When I returned to Houghton College for fall semester, I started thinking about military chaplaincy. However, I still had some growing up to do. I was hanging with the wrong crowd even though I still had a pocket of good friends who surrounded me and loved me no matter what I did. As a student, I was known for making a few of the resident assistants cry. As a freshman, I was taking seniors out to get drunk who had never even had a sip of alcohol touch their lips. I knew I had a decision to make. By the end of my sophomore year, I decided to surrender my life fully to Christ and to pursue his calling. I quit hanging out with my old friends and quickly became a leader on campus. After all, I wanted to be a Navy chaplain (the Marine Corps is a department in the Navy), so I needed to straighten up.
In order to accomplish my goal, I had to go to seminary, but before I could go to seminary I actually needed to study. By the start of my senior year, I managed to raise my cumulative grade point average high enough to get into seminary. I was accepted into Asbury Theological Seminary near Lexington, Kentucky, where many of my college professors had attended. I was released by the Marine Corps and raised my right hand in May 2003 as a commissioned officer in the United States Navy. I left Western, New York, the place I had lived my entire life, to come to a state I had never even visited before: Kentucky. Little did I know what God had in store.
Shortly after moving to Kentucky, I heard about an urban church on the north side of Lexington. Many seminary students were attending and walking away in awe of what God was doing there. I started going weekly and never looked back. I think God tricked me! I didn’t want any part of the local church. I wanted to work on the institutional side with the military as a chaplain. I would never even have gone to seminary if it weren’t required for becoming a chaplain. While attending this congregation, I started developing a heart for the local church, specifically for churches in urban settings.
I was glad I got plugged into a church when I did because I also discovered seminary to be one of the most selfish places in the world. The emphasis seemed to be it’s all about me and not about service to others. I wanted more of a transformative experience than a strictly informational one. Seminary was the first place where I saw people get into downright heated altercations about theology, which is not always a terrible thing, but it seemed to happen on a constant basis. Don’t get me wrong: seminary is not a terrible place. I grew a lot there. It was this season of preparation, paired with applying what I was learning in the local church, that helped keep me sane. Part of it had to do with me being impatient. I’m the type of guy who doesn’t necessarily plan where he wants to go out to eat until he hops in the car and drives down the road a bit; the one who would rather assemble a complicated piece of furniture without reading the directions.
As my heart for evangelism and the local church grew, I became further involved with this urban congregation. After my second year of seminary, I married a fellow seminarian, a woman who had been on the mission field and was attending the church. After marrying, we moved into the urban neighborhood to live out ministry. She was on staff at the church, and I was the custodian and youth worker performing whatever grunt work they wanted me to do.
During our first year of marriage, she had an affair, which ended our marriage. Subsequently, she left the church and her role on the staff. I was devastated. The years that followed involved me pursuing wholeness and healing via prayer, Scripture, an accountability group, counseling, and mentoring. I had great friends—a married couple that let me live with them for an entire summer. They looked out for me, and made sure I was taking care of myself and making sound decisions. I learned a lot about community from them and the role a community can play in the healing process. My confidence took a blow and I continually asked myself the question, “Do I take a break from doing this whole ministry and church-planting thing before I ever get a chance to start it?” After all, it was spring of 2007, and I was in my last semester of seminary. I was working two part-time jobs, volunteering at the church, and taking five classes. God confirmed to me that his calling on my life didn’t change because of the circumstances I faced. I left the marriage a broken man, but my heart for ministry was still intact.
When I graduated, I went from being the church custodian to being the associate pastor of the church, preaching regularly and stepping up in leadership. The people in the congregation didn’t know I had these types of gifts and graces for ministry. Yet, fortunately a new senior pastor took a risk on me.
My life and ministry experiences gave me a unique skill set and desire for church planting. I was able to empathize with hurting people and I knew the value of being part of a genuine, caring community. I always had friends that were different than me, and I had the ability it seemed to have a wide circle of people in my social network. My skills were developed while working at the church in every role from custodian to pastor, where it was instilled in me to serve whether I was cleaning toilets in the bathroom or preaching the Scriptures in the sanctuary. My heart for church planting was fostered through experiences that had left me a broken man. I had found healing in my brokenness through my relationship with Christ, and I wanted other broken people to experience the same healing I found. I encountered people who I came to befriend, people who were awesome friends, yet didn’t have faith because they had been burned by Christians in the past. There were also friends who did have faith but wouldn’t set foot in the church because it represented past hurts to them. I wanted others to experience a loving community where they could come as they were and walk together on a quest for transformation. This desire spurred the vision for a new faith community, a place that was authentic, messy, and not worried about itself, but was focused on blessing others. It was this vision that helped me birth Embrace Church.
I had connections to a few denominations, but I had to choose which one I would work with in this new venture. I settled on the United Methodist Church primarily because I was intrigued by the emphasis they had on starting faith communities through their New Church Development office (NCD) in Kentucky. NCD was established to encourage church plants and planters within the United Methodist Church in Kentucky because the Kentucky Conference had been slow in planting churches. Many of the existing churches could hardly show any professions of faith or new people coming in. I pitched the idea about planting a church to NCD, and they supported it. The need for a new faith community was overwhelming because many of the churches were not reaching new people. About 63 percent of all United Methodist churches in Kentucky had fewer than fifty persons in membership, with an average attendance of twenty-five before Bishop Lindsey Davis started his tenure.1 Also, the conference had been losing young people who grew up in the church because it had failed to meet their heartfelt needs or answer their real-life questions. Young people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five—especially men—were virtually nonexistent in the church. Without younger people coming in and taking the reins, churches will begin to die. I had a challenge in front of me but knew with God’s help Embrace Church could make a difference in people’s lives.
I got to work right away. I started meeting everybody and anybody to ask them to be a part of this new church. My first recruit didn’t exactly work out, which you can tell from my journal entry, “Dude, Where’s My Car?”:
There are some things seminary just doesn’t teach you. I paid $50,000 for an education I could have gotten by just living in the 40505 zip. Life in the “05” has been my schoolmaster over the past few years, especially in the last 48 hours. It all started when I came home from Aaron’s house where we were watching Office Space. I came in about halfway into the movie,