Jared Thomas and his wife, Lindsay, were happily serving at Christ Fellowship Cherrydale (CFC) in Greenville. They had a good friend group, and the church provided activities for their children. One Sunday, their pastor, Matt Rogers, announced that CFC would be pursuing a church plant in Blue Ridge within the next year. So, Thomas and his wife left what was comfortable and joined a church planting team to start Christ Fellowship Northwest.
Thomas said, “If there is a church plant that is going to that area … we live there. There’s going to have to be a reason for us not to do that.”
Robert McKinney, one of the founding pastors whom Thomas met during his time as a student at North Greenville University, hosted a small group in his house that formed the core church planting team. The church launched publicly in the fall of 2016 when they began meeting at the Three Rivers Baptist Association building. The church met at two other locations before finally purchasing a building in Greenville, south of Travelers Rest.
Thomas said, “In the midst of COVID, the church property that we’re at currently on Old White House Road came available. So, we kind of prayed about it with our people and realized, ‘Okay, it’s kind of taking us out of Blue Ridge,’ but in God’s providence a lot of our people were actually from Travelers Rest. So, the move actually made sense. We purchased that building and have been there since 2020.”
It was there that Thomas was invited to become a lay church elder.
But several years prior, Thomas decided back in seminary that he would not pursue pastoral ministry. He said he would be willing if he was ever asked to do so, but he never felt called to send his résumé in for any kind of vocational pastorate.
He said, “I just never felt the peace or the liberty to pursue a vocational position in a church, and I really don’t know how to vocalize it. It was clear that that wasn’t what I was to do.”
Instead, he became passionate about intentional discipleship and parachurch organizations that supported the local church. He obtained both master’s and doctorate degrees in biblical counseling at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Through working in various roles at NOBTS, he also grew a passion for higher education administration and serving students during the transitional time of schooling.
“Students go through a lot of challenges, by nature as being students, and there’s ripe opportunity to serve them with the gospel,” said Thomas.
Many of his passions culminated at North Greenville University, where he serves as vice president of Campus Ministry and Student Engagement. And saying yes to becoming a lay elder at Christ Fellowship Northwest has also proved to be a blessing.
“I absolutely love the lay eldership. There’s a liberating factor to it. You know, my paycheck isn’t married to the church ministry. I get to do it in the margins of life. It’s just a really rewarding thing that I wasn’t fully anticipating, like how much of a blessing it is to be a lay elder,” said Thomas.
(Editor’s note: In the May edition of our church planting series article, “Testimony of Discipleship: The Story of Ridgewood Church,” Trevor Hoffman’s home church was Standing Springs Baptist Church, not Sandy Springs.)