Gentry Brummett

campus Staff, Western Kentucky university

Growing up in central Kentucky, my younger years involved joy, along with hardships and confusion. I saw God as this distant King, whose primary countenance towards me was disapproval, tolerance at best, because I knew I was a sinner. I believed He was all-Powerful and I feared Him, which heightened a strong cycle of performance and control I was living in at an early age. I tried to earn every ounce of love and approval and I did not believe or understand how He could love me all on His own. I began to function like an orphan and “stiff-armed” a God I was supposed to believe loved me and watched over me.

 During the most difficult season of my life, the Lord faithfully put a host of godly men and women in my life. I was exposed to the Gospel for the first time, as men began to read the Bible and pray with me. I experienced God in a way I never had before. The Lord revealed Himself to me and gave me the faith to begin to trust Him and believe what His word said about Himself and my identity.

As I began college, my heart tightly grasped comfort and control. I would spend the next 4 years in discipleship wrestling with the Lord, my idols, and my story as I grew in my understanding of my Gospel identity and how it changes every part of my life. 

Entering my senior year of college, I felt the Lord bring home a clear vision and purpose for my life which I had run away from for most of my college years.

As I enter into full-time ministry, my vision is to be a part of the same mission those host of godly men did for me: love others enough to sit in my their sin and story with them, helping them live in their identity in Christ, and planting seeds of discipleship in young men that will redeem the way of father, husband, laborer and friend. I long to see the generations of fatherlessness end, and for the state of Kentucky to look a little more like Heaven when I’m laid in a Kentucky grave. 

May the Lord’s will be done in Kentucky as it is in Heaven. I am learning to live as His son and Beloved.