A cross with a crown of thorns hangs on the white wall. A clear podium stands at the front of the room, directed at blue chairs lined in rows with hymnals resting on several of them. But it isn’t a church.
It’s a chapel in the back of a maintenance building at North Greenville University in Tigerville, where the workers meet every Wednesday morning for devotions.
“The tiny room echoed with the voices of these faithful men on campus as they worshipped the Lord,” said Julia Low, a former university student who attended the service on occasion. “It gave me chills every time,” she said. According to Low, the service was also full of prayer.
Gifford overseas locks, keys, doors, and windows, but he also oversees souls.
Glenn Gifford, 68, works for North Greenville University’s Campus Enhancement Services, overseeing locks, keys, doors, and windows. But he also oversees souls — both on campus and at his church a mile up the road where he’s a bivocational pastor at Tyger Baptist Church. Gifford moved to Tigerville in 1998, when a friend told him that his skill set would fit in at the university. But there’s something greater that’s kept him around for over 20 years at the university.
“That’s how you make a home,” said Gifford. “You build friendships.”
Gifford didn’t grow up in the South. He was raised in rural Missouri and later moved to Colorado because his dad served at the Lowry Air Force Base. Gifford’s first official job was pumping gas at the base when he was 16 years old. He fueled cars for a year and then was moved to the service bay, where he repaired vehicles.
“And I became a grease monkey,” he said.
While in Colorado, Gifford found the love of his life, Deb, at church, and the two were married. The couple decided to move back to Missouri so Gifford could work for his uncle’s business servicing mobile homes. There he learned electrical work and plumbing.
During this time, he said he felt the Lord compelling him to become a pastor. So, after 14 years of serving at his local church and repairing mobile homes, he and Deb, along with their two kids (one in high school and the other in elementary school), moved to Mid America Baptist Theological Seminary in Memphis, Tenn., in 1990.
Looking back on his life, Gifford said he had a later start, not beginning seminary till he was in his 30s.
There at seminary, he met Archie England, the friend who eventually led him to Tigerville.
“[Archie] graduated [from seminary] and came to some little town called Tigerville, South Carolina,” said Gifford.
But Gifford didn’t follow his friend Archie to Tigerville quite yet. His first pastorate was a difficult one in Alberta, Canada. There, he said he worked alongside a controlling pastor who, although married, was entertaining a girlfriend.
Gifford and Deb loved those in the congregation, and the church had a thriving special needs program. But that wasn’t enough to keep them there long-term.
The last straw came one day in the church parking lot when a church member asked Gifford if he could borrow a hefty sum of money to pay back a loan from some suspicious people. Gifford had helped the member in the past, but this time the amount he was asking for was more than what he or the church could afford.
As Gifford addressed the man, he recalled turning around and seeing the blank look on his wife’s face.
Gifford said, “And the look on her face told me, ‘We have to leave.’”
So, he called his seminary friend, Archie.
“He gave me good counsel and helped me to recognize when things were going to change and go bad for me,” said Gifford.
A couple hours after their talk, Archie called with news of a job opening in the maintenance department at North Greenville University. He told Gifford he was the perfect fit.
Looking back, Gifford agreed. “Archie was right,” he said. “My skill set fit very well here. And it was a place where we could heal from all the trauma at that first church.”
Today, Gifford thrives in the all-hands-on deck environment in NGU’s maintenance department. He and his coworkers have different roles and unique strengths, but when help is needed, everyone jumps in.
Gifford said that every pastor needs to have an outlet that doesn’t have anything to do with church. And for him, it’s maintenance work.
“The difference between me and everybody else is, I get paid to do my hobby,” he said.
But more than enjoying his work, he sees it as a way to honor the Lord.
“I want to do a good job because of Christ. I want to honor Christ with my work,” said Gifford.
In the back of their repair shop is an office with two desk chairs, a table, a bookshelf, a whiteboard, two computers, and a key machine. Gifford said this is the office where all the brain work happens, like key coding.
Laying on top of the desk is an open Bible to which Gifford remarked, “You can see, there are always Bibles hanging around.”
But their love for the Lord isn’t confined to their repair shop or the chapel they meet in on Wednesday mornings. Gifford and his coworkers share their love by ministering to students while fixing college dorms and painting walls.
Gifford’s coworker Randy Joe Bryson, 65, said, “Being able to go into a dorm and work on something while the student is there. I love doing that.”
Once, Gifford’s coworker Dean Norris — now on the verge of retiring — was driving across campus when he saw a student sitting on a swing with his head down, crying. Norris said God laid it on his heart to stop and check on the young man.
He sat down next to the student, put his arms around him, and began praying. “I didn’t know what he was going through,” Norris said. “But God knows.”
Moments like these are what make Gifford and his coworkers stick around.
“The thing that keeps me here, above all else, is the interaction with students,” said Gifford.
Gifford has mentored several college students who have since become pastors and one student who became a missionary to Senegal. Gifford has also continued to pastor, first at Jackson Memorial Baptist Church for two years, and then at Camp Creek Baptist Church, which that old friend, Archie, connected him to. After four years pastoring at Camp Creek, he said he felt burnt out, which caused him to take a three-year break from pastoring.
During that time, Gifford said the Lord was able to quiet and redirect him. “The Lord was renewing my thinking,” he said.
After his three-year renewal, Gifford was led to a small country church just a mile from NGU.
“The last thing I wanted to be was a pastor of a little bitty church,” he said.
After three months as interim pastor, he fell in love with them and has been their pastor now for 16 years. But his church members aren’t the only ones who call him “pastor.”
Gifford’s utility vehicle at North Greenville University has the words “Pastor Glenn” stuck to the front of it.
It was a Thursday morning, and Gifford listened intently to a coworker share his recent medical diagnosis of several herniated disks in his back that would keep him from doing any heavy lifting for a while.
“All right, brother, we’ll be praying for you,” Gifford told the man. “Let me know if you need anything.”