The Little Church That Changed My Life
The story of my childhood in a small Southern town sounds dramatic—but only to folks who aren’t from small, Southern towns.
To people who aren’t from ‘round there, the details read like something from a (not particularly interesting) movie: parents’ marriage marked by addiction and violence until it ended before I entered school; raised along with a younger sibling by a single mother; anger and shame resulting in a lonely, friendless existence for years; and a deep internal drive, fueled by father wounds, to excel in areas of natural gifting (for me, academics).
To many—like my raised-in-the-suburbs wife—my story hits all the beats of books like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. In fact, when my wife finished reading that particular memoir in 2016, she closed it, turned to me, and said, “You could have written this.” For her, that sentiment simultaneously expressed her appreciation but also her sympathy and wonder. It was amazing that she now knew of two people with a story like mine.
But my wonderfully wise and compassionate wife isn’t from my hometown.
Although I didn’t realize it until I was older, my story was far from unique. Many of my classmates, I came to find out, were also products of broken, drug-ridden homes. They were, like me, latchkey kids whose parents worked shifts that weren’t conducive to creating domestic paradises. And, like me, shame kept them from talking about it. Where I’m from, my story is boring. If you’re reading this, chances are that you get it.
Here's another thing you might get: When I first tell my story to people who grew up in different kinds of places, I’ve learned I can’t just tell the story as I remember it. I have to interrupt myself to interpret the details. I code-switch and play cultural anthropologist with folks who grew up knowing both their parents, who processed anger in healthy ways, and who don’t have a close enough acquaintance with Hamburger Helper to have a favorite flavor. I’ve come to recognize wide eyes or furrowed brows for what they mean to communicate—“What world did you live in?”—and immediately turn into a tourist guide to my own life.
Where I’m from, my story is boring. If you’re reading this, chances are that you get it.
Sharing stories from my childhood inevitably raises the question I’m most excited to answer: “What happened to you?” People know the man I am today—a happily married dad to four kids and a Baptist pastor—and struggle to connect the dots. And over the years, I’ve given the same response hundreds of times: “There was this little church in town that changed my life.”
The part of my mind that pounces on theological error wells up at seeing the words written down like that. It wants to correct the words to, “Jesus changed my life.” And, of course, he did. But that isn’t how I remember it.
Instead, I remember sleeping over with a friend at his grandparents’ house and finding out, quite to my surprise, that we were going to church the next morning. I had attended a handful of Christmas services growing up, but the news that I would be going to church was like hearing I would be going to a tractor pull: I’d heard of it before, and I thought I had a basic familiarity with the essential concepts, but I’d never actually witnessed it all put together. Still, I didn’t have a choice, and for the first time, I stepped into Winchester First Baptist Church.
I don’t remember a single detail about that first service. But I remember two powerful emotions: shame at being underdressed, and curiosity at the way people treated each other.
In my house, standard communication was conducted at a high volume—that’s just how people knew you were serious. In fact, one of the first times my now-wife visited my family was during the planning process for my mother to marry her boyfriend. During a commercial break from Law & Order, I looked over to see her eyes welling up with tears. “What’s wrong, babe?” Her reply made no sense to me: “Is the wedding still going to happen?” “Huh?” Turns out, while I had been watching the bad guys get their justice, my mama and soon-to-be stepdad were yelling at each other in the next room about what time of day the outdoor wedding ceremony should take place so as to take the best advantage of the sunlight. I had missed the whole thing. “That’s just how we talk!”
They went out of their way to show kindness and respect for each other. I was fascinated. And I kept coming back for more. —Christian Crouch
But that’s not how the first Christians I ever met talked. They were gentle. They went out of their way to show kindness and respect for each other. I was fascinated. And I kept coming back for more.
One night, someone knocked at our door (no one ever came over to our house, especially not uninvited). When I opened it, there was Brother Alan, the only pastor I’d ever met. I’m not sure if twelve-year-olds can be bemused, but I’m pretty sure I was as I listened to him talk to my mom about salvation in Christ. “We believe you can worship Jesus at home,” she said with a polite but firm smile. I knew Brother Alan had about three minutes to leave before he figured out “how we talk.” Wisely, he did.
For the next several years, I was in church every time the doors were open. I didn’t believe the gospel, but I believed in the church. I knew those grandmothers and factory workers and mechanics genuinely loved me, and I liked being loved. I paid careful attention to almost every sermon.
For all the attention that I paid, I was rewarded with pretty much the same sermon every week: Jesus was holy, but he loved sinners like us, and if we would only believe in him and repent of our sins, we could be forgiven and made clean. I’m not sure how I squared intellectually scoffing at that idea every week with sitting in the pew and trying to pick out the tenor line of every “bouncy Baptist” hymn. But I did.
What I realize now is that, to use the language of Charles Taylor, before I ever could have assented to and embraced the good news about Christ, I needed a significant upgrade to my social imaginary. That is, I simply couldn’t imagine a world where people got something good without working for it, because that was alien to the culture I grew up in. I could buy the notion that people were sinners—no disagreement from my lived experience there. But the idea that there was a Creator—moreover, that he loved us and was able and willing to redeem us—was incomprehensible to me. The weekly sermon was an exercise in asking me to believe the equivalent of little green men building us a castle made of corn dogs. It simply didn’t jive with the world I lived in. But then, the world I lived in began to change.
It began to change when I realized that, whether I asked her or not, Mrs. Sarah was going to pull into our driveway every Sunday morning to pick me up for church. On Sundays when I just plain forgot, she would call my Nokia brick from her own and, as sweet as her tea, ask me if I was ready to go. When I told her she’d woken me up—and she often woke me up—and that by the time I was ready we’d be thirty minutes late, she’d answer just as sweetly, “I’ll wait.”
It began to change when the new youth pastor asked me to play guitar in the youth praise band, and then worked verse-by-verse through books of the Bible with us. When I made incessant jokes and asinine remarks interrupting his sermons, he never, not once, responded with anger, but either answered the question behind the joke or, mercifully, overlooked my immaturity.
It began to change when, after feeling compelled to walk the aisle several times but never experiencing anything resembling a living faith, I woke up one morning toward the end of high school and, apropos of nothing, thought to myself, “Holy crap, I actually believe this stuff.” (My seventeen-year-old mind wasn’t all that eloquent.)
When I talk about my childhood, or my family, or where I grew up, it’s easy to communicate how gloriously screwed-up everything was. In many ways, things are still bad. The sins of my fathers have born rotten fruit in the hearts of my close family, and my hometown is no exception to the epidemics and cycles that mark towns just like it around the country.
But the foundational, glorious truth to my own story is that the prayer of Jesus offered on the night of his arrest was answered: “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (John 17:22-23, ESV).
The glory of a loving and flawed local church was evident to my unregenerate eyes. I saw it. And I knew, and I believed. I owe everything to them. That little church changed my life.