Who Is Pastor Cole? — The Testimony Behind Kingdom Gospel Ministries

Announcer: Welcome to Kingdom Gospel Ministries. Stories worth coming home for, and the Book they keep leading back to.

Pastor Cole: I didn't get saved at a burning bush. I got saved because the pizza was good. My name's Cole. I want to tell you the truth about how I got here, because you deserve that before anything else. I grew up in Austin, in a house that wasn't against church. Just busy. We went some Sundays. We skipped more. If you'd asked twelve-year-old me why I liked church, I'd have told you straight. It's where my friends were. That's the honest answer. Not a burning bush. A youth group with good pizza. I tell you that first because I want you to trust me. A lot of preachers hand you the dramatic version. Lightning struck, the sky opened, everything changed in a moment. That's not my story, and I won't pretend it is just to sound more spiritual. Mine started small, and slow, and mostly through people I loved. That's still a true way in. Maybe truer than lightning, because it's how most folks actually come to faith. Quiet. Ordinary. Somebody feeding you supper and telling you a story. So if you're waiting on your own burning bush before you think you belong here, friend, stop waiting. I didn't get one either.

Pastor Cole: My grandfather never preached a sermon in his life. He taught me more about God than anybody with a pulpit. Every summer, my folks shipped me out to his place. Past Lampasas, out where the highway runs out of stripes. Cattle country. An hour and a half from Austin, and a whole different world. Grandpa didn't preach at me. Not once that I remember. He told stories. Over supper, like they were just the news of the day. He told me about the neighbor who drank his family down to nothing, and came back from it. Sober. Ashamed. Forgiven anyway. He told me about the widow two farms over, who left her porch light burning every night for eleven years, waiting on a son who might come home. And he told me about a man named Otis, who ran cattle three sections over and lost his youngest boy to the river the summer I was nine. Grandpa sat with that man on his own porch for six straight nights and never once opened a Bible. Just sat. Handed him coffee. Let him talk about the boy until he couldn't anymore. Otis told my grandfather years later that those six nights were the closest he ever came to hearing from God, and nobody had quoted him a single verse. Grandpa told those stories like they were just news. It took me years to understand they were sermons. I loved them before I ever knew that's what they were.

Pastor Cole: Nobody argued me out of my faith. I just went quiet, and quiet is how most people actually leave. I grew up spending summers with my grandfather, out in cattle country, listening to him tell stories about ordinary people and what God had done in their lives. I loved those summers. Then I went off to college, and I lost the thread. I didn't have a crisis of doubt I could point to later and say, there, that's where it happened. I just got busy. The way you do. Church stopped fitting the schedule. One skipped Sunday turned into a skipped month. A skipped month turned into a skipped year. I got comfortable being the guy who used to be religious. And I want to be honest with you about that phrase, because it costs more than it sounds like it should. It sounds harmless. Almost respectable. Like you graduated out of something. It isn't harmless. It's a slow leak. You don't notice the tire's flat until you're stuck on the shoulder. I didn't fight some noble fight and lose. I didn't fight at all. That's the part I want you to hear, if you're the guy who used to be religious right now, listening to this. You don't need a dramatic reason for leaving. Most people don't. And you don't need one to come back either.

Pastor Cole: I came apart on my grandfather's kitchen floor, and that's the day I actually became a Christian. My grandfather raised cattle out past Lampasas, and every summer of my childhood, he fed me supper and told me stories about what God had done in ordinary people's lives. I loved him more than almost anyone. By the time I was in college, I'd drifted from all of it. Quietly. The way most people drift. Then my grandfather died. I flew back for the funeral, and afterward I ended up alone in his house. It still smelled like his coffee. I walked into that kitchen where he used to tell me those stories, and I knelt down on the floor, and I came apart. Everything I thought I'd left behind was still standing right there. Waiting on me. Patient as a porch light left burning for somebody who might come home. And I understood something on that floor I couldn't have told you in words before that day. The gospel had reached me through him. Not through an altar call. Not through a program. Through supper, and stories about ordinary people, and what God had actually done in their lives. That was the work. Carry it the way he carried it. I didn't walk into that kitchen looking for God. I walked in grieving a man. I found out he'd been handing God to me my whole childhood, one story at a time, and I just hadn't known to call it that.

Pastor Cole: I spent years in seminary, and the most important thing I learned there is that the Book doesn't live in a lecture hall. Studied the languages, the history, the arguments men have been having about the Book for centuries. And here's what I actually walked away with. Not letters after my name. Not a stack of arguments to win. I walked away understanding that the Book doesn't live in a lecture hall. It lives in people. My grandfather never spent a day in seminary, and he taught me more about the gospel over supper than most of what I read in those years. He did it with stories about ordinary people and their actual lives, told plain, over food. So when I finished, I didn't go looking for a stage. I got in my truck. I started driving, sitting down at kitchen tables all over this country, doing exactly what my grandfather did to me. Listening. Letting people tell me what God had actually done in their lives, instead of telling them what I'd read in a book. That's still what I do. Not because I couldn't have taken a pulpit somewhere. Because the truck and the kitchen table are where the Book actually lives.

Pastor Cole: I sat with a man who could fix anything with his hands, except the one thing that was taking him apart. His name was Ray. Engines, roofs, busted plumbing, didn't matter, Ray could fix it. Except the one thing eating at him from the inside, which his hands were no good against at all. I spend my life driving around this country, sitting down at kitchen tables with folks I've never met, listening to what God has actually done, or hasn't yet, in their lives. Ray was one of them. I sat with Daniel, a welder out of Odessa, who went about as far from home, in every sense, as a man can go. Lost a hand on the job. Lost a lot more than that before he found his way back to anything like a porch light. I sat with a man named Marcus, who would've told you flat out that God was done with him. He'd have said it plain, like a fact, like something he'd already checked and confirmed. He wasn't done with him. He never had been. The Book's got a verse for that. Luke, chapter fifteen: But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. Which just means the running started before the son ever got close enough to explain himself. That's the whole thing, right there. Somebody watching for you, long before you're ready to be found. Ray didn't earn that. Daniel didn't. Marcus didn't. Neither did I.

Pastor Cole: This isn't a church you join, and you don't owe anything to be welcome here. I drive around this country sitting at kitchen tables, listening to people tell me what God has actually done in their lives, and then I tell those stories to you. Eventually I couldn't keep all of them to myself. That's what this is. That's Kingdom Gospel Ministries. Not a building. Not a church you join. Just the stories, told plain, and the Book they keep leading back to. You don't owe anything to be welcome here. And if these stories come to mean something to you, there's a place at the table for folks who want to walk alongside the work. If you're the guy who used to be religious, friend, I know that guy. I was him. I drifted quiet in college, came back on my knees in my grandfather's kitchen, and spent years since learning that the Book doesn't live in a lecture hall. It lives in people. In folks like Ray, and Daniel, and Marcus, and maybe in you. The door is open, and so is the grace. Welcome home.

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