The Fall of Bill the Baptist

(Part II) 

Mike Montgomery has been a ministry partner with Bill for the last three decades.  He has seen Bill’s monumental rise and devastating collapse.   He is recalling the regression from the subtle miscues to the inexcusable follies.  He tells these stories with a sense of regret, wondering if any of it could have been foreseen and thus prevented.  I sit across from Mike, who rubs face, as the memories may be too much.  “What was rock bottom?” I ask.   He laughs and shakes his head.

“When Bill peed in the baptismal.”

In a dark room Bill watches the old tapes, the images fill the large screen, making him larger than life.  Bill’s booming voice surrounds us, and we clearly see his passion.  An older man walks into the pool, and Bill takes a step to help the man in and slips just slightly.  On a screen like this, the mistakes are clear too. 

The spirit and the flesh are always at war with each other.  In the summer of ’89 Bill began dropping people.  “The first few times we chalked it up as a laugh, a simple bloop,” Mike says.  “Even Michael Jordan missed a free throw.  But it got worse.”   

Not only did Bill start dropping people during their baptisms, but his baptismal diction was beginning to raise some eyebrows.  At his peak, Bill has baptized thousands upon thousands and in multiple languages, on every continent.  His baptism structure and style was as diverse as those he was baptizing.  His ability to adapt to culture and context was uncanny and revolutionary.

“Because of Bill’s and Art’s impact and influence many now believe that doing baptisms are mostly about technique.  But they’re wrong.  It’s all mental.  You lose the mental edge, and you’ve lost everything.”  Mike remembers the mental threads beginning to fray.  “We were watching film one day after a pretty terrible set of baptisms.  Bill wanted to figure out what went wrong.  He’s picking apart his form and technique.  He’s saying, ‘Look at my feet, they’re not under my shoulders.  They’re too close.  Look at the wrist, it’s too loose.  I didn’t have my hand up high enough.’ Stuff like that.  And I’m sitting there, watching the same tape, and I’m in complete shock.  He’s totally oblivious.  Finally, I say, ‘Bill.  It’s not your form.  You did the whole service in Chinese.  We’re in Fort Worth, Texas.’”

There were certainly concerns and questions among the baptizing circuit, but after Bill the Baptist’s prolific career, many were giving him the benefit of the doubt.  After years of being the forerunner of technique and structure, most believed Bill to be experimenting yet again.  But some things were simply unexplainable.

“He would baptize fifty men in one night and call each one ‘sister,’” Mike laments.  “He’d replace ‘privilege’ or ‘honor’ with ‘regret’ saying: ‘It’s my regret to baptize you my sister in the name of the Father-‘ and then dunk them, and people would just be confused.  That was another issue.  Sometimes he’d forget about the Trinity.  One time Bill baptized 115 people only in the name of the Father.  That was a theological train wreck.” 

Due to Bill’s inconsistencies and erratic behavior, Mike and the team decided to send Bill down to the minors.  “It was tough for a lot of reasons, but we thought at the very least Bill could do some infant baptisms.”  This proved to be a grave mistake, as the format of infant baptisms were able to mask the problems but not actually fix them. 

After a month of “successful” infant baptisms, and believing Bill to be back in form, he was invited to head up the largest baptism of all time at Madison Square Garden.  10,000 were planned to be baptized; the would-be pinnacle of Bill the Baptist’s career, would turn into the abyss. 

With the bright lights of the most famous arena shining upon him, Bill began to do what he had been doing three decades previous, baptizing.  “The first few hundred went off without a hitch,” Mike said.  “Then he just hit a wall, and he got sloppier and sloppier.  He’d phrase the Trinity as all one word.  He’d just mumble, fathesonhospit.  And then dunk.  We were about to pull him, when all of a sudden he just locks up.  I remember that spotlight shining in his face, and his eyes all glazed over.  He didn’t do or say anything.  And then I hear a woman shriek, ‘He’s peeing in the pool!’  It was chaos after that.”

No one died, but over 225 people had to be sent to the hospital in the stampede that followed.  Bill’s spirit was all but broken.  They sent him down once more to take care of the infants, but after a handful of parents reported their newborns missing, the crew decided it was time to close the shop.  It was Mike Montgomery who had to break the news.

“I thought, I’m going to have to give an account to God Almighty.  I am responsible for shutting down one of his greatest instruments.  I prayed that God would have mercy on my soul.  It was one of the worst days of my life.” 

(Check back for Part 3 to conclude the story of Bill the Baptist)