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THE JOURNEY / 2015 SUMMER
We’re all Broken and
We’re all in Need of Christ Peter Vandenberg
L
ike many in the South, I grew up in church. In hindsight, looking back, I grew up “religious,” not in a purely Christian atmosphere. I was baptized as a baby in the church, I grew up in. It wasn’t until my wife Wendi and I got married in 1988 did I consider changing denominations. When Wendi and I decided to stay in Boone and raise a family, we really struggled with the church, because I wasn’t comfortable with the Baptist church, and that’s where her background was. All this time I had professed myself to be a Christian, but in my early twenties, I realized that I was far more religious than I was a Christian. I struggled with having to be baptized again because I felt like I was only being baptized again to join the church, and not to honor Christ. Eventually, I did get a full-submersion baptism in the mid 1990s, and joined Brushy Fork Baptist Church. In the next few years, Wendi and I were building a house, so I was doing a lot of work on that, and I sort of got out of going to church reg-
ularly. It was a low point in my life, because I was making my own needs the priority and not putting God first. In 2007, I felt like something was missing, and my life just did not feel complete. A friend of mine, Carla Propst, encouraged me to start teaching Sunday School. I hesitated at first, but Brushy Fork was growing at such a rapid rate that I decided to help fill the need. Several years later, in 2012, I took a job with Templeton Tours. That job was life changing, because it gave me opportunities to visit the Holy Land. At the same time, Brushy Fork got a new pastor, Toby Oliver. I didn’t know it then, but God had put both those new things in my life at the same time to show me who I could be, and to demonstrate how I could help fulfill the Great Commission, in which Jesus commands his disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I [Jesus] have commanded you.” Toby was like no other pastor I’d ever seen. I’d
