Let’s Talk About What’s Next

I Was Born Fourteen Weeks Early

That’s where my story starts. Not with a sermon. With a fight.

Fourteen weeks early means a body that isn’t finished yet trying to do the work of a finished one. I don’t remember any of it. But I’ve spent my life around the fact of it, and it taught me something before I had language for it: the thing that survives is rarely the strongest thing in the room. It’s the thing somebody stayed with.

By eight I was the National Ambassador for the March of Dimes. I traveled the country telling that story to rooms full of strangers. I met President Bush at the White House. I was a kid who had not yet decided anything about his own faith, standing on national platforms talking about staying alive.

I’ve thought about that a lot since. My work started on a stage before it started in a pulpit, and it was always about the same thing — advocating for people whose odds were set by circumstances they didn’t choose.

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At nine, I wanted to know God for myself

I’m a preacher’s kid. I knew the songs. I’d heard the stories. I preached in the living room and played church and sang and praised.

And something was missing.

I wish I could tell you I lived a life of sin and God found me. That’s the story people expect. The truth is I lived a life of the church, and I wanted to go deeper than the God we preached about, sang about, and praised. I wanted to know Him.

Other kids wanted to leave home and see the world. I wanted a different kind of freedom — the freedom to know God for myself, past Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, past inherited belief into something I’d actually chosen.

At nine, I chose it. Not out of fear. Out of hunger. I decided I wasn’t going to be a church member, a pew sitter, or a holiday attender.

Everything I’ve built since traces back to that decision.

Somebody else named It first

My mother made sure the right people were in my life. That’s the part I didn’t see at the time and can’t overstate now.

One of them was Dr. Kenneth Hammond. My mother told him I’d set up a pulpit in the living room and preached to my family. He didn’t laugh it off. He recognized something and then he did the harder thing — he stayed with it, and with me.

On January 24, 2014, I preached my initial sermon at Union Baptist Church in front of more than a thousand people and was licensed to ministry. Ten years later he’s still the voice that challenges me to stay spiritually connected.

That’s the pattern in my life. The call was there early. Someone else named it out loud before I could.

Where I Am Now

I’m planting a church.

Two of the leaders who served with me at Union Baptist in 2014 are on the leadership team. I asked both of them why they came. They said the same thing: the freedom. I’d given it to them before they’d earned it, and a decade later that’s what they remembered.

I’m also writing a book called Forward Not Finished, and I spend my working life as an organizational strategist — finding the real problem inside churches, nonprofits, and professional practices, and building the design that fixes it.

Those look like three different lives. They aren’t. A nine-year-old wanted a place where you could go deeper than the surface and actually know what you were part of. I never found that room.

So I’m building it.