After completing his undergraduate and M.Div. degrees in 2023 through the Spurgeon College Accelerate program, Keanon Hurst and his family moved more than 2,600 miles from Kansas City to Ketchikan, Alaska, where he serves in pastoral ministry at White Cliff Church. Keanon and his wife, Ruth, have four children.
MBTS: Tell us about your church and your current role there.
Keanon Hurst: I am currently serving as a pastoral apprentice through the Alaska Baptist Resource Network at White Cliff Church in Ketchikan. I have been called to pastor Shannon Park Baptist Church in Fairbanks, Alaska, and will be moving there with my family soon. White Cliff Church is pastored by my fellow Midwestern Seminary graduate, Alan McElroy. The church is made up of 50 members who are united together through our faith in Christ. My apprenticeship has consisted of preaching, teaching, studying, serving the church, observing pastoral care, and learning under the elders to prepare and equip me for future ministry in Alaska.
MBTS: How did God lead you to pursue pastoral ministry and seminary?
Keanon: Before becoming a Christian, my life was consumed with drugs and alcohol, and at age 35, the Lord radically saved me. At that point, all I knew was the life of an addict, so I decided to pursue a degree in drug and alcohol counseling. During this program, I was growing in Christ and started seeing that while drug and alcohol counseling can achieve the result of helping people get sober, it gives them no true and lasting hope. I became convinced that the help I wanted to give people was the gospel and that the best avenue to do so was in the context of the local church. As I had been studying the Bible on my own and with my pastor and desired to have more formal training to equip me to serve the church, seminary was the logical next step for me.
MBTS: In what ways did your local church in Kansas City help form and equip you for ministry during your time in seminary?
Keanon: My wife and I were members at Wornall Road Baptist Church and grew in our love for the local church during our time there. We were embraced as family even though our time there was brief. Wornall has many phenomenal leaders who prioritize training and equipping men and women for ministry, and we benefited from their faithfulness. I was able to serve in many capacities and participated in a pastoral internship with other men who were training for ministry. The opportunity to build relationships with the pastors at Wornall helped confirm my call to ministry and gave me
an up-close picture of what it means to serve faithfully in the local church in both hard and joy-filled times.
MBTS: What has been the most encouraging aspect thus far of serving the local church through preaching and pastoral ministry?
Keanon: In my time at White Cliff Church, I have grown in preaching through the encouragement and feedback of our elders and congregation. By getting to know individually the people I am preaching to, I have begun to learn how to apply the passage to the needs of our local church rather than just make a generic Christian application. This practice has challenged me to think deeper about the text and give more meaningful application while preaching and teaching. True and lasting change happens every day in the lives of ordinary people who are plugged into and invested in their local church. It is a privilege to have an upfront role in this change and growth in people’s lives through pastoral ministry.
