Dr. Bill Devlin graduated with his MAR from Westminster in 1989. He is missionary pastor of Infinity Bible Church in the Bronx and volunteer CEO of REDEEM! He specifically travels around the world to war zones in order to both support persecuted Christians and minister to those suffering from conflict. This interview has been compressed and edited for clarity. Reader discretion is advised for some depictions of violence.
Anna Sylvestre: What led you to Westminster?
Bill Devlin: I love telling this story. I was at a very non-Reformed church, and my wife and I were newly married. And there were four brothers. Two were actually graduates of Westminster, and they were serving in a church in southern Florida. And one of my colleagues at the hospital where I worked as a nurse invited me to a picnic and said,“You need to meet these two guys.” I had already been accepted to anon-denominational seminary in the South, and they said, “Devlin,what are you doing? You need to go to Westminster; it’s the ultimate place to study the word of God.” And then at this non-Reformed church, there were two brothers in Christ, and I’d been helping direct a college and career ministry, and they said,“Forget that other seminary; you need to go to Westminster.” I’m not a great student, and I had begun to hear from other people, “Oh wow, Westminster. That’s like the Harvard University of seminaries.” I’m like, “I’ll never survive.”
I had just finished my nursing degree from Florida Atlantic University.We were living in Southern Florida, where my wife is originally from,Miami. And I just remember saying to Nancy, “God is really speaking to me. I’ve got the nursing degree, but God is speaking to me about studying God’s word full time.” So that’s when I applied to Westminster.
I jumped in feet first. We packed up a U-Haul with a two-year-old baby. And my wife was pregnant with our second child. We moved to the Philadelphia area, and it has impacted my life ever since. I just began to swim in what I call the ocean of Westminster theology. I learned about the abundant grace, love, and mercy of God, and also the authority of Scripture, the sovereignty of God, and the necessity of sharing Christ. You know, people often say, “You Reformed people don’t think you need to share Christ.” But I am bold for Christ when I’m in the war zones in Gaza sharing Jesus with Hamas, and when I’m in Khartoum sharing Jesus with Sudanese government officials. (One of my best friends in Sudan is the former foreign minister.) Wherever I go, I’m sharing Jesus. And that was something I learned at Westminster.
AS: Who were some of the professors and theologians you learned from?
BD: I learned from many professors—everybody going back to Ed Clowney,Vern Poythress, Pete Lillback, Cornelius Van Til, Tremper Longman, Sam Logan, Clair Davis, Richard Gaffin, Sinclair Ferguson, Roger Greenwood, Al Groves, Ray Dillard, Ed Welch, David Powlison.
And on a practical level, I learned two things from engaging with them. Number one was personal holiness. And I mean—these guys—their personal holiness and their humility really impressed me. Number two was their devotion and dedication to Christ. So it was not only what I was reading—Herman Dooyeweerd, Abraham Kuyper, Geerhardus Vos—but it was the lives of the seminary professors both in the classroom and outside of the classroom, meeting them on campus, going to their homes. It was really just by a process of osmosis that I learned and grew during the seven years I went there for the MAR. And what I learned at Westminster is still active in my ministry and generating me today.
AS: Can you tell me about your background in ministry?
BD: There’s no question that Westminster Theological Seminary had a deep impact on my life, particularly related to engaging the vacuum of the secular public square. When I was at Westminster, I had already been engaged in ministry for ten years. And I had been in the military. I was only one of two Christians in a unit in Vietnam of 250 enlisted and officers, military men. And so when you’re only one of two people that love Jesus in a very hardcore military unit, you have many opportunities to open up your mouth for Jesus, and so that was really my initial crucible of learning how to engage the hostile public square.
But I learned a lot about ministry when I was at Westminster, too. Beginning there in 1982 and living in the suburbs, we had two young children, and we were involved in the pro-life movement. We began taking in drug addicted HIV positive pregnant young women, as a result of what I was learning at Westminster about the sanctity of life and the sanctity of family and the sanctity of marriage. We lived in Hatfield, PA, which is about thirty minutes north of Westminster. We had been there three years, and we had been taking in these young women, and then an opportunity came up for us to have a three-story, six-bedroom house, and we moved into it site unseen. And once we got there, it was in the city of Philadelphia—the Logan area—and we found out that all the urban social pathologies were present there: so the highest HIV AIDS rate, highest teen pregnancy rate, highest murder rate, highest robbery rate, and lowest test scores. And it really was the worst neighborhood in the city of Philadelphia, but we went there because of what I had learned at Westminster about being an incarnational witness to our culture and society.
AS: What did that witness look like in practice?
BD: We developed what I call the “triple ‘i’ strategy.” We infiltrated, we integrated,and then we incarnated. We went to a place that nobody else would live (infiltrate), and we developed relationships, not only with our neighbors but also with influencers in the city of Philadelphia (integrate). And the reason we were able to live there, even in the midst of all the urban chaos,was because God allowed us to incarnate his abundant grace, love, and mercy.
But this was not easy, and was sometimes even dangerous. One night, when I was returning late from an elders meeting (I had become an elder in the PCA) I pulled up to my home. We didn’t realize that our block had become a drug den, and as I got out of my car, there was a young man that popped out of the bushes in front of our home. It was midnight, March 1, 1987—I remember the day—and I said, “How’re you doing?” And he looked at me and he said, “I want your money.” I said, “Look, I don’t have any money,” and he pulled a big butcher knife out of his hoodie and said again, “I want your money.” I knew what he was going to do with that. I started to run. He caught up to me, and he began stabbing me all over my body. I was out cold for about ten seconds, and the reason I knew it was ten seconds is because I saw him running underneath the streetlight, and I ran after him to share the Lord Jesus Christ with him. A Philadelphia police car pulled up, and they jumped out, and they grabbed me, and they threw me in the back of the police car and drove me up to Albert Einstein Medical Center, where I was cared for.
Why do I share all that? Well, because of another concept that I learned at Westminster from the Heidelberg Catechism: my only comfort in life and death is that I am not my own but I belong to my faithful Savior—body and soul—to Jesus Christ.
AS: What a striking witness to the security found in God’s sovereignty over his children’s lives—both to the young man who attacked you and to the first responders! Could you tell me about how you apply that truth to your current ministry work?
BD: Let me fast forward to the work I’ve been doing the last eleven years.I’ve done 337 journeys as God called me to go to the war zones to minister to widows, orphans, the broken, the neglected, the forgotten, and the lost. And as I go to places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, thirty-three trips to Gaza, Northern Sudan, Khartoum, Nigeria, Ukraine—anywhere there’s a war zone—I can take that same strategy of infiltration, integration, and incarnation, knowing that my life is not my own.
If I really believe that my life belongs to God and my family belongs to God and my ministry belongs to God, then I can go to these places with total abandon. And I can say, “Lord, if I get beheaded in Nigeria, if I get shot in Afghanistan, if I get acid thrown in my face in Pakistan, it’s all for your glory. And for me ‘to live is Christ and to die is gain.’”
When I invite other pastors to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Gaza, to Sudan, to Nigeria, I say, “Hey, will you come with me?” and they always say to me, “Is it safe?” And here’s my retort: I say, “[t]he call of Jesus never gives provision for safety, security, or comfort.” So when I go, I sleep in the tents of the refugee camp; I sleep on the floor of persecuted Christians. That’s why I can go to Sri Lanka after a suicide bombing and rebuild the Zion Evangelical Church. That’s why I can raise the money for medical expenses and income replacement and funeral costs for the twenty-seven adults and fourteen children that were murdered there by an Islamic suicide bomber.
That’s my calling. Do we have a heart for the persecuted church? And are we going to leave the safety and security and comfort and the regularity of our lives here in America, and will we go?
AS: You have shown courage in reaching out to the lost in dangerous parts of the world. How would you advise us to engage with the same apologetic spirit in our respective contexts?
BD: In 1 Corinthians 13 we read, “The greatest of these is love.” When you’re talking about diving into the sphere of government, politics, media, entertainment, business, community, and society, we need to do it with love and with grace and with mercy because that’s what Jesus exhibited to us. Can we get righteously angry? Yeah. Should we be arrested for righteousness’ sake? Yeah. However, I love this verse: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.” So we should have beautiful feet. And I always quote to people that great verse, “I’m an ambassador for Christ.” And, whatever I do, I have to remember that I’m reflecting Christ in every word, in every thought, in every deed, and in every sentence. I need to be a practical theologian doing surgery. So, “let your speech be always seasoned with salt, like apples of gold in settings of silver” (Col. 4:6; Prov. 25:11).
When you’re sharing the love of Jesus and the grace of Jesus and the mercy of Jesus before a watching world, you have to be a surgeon, you have to be careful, not in a wimpy way, but in a way that is going to—what?—attract people, right? Isn’t that what the gospel should do? It should attract people. And that’s not saying that you give up the hard things of the gospel. Jesus said, “Eat my flesh and drink my blood.” He got radical on ’em, right? He said,“Look, this is really why I’m here. I came to die.” He said, “You should come to die as well and follow me.” What does the Scripture say? It says they all went home. So, you can say hard things in a gracious, loving, and kind way. The key thing is don’t give up your principles. Don’t compromise the word of God.
AS: That’s a necessary reminder for all of us, not just those with a public platform. What is the consequence of compromising the truth to soften it?
BD: I’ve learned that the public square abhors a vacuum. So, if a pastor in a pulpit or somebody like me is not willing to speak to the major and minor issues of the day, then evil’s going to get sucked into it, and then we lose our voice, and then bad public policy is a result of that loss.
I learned the word ‘intentionality’ at Westminster. Now, no other professors or my fellow students probably used that word, but I began to understand that if I want to impact and influence and engage the naked public square of planet Earth that we live in, I need to be very, very intentional about that. And therefore, whatever country I’m in—Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Northern Sudan, Ukraine—I mean, wherever there’s a war in the world today—I’m intentionally engaging at a very high level. So, some Christian workers in some of the places where I work are undercover. They’re doing another kind of a job. Maybe they’re engineers or they’re medical doctors. Well, I go in basically with the flag of Jesus flying. I want them to know initially who I am. So I’m more demonstrative in my faith with my words and also with my actions. And I find that when that happens, and I’m intentional about it, and every meeting, every conversation, every one of my trips has a goal to present Jesus Christ and his love, grace, and mercy, and his word, in the public square wherever I am, then that impact and influence is great.