Blake Williams
Four Prisoners Started With Only a Bible. By 1983, 86 Men Had Been Baptized.
Trace the manuscript’s account of the El Reno prison congregation, from four men studying under the trees to eighty-six baptisms.
March 1981
The second experiment started under trees on a prison compound.
The manuscript says Blake Williams arrived at the Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, after the earlier prison experience that had ended with sixteen baptisms.
There he joined Rick Watson, Alan Bullard, and Bud Godwin.
Rather than simply importing the conclusions of the earlier group, the men began studying again.
The agreement was stark: no clergy, no tracts, just the words on the page.
Intensive Study
This was not casual reading between prison activities.
Rick Watson’s account, quoted in the manuscript, describes the men spending enormous amounts of time studying while also working their prison-industry assignments.
They examined context, wording, and the relationship between passages.
The book emphasizes the effort because Don wants readers to understand that the conclusions were not reached through a quick proof-text session.
Baptism Becomes Personal
The first disputes appeared at the water.
The manuscript recounts Alan Bullard entering the water first.
Rick Watson then wanted to be baptized but initially asked the chaplain rather than Blake to perform it.
According to the story, the chaplain asked for testimony that Rick had already been saved.
Rick’s response reflected the group’s reading of the New Testament: he was entering the water in order to obey the gospel.
The chaplain withdrew, and Blake baptized him.
The prisoners read baptism as part of Peter’s answer to people asking how to respond to the gospel.
Bud Godwin
A letter forced another prisoner to reconsider an earlier baptism.
The manuscript tells of Bud Godwin receiving correspondence explaining that his earlier baptism had been because he believed his sins were already forgiven.
The El Reno study had led the men to a different understanding of Acts 2:38 and Matthew 26:28.
Bud concluded that his earlier baptism did not match the purpose he now saw in the text and was baptized again.
From that point, the manuscript says inmates baptized other inmates according to the biblical purpose they had come to understand.
86 Baptisms
By December 1983, the study had become a sizable prison congregation.
Rick Watson’s record, as reported in the manuscript, says eighty-six men had been baptized into Christ by December 1983.
The institution eventually provided chapel space.
The group assembled on Sunday and also held a Thursday Bible study.
The book describes them as the largest religious group on the El Reno compound at that point.
What They Did in Worship
The practices were chosen from texts they believed they could identify.
The manuscript describes the men gathering around the Lord’s table with bread and fruit of the vine.
They sang without instrumental accompaniment because the New Testament passages they were following instructed Christians to sing.
Men shared responsibilities for preaching, prayer, Bible reading, and leading the assembly.
Even giving had to be adapted to prison restrictions; the broader Blake Williams account says the men gathered and sold aluminum cans to create funds for benevolent work.
The prisoners looked to the first-day gathering of disciples as a pattern for the Lord’s Supper.
The group understood the New Testament’s worship instructions to call Christians to sing.
Not Blake’s Church
The nickname “Blakeites” bothered the man whose name it used.
The manuscript reports that other prisoners sometimes called the group Blakeites.
Blake objected to the label.
That reaction fits the book’s larger presentation of the experiment: its significance depended on the congregation being understood as a product of Scripture rather than a movement built around Blake Williams.
Why El Reno Matters
The prison becomes a controlled test inside the manuscript’s larger argument.
Don L. Wood uses the El Reno congregation to ask what happens when people deliberately remove later denominational authorities from the starting point.
The book’s claim is not that prison conditions magically guarantee correct interpretation.
Its claim is that these men repeatedly encountered the same core pattern Don believes the New Testament itself presents: gospel obedience, baptism, communal worship, the Lord’s Supper, singing, prayer, teaching, and shared service.
For the manuscript, El Reno is not merely a prison story. It is an experiment in what the apostolic documents produce when allowed to set the pattern.
Why It Matters
The El Reno story begins with four prisoners studying beneath trees and grows into a congregation the manuscript says included eighty-six baptized men by December 1983. Its importance in Who Changed the Church? is not simply the number. Don L. Wood treats El Reno as a living test of the book’s central question: if people return to the New Testament itself, how much of the original pattern can they recognize and practice without a later ecclesiastical system supplying it for them?