Legacy Builders Pt. 1: Navigating Fatherhood, Ministry, and Entrepreneurship with Matthew Johnson
“I started down the path that I believe God wanted me on, and so I have to trust Him. I have to trust Him through this, for this, beyond this.”
This episode is the first in a two-part series about what it looks like to build a legacy, specifically in fatherhood, ministry, and entrepreneurship. In this episode, Abby will be interviewing Matthew Johnson, a husband, father, entrepreneur and church elder.
He'll be telling his story and sharing his wisdom on...
- rolling up your sleeves in the face of responsibility
- being a servant for your family
- inviting wise counsel into your life
- telling your redemption story while it's still in progress
“I think this is how legacies are built. It’s built by serving.”
About Matt
Matthew Johnson holds many titles, including born-again Christian, husband of twenty years, father of four, entrepreneur, pastor, and blogger for careforpastors.org. He currently is an elder for a small church outside of Sarona, WI and he dreams of someday being a published author.
Read the Podcast
Intro: Welcome to Beyond the Bar, the podcast where coffee and conversation are a catalyst for growth. If you’ve been searching for that coffee-with-a-friend experience that leaves you feeling seen, met, and encouraged, you’ve come to the right place. So grab your cup, listen up, and together we’re going Beyond the Bar.
Abby: Hi friends, welcome to Beyond the Bar, I’m your host Abby. I’m so looking forward to today’s episode. It’s a little bit different than what we’ve done before, but this is gonna be a two-part mini series in preparation for Father’s Day, so we’re calling this “Legacy Builders”, this is part one and I’m really looking forward to sitting down and introducing you guys to one of my friends, Matthew Johnson.
Matt: Thanks Abby. It’s great to be here.
Abby: Thank you, I appreciate you being here. We’ve had a lot of conversations actually just around your dinner table.
Matt: Yes.
Abby: It is fun to bring that beyond the dinner table now to other people and I feel like you are going to be a perfect person to dive into today’s topic, so I appreciate it.
Matt: Thank you.
Abby: To start, maybe you could just explain a little bit about your background, who you are, where you came from…
Matt: Sounds good. So I like to start out by saying, “I’m a Christian.” I’ve been saved for 30 years. I was just thinking about this the other day, but that makes me feel old (chuckles). And so I’ve been saved for 30 years. I was saved at a young age, age of 15, and just so grateful that God was so gracious to me in my youth. He gave me a great family- I grew up in a great family, a Christian home-, had great role models in my dad, in my mom, and so I feel like, as the Psalms sort of said, the lines have fallen onto me in good places. So that’s first and foremost. Second, been married for 20 years, coming up on 20 years the next few days.
Abby: Congratulations!
Matt: So, married to just a wonderful woman. She’s more than the better half of me. And together, we’ve gone through a lot of the ups and downs of life, like everybody else goes through, whether it’s illness or just hard times. But through it all, God’s been so gracious in our marriage, giving us grace to live each day together and for him, and then been a dad for 18 years. So, this is kind of a new one: our firstborn is graduating and looking at life and that’s also making me feel old. (Abby laughs) So, but we have four kids, two boys and two girls, just can’t imagine life without them at this point, just the whole dynamic of family. And it hasn’t always been easy, of course, but it’s been very rewarding. It’s been very fulfilling. And then more recently, I became an elder in a church here in Sarona, and been doing that for a little while now. Kind of touching on where I came from ministry-wise, I have been in ministry and pastoral roles in one form or another for the last, uh, for 11 years. And so, whether it’s pastoring, assistant pastoring, lead pastoring, all of that has kind of been interspersed with also some business, um, starting with business, then into ministry, then back into business, and now kind of focusing more on ministry again.
Abby: Mm-hmm. And I’m, again, lucky enough to know your family, have gotten to be around them, be around your dinner table, but you actually started in business in kind of a crazy bold way. Could we get into that a little bit?
Matt: Yeah, sure! So a friend of mine and I, we met when we were 15 through a homeschool group gathering of sorts, and just kind of hit it off and we were curious minds, always thinking up trying to invent something, and so when I was 20- so graduated, age 20- we thought to ourselves, “What, we’re young enough, let’s start a business. If it doesn’t work we don’t have anybody we’re committed to, we’re not married, we don’t have any kids, and we have the rest of our lives to recoup.” So we thought, let’s do that. We also, to take it a little bit deeper than that, we really sensed that, hey, this is what the Lord wants us to do. I had applied for and been accepted into the industrial engineering program at NDSU in Fargo, North Dakota, and was planning on becoming an industrial engineer. Grew up on a farm and just had spent a lot of time looking at things and how to make them better. And it would frustrate me that it wasn’t better. And I grew up playing with Legos, putting stuff together, and so I just wanted to get involved in putting systems together and ways to make things better and create an environment for people in a business that would truly be a great place for people to work.
And so the age of 20, we cold quit our, we just quit our jobs. (Abby laughs) Like, I wouldn’t say do it that way necessarily again, but we were just so sure that we were on the right track, and, um, so we quit our jobs, we didn’t even know what we were going to do, um, so we spent the first month trying to figure out “What are we going to do?” And, uh, so that’s kind of how it started, um, in an apartment with a folding table and two wooden chairs and a couple legal pads.
Abby: I love that. And eventually you did figure out an idea and go into business, and then you eventually got married, which wasn’t like too long in that process, right?
Matt: So I’m getting married, I think that was about five years into the process.
Abby: Okay, yeah, okay.
Matt: So I was 20 when we started the business, I met my to-be wife when I was 25.
Abby: Okay.
Matt: And so, but the business, of course, we started out really humble. We didn’t have money, we didn’t come from money, and so you had to be very creative and you had to be very sacrificial. I know what it’s like to flavor noodles for weeks on end (Abby laughs) and live that life.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. But we got through those first few years and the business was starting to finally eke out a bit of a living for us when I met my wife. And so it wasn’t by any means a safe thing at that point. It wasn’t like, “Oh, this is in the, this is in the bag and there’s nothing to worry about…” There was still a lot of unknowns, there was still a lot of, there was still a lot of pinching yet to come.
Abby: Yeah. So how did you decide then that it was the right, you know, you met your wife, or she was gonna become your wife; business is okay but you’re still in those hard years, you’re grinding, you’re figuring it out. How did you decide that it was okay and the right time to pursue getting married, having a family, and doing that? While being, you know, kind of the risky entrepreneurial lifestyle.
Matt: Yeah. First of all, it was being very honest with her, like “This is how this could go.”
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: And I think the second thing was, we were so in love, I don’t know if we would have, I don’t know, reality didn’t play as much of a role as it could have or should have, maybe (Abby laughs). But yeah, it was just being brutally honest about “Hey, here’s how this can go.” It’s not like w were six months into it. We were a few years into it. And at some point, it was a little bit of a leap of faith. But at the same time, it’s the next stage of life that needs to get going, and so it definitely brought another level of seriousness to what I was doing in the business as opposed to just like, “Oh, if this doesn’t work out”, you know, “I can recover”… Well, no, it has to work out, so…
Abby: Yeah so how soon after you guys got married, you’re doing entrepreneurship life, she joins the partnership in that sense, coming on board… How soon after that did you guys start a family and you add dad to the list of roles?
Matt: Well we had this great ide that we were gonna wait a few years before we had children and like, we had it all planned out and, I don’t know, we weren’t married but two months and we found out that we were going to have our first. And so that didn’t, that didn’t go as planned. So we thought, “Well, we’re gonna make this work and the Lord knows about this” and so we kind of, you know, we committed to that, committed to just trusting the Lord through that phase, and we ended up miscarrying that first one. And so, but what that did is it really did kind of position our mindset for a family early. If that hadn’t happened, we probably would have waited, you know, for our ultimate dream to play out. But in the end, this was probably better than what we had dreamed anyway. It just, we didn’t see it at the time, it’s not what we’d have chosen, but it, the Lord knew better-
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: -and so I wouldn’t change it.
Abby: Yeah, yeah. So when you actually got your firstborn in your arms, how was that transition from like, you’re doing that, I mean, I know the entrepreneurship hustle. It’s weird hours, you’re working insane, you’re looking at numbers, you’re praying it works, and you’re taking risks on the future, so how did you balance that and then now this new role where it’s like, “I have to provide for this family and”, like, “make sure there’s a roof over their heads and we’ve got food on the table”?
Matt: Yeah, it was exhausting. (Chuckles) Yeah, I’m not gonna lie about that or sugarcoat it, it was exhausting but at the same time I was a lot younger and there was the energy there along with God’s grace, and so, but it was, it was not easy, it was, it was, I’m holding this precious life in my arms and there’s my wife and like, at the same time going through my head is, “Where’s the next paycheck coming from?” and “How are we going to pay for this?” and you know, it’s, it’s a struggle of life, it’s, it’s the day-in and day-out… now entrepreneurship will add definitely a whole ‘nother layer to that…
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: No doubt about it. But again, I kind of went back to the comfort that, “Okay, I’m doing the right thing. I’m in the right spot. I started down the path that I believe God wanted me on, and so I have to trust Him. I have to trust Him through this, for this, beyond this.” And so that was a big part of giving the energy and the wherewithal to be able to keep going and be able to do it.
Abby: I feel like even if you’re not an entrepreneur that is so relatable. Having responsibilities, having bills piled up, seeing the numbers come in and going, “How in the world am I gonna bear that responsibility?”
Matt: Yeah.
Abby: Do you have any advice to anybody who is in a similar position?
Matt: I would say you’re going to have to really put yourself last and put others first as a starter. You’re going to have to think about the needs of those around you, and your own kind of wish list, desires, wants… that’s just going to have to be put on the back burner and that’s the thing about, that’s owning responsibility. That’s just rolling up the sleeves nd denying self and doing it for the sake of others, but in that at the same time comes an amazing fulfillment that is above and beyond better than what ends up looking like superficial things on the wish list. And so there’s fulfillment, there’s also a sense of satisfaction I don’t know that- but that comes any other way. And that is, your focus is on others, and your life has now gone from serving kind of yourself to serving others, and it’s in that act of serving others nd being in that role as a servant that you really start to find, “Wow, life is big. There’s some worthy endeavors here, and it’s far more rewarding than what ends up looking like the superficial things on the list.”
Abby: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s such good advice. I think it’s counter to what you see in the world a lot. Everyone’s looking at the brands you’re wearing and how nice your house is and how cute your kids are dressed or the family vacation you’re taking or not, and in a world of social media and likes and a lot of that kind of superficial stuff that you’re talking about, I think it’s really hard to have that perspective. That, “Okay, put my head down” and “What does it look like to serve the people around me?” Particularly when you’re talking like a family, and as a husband and a father, you know, your kind of responsibility to make it work.
Matt: I would also add a very big ingredient to this whole formula, and that is, I had a wife who was right there alongside me. So, she’s the queen of finding deals, I don’t know how she does it, (Abby laughs) she just has this thing where she can walk in and she can- to a store or a thrift store and she can just find that one thing that we need, and, um, what I learned through that process, I’m kind of the opposite, I’m like, “I need this", I go buy this, end of story, I don’t think about it, right?
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: Well that doesn’t always work, especially in the situations we’re talking about.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: And so what it taught me was to get my focus off of the superficial, you know, the brand that I’m sporting or the newness of something and the price tag that goes with that.
Abby: Yeah, yeah.
Matt: And you really get down to practical living and I think, in part, it’s one of the, it’s one of the great things about family life and marriage in general is, it makes us practical rather than superficial and almost unrelatable to real life.
Abby: Yeah, no, that makes sense, I like that a lot. So you guys were doing family life, you’re doing entrepreneurship, but that’s not where you stayed, which you alluded to earlier.
Matt: Yes.
Abby: So at some point things started kind of changing for you. Could we talk about that season a little bit?
Matt: Absolutely. So shortly after I met my wife, I surrendered to the call to preach and to pastor- go into ministry. That was not something that I necessarily had in my mind from a young age of any kind, and I’ve been in the business at that point for roughly five years and things were going well at that point, you know, it was, it wasn’t like, “Well, this isn’t doing so hot so let’s try the next thing”, um, it wasn’t that at all. Um, the business was doing well and we were beyond just the “macaroni and cheese” stage now. And so, but what began to happen in my heart is, the desire that I had for business and some of the reason I started it began to not shine as bright. There was nothing wrong with the business and the partnership was great, but at the same time the Lord began changing my desires and so I was a little bit confused by that at first. I was like, “Where is this coming from? Why am I feeling this way? What is…” I mean, “I have what most people by the age of 25 would love to have. Why am I thinking these thoughts about ministry?” And I couldn’t figure it out. So I got some counsel, I went and talked to older men in my life- and I would say that was very important. It was very, very critical to get outside your own head in a sense and draw on practical wisdom from people who’ve been around. And maybe they haven’t started businesses, but they’ve lived life long enough to know some things and recognize some things and so, began to talk with some older men in my life and these desires grew and grew stronger and stronger; to the point where, one particular Sunday morning, I was in church and the pastor was preaching on Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross for Christ because he had fallen beneath the load, and the Lord just made it very clear to me, like, “This is what I want you to do. This is what I want you to do. Bear the cross of ministry and preaching.” And I said, “Okay, you’ll have to help me, but I’m willing.” And so that began a long process and from there, of course, I thought, “How is, how is my wife gonna, how is Rose gonna handle this?” Like, we’ve been, I haven’t met her that long, and, and so I called her up and told her, and she was like, “Well, I…” in so many words, she had expected that that’s who she would end up marrying one day would be a pastor and I did not know that. So what was going to be, I thought in my mind, very scary phone call, turned out to be like “Oh,” (both laugh) “…alright, well this is good.” And given where I was back in my stage of life, you know, 25, 26, right in there, and deeply entrenched in the business, it’s not like I could just up and leave and go to Bible school nd that. So after, again, kind of discussing with some of the older men in my life and including my pastor, we decided, let’s just train inside a local church. And during that process, I can slowly detach myself from the business, and we’ll see where, we’ll see how that goes. We’ll see where it goes.
And so for four years I trained in the church. I began helping out, and a pastor, my pastor at the time, gave me a lot of opportunities, which I would say was very gracious of him. He gave me a lot of opportunities to put my feet in the water a little bit and see how this goes and see how this feels. And so that was on-the-job training as it were. Some of it was book learning, but at the same time as I was doing that I was slowly extracting myself from the business so that that was in a healthy spot for my partner, and, yeah. So then after about four years we got to a point where I was able to leave the business, and at that point the church that basically I had grown up in from the age of seven voted to take me on full-time as an assistant pastor on staff. And so that created a transition for us: here I go from kind of the business mindset and and all that’s kind of in that world, to the ministry mindset and all that’s in that world, and they’re different worlds. And so that was, I think, back in 2007- September of 2007. And so, so I served in that church for nine years as the assistant pastor. And as those nine years went on, then I began to carry the responsibility and more of the pastoral load, and my pastor was very gracious to me to let me have the experience, to let me do a lot of preaching, preach on special occasions, and it was there that I kind of cut my teeth and the Lord also took our family through some, some health situations during that time and really as part of the training, like, like, I didn’t realize that was part of the syllabus but we were gonna have some kids and they were gonna be in the hospital for a while, and then, you know, how those things softened our hearts towards the plight of other people. So there was a lot that happened in that nine years.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: And then from there we took a church down in Missouri- or, I was the associate pastor for a year and then was voted as the lead pastor. And I was lad pastor there for years, so two years down there, so a total of 11 overall.
Abby: You mentioned something which I’d like to hit on and just ask you about a little bit… You said that the Lord kind of was working on your heart and softening it to pull out of business- this business you had built and was going well- and then go into ministry and you had that moment and you’re like, “Okay, I’m willing, I’m gonna do this…” but then you said it was four years of a waiting transition process. So could we get into that a little bit? Because I feel like waiting is not something that people talk about or is very popular, particularly in our culture right now. When we want something, we’re kind of like an instant gratification, like, “We want it now”, if you want something you just quit your job and you leave and you go after something else, but that’s a long transitional process into something else. From the moment you said, “Okay, Lord, I’m willing” to that- could we get into that?
Matt: Waiting, yes. Patience. We do live in a culture that… my wife had once told me, she said, “I slaved over the microwave for seven minutes” and she was using it as a joke…
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: …but wow. It really brought to my mind how in our culture we have come to expect, and our expectations have demands underneath of them, and when our expectations aren’t met, and then we get demanding, and there’s a demand underneath of them, those demands, from being polite about it to, like, “I want this now.” And so, you know, we expect instant communication, “Why haven’t you read my text?” All of that. It is, it affects us. There’s no way around that. That’s… we’re immersed in it every day… but God isn’t. And so a day can be- a thousand years can be as one day to Him. And our timeframes and God’s timeframes- and I think as you read through the Bible you’ll find this- they don’t line up. So it was four years of transitioning out and transitioning in. It wasn’t just done in three months. It was, you know, the Bible talks about patience, letting patience have her perfect work in our lives. And that is so necessary. To become less demanding, less expectant, more patient. It’s easier on everybody around us and it does glorify God.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: So I’m not good at that, I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I’m a bit of like, “Why wasn’t it done yesterday and why wasn’t it done perfectly yesterday?” So those four years… it was messy for me. I was definitely outside of my sweet spot. As I’m transitioning out, I’m also transitioning out of controlling everything. So I had built this life where I controlled everything. If I didn’t like it, I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t put up with it. It just, so you can’t do that in ministry. It doesn’t even work well in a home, right?
Abby: Or life in general…
Matt: Or life in general, yeah. So there was a process there where God had, God broke that down. Um, now I would say he’s still doing that, so I don’t know that we ever arrive, but God does work on us and we do get better and it’s because of His grace in our lives. And so that was a hard time. And then I’m transitioning into ministry where you can’t just hire and fire. I mean, you’re enmeshing yourself with people’s lives and you’re learning to love them, and that doesn’t happen overnight either. They’re not perfect and neither am I. And so their lives are messy and situations are messy and it’s not simple. It’s not cut and dry. And that takes time to work through and so you need patience for that. So God began a process of softening through the work of waiting and through the work of patience to make His servant more relatable and more of a servant and less of a boss.
Abby: And did you find that having kind of a foot in both places, was that…
Matt: That was hard.
Abby: Okay (laughs)
Matt: That was very hard. Because really, I had my feet in three places: family, business, and ministry. And I got to the point where I couldn’t do all three. And so, and part of the perfection, the perfectionist side of me was like, “Okay, if I’m gonna be in business I want to do it perfectly”, you know, “I want to give the customer the perfect experience. I don’t want them to get something and it not be right. I don’t care who the customer is or if they’re the first one or the hundredth one or the thousandth one. They need to have a perfect product.”
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: But then ministry is this… it, like, you’re dealing with things and it takes time and you’re working through things, and so those two things collided a lot and then I go home and, you know, there’s little noses pressed up against the door and I’m worn out. I’m worn out. And then there’s everything at the house to deal with. Not that that’s bad. There’s a lot of good things, but it’s the noise. Like, “I’m worn out,” like, “can I have like half an hour where I can just go sit in the porch and it’s quiet?” You know, stuff like that.
Abby: Yeah. Did you set any systems like that at home or boundaries at home? Did you, did you do anything in life to help boundary those kind of things or make Matt okay?
Matt: Matt had to learn how to change. Because I didn’t want… I’m really good at putting the system together. A process. Measuring that process. The KPI… like I’m really good at that. And I couldn’t do that to my family, and so I had to change and I had to relax, and that’s a word that felt almost, like, anti-who-I-am, is the word relax, but that’s what I needed to do. I didn’t do it as elegantly as I should have- and here’s me judging myself- but I didn’t do it enough and I wished I would have done it more even if it wasn’t quite elegant. I wish I would have done it more. But part of that plays into a little bit of something that kind of came out in ministry and in general later on, and that was just even, who I am, and the whole concept of identity… Um, I felt like there was performance attached to who I’m supposed to be. In the business world, it is about performance. It is about the product going out to the customer and it being perfect. That’s performance, and you measure that, and you’re never content with the numbers as they were. You want them better, and there’s this tendency to forget the victories as almost they never, as if they never happened because you’re on to the next thing like right now. And so I- that was, that was hard, it was hard to realize that who Matthew Johnson is, his worth, does not rest in that. His worth does not rest in the perceived success of that.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: Who he is and his worth rests in the Lord. nd we’re gonna make mistakes. Does that mean it’s okay to make mistakes? No. Do we like the mistakes that we make? No, but at the same time it’s reality, and God is gracious. He’s far more gracious to me than I was to anybody else in my life. And so Matthew had to learn how to relax and he had to change.
Abby: Yeah, yeah. I think that is so relatable to humans in general, but I think particularly to men. I grew up with three younger brothers, so I’m obviously not a man so I can’t speak to men from personal experience, but growing up with brothers highly involved in athletics, and I’ve even seen it in my dad, just that tie for, like you said, performance to be kind of how you base yourself or what you’re able to achieve. And it’s kind of just the sphere of competing against each other. And not that competition isn’t necessarily bad, but just that kind of striving to like, “Well I have to do the best and be the best” and that can have an impact in a way emotionally that you wouldn’t necessarily always see, so it’s cool that the Lord was working on it there.
Matt: Yes, absolutely. There is a sense in which a man wants to go out and slay the dragon. He wants to go out, he wants to slay that thing, and come home victorious, right? But at the same time the dragon doesn’t always… you don’t always kill the dragon. And so, who you are is not dependent, your worth is not dependent on how well you slayed the dragon. It’s good to have that in front of you, but not mixing up your identity with your performance is huge
Abby: Yeah, well, I can relate to that, even just as a woman. Just being someone who’s a high achieving person who has goals. Being in business now myself, it’s really easy to go like, “Yeah, my worth is tied in that, and if it fails, what does that say about me?”
Matt: Absolutely.
Abby: So being able to separate those two things- that my worth is secure, even if my performance fails- is life-giving, ‘cause it allows you to fully run in something but then not lose who you are in the process, which I think is necessary for business. It’s necessary for life, ‘cause like you said, we’re all gonna fail, we’re all gonna have those moments where you fall on your face- I definitely have- and if it hasn’t been for, like you said, learning how to separate those two things, you wouldn’t get back up again.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely.
Abby: So you transitioned into ministry, ministry full time, you were doing ministry in Missouri, could we talk about Missouri a little bit and what that was like? That was kind of your, like, last stop in, or where we last ended on kind of your journey.
Matt: Yes, so Missouri was kind of the graduate class, if I can say it that way, for this work that God was doing in my life as it relates to identity. Um, and in the sense that we talked about, you know, transitioning out of business into ministry, not basing your identity on your performance… That was level 101. But at this point I’m in ministry now, I’m out of business, and I’m enjoying ministry. It’s grueling at times, there’s hard cases, and if you’re not careful it can really weigh on you- other' people’s situations can really weigh on you- but I’m doin’ it. So we move down to Missouri, I take a church there, and things are going great. I’m the associate pastor. I went down there and the church and I- it was with the agreement or the understanding that I would become the pastor and the, and the previous one would retire, or the one then would retire. And so we… the first year I served as the associate and things went great. The church votes me on to be the senior or the lead pastor, and so I served for another year, and out of what I would say is out of the blue, as we would say, the expression, I’m not sure where it comes from, but I end up forcibly terminated. And that was the hardest thing I’ve gone through because unlike being forcibly terminated from a job, there’s like wrapped up in that for a pastor- if he’s not careful- is a whole spiritual component to it. And so the, the situation was especially hard because the way in which I was forcibly terminated- forced termination, basically, what that is is there’s a minority group of people in a church that lead basically a coup against the pastor and though there’s no moral fault, there’s no dereliction of duty or anything like that, they just don’t- either for whatever reason, they don’t like them or they don’t like the preaching or whatever it is, a lot of different reasons why this can happen- but they lead a coup essentially against the pastor and they sway the church to get rid of the pastor. And so for us, this was pretty hard because we don’t have any family in the area, we had left all to come and serve in this church, we had made a lot of friends in the church, we were living in the parsonage at the time, and so our lives are wrapped up in serving in that church.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: And so basically in a Saturday afternoon, it was all over, and I remember walking across the church parking lot to the parsonage just n shock. I remember thinking to myself, “Okay, I’m a pastor, but I don’t have a church.” And then, and I didn’t realize it at the time, but the problem with that was, I thought who I was was a pastor. I did not realize that I had misplaced my identity in what I do. You know, in our culture today we think about, you know, when we meet somebody, we say, “Well, what do you do for a living?” You know, I mean, you never really quite think of it as “This is what they do for a living”, we usually answer it with the idea that “This is what I am”, “I am”, you know, “a CEO” or “I am an entrepreneur” or “I am a pastor”, “I am these things” and over time we get to believing that, unfortunately. And so here I am, thinking to myself, “I am a pastor, I do not have a church. They want us out in 10 days.” It was very disorienting. It was, to say the least. And so, that began, really, a five-year process of, I would say, the first two years of that I was in a coma, just emotionally, spiritually, and it took that long just to realize that. “I never was a pastor in the sense of who I am. I am still a child of God. God did not abandon me. He did not abandon my family at that point.” And so once I could get my heart and mind around that, then there was about what I would say three years of rehab that followed that. And so, those three years; rehab’s not easy, you know. Being in the coma is almost easier because you’re out. I mean, you know, and literally during those first two years, I was numb. I was just numb to many things. I remember telling my wife that something died inside. And I… but coming out of the coma and then realizing, okay, I have to get out of the hospital that year, and there’s family around me, there’s growing children that are getting into their teen years, and so reaching out and getting some counseling, getting some help, which I would say was very hard for me to do. ‘Cause this whole thing brought on so many things. Just even pride in the sense of, “Well, I’m tough, I can handle this, right?” “No, you can’t. You will need help.” And so admitting that, embracing that… rehab was like, “Oh, I’m gonna put pressure on some joints that hurt.”
Abby: Mm-hmm.
Matt: We’re gonna take the pressure off and we’re gonna see how that goes and we’re gonna pressure on it again and then we’re gonna take it off but we’re gonna try to hold out longer this time. You know, it’s not easy, and so those were the hard three years and that kind of takes me to January of this year, and so yeah, God- God’s grace, I will say this: God’s grace was sufficient during that time. Though it was not easy.
Abby: And you had at one point said, or thought that maybe you wouldn’t go to church, potentially.
Matt: Correct. Yes.
Abby: Now you’re an elder at church, going to church, writing biblical, like, Bible studies, devotionals, like very involved in the church…
Matt: Yeah.
Abby: How did you go from saying, “I’m never doing that again and not being a part of something like that” to being like a faithful, productive member of a church?
Matt: I would say, well, there’s- there’s quite a few things that kind of came together. First, I would say, my wife got there sooner than I did and so she was a big help along the way. You know, when this whole thing first happened, I thought to myself, “Okay, I have a family I’ve got to provide for. I got to get them to a location of some kind. We’ve got to get a house again. I’ve got to find a job.” Not that ministry isn’t work.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: But I, like, when you get forcibly terminated like that, word gets out about how toxic you are at that point, and so people shun you. People who you thought were your friends in the ministry are no longer your friends. What’s interesting is, I never got a phone call to find out if what they had heard was true. And so there’s this sense of being betrayed. And so I, and I knew at that point like, I can’t just jump back into another church. I don’t know what happened to me, so I was thinking that, I don’t know what’s happened to me, but I know I can’t just jump back into another church so I got to find a job somewhere. And so that, that took a lot out of me just to reset the foundation again. And so once that was done, then it’s like, okay, now the pain starts to set in. It’s kind of like, you know, you fall off the bike, you hit the pavement real hard, you don’t feel it at first, you get up, you’re looking at yourself like did I break anything?
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: And then all of the sudden it’s like, “Oh, my knee hurts really bad,” and so that was, that was in that, it was in that moment of sheer pain that I began to think to myself, “Well, if this is how the Lord’s church is going to treat me- is going to treat my family- I don’t want anything to do with it.” You have to be obviously looking back on that, it’s, it’s, I wouldn’t have accepted it at that time, but that’s pretty, that’s pretty proud nd arrogant to say, because not all churches are the same. Now, not all, no church is perfect, but not all churches are the same.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: And so, but, you know, in the state of pain you don’t, you don’t hear that kind of thing, you know, logic and reason doesn’t- you just- pain, that’s all you feel. And so, part of the problem too was, prior to thinking that we got involved in another church again, and this church had found out that, well, “Wow, you used to be a pastor and you guys know how to do ministry” and things like that. So you know, just got plugged right back in. And I didn’t quite realize that that was not the thing to do. And so, literally one Sunday morning, I’m trying to put on my church clothes, as it were, and I just have a breakdown. Like I physically cannot move. I’m done. Then COVID hit. And so the church we were attending at the time stopped having services like lot of other places and it was really kind of the thing for us that allowed us to step back and really say, “Wow, we’re in way too far at this point. We are gonna have to heal first.” And that’s- the whole concept of healing really began to kind of come to the forefront. And like I said, my wife got there first. And I would say even my children got there before us. and so once, I remember, we were going for a walk one day and my wife was like, “So, I talked to this counselor today.” I was just like, “Oh, good for you.” (Both laugh) I don’t need, in my mind, I’m like already defending myself. I don’t need one, you know, and she begins to talk about like, just the things that this counselor had helped her see, and that began to slowly soften me up a little bit towards accepting the fact that I have a lot of healing that I need to do and I’m not gonna get through on my own. You know, when you go to rehab they don’t just say, “Okay, here’s the stretches, I’ll be back in half an hour”…
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: They’re gonna show you how to do it and they’re gonna help you move your arm because you don’t have the strength to move your arm on your own, depending on, you know, what your accident was, and so I, so that began to just roll around in my mind, like, “Okay, I’m gonna need this.” And finally, I admit, “Okay, who are you talking to again? Do you think you could find out if they would, you know, talk to me, that kind of thing?” And it just slowly started stepping my way into that. And that was, it was hearing that other voice on the other side of the Zoom call and seeing that other person on the other end of the Zoom call that really began to work on my mind and my heart to say, this isn’t over. This is not final. This is, God’s at work here and He’s allowed this.
Abby: Yes.
Matt: Is this what you would have chosen? No. But what he’s going to do through this, He wants you to be a part of it. And like, that was the first glimmer of hope, where I could see that God loved me. He loved my family and He’s going to help me, and whatever this next thing is, whatever this “it isn’t over” is, He’s going to, I’m not going to have to do that alone and that’s not going to define me either. And so that’s it, of how I began to step out of that.
Abby: Yeah, yeah. Our stories are not at all the same, but I can relate to that timeline you talked about. You go through something that’s traumatic and you just feel, like you said, numb, in a coma, don’t know how to process, and then all of a sudden you get to that stage where you go “Oh, I’m feeling the broken things now” and then you almost don’t even realize the depth of brokenness there because you have this kind of innate like, “I’m gonna muscle through.” And then as you’re muscling through, you start to realize, “Oh, I’m maybe not as okay as I thought I was.” and so, getting to that level of healing, letting people in, but now you are starting to see some of those redemption pieces of your story coming into play. You’re back in ministry and you’re actually starting to get into a sphere where you’re telling that story to help other people. So are you starting to see the picture come together a little bit here?
Matt: Yes, so back in January I thought, “Well, I’m gonna read the Bible through this year. I’m gonna do it chronologically.” And then I started to do that. I got through the book of Genesis, Job, getting into the book of Exodus, and I thought to myself, “I need to get out of my comfort zone a little bit here and start writing, journaling my thoughts, and put that out into the form of a blog.” And so the very first one was very hard to do. Again, all the insecurity, “Did I do it good enough?”, all the perfectionism, like, the ghosts from the past, they all start to wave their hands at me.
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: And so I began to do that, but I found that as I did it, the floodgates begin to open for the desire to be back in the ministry. It was very therapeutic, it was very healing, and putting myself out there. And then as I did that, kind of in the back of my mind was, first, well, in the back of my mind was the ide of taking the comfort and healing that I’ve experienced and being a steward of that. It is a gift. It doesn’t feel like it in the moment, but it is a gift. And God allows us to go through those things so that we don’t just keep that to ourselves, but we take that comfort that He’s given us and we comfort others. And so as I began to think through that again, it’s kind of like the floodgates began to open to… “I want to help people again. I want to love people gain. I want to learn how to do that better. I want to glorify God through that.” And so I, kind of like, the floodgates began to open to us. And so as I began to think through that, “Do I help others going through what we went through see beyond the tragedy and see beyond the pain” and not that you’ll come out the other end of it identical to who you were going into it. You’ll come off the other end of it better, but t the same time, kind of, to use the story of Jacob wrestling with God, Jacob wrestled with God all night, and it’s just amazing that God even allowed Jacob to wrestle with Him. I mean, it’s not like God was barely hanging on, but Jacob walked away with that, away from that with a limp for the rest of his life. And it was just, you go through some of these things like this and you heal, but you’re a different person now. And how does God want to use that person? And how does God want to use the things that that person now knows nd use it to help others?
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: There is, again, kind of coming back to that “serving others” mentality. There’s another tool in the tool belt. It wasn’t easy to get, but it’s needful in other people’s lives and how can I be part of that?
Abby: Yeah, yeah. And I don’t think everyone goes through experiences nd chooses to allow it to prove that result. And you know, for a while you didn’t know if you were going to either.
Matt: Yeah.
Abby: And, and so I think it is so encouraging as you start to tell your own story, it encourages other people to start going, “I want to go through whatever my trauma is; whatever my hard season or chapters are, I don’t want them to be the thing that defines me forever. I want it to refine me and then I want to set out and I want to find the people who need to hear what I’ve been through so that they can have the hope you’re talking about finding.” Which is so cool because you’re actively doing that now or starting to do that is, putting out resources, putting out daily devotionals- which are fantastic by the way, and doing things to be back in ministry. serving the Lord and offering hope and encouragement to people, which again, like, what a redemption, a redemption story. Which I know is still being written but what a cool phase that you’re in with that.
Matt: Yes, something that’s kind of interesting is when I first began to write these devotions and put them out on the blog, um, the organization that I had reached out to- that Rose had reached out to initially for some counseling; it’s an organization that their setup and their focus is to help pastors and families go through forced termination and come out the other side of it- they actually reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in being a guest blogger for them. And at the time, I had begun to write kind of the first paragraphs, I’ll say, of the story. So this is different than the devotionals, but began to write the first paragraphs of the story. And so it’s just interesting to see how God’s working through all of this. And, um… so I put that together and that’ll be coming out in May on their blog and it’s… it’s brutal. It’s pretty, it’s pretty raw. But at the same time it’s filled with hope and help and so I don’t know where all this is going other than to say there’s a lot more of the story to write-
Abby: Yeah.
Matt: -and I truly do hope that it does help others.
Abby: Yeah. I am such a passionate fan for telling your redemption story as it’s in process. Not at the necessarily, the, those beginning parts, you know, I think there’s a part for privacy and there’s a part for healing and there’s a part for, for that and a stage for that, but then there comes this stage where you don’t necessarily know all of that and I don’t know if we ever will always all of the reasons why or see all of the finished story tied together in bow, but I think that there’s something really beautiful about telling your story in process.
Matt: Yeah.
Abby: Where you’re going, “This is messy and I don’t have the final story like ‘Oh and then this happened so it’s great’” like that final close movie scene, but you’re just telling it in process, so I love that you’re a person who’s doing that. I think it needs to happen more.
Matt: Well it’s definitely, that’s the, that’s the point in which it’s most alive, if I can say it that way. Boy, it’s coursing through the veins and it’s pretty fresh, so yeah, to get that out and in front of others, that’s, that’s real.
Abby: Yeah, yeah. So I for one will be reading it. We asked two questions t the end of every Beyond the Bar episode, but I added a third one for this specific little mini series. We’re talking about being “legacy builders”, specifically about fatherhood, entrepreneurship, and ministry. So one of the questions I wanted to ask on this specific episode is, “What would be the biggest piece of advice you would give to men who would either like to be a father someday or are already fathers trying to walk that out well?”
Matt: I would say two things: One- relax. I think I’ve already said that earlier. Relax. And you don’t have to go it alone. The Lord can, the Lord’s walked this path. I mean, He’s the Heavenly Father. And so, so relax. You’re not gonna do it perfectly. You’re not gonna be a perfect husband. You’re not gonna be a perfect dad or father. And again, don’t get your identity tied up with your performance. I would say there’s help in being a father and bein a husband and rely on that. Don’t try to go it alone, so relax. And then I think the second thing I would say is… second thing I would say is be a servant. Again, in our culture the emphasis is “me” and “now” and “what’s the return for me” and you have to get beyond that and really get down into rolling up the sleeves and, of course, the illustration in the Bible is Jesus. He takes a towel and he washes the feet of his disciples while they just have been arguing about who’s gonna be the greatest, and I would say as a father and a husband and really I think this is how legacies are built. It’s built by serving. That’s what people are gonna remember. That’s what people are gonna love about you. That’s what’s gonna resonate with them. They know they don’t deserve it. But when you’re served, when somebody serves you, it’s not easily forgotten. It’s… it’s that thing that was a difference-maker. And so I’d say relax and learn to serve. Be a servant.
Abby: I love those pieces of advice for men but I think both obviously could be applicable for women too. I think those are kind of great life pieces of advice. The servanthood one and just relaxing, settling in and not going alone are all great pieces of advice. Moving on two our other two questions- which, again, we close every episode of Beyond the Bar with, they’re just the questions I want to know from the people that I sit down and talk to- so it’s a two-part question: first part is, if you could go back and tell your younger self one thing, what would it be? And then the second one, what’s one thing you want to be remembered for?
Matt: Boy, if I could tell myself one thing- I’m gonna sound like broken record here-
Abby: That’s okay, people should really get it; it should nail home.
Matt: I would tell myself to relax. I would, I was so high-strung and I don’t want to say hard to live with but at the same time, not easy. It’s just, and it’s not that you, you don’t have to throw passion out the door for that. You don’t have to throw a dream out the door for that. You don’t have to pursue something with 110% of your being in that sense You don’t have to do that. But at the same time, don’t let that become what you serve. Because if you do, people aren’t gonna be able to live with you. They’re just, it’s gonna, it’s not gong to be the satisfying life. You’re gonna chase vanity. So I would say relax and then what I would want people to remember me for is, I would hope they remember me for serving. I have never chased the spotlight. That was one of the hardest things bout going into the ministry is, I did not want to stand up in front of people and say anything. Just give me a vacuum cleaner on a Saturday afternoon. I’ll vacuum the sanctuary, right, that’s where I wanted to be, and so I would say serve. It’s, I mean, I would want to be remembered as a servant. That I think has the most return, not just now, but in the future.
Abby: Yeah, yeah. Ugh, so good, so good. These are why these are my favorite questions. It’s just fun to hear what people that I look up to would respond, what would you go tell, you know, your 16-year-old self, if you grabbed them by the shoulders, what would you say? Super interesting to hear people respond to that, which sometimes you could have heard earlier in the episodes, which just happened. And then just that impact piece, like what impact do you really want to be known for? And obviously in today’s episode we were specifically talking about building legacy, and so like you mentioned earlier, I think one of the, I think you’re right, one of the biggest ways you do that is by serving others. If you, if you want a legacy left, you have to be thinking about the people that are around you. So thank you so much for being here. I think you’re doing it and hopefully this episode becomes a part of it, um, leaving cool legacy about having positive impact. So I really appreciate you being on the show, it was really fun to get to chat.
Matt: Thank you for having me. I just love this concept of going beyond the bar. Getting down into these kinds of conversations that, you know, we all live here and hearing other people’s stories, the hope and the encouragement that comes from that. Thank you for letting me be a part of that.
Abby: Thanks, thank you. Thank you guys for being here to listen. We’re gonna have the blog post, Matt’s blog post options on somewhere on the screen here, so you’ll be able to hit the show description, find all of that information that we talked about today in the show, and you can hit that subscribe, subscribe button if you haven’t already, so you can stay tuned for all of our future episodes. We will have a part-two to this mini series, so “Legacy Builders Pt. 2” talking with another gentleman about family, or, fatherhood, ministry, and entrepreneurship, so stay tuned for part two, it’s going to be a good one. Thanks guys!
