Pastor JD says Goodbye
Fellowship Family:
As some of you know, I recently resigned my position at Fellowship Memphis. This letter is so difficult to write, especially as I know it is just one of many that we have had to read in the last season of life here at Fellowship. Elizabeth and I moved to Memphis 11 years ago with an 11mo old and 3mo old in tow. For 10 years and 51 weeks, we’ve gone to church at Fellowship Memphis, for 10 years and 50 weeks, we’ve considered Fellowship Memphis our church home and for 9 of the last 11 years, either Elizabeth or I have been on staff at Fellowship Memphis. Our community here has become our family and we are forever grateful for that.
In a lot of ways, this decision to resign is just flat out the result of seasons of life and time availability changing. When I started, we had three kids, the oldest was five and I had the flexibility to bounce between both jobs and home commitments with ease, but as our seasons have changed, our family has grown and I've taken on a bigger role with the Memphis Family Connection Center, so my time at Fellowship comes to a close.
I wanted to say thank you. I know our church has been through a lot these last two years. I don’t have to list out all of the reasons why, we all know them painfully well - but I want to speak to my time at Fellowship. I would not be the man I am, nor our family the family we are without our church family. To be more specific, our family’s connection to the work of Fellowship Memphis goes back to when we were praying through the adoption process and happened to be talking about it with a guy named Soup Campbell while we were on a trip with Eikon Ministries 13 years ago - before we even lived in Memphis.
The Holy Spirit used Soup’s words to prompt us to start the adoption process from Memphis and we’ve never been the same since. Naturally, when we moved to Memphis 2 years later, it made sense to try out ‘Soup’s Church’ first. It was different. The preaching was dynamic and made us the good kind of uncomfortable and forced us to confront things we didn’t want to, but, as the parents of a mixed family, desperately needed to. The music was so beautifully representative of the cultures represented in the body - it was exactly where we needed to be.
I was equipped to do really hard youth work in Binghampton because of what I’d learned/who I was in community with at Fellowship Memphis. I had a vision for seeking the welfare of our city because of what I’d learned at Fellowship Memphis - we got connected to Mo and Tona and the adoptive/foster parent community in Memphis because of Fellowship Memphis - we fight for the vulnerable children and for justice in broken systems in our city in part because of the explicit teaching and community we’ve had at Fellowship Memphis. We have been in community with those ethnically and culturally different from us because of Fellowship Memphis.
I feel the need to say all of that to say that the work I’m doing right now at Empowered to Connect and the Memphis Family Connection Center is helping to bring hope and healing to families in Memphis and around the globe and it doesn’t happen without what we learned and who we met at Fellowship Memphis.
There are not words for me to express my gratitude to each of you reading this. Calling this group our church family is a gross understatement. You have been a part of transformation in our lives that will not only serve our family, but the families our kids one day build and that gives me joy inexpressible. I want you each to know that God has used Fellowship Memphis to do in us and for us these last 11 years more than words could ever express.
Thank you.
JD Wilson
