Get to Know… Pastor Johnathan Kelley at First Baptist
Editor’s Note: This is part of a series of Q&As getting to know members of places of worship. The series will later expand to city leaders, educators, first responders and more. A new feature will be published each Monday.
Pastor Johnathan Kelley recognized his calling while in pursuit of a doctoral degree at Duke Divinity School.
After serving 10 years at a church in Little Rock, Kelley and his family moved to El Dorado in 2016.
The News-Times spoke with Kelley about his journey through faith and struggles.
Q: Would you mind telling me how you grew up, where you grew up, if you grew up in your current faith and just start there?
A: I grew up in Benton, Arkansas. … Most of my earliest memories, most of those are connected with life at the church. I grew up [in] a family that was a part of the church, grew up going to youth group, going to church camp and I don’t have any kind of memories apart from the church of ever having wild college years or anything like that.
Q: Did you decide to leave Little Rock because of the call from El Dorado? Can you say ‘no’ to a call?
A: I had reached this point where I had always been able to
project while I was serving there and what was the next kind of thing the Lord wanted me to accomplish there. I had kind of hit a wall at some point and in the course of hitting that wall of not seeing past two months, people kept mentioning First Baptist Church of El Dorado, people that I trusted, people that knew the church and knew it quite well. I was talking to a friend one night who grew up in Junction City and is a seminary professor and we were talking and he said, ‘Well I’ll send them your resume. People keep mentioning it; maybe it’s the Lord, maybe it’s not.’
He sent them my resume, my wife and I came down, we interviewed and within six weeks, we had come down. … They call it ‘in coming in View of a Call’ to be the senior pastor. You come and preach and the church votes on you. It was a pretty quick whirlwind of this is what the Lord had for us and trying to follow through with that. And you can say ‘no.’ You could very well be like, this is not what God desires for me and you can back out.
We felt strongly that this is where the Lord wanted us to be, and that continues to be confirmed for us.
Q: Was it strange having that ‘hit the wall’ feeling?
A: I think any time in life you feel like you’ve reached a point of closure, it’s a weird kind of feeling of uncertainty of what that meant. Probably if I was writing my own story … this maybe would not have been the chapter that was written, but that was the chapter God wanted to write.
It is weird. It’s hard. … You’re discerning like, ‘Lord if this is next, we want to be faithful to it no matter what.’ It was sad. I think one of the weird things of being a pastor is that it’s not a job. It’s about a family relationship, you’re invested in peoples’ lives, so to hit a wall in a place and to see there’s a point of closure you’re approaching means you grieve the loss of relationships in that former place of service, and with excitement, anticipate those new relationships. That’s kind of a very emotionally draining process.
Q: Have you ever struggled with your faith?
A: I think anybody who asks the right questions, you have a point of struggling. As I read the New Testament, the cornerstone of the faith is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you haven’t wrestled with that fact — and it doesn’t mean it comes to a point where you reject the faith, you reject Jesus — but if you haven’t wrestled with the fact that we believe that God, through the son, has entered in to the human condition fully human, fully divine, he died on a cross, and anybody else who died on a cross died on a cross and he died but then three days later was raised. … I think if you’re serious about your faith you’re going to wrestle with it, that’s the story of the disciples of the New Testament. … Thomas is known for one characteristic: he’s a doubter. The reason he’s doubting is because the resurrection doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think it’s just the course of what you see that [in] the New Testament, the apostles and disciples [are] wrestling with this, they are grappling with what their faith means. But what they’re certain of, I think, at the end of the day, and what Thomas becomes certain of and Peter and the rest, is that Jesus is alive and so that they are going to bare witness to that resurrection.
I always tell people God’s not afraid of our questions and God’s not afraid of our doubts and fears. He’s a God who I think, I truly believe, brings clarity as you pursue him. He’s a god of all wisdom. God is not even afraid of our ideas, even ideas that I think about him because he wants to speak truth into that. I think a lot of people who would say, ‘I never grappled with my faith,’ partly it’s because they think God would be upset with them. They think, ‘oh, God is going to be disappointed, he’s going to feel like I don’t really’ … No. It’s a relationship. If it’s truly a relationship, relationships have these phases and moments of growth where you’re not sure and you’re sure again.
Q: What does the word ‘faith’ mean to you?
A: Allegiance. … I think popular conceptions of faith is that faith is the mere intellectual assent to a set of ideas. I agree with this notion. Faith in the New Testament is much more than that. It is right belief matters but it cannot be divorced from action. We have a dichotomy in Western thought between thought and action, and in the New Testament, thought and action are interwoven and cannot be separated from one another. For me the word allegiance captures what it means to have right belief and right action. … For me your allegiance falls with king Jesus in his kingdom, you stand with that. That means you believe what is true according to that kingdom, notions of who Jesus is but also practical things like what it means to forgive and what it means to love and all that practical outcomes.