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Kenton Beshore, Senior Pastor: Mariners Church

Each year our senior pastor, Kenton Beshore, takes the whole month of August for rest and vacation. He and his family visit the place of his wife’s childhood in Texas for a few weeks and then…

He visits around a dozen churches. He’ll attend the weekend services of tiny churches in Gonzalez, Texas and he’ll make his way into some of the more well known mega-churches both in Texas and in California. Each September, as he makes his return to our staff he elaborates on all of what he learned from each of those churches (big, famous, complex, simple, tiny, etc.). There is, within him, a huge sense of humility. He approaches each of the churches as though he could be taught, challenged, made a better leader.

Here’s a learning from 2 summers ago that has impacted our church:
Kenton visited a church that had a healing service. Mariners Church, up to that point, had nothing like that. We had always welcomed people to come for prayer with the elders. But, we’d never held a service for people in need of healing. Kenton saw it in a church during one August and thought we could do it at Mariners. I had never seen it. I had never expected being a part of that kind of service. But, people came. Our church staff prayed with people who needed healing: marriages falling apart, physical ailments, emotional distress. It wasn’t a circus. It wasn’t really all that dramatic. It wasn’t televised. God met people in a unique way because our pastor had the guts to learn something from another church and implement it here.