My journey to faith.

I did not grow up in church. My father died of cancer at age twenty-eight, just months before I was born. My mother, still in her twenties, spent the next few years drifting across the South trying to survive. We were homeless at times. I attended many different schools, failed a couple of grades because of instability, and developed deep social anxiety and distrust of authority figures.

At sixteen, after a troubling incident with my stepfather, I left home and subsequently made a lot of mistakes. Knowing I needed an education, I joined the military, earned my GED, and began community college. When my service ended, I returned to Tennessee and met Tina Goins. We fell in love, married, and moved near her family in Oak Ridge.

A couple of years later, at a friend’s wedding, Tina, our two daughters, and I were invited to church. Honestly, we had no real desire to go. But our girls insisted—they were excited to see what “church” was like. Reluctantly, we drove twenty-one miles to Union Baptist Church in Morgan County. From the moment we arrived, we were warmly welcomed. Our girls were embraced in the children’s ministry. Tina and I were greeted by an older couple, who treated us like family even though we were strangers to their small town.

It felt like home.

Six weeks later, I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ and was baptized. I knew almost nothing about following Christ, nothing about being a Christian husband, father, or disciple. But the pastor, Mark Caldwell, took me under his wing. Every other week he discipled me for hours at a time. He taught me to pray, study Scripture, lead my family, share my faith, and walk with Christ daily.

God used Pastor Mark to ground me in the gospel and give me the tools I needed to grow. I am forever in his debt. His investment in me shaped the foundation of my faith and ignited my desire to help others discover the transforming grace of Jesus Christ.

About eighteen months after coming to faith in Christ, I became deeply involved in the men’s ministry at our local church. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by godly men, men whose marriages were strong, whose character was steady, and whose lives reflected a genuine love for Jesus. Their example awakened a desire in me to grow deeper in my walk with Christ and to help others experience that same transformation.

Call to ministry.

In the summer of 1998, our group attended a Promise Keepers conference. As pastor after pastor preached the gospel with conviction and called men to holy living, something inside me stirred powerfully. I sensed that God was not simply calling me to follow Christ, but calling me to help others follow Him, to be a disciple who makes disciples, a shepherd who cares for God’s people, and a minister who brings hope to the broken.

The following Sunday morning, as our pastor preached, the Holy Spirit spoke to my heart with unmistakable clarity. I knew in that moment that if I resisted God’s call to ministry, it would be disobedience. I wept through the sermon. At the invitation, I walked to the front of the church and publicly surrendered to God’s call. My wife, Tina, was stunned, honestly, so was I, but over time God confirmed to both of us that this calling was real and would shape the rest of our lives.

From that point forward, my heart was drawn to preaching the Word, shepherding people, and investing in the spiritual formation of others. I found joy in teaching Scripture, counseling the hurting, encouraging families, and walking with people through both crisis and growth. God gave me a particular burden for the least, the lost, and the hurting, those facing poverty, trauma, addiction, grief, and instability. My own upbringing gave me eyes to see the forgotten and a heart to move toward them with compassion.

Over the years, God has entrusted me with opportunities to disciple men and women, develop leaders, strengthen families, and build ministries that help people grow in Christ. The call to ministry has always been, at its core, a call to shepherd, to love God’s people, proclaim His Word, make disciples, and invest in the transformation of lives.

My calling today remains what it was the moment God spoke it into my heart:

to preach the gospel, to make disciples, to shepherd them well, and to offer Christ’s hope and healing to the most vulnerable and to develop leaders and teams for the work of the ministry.

As a devoted Christ-follower, husband, father, and pastor, I have enjoyed listening to and sharing stories of faith, hope, and resilience. Those stories have inspired me to sit down and put them on paper from time to time. I hope they inspire you as much as they have me and those in my life.

Tim Jackson