I’m CSPC member Aaron Moody. Here’s how I’m living deeply. 

“Not long ago, my 13-year-old came home from CSPC’s fall camp, the same one I went to when I was his age. Afterward, we were talking about it. I told him I remembered sitting around those same campfires -feeling the warmth of the flames, mesmerized by their blazing illumination of the otherwise black, chilly fall night- thinking, ‘This is the best. I’m hearing so much from God. I feel so connected.’ Isaac, my son, agreed: ‘I really liked it.’ He was casual and understated, like teenagers can be, but I could tell he was relating to what I was remembering. Some shared experiences across generations just deepen the father-son bond, and this was one of them. I’ve been part of CSPC since I was nine years old. My family moved to Knoxville, started coming here, and it never really stopped feeling like the place where I was supposed to be. I’m 43 now, so you do the math. Growing up, the church felt like a home away from home. Especially in high school. The teaching was always great -John Wood, Jimmy Davis, Jim Branch- but what I remember most is the feeling of walking in and knowing that these people didn’t just recognize me. They KNEW me. And I knew them. You could feel the difference. It wasn’t a ‘big church’ thing where you blended into the crowd. People tracked with your life. They remembered what you’d told them the week before. It was deep, real relating. Not just showing up and checking a box- but people who had a genuinely high standard for themselves and for you, and who held you to it in love. Jim Branch was one of the high school pastors during some of those years. He and others would say, as we came across important truths, ‘Circle that in your Bible. Keep a journal and write it down. We’re a storehouse- let’s store it up.’ My brother-in-law, who grew up going to church elsewhere, used to tease me about it. He’d say, ‘Do all CSPC people journal? Does everyone just walk around with a notebook?’ And honestly… kind of, yes. There are rhythms here that are just unique to this place. Rhythms I didn’t fully appreciate until I was older and realized not every church does this.

When I was in my early 20s -newly married, first year or two of teaching third grade at West Haven Elementary- I realized I really wanted a consistent mentor. My wife Anneke was 20 when we got married. I was 23. We were babies. We’d just bought a house out in Halls. I was already volunteering with the youth ministry at CSPC, but something in me knew I needed someone to push me for more. So I reached out to Damon Kelly. He’d been my middle school pastor, and I’d watched him for years- not just in the big moments, but in the everyday ones. That’s really what I trusted about him. It wasn’t witnessing him have the hard conversations or make the grand gestures. It was the moment-by-moment way he just genuinely cared for people. High expectations, delivered in love, every single day. That was what I saw in him. And I wanted to be like that, to have him help me get there. So we started meeting at the Waffle House every week. Just breakfast, just life. He’d ask me things like, ‘How are you spiritually caring for your wife? What were your prayers like this week for her?’ Not just, ‘Are you thinking about these things?’ but, ‘Practically, what does that look like in your everyday life?’ I was trying to figure out how to be a husband and a teacher and a man of faith all at the same time, and someone was sitting across a booth from me every single week asking me the questions that actually mattered. I can’t overstate how much that meant. I don’t think it’s an accident CSPC has that kind of culture. I couldn’t necessarily put my finger on exactly how it got built, but mentorship never felt weird or foreign as I was growing up here. It never felt like some formal program, either. It just felt like… what you do. What the men around me did. And so when I needed it, reaching out didn’t feel strange. It felt obvious- like, ‘Of course this is a place where I can ask for that and someone will say yes!’ What I didn’t know then was that one day, I’d be on the other side of it, too.

My son Josiah is in fifth grade now. On Wednesday nights, I volunteer with KSG -Knowing the Story of God- at CSPC and I get to be right there with him and his friends. I watch him ask real questions about the gospel. Impactful questions. I watch him want to read his Bible, want to know more. And I think back to what Damon and I used to talk about over breakfast: that you’re planting seeds, and you may never see them sprout, and you have to be okay with that. That’s all true, but in this season, I feel doubly blessed in that I actually DO get to watch some of these seeds grow! Not all of them. But some. And that is a gift I did not earn. Anneke volunteers with the seventh-grade girls. Our son Isaac is in seventh grade. So we’re all there, in the same building on Wednesday nights, just on opposite sides of it: her pouring into Isaac’s peers, me working toward eventually traveling with Josiah’s cohort all the way through middle school and high school, the way CSPC mentors before traveled with me all the way through. I told Josiah, ‘As long as you still want me as one of your leaders, that’s where I want to be.’ I also serve on CSPC’s Elementary Ministry Team now: giving feedback on curriculum, on programs like our Ready to Worship gatherings, trying to help make sure the things we’re doing are actually connecting kids to God and not just filling time. It matters to me in a way that’s hard to separate from who I am. God has given me a gifting here- a passion for helping young people encounter him and watching his Spirit develop in them. But I also know it’s personal. I know what it meant to have people pour into me when I was young. I know it stuck, and I want to be that for someone else’s kid- not to mention my own. What CSPC has given me over thirty-some years is a place that felt safe. That felt loving. That held to a high standard. I feel a lot of gratitude toward God for that. He gave me people and a place that took care of needs I didn’t even know I had yet. And now, when I watch my boys here, I think: ‘He’s doing it again.’ My sense of thankfulness to God is only growing. Blessings upon blessings.”