FORTVILLE — Fifteen years ago, Joey Claus was an elementary school student who rode a bus to Fortville Church of the Nazarene for some of its youth programs.
Today, he works with children and youth in the very church where he grew up; he’s “Pastor Joey” to some of the volunteers who once taught him on Sunday mornings. His is one of a number of Hancock County churches who have watched church youths grow into adult staff members.
In fall 2018, Claus joined the staff in Fortville as pastor of generational ministries and media design. He organizes programs for children and youth. He has worked to launch a student worship experience in a multi-purpose space at the east end of the church building. He has also been redesigning the church website.
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This role follows stints at a church in Virginia and as a student minister at First Church of the Nazarene in Indianapolis.
Claus and his sister began attending the Fortville church through a church bus route that was an outreach to children and youth. A couple of years in, youth leaders asked him if he wanted to go to church camp, gaining permission from the grandparents he lived with and offering him a scholarship to go. During that camp, he made a personal commitment to follow Jesus.
“From there, everything changed,” Claus recalls.
He became more involved at the church, joining the choir and the tech team and becoming one of those people, as the saying goes, who is “there every time the doors are open.”
In his teens, he went to a conference at Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois with his church youth group. He was moved by what he heard there in a way he couldn’t fully explain.
“Something was stirring in me, but I didn’t know what it was,” he said. In time, he understood it as a call to ministry.
The Rev. Phil Edwards, senior pastor at Fortville Nazarene, said it’s been rewarding to watch Claus’ journey come full circle and thinks the transition has been smooth.
“He’s not ‘little Joey Claus.’ He’s coming into his own,” Edwards said. “They accept him for who he is and the role he’s fulfilling.”
That journey from youth participant to adult staff member has its potential pitfalls, some local ministers point out. What if adults can’t move past a teenage prank? What if the oldest students still see a young staff member as a peer?
Yet at its best, they say, the journey can leverage relationships that have been built over many years.
About 16 years ago, Troy Doubman was leading youth group meetings at the Hancock County Boys & Girls Clubs in Greenfield. Brandywine Community Church had not yet built its building at 1551 E. New Road; the church met in a storefront at 1260 N. State St. and conducted Sunday evening youth activities offsite.
Doubman noticed that one young man came early and stayed late, unasked, helping set up and tear down for each meeting. Nearly 10 years ago, Paul Galbraith joined Brandywine’s staff to work with children. Today, their offices are next door to each other at the church.
“It wasn’t anything that he voiced,” Doubman recalls. “It was his attitude and his heart to minister to his peers …
“It was my heart to have him working beside me.”
Like Claus, Galbraith said working in his childhood church has been a good fit.
“I love serving where I grew up,” he wrote in an email to the Daily Reporter.
Similarly, Andy Flink said it’s “a blessing” to get to be a leader in his home church. He’s one of several staff members at Brookville Road Community Church in New Palestine who grew up attending the church. While he said positions don’t automatically go to a candidate who grew up there, there is an advantage of knowing how a person interacts with people and knowing he or she is familiar with a church’s approach to ministry.
“If we’re just looking at a resumé, we can see competency,” he said. “It’s really hard to put a price tag on, ‘Oh, we know what this person’s chemistry is like.’”
Flink has been attending the church for about 30 years. During part of that time, his parents ministered in China. He realizes some older people in the congregation may remember him more as an 11-year-old boy in a missionary prayer card photo on their fridge than as an associate pastor of the church. But he’s chosen to embrace the positives in that.
“I have people who have been praying for me for almost 30 years,” he said. “How amazing is it that people love me in that way?”
During some of his pastoral care visits, he not only sees the older people he’s visiting; he also remembers the class they taught, their greeting at the door — their kindness through the years they have shared with him in the same church family.
“On some small level it’s just me repaying,” he said. “’Let me try to minister (to you) in this season of your life.’”
