Early years
I grew up in Fort Smith Arkansas at First Baptist Church where the senior pastor was Ron Herrod for a short time and then later Dale Thompson. My family was faithful church attenders and involved in every ministry the church had. We were at every event and I have great memories of growing up at FBC Fort Smith.
Salvation Testimony
It was the summer of 1987 and FBC was hosting their annual Vacation Bible School. My friends and I looked forward to the mid-day snow cone we would get at snack time and jumping the green hedges of the churches landscape outside the worship center. Jumping the hedges at the church was a measure of your cool factor when your seven years old at Vacation Bible School. It was also the source of several injuries but that was half the point of jumping the hedge it wouldn’t have been fun if you couldn’t get hurt. Thursday was the gospel presentation and our pastor Ron Herrod gave the gospel call. I do not remember much about his message that day but I knew that I was a sinner and needed to respond to Christ. I still remember where I was on the left side of the sanctuary around 7 rows back. I can still smell the mixture of sweat and polished wood from the back of the pew I was holding onto with a death grip. I was struggling inside trying to get the courage to go forward. As I was looking down at my feet and trying to figure out how to move my paralyzed body into action I suddenly saw the feet of the boy next to me move out into the isle and go forward. I thought to myself “if he can do it so can I” and I stepped out into the isle and headed down to the front and had my eternity changed forever. I went through a short discipleship class on baptism and then was baptized about a month later on a Sunday night before the church.
Call to Ministry
My call to ministry was revealed to me over time. It started one Wednesday night in 1993 on the third floor of the Ferguson building at our youth group meeting. I attended Darby Jr High which was literally across the street from First Baptist Fort Smith. After school I would walk over to the church and hangout with our youth director until the youth service began at 6. One Wednesday night I happened to be standing in the back by the sound room asking our youth director Chris Perry what he was doing when suddenly he asked me if I would be interested in helping run the sound equipment. That one fateful day turned into a passion and I was hooked from that moment on. I continued running the media department for the youth all through Jr. High and High School as well as helping the church on Sundays and big events like Christmas.
When I was about to graduate from High School my uncle Larry Plummer happened to be the children’s pastor at our church as well. He called me one afternoon saying he needed help with a kids event he was putting on called Bibleman! I had no idea what Bibleman was, but was always willing to help out with media when needed. I got to meet Bibleman, a man named Willie Aames who was a childhood TV star in Hollywood. He was famous for a show called “Eight is Enough” and “Charles in Charge”. Willie happen to be looking for someone to travel with the group to do all the media for the live action Bibleman show. This was a dream come true for me at the time, I wanted to travel and see the rest of the country and this was a perfect way to hone my media skills and have an adventure. Little did I know that God would use this experience years later when I became the children’s pastor at FBC Bentonville. But now I am getting ahead of myself; I traveled around the country with Bibleman for 3 years visiting 48 of the 50 states and seeing the inside of more churches than I care to remember. I also got to meet God’s wonderful people all over this country and see the amazing things that he was doing through them at their churches. The allure of traveling and living out of hotel rooms and a duffel bag eventually wore off and I was ready to stay in one place for a while. I ended up back home in Fort Smith running sound on Sunday mornings and starting a college ministry at FBC. The media role at the church was only part time on Sunday mornings and soon I had a new full-time media ministry opportunity at FBC Bentonville.
I moved to FBC Bentonville Spring of 2006 and little did I know how much life I would experience at FBC Bentonville. I was hired to help run the media ministry and primarily run sound on Sunday mornings and all other church events. The pastor of the church also made a deal with me that if the church hired me I had to finish my college degree. So, I was doing a 40hr+ job as well as finishing my undergraduate degree. A short time after I was hired the ladies of the church began to conspire to find me a girl and I eventually met my wife Mandy the weekend before Father’s day as she was scheduled to sing and needed to rehearse in the worship center. It didn’t take to much time after that before we were officially dating and then in the summer of 2008 we were married. I graduated from John Brown University and shortly after that Mandy and I were also expecting our first child. During this time, I had really felt the call to go to seminary and prepare for ministry. So, I went to our pastor and shared with him my desire to go to seminary and he rejoiced with me and helped me begin the seminary journey. I was licensed and ordained by my church and I enrolled at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the fall of 2010 and graduated in 2018 with a Masters of Divinity.
My call to the ministry began back when I was 13 and God has revealed it little by little over the years and solidified in my soul that serving Gods church as a pastor is the calling he has placed upon my life. Its who I was created to be and has been the trajectory of my life.