RISCO – It seems that Gene Lancaster has a thought that as long as there is a soul to be reached for Jesus Christ, there is still a ministry need.
Lancaster, 83, is still very much about Kingdom business.
He has spent six decades largely in the southeast part of the state ministering to more than a dozen churches as supply pastor, interim pastor and pastor. Furthermore, he conducted double digit revivals in and out of those churches for years.
As a result, he has seen hundreds give their life to the Lord in salvation.
Gene and Carolyn Lancaster
While he has a definite heart for soul-winning, he treated pastoring and interim pastoring with the same focus on shepherding the congregation.
“I always felt a pastor needs to be a pastor. I tried to visit everyone in town,” he said adding he would do home visitation even as an interim.
As a young man, Lancaster started school at Southwest Baptist College, but left for a time, due to finances and wanting to provide for his wife, Carolyn, and their two boys. His father rented him 160 acres to farm at the time.
But God wanted him in the ministry, reaffirming this calling in a dream.
“I made a deal with God. I’d preach, if my daddy and my brother would get saved.”
So, as he was pastoring Risco Baptist – where he had been saved, baptized and married – he was preaching and the same night at the same time, both his father and brother came forward to accept Jesus.
There were times he held double digit revivals in a year and still pastored. Many times when one church pastorate opportunity ended, it wasn’t but a few weeks that another church was calling him.
More than one of the churches he served called him back to serve again later. He rattles off the baptisms at different churches with little effort, easily surpassing 350 of just a few of the churches he mentioned.
Lancaster has tried more than once to retire, yet he still feels called to minister to churches.
When he was at one church, God again spoke in a dream, telling him he would return to Risco. He told his son Steve, but said not to say anything. Several years later, Risco called him. As Lancaster met with them, he told Steve what he had told him prior.
Included among those he’s reached through the years are family members. He has been privileged to baptize all three of his children, performed weddings of all three, as well as a grandson’s wedding at the Air Force Academy Chapel in Colorado Springs, and he has baptized several of his grandchildren.
His son Steve, a deacon at Risco, held a hayride earlier in October 2021 that drew over 50 people, and almost half of them teenagers. Gene Lancaster shared about “what if you were to die today?” And about nine raised their hands in the dark to make the decision and several others later. On October 17, nine people were baptized.
“I give the Lord the praise and the glory. I’m as excited as ever. “
Some think that, at age 83, Lancaster should slow down, but he doesn’t agree.
“I can think of no better way to die than to be in the pulpit,” Lancaster said.