Growing up, Paul Carrington never heard the Gospel. A native of downtown Toronto, he took to sports and met his future wife Melinda at a nightclub when he was eighteen. In God’s sovereignty, Melinda was soon converted to Christ—a change which made Paul mad. While playing hip-hop music in his bedroom one night, he began to read the Bible in the hopes of dismantling Melinda’s faith. Yet, in a miraculous work, the same Spirit that had saved his girlfriend gripped Paul’s soul as he read the Scriptures, and he surrendered his life to Jesus. 

Becoming radicalized for Christ, Paul married Melinda. And while they lost old friends due to their witness, their zeal for God led them to share their faith around the world in remote huts in the Kenya bush, in shacks in the slums of the Dominican Republic, and in Muslim strongholds of Western Turkey. Paul and his wife currently live in North Carolina with their six children and remain active in missionary work through the translation and distribution of Christian resources into Turkish, Farsi, Russian, and Arabic. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're gonna talk to one of the speakers at our national conference, Paul Carrington. As you know, we record the life stories of our speakers at our conferences. And Paul Carrington, a dear friend, is gonna come and tell his life story. What a blessing.

I hope you enjoy the discussion of really one of the most wonderful evangelists I've ever known. So Paul, we're old friends. We've been going to church together for a long time. We sent you off as a missionary to Turkey. Your work is still going on there.

Wonderful church members, so thankful for you. It's great to have you here. Thank you. Good to be here. One thing I just want to mention about the Turkish evangelism efforts that you've been involved in, that we've been involved in as a church and are very excited about, is God gave you an idea to create a Turkish language audio app, because just like here, people aren't reading, they're listening.

And so you created this audio app with wonderful gospel resources. Nothing like this has existed in Turkey or in a lot of countries. And Paul Washer and some other guys saw what we were doing and said, this needs to be done in a lot of different languages. So, so far It's Turkish, Russian, and Farsi with Arabic around the corner. But man, I'm so thankful that God gave you that idea, and it's spreading the gospel in other countries beyond Turkey, which we sent you to Turkey.

And anyway, it's just so good to have you back and working really hard. You've also worked at large technology companies, and we won't talk about all that, but a great history, a great work history in great companies. So anyway, it's great to have you here. We just want you to tell us your life story. Sure, yeah, okay.

Well, where should I start? I think when I look back to where I grew up, I grew up in Toronto, downtown Toronto. Grew up in a family with my mom and dad, and then a little later on, they ended up getting divorced, probably in my early, maybe mid-teens around that time. I had two brothers and a sister, and we basically never went to church. I don't think, when I look back, ever met a Christian.

Never had anybody come up to me at least and present the gospel or anything like that, anything remote, so you'd see churches as your passing, but just never really had any concept of who God is, who Christ is, except for maybe some of the just, you know, the name of Christ and so on, but never any real deep interaction. So it wasn't until I was about 18 years old and I was in university playing on the university football team. I was in my first year and where it all started for me is actually with my wife now who was my girlfriend. We met on a Sunday night at a nightclub. I was one of these just guys on the football team that got in, I was actually underage, but the guys were all bouncers, so they let me in.

And so here I was in this nightclub, and a guy walks up to me. It's a lot of music, loud, and he speaks in my ear. He says, which one do you want? And he was pointing to these two beautiful girls, and I said, I'll have that one. And that was literally how I met my wife, in a nightclub on a Sunday night, in a most godless environment you could imagine.

And so we dated on and off for a while, and then she ended up, in the course of time, just to make it quick, she ended up hearing the gospel. And this was probably a year and a half into us knowing one another, and she ended up becoming a Christian. And so when she became a Christian, I didn't want her to have anything to do with Christianity at all. I thought this thing's just, you know, mind control and all that kind of stuff. And so what happened was I said, you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to get my hands on it. It is my, it is my control, life control. And so what I said, I'm going to get my hands on a Bible, and I'm going to dismantle this whole thing and just show her how foolish it is. Well, it was one night, I was in my room, now I'm about 20, and I'm sitting in my bedroom, I'm listening to hip-hop music, and I say, let me see what this thing has to say. And so I open up the Bible, and it opens to the Sermon on the Mount, and I start reading.

And it was even today, it's like yesterday in terms of my memory, but I'm sitting in my bedroom, maybe midnight around that time, and I start reading the words of Christ. And it was just, I'm stopping, I'm listening to hip hop music, and then I'm reading the words of Christ. And that goes on for a while. And I got angry. My first impulse was like anger.

I'm saying, how come nobody ever told me there was another way to live. And I just got this overriding anger. If this is true, then what is this stuff that I'm listening to? These two worlds kind of colliding. Isn't that amazing?

It's the Holy Spirit that did that in your thinking. Yeah, yeah. And I kept reading, and I remember saying out loud, I want to know this man. I didn't have any theology. I didn't know anything about Trinity or anything like that.

I just, I want to know this man. And so what happened that night is I ended up getting all of my, this is 1996, so I had all these cassettes, big, big garbage bag of hip hop music. I filled up all the stuff that night and I walked across the street. We had a basketball court in the middle, you know, where all of us would play basketball. And I dumped all those tapes in the garbage.

I didn't want to give them away or anything like that. And I dumped them in the garbage and walked back to my room and just kept reading. And for me, looking back, that was the moment, Yeah, the Lord, the Holy Spirit really got hold of my life and converted me, I believe it was that night. And so we started- And you had an instantaneous revulsion reaction toward the music and the stuff. God just gave that to you immediately.

Yeah, you have to look at the music, hip hop, not to get too deep into it, but it really is a culture, so it's not even just the music. It comes with a way of thinking, a way of living, the way you look at women, the way you look at your own life everything, It's its own theology, if you will, the whole culture, subculture. And so it wasn't just kind of the music itself, but everything that kind of came with it. So yeah, you ended up losing all my friends and even family started kind of getting concerned and all that kind of thing. They weren't concerned when I was going to a nightclub where people get shot or killed, but when I started going to church, you know, that's where people were getting concerned.

It's very dangerous, Mr. Paul. It really was. Very dangerous. And yeah, Melinda and I, we would just start, you know, we'd start reading the Bible and going to this small, little Pentecostal church, where they would just preach the word of God and so on.

And so that's really how it all began. So, Belinda, okay, tell us a little bit more about Belinda before this time when you woke up. Yeah, so like I said, she was just, you know, she was going to university, a different university in Toronto. And, you know, she was just, you know, living a life like any young woman. She was by herself, living in an apartment, well, with her friend, both of them living downtown Toronto.

And, but she, when I ask her, when anyone asks her, she always had this like gaping hole, you know, that like, am I the only one in this room or my whole life is it really, like, there's got to be more to it than what I'm doing. And so I think when she heard that gospel, it was a simple gospel message, probably the simplest you could ever hear, that really the Lord laid hold of her life. And it was her changed life when I looked at it, this is like, I don't want her to go this way, that jarred me into even looking into Christianity. And so her life changed pretty dramatically just in terms of everything, you know, since she started going to this small little church. And so that's where we ended up going for the first part of our Christian life.

If I'm fast-forwarding too far, let me know, but talk to us about Costa Rica. Was it Costa Rica? Or Dominican. Dominican Republic. Yeah, first it was Africa we went to, and then it was Dominican Republic.

So once we got saved, the first thing I wanted to do—I was 20, but I wanted to get married. And I had other plans before that. I'd never thought of getting married until becoming a Christian. But what happened was we got married, and then we started having children. So the question then arises, what should we do, you know, education-wise?

And so, again, this is where the Lord intervened and introduced us to homeschooling. We had never heard of it before. And somebody came to the church and started talking to us about homeschooling. And so we ended up, long story short, embracing that. And as you do that, you get exposed to different resources about missionaries and so on.

So my heart, once I got saved, was like, if this is true, if a man was dead and he's now alive, what is more important in the world to know? And so that was our natural impulse, I think, both of ours, as we were growing together to tell as many people there in Toronto about the gospel. And so I would just go out and talk to people in the streets, do whatever I could just to strike up a conversation. So that kind of impulse was there, not by anything other than it just seemed the most natural thing in the world. And so as we got exposed to homeschooling, we started getting exposed to missionary work.

And so we started reading things like Hudson Taylor's biography, little kind of the smaller ones and so on. And so we ended up going to Africa because I ended up starting a business and opening up an office in Kenya. And so when I went to Kenya, to Nairobi to do that, the guy that I opened up the office with, he wanted to take his mother-in-law to this kind of like mineral spa way out in the middle of nowhere. It's about five hours north of Nairobi in a tiny area called Lake Bogoria, which is There's a documentary, a National Geographic on it called Hell's Gate. It's got these natural sulfur springs that just people go to for medicinal reasons and so on.

So I ended up going there with him and his wife and his mother-in-law, and they all kind of went their way. And I'm in this tiny little village, and I just walk up to these guys washing their clothes in the river, and struck up a conversation about the gospel, exchange information. And so we ended up moving there, long story short, about two and a half years later, sold everything, and went there and started planning a church and just evangelizing in the villages in and around this little area here. What were some of the learning points from that time? Because you've been in Kenya, you've been in the Dominican Republic, you've been in Turkey, and you've been downtown Raleigh.

Mm-hmm. In the heart of paganism. Yeah, you know what? All those places are different, but what you begin to see is man is the same everywhere you go, and the gospel is the only answer. You talk to these people in these third world countries, The interesting thing about them is no one...

There's no such thing as an atheist. They're just not... They don't have any view of that. They know about sin, because it's all around them, the brokenness and destruction, and they know there's a God, just because God's placed that in all of our hearts. But what they don't know is how to be reconciled to God.

And so to me, it was the beauty of the simplicity of the gospel that really struck me in Kenya, the simple gospel message of who Christ is, why he came, what he commands us to do as people, as human beings, which is to repent and to believe the gospel. So that was our simple message, going hut to hut, sitting down. You know, you have about eight, these burning cups of tea per day, you know, just every hut you go to, that's all they have. You sit outside in these little stools and you talk to them about the God, who he is, read the word and invite them to come and join us, that was simple as that. Preparate, preparation for Turkey.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. So then sometime after that, you went to the Dominican Republic. We did, yeah. So that was a different, so in Kenya, we lived in the bush where, you know, when people from Kenya, Nairobi, came and visited us, they were, you know, they couldn't believe places like this existed. It was just far remote from anything.

You know, you might see a car every three days or something like that. Whereas in Dominican Republic, we worked in a city. We worked in a slum. We didn't live in the slum, but we lived outside the slum. And then I would go in and basically do the same thing.

Go instead of hut to hut, they had corrugated shack to corrugated shack. And it was a very religious country. It's Catholic, but it's a lot of voodoo, mixed religion you get in a lot of these different countries. And so we would just do the same thing. It was filled with prostitution and violence.

One day we had a guy who was the neighborhood hitman. He actually came to a Bible study that we were having. So that's the kind of people that you're dealing with. It's just a terrible environment. Out of a barrio of about 20,000 people, There was only one nuclear family, if you can imagine.

Yeah, it's just unbelievable. It broke in us on every side, but it was a hard environment for sure. And so we went there and labored there before coming to the US. What were some of the learning points from the Dominican experience? Yeah, I think some of the learning there, well, I think personally for me is that I probably ran too fast, like into actually, I got the language pretty quick and then automatically started going out and preaching.

I think it would have been better to probably acclimate my family to an environment like that. I think a big learning part for me was also not going alone. We did go alone to Dominican and to Kenya. But in Dominican Republic, it really stood out. The insecurity of being in a new place and just being a lone family was really, really hard, especially the security situation where as soon as I left the house, we had to lock up all the doors.

You had padlocks on every single door, not just regular locks, because of crime. And so, I think that inbred insecurity of just, no one can go outside, you can't really speak any English, just because of, again, the nature of where you're at, Those are probably the two biggest ones, probably not moving too quickly and then going with a team for sure. So you've been here in Wake Forest for about a decade and then a stint in Turkey and God's given you a wonderful family, children that are a blessing, super blessing to me, I love them, they're so neat. I really am thankful for them and your family. Anything else you wanna tell us about your life?

You know, I think when I look back to right before getting saved, I was at a summer job to pay for school and I was selling alarm systems, just going kind of in these strip malls and trying to sell them to just small little businesses. Well, I went to one where there was a group of like West Indian folks that were doing like a midday prayer meeting. And there I went in there and they didn't buy an alarm system, but they asked could they pray for me? And here I am, I'm just this young guy, and they all surrounded me and I got a little nervous, but they just kind of all laid hands on me and prayed. And when I got saved, which was about two and a half months later, I went back, I drove back, it was about 45 minutes away, just to say, thank you, God answered your prayers.

And these were the first people that have ever prayed for me that I know of. And that place was no longer in existence. They had shut down. And that, to me, has been maybe the single greatest motivation for just preaching the gospel because they won't know until eternity that God answered their prayer in saving a young man that day. You just pray sometimes and you don't recognize that God is indeed answering prayer even though you don't see the fruit of it.

And so that's probably been the single biggest thing that's lodged in my heart of preach the gospel to every creature, whoever it is, perchance God might grant them repentance. You may never see it, but you know that the Lord would potentially do that. So it kind of removes this fearlessness and passivity and apathy of, well, I haven't seen anybody come to know Christ, so what's the point to God is always moving, he's active, he's saving, he's a great God, and he's able to do these things? Well, you know, walking together these years, it's very clear that that's what you do. That's what you do.

You can't help yourself but to say something about the gospel to almost everybody you meet. And I didn't realize that it had such a root, that you had that experience of somebody pointing you that way, so that's what you do now. Mm-hmm, yeah, it's just really, honestly, it just seems like a natural thing to do. I still get afraid or fearful or passive and indifferent and all the things that we all face, but yeah, just what if that person could come to know Christ in the eternal weight of that, I think is the most important thing that men must know Christ. Otherwise life is entirely in vain.

So that becomes a somewhat consuming thing that men might know him and worship him, and God is able to do that. So it's us as those who know him. It's our responsibility to introduce Christ to them. I think that's what I'd like to do at the time I have here. There you go.

So you went to Turkey and you're doing that in Turkey even now, even though you're here in the US. You can't go to Russia, but you're going to Russia. You haven't gone to Iran, but the voice of the gospel is in Iran. It really goes way back to what happened to you at the very beginning. Yeah, it really does.

Yeah, and there's a great team of people that are doing the app work with me. I have a friend in Switzerland and my own daughter, and then those people that are in those countries that are doing the translation work, it's been great. And then of course, those that are supporting it, like HeartCry and others, it's been a great encouragement. So we're hoping that the Lord will use those resources to really strengthen the church on the one side, but also be a means of evangelism and turning people from darkness to light on the other side. Paul, if somebody wanted to just see the app and kind of experience the interface, unless you speak Turkish, you're not gonna be able to understand it.

I've listened to it and it's interesting to listen to, but I don't understand a word of it. Where could they find it? Yeah, you could go to the app store and you just type in heart cry. And you'll see, I think in sequence, you'll see the Turkish app, the Russian app, and then the Farsi app. And hopefully soon in November we're gonna have the Arabic one, but they're all gonna be found under heart cry.

Okay, well, pray for the spread of the gospel. Amen. Amen. Paul, thanks a lot. It's so, so good to be with you, and I can't wait to hear your message at our national conference next year.

And of course, a lot of your messages, you've preached at our conferences before, and also at the Hope Baptist Church website on sermon audio, your sermons are there as well. So anyway, praise the Lord, He rescued you in Toronto. Amen. Amen. Yeah.

Great. Well, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can join us next time, and go check out the testimonies of the preachers at our conferences. We'll see you next time. Encourage you to check out churchandfamilylife.com.