Tony Darling started his duties as senior minister at Wilkinson Church of Christ in May. Church member Jeanne Delbridge said he’s been supportive of the different programs going on at the church. “He is very genuine, very concerned about people in the church,” she said.
Tom Russo | Daily Reporter
WILKINSON – The call was there, but a pull was strong.
“I felt a call to ministry in high school,” Tony Darling recalls. “I ignored that call because I wanted to be a law enforcement officer so bad.”
So Darling did not become a minister, instead choosing to major in conservation law enforcement when he headed to college after graduating from high school in Knightstown.
But the story of that call to ministry was not over, and Darling says it took losing an eye to help him see things more clearly years later.
‘I just had to prove…’
Darling headed to Vincennes University after high school graduation in 1988. He and his wife, Ann Marie – also a 1988 Knightstown graduate – were married in 1992. Darling went on to work for Knightstown Police Department and in 1995 began working for Henry County Sheriff’s Department, where he would remain for the next 23 years.
In 2003, he was at a firearms range helping another officer train to meet a required standard in firearms training. Darling had his safety glasses off momentarily, on top of a car, while another officer training to become an instructor advised the officer who was practicing shooting, taking aim at metal reactive targets.
A fragment from a bullet “freakishly flew” to one of Darling’s eyes, he said. It was the size of a dime, the thickness of a nickel, yet it missed his eyelashes and eyelid — and, doctors would later marvel, his brain.
That eye’s retina was detached, and Darling lost that eye. He remembers doctors being amazed he hadn’t died. One assured him he’d be able to go on disability, but that bothered him. There were a couple of surgeries and fitting for a prosthetic eye still to come, but he saw returning to work as part of his future, too.
“Sixty days later I was back on patrol duty,” he said. “I guess I just had to prove to myself that I could do it.”
‘I’ll be faithful’
Darling continued moving through various levels of law enforcement work, later transitioning to the detective division, but that training accident was a turning point.
“That really focused my attention on the fact that God had something planned for me…,” he said. “That really turned my attention back to Christ.”
The year after the accident, a newspaper near the sheriff’s department featured Darling in a Thanksgiving story about being thankful. A photo that appeared with the story, taken amid a backdrop of city buildings, commanded his attention.
A church was part of the background, and in the photo, “right over the top of my head was the word church,” Darling said.
He thought about the various ranks he’d held in the sheriff’s department. He thought about the surgeon who said he should have died.
“(I said,) ‘OK, God, I don’t know what you have, but I’ll be faithful to you.”
Heeding the call
The Darlings were attending Knightstown First Christian Church, where Ann Marie had grown up and been baptized. Tony Darling became a deacon and later an elder there.
Eventually, church leadership approached Darling about becoming associate pastor. He began those duties in 2012, serving part time while he continued to work at the sheriff’s department.
In 2018, with the senior minister retiring, church leaders asked Darling what it would take for him to step into that full-time post. Darling was about seven years from being able to draw a pension from the sheriff’s department, but he and the church made an agreement and Darling retired from the sheriff’s department. About 30 years after ignoring a call to ministry, Darling was a full-time minister.
“I don’t think he ever took it away,” he says of the call he felt from God. “You just have to be obedient to that.”
Yet he believes God also used, and uses, all those years he worked in law enforcement. He’s on the chaplain list for Hancock County 911, and he’s the chaplain for Charlottesville Volunteer Fire Department.
D.B. Bowman, chief of the Charlottesville department, invited Darling to take that role after he spoke to the department after a traffic accident, one that claimed the life of a person close in age to some of the firefighters.
“We really think a lot of him. He’s a big help to us,” Bowman said. “It’s helpful like that with his background in law enforcement.
“He’s just a likeable, honest guy. You can tell, talking to him, … he just tells you like it is.”
Darling said his law enforcement background helps people in public safety believe he really does know what they’re going through.
“When you do law enforcement the right way, you’re really ministering to people. That was great prep,” Darling said. “That career teaches you how to listen to people; that career teaches you how to counsel people … how to make decisions.”
But there was another decision coming that would be hard.
‘Walk life’s journey’
Wilkinson Church of Christ was looking for a senior minister.
“We already knew, because of being in the community and having relationships, that Wilkinson was a very close body of believers,” Darling said. “They are very relational … that’s just shown by their outreach and all the programming that they have in place.”
But, Darling said, he loves that congregation in Knightstown: “They are very dear, sweet people that love the Lord.” So around Christmas, he told Ann Marie he wouldn’t apply.
She reminded him they’d prayed, asking God for guidance on what to do. If he didn’t even apply, was that trying to control the outcome?
Over the next several months, Darling talked to leaders of both churches. He gave an introductory sermon at Wilkinson on May 1 and officially began his duties as senior minister there on May 16.
Since then, he’s been trying to go to different groups that meet at the church, such as the Russ’s Table lunch group that meets once a month. After Sunday services, he’s trying to shake as many hands and meet as many people as he can.
“We don’t want just numbers in seats. We want people to come to Christ …,” he said. “When someone comes in, they’re not just sitting in a seat. We really do want to walk life’s journey with people.”
When he arrived at Wilkinson, one of the items unpacked in his office was a conversation piece from his own journey: that photo of him with the word church above his head. It’s a reminder of the moment when he, newly gazing at the word with one eye, found his vision come into sharp focus.
“I really believe partial blindness brought the spiritual sight that I needed.”
