Evangelistic Efforts in Southern Oregon

In the winter of 1911, Clarence Frost, a logging contractor in southern Oregon, rented a building in Ashland, Oregon, and opened a bowling alley. A group of Christian people in the area had hoped to obtain the building he had rented and use it for a mission. Without ever meeting him, they began praying for the “bowling alley man.” One night God led him to their meeting, dealt with his heart, and saved his soul. What rejoicing broke out when the people praying with him found that he was the man who owned the bowling alley! He soon helped them transform the building into a mission hall.

The camp meeting of 1913 found Clarence Frost in Portland, where he remained for a few years. However, he carried on his heart a burden for the people of southern Oregon. He began preaching, and in 1919, he was appointed pastor of the Medford Apostolic Faith branch church.

Clarence Frost was very evangelistic minded. He went into communities where he had lived, and many people who remembered his youthful days there as a sinner came to the meetings and were saved. He held a series of meetings in Dorris, California, where people had known him as a drunken logger. More than sixty people were converted in those meetings. Reverend Frost took his evangelistic meetings wherever he found a building that could be used for a temporary church. Meetings were held and souls converted. By the time his ministry in Medford ended (in 1955), that church had become one of the largest branch churches of the Apostolic Faith work in the United States.