About Us

Who We Are

Hello! My name is Rick Carter Sr. My wife of nearly 45 years is Eunice.

I was saved at a new church plant in the summer of 1960. I remember the church’s organization service and the special offering they took up to pay the newly-installed pastor.  I can’t help believing this experience was the seed for my heart for church planting. My wife and I started our first church in 1976. We didn’t have a clue what we were getting ourselves into.  I went in and got a job, found a house that would double for a church and began to knock doors.  We planned to spend the rest of our lives there, until one day God spoke to my heart concerning moving on.  My heart was to do what God wanted, so we didn’t give it a second thought. God sent a candidate the following Sunday and the church gave him a 100% vote. Two weeks later we were meeting with another group of folks, who were driving over 50 miles one-way to attend a good church, about starting one in their community.

We continued to be faithful to lesson, but through the years it became difficult to find families who would take the churches in small town Kansas. We grew discouraged with the results and felt God leading our ministry in a different direction. In 2001, we moved to Mustang, OK with a heart to start Lighthouse Baptist Church. We chose Beth Haven Baptist Church to be our sending church as they had invited us and had been praying for Mustang already. I had driven from Kansas to teach in their Bible College for several years. We went to Mustang with a mission to have: 1. souls saved 2. preachers called and 3. churches planted. In the mean-time, my oldest son became pastor of Beth Haven Baptist.  To make a long story short, Lighthouse was doing great. We had sent out our first missionary family and was in the process of trying to restore a small church about 20 miles from our church. But with all this going on, I still felt God moving us.  During that time, my son asked me to consider coming on staff at Beth Haven and helping lead the school, primarily in a Vo-Tech style, to start churches. Well, here we are three years later, and we are on our second church in the OKC area. We take students out of our school and go to an area where none of our sister churches are knocking doors and work to establish a church there.  Beth Haven encourages the families in that area to attend and support the new work.  I believe the heart to start churches to be directly related to the fact that God has called 10 men to the ministry in Beth Haven in the last couple years.

We are still on the learning curve, but believe we are using a multiplying model that could work for your church. We started with a goal to start 15 churches in the OKC area in 10 years. We believe it can be accomplished if we can get other churches to catch the same vision. Just think what could be done in our great country if our churches get a vision to start a church 20 minutes down the road from them!

Church planting is a never-ending job. At least until the church is called up to be with the Lord.

When we look at churches of Asia, we see different spiritual climates. And strong warnings from John if they didn’t continue to work on themselves. I’m sure you know of strong soul-winning churches that have all but shut their doors. It’s a sad reality, but churches go by the way.

The other issue has to do with the ability of the church to reach their own community. Many people drive to be in church when nobody is reaching their neighborhood. The mega church philosophy appeals to our ego. It’s very impressive, but the sad reality is they have the same limited sphere of influence as does a small church.

These are the reasons we continue to start churches.

What we are trying to do at Beth Haven is utilize the resources we have – men called to preach and preparing for the ministry in our local school, piano players, song leaders, teachers, as well as families that live in the given areas that we want to start churches in. We encourage them to be involved in the new work in their area. We respect sister churches, but at the same time want to make sure there are no gaps where people are slipping into hell! What it basically boils down to is: pastors will have to give up their greediness.

Did I mention I’m trying to raise support?

1. We believe the Authorized King James Bible is the Inspired, Inerrant, Infallible and preserved Word of God for English speaking people and use it exclusively.  We accept the Bible as the supreme and only authority in faith and life.  We do not however hold the Ruckman position of double inspiration.
2. We believe in one God, eternally existing in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
3. We believe that the Genesis account of creation is to be accepted literally, not allegorically or figuratively; that man was created directly in God’s own image and was not a matter of evolution or evolutionary change of species.
4. We believe that Jesus Christ was begotten by the Holy Spirit, and born of Mary, a virgin, and is true God and true man.
5. We believe that man was created in the image of God, that he sinned and thereby incurred not only physical death, but also that spiritual death which is separation from God and literal eternal judgment in Hell and the Lake of fire: and that all human beings are born with a sinful nature, and, in the case of those who reach the age of moral responsibility, are sinners in thought, word and deed.
6. We believe that the Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures as a representative and substitutionary sacrifice, and that all who believe in Him are justified on the ground of His shed blood.
7. We believe that Salvation is by grace through faith without the addition of any works.  We believe that repentance is necessary to salvation.  We reject the doctrinal errors of both Calvinism and Arminianism. We believe in both the response of man, and the sovereignty of God, that when man chooses to accept salvation, he is kept by the power of God unto the day of redemption (eternal security).
8. We believe in believers only baptism, that baptism by immersion is an answer of good conscious toward God. That salvation and scriptural baptism are requirements to membership in the Local New Testament Church, but that baptism holds no saving power.
9. That the Church of our Lord is a viable, local, self governing body of believers who have been baptized and that there are only two ordinances: baptism and the Lord’s supper, both of which are administered only to believers.  We reject the doctrine of the universal church.
10. We believe that upon salvation the believer is sealed and indwelled by the Holy Spirit of God. We are non charismatic, and do not believe that speaking in tongues, or signs and wonders are actively being used by the Holy Spirit of God today.
11. We believe in the resurrection of the crucified body of our Lord, in His ascension into heaven, and in His present life there as High Priest and Advocate.  We believe as well that because of His bodily resurrection we will also be bodily raised and given a new glorified body to live with Him forever
12. We are dispensational in theology and believe in a Pre-Tribulation Rapture of the saints and a Pre-Millennial return of Christ to set up His literal Kingdom on this earth.