Life in Small Town America
Author : Steve Author | Published On : 07 Oct 2026
If you had asked the boy growing up at the end of Kyle Road what he wanted to be when he grew up, I doubt that “pastor” would have been the answer.
I certainly couldn’t have imagined spending decades in ministry.
Back then, my world was much smaller: our family farm outside Dorset, Ohio, my grandparents’ dairy farm about a mile away, school, Dorset Methodist Church, and whatever adventure my brother, sister, foster siblings, friends, and I could create.
Faith was already part of my life, although I didn’t yet understand where it would lead.
Neither did I understand that the road from that Ohio farm to the pulpit would be anything but straight.
It would take years—and quite a few unexpected turns.
Faith Before the Pulpit
Some of my earliest memories of faith are remarkably simple.
Our family attended Dorset Methodist Church every week. We had our familiar place in the pew. Church was part of the rhythm of family life.
Faith was present at home, too. At naptime, Mom sometimes read stories to me from a children’s Bible storybook.
As a child, I wasn’t thinking about theology or ministry. I was simply absorbing what surrounded me.
Looking back, I can see those experiences as seeds.
But seeds can remain underground for a long time before anyone sees what they will become.
Mine certainly did.
First Came a Very Different Road
My early interests pointed toward technology, not the pulpit.
I was fascinated by how things worked. My father was colorblind, and as a boy I helped him sort electronic resistors by their colored bands. As I grew older, that curiosity became an interest in electronics.
Eventually, technology became part of my working life.
There was marriage and family, too. Jeanette and I were building a life together, raising children, working, paying bills, moving when opportunities required it, and dealing with many of the same uncertainties young families face.
Our road took us from Virginia to North Carolina and Florida and eventually back to Virginia.
There were jobs that looked promising and others that ended unexpectedly. There were new houses, rented houses, new communities, and new beginnings.
I was moving farther and farther from Kyle Road.
Yet some of the things I had learned there were traveling with me.
When Plans Change
Most lives look much neater when viewed backward than they felt while we were living them.
Mine certainly does.
Looking back, I can point to experiences and say, “That prepared me for this,” or “Now I understand why that mattered.”
At the time, I usually couldn’t.
There were seasons when I thought I knew where life was going. Then something changed.
A job changed.
A move came.
An opportunity disappeared.
Another appeared.
There were responsibilities to my family and decisions that had to be made without knowing exactly where they would lead.
Eventually, the road brought us back to Virginia.
And somewhere along that journey, a question that had been quietly growing became harder to ignore.
Was God calling me into ministry?
Answering the Call
A call to ministry sounds dramatic when summarized in a sentence.
Living it was more complicated.
By then, I wasn’t a young man beginning adulthood with unlimited choices ahead of me. I had a wife, children, work experience, responsibilities, and an established life.
Answering God’s call affected all of us.
There was education to complete. I earned my bachelor’s degree and later commuted to seminary in Washington, D.C. There were churches to serve and sermons to prepare. There were meetings, hospital visits, funerals, weddings, baptisms, Bible studies, administrative responsibilities, and Sunday mornings that arrived every week whether the pastor felt ready or not.
My first pastoral appointment took our family to McDowell, Virginia, where I served a four-church charge.
Once again, we packed and moved.
By then I was beginning to understand something that would become an important theme of Beyond Kyle Road:
Sometimes purpose isn’t found by arriving at the destination we planned.
Sometimes it is discovered by responding faithfully to the next turn in the road.
Ministry Is About People
Over the years, I served many churches and communities.
Each congregation was different.
Each had its own history, traditions, personalities, strengths, disagreements, joys, and struggles.
But ministry was never primarily about buildings or statistics.
It was about people.
Pastors are invited into moments that most people experience only a few times in their lives.
I stood with couples beginning marriages and families saying goodbye to people they loved. I visited hospital rooms. I baptized children. I preached Sunday after Sunday. I sat with people facing decisions that had no easy answers.
Sometimes ministry meant celebrating.
Sometimes it meant grieving.
And sometimes it simply meant showing up.
The longer I served, the more I came to understand that people don’t always need someone who can explain everything that is happening to them.
Sometimes they need someone willing to walk beside them while it happens.
Serving in Another Kind of Ministry
My journey also led into military chaplaincy.
Wearing a military uniform while serving as a chaplain brought together two different forms of service. The setting was different from a local church, but many of the human needs were familiar.
People still worried about their families.
They still experienced fear, grief, uncertainty, hope, and questions about faith.
They still needed someone to listen.
My years of military service became another chapter I could never have imagined while growing up on Kyle Road.
Yet by then I had begun to recognize a pattern.
The road kept changing.
The call to serve did not.
What Kyle Road Had to Do With It
What does a childhood farm in Dorset, Ohio, have to do with decades of ministry?
More than I realized.
Kyle Road taught me about family and belonging.
Farm life taught me that work needed to be done whether you felt like doing it or not.
My parents and grandparents taught me lessons through their lives long before I was old enough to recognize them as lessons.
And that little Methodist church introduced me to a faith that eventually became central to my life’s work.
None of those things guaranteed that I would become a pastor.
But they became part of the person who eventually answered the call.
That’s something I understand much better looking backward than I ever could while living forward.
Why This Became Part of Beyond Kyle Road
When I began writing Beyond Kyle Road: A Journey of Faith, Family, Finding Home, I wasn’t interested in simply listing the churches I served or the jobs I held.
I wanted to understand the journey connecting them.
How did a boy on an Ohio farm become a husband and father?
How did someone interested in electronics and technology eventually enter ministry?
How did success, disappointment, love, loss, and unexpected opportunity change my understanding of faith?
And what did all those places I called home teach me about the meaning of home itself?
Those questions became more important to me than the résumé.
The book’s subtitle—A Journey of Faith, Family, Finding Home—grew from that understanding.
It really was a journey.
And I didn’t have a map.
The Road Still Continues
I retired from full-time pastoral ministry in 2022.
But retirement didn’t completely remove me from the pulpit. I continue to serve churches part-time.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised.
The road has rarely taken me exactly where I expected it to go.
When I look back toward Dorset now, I can picture that boy sitting in the family pew at Dorset Methodist Church.
He had no idea that one day he would stand on the other side of the sanctuary.
He didn’t know about the places he would live, the people he would meet, the family he would raise, the careers he would pursue, the losses he would experience, or the churches he would serve.
He couldn’t see beyond Kyle Road.
Maybe that’s the point.
Most of us can’t see very far down the road we’re traveling.
We take the next step. We make decisions with what we know. Sometimes we change direction. Sometimes circumstances change it for us. And occasionally, after enough years have passed, we look backward and discover a pattern that was impossible to see while we were living it.
For me, one of those patterns has been faith.
It began long before the pulpit.
It began at home.
