Keith Stoller Pastor

Keith Stoller
Pastor
Van Wert, Oh 

All of us have someone that we can say has had a direct impact on our lives. We have someone that has in some capacity, shaped our lives or influenced the decisions we make. Most of us know of these people, we see them every day; they are family, friends, teachers, or preachers. Most of us don’t recognize there are people in the background, in a place just distant enough from our lives that we don’t even know they exist or the impact they have had on our lives. I was given the privilege of meeting one of these people in my life.
Keith Stoller has been serving God for 36 years now and shows no signs of letting up. One of the churches he started, in his willingness to follow God’s call, has been my church home for nearly 20 years. He has never been directly involved in my life, I have only truly known him for three years, and had barely said a few words to him prior to the day of the interview, but the impact of his life’s work has clearly helped to shape the man I am today.
To be a man of God, does not make things easy, in fact in many respects it makes things more difficult. Instead of living for something you want, you live for what God has called you to do and often times it is against what we want for ourselves. Some consider this odd, some would even say crazy, but it is faith that leads us to do the things most consider strange. Keith Stoller is neither odd nor crazy. His faith in God and Jesus Christ has led him to be where he is today through the good times and the bad. His submission to God’s call has left an impact on many lives over the years and hopefully for many more years to come.

Keith Stoller
God’s economy is incredible. At any point in time there is an area of need and every point in time there is a source of supply in God’s economy. All that we have to do as believers is pay attention. Let me tell you a quick story. There was a charismatic church out in California that was just busting the doors of their small building and they needed to build. Well they needed a piece of property because there was no space to expand on their property. So someone gave them an incredible amount of acreage on this mountain top. The only problem is before they could build upon it, that mountain top had to be leveled off. Well it just so happens that in that town was a contractor who had been contacted by Caterpillar, the big equipment maker. Well, they had developed a prototype earth moving machine whose primary aspect or primary purpose was to remove huge rock and level off rocky areas. They called this man to see if he would test their prototype. He offered his services for free to level off this mountain top so they could build their building. He accomplishes the work and the contractor gets back to Caterpillar and they say thanks for your testing but we have determined it is not economically feasible to put this model into production, so they scrapped it. So we have one prototype, one mountain top for one church congregation. That’s the way God works, only God works that way, so incredible.
The defining moment in my life, believe it or not, the moment that really defined my life occurred in my third grade year of elementary school. In the spring of my third grade year [1953/1954], our teacher said “we are going to talk today about what you want to become when you grow up.” Well growing up on the farm and with my dad being a truck driver, I knew I didn’t want to go into truck driving that actually kind of scared me. We were sitting in a semi circle and I was about a third of the way in. So kids started saying what they wanted to be when they grew up, as much as they knew now. At that point in time I hadn’t thought about being much more than a farmer, maybe a fireman [laughing]. But when it came to my turn to speak, I said “I want to be a preacher.” I had to my knowledge never had that conscious thought prior to that in my life. Hearing myself say those words, “I want to be a preacher”, I actually kind of went semi conscious of what was going on the next couple of kids down the row from me. Well, when I came to, I ya know, in a sense, I could not believe that I had spoken those words, but they were clearly exactly God speaking to my tender little heart at that age. That impression was so incredibly impressed upon my life that I knew someday, I didn’t know how, that I would become a preacher.
Now that’s more specifically unique because of the church I grew up in, the men did not surrender to God’s call and go out to Bible College and get called to serve in the ministry. They were just guys in the church that were voted on by the church. The ministry was not something to aspire to by the men in the Apostolic Christian Church and certainly not their wives because it was thought to be a drudgery, a burden placed on men. I didn’t feel free to share with anybody this call in my life because if a man would aspire to the ministry then that would give the impression that man just had a prideful heart and want to stand up before people. So I kept that to myself, in fact my own dad did not know of this experience until 1991.
Well I never told anybody and yet I knew that God had full time claims on my life. So its fascinating as I look back I never shared that with anyone and yet my growing up years out of the clear blue sky people would say “Keith” and after I got saved “brother Stoller, I can see you behind the pulpit someday.” That occurred often enough that I knew God was just re-reminding me that he had called me. All the while I knew that God had called me and I am sure that knowledge kept me, I know it did, it guided some of the choices I made throughout my life, as a teenager and young adult, because no matter how I wanted to and what I wanted to do there was a continuing awareness that God had claims on my life.
I got saved February 7, 1965. To sum up the experience, I had been home all week long enjoying semester break from Bowling Green and I wanted to see my girlfriend, Maxine, again before I headed back. So, the woman who would become my wife, Diana, before we left church that morning asked “when are you ever gonna get saved?” And I said “I dunno.” “You are a fool if you don’t” she replied and I just kind of dismissed it. Well I went to Max’s apartment and walked up the outside steps to her apartment and she opened the door and looked at me and said “what’s wrong with you?” “What” I asked. “What’s wrong with you” she asked again. At that instant the Holy Spirit just made my stomach feel like there was a bowling ball in it and all I could say to Max was “it must be the Lord.” Well I didn’t know how to express myself so I just walked past her and sat down on her couch. I think by that time I had tears streaming down my face and she came over and sat on my lap. We just sat there and cried together for probably five minutes or so not saying a word. Finally I got up and said “Max, I gotta go and I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again or not.” Cause if you got saved and joined the Apostolic Church then you was no longer able to date. You might meet someone who ultimately you would desire to become engaged to and that’s a whole nother story. So I got up and walked out. I got to the restaurant where my family was and just sat there kind of mopey and mom looked at me and asked “what’s the matter son? Ya got girlfriend problems?” I said “no, it’s my girlfriends boyfriend” me “that has the problem.” Later than night, it came to me. I needed to get saved. So I went and told mom and she called up the church elder then I went over and talked to him. That’s how I got saved.
Well I got married and ultimately became a public school teacher. I taught special education at Paulding High School in the 1968 and 1969 school year. I remember a couple of times breaking into tears and Diana would ask “what are you crying about?” I would say “I know God has called me to preach but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to become a preacher.” “I didn’t marry a preacher and I’m not gonna be a preacher’s wife so you can just forget it” she would say. Well I say I taught special education in high school and those kids’ IQ were roughly 65 to 80 or 90 but there was nothing for young people with IQs below 50. I got involved with the Paulding County Association for Retarded Children and God planted in my mind and heart the burden to help start a school. So I was the founding teacher and administrator for the Paulding County School for Retarded Children. We started with six or eight kids that first years but today the Parc Lane program has what, pre-k all the way through to a workshop. It is astounding what God has done with that program over the years. I knew though, in the deep recesses of my heart that I was not doing what God called me to do. I was vocationally very dissatisfied. I was still emotionally immature, spiritually very immature. I went through lots of jobs but finally I could run no further from God’s call so August 21, 1974 I surrendered my life to the Lord, completely surrendered to preach. So I went to the factory where Di worked and called her out. I said “I’ve just surrendered my life to the Lord and if he wants me to be a preacher then we’ll go preach.” I then apologized for the eight years of hell I had put her through with my immaturity and all that.
So as a college graduate with the ability to speak God enabled us to go to Fremont, Ohio where we started our first church called Calvary Chapel. We moved by faith, borrowed a farm grain truck and started making trips from Bryan to Fremont. We had made a survey trip to put an ad in the paper “minister, wife, and daughter need to rent home.” The Lord provided us an incredible three story beautiful home catywompus from the largest Roman Catholic church in town. So we moved there by faith, started Calvary and started door knocking and the Lord led numbers of people to Christ. We had a Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, and Friday night services and then on Sunday. Well Thursday night Marcy [Keith’s daughter] came forward and I led her to Christ. Well at this time we were leading lots of people to Christ and so we planned a baptismal service. Di said to me “I need to be baptized.” Well she, like I had, had been baptized in the Apostolic Christian Church when we joined. So I said “well you don’t need baptized cause you did right before I did.” She answered “no, no I need to get baptized.” I asked why and she slowly spit out the truth the while she had been a church member she never really trusted Christ. All those weeks leading up to planning this ministry she realized that she wasn’t genuinely saved and with a bunch of young people coming to help clean up the building we rented she got scared. So the Saturday before they showed up she sat down with a gospel tract and truly trusted Christ as her savior. Well we baptized five or six folks that first service and my wife was the very first person I ever baptized and the second was my daughter. Today, I have baptized oh 630 or 640 folks in all these years of ministry but the very first was my wife.
One Friday night we were sitting around the dinner table and I had just that day felt the call to go to Bible College. As I prayed for our meal I said “Lord, prepare Diana’s and Marcy’s hearts for what I have to share with them.” We started to eat then all of the sudden Di remembered my words and said “what is it you need to share with s that the Holy Spirit needs to prepare our hearts?” I said “well, sweetheart, God has called us to Bible College.” “You’re kidding” she said. “No, I’m not” I said. She took a few bites and said again “you’re kidding.” Again I said “no.” Finally the third time she said “you are really serious aren’t you?” “Yes” I said. So we went out to Missouri and looked at Baptist Bible College in Springfield. We were impressed so we checked out some classes and rented a house by faith. We came back gave our jobs and landlord two weeks notice, sold as much as we could and packed up the rest in a Ryder truck. That was May 1977 [showing me a picture], I was much skinnier then [laughing]. So we moved out there and I started Bible College.
October of 81 I was sitting in my office praying about the ministry. I had just recently turned down an opportunity to preach at a church in Oklahoma because of the burden I had for the ministry at Baptist Temple [the church he attended and now worked for while going to Bible College] and just too many things aimed to keep us in Springfield. That was a difficult position to be in when people are counting on you and yet you have to do what God wants you to do. So I am sitting here this October morning praying, and all of the sudden the bottom drops out of this burden. I sensed the Lord wanted to do something else with us. Well we moved back to Ohio and found an opportunity to start a Christian school in Clyde. To make a long story short there were a lot of lies told to us. One night, while living in a spare bedroom of some perfect strangers, God begins to build in my heart that he wanted us to start a new church. Well I called a Pastor in Findlay and asked if there were any towns that would be a good place. He suggested Van Wert, Ohio. I hung up the phone and told Di, Van Wert was almost our hometown. I already had the name from a verse I had just read Isaiah 61:1. Jesus is speaking and says “the spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord as anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek. He has sent me to proclaim Liberty to the captives.” We packed up our cars and went to Van Wert. I got a job and found a house to rent. We made a trip back to Springfield to get our things out of storage and noticed about $4,000 of our stuff had been selectively stolen. We had about a 13 hour drive home and we wept but had to decide that all those things were God’s and if he chose to redistribute them, then he would resupply what we needed. We rented a city school building that was no longer in use and began Liberty Baptist Church. We were struggling to pay the bills there and found an office building in town. The building was owed by a doctor and he let us rent it for a year without charge. We kept growing and had to rent an apartment next door and even had to have the teens meet on the vans. Our first year anniversary we had 134 people in attendance after officially starting with 29. Does God honor our faith? He sure does!
Keith Stoller went on to work in other churches in Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan but has recently returned to his “almost home town” and one of the two churches he has started. Today he preaches at various churches from week to week and is even involved in the Heartland Patriots [an offshoot of the Tea Party]. He says “I have always been politically active, so the Heartland Patriots was the vehicle that I could invest my time into and efforts to help restore Godly leadership to our country. I am hoping that whatever little bit of influence I can provide will help spin the tide a little bit.”