out of them. I don't know what kind of past experiences they had. They were hurt by somebody. So I let them speak. And then I'll usually stick my hand out and say, what's your name? Oh, my name's Joe. My name's Bill. All right? Now that diffuses the situation. And I've let them speak. And I'll just ask them a few questions. about some of the things that they said. So I need to listen to what they're saying. And I'll ask them a few questions about this or that. Have you ever read the Bible? Or how much do you know about the Bible? Or what do you think I'm really trying to tell people? I try to get a dialogue going where I'm picking their brains and I want them to find out what's in my mind, what I think is important. But my main goal is to let them know, I tell people all the time, the Bible is the passport to freedom. Most people are prejudging this book. They have no clue what's in it, or they think they know what's in it, but they've never really spent any time looking into it. My desire is to be an evangelist to the lost, salt and white to the lost, and a source of encouragement to my brothers and sisters in Christ. It's a ministry. I've done premarital counseling out there, marital counseling out there. I never know who the Lord's gonna bring to me and what I'm gonna be called upon to do. In the beginning, I did it out of sense of duty. That's it, duty. I'm a believer. God's called me to evangelize. This is the technique that I have to evangelize with. And I had great apprehension, great fear. I would pray for rain every day. Lord, let it rain. Because if it rained, I wouldn't have to go down. One day I was standing at the pier and Sun was going down, and I was waiting until the sun went down before I would do the second message that evening. As I stood there, I began to have this awareness that what I'm doing is a real blessing, is a real privilege, that God has now called me and allowed me to come out to this particular venue and preach the only message given in the entire world through which a person could be reconciled to God. And I realized that this was an amazing thing that God had gifted me with. And I realized that the Lord Jesus went public for me. He identified himself publicly upon the cross with me, a sinner. Now he was giving me the opportunity to publicly identify myself with him, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. And I remember that night. Standing there, and at the end of the message, I said to the people, it is my great privilege and my great honor to declare in your hearing that Jesus Christ is the King of kings and the Lord of lords, and he is worthy of your faith, your confidence, and your trust. And from that point on, I started to look at this from a whole different perspective. Still, yes, it's duty, but now I see it as an honor and a privilege for me to go out into the public eye with this message and to herald these truths to people. I come each and every year to be a part of an event called Swim Around Key West. My good friend, Pastor Bill Welzien, is the race organizer, and we've had a relationship with Bill for several years. We have swimmers that come from several different states and several different countries to be a part of this event. This is the 42nd year that this event has taken place. First wave goes out at 9.15 a.m. The swimmers have eight hours to complete this, and again, what a great event. We thank you that you're such a great and glorious God. We recognize that you're the sovereign God. And that we wouldn't be here apart from your grace. This will be my 102nd. Yes, I have 101 completed. 27 states and 6 countries, 6 foreign countries. We had 183. I think a couple people didn't show up. Maybe we have about 180 right now. And the solos are about 101 or 102. In the name of your first son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. My wife plays a big part in the ministry in that she doesn't try to hinder or hamper me from doing what the Lord calls me to do. So she's very patient that way. Her job was to be a homemaker. She homeschooled our nine children and she busied herself about her duties and responsibilities at home. He has a lot of determination to be in the center of God's will to do what he feels God has shown him what to do. Very great desire to preach the gospel. Some were believers that I met on the pier, and they were encouraged, and they'll come back. They'll say, well, I saw you down here 10 years ago, or I saw you down here 20 years ago, or my wife and I were on our honeymoon, and now we're celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary. It's so great to see you still here. Or someone will come up and say, were you here 25 years ago? Because I think I saw you then. Folks, if you think I'm all wet, please love me enough to come up and straighten me out. Put your faith in the Lord Jesus. Life is short. Eternity is very, very, very long. Thanks again.