Testimony of Conversion

My name is Justin Newly. When I was little, I began to attend a mission with my parents and my two younger sisters. When I was in the fourth grade, our family moved to another place, and we stopped attending church. Entering adolescence began my spiritual crises, but I did not attend any church. At the age of 19, I attended an evangelistic meeting. That same day God showed me how miserable I was despite my young age. That night while the preacher was speaking, I felt the conviction of sin and repented, asking the Lord to forgive my sins and save me. I began to attend that church where I was also baptized, and there I began to grow spiritually and serve the Lord.

Call to Ministry

In 1991 I felt that God was calling me to the holy ministry. I ignored this call because I wanted to continue serving without that commitment and great responsibility. The following year the pastor and the leaders of my church proposed I attend the mission I attended as a child because the missionary who had attended for more than 40 years had died. With the help of the Lord, our work in that place bore fruit, and that mission became a church. Without almost noticing, God made me get involved little by little, and what I went to do (I thought) for a short time resulted in not putting more resistance or more excuses to the call of the Lord to serve Him full time. I moved again, and we began to work full-time in the Lord’s work. I entered the seminary to study. At the end of my third year, my scholarship was not ratified to attend my last year for defending my position in favor of the doctrines of Grace in front of my professors (all Arminians), which caused me to question if I had really had the call of God to the ministry because now all of a sudden everything had vanished.

From that moment on, with the ‘heretic’ label, who would want me as a Baptist church pastor? But the words of Psalm 138:8 always came to my mind, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose in me.” At that time, I married my girlfriend, Jacqueline Perez Santienteban, and we began to attend a baptist church in her hometown. As expected, the problems began. I was accused of teaching Calvinism. I digress to explain a bit. At this point, with 10 students expelled from the Seminary as Calvinists, many brothers in the different churches began to wake up and ask themselves: all my life, I have believed that God sovereignly chooses men for salvation. If these guys were expelled for believing this, then we are also Calvinists because we believe the same thing.

Providentially there was another Baptist church whose pastor was not on good terms with the Convention. because of some situations that had happened to him. My wife and I started attending his church. We presented our situation to the pastor, who understood us and was very helpful. As time passed, we found other brothers who also held the doctrine of the Sovereignty of God. Until the time of the events at the Seminary, they thought that what they believed was the most natural thing in the world and that everyone thought the same way they did. As was logical, among the group (5 brothers), we discussed these issues and decided to meet to study these doctrines in more depth. Hence we agreed to begin praying to meet separately with a view to forming a church in which we could teach what the Lord in His goodness had shown us through the study of His Word. At that time, we talked to the pastor to let him know what we would do. So little by little, the group grew, not only in number but also in knowledge. On January 24, 1999, we were constituted as a church, and the brethren elected me as their pastor.

In our ignorance, we were like Elijah, who thought he was the only one who had remained faithful to the Lord. On the other side of the scene, God providentially had allowed several of my former Seminary classmates, who had the same fate as me, to travel to the Dominican Republic to IBSJ and meet their pastors personally. There my name came up, and Pastor Sugel Michelén asked to meet me. It was a tremendous blessing to be able to share with Pastor Sugel and his wife, Gloria our experience. When he spoke to us about the Reformed vision, that is, what a Reformed church really is, we told him without hesitation: that is what we want for our church. Even though I was already ordained as a pastor, we asked him to enter into the Ministerial Academy training that would begin here in our homeland and the process of pastoral oversight. I communicated all of this to the church, which was my own decision, warning the brethren that if at the end of the supervision process with the IBSJ pastors, they believed that I was not fit for the pastoral ministry, I would withdraw from the pastorate. We would be waiting for the church to appoint another pastor. After two years, the pastors met with me and said they found no impediment to my qualifications for the pastoral office. It has been 17 years, and our good God has been patient and merciful to all of us. Despite all the difficulties we have gone through during all this time, we can say that His goodness and blessings have been more. I am happily married, and we have two children, Samuel and Idelette, aged 22 and 19, respectively.