Blake Williams
No Clergy. No Tracts. No Denomination. Could the Bible Alone Produce a Church?
Enter the Blake Williams story and the manuscript’s claim that ordinary men reading the New Testament reproduced the same basic church pattern.
The Experiment
Remove the denominational labels and start with the text.
The Blake Williams story appears near the end of the manuscript because Don L. Wood treats it as more than an interesting prison conversion story.
The men agreed to set aside outside religious systems and work from the biblical text itself.
At El Reno, the agreement is summarized in the manuscript with three short lines: no clergy, no tracts, just the words on the page.
That makes the story function as a test. If the apostolic pattern really is preserved in Scripture, what happens when people encounter that pattern without first being taught a denominational system?
Start With the Gospel
Their first major question was not what to call the church—it was how to respond to Christ.
The manuscript describes prisoners reading until the conversion passages became personal rather than theoretical.
Acts 2:38 became especially important. The men understood Peter’s command to repent and be baptized as part of obeying the gospel for forgiveness.
In the first prison setting, fifteen men were prepared to be baptized and Blake Williams joined them, making sixteen.
The book emphasizes the ordinariness of the scene: a child’s swimming pool, a concrete floor, and men trying to obey what they believed the text required.
Peter calls hearers to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for forgiveness.
The Second Test
At El Reno, Blake deliberately stepped back.
After arriving at El Reno in 1981, Blake, Rick Watson, Alan Bullard, and Bud Godwin began the process again.
The manuscript says Blake intentionally stayed largely in the background because he wanted to know whether the other men, working from Scripture, would reach the same conclusions.
According to the book, they did.
That detail is critical to Don’s argument because he does not present Blake as the founder of a new sect. He presents him as someone testing whether the text itself could reproduce the same convictions.
Worship Takes Shape
The congregation’s practices came from passages they believed they could actually point to.
The men read that disciples gathered on the first day of the week to break bread.
They read instructions to sing, so the manuscript says they sang without instrumental accompaniment.
They prayed, read Scripture, taught one another, and rotated responsibilities among the men rather than creating a separate priestly class.
Their practices were not identical to every detail of a modern congregation because prison restrictions changed what was practically possible. But Don argues that the governing pattern remained recognizable.
The disciples are shown gathering on the first day of the week to break bread.
The churches are instructed to teach and admonish one another through singing.
No Professional Clergy Required
The book treats their shared ministry as another continuity test.
The prisoners did not begin by appointing a professional pastor to mediate Scripture for everyone else.
Men participated in prayer, Scripture reading, preaching, teaching, and other responsibilities.
That does not mean the New Testament has no leadership structure. Elsewhere the manuscript argues for qualified plural elders in established congregations.
But the prison story reinforces Don’s distinction between biblical leadership and a separate sacerdotal class standing between ordinary Christians and God.
The Results
The experiment did not remain four men sitting under trees.
The manuscript records that by December 1983, eighty-six men had been baptized at El Reno.
The group was eventually given chapel space for Sunday worship and a separate weekly Bible study.
According to the book, it became the largest religious group on the compound.
Don uses the growth not as proof that numerical success equals truth, but as evidence that the experiment became an actual functioning congregation rather than remaining a private study circle.
What the Book Claims
The Blake Williams story is meant to answer a much larger historical question.
Who Changed the Church? spends much of its argument comparing the apostolic church with later changes in leadership, authority, worship, priesthood, revelation, and salvation teaching.
The prison story asks whether returning directly to the apostolic documents can recover the recognizable pattern without a later institution first authorizing it.
Don’s answer is yes. His claim is that the Word functions like seed: when the same seed is planted, the same kind of life can emerge.
The manuscript presents the prison congregation as a living test of whether the apostolic pattern remained reproducible from Scripture.
Why It Matters
The Blake Williams story does not prove every theological question by itself. That is not how the manuscript uses it. It functions as a practical exhibit placed after the book’s biblical and historical argument. Men without a denominational system began reading the New Testament and, according to the account, produced a recognizable pattern of conversion, worship, shared ministry, and congregational life. The deeper question—whether that pattern matches the church the apostles left behind—is the case the rest of Who Changed the Church? asks the reader to examine.