About Pastor Richard von Eye

I was raised as a child in the denomination of the Church of Christ. My family was the three church services a week type that was pretty much typical of the times and every Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening we attended services at church. I have always been sort of a maverick (now a day referred to as a “geek/nerd”) and from elementary school through high school was the kid in school everyone picked on. I started the first grade when I was 5 years old and was a year younger than all of my class mates which did not make the situation any better. My peers were rather brutal on me growing up in the early 1950’s and the 1960’s. What started out as name calling escalated by junior high school to groups of bullies trying to catch me on my way home from school to beat me up. Since I had very few friends outside of the church I could associate with, the church youth group was the peer group I associated with and I found comfort in reading my Bible and studying it. When I reached high school I had more questions than the answers I could find in the Bible and my self esteem was pretty much non existent. I was in a pretty depressed state the majority of the time and in the 10th grade one of my few non-church friends introduced me to alcohol for the first time. It made me feel wonderful and eased the hurt of the constant harassment I had to go through everyday at school. It did not take long for me to become addicted and by the time I was ready to graduate from high school, I was sneaking around my parents and drinking every day. Suffice it to say, I will refrain from going into detail about the things I was put through by the people in that town. With all that had transpired up until my graduation from high school, I pretty much became the black sheep of the church youth group and began to get ostracized there as well. The very people at church who should have reached out to me and pastored me with reproof, correction, and love… publicly in front of the congregation withdrew fellowship from me (that is what they call excommunication in the Church of Christ). My reaction was that I never went back there again and was in a state of self isolation my last few months in high school.

Upon graduation, my parents immediately enrolled my in college since the Viet Nam draft was going on, since student exempt status meant not getting drafted. The college was in a neighboring city and I was exposed to a whole new group of peers who did not have it in for me. It was 1968 and the campus hippies welcomed me with open arms. We were all misfits with a mission of peace, resistance to the war, and desire for love and happiness. I grew my hair long (down to the middle of my back) and in the time it took to do that had tried pot, mescaline, peyote, acid, speed, barbiturates, and anything that could make me good and “enlightened.” I started searching for truth in all the wrong places. In my search I joined the Bahai Faith (they kicked me out for drinking – was against their teachings), tried Transcendental Meditation, got caught up in a coven of witches, I was introduced to the Muslim religion by a foreign student friend (son of an Arab oil minister), read the Bhagavad Gita in an attempt to get into Hinduism, and finally read “The Little Red Book” by Chairman Mao Zedong. I had pretty much wore myself out by that point in my search for enlightenment and truth and none of it made me feel in any way enlightened or spiritually satisfied. All of this transpired form 1968 to 1974. Guess you could say I was a professional student, switched major prior to graduation to continue with student exempt status and avoid the war draft another few years. I had given up on finding truth and was happy being an alcoholic drug addict at this point. It was then when I had given up looking, that a campus outreach ministry found me. They were different from the church people who had so quickly judged me on my wrongs when I was in high school and they ministered God’s Word to me. They taught me that God was a loving God and not something poised with a hammer over my head to whack me when I messed up. They welcomed me into their fellowship and I felt a burden lift from my heart. They were not only an outreach and teaching ministry, they were a ministry who taught how to do Biblical research and Biblical research became a passion to me. Finally I knew how to find the answers to the questions I had when I was younger and getting those answers removed the barrier I had placed between myself and God for the past 7 years. I finally received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and became a Spirit filled Christian. With this filling of the Holy Spirit I felt the first compelling call from God to go and do His work. In the summer of 1975, the Viet Nam war draft was ended and an opportunity was made available to me to be of service to the body of Christ and answer God’s call to me.

From 1975 to 1979 I served as a church planting missionary here in the US in Wisconsin as part of the Biblical teaching and research ministry I had become involved with in college. It was during this time that I learned to read and study the scriptures from the original texts in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek. After my return from the mission field, I ran a Bible study fellowship in my home until I got married and gained a family (I adopted the two children that came with my wife) and two children followed. In place of the in home Bible fellowship I eventually became a Sunday school teacher in the church we compromised on and was attending. I could not ignore the calling God had placed on me and teaching was a large part of that calling.

In November of 2001, I began going through a period of dealing with discouragement, when my marriage of 13 years ended. I did not feel worthy of serving my fellow believers in any capacity and let the hurt of the divorce hinder me from being a servant to my brothers and sisters in Christ. I channeled all of my energy into my work instead of what God had on my heart to do. To feel better I spent the majority of my spare time studying the Bible and working the King James scriptures from the original Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew looking for a whole new set of answers to questions I had never anticipated needing answers to. It was this Biblical research that opened my spiritual hearing to hear God still constraining me to continue working for Him. I had no clear direction I could understand other than ministry and pasturing and I began to look for a means of ministerial confirmation.

I was ordained as an independent minister on March 29, 2004 but was uncertain what God had for me to do ministry wise, and until I had clear direction and opportunity to proceed, I participated in prison outreach for a period of time. Still not certain in my heart what God’s purpose for me was, In January 2005 I tried to start an Internet consulting and web design business, but I never could even succeed in getting any business. I finally prayed to God for the answer to this problem and the answer I got was not what I expected. The compelling thing I felt in my heart was to use the talents God gave me in Internet technology & marketing, to use the Internet to reach the maximum amount of people possible with the truths of God's Word. I replaced my business website with the ministry web site. A business of my own was not God's will for me and I gave up my business idea to devote all of my effort to the Internet ministry, reaching out to people in need of the salvation of the Gospel via the Internet and pastoring brothers and sisters in Christ who had lost trust in traditional churches because of spiritual injuries they had received from them (my heart went out to believers who had been hurt by a church).

For the past 34 years I have spent more hours studying and researching the Scriptures than 40 theologians would do to obtain their doctorate in Biblical studies. I am more comfortable with a Bible in my hands than most people are with a fork and knife at the dinner table. God’s Word, the Bible, is the food my spirit craves constantly and the more I learn the more I see I do not know. God put the idea in my heart that the way to learn more is to share what He has taught me, as I give out the understanding of His Word, the more He opens the eyes of my understanding to the knowledge He has recorded to us in the Scriptures. The ministry He has called me to enables me to pass along the truth He has taught me in greater depth than I would be able to share in a traditional church setting where I am limited to dishing out meager 30 to 45 minute doses of the Scriptures at a time. If you ask me a Bible question on the Internet, and my brothers and sisters in Christ who have can attest, you get an in depth covering of the subject starting with Genesis and going through the book of Revelation. That is how I continue to learn and I am far from knowing it all. I have come to realize over the years that God means what He says and says what He means and that the Bible is a totally accurate an infallible source for understanding God’s will for us all. In the few years that this ministry has been around, I have seen God provide open doors to teach His Word that I have never in my wildest dreams imagined. The ministry is named, The Way of Christ - Internet Outreach & Teaching Ministry. The ministry's mission is to hold forth God's Word to people who have not had the opportunity to hear the Gospel, provide a source of learning for people who are already born again believers, and show hope to people who are searching for hope. To make available a source of true knowledge that enables protection and hope for God's people and continued blessings for their children and children's children. And, to pastor and nurture my brothers and sisters in Christ that God sends my way.