Bible Gateway Blog

By Zach Williams

One Sunday after church, the pastor found me and said, “Zach, we’ve been watching you and Crystal for a while now as you’ve been involved with the prison ministry and Celebrate Recovery. We’ve seen how much your family has grown and matured. We all feel like God has placed you here. We’ve been wanting to launch a new campus for a long time, but we’ve not been able to find the right fit for some of the leadership positions. We feel like with your story, you two can reach people we can’t. Zach, would you help us launch this campus by being involved with the worship and the music? Would you come on staff with us here part-time at the church?”

I had a lot of questions, especially about our past and how that would affect our involvement with the church staff. Plus, at that point, I didn’t consider myself a “worship leader,” either as a role or as a job title. To all my rapid-fire questions, the pastor just kept saying, “Don’t worry, Zach, we’ll figure that out.” Finally, he offered, “Starting out, we won’t call you a pastor, we’ll call you a director. There’s a full-time pastor you’d be working with.” The plan was to keep my construction job with Dad but also to have specific music responsibilities with this new service. Fast-forward—the church staff made it happen, and I helped them launch a new service called the Refuge.

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