Episode 1 - Connor Vincent Testimony

Within this episode we will hear the testimony of our host Connor Vincent. We learn about how he came to faith in Christ, how he developed a passion for youth ministry, and the whole goal of this podcast. 

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Transcript

Welcome to Summit Youth's podcast. My name is Connor Vincent. I serve as the student pastor at Green Valley Baptist Church, and I serve as the host of this podcast. If you enjoy some of the content that we put out there, please feel free to like, comment, and subscribe for more. Now, when it comes to Christian podcasts, there's supposed to be a supplement for the church, not a substitute, meaning we want you guys who are listening to be involved in a local church and to be involved in your local youth ministries. So be prepared, buckle up, and have a good listen.

Well, welcome to Summit Youth's podcast. Once again, my name is Connor Vincent. I serve as the youth pastor at Green Valley Baptist Church, and I'll be the host of this show. Kind of the whole goal of this podcast moving forward is I've thought that, man, there's a lot of hours in the week as a youth pastor that I don't get to spend with my students. I spend two to three hours on a Sunday with my kids, an hour in the morning and two hours in the evening. And it's like, man, what's another way that I can reach them throughout the week? And I've looked at something called the internet and our cell phones and how we spend so much time either just listening to a podcast or music or watching a YouTube video. And kind of my whole goal and heart behind making a video podcast or an audio podcast is to better reach my kids the hours that I don't have them. There's 168 hours in the week. I have them for three live hours, but how am I going to reach you guys, my audience, the other 165 hours? So that's kind of my whole goal and my heart behind this, because I know in my own personal growth journey as a Christian, I've listened to a lot of men and women, whether it be through lessons or video podcasts such as this, where it's really affected me and strengthened me as a believer. And so I just want to view this as a form of kind of discipleship from afar.

Once again, if I'm not your pastor, I'm not your pastor. There's 50 to 60 kids in our youth ministry that primarily this is for them. But if this reaches a greater audience than just the youth at my church, praise the Lord.

But we want anyone who listens to this to first and foremost get plugged into your local church,(...) sit under the weekly preaching of the word of God under the authority of your pastor and elders at your church.(...) And if you're a teenager,
that is primary too. 

Youth ministry is not a substitute for Sunday morning worship with the congregation.(...) Youth ministry is an addition to type of ministry, like a para-church ministry, meaning para means like parable in Jesus walking alongside.

That's what youth ministry is supposed to be. You're supposed to walk alongside the local church.(...) And so that's kind of my whole hope that this would be like a spiritual vitamin throughout the week. And your Sunday morning worship is kind of like the meal that sustains you, the steak and the potatoes.

You need to get that preaching in your diet, but you also might need to take some little vitamins here and there. Maybe that's what this podcast can serve for you. And I'm sure you listen to a plenty of other talking heads out there or other Christian creators and all this different stuff.(...) So that's kind of my hope and my goal in starting this whole channel for my youth ministry. 

And so I do want to just get into kind of like my testimony so that people can understand where I'm coming from and who I am. And so I was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada. Not many people were born and raised here. About one in five residents actually are born here. And I grew up in the church and I've only ever known Jesus. I didn't have some crazy conversion story like the apostle Paul.

My parents raised me in the fear of the Lord and my dad would always repeat this proverb to me is to raise up your kids in the ways of the Lord and they shall not depart from it.

Well, I praise God that he did that because I have never departed or turned my back on God and throughout the course of my life. And now I serve as a pastor at a church. And my brother actually also serves at a church full time doing video, which he taught me all this different video stuff. And I love my brother.

So yeah, grew up on the East side of Las Vegas. I grew up at Central Christian Church and I was there way back when it was still at the Mojave campus. My dad actually helped build the big Henderson campus that's there now.

I always like to attribute my story to the root of when did Christianity reach my family? When did Christ change my family? Because my family, my mom's side was from New York and my dad's side was from the Philippines. And my parents met when my mom was about 17 or 18 and over years of dating, they got engaged and they're like, well, we got to get married in a church. And they didn't know what church to go to. And they were just kind of church shopping. And my mom was like, well, I've never really been a practicing Christian. She kind of was raised somewhat Mormon kind of Christian. My dad is kind of raised Catholic because Filipino families are very Catholic.

And my mom remembers one day when she was a little girl, some man was visiting her house and he was staying there until he could find his own place. And during that time, he shared the good news of the gospel with my mom. And she remembers as a little girl saying, yes, I believe that I accept Christ into my heart. And she may not have remembered or acted Christian or got involved in the church for many years, but once she got engaged to my dad, she was like, hey, we need to get married in a church. And so they found a church, they found central, they got saved together, they got baptized together, and then they had me and my brother, they raised us in the church.

And so I've always loved God. I've always loved the church. I praise God for that because I know that a lot of people who are raised in the church can end up being kind of jaded towards Christianity or towards church-ianity as some may call it.

But that's just kind of my, a little bit of my origins. I like to trace it back to how did the gospel get to my family, but then how did it get to my own heart, right? Because as the church were a corporate body, but we're also made up of individuals. And so when did my own faith journey start? Well, I've always known the Lord, but I would say faith became real to me when I was 10, 11 years old of just like, man, this is something that I have to do. Because I remember when our church would take the Lord's supper, right? The grape juice and the bread, my parents would be like, no, you can't take of it yet. You haven't been baptized yet. 

And I was like, why not? I believe in this stuff. Why not? And so I went up to my dad and said, dad, I would like to be baptized. This is something that I truly believe in. And a couple of weeks later, my dad baptized me on a Wednesday night worship service.

And it was amazing. It was 2004. It was August of 2004. And I was 10 years old.

And I remember that moment. And one of the things that Paul actually tells us to do as Christians is to remember our baptism and what Christ has done for us. And through Christ's faithfulness to my parents in getting the gospel to my mom as a little girl, now an entire generation of Christians has been changed. Can you believe that? That's so cool. Because my family, we were, you know, they both had, my parents had rough kind of upbringings in their family life. I won't get into any sort of details or talk negatively about my family, but my family was, they were truly chain breakers. Like I could have had a very rough upbringing, but my dad and my mom, they laid down their life for me and my brothers.

And wow, I'm just so grateful for who my parents are. And then as I got older, I got involved with the, you know, student ministries, the youth ministries. I would say it was summer of 2007. So about three years later of when I really felt the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit, I was at summer camp and the sermon was just hitting hard that day, you know, and the music was amazing. I was just overwhelmed with emotion. And I was just like, wow, like this, this isn't just like a, you make a decision thing. This is your life has changed, you know, and I truly felt the Holy Spirit in 2007. And I'd say by 2009 though, in my faith journey, so now I'm 15 years old, we did instead of summer camp that year, our youth ministry did a mission trip to downtown Los Angeles. And during that mission trip, we basically just kind of helped out a lot of homeless people on skid row. We went to a couple of different places that needed some work done. And it was the first time in my life where I realized that Christianity is not just about me, right? I remember that summer,

I was upset that there wasn't summer camp. I was like, I want to go to the, you know, camp where you go to either college campus or the cool place in the woods and you play all these games. You know, you play all these games, you have the great music and everything's for me, me, me, me, me. Well, that summer, it was when I realized that man, Christianity is not about me. It's about service. It's about laying down your life for other people. And so I got to spend a lot of time with people who just needed shelter. And I got to comfort them in good conversations and stuff. 

And at this point, I didn't really think that I was going to be a pastor or a youth pastor, but I would say probably by my junior year is was when God kind of made it clear to me because I always loved the church. I loved to, my dad would teach Sunday school for second and third grade. And one of the things that we would do on Saturday nights is he would be preparing his lesson and I would want to prepare with him. So if he called on me in class Sunday morning, I would have the answer and I would look smart in front of everybody. So I love to study the Bible with my dad on Saturday nights. But I little did I know that that was kind of preparing me for a future of, you know, lifelong ministry.

But the real defining moment for me of when I knew that was called to pastoral ministry was May 5th, 2010. No, 2011.

And I played baseball my whole life. Baseball was my passion. I would practice for hours with the team, but then I'd go home and I'd hit off of a tee or I'd tell my dad, "Hey, let's go to the park." And he would pitch to me until his arm would fall off.

I thought I was going to go to at least play college or professional. And then one day I was in the middle of a game and I was running the base paths and the pitcher tried to pick me off and I dove back into the bag and my shoulder came out of place and it tore my labrum. It was Cinco de Mayo, 2011. I remember that.

And by July 5th, I had to have labrum repair surgery. And so that takes about a year and a half before you can even throw it 80%. So I didn't even play baseball my senior year. I kind of, you know, my career ended because that's the most important year for you in baseball.

Well, because I got injured and even prior to my injury, my own youth pastor, Frank Tappe,

he at some point in the spring of that year before I got injured, he said, "Hey, man, you know what? I think that you should do what I do one day or you could probably do it, man. You should look into that." And I kind of laughed at him in the moment of like, "Come on, dude. I want to play baseball. You know that." And then the Lord took baseball away from me. I got my surgery on the 5th of July. Summer camp that year was the 10th of July. So I'm going to sling, go into summer camp. I'm using one arm while I'm there. I was the only senior in my small group and everyone else was a junior. And it was that summer camp where I knew, wow, like I kind of like rallied the guys together, had a bunch of great conversations and recognized that it was like, you know what?

Frank was not crazy when he asked me to go into full-time ministry. And that was like, it wasn't like the audible voice of God that I heard him, but God made it so clear that it's like, okay, you're going to go into ministry for the rest of your life. And from that moment forward, I was all in.

My senior year, I got super involved with the youth ministry. I taught a couple times, probably shouldn't have, probably now that I look at it. But now I wanted to go to Bible college, but I didn't have the money at the time.

A couple of months later, actually, my parents got a divorce and that kind of just shook me a little bit. And in Vegas, divorce is kind of normal here, but we never want to celebrate divorce. It was something that just was hard to work through as a teenager. And my first year of college, it was a rough go. But I know there's probably many listening who've seen their parents go through divorce or are part of a divorced home.

God can still work through divorced people, just a heads up. God may hate divorce, but it doesn't mean he hates the people who have gone through it. I still love my parents and I hang out with both of them and I love them greatly.

But know that there's hope for people who have been divorced.

And so if you've been through that, that's something that I can relate to you in. So when you come see me, we could talk about it if you want to.

But as that happened, as my parents were going through that, a woman came into my life and her name is Brooklynn. She's now my wife. And she was actually there the whole time and walked with me through it. And she was a close and near and dear friend.

And so I just saw her commitment to our friendship. And I saw her developing and growing as a newer, she was a newer Christian at the time. And by May of that year, it was 2013, we started dating. And so we've been together for 11 years now. But man, she was amazing. She loved me for who I was. And she stayed with me when even though I moved away for Bible College in 2014, I was gone for three years. So I left in actually 2015. So I was gone for 2015, 2016, 2017. And then I went to Bible College. I went to a school called Moody Bible Institute.

And I got my degree in biblical studies and theology there.

But we did three years of long distance. And one of those years was between Las Vegas or no, no, I lived in Chicago and she lived in Australia. So that was like a 17 hour time difference. So we didn't really sleep much because we had to FaceTime a lot.

So if you ever are in a long distance relationship, come to me. I have a lot of experience in long distance. I honestly think that it was a blessing for learning how to communicate to each other.

And so after I graduated college,

we got married in March of 2018.

And we do we had the best wedding. I don't want to talk about it too much, but let's just say In-N-Out was there the food truck. So special wedding.

And then, ya know got married, kind of moved back home from Bible College, was looking for jobs in ministry. Nothing was there's no real bites. And so I had this desire to study a little bit more. I was like, okay, maybe I could get a master's, which is just crazy. I never thought I'd ever go and try and get a master's.

And so by 2019, I applied to a school called Westminster Seminary California. And we ended up moving there in 2021 because the pandemic kind of slowed down a lot of things.

And we were there for only a year. And this is kind of how I got to Green Valley. So it was 2022.

Oh yeah, by the way, in 2020, I had my first daughter. So in the middle of the pandemic, we had our first kid, which was very amazing. It was a cool experience to like have our own hospital room at the time, because you know, hospitals were just like very particular with all the rules of COVID and stuff.

And then we moved to California at her first birthday in August. But then we moved back September of 2022 because I was visiting home during summer break in August of 2022.

And I came to meet Pastor Calvin, he's the senior pastor at our church, to just talk about a potential internship in 2023. Because in your master's degree, you have to have a lot of internship hours. And I was going to say, hey, maybe I could work at Green Valley next summer as an intern. And I'm just sharing my heart for ministry and sharing my heart for the Bible and theology and all these things. And Pastor Calvin goes,

you don't want an internship, you want to move home and work here full time as our youth pastor. And I was like, what?

So I didn't even know I was in a job interview, I was just sitting there. I had just gotten out of my car after I drove from California for five hours, I was in shorts and a white t shirt and flip flops, I was not dressed to impress. And Pastor Calvin offered me the job. I go home to my wife, and I'm like, you're not going to believe it. She's like, did you get an internship? And I'm like, internship? The dude offered me a full time job and asked me to move home.

And all the flags were green. We asked a lot of questions moving forward, we prayed about it, we fasted about it, and the Lord brought us back home to Green Valley in September of 2022.

And so I've been here for over two years now. I was ordained to pastoral ministry in February, 2023.

And I've loved every minute of youth ministry.

I just find it to be the most important years of your life when it comes to

understanding the Bible and understanding God's word. Because if you just look at the state of the world, and how kind of colleges are, it's almost as if the second you walk onto a college campus, they're there to try and disprove or attack Christianity. And so, while you're still plugged into public school and high school and all these things, my goal as a pastor is to give my students tools to understand that they can trust the Bible, that God is greater than anything. And Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one could come to the Father except by Him. And so my goal as a youth pastor is to try and develop and train these students so that by the time they get onto their college campuses, they're ready for when their college professor tries to challenge their faith. And so that's kind of my whole heart behind youth ministry, is in those formative years from 11 to 18 years old, sure your brain isn't fully developed yet, but if you don't have a solid and rooted foundation in God's word,

when you get to college or when you move away from your family's house, man, the enemy is going to continue to attack you and try and steal that faith. And his job is to steal and to kill and to destroy. So I want to help people know that man, God is sovereign, God is good, and His word is trustworthy and reliable.

And yeah, after we moved here, we had our second daughter in March of 2023, her name is Harbor. So my wife's name is Brooklyn and our two daughters are Haven and Harbor.

And man, we love Las Vegas. I could see myself dying here and just living here for the rest of my life.

One of my favorite things about Vegas is, and then Paul says in Romans five, where sin abounds, grace abounds that much more. And so my whole goal is to turn sin city into grace city. And I think it starts with having good biblical and theological and personal conversations about God and His word. And so that's kind of one of the things that I want to do with this podcast. So what I do plan to do moving forward is having a lot of interview format with this, that it's not going to be solo episodes of me talking every week. This isn't the Connor show.

I will be interviewing a lot of our leaders, some of our upper-class students, maybe other pastors and other pastors in town or other friends that I just want to have a conversation that I want to capture. And so that's kind of our introductory episode, kind of my testimony.

And I hope that you've taken something good from it. If anything, you know me better. And so if you come and visit our church, come and say hi to me. I love meeting new people. And so I appreciate y'all listening. And that is the end of the first episode.