The last things an adolescent Russ Ewell would have likely responded to someone asking him about his future plans are presumably “executive minister at a church in San Francisco” and “working hard to bring people to Jesus.”
In a recent phone conversation, Ewell, the executive minister of Bay Area Christian Church, told Fox News Digital that he is especially committed to winning over the religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” to God because of his upbringing.
Ewell claimed that although he “wouldn’t have anything to do with that,” he “had a lot of friends who were religious” when he was a teenager growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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“They tried to get me to go to stuff and do things, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with it,” he stated.
Ewell believes that the best way to characterize his teenage self now would be to say that he was “agnostic.”
“I was against attending church. I didn’t attend church,” he declared.
Rather, Ewell stated that his goal was to enter the political field and become a politician.
He claimed that when he got to know a man he played basketball with in college, that changed.
“After I got to know him, I learned he was a Christian — and I began to give the Bible a chance,” he stated.