Charles Homsher’s Life
Charles Homsher was born October 30, 1925 in Brighton, Colorado. He was the youngest of 4 children. He grew up in Springfield, Colorado. In high school he enjoyed playing football and basketball with his fellow teammates.
At the age of 14 Charles attended a citywide revival service held in his home town where he made his decision to trust Christ as his personal savior. That became a turning point in his life.
After graduating from high school, Charles joined the Navy. This took him to Iowa for naval training followed by one year at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He attended Montana School of Mines for one year while still in the military. He wanted to be a pilot for the navy, but with World War II winding down, the pilot training opportunities weren’t available. He was discharged in Chicago from the Navy in June of 1946.
He returned to Colorado after a summer of traveling to enroll at CSU in Fort Collins to study animal husbandry. After a semester, he went back to Springfield to help take care of his father. Back in Springfield, he started farming, taught Sunday School at his church, and also served as a deacon. He attended special meetings in a little town called Campo where he answered a call to serve Christ in ministry.
He married his hometown sweetheart, Peggy Hopkins, April 22nd, 1949. While plowing the fields with his Ferguson tractor the summer of 1949, he felt God telling him there are greater fields to plow to win souls than to remain farming.
He sold his tractor, and he and Peggy moved to Denver so that he could enroll in Western Bible Institute to train for the ministry. There he received his bachelors of theology. He then went on to attend Baptist Bible College where he received his bachelor’s of religion. He taught three years at Western Bible College.
During his time at Western, he became a father to a daughter who they named Janice. He had his first bus route that he kept for the six years while he attended and taught at Western Bible Institute., now Colorado Christian University. During the summers while he was at Western, he traveled with a gospel team that conducted revival services across the country. He expanded his bus ministry, purchased a bus, and with his wife Peggy held Bible classes in the project areas of Denver taking the gospel to the underprivileged of Denver. They called this The Hour of Truth. Within a few years with upgrading the program it became known as Mobile Bible Time. God blessed this ministry and 700 children were reached.
In 1956 he was called to pastor the Highland Baptist Church in Boulder, Colorado where ministered for ten years. During this time Mobile Bible Time expanded into fellow pastor’s churches that were within the fellowship that Charles participated. These pastors started using Bible Time in their churches to replace the traditional VBS. This is when Mobile Bible Time became Neighborhood Bible Time because the emphasis was to reach the neighborhoods of the participating churches.
Pastors who left Colorado churches to serve in other states brought Bible Time to a national level because they would request the program to come to their new church location. It has spread internationally through the years as well, because ministerial students, who have traveled with Bible Time putting on the program, have become missionaries and taken Bible Time to their places of service.
Over the past 60+ years Neighborhood Bible Time has been in hundreds of churches and impacted the lives of hundreds of men who have come for the summer to be the representatives of Bible Time to the churches that have chosen Bible Time to be a part of their summer outreach. Throughout the years Charles conducted revival services and held extreme impact teen youth revivals as well.
Even though he wasn’t playing an active part in the ministry any longer, he was a faithful prayer warrior for the ministry and all his friends. When he said he was praying for you, you felt the power of his intercession to God on your behalf.
He has been preceded in death by his wife, Peggy, brother Forrest and sister Mary, parents and many friends.