From agnostic to pastor - the Dwayne Fuller story - Part I
Published:Thursday | October 4, 2018 | 12:00 AMPaul H. Williams/Gleaner Writer
The Reverend Dwayne Fuller is an ordained minister and founder of The Vision Center Church of all Nations, which has three campuses. He is pastor at the Hope Road (Half-Way Tree) campus, located at 21 Hope Road, Kingston. In 2012, he was publicly ordained before a presbytery of ministers from multiple denominations.
The St Thomas native is also president of The Greater August Town Ministers' Fraternal, and leads nine churches of various denominations and works in cohesion with their pastors "to bring transformative and collaborative humanitarian and strategic interventions in our given community of Greater August Town", including some communities outside of August Town.
"Together, we partner strategically with various stakeholder groups to deliver a spiritual presence in the communities and to develop our community's children, youth, and adults, including the elderly," Reverend Fuller told Family and Religion.
He said further: "It also means that we provide activities which will lead the community to develop a relationship with Christ, while instilling a sense of lasting peace, neighbourliness, justice through prayer, fasting, fellowship worship, unity, and evangelism. I consider it a tremendous privilege to serve the body of Christ, to provide leadership and to be able to make a significant contribution to our nation's development."
But Reverend Fuller was not always a person who believed that it is "a tremendous privilege to serve the body of Christ". In fact, he said that he was at one point an agnostic - someone who does not believe that there is evidence that God exists.
He attended the New Haven Seventh-day Adventist Church in St Andrew in his early childhood years, but was baptised in the Emmanuel Apostolic Church when he was 18 years old. Yet, during his high-school years, he was an agnostic who found church services boring, thus sleeping through them.
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"During my adolescent years, being an avid student of science, many of the stories in the scriptures seemed far-fetched to me. I didn't see those things of Bible days happening in our time - that is miracles, supernatural occurrences ... . I needed something more tangible than just claims and further evidence to support what the scriptures were purporting to be possible, in written accounts."
The evidence that Fuller was waiting for came in the form of the 'divine healing' of a school friend who became a Christian, he said, after he was healed after attending a church service. He had gone to the church to get help for his left eye after he had gone partially blind.
"There were visible white specks that dotted his eyeball and obstructed his vision," Reverend Fuller recalled. Next week, he tells what happened after his friend visited the church.