Alumni Spotlight: Bruce Kelly ‘90

I was born deaf. When I was a young child, I had been getting in trouble at school so my mom decided to make me go to church so that I would behave better. However, the church did not have an interpreter so I never understood what the pastor was saying. I would sit for two hours through Sunday school and the morning service not understanding anything, and after a few years, I just stopped going to church.  When I was thirteen, one of my deaf friends invited me to church. I initially said “no,” but he said that the church had a sign language interpreter. At that time I didn't know sign language very well, but I decided to visit because I wanted to understand at least part of what the preacher was saying. However, the signing during the service was too fast for me to understand, and I didn’t get much out of the message. Afterwards, the leader of the deaf ministry took me out to eat and walked me through the tract, “This Was Your Life.” He took two hours explaining to me my need to accept Jesus Christ as my Savior, which I did that day, the best day of my life.

I had grown up angry that I was deaf because I couldn’t understand what people were saying, but after I got saved, I understood that God had a plan for me, and I wasn't angry about my deafness anymore. At the age of fifteen, I began to feel God’s call to be a pastor. When I was eighteen, I went to Bill Rice Ranch, where I surrendered to his calling. After high school, I attended Trinity Baptist College and graduated in 1990.  In 1994, God led me to pastor the deaf ministry at Greater Portland Baptist Church, and I ministered in Portland, Oregon almost four years.  However, in 1997 God began to burden my heart to become a missionary to the deaf, and we joined Baptist International Missions, Inc. in 1997. We started Deaf Baptist Church in 2001 in Atlanta, Georgia with 3 deaf people.

One of the challenges we faced in growing our church was finding where the deaf people even lived in our area. We weren’t able to pursue traditional outreach methods such as door to door evangelism.  Another difficulty was in finding our own building. Many deaf people are unemployed or have very low paying jobs, which makes raising building funds difficult. After much prayer about purchasing a church building, we found one available for $80,000. We needed the funds within a week so I turned to God for a miracle and remembered the call in Matthew 7:7 to ask for God’s provision. A few days later I received a call from someone who was burdened to give our church the $80,000 we needed for the building. This confirmed that God was at work. The building was in bad shape and needed a lot of repairs to be up to the city fire code.  It took two years to complete the renovations, but we had our first service in the new building on September 16, 2012.