By Buddy Howard
As long as I can remember I wanted to be a lawyer. The prestige, the income, and the occasional opportunity to help people were the major motivating factors in my chosen career goal. Not having grown up in a Christian environment, I thought each of those factors was worthy. So, like many others in my generation, I worked hard to achieve my goals.
From the Classroom to the Courtroom
As planned, in 1990, I graduated near the top of my class from the University of Kentucky with a business administration”“finance degree. I was awarded a scholarship to UK Law School. My “career plan” was falling into place. After graduating from law school in 1993, having done well again, I went to work at a prestigious law firm in Louisville handling complex litigation cases.
During my senior year at UK, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Over the next several years, God began to ignite the teaching and leadership gifts he had given me and I developed a passion for the “lost.” My wife, Carrie, and I started a Sunday school class at our church and began serving in a variety of ways, taking leadership roles on committees and joining in whenever it suited us. However, giving my life””I mean really giving my whole life””over to Christ was not on my mind or in my heart. Law was the real deal for me.
My early law career was just what I had anticipated. The caseload was exciting and the money was more than I ever dreamed. After a few years as an associate at one law firm, I formed a law firm with a friend from law school. Within a few years we had several associates working for us, a large staff, and had gained a pretty fine reputation in the legal community. Everything seemed great””well, everything except for my personal life, my spiritual life, my marriage, and my health.
In spite of obtaining my career goals, there was uneasiness in my life. Nothing seemed quite right. It”s hard to express or explain. My mind, my attention, and my energy were slowly becoming more and more focused on eternal things rather than on temporal things of this world. God changed the way I looked at people””I saw them as living the glorious life that God desires for us, or as missing out on something special. God changed my marriage. God changed the way I viewed money””I stopped caring about what I made and started caring about what we could give. God changed what I did with my spare time and what I wanted for the future.
Then, in the spring of 2003, on a spur-of-the-moment decision (like 45 seconds), I agreed to go on a teaching mission trip to Ghana, West Africa. At that time in my life, that was the equivalent of going to the moon. I had no desire to leave the United States. I like comfort and security. I like real bathrooms. I like American food, unless you count french fries as foreign.
A few months later I was in Tamale, Africa, one of the least Christian places on earth. Over the next 15 days, my eyes were opened, and God spoke to me about his kingdom, specifically, what he wanted from me””and it wasn”t to practice law for the rest of my life. I was to become a pastor and start a church.
No way! was my response in my head. I”ve worked too hard and too long. I”ve just now got my career where I want it. And, besides, I have a family to take care of.
From the Courtroom to the Classroom (Again)
After returning home from Ghana, I became consumed with thoughts of becoming a pastor and starting a new church. It was a foreign and scary concept for me though. Lots of questions ran through my mind every day: How could I ever support my family and return to school full-time for four years? Isn”t it a ridiculous idea to just “start a church”? Even if that idea isn”t ridiculous, would a traditional seminary education provide the practical training necessary to prepare me to actually lead a new church? And, responsible people just don”t do things like quit their jobs to start a church, do they?
I shared these thoughts with my wife and family and asked them to pray that God would provide some relief for me. I was hoping all of this would leave my head and not come back.
Within a week, my mother-in-law brought a Southeast Christian Church newspaper clipping that advertised a new school for second-career people to prepare them for full-time ministry. The school, called The Londen Institute for Evangelism, is the product of the vision of Barry McMurtrie, senior pastor at Crossroads Christian Church in Corona, California, and Jack Londen.
The Londen Institute was the answer to our prayers. It wasn”t the answer I really wanted or expected, but it was the answer. The institute offers in-person, practical training by some of the best Christian ministers in the nation.
These in-person, 12-day sessions are held in Corona twice each year””a schedule that allows someone like me to continue working so as to support his family and be trained for God”s work at the same time. The institute also provides in-depth Bible classes and more traditional course work, under the direction of Bob Pavelskey. These classes are done long-distance during the months in between the in-person sessions at a reasonable pace for someone still running his own business.
Immediate is not a strong enough word for how fast I began the application process. Sometimes you hear from God and it requires immediate action. This was such a time.
I began my coursework at the Londen Institute in the fall of 2003. The institute was more than I had hoped for. The coursework was challenging. The instructors were phenomenal. The in-person sessions prepared us (in a group of less than 50 students) for church planting, church leadership, communication, vision casting, ministry obstacles, message preparation, and creative thinking. We were taught by some of the best pastors in the country in a small environment where it felt as if we were literally “sucking all of the good stuff” out of their brains.
My Londen Institute training was a wonderful experience. After my coursework and sessions were completed I had confidence God could use me to lead a church and pastor the people he would bring to Adventure. I developed an exit strategy from my law practice so I would be in full-time ministry by the summer of 2004.
In the spring of 2004, while still a student at the institute, we held ACC”s first informational session in the living room of my house, and yet another chapter in the story of Adventure Church began.
From the Classroom to the Living Room to the Warehouse
Using what I had learned at the institute, we began ACC by holding informational meetings in our home. We invited everyone we knew to come and hear our vision and ask questions about the future plans for impacting our community with the gospel.
Soon, there were enough committed families (seven) to start our “practice” worship services. From March through May 2004, we met in our home for informal worship time and to study together what it meant to be a New Testament church. We would move every piece of furniture out of the first floor of our home to make room for worship, Communion, and study. Children met downstairs in our basement for a group lesson and then moved to our upstairs bedrooms for small group time. It is an enjoyable memory thinking about those kids tramping through our “worship service” to go from the basement to the second floor.
By the end of May we had outgrown our home. A little church on a main street near our neighborhood allowed us to use their building on Saturday nights. We continued “learning to be a church” for the next several months, and our launch team expanded to 55 people.
On October 31, 2004, we held our first public worship service at a local private school cafeteria. Over the next year we continued to grow””not just in numbers, but also in our understanding of who we are as a church and what God is calling us to do. We started focusing on reaching the unchurched and those families who might have been away from church for a long time. We held baptisms in the school”s pool on Sunday, at other churches during the week, and even at a member”s pool. More than 40 people were baptized during our first 18 months.
We also started focusing on impacting our community through service to families in need and impacting our world by supporting missionaries in the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Japan. And we continued to grow.
In June of this year, we purchased our first building. It”s a large facility, half warehouse (our worship area) and half office space (our offices and classrooms), that used to be the home of a communications company. ACC”s attendance averages well over 200 each week. More important, nearly all our members are actively engaged in ministry.
In looking back over the past two years, at times it seems as though it is all just a dream. Then again, I know that it is a dream””a dream that God had for using the unlikely and the nontraditional.
Buddy Howard is senior pastor with Adventure Christian Church, Louisville, Kentucky.
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