‘How shall they hear without a preacher?’

CEDAR HILL—The Bible says faith comes through hearing, and now Billy Fuller is ready to lead others to faith, because he can hear again.

Fuller, interim minister of outreach at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Cedar Hill, was a pastor until deafness caused him to leave the pulpit. But after a cochlear implant, he considers himself ready to lead a congregation again.

Efforts by a layman John Ayers, a layman at Colonial Hills, help bring about the restoration of Fuller’s hearing. The two men met when Fuller, who was visiting his mother, noticed Ayers’ cochlear implants.

“He tapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘I see you have cochlear implants. How do those work for you?’” Ayers recalled. He said the question always makes him laugh, because if they did not work, he would not hear the question.

Even after Fuller returned to Oklahoma where he was living, Ayers tried to help him find resources for a cochlear implant, but it did not work out. When Fuller returned to Texas to live with his mother, Ayers renewed efforts.

A state rehabilitation agency helped Fuller gain funding, because an implant costs more than $30,000 per ear. The process took about a year, but at last he could hear.

People need cochlear implants when the 33,000 hairs inside the cochlea stop functioning, Ayers explained. While the eardrum and the small bones inside the ear can be repaired, the cochlea cannot.

Ayers knows, because he began to lose some hearing by age 25 and by age 50 was “really struggling,” he said. He lost all hearing in 2004. He spent one month in bed with vertigo and nausea that accompanied his hearing loss.

He first had an implant for his left ear and, a few years later, his right.

“There are flaws, and there are faults. They are not perfect,” Ayers said of cochlear implants. “But praise God, I catch a whole lot that I wouldn’t.”

The implants send digital impulses to the brain, which is not the brain’s natural way of hearing sounds, he explained. Humans are designed to hear through auditory or percussion methods. So, the brain has to learn to hear in a different manner.

Also, while the human ears are synchronized, cochlear implants are not. They also are not directional. While a person with implants can hear things, he doesn’t know where the sound originated.

Even with their faults, Ayers praises God daily for giving people minds to design the cochlear implants, because without them, he could not hear anything.

Ayers serves Colonial Hills as a deacon and Sunday school director. He also speaks to senior adult groups about hearing loss.

“I do it to bring people out of the closet of deafness. People pretend they hear and you’re in a conversation with them, and they’ll grin and say ‘Uh huh’—they weren’t hearing a thing. They’re just being polite.

“I’m trying to draw them out and say, ‘Everyone doesn’t need a cochlear implant, but there are a bunch of very good devices that can help you,” he explained.

Ayers has done so well with his implants, five universities around the country fly him in for research studies. He also counsels people about cochlear implants online.

Fuller is glad Ayers is such an advocate, because it helped move him closer to where he wants to be—back in the pulpit. Fuller was pastor of First Baptist Church in Graford when he first began to notice a loss of hearing in his right ear about 23 years ago. Tinnitus and dizziness soon followed. A trip to the doctor confirmed he was losing his hearing.

As pastor of a small church, he didn’t have insurance that would cover improving his hearing, so he compensated.

When Fuller moved to Bethel Baptist Church in Weatherford to be pastor there, he also led the music. To help him hear the piano, he moved it to the side from which he could still hear well. Then he began to lose hearing in that ear, as well.

“We tried the hearing aids, and louder was plenty loud, but the understanding of words began to leave,” he said. “Finally, it got to the point where I could not communicate. I couldn’t understand people.

“Preaching wasn’t a problem. Now many times I would be in the pulpit and just have to hang on because the earth began to move,” Fuller said, describing the vertigo that would come on. The vertigo also made it difficult to drive.

“But it was just me, so I did it anyway, and I’ve jumped the curb many times,” he confessed.

The only thing that would halt it was to lay flat on his nose in a dark room for an hour or more, “but you can’t do that and drive,” he said.

“Those things became normal for me, and I worked my way through it, but it got to the point where I could not hear prayer requests, and that’s a major function, at least of the churches where I’ve been pastor,” Fuller said.

“One of the last straws was when a little girl walked the aisle to receive Christ as her Savior. … I couldn’t hear her. That’s heartbreaking, and I realized these people need a hearing pastor,” he said.

He then went to Oklahoma to try to start a deaf church, but it never got off the ground, so he began working at Wal-mart, “mopping 15 miles of floor every night.” He did that until he returned to Texas—and to hearing.

“Now I can hear. I can communicate—I always could talk, but communication goes both ways, and now I can communicate.”