We Interrupt the Regularly Scheduled Program…

The Wilderness and the Winding Road to Ministry

For those expecting Chapter Three of Finding Forever Land: Approaching the Kingdom with Childlike Faith, my sincerest apologies. My ‘day job’ through the month of March was just crazy busy with a very different schedule that I’m used to. It made finding time to write, while maintaining a healthy lifestyle, spending time with God, sleeping, relaxing a bit each night, etc, very challenging. Thankfully, with April approaching, my schedule is going back to business as usual, which means more time to write this book.

Part of me, however, is quite glad this has happened. The reason? Since coming to Substack, I’ve added quite a few new followers/subscribers to the list that know next to nothing about me. And while there’s far too much to tell about my life than a ten to fifteen minute read can provide, I thought it best to focus a bit on recent years and what I call my ‘twenty years wandering through the desert’. To do so will allow you, the reader, to understand where I’m coming from on most things. Why I’ve shifted gears from strictly fiction (mostly mysteries) to no-holds-barred Christian nonfiction and why I’ve become so vocal about my faith whereas before, it was more of an ‘every once in a while’ thing just to remind folks that I was a follower of Christ.

So, sit back in your favorite reading chair. Put your cheaters on. Grab your cuppa Joe and get to know me a bit better.

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Since childhood, I’ve loved Jesus. And I’ve been fascinated by His word. As a kid, walking home from church, I used to bombard my mom with a myriad of questions about the day’s Sunday School lesson. Or, I’d ask her esoteric and philosophical questions about the nature of God and the universe that had plagued the greatest minds of Christian theology since the beginning of time. [My poor mom is truly a saint!]

Fast forward to my teen years. As might be expected, I felt the call to ministry in youth group. Naturally, I still had to finish high school and go to college. And while there, I had to choose a major and get my bachelor’s degree. I chose ‘Criminal Justice’ because I wanted to be the next great Sherlock Holmes (I mean, who wouldn’t?). And by the time I graduated, I still loved Jesus, but that burning for ministry I had had subsided enough that I was able to pursue a job at one of the largest medical examiner’s offices in the state of Florida. Despite this vocation switcheroo, I served actively in my church, teaching Youth Sunday School and eventually moving on to teaching College and Career and other venues.

That was in the early to mid-1990s. Let’s skip ahead again to September 11, 2001 [I’m bypassing a few major incidents that ultimately changed my life in both positive and negative ways…but those are tales for another time]. So, we all know what happened on 9/11. At the time, I was in Gainesville, Florida, working for a local TV news broadcast as an assignment editor. After the events of that fateful day, however, it felt as though God let me know in no uncertain terms that He wasn’t happy with the direction of my life. He reminded me as those buildings came crashing down that He had called me to ministry, and during this time in my life (it was just after a particularly difficult marriage and divorce (one of those life-changing stories I’ll have to share another day)), I wasn’t exactly building my resume as far as service was concerned. In fact, I was hardly active in a church and the only semi-regular ministry I had was in one-on-one relationships with co-workers at the television station where I did share my faith quite often (I might not have gone to church regularly, but I hadn’t exactly ‘backslidden’ either). Point is, that burning for ministry I’d lost erupted like Krakatoa fresh off a half-dozen cans of Red Bull. I decided right then and there to drop everything and go to seminary to pursue vocational ministry.

Just one hitch with two parts. One, I am Southern Baptist and two, I’m divorced. See, there was (I use past tense here because I think this is changing) a deep-rooted misunderstanding within my denomination of Paul’s qualifications concerning pastors he gave to Timothy¹ . In the referenced passage, Paul states that a pastor must be a “man of one wife.” Two erroneous conclusions of this have been perpetuated among Southern Baptists for decades. First, the belief is that a pastor cannot be divorced and second, a pastor must be married. Both of these things are patently wrong, but I’m not going to get into a theological treaty on the subject here. It’s just not what this post is about. Point is, right or wrong, the fact remained that I wasn’t married (and honestly had no real desire to ever re-marry (to my parents’ chagrin, I might add) and I also was divorced. This limited my vocational ministry opportunities a great deal. When I graduated seminary in 2005, I went home and was quickly ordained and offered a part time job as evangelism pastor in my home church.

I’ll be honest with you. I wasn’t overly excited about the prospect of this particular ministry. Evangelism is scary stuff, even for seminary-trained pastors/ministers. I’ll admit, I had about as much passion for evangelism as your average church-goer at the time. God’s funny though. As Jonah found out all to well, God might call us to a ministry we’re not overjoyed about. In fact, we might loathe it. But if we’re faithful to that call, God tends to put a passion for it within us. That’s exactly what He did for me in evangelism. I quickly developed a deep-rooted, overwhelming passion for it. I ate, drank, and slept evangelism. A deep well of excitement and joy boiled up within me from sharing my faith with anyone who would listen. Even more, I adored the opportunity to pass this passion for evangelism to the congregation who came every week to our visitation program where we’d go visit the previous Sunday’s visitors to care for their needs. During this outings, I taught these people how to share Christ and I saw in them the joy grow in their own hearts as well. Oh, it was so contagious. I could’ve stayed there doing that forever.

Except I couldn’t. The job was only part time. $200 per week and no health insurance. In my twenties, that would have been perfectly fine. Now approaching my mid-thirties, I had my health to think about. So, when I received a call from the Medical Examiner’s Office in another city asking if I’d like to come work for them, I took it as an opportunity to expand my ministry. I’d only intended to work there a year or two, max. My heart and mind were filled with visions of church planting or finding part time church work near my new office. All sorts of ideas brewed in my head. And within a year or two of working at the ME’s office, those sugarplum visions had pretty much evaporated to dust. I had looked into church planting, but without a solid local church to partner with, the prospects looked bleak. I eventually found a church to root myself within and soon became a volunteer director of discipleship. Stayed there a year or two, helping the pastor and providing pulpit supply. But soon, the rigors of my job schedule requiring me to leave at any given moment to investigate a death meant that I would have to leave church at any given moment and thus, any Bible studies I might be teaching at the moment would be cut short. And that was if I was lucky enough to actually make it to church to begin with. Sunday morning callouts was a rather common thing in this business. Eventually, I felt so bad about not being dependable, I gave up my position there and wandered from church to church, looking for a place. I eventually found another church to serve as volunteer director of discipleship, but the same issues arose. So, the wandering continued.

This, my friends, is the brunt of the last twenty years of my life. The wandering the wilderness I often talk about. The Israelites wandered the desert for forty years for their unfaithfulness to God’s instructions. Mine, thankfully, only lasted twenty.

You might be asking, “But Kent, it doesn’t sound like you were being unfaithful. What do you mean by that?” It’s true, during these last twenty years or so, I can’t say I ever truly backslid. I never lost faith in Christ. I never fell into a life of habitual and unrepentant sin. I just kind of…wandered aimlessly. I imposed my own exile. I was stuck in my desire to serve Christ and my desire to control my own destiny and do things in my own way. Put simply, I was never truly ready to go into vocational ministry, even after seminary. I simply wasn’t mature enough at the time. God knew this, of course. Took me twenty years to realize it though. I can be thick-headed sometimes. Thankfully, God factored my pig-headedness into His plans for my life and allotted this little twenty-year detour for me to grow. To understand things better.

Don’t get me wrong. Some good things came out of this period in my life. I discovered writing, for instance. When I first starting writing semi-professionally, my goal was to be a ‘Christian fiction author’ like Frank Peretti, Bill Meyers, and Ted Dekker. Only to discover that Christian publishers prefer bonnet romances to supernatural thrillers and the three above-mentioned authors were exceptions rather than the rule. So, I moved my writing to more mainstream and secular genres while maintaining a very clean, family-friendly brand with a subtle Christian worldview. And these secular, but clean books did bring glory to Christ, there’s no doubt about that. Just one example: Because of one book series I wrote, it provided me the opportunity to travel to California to perform the wedding ceremony for a cast member of Destination Truth, an extremely popular SyFy Channel TV show that had inspired the very same books. During this ceremony, I was able to present the gospel to a number of Hollywood types that might never have heard the good news before. Josh Gates, the show’s host, even dubbed me the DT’s official chaplain, which was a huge honor.

As a writer, trying to attract readers of various walks of life, I learned real quick to tone down my Christian talk on social media. Not because I was scared of what people might think, but because conventional wisdom says to be as vanilla as possible when interacting with the culture and readers. I was told time and again by various authors to keep my beliefs (both theologically and politically to myself (especially considering I’m pretty far right on both counts)). And so, Christ eventually took a backseat once again in my life…this time, in my writing ‘ministry’.

As you can see, despite the few positives, I can certainly understand God’s exile of me into the wilderness. I can understand why He let me wander aimlessly. Why He allowed me to continue working in a great job with great benefits while I slowly grew more and more resentful toward it. While it drained my compassion and general peace of mind like some fierce emotional-devouring vampire. This act wasn’t a punishment though. Not at all. The Bible often talks about God ‘giving them up to their own iniquity’. These aren’t punishments either. They’re lessons. They’re a means in which God can have us grow in our faith of Him. And that’s precisely what happened to me.

I think I came to the edge of the desert around mid-last year. Prior to the election. Most definitely during the Christmas season. More specifically, in portraying Santa Claus to nearly 500 children in three weeks. In seeing their hopes and dreams practically overflowing in their innocent eyes as they told me their Christmas wishes. Of knowing the harshness that awaited them as they grew up. I prayed over them and their innocence and I knew I needed to find a way to reach these kids before it was too late.

With this in mind, I took a good long look at our world…considered the paths those in charge (on both sides of the political aisle) were taking us…and knew instinctively that we are running out of time. Those children were running out of time. Their parents were running out of time. The whole world was running out of time.

Now, I’ve never been a big prophecy buff. My basic philosophy is that 1) let me understand the rest of the Bible first and then I’ll dig deep into the prophecy and 2) the Jewish leaders thought they understood prophecy prior to Christ’s incarnation and they proved otherwise real quick. Yes, we now have the help of the Holy Spirit to help us understand these things better than before Jesus, but I’m always wary of ever thinking that ‘this is exactly the way everything is going to play out and there can be no deviation from it’. Despite my skepticism about prophetic interpretation, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re all running out of time. Christ’s return is imminent. It has been imminent since His crucifixion and resurrection. But something tells me it’s so so soon. Which means, we’re running out of time to share the good news of Jesus Christ with those who don’t know Him. We’re running out of time to prepare people for His coming. We’re running out of time to stand up for what’s holy and righteous and be a reflection of Christ in a dark and corrupt world. We’re running out of time to be that light on a hill or the salt of the earth.

There has never been a more important time to truly get serious about the good news of Christ. And with my retirement coming up next year, I can finally settle down and let God lead me through the path He wants my ministries to go. And that, my friends, is what I’m doing and what I’m going to continue to do until those trumpets sound in the sky and His Church is called home. I just pray you all will be part of that glorious wedding celebration when it happens.

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Now knowing more about me and my heart, I hope we have a better understanding of each other. I hope you’ll get more involved in this ministry of sharing Christ through words and videos. Of training up young Christians and helping them seek out their own ways to serve Christ (more on that coming soon!). At 4N6 Ministries, as I approach retirement, I’m going to be more reliant than ever on your generosity in continuing this mission. Finances will be limited like never before. I’m going to retire at 55, which means insurance costs because I’m not eligible for Medicare for another few years.

Long story short, while I only want you to consider giving if you can afford to do so (the economy is showing some signs of improvement, but I know things are tight for everyone still) and if you truly feel God leading you to support this ministry. Otherwise, just keep coming back and reading my stuff for free.

If you do choose to support 4N6 Ministries, however, there are now two ways to do so: the paid subscription option, which Substack requires an annual payment. And the new method I’m implementing via buymeacoffee dot com, where you can simply put in any amount you’d like to support a particular post. From now on, this option will be available to my readers on every post.

Anyway, I hope you’ll come back next week as we pick up where we left off on Finding Forever Land and figure out what it means to have childlike faith! Love you guys! May God bless you each and every day.

1. 1 Timothy 3:1-7