Member Spotlight: Board member Bill Kurth

When Bill Kurth came to a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, he kept it to himself.

For two years.

“When I finally decided to accept the Lord, I said, ‘OK, Lord, I’ve accepted you. All I’m going to do is believe,’” Bill says. “The Holy Spirit wasn’t making me very comfortable and finally He kept working on me and working on me. I finally came out of the closet and acknowledged I was a born-again believer and started to grow.”

It wasn’t until a pastor confronted the Lake City, Iowa, lawyer that he admitted to another person that, yes, he was saved.

And then it was like a lion had been loosed.

“It’s like my sister and I said, ‘If this man ever gets saved, watch out,’” says Karen, Bill’s wife of nearly 50 years.

Bill became a deacon at the Independent Baptist Church the Kurths attend in west-central Iowa, started a Bible study in his office which has seen a few men saved, began taking cases for a religious civil liberties organization, and became involved in Christian health care need-sharing, first with Christian Brotherhood Newsletter and then later with Samaritan Ministries International.

The 70-year-old Iowan was the ministry’s first elected member of the Board of Directors, and has since served four terms on the SMI board.

“To be involved in Samaritan Ministries from the outset was to be able to share needs with fellow believers and be able to help them in their time of trouble,” Bill says. “As I keep telling everybody, the most beautiful thing about Samaritan Ministries … is that we’re able to deal with Bible-believing Christians of all sorts. There are many Bible-believing Christians that I wouldn’t want in the pulpit (of his church), but they’re still believers. We are able to fellowship together in this manner and not compromise principles at all.”

The lure of law—and Christ

Bill wanted to be an attorney from his early youth. “I decided to become a lawyer when I was 14 years old,” he says. “I was in a little difficulty and had a lawyer who was lying to me. I decided to go to law school and find out if I was right.”

Bill married Karen in 1959, then things changed soon after that when Karen became a Christian believer.

Bill wasn’t biting, though, holding out for 17 years.

“During all that time, I heard the salvation message hundreds of times when I allowed her to drag me to church,” Bill says. “I never accepted the Lord until I was listening to a Billy Graham show while reading a science-fiction book.”

After becoming a Christian, Bill made changes to his practice. He no longer takes divorce or bankruptcy cases, for instance, and “there’s a great deal of criminal law that I will not have anything to do with.”

In his time as a Christian lawyer, Bill Kurth has developed a reputation as a tough-minded believer willing to stand for the principles of his faith and freedom. One homeschool activist who turned to him for a key test case in Iowa in the 1980s said he has “a reputation for not compromising.”

Bill is comfortable with that.

“I pray it’s true,” he says. “When it’s ‘Thus sayeth the Lord,’ that means that’s what it has to be. Once you start to compromise, you’ve deviated from the Lord’s path that he’d have you walk. Once you’re off the path, it’s so hard to get back on.”

Besides assisting Christian health care ministries and homeschool families, Bill has also taken many Iowa cases for The Rutherford Institute, a conservative religious liberties organization. In May, for instance, he filed a lawsuit on behalf of a former employee of Rockwell Collins, a communications and aviation electronics firm. The client said he was fired for refusing to take part in a diversity-training program that would require him to accept the homosexual lifestyle.

Dealing with challenges

Bill says one of the main things that has helped him to stay on the narrow path over the past 30-plus years of belief has been prophecy.

“Somewhere between 20 and 38 percent of the Bible is prophecy,” he says. “Prophecy, as we’re told (in 2 Peter 1:19), is that sure hope that we have. It is the one thing that we don’t have to worry about. If it (the Bible) tells us it’s going to happen, we know it’s going to happen.”

Not that life isn’t without its challenges.

Though Bill has never had to submit any needs for himself to Samaritan, Karen had a gall bladder removal and some other needs.

“They’ve helped us meet our medical expenses,” she says.

The ministry has also helped them meet other brothers and sisters in the faith, one of the main reasons that Bill and Karen enjoy SMI’s board meetings.

“The fellowship with other believers, the ability to have iron sharpening iron as we discuss why and how we should decide a question when we apply God’s word” are what Bill says he looks forward to.

He says that when discussions become difficult at the meetings, the board members turn to prayer.

“Everyone does primarily what I do and says, ‘Lord, guide me through this one,’ and we discuss it in detail, then appoint someone to provide further research. There aren’t any decisions that are difficult that are made off the cuff or quickly.”

We are glad the Lord brought this “lion” to Samaritan Ministries and has used his tenacity for His glory and for the good of this ministry.