“Of Football and Farming”
Hello church friends and family. I hope that your Thanksgiving holiday was full of great food, lots of thanks, and beautiful memories with friends and family. Brit and I recently made a trip to Alabama to assist and network with our partner churches there. Our girls got to spend a whole week with Gigi and Papa and we returned to two very spoiled little girls! But I wanted to share with you briefly something that impacted me pretty profoundly while I was in Alabama.
A few representatives from different churches and organizations in Alaska were there in Alabama with us. In the conference room, different groups connected with the SBC all had booths set up in the giant conference room including a booth just for us representatives from Alaska. We were blessed enough to be placed right next to the booth for SBC churches from Montana. And manning the booth for Montana was a church planter, Darryl Brunson, and his wife, Veronica. They planted a church in Livingston, Montana, and currently pastor the now 150-ish member church.
Darryl is a big guy and with his ten-gallon hat and camo shirt on, he seemed even bigger. The first day, Brit and I were getting our bearings on things and meeting new people so we didn’t have time to really talk with our friends in the booth next to us. I was also slightly intimidated by this large man with the cowboy hat. But, unlike our booth, their booth had homemade caramel candies on them.
The next day, despite my intimidation, the draw of the sugary sweets had won out and I sheepishly approached their booth like a shy child asking for Halloween candy from the spooky house in the neighborhood! I soon found out that Darryl was not only physically a large guy but he also possessed a personality that was larger than life as well. Out of his mouth came a thick southern drawl and I immediately fell at ease. He was one of my kind! All of this took place at the end of the evening and while everyone was leaving the event center, he and his sweet wife invited us to dinner. He was actually from Alabama and knew the Birmingham area fairly well so we let him be our guide to find some good southern BBQ.
Before arriving at Jim ‘n Nick’s BBQ, I knew that Darryl was a church planter in Montana. I also knew that there is quite a bit of overlap between church planting and church revitalization and between Alaskans and Montanans, so I was eager to pick his brain about some church growth strategies in these western states.
After ordering a half-chicken with some classic Alabama white BBQ sauce (it was soooooo good) and whatever everyone else ordered, we sat down and exchanged stories of how we ended up in our respective ministry contexts. It became immediately evident to me that he and his wife were passionate about Kingdom work.
We ended up talking about various things for two hours over the delicious meal. It was a time of great encouragement for me because whether he recognizes it or not, Darryl is a pastor to pastors, especially young inexperienced pastors like me. While we talked about a lot of things within that two-hour span, there were two things that helped me with my perspective on reaching people with the gospel.
It’s all about the Kingdom
This may sound silly coming from a pastor, but I needed to be reminded of this truth. While I am pastoring Glacier Valley with the anticipation of walking her through revitalization, I needed to be reminded that Kingdom work comes first. If that overflows into Glacier Valley growing as a church, so be it. But my first and foremost allegiance is to Christ’s Kingdom.
Darryl shared with me that they began their church planting mission from scratch. There had been an SBC church in Livingston years ago, but they died decades ago. And as far as evangelical churches go, it was mostly a desert. But he shared that rather than going in with the mission of “starting a church,” he approached it instead from more of a Matthew 6:33 approach, “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.”
I suppose that as the revitalization pastor, I’ve been caught up in making sure Glacier Valley grows rather than making sure that His Kingdom grows. I guess because of the focus of my job description I lost the bigger picture. My call as a disciple of Christ is to glorify God and be used by Him to build up His kingdom…not mine.
The Lord has blessed Darryl’s efforts. By seeking God’s Kingdom first, the Lord has put people in his path and sent people to his church. But Darryl isn’t on a mission to build up Expedition Church (his church in Livingston). But to build up God’s Kingdom. When he leads someone to Christ, he encourages them to join a local congregation that preaches the Bible and biblically raises up disciples. His church is obviously a good option but he doesn’t take his toys and goes home if they choose to worship with another congregation. He still encourages them.
This reminds me of something Coach Vince Lombardi did after the Packers suffered an embarrassing loss. He walked into the locker room and told his team that they needed to get back to the basics. He then held up a football and said in all seriousness, “this is a football.” This aspect of my conversation with Darryl was my “this is a football” moment. I needed that reminder. I already knew this to be true, but it took God sending Darryl and Veronica to me to remind me to get back to the basics.
Sowing Seeds
Another obviously simple thing the Lord needed to remind me of through Darryl and Veronica was the parable of the sower. You know, the one about the farmer that sows seeds that fall onto four different kinds of soil? As a person who has grown up in church my whole life, I had heard this parable many times. And luckily Jesus interprets the parable for us so that leaves a lot of the guesswork out of things as far as interpretation. But despite my familiarity with it and Jesus’ own interpretation, the Lord revealed a new perspective on it through Darryl. Let me explain.
In Matthew 13, Jesus tells the parable and says that seed fell on 4 different kinds of soil: the road (eaten by birds), rocky soil, thorny soil, and good soil. In short, the seed is the gospel, the soils are different people, the road/birds are the enemies stealing the good news, the rocky soil is the soil in which the seed can’t take root and withers away at the first sign of temptation, the thorny soil is when the worries of the world choke out the good news, and the good soil is the soil in which someone properly responds to the good news.
Bare with me if you already knew or had thought about this before, but I had always thought of the four types of soil as types of people that are stagnant in their ways. For example, people that would be considered rocky soil, are always going to be rocky soil, and so on and so forth.
But Darryl pointed out something stupidly simple that I had not considered before. The good soil wasn’t always good soil. Sometime in the past, the good soil had to be broken up, weeded, rocks removed, etc. So, rather than viewing the four soils as stagnant soils, a better approach would be to view them as a spectrum!
Boom! My mind was blown! He shared with me how some people were much closer to receiving the gospel than others but it was usually because something or someone in their past had readied the soil for that seed to take root.
So, even if someone is swamped with worries of life and it is choking out the reception of the gospel, it is the kingdom person’s job to be used as the de-weeder. Or if their hearts are hardened, the kingdom person may need to be the tiller. Obviously, these things are such that the Holy Spirit needs to help us in our discernment and approach, but nonetheless, as sowers, we may have more work to do than just throw out the gospel. We need to figure out what soil a person is and figure out how to get them to the point of becoming good soil.
A Vision for the Future
Over the past several months, the Lord has really burdened me concerning how faithfully I share the gospel with others outside the pulpit. As a revitalization pastor who has studied this field extensively, I can create strategies and plan awesome events, etc. but if I don’t lead the church in faithfully sharing the gospel with the lost in our community, all of those strategies and events are a waste of time. Jesus isn’t in the business of building up GVBC. Jesus is in the business of building up His Kingdom and GVBC just gets to play a small part in that.
This coming year, I desire to cast a vision for our church that we can catch. And that vision is based on Acts 8:4. Our vision is to go on our ways preaching/speaking the good news as we go. It’s simple. It’s basic. But it’s vital. It’s what we are called to do. It’s our identity.
This is how the early church grew so rapidly. The people were approached with such good news that even when persecution arose and scattered God’s people, they still went on their way preaching and teaching the good news of the gospel. Paul, for as great a church planter as he was, regularly came across churches that had already been started by some unnamed believer that was scattered and simply went on their way sharing the good news. It was probably hard and I’m sure there were some awkward and uncomfortable situations, but they just couldn’t help it because the gospel was that good of news. Brothers and sisters in Christ, let this be our vision for 2023 onward!
In love,
Pastor Trenton
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