Most people are surprised to learn that I am a blind pastor. After losing eyesight in 2018, I resolved to continue being a pastor and preaching God’s Word. Although I would have to approach it differently, I determined that I wouldn’t quit. Perhaps you are someone who would like to feel closer to God and understand His Word better. My role as a pastor and Bible teacher is to help people clearly see God’s will for their lives. What an odd assignment for a blind man, wouldn’t you say?
My story begins with the mission field. I was saved at a young age, grew up in a tremendous gospel-preaching church, and the Lord captured my attention as a young boy. At the age of twelve, a family friend who was a full-time missionary in the former Communist Bloc of Europe asked my parents if he could take me alongside him to do mission work in Romania. I joined him for the summers when I was twelve and thirteen years old. The time God allowed me around these courageous, full-time missionaries set the course for the rest of my life. As I returned home from these trips, churches began to invite me to share with their youth groups and on Sundays until eventually I was preaching in many churches. Through my teenage years, God gave me the opportunity to preach in over two hundred churches in my home region. Even though I am a pastor today, missions has remained one of my great passions. By God’s grace, I have preached through forty countries helping to train pastors and church leaders, and planting churches.
My role as a pastor and Bible teacher is to help people clearly see God’s will for their lives. What an odd assignment for a blind man, wouldn’t you say?
The next step in my journey was planting Preaching Christ Church. We launched on January 6th, 2001 when I was only twenty years old. I was a single pastor with the support of only a handful of people. My entire congregation consisted of less than ten adults. I will never forget receiving a letter from an elderly lady named Betty Hawkins who was a charter member of my church. She could see my discouragement as it was so hard to gain traction as a church planter. She reminded me that in God’s wisdom, He would grow the roots deep before He would even consider growing the branches wide. Betty passed away a couple of years later, but I never forgot her words and they proved to be true. Today, hundreds of people call Preaching Christ Church home, but the roots are far deeper than the branches, and I thank God for that.
As the church grew, so did my desire to have a family. The Lord would begin to unfold his plans on Mother’s Day 2008. A family who had been attending our church had a daughter away at college, and kept hinting that they wanted us to meet. I met Sadie Hawk for the first time that Mother’s Day weekend and my dad told me, “Chad, you should marry that girl!” I married her March 6th, 2009, and since then we have been doing life together along with our four amazing kids, Piper, Emmy, Hudson, and John Mark.
He is teaching me contentment, an unhurried pace,and to truly walk by faith and not by sight.
Everything changed for my family in 2017. While in Nicaragua training pastors, I hiked to a radio tower high in the mountains and blood vessels burst behind my left eye. After coming home, I suffered two failed eye surgeries, the surgeon accidentally tore my retina, leaving me blind in my left eye. Sixteen months later, I lost vision in my right eye, leaving me completely blind by October 2018. While I knew that God’s grace would be sufficient, I could’ve never understood just how sufficient His grace is without walking through this valley. The valleys of our life have the potential to become the sweetest places of our life, and so blindness has become for me and my family. Ruth Bell Graham once said, “Mountains are for breathtaking views, but fruit grows in the valley.” God is now teaching me what books never could. He is teaching me contentment, an unhurried pace, and to truly walk by faith and not by sight.
