Fred Kingman
This is the last Faith & Insight article I’ll write as I’m moving to New Hampshire to serve with a new local church. Leaving Nevada is perhaps the hardest thing we’ll do as a family, as it’s been home for almost 30 years.
But living in the desert has taught me a few things, from tenacity of thriving in a place where life can be hard to naive optimism that drives much of the growth of the west.
My dad moved to Las Vegas in the 1990s to start a company, so I grew up skating construction sites and hitting dirt jumps in empty lots on my Redline.
When I moved to Reno to attend college, I learned the hard lesson of leaving friends who cared about me to chase something new. From bombing classes to graduating with a degree in engineering, I learned to cultivate new friendships, navigate failure, and even convince a girl to marry me.
It’s then I heard the call to be a pastor, which is always awkward when you try to explain it. I simply loved Christ, loved my friends, and wanted to teach them what was true.
So, my wife trusted me, and we moved to Carson City to gather a core group to plant a church. And over the next 14 years I had planted two churches, become a dad to two wild but compassionate boys, and served as the spiritual formation pastor at LifePoint.
And while these memories fold in my mind, I have learned to see my sin and accept my limits, knowing as Tim Keller said, “I am more sinful than I could ever dare imagine, and more loved and accepted than I could ever dare hope.”
So here I am preparing to move to the East Coast. Once again, I’ll leave friends who love me more than I could ever love them. Once again, I’ll ask my wife to trust me to serve Jesus where he’s not yet known.
And for the first time, I’ll lead our boys to be open to the call of Jesus even if it means leaving all they’ve known behind. I wonder if they’ll look back at this time in their 40s with joy, naively optimistic and tenacious in their own pursuits of making much of Jesus. Regardless, I want to say thank you for allowing me to write, pastor, and shepherd so many in this city. I’ll end with scripture from Hebrews 12:1-2 that has formed me these past years as I have had the honor of serving Christ among you.
“Therefore, since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every hindrance and the sin that so easily ensnares us. Let us run with endurance the race that lies before us, keeping our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. For the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising the shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”