The man who gave Christian recording artist Chris Tomlin his first opportunity to lead worship at a concert has been called to pastor his first church at age 70. In fact, it’s the church both he and Tomlin grew up in, years apart.
Main Street Baptist Church in Grand Saline, Texas, had “been kind of dormant” after years of successful ministry, said David Crain, the church’s pastor who, after 45 years as a traveling evangelist, was hesitant to think he had what it took to lead the congregation back to vibrancy.
The pastor search team had secured a younger candidate just over a year ago. “He was coming, 29 years of age,” Crain said. “I chuckle when I think about it.” The church asked Crain to fill in for four weeks until the new pastor arrived, but the pastor went to another church and Crain’s time was extended.
“They asked me if I would consider being their pastor, and I said, ‘No. I have never pastored. I have no idea what that means,’” Crain recounted. After turning them down repeatedly, he agreed to pray about it and realized God was leading.
Attendance the first four Sundays Crain preached at Main Street Baptist signaled something may have been up. The first Sunday, they had 85 people in worship. The second Sunday they had 112, the third Sunday they had 144, and the fourth Sunday they had 180, Crain said.
Now attendance has surpassed 360, and the church has moved to two services. “It’s kind of just skyrocketed for a little town in East Texas,” Crain said.
They baptize most every week, and many new people have joined, including couples with young children and students. The church has hired two associate pastors, and preregistration for a fall Awana program is nearing 70 children.
‘I knew their heart’
“All I can tell you is God is in the middle of something here, and I didn’t want to miss out,” Crain said. “The conventional wisdom says, ‘Get a younger guy,’ and we would have done that had we been able to find one.”
One way being 70 years old helps at this particular church, Crain said, is that he already had connections with the congregation.
“I wasn’t the new guy on the block,” he said. “I knew everybody here. … I knew their heart, and I could just start ministering right away.” That includes being with a family when a loved one dies, cheering on the local team at football games, and visiting people at hospitals.
“In a church this size and a town this size, there’s a whole lot more going on than you would think,” Crain said. “We’ve had two suicides here in the last month or two — kids from our school. There’s a lot of need, and there’s a lot of pressure on folks in this day and time, so to be able to be a part of that and help them through it is kind of a wonderful thing.”
David Martin, who grew up in the church five years ahead of Crain and now serves as a deacon and trustee, said, “He doesn’t let anybody in the church go to a surgery or anything like that unless he’s standing there with them when they go in.”
And since Grand Saline doesn’t have a major hospital, that means a 45-minute drive to Tyler or a 55-minute drive to Dallas.
“You can’t speak about his age because his age doesn’t show,” Martin said. “I’ve never seen a young pastor that was able to keep a schedule like that.”
Having recorded several studio albums, Crain is a world-class musician, Martin said.
Tomlin wrote about Crain in an Instagram post in 2017: “David was a traveling musician out of our little church. I thought he was the coolest guy ever. I couldn’t believe that someone could travel around to churches and sing for a living (ha).
“I’ll never forget this one particular afternoon when I was in high school. David stopped by my house and asked if I would like to go help him set up his gear and sell ‘tapes’ in the back for the concert that he had that night,” Tomlin wrote.
“… In the middle of his concert, he said he had a friend in the back named Chris that was helping him for the night, and he thought it would be a good idea if I took the stage and played a couple songs. Then, to my surprise, he just walked off the stage and everyone was staring at me. All I can remember was that I was pretty awful. But that one opportunity turned into another and then another and then another.”
No end in sight
Martin said Tomlin is one of countless young men Crain has nudged into the ministry and even mentored. His decades of preaching at youth camps between revivals demonstrated his love for youth.
“Kids just flock to him,” Martin said. “They sit on the front row. The front row is loaded down with kids. God has worked through David in many, many ways that we don’t even know about.”
As for how long he plans to continue pastoring now that he has gotten started, Crain said he doesn’t see an end in sight.
“I know the Levitical priests actually got to retire after a certain amount of time, but since I’m not of that tribe, apparently there’s no retirement for me,” he joked. “I just want to be purposeful. I just want to be useful.”
To everyone around him, he said, he’s 70, but “to me, I’m still like in my mid-40s. I look in the mirror and I don’t know the guy.”
His schedule had been full of 30 to 40 revivals a year, as well as concerts and camps when he was asked to pastor, so “it wasn’t like I was running out of anything to do.
“Right now, it’s kind of just full steam ahead.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was originally published by the Southern Baptist Texan.
