Ben Holloway - 'Little Man of God'

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BEN HOLLOWAY: Little Man of God

Ben Holloway is a fidget.  Always has been.  My memories of him as a kid are that he was undersized and overly active, always moving, even when he was standing still.  It’s not surprising that someone with that much energy found an outlet for it as a drummer.   Drumming was in his blood – his mom, Mary, was a singer, and dad, Starling, was a drummer who encouraged Ben to start playing at an early age.  Starling, who when he wasn’t doing a thousand other things (I guess the boundless energy also ran in the family) had a jazz band back in the 1940s and 1950s and even spent some time playing for Dinah Shore.

Ben and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Madisonville, Kentucky, a town of about 15,000 souls in the heart of the strip-mining coal fields in the western part of the commonwealth.  Ben was exactly two years younger than me – we share the same January 25^th birthday – and we lived at diagonal corners on the block.  He was always a lot of fun to hang with, in part because of his bottomless pit of energy, and in part because we were both a little impish, prone to mischief, albeit harmless mischief.

One of the reasons I was surprised to find that Ben was on the Lord’s payroll was that he was one of the first people I knew who casually took the Lord’s name in vain.  I don’t know why it left such an imprint, but I clearly remember him doing so one day in the presence of his older sister, Finley, and her reply was, “God’s last name isn’t dammit!”

Another reason his current vocation was a little surprising is that in the early 1970s in Madisonville, there were two rapidly growing movements attracting young people.  One was the blossoming of Bible study groups all around the town.  The town was ripe for it.  You probably couldn’t walk 10 minutes in any direction without passing the door of a church or two.  And, since there wasn’t much else to do in Madisonville, the Bible studies provided kids with a great social gathering outlet.  But there was another movement rapidly growing, and Madisonville was earning national notoriety for it.  Drugs were becoming pervasive.  Many teens, and lots of adults, were coping with small-town boredom by getting high.  Kids were getting arrested and kids were dying.  And CBS’s 60 Minutes produced a 1975 report, holding up Madisonville as the poster-child for America’s rural drug problem. 

In early 2011 Ben and I reconnected via Facebook.  I had moved away from Madisonville after my sophomore year in high school and lost touch with Ben.  What I found out after our online reunion was that Ben had lost touch with Ben, too.  He detailed his lost years with drugs, but very passionately described his profound transformational experience in 1974.  During that experience he had a vivid vision of Hell.  That was followed by a complete surrender to the Holy Spirit during which his drug and alcohol addictions were replaced with an addiction for the Word of the Lord (his description, not mine). 

After that experience, Ben began sharing his testimony in churches around Madisonville, and it was in one of those churches, Christian Assembly Church in Madisonville, that he met his wife to be, Karen Roberts.  They were married in 1980.

Ben continued playing the drums and traveled with Christian bands throughout the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.  In 1982 he decided to settle down and he started a home-security business.  On the weekends, he continued to share his testimony.  But in the mid-1990s others began to recognize that he was blessed with a calling to global evangelism.  He began to travel, sharing his story and helping train pastors in foreign lands.  But the more he traveled, the more his business suffered and in 1998, with Karen’s support, he decided to devote his enormous well of energy to full-time evangelism and Impartation Ministries was born.

Through Impartation, Ben focuses on pastoral training and he teaches at conferences throughout the United States.  He frequently takes his message, enthusiasm and passion to conferences abroad in Mexico, the Middle East, Africa, South America and wherever he is called.

Ben and Karen have raised two children and still live in Madisonville, where Impartation Ministries is based and where they continue to be active in Christian Assembly, and where Ben has served in many capacities since 1977.

The following excerpt is Ben's story of his profound conversion experience in 1974.

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TRANSFORMATION

I continued to party and I continued to do drugs and I continued to drink. Until July 14, 1974. That’s when I had this dream.

What I saw in the dream I now know was scriptural. Now that I look back on it it was so cool because I didn’t have any Bible frame of reference. In this dream I saw a very dark place. It was a literal, physical place, like a cave. There were flames burning out of the rocks. I saw people screaming in torment and burning, eternal weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth. It was just incredible. I had no idea what all this meant. But I was later to find out that what I was seeing was the scriptural interpretation of this place called Hell. What was interesting about it now that I look back on it was that none of these young people had talked to me about Hell. It wasn’t something that had been planted in me, it was just something that I saw in this dream. It’s been too many years and I can’t remember how long the dream went on – it seemed like it went on for a very long time. But I remember sitting up in bed in a cold sweat and I was stone cold sober. It was the first time I’d been like that in three years. It was about two in the morning because I remember looking at the clock. I laid back down in the bed and it was soaking wet and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I just tossed and turned all night. And I remember saying to myself – it wasn’t like I was praying – I was thinking out loud, “What does this mean? What does this mean? What does this mean? Why am I dreaming this dream?”

Carol Cummings was one of the teenage girls who had tried to share Jesus with me. She called about eight o’clock the next morning and asked me if she could pick me up and take me to church. I didn’t tell her anything about the dream, I just said, “Yeah, sure, why not. I don’t have anything else to do.” I remember her reaction to that was kind of shocked because she expected me to say, “No.” When I said that I’d go, I remember her saying, “Really?” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll go.”

So she picked me up in time to go to church. We walked into this service and it was a full-blown charismatic full-gospel service with a band and singers. I’d never seen that before. People had their hands raised up. This worship was intense, it was extreme, it was passionate worship. Carol and I sat about halfway back in the building. After about four or five songs, the pastor, Roy Conley, who I’d never met before, takes the platform, comes up to the pulpit and says, “About two weeks ago, I had prepared a message to preach this morning. But I cannot preach that message. I have to preach what the Lord has given me to preach.” He said, “At two o’clock this morning…” – and that got my attention. I had just remembered my experience from a few hours earlier – “…the Lord gave me the message that I’m supposed to preach.” And he took his Bible and he began to preach exactly what I had seen just a few hours earlier. Oh, and he did say this, “This is only the second time in 20 years in the ministry that I’ve ever preached on this subject.” And he preached exactly, I mean exactly, what I had seen just a few hours earlier. And, he said, “I have no idea why I’m preaching this message.”

At that point I hadn’t told anybody. I hadn’t told Carol or my parents or anybody about my dream. I remember the pastor giving an invitation to receive Christ, and I stood there. I was holding onto the pew in front of me until I thought my knuckles were going to break open. It was a hot day, there was no air conditioning in the building and I was shaking like it was 40 below. He said, “We’re going to open up these altars here if you’d like to come and pray, and if there’s anybody here who’d like to receive Jesus and avoid this place that I have just describe, come up.” He preached not only about Hell but about salvation through Jesus and it was not God’s will that anyone should perish but that everyone should have everlasting life. I mean, I’d never heard this before.

I literally stepped out from the pew into the midldle aisle and I ran. I didn’t walk, I ran as fast as I could and I just fell on my face. I didn’t pray this elaborate, wordy prayer because I didn’t know how to pray. I just said, “Jesus, help me.” That’s all I knew how to do. I did say, “Jesus, if you are Lord, if you can do anything with my life, I want to give it to you. Just set me free.”

My emotions didn’t manifest in weeping or anything, but let me tell you what happened next. I was on my knees and oddly enough, there was nobody around me. Nobody was laying hands on me, nobody was praying for me. I think maybe in that situation it was that God didn’t want anybody to touch me or help me pray because I just needed something that was so real, and for lack of better terms, untainted by human contact.

I had my head bowed. I was kneeling and I had a sensation of somebody taking a garden pail with a big shower head and pouring it on top of my head. Hot water. It was so real that I thought some kid had gone to the back of the church and filled up a pail and was pouring water on me. In fact, I know this is going to sound funny, but it kind of irritated me. I’m having this experience with God and some parents have let their unruly kid do this to me! Isn’t that strange?

I was just about to open my eyes and say, “Stop it! I’m connecting with God here!” And when I looked up, I raised my face toward the ceiling, and I opened my eyes fully convinced that I was going to see this garden pail pouring water on my face. When I looked up, there was no pail, but I felt the water cascade over my face, all the way down my chest, over my shoulders, totally like I was standing in the shower. And then there was this sensation like someone taking a toothbrush and just scrubbing me. Every square inch of me. Just cleansing me. It’s the only way I can describe it to you.

You’ve got to understand that for three years I had seen the world through the cloud of drugs and alcohol. When I got up from that experience – and I don’t mean to sound spooky or strange – the sky was bluer, colors were more vivid, I heard birds singing. Things I hadn’t seen or heard in three years. It was like God was showing me the earth that he had created and I was able to see it through eyes and a brain that was unclouded by drugs. I was totally, completely set free from addiction in just a matter of moments.