CEP SEASON THREE EP: 14 - WITH GUEST BRANDON PETTY

Apr 20

By Dave Mckeown and Nathan Benger

Welcome to our latest episode with Brandon Petty, the lead pastor and planter of Generation Church in Portland, Tennessee. Brandon has been in youth ministry for over 14 years and has spoken at many different camps and conferences.

Brandon is best known for his passion and the ability to include humour with real-life applications to his messages. His testimony of surviving trauma and abuse as a child and his powerful story of redemption and purpose helps him connect with leaders of all ages.

Brandon and his wife, Jessica, moved to Portland in 2011 with their two daughters to start Generation Church, which was included in Outreach Magazine as one of the fastest-growing churches in America in 2019.

In part one, Brandon courageously shares some headlines of how he faced various types of abuse as a child and dealt with this while leading a growing church. He communicates with openness and vulnerability some of the steps he took to move forward.

We hope you are inspired!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

CREATED BY AI - SO NOT 100% accurate.

David Mckeown 0:00

Welcome, everyone to the church explained podcast a conversation to grow your leadership and build your Church.

David Mckeown 0:09

I'm Dave

Nathan Benger 0:09

and I am Nathan. And we're the hosts of the church explained podcast as always, and today we've been joined by Brandon petty. And Brandon is the lead Pastor and planter of generation Church in Portland, Tennessee. Brandon was in youth ministry for over 14 years and has spoken at many different camps and conferences. Brandon is best known for his passion and the ability to include humour with real life application to his messages, his testimony of surviving trauma and abuse as a child, and his powerful story of redemption and purpose helps him connect with leaders of all ages. Brandon and his wife, Jessica moved to Portland in 2011, with their two daughters to start generation Church, which was included in outreach Magazine as one of the fastest growing churches in America in 2019. So Brandon is great to have you with us on the church explained podcast.

Brandon Petty 0:58

Honoured honoured to be a part. Thank you guys so much for asking.

David Mckeown 1:02

Yes, sir. Good to have you here, Brandon. Just to get a little bit of your story that we want to find out a little bit more of your story, of course. And just wonder we always like to start off our podcast asking this question Brandon, tell us that we wouldn't say Brandon to everyone like of course. Just to make clear, you know, tell us a little bit about your faith story, your ministry journey, a little bit about your background of farming. I know you've said something in the bio, and whether you want to go into that. We'll leave that up to you. But yeah, we're just let's find out a little bit more about you today.

Brandon Petty 1:36

Sure, yeah. Um, I did not grow up in Church. My mother was, she was pregnant with me when she was 15 years old. And so she dropped out of high school to help raise me worked several jobs. And, and so and then a few years later, she had my brother. And so we kind of I grew up, I tell people, I grew up in a house full of women, I was raised by my mom, my grandmother and my two aunts. And so I didn't know my biological father until I was 15. And so but my mom, she, she walked through a lot of different relationships when I was a child. And so we were moved around a lot. Anytime people asked me where I'm from, I just say middle z, because we pretty much lived in almost every city or around in Middle Tennessee in the Nashville area. And so with that came a lot of abuse, whether it was physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, all the things from the time I was probably seven or eight, all the way up until I was 12, or 13. And so by the time I was 15, my mother ended up in prison for drugs. And so I had to move in with my aunt and uncle. And so I lived with him through high school. And I always tell people that that in high school, I had a drug problem. I was drugged to Church every single day by my aunt and uncle, that was one of the stipulations living in their home is that we had to attend Church. And so didn't catch on right away. I actually it was a small little rural Church out in the middle of in Kentucky, in a rural area of Kentucky. And I could not stay in Church at all. And then, man, God, miraculously, when I was 18, right after I graduated high school, God just radically saved me and changed me. And immediately I began working in student ministry. And I actually about a year later when I was 19, sort of preaching the gospel, and started serving in student ministry. And I thought that I would be in student ministry for the rest of my life. I kind of envisioned myself being like, in my 70s, still preaching to

Brandon Petty 3:55

people, people were like, you know, one day, you'll have your own Church, one day, you'll be a Pastor. And I would just in my mind, I would just be like, there's no way like, I would say no to that in a heartbeat. But of course, in 2010, January 2010, God started wrecking my heart to plant a Church. And so by the by January of 2011, we had transitioned out of our Church as youth pastors, and began the journey to start building a team and planning a Church. And then on March 4 2012, we launched generation Church out of a little Elementary School here in the City of Portland. And we saw 482 people show up on our first day, and then six weeks later, we baptised 89 people at our first Easter service. And so ever since then, God has just been faithful. He's been so good. And so it's been a an incredible journey. One that has obviously came with its ups and downs. I'm sure we'll jump into that and dive into that along in our conversation, especially when it comes to

Brandon Petty 5:00

Whew, some of the trauma and stuff that I spoke about earlier, and how it came back to revisit me and my adult years. But yeah, so now not only did we start the Church with our two daughters, but in 2015, my wife gave birth to our son. So now we have three kids. So I got two teenage girls, so need lots of prayer there. And then, of course, I have an eight year old son, who is just, he kind of rules the rules the household so

Nathan Benger 5:28

now I relate to the youth Pastor common, where you think you're going to be in student ministry for the rest of your life? Because, yes, I was a youth Pastor. And yes, you do. Just think you know what, I'm in it for life. And then, yeah, the day comes where you're like, No, not in it anymore. And it's, it's very different. But also, Brandon, we love to ask this question. What do you do for fun?

Brandon Petty 5:53

Oh, man, I absolutely love playing disc golf is Disc Golf very popular there.

Nathan Benger 5:59

It's not like the like with the the Frisbee frisbee golf.

Brandon Petty 6:03

Yes, except for here. You say frisbee you'll get you get attacked pretty quickly. You don't say frisbee you say dance. But yeah, you know, we have the chains and the goal is to throw them into but that's pretty popular with our staff. I love to work out. I'm a big gym, gym rat. And then of course, just just love any kind of outdoor activities, a hunt, fish camp, those type things. So awesome.

David Mckeown 6:32

So some some interesting stuff. The desk what's called the squat. This is my apologies to all our American audience. It's a conversation between soccer and football, isn't it all over a year?

Brandon Petty 6:45

That's pretty much what it is. Yeah,

David Mckeown 6:48

we'll say no more. A great great to hear invite the Church on. And obviously God's blessing you there. And you're you, as you've described that you've been working through some stuff, love it, just to hear how God impacted your life at the age of 1819, just to take that sort of journey to follow him. But I thought it would be good for us maybe just to get down a little bit. Now some of the questions around like, how do you take care of yourself? You've mentioned I know the the gym stuff. But how do you take care of yourself as you think about the Church and this growing Church that you're leading? Like, what do you do? How do you take care of yourself, your family, your soul, your team?

Brandon Petty 7:25

Well, and interestingly enough, I didn't even really do anything for that until I was until until about 2015. We were like three and a half years into the Church plant. And it seemed like we went through about a year and a half of just trial after trial, which when I look back now, I really believe it was God leading me to freedom and to health and my soul. My wife's brother, she ended, he ended up he was an alcoholic, and he ended up on basically his deathbed. He was on one of these rotating beds, he had almost drank himself to death. And they told us 3% of people end up getting out of those beds. And so during that time, it was like three or four months of us at the hospital every single day with her mom or brother praying for a miracle which we received. Four months later, he ended up walking out of that hospital gave his heart and life to the Lord. So that was an incredible journey. But also during that same time period. My father passed away and I had just began to restore our relationship as an adult, my son was just born. And my dad never got to see my son, he had a sudden heart attack a few months after his birth. And so that was kind of like a hard hit. Partially because I was still trying to figure out my father wounds and those type things. And cap it all off. I told you guys about you know, being a child at eight years old, being sexually abused, I was actually forced to watch pornography at the age of eight. I don't know how raw This podcast is so sorry if I can be able to. So but when I was about nine, the second person to sexually abused me was a neighbour and he was a 16 year old male. And so we come to Church one day and we just we drive up as a normal Sunday and we're walking in and I encounter a volunteer who was setting up our parking lot. And after a few minutes of this conversation, I realised that the person that I'm having a conversation with is the person that sexually abused me as a child. And so it was like this. It was like a wave of grief that hit me in that moment of realising man that the guy that abused me is is in my Church, right? And so I went through a three month period of depression, anxiety A, I would have nightmares that my son was going to be murdered or missing. And he was just a baby at the time. And I remember I would just daydream about different jobs that I could take. I was trying to figure out how I can offload this Church to somebody else. I basically just went through a dark, dark time of just not figuring out like, what's what's wrong with me what I would sneak in the back door of our Church every Sunday sneak out, I didn't want to encounter people. And my wife had known a lot about my childhood, but not a lot of details. And so I knew one of two things is going to happen in my I'm either going to probably make decisions that are going to disqualify me from ministry, I'm going to quit ministry, or I'm going to get help, like one of those three options. And so one day, we were getting ready to go out meet my wife and I was so filled with shame over what happened to me as a child, that I couldn't even look her in the face. And so I was in the shower, she was standing in the in the bathroom getting ready. And I just began to pour out my heart. And I'm, I'm uncontrollably sobbing at this point, and trying to be make a coherent speech. And you know, what's incredible, this is what I encourage people all the time is that the thing that we hold in that we think is the thing that's going to make people ashamed of us are embarrassed of us, judge us is actually the thing that leads to our freedom. Because once we confess it and get it out, it's no longer hidden in the dark, and it can continue to grow. And, man, that moment, my wife loved me was such great, it actually grew us closer together once I was able to be fully vulnerable and transparent with her, which was incredible. And so I know, I'm kind of giving you guys the long version of this. But several, several months into that. Thank God, I had a great network of pastors, friends and networks around me, who loved me and cared for me and my wife encouraged me to reach out. And so I did, they paid for me to get counselling. They, they encouraged me to take some time off, which I did. And so I started going to counselling pretty heavy. I started reading books on sexual trauma. And probably one of the things that kind of kick started my soul health was, I had a Pastor friend who every year he did two weeks of a solitude sabbatical where he would just go off, and he would just camp and fish and spend time with the Lord. And I didn't know what that was, I didn't know what it looked like. And so he invited me for a few days to come and just be with him as he did that. And from that point in 2015, on every year, I do that myself, I take a solitude sabbatical. And that first one in 2015. Guys, I'm telling you, it was oh my gosh, it was just it was truly an encounter with God. Because I finally began a journey. Here's what I believe, I believe a lot of people experience survival in their life, but never fully experienced victory. And what I had come to realise is I had survived a lot as a kid. But I didn't have victory over hardly any of it. And I think we I think we both think that sometimes time will erase our pain. And I believe why we think that is because we think that our past will never come knocking on our door in the future. But what really struck me was I never expected my past to show back up. But it didn't just show back up emotionally or mentally it showed back up physically. The person was standing right in front of me. And I'll never forget what my counsellor said. He asked me this strange question that I thought was a strange question from a counsellor. He said, Do you think you can whip this guy? It's like, No, this is a weird turn into the session. I said, Well, yeah, you know, not trying to brag or anything. But yeah. He's He's older than me. Now. You know, he's a lot older me and, and he said, well, then you need to go tell your 10 year old self, that you're safe. You're good. And I just remember thinking like, I hadn't realised he cuz he explained. He said, The reason why you're having these dreams about your son. The reason why you know you're walking through this is because the moment you saw him, you reverted back to that nine or 10 year old that you were experiencing as an adult through the eyes of that child. And he's like, You need to tell that child you're okay. And I'll never forget leaving that session. I sat on my car and I just I just show owes, you know, because people kept trying to give me all the advice in the world, you should kick him out of the Church, you should do this, you need to sit down and have a conversation. And the hard part is it wasn't just about me and him anymore. He had kids, he had grandkids, you know, he had like relations. And so like, do I bring this to light, and then start affecting all these other relationships? Or do I go on this because because it wasn't even about him. And I, what I came to realise is it was about my own journey toward finding healing in my soul. And so from that point forward, I began implementing slowly. Because Because I read the book, the life you've always wanted by John Ortberg, on that first article. And man, it led me down this beautiful journey to establishing practices of Sabbath of solitude, silence, prayer, like really creating space and margin in my life to be in the presence of God. Because I'm, I mean, I'll be ashamed to say and tell you guys like, I think a lot of pastors because I did, it will lead their churches for a long time off of there gifting.

Brandon Petty 16:15

But eventually, your character will catch up, and your soul, your your essence, your being or your ethos, as that word is described, and the Greek, it will, it will eventually come out and reveal what's really hidden within. And I'm grateful that God took me through that journey. Because I tell people, like if it wasn't for that moment, I don't know where I would be today, I don't know what my marriage would look like, I don't know what the Church would look like. And so for me that even now, it's morphed into where eight years later, I just did my first Silent Retreat at a monastery. So silence and solitude have become a big part of my soul health. The sabbatical, once a year has been a big part. I do at least two retreats with other pastors and leaders every year, get ready to go to Montana in May, for a pastor's retreat where we'll just, you know, will fly fish and, and spend time in Montana. And so that and prayer has, its vital and so my first two hours of the day, are spent in prayer in the word in silence. So to answer your question, in the long form, those are the ways that I take care of my soul is just being in the presence of God is as often and consistently as I can be, and making that a routine and a habit and a practice of my life. So

Nathan Benger 17:53

well, I just want to firstly, say thank you for sharing your story with us. And that story, I believe that will just be helpful to other people around there. Only if you just paint a little bit of context of what was happening in the Church. So obviously, you mentioned you were coming in and out. But was the Church still growing? Was it still moving forward?

Brandon Petty 18:15

So ironically, about year three, when all this started happening is when our Church plateaued and started to decline a little bit. And about a year and a half later. So by 2017, the Church started growing again. And I tell I tell people, the moment I got healthy is when the Church started to get healthy. And I'll never forget what my counsellor told me. He said, once you walk through this and find healing, he said, you'll become a better communicator of the gospel. He said, Now you have tasted grace, tangibly firsthand of what it's like to forgive, of what it's like to show grace, and receive grace. And so I truly believe that that was a turning point in my life and the church's life. And even five years later, you know, what we're experiencing right now I tell people, this is the harvest of a field that God had to plough in my own heart five years ago. I think sometimes when we're walking through a season of blessing, we think it would just it just happened overnight. But really, it's cultivated with seeds of prayer with seeds of healing with seeds of repentance and confession. And those things come to fruit in our lives much later than we anticipate.

David Mckeown 19:37

Yeah, I mean, that's some great stuff you've said there. And as Nathan said, yeah, thanks for sharing your story and being so vulnerable before people because I think it will really help people Yeah, we don't know who to listen to this podcast, and we pray will just help them as well as to hear your story. And that story of redemption is an ongoing story, isn't it? God helps us and works in our life. One of the things said there was a couple of things I just want to pick up on. One is, you mentioned this idea of like when you got healthy, the Church can healthy. I think that's a sense. And then the other thing, you've mentioned her this idea of creating margin, I wonder if you could maybe speak into that a little bit. One, like you've mentioned about your journey of getting healthy. What would you encourage people to do? And to how do you practically create margin on a daily basis?

Brandon Petty 20:32

Yeah, no, those are great questions. And I think the simple answer is start somewhere. You know, I think a lot of people feel like when it comes to, you know, prayer time margins that, you know, it's like, they try to bite off more than they can chew. In the beginning. I love this story on if you guys have heard this story, but there was a they did this study, and they introduced a bicycle that when you turned left with your, with the handlebars, the the wheel actually turned right. Okay. And in the study was to see like how long it would take somebody to relearn how to ride a bike, right? And so this gentleman hops on, it takes him eight months to learn how to ride this bike. Right? And then the kicker was, they gave it to his young son. And you want to guess how long it took his young son to ride this bike?

Nathan Benger 21:29

Eight minutes? Well,

Brandon Petty 21:32

it took two weeks. But the point here,

Nathan Benger 21:35

I was just going for

Brandon Petty 21:40

what you understood where I was going with, yeah, the longer we create habits in our lives, the longer it takes to deform those habits. And so when somebody is starting out, you know, you can't just say, Well, you know, I'm going to get up because it started with gradual stuff. For me, I'll tell you, I used to be the most unorganised person, I was the person that couldn't out hit my snooze 48 times before I get up in the morning. But But now, but now, you know, I'm a person who gets up at 4am. On the first time the alarm goes off. There's a great book called atomic habits by James Beard. But it really is creating the habits that lead to the habit, if that makes sense. And so will I get ready for my day, the night before, I established routines that and that took time, and there was times where that wasn't perfect. And so what I had to do, what I would encourage people is like, start slow, start somewhere, give yourself grace. And I think we underestimate what can be done in a long period of time. And we overestimate what can be done in a short period of time. And so what people tend to do is go oh, man, I want to be you know, it's everything in our culture is about quick fix. I mean, you've heard probably have, like, hold, you know, 30 days to wholeness, or fit and 40. And so I told our Church, I'm not trying to get you 30 days to wholeness. I'm trying to get you 30 years to wholeness. Yeah, so what can my life look like in a year, if I stay consistent with the small practices, yeah. And then and then add on to it. So maybe instead of saying, I'm going to get up two hours earlier, say I'm going to get up 20 minutes earlier. And, and here's how I'm going to spend that 20 minutes, and here's how that's going to play out. And then after six months, add another 10 minutes, you know, and so sometimes you have to set the goal and then work backwards, you know, if the goal is one day, I want to get up at 4am. But you right, now you get up at 7am, well, then maybe you need to back it up to six, and then after a year, back it up to five, and then back it up to four, you know, because the whole point shouldn't be getting up early. But the point should be that I'm becoming a person who, who spends the first part of their day with the Lord. And if that becomes my goal than all the other stuff becomes that's trivial anyways, and it really isn't, you know, because you can be a morning person and still not be a person who starts their day off correctly, or start off in the right mood. And so I think for a lot of people, it's understanding, like, if you have spent the first 30 years of your life, getting up at the last minute, pushing the snooze button 10 times, that's not going to fix itself in a month. And so to start, practically, it's start small, start somewhere, give yourself grace. And eventually, you don't want to just give yourself margin, you want to become the kind of person that creates margin. And that's the difference in the mindset. You know, it's not just doing the stuff, but it's becoming the kind of person that does those things

David Mckeown 24:45

for them.

Nathan Benger 24:46

Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, Brandon. It's been so great to have you on the podcast. What's the best way for people to connect with you?

Brandon Petty 24:53

Sure. If people are interested, I have a podcast when it's good podcast. You can go to made to win podcast.com. If you want to engage there, you can check that out. Also on Spotify, iTunes and youtube. And then of course, I'm on Instagram and Facebook. That's B, Petey G see on Instagram, and of course, Brandon petty on Facebook. So those are three of the easiest ways to connect with

David Mckeown 25:21

me. Right? And we'll stick those in the show notes.

Nathan Benger 25:22

Yes, we will. Yeah. And well, like we said, Brandon, it's been so great to have you on the podcast and thanks everyone for listening and remember, to support what we're doing. Remember to share, subscribe, leave a review wherever you're consuming this content. Don't forget we have a whole load of resources for you on your Church IKON dot Church forward slash open, but we look forward to seeing you next time on the church explained podcast. We'll see you soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai