Interview With Virgil Walker: Saved Out of Word-Faith Deception

Interview Introduction and Virgil Walker's Testimony

Welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Justin Peters. I hope that this finds you and your family doing well today. I want to thank you so much for joining me for this podcast. I have the special privilege of bringing to you an interview that I did with Virgil Walker.

He is the Executive Director of Operations at G3 Ministries. And I met Virgil a number of years ago, five, six, something or so years ago, and we've developed a friendship over these past number of years.

And he's just a great, great guy and a wonderful testimony. Just a very compelling testimony, very encouraging testimony. And I've wanted to interview him for quite a long time for my channel. And we're just now getting to it.

But his testimony will encourage you greatly, how God delivered him out of some really bad stuff, bad theology and deception, and make you aware of some of the resources that he has that will be a blessing to you and will help you in your sanctification and growth in the Lord Jesus Christ.

So without any further delay, here's the interview that I did with my friend Virgil. Well, Virgil, brother, thank you so much for joining me. How are you tonight?

Fantastic, man. It's always a joy to get a chance to talk with you and interact with you, brother.

Thank you. Thank you so much, brother. Well, I've been wanting to have you on my channel for some time now. And so glad that we have this opportunity. And I just want people to get to know you a little bit.

I feel like I made it, like I finally arrived, brother. So if I'm on your channel, I know.

You know, a lot of people are on my channel for all the wrong reasons.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

You are an exception to the rule, brother. You are on for all the right reasons. Yeah. So you're not going to make an appearance in Clouds Without Water or anything like that.

No, sir. No, sir. But hopefully you would call me long before I got there. You would call me and say, hey, brother. Virgil, you got to pull it back, man.

You got to pull it back.

There you go. There you go. Long before. All right. Well, brother, the honor is truly mine. It's a great privilege. So I want people to just get to know you a little bit. So tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, where you live and what you do.

And then we'll talk about your testimony.

Growing Up in Tulsa and Coming to Faith

Yeah. Yeah. Well, born and raised in upstate New York. I tell people I moved to Oklahoma as soon as I possibly could. But truth be told upstate New York, if you know anything about that part of the country, not much different from a standpoint of country than some places and the rural parts of other states.

But grew up in Oklahoma, Tulsa, Oklahoma, to be exact, kind of the Mecca of the word of faith movement. So that was kind of my backyard. Mom and dad were there, married, was there with them for years.

I would come to faith in high school. Dear friend of mine, John Lindsay, introduced me to Christ and the gospel. And through our relationship, just really learned a lot about what it meant to be a true follower, a disciple of Christ.

And so he was just a dear friend through high school. My college years were kind of mixed up and messed up all over the place. I went to a place called Harding University, which actually is a Church of Christ college.

Didn't know what that was all about for the most part. Just knew my friends were going there. And so that's where I was trying to go. Would leave there, come back home and really kind of get lost for quite a while.

And I'm sure we'll talk about this particularly with regard to personal testimony, but was really trying to find my identity, if you will, kind of where I wanted to land. I knew I had a relationship with the Lord.

I knew that that was a very real expression. I understood the message of the gospel. I understood and could articulate how Christ saved me from my sins and that I knew that it was by faith based upon his grace in my life and my repentance of sin and placing my full faith in his finished work.

All of those things were clear. In the Mecca that was Tulsa, Oklahoma, however, it was difficult to ascertain what I was missing. I was always being told that there was an additional blessing that I was missing out on.

And my parents, interestingly enough, grew up when I grew up in New York, were Kojic. So we were Church of God in Christ. I didn't have a profession of faith at that time, but I knew that as church. Every my earliest memories are growing up in more Pentecostal circles.

And so as I come to faith in Christ, my thought was, I've got to get back to those roots. At the time, there was a movie you may or may not remember. Justin, the movie was Malcolm X. So everybody was wearing the X hats and all of that.

So this was a real kind of time of identity, especially for Black kids. And so I was really struggling with that. And so thinking along with this kind of cultural expression of Blackness, if you will, that I needed to get back to that area in my life as it related to spiritual issues.

And so I'd find myself at Carlton Pierce's church. But just fast forward through that, I would be there for a while. I would take on a job, a number of jobs. Started out in the military and did that for quite some time, about 12 years.

Would then transition into civilian life, so to speak, after getting my college degree. I worked for a pharmaceutical company called Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. Did that for a number of years and did very well in that space.

There's a lot of funny stories combining earning a great income alongside this kind of name claimant prosperity gospel thing. While some of it's funny and humorous, other aspects of it were very, very dangerous and had dire consequences on my family and the like and me personally.

Almost shipwrecked my faith. And so that was definitely a part of it. We would move from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Oklahoma City as a family. I would move from Oklahoma City then to Omaha, Nebraska. And in Nebraska, I would take on a job as a manager for a pharmaceutical company.

And I was managing nine sales representatives across three states. Just I was barely home and really had kind of latched onto my identity as a provider and what that meant and kind of got headstrong about that.

Neglecting the spiritual life of my family and my own personal spiritual walk and journey as well. And again, that's where the tension came from a standpoint of our marriage and the like. And so a lot of tension to the point of almost not just bending, but breaking.

But God and his great mercy just kind of held us together. I didn't have enough really sound theology to keep my head straight. So God just kind of graced me through that period as I began to wrestle with different issues.

My wife and I would kind of reconnect. There's a very brief kind of a separation there. But she would come back. Her family was in Ohio. She would come back to Oklahoma. And then we just kind of tried to figure it out.

We were in a Southern Baptist church at the time. I had come across apologetics. This is the first time ever in my life I even knew how to spell apologetics, much less what it actually meant. And it was through that process that I'd begun thinking about what it meant to defend my faith.

And for me, this was the first time as well. I know I'm running through a lot of content material, but this was the first time that I understood what it meant to love the Lord, love the Lord, my God, with not just my whole heart, but with my mind and strength.

And so it was a new, I felt like in many ways, this was kind of almost like a born-again-again experience, as now I could, it wasn't, my faith wasn't this emotional high. It was rooted and grounded in what it meant to study and read the scriptures, know what they mean, and to be able to defend the faith.

My wife and I were still kind of word of faith, you know, kind of, I call it word of faith light. But we were attending this Southern Baptist Church. And our thought was, honestly, Justin, it was, well, we'll teach our kids all about speaking in tongues at home.

We'll teach them about the gifts of the Spirit at home. And, you know, these poor folks here, they'll just, you know, they only get a partial gospel. That was kind of what we were thinking. And in my journey related to apologetics, I'm online, looking up stuff, learning.

I actually run into you at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, giving a talk about all of the false teachers. Of course, I didn't know that they were false, didn't claim that they were false at the time.

All the false teachers that I had, you know, cut my teeth on and grown up listening to and enjoying, you basically dissected them one after another. So you had the combination of two things. One, my desire to learn more, again, a God-given desire to learn more, to be in the word, to understand it.

And then to hear you rightly divide that in light of the false teaching that was being given. And it was like a light bulb went on for me. And I just was in awe. I couldn't, after that, I tried to find as much material that you were putting out that I could get my hands on.

And I've listened to, especially the talk that you gave at Southwestern years and years ago, so many times. If the internet were a tape recorder, the tape would have broke. So I just all but memorized much of that content.

So here I was moving in the direction where you are, where we are today. And also needing to figure out what it meant for me as a man who had never understood what it meant to shepherd my family, to catechize my kids, what it meant to really study the scripture in a family worship setting, had no framework for any of that.

And I had to figure it out. So I grabbed, you know, Vodibakam, I get a hold of his stuff and drink it down like I'm parched and get as much of that as I can. Family shepherds, family driven faith. And so I'm indulging all of that.

And then again, with your content, what I'm beginning to do with my wife is just share little bits and pieces with her and let her kind of chew on the word of God. And she would do that. And I want to say it was a process of about three years of us really dissecting, exegeting, understanding text of scripture in the light of proper biblical hermeneutics rather than what we had been taught for, you know, 10, 20 years.

And so that was indeed a process. And so we went through that process and came out on the other side and as a result, I got much more active as I now understood the word. I felt like everybody had to know it.

So I got involved in just street evangelism, showing up at abortion clinics and just pleading for the life of the lost. Well, the folks at my Southern Baptist Church began to take notice and just ask me, you know, do you feel like you have a call to ministry?

And for me, at that point, by that point, I was, you know, five years into that whole kind of, you know, deconstruct process, if you will. I know that has a negative connotation regarding, you know, other things.

But this was an important part of that process for me. But once I had done that and really understood the word really well, I was about five years in and I said, you know, for me, I know it's not a matter of if I feel called to ministry.

It's just a matter of when. And I'm in no rush. I'm seeking no position or anything like that. I just love the Lord, love his word, love his people and want to grow in that. And so they were very gracious.

Asked me if I wanted to, if I was interested in an opportunity that they had to come on staff and work in discipleship. And I told them absolutely not for two reasons. One was I did not feel theologically equipped for the role.

I had just started putting myself through, I was working in pharma. So I'd taken some of my bonus checks and put those toward a theological education at Midwestern. And so I was kind of going to school there, kind of going through that process.

And then two, I was still in the pharmaceutical arena and we weren't doing badly. You know, my wife and I, financially speaking, weren't doing poorly. I recognized I wasn't showing up to Creflo Dollars Church.

So there were no jet planes waiting for me. If I made a transition from pharmaceutical sales to the ministry. And I knew that we would take a financial hit and talk to my wife about it. We prayed about it.

And, you know, she really basically affirmed, you know, what took you so long? And I knew that this is where God would have you and, you know, let's move forward. So we did that, got involved there at Westside Church there in Omaha, Nebraska, where I served as the discipleship pastor for about six years and loved everything about what I had the opportunity to do.

They were incredibly kind to me, gracious toward me in so many ways, Justin. I mean, you know, the fact that they knew that I was trying to work on my theological education, they agreed to pay for that theological education, allow me to go to school while I was doing, while I was fulfilling the role.

And then when all of the issues of social justice began to crop up, they were hands wide open. They felt like I had a command of an understanding of the subject matter. And they never, you know, they always promoted my going and coming and doing anything related to that.

So they were very, very gracious in that regard. They were willing to deal with my more reformed, you know, theology as it continued to progress. And that's a whole nother story. But, and understood even in hiring me that at the point that they hired me, I was a five point Calvinist.

And they understood that they were more traditionalist in their perspective. And I tried to, I did my best to kind of honor the leadership there. I would eventually get a phone call. This was in 2020 from Josh Bice.

I had attended G3 in 2017 and had met Josh. And Josh and I would meet, Josh Bice, who, for those who don't know, is the founder and president of G3 Ministries. We would meet from time to time in different spaces and places and connect and have kind words.

And I was watching G3 ministry from afar for quite some time. And I think I just got on Josh's radar screen over that time. And he would watch me on social media and would eventually, especially after about, after 2020, when the George Floyd stuff broke, ask me if I would be interested in doing some writing for G3.

It was just an opportunity to write some blog articles, myself and Darrell Harrison, which I agreed to do. And then that began a conversation that would eventually have me in the role that I'm in now as executive director of operations for G3.

Carlton Pearson, the Gospel of Inclusion, and Universalism

Wow, brother, that is quite the journey.

It is an incredible journey.

That is quite the journey. Well, praise the Lord for the work that he's done in your life. And yeah, I rejoice in that. That is the true work of the Holy Spirit, not all of the charismatic nonsense, you know, angel feathers and gold dust and stuff.

It's what he did with you.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And there's so many amazing things through that journey that God blessed along the way, blessed the work of my hands, blessed the ministry that I was a part of. Just so, so many amazing things. I never...

Justin, I know me, I know Virgil. I know what's in this heart. I know what I need to repent of on a daily basis. And so this is all the grace of God, the goodness of God, the providence of God. And I wake up daily grateful for the opportunities that I've been given.

Amen, brother, amen. Well, can I ask you a couple of more specific questions about...

Absolutely, anywhere you want to go.

All right. Well, you mentioned a name briefly, and I want to return to it, but Carlton Pearson. So there was a season in your life when he was your pastor, is that right?

That's exactly right.

That's not exactly a household name like Joel Osteen is. So tell us who Carlton Pearson is or was and your experiences there and how you ended up leaving that church.

Yeah, Carlton Pearson is now an apostate. But at the time that I ran into him there in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he was the pastor or bishop of a higher dimensions evangelistic center there in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He was very famous, very well known pastor. In fact, there's a Netflix movie called Come Sunday that kind of takes a look at his life. And what's interesting, I got a chance to watch that particular movie, the Netflix docudrama documentary, and it's very, very accurate.

In fact, many of the characters, very, very accurate. In fact, many of the characters who played specific roles, I knew those people personally. I knew exactly who those folks were, his interactions with them, all of those things.

And some of them I even still have access to and not connected with, but know if I needed to reach out and touch one of them, I could. It's that kind of a relationship. But he was a very charismatic, and I don't mean that in a theological sense, but a very charismatic figure.

He enters a room and I'm telling you, he's a thousand megawatt kind of personality. And he's very, very gregarious. He's very warm. If his gaze is on you, you feel very, very important. He was that kind of a man.

This was the first time for me, and I think for many, especially in Black communities where you don't really have a... There are a lot of Black boys in particular who are absent fathers, and girls who are absent fathers.

So in many respects, a large part of his Black congregation saw him as a father figure. And what's interesting now, now that I understand what it means to pastor or to shepherd the souls of a congregation, you could not call him a pastor.

He was a preacher. He was an orator. And more times than not, his theology really revolved around music. He would exegete songs from days of old. The biggest gift that he had was he had a gift for taking kind of the older generation, this generation of grandmothers, folks that would be my grandmothers who would be in their 60s, I'd say from 60 to 80 years old, and bridging the gap between them and a very young audience of 20-somethings.

And he was a wonderful bridge between those. And the way he bridged it wasn't through the exposition of scripture. It was through music that he did it. And just a powerful, powerful presenter. I go back now and listen to what passed for sermons, and I just shake my head.

It's just gobbledygook. It's absolute gobbledygook. But again, folks would show up. The big draw for him and for that church was the Sunday morning experience. I remember showing up on Sunday morning.

From out in the parking lot of the church, if you got there a minute after things had started, you could feel that building just rocking. Imagine a 100-plus-person choir with vocalists who were outstanding.

I mean, any one of them could have been a Grammy Award-winning gospel artist. Any one of the people that were leading. And on any given Sunday, you'd have this old, this elderly woman who would grab a microphone and start singing, and she would wail, and the church would rock.

I mean, it would just rock. And she could pass the mic to anybody else, and any one of them would outdo a Whitney Houston on any day of the week. I dare Whitney Houston to walk up in there on a Sunday morning.

Somebody would hand her her head. I'm telling you, they could do it. So he had an ability just to draw these incredibly gifted and talented artists. And people came to see the show.

They came to see the show.

It had very little to do. Again, the idea of worshiping God was on the top of that. But most of the songs we sang were, if you begin to break them down theologically, they were very man-focused, very man-centered.

Tongues, Prophecy, and the Limits of Charismatic Experience

Yeah, yeah.

So theologically, he was charismatic, but he also was an annihilationist. Is that right? Or a universalist.

Yes, yes. He would eventually lean into universalism. Carlton didn't have much in the way of a theological education at all. I think he took a semester at Oral Roberts University, maybe. He was a part of the singers, the ORU singers, and traveled and quote, unquote, preached.

And that's kind of how he cut his teeth. And he was a favorite of Oral Roberts.

He attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And Oral Roberts himself took Pearson under his wing.

Out of all the probably 25 ,000 students that had gone through there by the time he retired, no one had the kind of access to him as I did. He literally treated me like his son.

And so they provided additional platforms for him. And again, the more you practice preaching, the better you get at whatever style of preaching you're practicing. And so he got very effective at his style of preaching, again, which definitely wasn't expositional preaching.

But yeah, he would eventually, and I watched this trajectory go from one who, he would call himself Baptocostal initially, you know, Baptopentacostal, you know, is kind of how he labeled it. But his theology would eventually kind of deteriorate to the point where he held the belief of universalism, that all were already saved, that you did not have to claim Jesus as Lord, and that even though you didn't, you could be Buddhist, you could be Muslim, you could be Hindu.

Jesus had already died for you, and you were already saved, whether you knew it or not, that there was no, in fact, he would eventually deny the existence of hell.

So now Carlton had come to his own radical conclusion about hell and decided he was going to preach it, that he had to. And so he stood up in that big church of his in front of his thousands of worshipers and.

Lit it all up.

For the first time in all my life as being a Christian, I really not only loved God, I started liking God.

He called it the gospel of inclusion because it included everybody, not just Christians or Evangelicals or Fundamentals. There'd be conflicts, of course, but surely he, of all people, could convince his congregation and maybe the Evangelical community to welcome his new idea that everyone is saved, that hell as a place after death does not exist.

And that's kind of where it stood. Now, I watched that doctrine of everything. That was the one thing that would eventually deteriorate the church into absolute nothingness. People would actually walk out at that point.

And so that was the straw that broke the camel's back. He would eventually find a home in circles that affirmed same-sex marriage, gay relationships. He would eventually land in those spaces. And since that time, I've had an interaction or two with him prior to, I think he ended up blocking me on social media.

We had a few exchanges. I was very cordial. But at this point, I had studied why I believed what I believed. I knew very well apologetics. I understood laws of logic and reason and could identify logical fallacies very well.

And so he didn't have much time or room to really interact with me in a social media.

Space.

Right.

And I'm assuming that he would also, and I'm going somewhere with this, but he also had the ability to speak in tongues?

Yes. Yes, that was preached heavily there, whether tongues and prophecy. And man, I saw some of the weirdest, strangest things there that as a result of that very firm belief that there was modern day revelation that folks could prophesy and get words from the Lord immediately.

And then tongues for those who are continuationists, there was never a biblical framework for that expression, even in that setting. Everybody all the time, every Sunday we're speaking in tongues.

Yeah.

So speaking in tongues, prophesying, words of knowledge, probably some, maybe not during the service itself, or maybe so you would know more, but being slain in the spirit.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Okay.

So all of that stuff was going on. He was practicing it. He could do it. He could do the tongues. And yet, as a universalist, that puts him well outside of the parameters of a biblical Christian. So this was an unregenerate man, lost, false professor of Christ.

Yeah.

And yet he could do the stuff.

Yes. That's very good. That's a great point. That's a great point. I mean, his testimony was, if you ever asked him for his testimony, it wasn't, you know what, I understood the gospel. I came to faith in Christ.

I repented of my sin. I understood the finished work of Jesus. I'm saved by grace through faith in Christ, according to scripture, guys. Well, that was, I've never heard a testimony like that. Testimony was always, I've been preaching since the age of five.

So obviously, from the age of five, earliest memories, he was always preaching. So there was never a saving knowledge of Christ. There was never a profession of faith going from death to life as a result of a clear.

Gospel call.

There was never that. It was always, you know, this, this kid who was mimicking pastors that he knew from the age of five and things went on. So I agree with you. I don't believe he was regenerate at all.

No, no, there's no way it could have been. And, and, but yet he could do all the things that charismatics do. So that, that shows that just because you're speaking in tongues, just because you get words of knowledge, just because you think God is speaking to you and you prophesy and you, you shake and jerk and you, you know, you get slain in the spirit.

So what?

Grace, Providence, and the Next Chapter in Ministry

So right, right, right.

I mean, I, again, I, by the, by the time I got out of all of that, I think there was a, someone wise said, and I don't even remember who it was. It's not, it's not all about how you, how you fall down.

It's about how you get back up and, uh, and what you're going to do as a result of, of having a clarity of understanding of what the word of God says, uh, and, and, and, and how to apply that biblically to your life.

All right. Well, well, brother, thank you so much for sharing your testimony. I mean, you've come a long way by God's grace. He has brought you, um, a long way from where you are.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm so grateful for what God has done. The people he's used like you and so many others who've, uh, declared truth, um, and, and stand on the truth and, uh, preach the truth and, and people I've been fed by, you know, I, I count you as, as, as one of those.

And I'm, I'm so grateful, man, for, for your ministry and what it has meant not only to me, but to, I know many, many other people, but, but personally speaking for myself, uh, for my wife and for our entire family.

So incredibly grateful brother.

Oh, well, oh brother, the affection is mutual and you've been an incredible encouragement to me as well. And, um, thank you. Thank you, brother. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for your ministry.

And, um, as we close, uh, you've written, you've written some books. I want to get people in touch with your resources. Where can people go, brother?

G3 Resources and Closing Benediction

Yeah, you can go to, uh, g3men .org, uh, got two books that I've written, uh, coauthored with Daryl Harrison. Uh, just thinking, uh, about, uh, I almost forgot the title of it. Just, just thinking about the state, just thinking about the state.

Uh, and then, cause we've got, we've got a trilogy. One is just thinking about the state. We're in the middle of just thinking about ethnicity. Third one is just thinking about the truth. The one that's out now is just thinking about the state.

And so that one's out now it's available. And, uh, and you can, you can check that out. You can go to Amazon and get that, uh, wherever, wherever you perhaps buy your books. Uh, in addition, uh, G3 press, uh, has published our other, our, our other work.

Uh, and, and really this one is more of a, kind of a biblical worldview, uh, kind of book at really looking at, uh, issues of fear. Uh, why are you afraid is the title of that one. And we, we had a great time putting that together again, based upon a lot of the work that Daryl and I have done, uh, on the podcast, on the just thinking podcast.

So definitely want to check that out.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

All right. Well, dear ones, I will put the, uh, I will put the links to all of that down below in the description. And so you can click those links and go right to the source and, uh, I highly commend those resources to you, Virgil.

Thank you, brother. Appreciate you.

Hey, thanks for having me, brother.

All right. God bless you, man.

Okay.

All right, dear ones. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope that was an encouragement to you. Certainly was to me. And until our next time together, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of His Holy Spirit be with you all.