Under John’s leadership, the church with its new building continued to grow and flourish. Several new members and families joined the church during these years, many of whom would remain active parts of the fellowship for years to come.
Mo and Lisa Anvani
John shares a fond memory of one couple who joined during this time, Mo and Lisa Anvani. John begins, “He's from Tehran, Iran. And he married Lisa, who's as white and American as you can get.” He continues:
I did a funeral. I think it was for one of Lisa's relatives. And Mo, her husband, was at the funeral. Well, something I said sparked an interest in him, and he asked to speak with me. He ended up in my office there on Carrier Parkway. We had a temporary outbuilding as offices. I still remember him coming in, and I bet we talked three hours, but he was genuinely converted to be a Christ follower. It was wonderful. He owned a restaurant in Grand Prairie, Mo’s Fried Chicken. And [he was] just genuinely saved.
And while I was ministering to him, his wife sat down. I always met in the slow hours for restaurants, 2 or 3 in the afternoon, for them. And she sat down. She asked me a question about baptism, and I led her to the Lord also. I thought she already knew the Lord, but she was trusting in her baptism.
And in the first week he was attending University of Texas at Arlington, Mo Anvani took the napkin, or whatever piece of paper that I wrote on to explain the gospel to him. He took that to his fellow students at UTA [and] witnessed to 150 of them in the first week, using that piece of paper. That's how radically transformed he was!
Mo, Lisa, and their two sons would become active and faithful attendees of Believers Bible Church for some time.
John and Elaine Beekman
Originally Wycliffe missionaries to the indigenous peoples of southern Mexico, the Beekmans became well known in the missionary and Bible translation world. They’d served throughout the late forties and fifties and during that time helped complete the translated New Testament for the Chol people of Chiapas in only seven years—a remarkably short amount of time. The story of their time in Mexico is told in more detail in James C. Hefley’s book Peril by Choice: The Story of John and Elaine Beekman, Wycliffe Bible Translators in Mexico.
But they’d had to stop active field work and return to the States for health reasons. John had a heart defect discovered when he was young. At one point—before even going on the mission field—a doctor gave John only five years to live. By God’s grace, he’d already outlived that prediction, but mission work was becoming too strenuous for him. Heart surgery was in its infancy at the time, but John was one of the first-ever recipients of a plastic aortic heart valve, which ended up being successful and extending his life by many more years. He became known as “the man with the noisy heart” or “the missionary with the ticking heart.”
Due to his aptitude with translation, John became Wycliffe’s senior translation coordinator, helping to instruct and counsel other translators, and also pioneered the “workshop model” which is still widely used in Bible translation to this day. By the time Believers Bible Church was founded, the Beekmans were in their fifties already and had relocated to the Dallas area for work at the SIL campus. They found the church around 1977 and became regular attendees. John attended for only a few years before his death in 1980—over three decades after he was given only five years to live. Elaine remained a part of the church for years following her husband’s death.
The Beekmans left a powerful legacy both in the missions world and in their family. Their daughter, Judy Van Rooy (nee Beekman) and her husband Steve would later become longtime members of the same church also.
Dave, Doris, and Vange Blood
Dave and Doris Blood had been Wycliffe missionaries in Vietnam in the late 1950s. They worked with the Cham people, learning the local language in order to translate the Bible, and also running a small clinic that served the local area. Dave’s brother Hank and his wife, May Evangeline (who went by the nickname “Vange”) were also missionaries in Vietnam at the same time.
“They were in Vietnam while I was in Vietnam, as a soldier,” Charles recounts. “And [Dave’s] brother Hank was captured by the VC [Viet Cong] and died in captivity.” The full story of the Bloods’ time in Vietnam can be found in the book No Time for Tombstones: Life and Death in the Vietnamese Jungle by James and Marti Hefley. “It’s a heartbreaking book,” Charles says.
According to Doris’s memorial, “In April 1975, Dave, Doris, and their son Jeff left Vietnam as South Vietnam began to fall to a Communist offensive. Dave and Doris moved to Duncanville, where Dave worked to do translation checking for other languages, while Doris eventually became the curator for the Museum of International Cultures at the International Linguistics Center in Dallas.” Sometime after moving to the Dallas area, the Bloods discovered Believers Bible Church in Grand Prairie and became longtime members—along with Vange, Dave’s sister-in-law and Hank’s widow.
Tad and Michelle Cooper
Tad and Michelle Cooper joined the church in the early 80s. Tad would soon become an elder and would be active in the church’s ministry for several years to come.
Tad attended Talbot Seminary in La Mirada, California. After he graduated and they married in 1982, the Coopers sensed that God might be leading them into Bible translation and the mission field. They moved to Dallas area to attend classes at the SIL campus. Tad had previously been on staff at a Bible Church in southern California, so after relocating to Duncanville, he called several Bible Churches in the area—looking for a place not just to attend but to continue serving.
Eventually, the Coopers visited Believers Bible Church in Grand Prairie and were able to connect with John Wecks. “I got excited the first day that we pulled up,” Tad recalls. He explains:
We pulled up to—at that time it was Believers Bible Church—and I looked at the building, and I said, “Honey, we worship in a pole barn!” I grew up in Indiana, southern Indiana, and that's what the facility looked like. It looked like a pole barn, and what that said to me is this church is pouring their money into things other than buildings….I like a pretty church building, but it's like it said something about the people and their priorities at that time.
After a little while, God redirected Tad and Michelle away from their original plans. He shares:
As I went through the schooling, I was enrolled also at UTA in linguistics. And we just realized that, bottom line, I wasn't cut out to be a translator. But by this time I [had done] all the classes, except for the literacy class at SIL, and I took several classes or a handful of classes at UTA. But then I dropped out by that time. We just realized it’s not where God is calling us.
After attending for only about a year, Tad became an elder and a part-time staff member of the church in late 1983. He and Michelle welcomed their first daughter not much later. Tad would continue to serve in ministry, both at the church and through pursuing other mission opportunities apart from Bible translation. At the church, his primary areas of focus were youth ministry and outreach.
Tad says, “[I] worked alongside John Wecks. And basically ... I had been looking for someone who my gifts would complement, and someone who could further hone me, hopefully as a pastor. And it was a real God thing with John Wecks.”
Tad and John soon began doing ministry activities together—or building on the activities that had already been started. “We did like growth groups,” Tad recalls. “We developed a curriculum back in the day for small groups….We tried to give them a decent Bible foundation in their community group setting.”
He adds, “We were trying to build on that. And he [John] had a group. I had a group. We were trying to continue expanding those groups.”
Doak and Gloria Jones
The Joneses, who began attending the church in the early 80s, were a young couple with a two-year-old son (Jeff) and one more (Chris) on the way. Describing their church search process, Doak joked, “We Googled it”—and then adds, “Back then, it was called ‘yellow pages.’” He describes the circumstances that led them to seek a new church:
[Gloria’s] father was an associate pastor in a church over in North Dallas, where we grew up in—a Methodist Church. And her father got transferred up to Sherman at some point, but we kept going. We were in Grand Prairie, driving all the way to North Dallas to go to church over there. And it got to be just so liberal as far as their theology was concerned that we said, “You know, it's not worth driving over here to go to church,” so we just kind of quit going to church. We visited a couple, but ... it was like we’d go to a First Methodist in Grand Prairie, which was about the same thing. So anyway, we kind of quit going.
Doak then recalls reconnecting with a good friend of theirs from their youth group days, who had since gone to Dallas Seminary and become a pastor. He continues:
One weekend our friend invited us to go. He was a pastor down in Friendswood, down around Houston. He invited us to come down there and go to their church and spend the weekend. When we heard him preach and everything, we said, “We gotta go find us a church that preaches the Word like this!”....He pastored a Bible Church. So when we got back, we got the yellow pages out and looked for Bible Churches in Grand Prairie, and there was a Believers Bible Church.
Gloria adds, “It was the only one. So we went the next Sunday and never stopped. Because it was such a difference. You were hearing the Word and the truth of the gospel. Even the way people interacted with you [was] different.”
The Joneses began getting more involved and attending Dick Perkins’s mini-flock. “We started going to that and just developed relationships with people,” Gloria recalls. “That's really important, to get into that sort of environment rather than just the Sunday morning worship.”
Doak and Gloria began attending around 1982. Today, over 40 years later and through all the changes the church has seen over the decades, they’ve remained active members of the same fellowship.
Larry and Linda Jones
Larry and Linda Jones also joined the church in those early years—and became some of its first missionaries to be sent out. Larry recounts their backstory:
We graduated from university in 1976. Linda and I were both involved in training with Wycliffe, for me right out of college. I graduated, [and] I started studies with Wycliffe to be involved in Bible translation. And so we were married in 1977 and moved here [to the DFW area] in early 1978 and started looking for church to go to….And we were very much drawn to the size of the church. We didn’t want to go to a megachurch.…We looked in the phone book. I called John [Wecks], talked a little bit, found out a little bit about his background, and what the church was like, and we attended once and really liked it and said “Okay, this is where we’re gonna stay.”
From there, God continued preparing the Joneses for the next step of their journey.
We were worshiping in [the] Bible Church starting in about 1978. I was in grad school at UTA. Linda and I were newly married and were looking for a church to worship in. At that time John Wecks was the pastor….We started attending the church there, and were involved with a small group that was hosted by Earl and Louise Swain….There were a number of young couples that were there that were sort of shepherded by the Swains.
We were part of the church from 1978 until spring of 1980, when I was granted my PhD at UTA, and we were getting ready to go to Indonesia….There were already quite a number of Wycliffe people who were at the church. There were a lot of Wycliffe people who attended the church because of the proximity of the training center in Duncanville….I think the John Beekman family may have been supported by them at that point, but they [the church] were not supporting very many people from Wycliffe.
So John [Wecks] called me out of the blue and said they would like to consider having us be on there be a part of their missions program, that they'd like to support us. And I was quite surprised because there were lots of Wycliffe people who were attending the church, and so I was a little bit delighted. We were in the midst of raising support to go to Indonesia, but they put us on their budget, and it was very early. We may have been the first field-assigned Wycliffe people who they put on their budget….So they’ve been faithfully with us really since about 1980, so if you do the math that’s quite a number of years—43 years or something at this point, that the church has been very, very consistent and generous.
Larry and Linda would go on to spend 18 years as missionaries in Indonesia and 9 in the Philippines before returning to the States long-term. But they’d continue to serve with Wycliffe—and be involved in the same church fellowship—for many years to come. Larry would later serve in the church as an elder too.
Charles and Vickie Smith
Married in 1978, the Smiths had been longtime members of Pantego Bible Church—the fellowship that had originally established Believers Bible Church as a satellite church of its own. But, living in Arlington, they began growing tired of the longer drive to Pantego. “I was heavily involved at Pantego, with the Christian Service Brigade program,” Charles recalls. “I was gonna make the commander and doing other things. So it [looking for another church] just came up after we got married.” Charles continues:
We heard from the staff at Pantego that one of their missionaries [Craig Prather] had planted a church. And so we showed up one day, and it looked like it was a tackle shop, but on the edge of the city park. But it turned out to be, at the time, Believers Bible Church….They only had the yellow single metal building before it was even decorated. It hadn't been dressed up on the outside.
The Smiths ended up joining the church and becoming actively involved. Vickie became the church secretary in those early days—one of the church’s first staff members. Charles would go on to serve in a number of roles over the years, including multiple stints as an elder. As of 2024, the Smiths still attend the same church, and Charles currently serves as a deacon.
Glenn and Judy Stewart
Like other families already mentioned, the Stewarts had a heavy missions involvement and would end up serving as missionaries of the church. Having grown up as a missionary kid himself, Glenn shares a bit about his backstory: “We went to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and although we graduated the same year, we met later in the home of a member of Believers Bible Church at that time—John and Elaine Beekman, who became matchmakers for us. And we met on December 23, had our first date on December 28, and got married January 19 … a year later.” He comedically adds, “Those of you who know me know I don't move that fast.”
Glenn continues:
When we got back from our honeymoon, we had been attending Rinehart Bible Church and Northwest Bible Church. We were looking for a Bible Church in Grand Prairie, where we had settled in my parents’ home. We were driving down Carrier Parkway [and said] “Oh, Believers Bible Church,” so we moved in there.
We didn't know that Elaine Beekman was a member there. But we had been in the home of Elaine and John, and Elaine became our first missionary supporter. As we got ready to go as missionaries, John Wecks was our pastor. And I remember going in his office and saying, “John, we would like to be missionaries. We've been trained as missionaries. What are our next steps?” He helped us through that. He prayed for us.
After joining the church and preparing to be missionaries, the Stewarts didn’t go onto the mission field until 1986, after John Wecks left the church. But after spending 15 years in Bolivia and 16 in Guatemala, they remain grateful for the continuous support the members of this fellowship faithfully provided over the decades.