My parents, Arthur and Nancy Wilson, were both Deaf. I was born in Columbus, Indiana — the fourth of five kids — and grew up with American Sign Language as the language of our dinner table, our family arguments, our bedtime prayers. We were all fluent in two worlds before we knew that was unusual.
Columbus sits almost exactly halfway between Louisville, Kentucky and Indianapolis, Indiana. That geography matters more to my story than I fully understood as a kid. Hollis Maynard was preaching for the Deaf in Louisville. Bob Anderson was preaching for the Deaf in Indianapolis. They would make the drive to Columbus, teach, and help plant the church where my parents became followers of Jesus. In 1959, Bob Anderson baptized them both.
My mom and dad loved Jesus with everything they had. They taught me that faith doesn't need sound to be real. Every Sunday they were in their seats. Their hands told the story of the gospel better than most voices I've ever heard. Because of who they were, I found who I was supposed to be.
In 1977, Hollis moved from Louisville to Lubbock, Texas to found the Deaf Ministry program at what was then the Sunset School of Preaching. Growing up, he would take our family to the Christian Camp for the Deaf in Guntersville, Alabama each summer. Later, Bob Anderson — who had gone to California to work with the Deaf there — eventually joined Hollis at Sunset as well. Because of these two men, I grew up knowing that Deaf ministry was real, that it was serious, and that Sunset was the place where it happened. When I graduated high school, moving to Lubbock felt less like a decision and more like an obvious next step.
Here is what still stops me when I think about it: two hearing men drove to a small town in Indiana, taught a Deaf couple, and helped plant a church. That little church in Columbus — not a school, not a program, just a handful of Deaf believers gathering in the name of Jesus — is where it all started. Those two people came to Christ. They raised a family. They eventually moved to Lubbock themselves — and my parents, my mom and dad, enrolled at Sunset alongside me. When we graduated, we made a little history: the first father and mother to graduate together with their son from the Sunset School of Preaching. A Deaf couple from Columbus, Indiana, and their boy — all three of them, on the same stage.
That small church produced preachers, teachers, missionaries — servants of Jesus. Hollis and Bob planted it and moved on. God grew it across generations. Now I serve at the very school those two men founded, doing the same work they did, for the same reason they did it. The school is not where the story began. It is what the story produced.
That is what happens when one Deaf person gets trained. That is the ripple effect. That is why this work matters.
I enrolled in the Adventures in Missions program at Sunset. The year after I went through, my future wife went through the same program — we weren't married yet — and she did her mission work on Long Island and Staten Island, New York. All four of our kids have gone through AIM as well: our oldest served in Guadalajara, Mexico; our oldest son in Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras; our youngest daughter also in Honduras; and our youngest son in Guatemala. It's not something we planned as a family legacy — it just became one.
Since then I've done mission work in Cozumel, Mexico, spent time in Perm, Russia, and traveled through Scotland — but my heart has always come back to the Deaf community. I served as the American Director of Ciudad de Angeles in Cozumel for years, and eventually came home to Lubbock to serve in the program those two men built.
Today, I'm a husband — married to my wife since March 2, 1990 — and a dad to four kids and grandpa to three grandkids who are the absolute delight of my life. Precious, every one of them. My wife works as a professional counselor at the Children's Home of Lubbock. We care deeply about kids and families, and that shapes everything we do.
I'm also a Licensed Professional Counselor, part of the Open Church family here in Lubbock, and the founder of Straight Truth Press. But if you ask me what I am, my answer is simple: I'm a disciple who wants to help other people become disciples — in every language, in every nation, beginning with the 98% who have never had the chance.
