God’S Doctor: A Texas Physician and the Miracles of God

By Dr. Bob Eckert

What are some of the factors that led to the Jesus movement and charismatic renewal of fifty years ago? How did people hear the Lord so clearly and succeed in transforming the American culture? What kind of radical trust did they practice, and what are some of the secrets they learned about answered prayer and the way God loves to work if hes given the opportunity?

Dr. Bob Eckert was a leader at the famed Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, which in the 1970s was one of the top renewal churches in the world. His fresh insights illustrate how believers tapped into Gods power and presence back then and how they can still do so now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512787177

Dr. Bob Eckert

Dr. Bob Eckert is a graduate of Baylor University and the University of Texas Medical School. He was one of five founding elders of a charismatic outpouring at Houston’s Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, named Church of the Year by Guideposts in 1972. He founded the renowned Fourth Ward Medical Clinic in one of Houston’s poorest neighborhoods and taught at the Houston branches of Baylor Medical College and University of Texas Medical School. His career spans 40 years from eastern Texas to southern Mexico. He and his wife, Nancy, live in Corpus Christi, where they have spearheaded a regional renewal movement.

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Copyright © 2017 Dr. Bob Eckert.

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THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-8718-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8719-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-8717-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017907692

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/20/2017

Contents

Dedication

Prelude

1.   All of me had to go

2.   Transformation

3.   Losing our death

4.   The work expands

5.   Money matters

6.   Redeeming the unredeemed

7.   The Black Panthers

8.   Twelve cents

9.   Getting to Mexico

10. La Concordia and the nuncio

11. The soldiers

12. The priest’s healing

13. Mountain dark, heavenly light

14. Air travels

15. Sulphur Springs

16. Athens

17. Babes in the Lord

18. Ireland

19. Israel

20. Corpus Christi

Afterward

Acknowledgements

DEDICATION

M y heart’s desire was to call this book God’s Autobiography, because it is all about the Lord as He brought glory to Himself in those special occasions recorded herein. As the whole earth is full of His glory, the task of this book is to show a part of that glory. However, an autobiography must be written by the person, not by someone about that person. Because I was not given that assignment, I could not author for that Author.

Therefore, my autobiography is dedicated to Jesus, my elder brother, the Son of God, my Savior, who humbled Himself to become a person, a very little person compared to His status in heaven and across all creation.

I also dedicate it to my fellow little people, to each one of you who walked with us in this journey. You are big in God. Righteousness marked our lives, far above our many imperfections. Unity made us one in Him and it impacted those wherever He sent us. It still shows in the lives of those we touched, and that ripple effect continues. Although our memories fade, the Lord’s record is clear and permanent. We are apples of His eye. He has embedded us together in Him forever.

Our joyful and victorious walk was more than worth the cost.

PRELUDE

O ne evening in the fall of 1964, a Texas doctor with a successful medical practice near Galveston invited an Episcopal priest friend over for dinner. The doctor’s life was changed irrevocably that night and this little book is the result of what happened when he came face to face with God, the Lord, Jehovah, the Creator, Sustainer, and Receiver of all. He is continually active in our lives, even when we think He is not around or watching.

This doctor encountered Jesus Christ, the only perfect human expression of God. That encounter transformed the doctor to such an extent that, at the Holy Spirit’s instructions, he left his profitable practice to pour his life into a community of saints at a dying Episcopal parish in east Houston. He was one of five men raised up to lead the Church of the Redeemer to become one of the most famous churches in the worldwide charismatic renewal that exploded in the late 20th century. In the eternal plans of God, Who is the architect of every detail of our lives, He included a doctor in this quintet. That physician used his medical training to evangelize in the barrios and slums of Houston.

Eventually, this doctor founded the renowned Fourth Ward Clinic in the midst of Houston’s historic black community to provide a standard of free medical care that was praised everywhere from the pages of the Houston Chronicle to a CBS documentary. Both of the city’s medical schools competed in having him teach their students and direct their interns. Medical students from Scotland to the Netherlands traveled to study under him. Later, he was elected president of the Texas Medical Directors Association.

And what were the lessons this doctor was learning and teaching? That God never slumbers nor dozes off. Although He works on our behalf, He is not us-centered, but we do get to come along. We are His workmanship, His custom-made humanity. He is the architect of every detail and always does the right thing eternally. His presence never leaves us and He never ceases to actively function for our eternal betterment and His glory. He stretches us when and where we need stretching, but never more than we can tolerate if we trust Him continually in everything. That is impossible for us, but He can handle the impossibilities and our failures.

Alongside his packed schedule at the Fourth Ward Clinic, this doctor was directed by God to bring medical help to a small village in southern Mexico during a series of visits that transformed that corner of Chiapas state. The anointing of God on the Church of the Redeemer in Houston was so strong that those sent out from it could go about His work with the authority over themselves that Jesus had over Himself. As Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, so were they His adopted sons. As such, they were properly equipped to demonstrate God’s power and they did.

These same saints were sent to Israel and Ireland to do work on behalf of a God who is never late and encounters no detours or dead ends. Every miracle and encounter in these lands had His purpose and was on His schedule. The Lord created time and organizes all situations because He is the Almighty and because all of His creation needs Him and His order fulltime. That makes it possible for us all to be led by his Spirit daily, whether we’re a physician or a physicist.

This same God is still adding us humans, His prime beings, to His eternal family. The story of what he has done in Houston and beyond is all about Him, not us. My testimony is about Him, is designed to display Him and encourage you in realizing that He has not changed from that famous era of renewal more than 50 years ago. I was that 34-year-old doctor whose life was so turned around that fateful evening near Galveston. I gave up my work, my reputation and even some of my family to pursue God, and received back much more than I lost. God has written in my life with His own hand, as He has also written of Himself in your life. Now at the age of 87, I hope that my insights can enable you to see His hand in everything; to align with Him and to cooperate with Him so that you will see the wonders that we saw.

We are His workmanship and are designed to reflect Him. That’s real life. Let’s get on with the whole of it.

Dr. Bob Eckert

May 2017, Corpus Christi, Texas

CHAPTER 1

All of me had to go

T he priest sat across from me at the dining table in our gracious home near the beaches of Galveston. His tale was spellbinding. Here were stories of a God who was not trapped in a 2,000-year-old book but who was alive today and doing amazing things. The Episcopal cleric’s name was Graham Pulkingham.

I began thinking to myself, That’s the Bible! That’s just like it says in the Bible! I began to say some things to God, although to me, He was God, a distant and impersonal title compared to Lord or Jesus or Father. I wasn’t yet able to call Him Lord and I wasn’t speaking to Jesus. Next, I prayed, God, I want that…that which Graham has. I want that.

For me to even admit this desire was a real miracle. I was 34 years old, a successful doctor, married with four sons and on my way up the ladder of success. I had come a long way from picking eggplant, tomatoes, beans, lettuce, strawberries and carrots as a boy at my family’s farm north of Houston. Looking back, it is easy to see that the Lord had been molding my life long before I was born. My paternal grandparents immigrated to America from Germany in 1893. One of those grandparents, Joseph Wilhelm Eckert, had relatives who were sending him to safety. As a peace-loving Catholic family living near Stuttgart, they were of a long line of gardeners for the German kaiser. But they could see that Europe, especially Germany, was gearing up for war. When he left at the age of 19, his family knew they would never see him again.

My paternal grandfather met my then 16-year-old grandmother, Genovefa Rieger, and her parents on the boat coming over to America. After it landed in Galveston, she and her parents settled there but he continued inland to Houston. The shipboard romance flourished and they married about two years later after he had built a home on farmland north of Houston.

1BobCollege.jpg

In 1949 at age 19, Bob was a junior at Baylor University and the proud owner of this 1929 Model A Ford.

Although my grandfather was the only one in his family who emigrated, a large part of my grandmother Rieger’s side came to America as well. My grandmother’s sister became a nun at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Houston and I remember her as a very faithful, gentle and loving woman.

Born in 1930, I was about 3 years old when my appendix ruptured. There were no antibiotics in the early 1930s, no body scans and not much in the way of X-ray equipment. A ruptured appendix with peritonitis was expected to be fatal in those days. I was hospitalized in St Joseph’s Hospital in Houston for several weeks and the prognosis was not good. I did have surgery at first with an open drainage of my infected abdominal cavity. My mother was with me 24/7 praying and tending to me, along with my grandmother’s sister, the nun. My great uncle Walter Hurley, who had raised my mother, was there also.

One day, I remember hearing a voice calling me, saying Come. As a little child, I thought it was the Good Humor man outside my hospital window. In those pre-air- conditioning days, the windows were open. I told my mother that I had to go because I was being called. My mother, Beatrice Eckert, was spiritually perceptive.

You aren’t going anywhere! she said, and set herself to praying again. Her mother had died when she was young, so she had known great loss and she wasn’t about to let go of me. My infection healed and I was sent home. It wasn’t until 31 years later - starting around that evening when Graham and his wife, Betty, came for dinner - that I again heard and accurately recognized that voice.

The years of my youth were nice and peaceful. We were a typical honest, hard-working German farm family living in the Aldine area off of what is now Interstate 69. There was no religious conflict in our family. My Catholic father, Louis Eckert, worked seven days a week cultivating a huge variety of vegetables and my Baptist mother took us boys to the Baptist church on Sundays. I was born again one Sunday when I was 11. Nothing big or new seemed to happen to me that day because I had always believed in Jesus. I merely walked the aisle, shook the pastor’s hand and made a public commitment.

Mama, what’s next? I asked my mother on the way home from church. She thought a bit and said, Well, now you be good and read your Bible. She named several additional good helps. I’m already doing those things! I thought. Year after year, I had attended Sunday school, been on time, faithfully read my Bible and had some coins to put in the offering. There were about 10 things that, if I did them all, I would be 100 percent each week, and I had already been 100 percent week after week for years.

The things of God became less and less important to me during my high school and college years, and I dropped out of church. In my fourth year at Baylor University in Waco, I took a course in organic chemistry that was ordinarily reserved for nursing students and home economics majors. I was pre-med at that point, but I needed that one course to complete a chemistry minor. I had missed the first day of class, during which the professor had given the students assigned seating. On the second day, I was the first student there so, not knowing about the seat assignments, I sat where I wanted. Then a young curly-haired brunette, who was wearing a brown sweater, came and sat by me at her assigned seat. That was Nancy Nance, a home economics major from a ranching family in Nixon, Texas. She needed this same class. She noticed a courteous man with an honest face, who was six-foot-one and a self-confident East Texas country boy. I sensed in her a soft, graceful personality. The Lord had prepared her to be the one I would share life with but that was not obvious to us or to anyone else at the time. As seatmates, we became friends and I was quickly smitten, as she was always so pleasant and warm. Nancy was in a much better spiritual walk than I was, as far as living for the Lord.

We married in 1952 and moved to Houston, where I worked in industrial safety for four years, then attended the University of Houston for one year to qualify for medical school. We had two sons when we entered the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. We lived in an apartment with my study desk in the garage where, above my desk, I posted a picture of a man in a hammock with a drink in one hand. That, I told my family, was my motivator for a high-flying career as a doctor. Once I established a practice, I said, I’d take it easy. I then interned at Memorial Hospital in Corpus Christi, where our third son was born. We returned to Galveston County, where I set up a practice and our fourth son was born.

By 1964, it was nearing time for the Lord to strike. Now I had met Graham while I was in medical school. We became moderately close and our children were close in age. Nancy and I had become Episcopalians and he was the Episcopal chaplain on the medical school campus. On Sunday evenings, about 20 medical students and their wives would gather at the Canterbury House, which was the Episcopal student center. We would spend an hour or so going through Scripture, read some verses, usually led by Graham, then comment on them. By the time we finished, we had either reinterpreted or removed those verses from the Bible by saying, Obviously this doesn’t apply anymore or This is probably a misinterpretation… We did all kinds of things to obliterate the Scriptures and to prevent them from having any effect in our lives. It was a time of the blind leading the blind.

Several years later, we were doing really well in life. I bought a new Plymouth Sports Fury every year, we had a nice, big, fancy home and this farm boy was now Doctor Eckert with all of society’s rank and privileges. We enjoyed a private club in Galveston and I had a partnership in a liquor store. I decided to re-contact Graham, who had moved from Galveston to a parish in Austin and then to Houston where he had become the rector at Church of the Redeemer-Episcopal on the east side of town. I called and asked if he and Betty could come for dinner at our home in Alta Loma, just west of Galveston. It was the fall of 1964 and I was intent on showing him what a great life I had going.

Sorry, I can’t make it this week. Call some other time, he said. I called again the next week. He had the same excuse and said the same thing. The third week I called him, he started giving me a similar excuse when he stopped and said, But we’ll be there. So he and Betty showed up on a Saturday night for supper and a display of my goodies.

After supper when the kids were playing elsewhere, we four lingered around the table. I gave him the first opportunity to describe the things that were going on in his life. Him being a preacher, it shouldn’t take very long, I figured, for him to exhaust his short list of accomplishments. That would give me an hour or two to talk about all the big, wonderful things in my life.

Graham, I asked him, what’s been going on since the last time we were together? He started telling me about God leading him, speaking to him and working through him. Physical, mental and situational miracles had been happening before his eyes. The story of Graham’s stunning personal transformation and that of Redeemer was just getting out. At first, the bishop had told Graham to just give Redeemer, then a dying parish, a decent burial. Graham reached out to the neighborhood, met up with the local gangs, even rode with them in their cars, but nothing changed in their lives. These neighborhood kids ended up wrecking the church.

Meanwhile, Pentecostal types began seeking Graham out and telling him to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Graham began finding verses popping out at him in the Bible about this. He went to New York to visit David Wilkerson, a Pentecostal minister, and saw the powerlessness of the traditional church. Then Wilkerson and a friend prayed over him. He felt a swoosh, as if he was cleaned out from head to toe, and he began weeping. He knew there’d been a change. Graham began seeing changes in the Eastwood gang leaders when he talked to them about Jesus, and he began to see healing miracles at Redeemer.

I listened patiently for a while. As I began to get the picture he was painting, it really disturbed me. What’s wrong with my friend? I thought. Does he have some mental disturbance? Is he delusional? I dismissed that as I had also dismissed the possibility of him being a rank liar. He talked for two hours. After the first hour, it began to dawn on me that his testimony was scriptural. They were things that had also happened in the Bible.

Having been raised in the Baptist church, I knew all those Bible stories about miracles. But for me, those things were in the distant, non-functional, unreal past. Here was Graham, a respected and trusted friend, seated across the table, in living color, telling me of his having seen and participated in actual, biblical-type miracles. For the first time in my life, I was hearing that aspect of the Gospel from someone who could testify to its present reality and applicability. The only appropriate response I could muster during the first hour was to make fun of him, saying, "Graham, you need to see a doctor, and you