Just One Thread

by Melanie Hemry

Ted and Jan Currington and their two children, Christi and Chad, stepped inside the church sanctuary, not knowing their lives were about to be changed forever. When the evangelist took to the pulpit, he pointed to Ted and Jan and directed them to stand.

Then he said, “God has called you. You will pastor a church one day.”

Ted kept his face blank. He’d heard things like that before. His grandmother used to see him coming and say, “There’s the little preacher!”

He’d always blown off those words coming from his grandmother. But now, they were a little harder to dismiss coming from a preacher. One thing Ted knew for sure: If he ever was to become a pastor, God would have to do it.

Ted and Jan had already faced a lot of opposition. They’d married young, while still in their teens. “They’ll never make it,” the naysayers said. But Ted and Jan had never looked back, or questioned their decision.

There were two things that Ted liked to talk about…the Lord and horses. He raised horses, showed horses at halter, and team roped. He loved spending time at the barn. Tending to the animals gave him a lot of quiet time to talk to the Lord and to hear from Him.

He often thought about the prophetic words spoken over him, and wondered how God could take him from a secular career into the ministry. How in the world could he ever pastor a church?

The Barn

“Right after Jan and I married, a group of us at church discovered KCM,” Ted recalls. “Jan and I became Partners early in our marriage. We got the BVOV magazine, and faithfully watched their program on TV.

“As years passed, in addition to horses, I worked for an oil company. One day in the late ’90s, Chad came to me and said, ‘Hey Dad, they’ve started a cowboy church at the barn where they sell cows. It’s on Monday evenings, and I’d like to go.”

Our 13-year-old son wanted more church? Ted thought.

“We didn’t have to discuss it,” Ted recalls. “We added Monday evenings to our Sunday and Wednesday church routine. After a few weeks, I realized that the evangelists had to clean the barn and set up the sound equipment every week. Since I got off work at 4 o’clock, Jan and I took over doing that. I had prayed that God would give me an opportunity to meet with Glenn Smith, the person who started and headed up Church at the Barn, one on one.

“We’d been attending for about six months when Jan dropped me off at the church one Monday evening to clean, because she had an errand to run. When I walked in, Glenn was there.”

A former rodeo clown, Glenn Smith had dedicated his life to bringing the gospel to the rodeo circuit. Because rodeos were generally held Thursday through Sunday, in most cases participants were unable to attend regular church services.

Glenn lived in Post, Texas, but spent considerable time traveling across the country preaching the gospel and establishing cowboy churches. Along with two other cowboys, Corey Ross and Trey Johnson, they had started the Lubbock Church at the Barn.

“It was a God connection and an answered prayer,” Ted now says of his first meeting with Glenn. “I found out that he and his wife, Ann, were close friends with Kenneth and Gloria. Ann had also been close friends with Kenneth’s mother. They were very strong in faith.”

Glenn soon became a good friend and mentor to Ted.

“They introduced us to the Southwest Believers’ Convention and KCM’s Ministers’ Conference. We attended those meetings faithfully, and even bought recordings of the conference messages. To this day, I listen to them over and over in my pickup truck. They have taught us how to live in the fullness of the Covenant. Every time we go to a meeting, we feel like we’ve just been fed by a fire hose.”

The Call

Ted should have been happy. He had a wonderful marriage and great kids. He enjoyed his job and both the churches they attended. But something seemed…off. Often, Jan would come home from work and ask, “What’s wrong?”

How could he tell her when he didn’t have any idea himself?

One afternoon Ted sat at the kitchen island reading his Bible. He was excited about the horse he’d just bought, yet something wasn’t right.

Ted jumped up and said, “Lord, You’re going to have to show me what’s going on. It’s driving me up the wall! Just show me!”

Opening his Bible, words from 1 Corinthians 1:26 (NKJV) seemed to leap off the page: “For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.”

Ted sighed. He’d never felt worthy of the call. It seemed God was telling him that wasn’t the criteria.

Looking up toward heaven, he spoke one word: “Yes.”

Five days later, Glenn Smith called.

“Ted, we’ve had a thousand salvations this year, but where are they? We’ve got to start discipling people,” Glenn said. “I want you and Jan to be the Bible teachers at Church at the Barn.”

Ted and Jan soon realized the sale barn was not large enough to accommodate their growing Bible study group. One of the cowboys who had gotten saved at the sale barn, and his wife, offered their feed store as a meeting place on Tuesday evenings. They had nearly 100 people meeting there.”

One evening Glenn came by and said, “You are building your church!”

“Not my church!” Ted insisted. “We are a part of this with you!

“Glenn was confirming what had been prophesied to me all those years ago.”

Soon after, Glenn and Corey began talking to Ted and Jan about getting ordained and calling them the pastors of the church.

As Ted was just driving up to the barn one night, he received yet another call from Glenn.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m just pulling into the parking lot of the sale barn,” Ted answered.

“Good, you’re up.”

“You’re up!” That’s how it started.

By October 2000, Ted and Jan were ordained. On Jan. 1, 2003, the church was officially turned over to them. It was renamed West Texas Church at the Barn, known today as West Texas Church.

The Warning

In 2004, Ted was walking across the arena when he heard the Lord say, Go get a physical. That was odd, Ted thought. He was only 48 years old and had always been in good health. Still, he knew the voice of the Lord. Turning around, he went inside and found Jan cooking supper.

“The Lord told me to go get a physical.”

They made the appointment and were shocked to learn that his EKG looked bad. Ted was admitted for an angiogram.

“You have a blockage in your heart,” the doctor told Ted, “but it’s in a spot where we can’t fix it. We’re not going to do anything at this point. We’ll treat you with medication and lifestyle changes.”

“I’d always said that God would do His part, but we still have to be smart enough to do our part,” Ted said. “We took our faith stand on God’s Word. We also changed our eating and exercise habits to do our part in the natural. The following year, in 2005, we bought land and built a church. We borrowed the money and paid it off in one year. Only God can do that!

“The church grew so fast that we ran out of seats. So, in 2008, we tripled the size of the church. Once again, within a year and a half, God paid it off.”

Things moved along well both at church and at home.

In 2012, Ted was walking on the treadmill when he heard the Lord speak again:

I want you to have a triple bypass.

Wait. No way will I do that, Ted thought. I’ll come home and be with You.

I want you to have a triple bypass. Everything will be good.

Ted agreed, but didn’t tell Jan what he had heard.

One night a few weeks later, Ted couldn’t sleep all night.

“The next morning, I told Jan I thought I needed to go to the hospital. My brother went to a certain cardiologist, so I asked Jan to call his office.

The Vision

“While Jan was making phone calls, I prepared myself for the reality of heart surgery. Miraculously, the cardiologist said he would meet us in the ER. Before we left, I told Jan to pack some clothes because we wouldn’t be coming home. Chad and Christi were there with us. When they told me that I had to have open heart surgery, I said, ‘I know,’ because God had prepared me for what was coming.”

Ted had the surgery and was released from the hospital three days later.

At home, he developed pneumonia. His parents, Chad and Christi, and grandkids all gathered around the bed to take Communion. Suddenly, Ted left his body.

“I watched everything from above the scene,” Ted remembers. “Everyone was standing around my bed except for Chad. He was sitting on the bed beside me. I saw a bright light come in from the right. It covered the whole bed.

“From the other direction, I saw demons. They were holding long spears that were flat on the end. They jumped up and down, sticking the spears under the edge of light. They were trying to flip it off me.

“I heard the Lord say, As long as you have the prayer, the Light cannot be taken away.”

No Fear

“Ted recovered supernaturally fast after that,” Jan remembers. “But over the next five years, we went through trial after trial: angiograms, heart attacks and him just not feeling well. Night after night I would wake up to make sure he was breathing. One night, the Lord said, Read Psalm 91.

“At church, Ted had us reading Psalm 91 for 91 days. We read it in every version so that we got it embedded in our hearts. I was on day 46. I picked up my phone and read it from the Amplified Bible, Classic Edition. In verse 5 it said, ‘You shall not be afraid of the terror of the night.’ And verse 6 said, ‘nor of the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor of the destruction and sudden death that surprise and lay waste at noonday.’

“ Sudden death . Those words leapt off the page, and I knew God was saying, Stop it. You don’t have to worry about him dying suddenly in his sleep. With those words, the fear left, and I had peace.”

In 2014, Ted was told he needed another operation. This time, because of complications, they said he had to be put on a waiting list for a heart transplant.

“I don’t have peace about this,” Ted told the doctor. “I don’t think that’s for me. We’ll just trust the Lord.”

“Do you understand that you need another heart? We can’t do surgery on yours again.”

“That sounds good to me,” Ted replied.

In total agreement and peace, Ted and Jan, along with the entire family, took their stand of faith. When symptoms hit, they quoted God’s Word. They understood that Ted wasn’t sick and trying to get well. He had been healed 2,000 years before. They were believing for the manifestation.

The church grew so fast that we ran out of seats. So, in 2008, we tripled the size of the church. Once again, within a year and a half, God paid it off.

God Intervenes

Several years later, Ted received a call from his cardiologist.

“I’m retiring,” he said. “Before I do, it’s urgent that I get you in to see a cardiologist friend of mine in California. He may be able to repair your heart without surgery.”

A cardiac interventionalist had developed a procedure called a “Hybrid TECAB.” Using a catheter and a robot, it allowed him to perform a coronary ablation rather than a bypass. He only performed the procedure on 3% of his patients—those for whom surgery was not an option. The length of the procedure and possible complications were similar to those of bypass surgery.

It took three months to work out all the details. Finally, in November of 2018, Ted and Jan flew to California.

Prior to the procedure, an angiogram showed a single artery feeding the back side of Ted’s heart. It looked like a thin, red thread because of the blockage. The cardiologist inserted a tiny wire into the artery. A tiny balloon followed the wire.

With intricate delicacy, he moved the wire and balloon millimeter by millimeter. Using 28 pounds of pressure, he opened the artery a little at a time and put stents in place. After three hours and 20 minutes, the artery pulsed with blood. Instead of a thread, it looked like a fat earthworm.

Later, the doctor told Ted, “I literally don’t know how you made it here. Your life was hanging by a thread.”

Today, Ted Currington is happy, healthy and living his best life. He and Jan continue to lead the church, where Christi and her husband, Matt, are over children’s church and Chad and his wife, Ann, are over the teens and youth. Three of their grandchildren are on the praise team and the others serve in other aspects in the church. The youth are in revival; they are seeing salvations and baptisms weekly, and God’s miraculous hand moving on people’s lives.

“When I told Christi and Ann what the doctor said,” Jan says, “everyone agreed as to what the ‘thread’ was that the doctor had spoken about.

“It was a thread from the hem of Jesus’ garment!

“Whatever you’re facing, just grab the hem of the Master’s garment. Just one thread will do!”