My Life in Ministry
I did not grow up in church. Though my family went to church when I was a small child, once we moved away from my family’s hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, we never really got involved in a church anywhere after that. My parents, however, did want me and my siblings to be raised with good Christian morals, so in the summer of 1990 my mom enrolled us in a summer backyard Bible club taking place at our apartment complex. Though I tried everything to get out of going (as an eight year old, you just want to play during the summer!), my mom was pretty persistent and we went. It was there that my faith journey began, when I first really heard about the story of Jesus, prayed to be forgiven of my sins, and asked Jesus to be my Lord. All I had was a King James Bible that no eight year old can understand, and my family still wasn’t involved in any church, so I didn’t experience much spiritual growth for the first several years of my spiritual journey. But when I turned 16, I started to drive myself to church in order to be a part of a basketball program there. From my first experiences in that basketball program, I was caught, hook, line, and sinker. I started to get involved in every aspect of church life that a student could be involved in. I got an NIV Bible and completely devoured it. And the Lord really started to shape my life in him.
As a 16 year old, I started to sense God’s call on my life into vocational Christian service. I started my vocational ministry in the fall of 2000 as a student ministry intern at First Baptist Tillman’s Corner in Mobile, Alabama, and served under two different student ministers there for a couple of years. After the second student minister left, I was asked to take on the interim student minister position. As a 20 year old with little experience in the driver’s seat in a ministry way bigger than I deserved, I was in WAY over my head! I was a student in the Religion department of the University of Mobile at the time, and was learned ministry both from the School of Religion there and the School of Hard Knocks in ministry. But somehow, God blessed that crazy year of my life and taught me more than I ever could have dreamed I would learn at that stage in my ministry. When FBTC finally hired their full-time student pastor, I took on the role of student pastor at Dauphin Way Baptist Church (also in Mobile) while I continued my studies at UM. I served on staff at DWBC for about two years. During that time, I finished my schooling at UM and married my sweetheart. But I could tell that God wanted me to continue my education. So I stepped down from my position at DWBC and pursued furthering my education at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. At first, I commuted from Mobile twice a week while serving as a guest speaker at numerous churches across the Mobile area. Eventually, I could tell that God was moving us away from Mobile. I took a pastorate at a small country church in Mississippi called Crooked Creek Baptist Church and served there for a year while I continued my seminary education. Though Erin and I were very happy serving one of the most loving congregations a young minster could have ever asked for, my heart was still with student ministry. When the student ministry position at my home church, FBTC, became available, we joked about how neat it would be to be able to serve there again but didn’t put much thought into it. But then I was contacted by a couple of people from FBTC asking me to send in my resume. After much prayer, Erin and I pursued the position there at FBTC and God wound up moving us back home. I served as the Pastor to Students at FBTC for almost four years, witnessing some incredible growth in our students and in our church. During that time, God began to work on my heart, giving me a great desire to reach the unreached people of our city. I had felt like my next step from there would be into a church planting role, but I believed that next step would be 10 years down the road. But God had a different plan. Through a series of events that opened my eyes to the great need of our city for new congregations, God cemented in my heart that I had to make a bold step of faith to continue to follow him. He was calling me into church planting, and it was (and still is!) the scariest decision I’ve ever had to wrestle with. But I knew God was and is and will always be faithful, so Erin and I took the plunge and stepped down from our position at FBTC to pursue church planting full-time. If you want to read more about the story, click the first picture on the right under “Important Stuff to Read.”
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