Don Wilton’s office appears more like a museum, chronicling his life on two continents, than a pastor’s study. On his desk, the walls and bookshelves are pictures of his dad, a championship motorcycle racer, and of classmates at a boarding school in South Africa and at Selborne College; a bomb that he defused as a tank soldier; a sketch of the church where he met his wife; a cricket ball from his years as a coach; diplomas; a framed golf scorecard marking a hole-in-one; and portraits of his father, himself and his sons, preaching in the pulpit of First Baptist Church, Spartanburg.
These are among a hundred or so other trinkets and memorabilia – all testifying to past events that shaped the newly elected president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention. Now at age 52, as he looks back at even some of the “painful times,” Wilton observes, “I have no doubt that God intended these things because he had a plan and a purpose for my life.”
One of three sons of a businessman in a resort town in South Africa, Wilton recalls how a dramatic conversion experience through the witness of a Baptist minister redirected his father’s life into the ministry. His father became a prominent pastor and was elected president of the South Africa Baptist convention.
At age 9, Wilton was sent off to boarding school “deep in the heart of Zululand.” Led to the Lord by his father, Wilton was filled with fervor to share the gospel with local tribesmen. On Saturdays, he would often fill a backpack with records and toting a wind-up record player, he would ride a horse bareback into the center of a mud-hut village to share Christ.
During his adolescent years, however, Wilton began hanging around “the wrong crowd” and turned rebellious. “Anger and hostility welled up inside me,” he recalls, adding that he strayed from the Lord to the point of questioning if he had been saved. “I spent worthless hours looking for something I couldn’t find because I was running away from the Lord,” he confesses, describing himself as a “classical prodigal son.”
Civil war in Angola broke out, and after high school, Wilton was assigned to a heavy armory battalion. A close brush with a hand grenade, and another incident when he fell off his tank in the heat of battle, left him asking, “What would happen to me if I died?”
“In all of that, God got a hold of my life. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but I knew I was in a pig pen, far away from God,” Wilton relates. “In my heart, there was a furnace. I was searching for purpose and meaning.”
On the first Sunday night after returning from war, he coaxed some buddies to attend Grahamstown Baptist Church by telling them that the prettiest girls all went there. Sure enough, as he sat in the balcony, a girl on the second row not only caught his eye, but changed his whole world. “The single, absolute best thing that ever happened to me was Karyn because of the influence she has had on my life,” Wilton smiles. Married for 29 years now, they have three children, Rob, Greg and Shelley.
Shortly after they met, Karyn helped put Wilton’s spiritual life back on track. In his new book, “Totally Secure,” Wilton recalls getting on his knees and praying: “I don’t know whether or not I am a Christian. Sometimes I think I am. But often I don’t,” he began. “I can’t go on like this. I must know. I want to be totally secure. I want to know when I die I will go straight to heaven to be with you forever,” he continued.
From that day forward, his life took a dramatic turn. He felt God’s call “to lead people and to encourage their hearts through the word of God.” A pastor from Mississippi on a mission trip to South Africa encouraged Wilton to attend a Southern Baptist seminary in the States, where he could earn a doctorate while preparing for the ministry.
After selling their possessions to pay off his student loans, he and Karyn arrived in New York City with a small suitcase and $1,400 in his pocket.
Wilton enrolled at New Orleans Baptist Seminary, and upon graduation joined its faculty as a professor and spent the next years “preaching, teaching and investing in the lives of these precious men of God.”
Then in 1993, Wilton was called as senior pastor of First Spartanburg. Currently with 6,700 members, First Spartanburg – with two Sunday schools and three morning services – is the largest congregation in South Carolina. But that’s not what interests Wilton.
“I’m interested in a church filled with people who share untold joy together in serving the Lord Jesus Christ,” he explains. “I’m interested in people who have a passion to reach the world for Christ.”
Calling the South Carolina Baptist Convention “a precious jewel” because of its unity and faithful people, he maintains, “All I want to be is a blessing to South Carolina Baptists for one short year. All I want us to do is to keep the main thing, the main thing – sharing Jesus Christ” … along the Way.