JimBo Stewart: [00:00:00] Here we are back at it again, back at the bootcamp. Hope you’re ready for the next episode. Today’s guest is the husband of one of our blog writers. Cause you know, when people get, when wives get introduced all the time, especially if pastors, they’ll get introduced as, you know, my wife hates when she’s introduced as Mrs.

Jimbo. And so I’m going to flip the tables on you and we have Mr. Aaron Cofield. her husband, Will Cofield with us on the bootcamp today. Glad to have you.

Will Cofield: Oh, thanks for having me, Jim. It’s funny you said that because it’s kind of the butt of the jokes around some of my circle of friends because they know I’ve been following the Replant team with them for so long, and then when Aaron started writing for you guys and working with you for your blog work, the joke that came, are you going to hang out with Aaron’s friends? And there was a time, actually I don’t know if you remember, you and Bob were talking about it, where you would ask the question. Who if we had questions for topics for the shows and Aaron logged on and commented, Will Cofield [00:01:00] has a question and then you and Bob talked about it in your podcast about why I didn’t ask the question myself and she was going to go in, but she, she didn’t just because and say, well, these are my friends and you got to get your own, but it’s just kind of the joke around the house.

JimBo Stewart: Well, we, we love Aaron at the bootcamp and we love you too, Will. And we’re glad that she brings you along every once in a while.

Will Cofield: She lets me come along and participate. So I felt like the husband, I feel like, I feel like the wives at the SBC meetings. Now I’m just saying. I understand their pain and their plight now.

JimBo Stewart: Well, other than being a trophy husband, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Will Cofield: Well, I was born in Northeast Georgia. Wasn’t born in a Christian household, but gave my life to Christ after we were married. Obviously Aaron had a large influence on that. We moved around my secular career and I surrendered to a call to ministry in 2008. And all I ever wanted to do was be in youth ministry.

I loved youth ministry, still love youth ministry. And surrendered to a call to youth ministry, came to Central [00:02:00] Baptist Church in 2008 as the youth pastor.

JimBo Stewart: Hmm.

Will Cofield: The church was a struggling church at the time. Pastor was a very sweet guy, but the church had just years of turmoil pastoral turnover. The church had split in the early nineties over whether to build a fellowship hall for bluegrass quartet concerts or whether to build a family life center with a gymnasium.

So the church split then, never really recovered

fully.

JimBo Stewart: that’s the first church split I’ve ever heard over bluegrass

Will Cofield: You know, the Bluegrass won out too. I’m just gonna say, we have a a fellowship hall that is set up for a Bluegrass Quartet. That’s what, it split over that. But the church had just been a tough church for a long time. You know, they had gone through several pastors. Average tenure was about a year and a half between interims and pastors.

And the pastor had been here for about three years. He was actually younger than I was at the time. We were in our late 20s. And he just looked at the congregation. The average age was 65 to 70 and he did what every pastor did. You know, [00:03:00] then we said, well, if we’re going to reach young families, we’ve got to hire a youth pastor.

Which is not necessarily the answer, right? They hired me, came in, we started a youth ministry. For the most part there wasn’t a lot of kids, there were some grandkids. But the goal was to reach into the community as we did that. And we did that well. The problem was the church really didn’t want a youth ministry.

What they wanted was their kids from 30 years ago to come back to church. And so the community had changed the culture changed in the community. And when the families came in, There was tension in the church from the start and it only increased that tension. So, we went through a tough time at the church for a while.

The church split again in the around 2011 2012. It wasn’t the traditional church split where there’s a bad vote and everybody leaves. This was a slow trickling out to another church in the community that had a traditional service. And we probably lost half the congregation at that point in time. And the pastor, even though he was a really great guy, sweet guy, godly man, he was just very discouraged.

And you know how discouragement is when it’s in the [00:04:00] church and in the leadership, you almost sense it. And a lot of the families that had came with him or that he had reached they stopped attending. They, they left the church and the church really dwindled down to. Bare bones for the longest time.

He left in 2016, and then for about a year and a half, I just preached. I did youth ministry, adult ministry, And then in late 2017, they asked me to be the senior pastor, and we began a process of trying to get healthy. But it was a really tough process. We had a lot to overcome, a lot of baggage.

Part of that was we had some unhealthy matriarchs running the church. had been in the church for a very long time in leadership positions, and they had, if I’m being completely honest, they had really, Caused some heartache in the life of the previous pastors. A lot of the turnover in the past, it came from their relationships with them.

And again, I guess it all comes back to a discipleship issue and they had never decided, been discipled not to do the things they did. But as we began to lean in and make changes, I’d really made the effort to build a relationship with them, work through some different [00:05:00] things. I taught their senior school class try to build that bridge and redirect some of the negative behavior that was happening.

I mean, As gracefully as I could have to sit some folks down and say, you can’t send scathing emails to other ministry leaders, how terrible they are. You can’t do that in the church. So we tried to, but it was to no avail. And they eventually turned their efforts toward my family. It was verbally abusive.

So, I did what I had to do. I went to address it, and one of the matriarchs, her husband, was a deacon, and I went to speak to him, and I knew it was not going to go well, so I took a witness to kind of stand outside, and they listened, and I went to him, addressed him, and said, we need to talk about this, and it did not go well to say the least.

I have, you know, He cussed me for everything I was worth came up and grabbed the lapels of my jacket and just growled in my face, this terrible growl and then he came out and said, why don’t you and I just take this outside and finish it? And he consistently [00:06:00] tried to, to urge me to go outside with him.

Now, the man was the man was 83 years old and on dialysis, but he legitimately wanted to go out in the street and fist fight with me. And my associate pastor, we had raised up like a residency, and we were getting ready to send him out, and he just looked at me and said, you know, you can’t win that fight.

In my mind, and I’m staying calm, but in my mind, I’m thinking, like, I can handle this. He said, no, if you go outside and you don’t fight back, you got beat up by an 83 year old man on dialysis. And if you go outside and you defend yourself, you beat up an 83 year old man on dialysis, you cannot win this fight.

I was like, you know what, I saw the wisdom in that logic, and and we gracefully. Settle down. We worked through a season where we tried to restore the relationships. I had hoped we’d go through a process of restoration between the families. They weren’t interested. It entrenched the church in a year long conflict

JimBo Stewart: Hmm.

Will Cofield: between the leadership because they had a lot of influence in the church.

JimBo Stewart: Yeah.

Will Cofield: But eventually they didn’t want to work through the restoration. I tried to, I think most of the congregations saw that and they eventually left, they kind of [00:07:00] withdrew their friends that were, they were very influential where they kind of began to do the boycott of the worship service for the pastor.

They would come to what was left of their Sunday school class and then leave right after that and make it known as much noise as they could leave it. So we had to address that as well. So we worked through the first. three years of conflict in that area. And then COVID hit. And for many, COVID was just a terrible season of isolation for us.

It was almost a breath of relax. We could take a step back and say, okay, we need to breathe out. And there’s a lot we can move past some of the tension. But the very first week of COVID, when the shutdown happened, my worship leader that I’d inherited and seemed like a sweet, charismatic, godly man. He lost his secular job for sexual harassment and it was, it was a legitimate case.

So of course we had to address that. We wanted to, he obviously was going to have to step down from those positions, but we were going to work through a restoration process, [00:08:00] getting him counseling working through marital counseling with his wife and him, getting him counseling for some issues he has, and then try to help him back in that.

But instead of doing that, they ran from church discipline during the COVID weeks when we were completely shut down moved, changed phone numbers. deleted social media. So I went through that. That was and it was about this time. The crises and the tension were really just mounting in the conflict. It was really taking this toll.

And just when we started seeing, it seems like we’re getting past it. January 31st, It seemed like a normal day at church. We came to church, worship was good. It wasn’t necessarily memorable, but it seemed things like we went fine after church meetings and then Sunday night I led a small group, Aaron and I led a small group there for parents that wanted to take advantage of the, a small group at the same time slot as children and youth ministries closed up left.

And I was just absolutely exhausted mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and the church I think was exhausted in the same ways. And as I’m [00:09:00] closing up and locking the church up. I get a text message. I looked at my phone. It had been set on Do Not Disturb while I was in Bible study. And it was one of our most faithful members.

And she had sent a text message saying, Are you and Aaron still at the church? And it seemed important. And before I could text her back, the phone rang again. And she said, Don’t leave. I need to talk to you. It’s bad. Didn’t know what it was. It was very vague. Well, they come in, her and her husband, very close friends of ours.

And their son is with them, and he is, he’s obviously upset, he’s crying, and he’s clinging to them. And at the time he was about nine years old. And she said, my son has to show you something. And he obviously did not want to show it to me, and he hands me his phone. And he shows me a video of the chairman of the deacons sexually abusing an eight year old girl at church. And he’s terrified because he thinks it’s his fault or he’s going to get in trouble for showing this to me.

JimBo Stewart: Hmm.

Will Cofield: And it [00:10:00] was the hardest thing we’ve ever faced because the little girl was the daughter of my best friend.

JimBo Stewart: Mm mm-Hmm.

Will Cofield: One of the first men I had discipled at church, and the chairman of the deacons. I didn’t know what grooming really was then.

I’d never experienced it. I’ve heard the term, but didn’t really understand it. And he had groomed this family for years.

JimBo Stewart: Hmm.

Will Cofield: He shows me the video and I mean, I’m, I’m sick at my stomach. Aaron is sobbing, crying. The family that’s with us is crying. And I knew that the first step was to call the police, so we called the police immediately.

The police, and as much as I wanted to reach out to my friend and talk to him and his wife and comfort them, the police had warned me not to speak to him until they had talked to him and shared what was happening. The chairman of the Deacon’s was arrested that night. He was booked, charged. I had to wait by the phone until the father had heard what was happening.

And he called me at 1. 30 that night [00:11:00] obviously upset, obviously broken. It was one of the most terrible events I’ve ever experienced in my life. And I would never wish that on anyone. And this was not a negligence case. I mean, we, we’d done background checks. We had done sexual offender checks. We had had training in the church, but it was, he was very good at what he did.

And. He had been chairman of the Deacons for a season, very influential in the church very, very generous. He was the surrogate grandfather to a lot of kids and, and what he would do is he’d build a relationship with the families and then he’d build a relationship with the kids and it was nothing to see them all walking into church together and him carrying the child, just like he would go to the kids games and dances and just really poured into their life.

And I didn’t understand what all that was. And looking back now, I should have, if I’d have known what I know now, I could probably picked up on patterns. But even then he was very smooth

and very calculated and very tactical in what he did. But and he would have never gotten caught if this little boy hadn’t had the courage.

He saw [00:12:00] something that bothered him

JimBo Stewart: Hmm,

Will Cofield: and he had the courage to take his phone out and start videoing.

JimBo Stewart: hmm,

Will Cofield: So he was arrested, prosecuted. We tried to get help for the family. We, you know, they tried, they were still in a good relationship with the church. They tried to come back, but it was just too painful.

Every time they came to the church doors, they saw that in their mind every time, but we offered we tried to get them counseling, therapy anything they needed, pay for legal advice, whatever they had to have. And we stood for them on the court date when he, when the man was convicted, we stood on their side and pleaded that that the judge would not be lenient in this, there would be some justice in this.

And we still have a great relationship with them, but it was tough. But what was wonderful in that is, is as terrible as all those crises were, Central was such a, dysfunctional church with a toxic culture. There were some great people here but there had been so much conflict and the church really wasn’t willing to die to itself.

It wasn’t willing to repent of [00:13:00] not loving God the way it should. It wasn’t willing to to turn away from its self personal preferences. It wasn’t willing to love its community like it should. But those crises, God used those as a catalyst to bring about change in our hearts, to bring us all to a point of desperation.

I really thought I met with my best friend in the ministry. That happened on Sunday night. Monday morning, I’m sitting in a Waffle House booth with my best friend in ministry. He is, I mean, I’m just sobbing at the Waffle House booth. He must have thought I was crazy, and I’m sobbing, and I’m really thinking that we’re going to just write Ichabod over the door and just shut it down.

And when we got to the point of desperation, we realized there’s nothing else we can do. There’s no program. There’s no tactic. There’s no training that there’s nothing we can do to fix this until we all repent of not loving God, the way we’re supposed to and loving our community, the way we show that selfless love until we get to that point, there’s nothing going to happen.

And God brought us to that point of, of humility. and desperation and it changed almost immediately. [00:14:00] We publicly and corporately repented of our sins, of secret sin in the church, of idolatry, of personal preference. We repented of that replanted the church, started over and it immediately changed after that.

JimBo Stewart: So when you say that you replanted the church at that point, what does that, what does that look like? What does that mean at that point? Mm-Hmm.

Will Cofield: Well, ours was, was not a typical replant. It was, you know, usually when you think of replants, you think of a fostering or adoption situation or, or handing it off to a. to a new church in the community that’s being planted, using the facilities. Ours was, for the most part, we shut down for a minute. We shut down, we stripped everything away, and COVID did help that a good bit.

started back over from scratch with a worship service that was scriptural based, that would focus on a devotion to God. Our focus in our budgeting and our finances immediately changed to where we embraced the idea that we were missionaries in our community. That was an attitude that we hadn’t had before.

The [00:15:00] church commissioned a replant team. We began to go through some training as a team. I had, I had gone through a little of the training myself, but we’ve been going through, began to go through a training as a, as a replant team, and we made recommendations to the church and we began to go through the process of, of trying to be a healthy, thriving church again

JimBo Stewart: Hmm mm-Hmm.

Will Cofield: for us, what that started with, you know, making sure we had a Christ Center worship service.

That our worship service wasn’t about attraction, it wasn’t about show, it was really about God’s word being at the center of it with expository preaching songs and music that exalted and lifted up Christ and were theologically sound, it was about loving one another sacrificially. And then loving God with our heart and then loving our community as we love ourselves.

almost every mission statement is rooted in the great commission of the great commandments, right? But our, our mission statement, we changed and really embraced the idea that we exist to love God, love people and make disciples. And we embrace the idea that making disciples was not just bringing.

people into the church, but actually raising up disciples and sending them back out again. And that [00:16:00] became a battle cry for us. So we began to minister to our community. We began to realize that for years, the church it’s a mill village church. Back in the day, it was planted to reach the mill village.

And while the mill village existed, it thrived. But when the mill shut down, the rental homes, the mill village homes became transient real estate property. And it changed around the church. And many of the congregants. really resented the community in many ways. It wasn’t that they hated them, it was just that they were different.

JimBo Stewart: Okay, so as the community’s changing, and all this stuff’s going on in the church, and so, that was a lot of chapters to a story, from youth pastor to pastor, split over bluegrass versus fellowship, and bluegrass, bluegrass wins almost getting into a fist fight with a guy in his 80s. That is you know, making me think of the one of my favorite Proverbs, Proverbs 18, six, a fool’s lips, walk into a fight and his mouth invites a beating.

But I guess the caveat is if he’s, if he’s in his eighties and medically struggling, maybe don’t fight [00:17:00] him because you can’t. You can’t win that fight to some heartbreaking stuff with abuse chairman of the deacons. You’re having to go through that whole process. COVID hits, which does give you an opportunity to reset.

You kind of reset the stage there a little bit. And so The suggest a guest button. So for our, our listeners, we have a button on the website now, suggest a guest. You can submit who you want to hear from and what you want them to talk about.

And we got a message well almost immediately, as soon as we put up the suggest a guest button from Glenn Shelton. And he said, he’s going through his demon program at Southeastern with, with you and the insight that you’ve been giving through the revitalization process has been. invaluable and entertaining.

And so here in your story, I would agree. It’s, it’s It’s both invaluable and entertaining and it’s good insight. So here’s the last thing I want to land on. Last episode the previous episode of this I had on Richard Blackaby and towards the very end of the [00:18:00] episode we had really talked about everything.

This was just, I was asking him how we could pray for him and he talked about the pain he’s going through with his back and he’s got back surgery coming up right now and and then I’m actually pulling up the transcript so I can say it the way that he said it. And he said I know everybody’s got stuff that they face, and I just, I think, maybe watching my dad, I am just determined that I’m not gonna let stuff, even when it’s painful, when it’s difficult, I still get to choose my attitude, and I’m just not gonna let it get me down if I can possibly help it.

With God’s strength, he says, every time you go through a dark valley, you just ask So God, what can I only learn in a dark valley that you’re going to teach me during this season of my life? I know that a dark valley is not where i’m going to be spending the rest of my life But in this season there must be some things that you can learn best there.

So teach me those lessons So that I’m a better person when I get out on the other side. And that would be my prayer for this [00:19:00] journey as well. And I thought that was, that was just very helpful and insightful. And man, I know what the pain, I don’t know, you know, exactly your situation, but I know the pain of being under criticism and conflict and difficulty and people being disappointing you in that dark valley that you went through, what are some lessons that you learned that can only be learned in a dark valley?

Will Cofield: one of the greatest lessons I learned in this is that for pastors, isolation will kill you.

JimBo Stewart: Hmm.

Will Cofield: For the early years of my youth ministry, I was very isolated from other pastors. And that was my own immaturity. That was my own my own issues that led to that. And I guess I didn’t think I needed anyone else.

That, you know, I was enough, and that God would work through me, and everybody, they could go minister how they thought. And I began to build relationships years later, in the later years of my youth ministry, and found those beneficial. And during that time, I built, I [00:20:00] built a relationship, or actually he built a relationship with me, because I was probably standoffish and young and immature and, and naive.

Brad Vassie from Hillcrest reached out to me and built a relationship with him and became one of my best friends. And he had gone through a revitalization of sorts at the church he pastored and I must have seemed to him like I thought I knew it all.

JimBo Stewart: Hmm.

Will Cofield: But he dealt with me very gracefully, very kind, very generously.

And if it had not been for him and several other men who were friends, I would have quit, collapsed, had a breakdown. There’s no way I would have made it because he was the one I sat in that Waffle House booth with and bawled my eyes out over what happened, over the sexual abuse. And when I said, I think we’re done, might as well just sell the property.

And I put my, I’ll put my resume together. I don’t know who hired me because of all the stuff that we’ve been through. And I was the one just thinking how bad it was going to be. He was the voice of reason that said, Maybe God has allowed you [00:21:00] to suffer for a reason. Maybe you should rejoice because you were chosen to suffer.

JimBo Stewart: Hmm.

Will Cofield: And that resonated in me. But now that’s a huge part of my ministry is building relationships with other pastors. But if it, if I had been isolated through this, I can’t imagine what the result would have been.

JimBo Stewart: I can attest to similar experiences during my dark valley of ministry and men that I sat with that were pastors that helped me, that lifted my arms like Aaron with Moses, that encouraged me that Galatians six helped me carry a burden that was too heavy for me to carry and therefore fulfill the law of Christ.

And I think it’s a good word. What other less, are there any other lessons you think that you only could have learned through the crux of all the crisis that you went through.

Will Cofield: you know, at the heart of revitalization is really, when you go back to, you know, Revelation 2 with the church of Ephesus, the heart of revitalization is getting back to a love and a zeal and a passion for God again that was lost somewhere along the [00:22:00] way.

Sometimes we don’t get to that point and God has to bring us to the end of ourselves for this and it’s like what did Paul say, and again, I’m winging this so I’m probably going to misquote this, but he said that we thought we were under a sentence of death.

But God used it to teach us to depend on Him and not on ourselves. When a church has money and they have people, they’re not desperate, in a sense. I mean, you can have a sense of desperation, but it’s hard to bring about revitalization when the congregation and even the pastor doesn’t realize that even with money and even with people in the congregation, we’re still in a desperate situation for God to move.

We can’t bring about renewal on our own. That comes from the power of God. We’re desperate for him to grow his kingdom, to renew us spiritually, and to revitalize the church if it’s declining. Only he can bring something that was dead back to life. Our pragmatics can’t, our programming can’t, our efforts can’t.

I can depend on him and he may work through those pragmatics and programs, but I can’t, he won’t do that if I’m not dependent on him. If I’m [00:23:00] trying to do it a self sufficient way and through all those crises, what it really taught us is that it really is about us clinging to God at every moment in the good times and in the bad times.

And when we forget to cling to him in the good times, sometimes the bad times and the times of suffering are there to bring us back to a dependency on him.

JimBo Stewart: I think I learned and I’ve tried to share with others as they enter into a hard season is the temptation in this season is to run away from the pain and find comfort. But, God has you in this season on purpose and when you try to run to comfort the first things you’re gonna find typically are gonna be idolatry

Will Cofield: Yes.

JimBo Stewart: And so you kind of have to just face the season and that’s why I think I love what Richard Blackaby was saying is that you just go.

Okay, Lord, you’re taking me through this dark valley And so I know there are lessons I can only learn [00:24:00] So my word to the listeners and I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again is when you’re hitting that season. Don’t run from it. Don’t try to fix the pain. Don’t try to fix the symptoms. Sit in it.

Sit in the difficulty. Sit in the pain and ask the Lord. Okay, God, what, what do you have for me to do? And, and largely you just have to take it one day at a time. And just, okay, today, God, what does it look like for me to be faithful? And then you do that. And then the next day, God was it look like for me to be faithful today?

And then you do that.

Will Cofield: And that’s that leaning into it, right? I mean, we’re with the conflict, with the tension, with the pain, the suffering, the hardships come and rather than retreating through whatever, maybe some of us retreat through going home and zoning out on the screen for three or four hours. Some of us retreat to it by looking for another church or trying to run away from it or get away from it.

But, if we lean into it, what you’re talking about there is that God is moving in that, we’re learning from it, and He’s doing the [00:25:00] work in us that only He can do. And He’s using our circumstances, which are often our suffering, to do that work in us.

JimBo Stewart: as we close, how can we be praying for, for you guys?

Will Cofield: Pray for us. We are desperately trying to raise up pastors to send out. We’re desperately trying to raise up Teams to go with pastors to send out. We want to revitalize churches. So we’re trying to, to raise up pastors, trained and equipped and understanding how revitalization works in this dependency on God and to be able to send out, so help pray for us in that pray that God will continue to move and what he’s doing here and more than anything else, even if it’s painful, pray that we would remain desperate for him, because I think.

You know, the church always has to be revitalizing at some, some level. And I think sometimes when we get, when we were sick and unhealthy and dysfunctional and we get to a point where things seem well, everyone takes a big sigh of relief and sometimes we lose that desperation. So pray that we don’t lose that.

JimBo Stewart: Will, will you close this out by praying for our [00:26:00] listeners?

Will Cofield: Absolutely. Father God, Lord, I pray for our listeners. I pray. for these pastors that are, that are suffering in the trenches and struggling. Lord, I pray that they would know that their suffering is not in vain, that the conflicts they faced are not in vain. We’ll give them wisdom and discernment on how to deal with these situations and conflicts and crises that are as they arise.

But Lord, also renew the spirit within them. Father, renew your power, their love for you. Give them faith, give them strength. Lord, move in their life and Lord, surround them with other pastors that would help them be faithful, that would help them be consistent, that would help them be devoted to you.

Because I know that we’re better together and I know that you are calling us to serve you faithfully. It’s not about us, it is absolutely about you. So Lord, I pray again that you would bless these listeners, these pastors that are listening. Lord, I also just want to lift up Richard Blackaby, Lord. Lord, I pray that you would be with him.

I pray that you would in the moment that he’s in, Lord, I pray that you would touch his family give them encouragement, give them strength, and Lord use [00:27:00] whatever it is he may be going through, Father God for your kingdom and for your glory. And I ask this in Jesus name, Amen.

JimBo Stewart: Amen. Thanks for coming on. Will.

Will Cofield: Thanks for having me.