Pastor Brent Brooks.

he life journey where Pastor Brent Brooks gained many of the insights he shares with others about the difference that Christ makes in one’s life began by being an avowed atheist, then a civil trial attorney, then experiencing complete kidney failure. Why do Christians suffer? When do we get the desires of our heart, as the Bible promises? In our interview, Brooks, the senior pastor of Reno Christian Fellowship in Nevada, shared these insights, along with perspectives on church planting, patriotism, and other aspects of the Christian life.

ATTL: You grew up as an atheist. What caused you to change your perspective and come to believe in God?
BB: I became a Christian in 1973 when I was in college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. I came to a point where I decided there had to be someone or something that put the world together so that it made sense. I began to search; that search led me to Jesus Christ, and I surrendered to him.

ATTL: Was this due in any way to someone’s influence on your life, a Christian you observed?
BB: I had a close friend in college who was a consistent Christian in the midst of a world that certainly wasn’t. He didn’t present lots of apologetics arguments. His life was the argument. His life was consistent; mine was not. His life had something mine didn’t have. Several times a week I found myself in Sam’s room talking to him because there was something about his life that attracted me.

ATTL: Having been an atheist, what do you think is the best way for Christians to witness to their loved ones and friends who are atheists?
BB:  The ultimate irrefutable argument for Christianity is a life well lived. Arguments can go back and forth. There is a counter-argument for every argument. But there is not an argument for a life. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the Gospel wherever you go; if necessary, use words.”

I think the idea in witnessing is to love them until they ask you why. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn the arguments – apologetics – you should have some defense for your faith; but there are limits to that. Some people just love to argue. I loved to argue. Nobody argued me to Jesus. Somebody loved me to Jesus.

ATTL: When did you start really studying the Bible?
BB: I started law school in 1975 and graduated from University of Texas School of Law in 1978. I also worked with the Christian Legal Society on campus and at a singles ministry at a local church. During that time, I really plunged further into God’s Word. I graduated from law school with a definite understanding that God’s Word was real and true.

ATTL: It’s interesting that you were a trial attorney. Attorneys can usually argue the same case from both sides – almost as though their perspective is that nothing is absolutely true.  How did you change that perspective to a Christian view where some things definitely are right and true?
BB: You’re right; I can argue both sides of everything. It started back in my high school years when I was a competitive debater. I think my legal training was a wonderful foundation for ministry. It gave me the ability to understand how the other side thinks. Preparing for a case I’d argue taught me how to persuasively put arguments together to answer the questions. I think most lawyers understand that, while there are two sides to argue, not everything is true and there are still facts to wrestle with.

ATTL: When and how did you know the Lord was calling you into the ministry?
BB: I got married a week after graduating from law school, and Jill and I moved to Houston, Texas, where I was practicing law. At a missions conference at the church we were attending, it seemed like the speaker was directly speaking to me when he talked about going into full-time ministry and leading people to Christ. I left that missions conference with the conviction that I was being called to make a decision to devote my life to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

ATTL: How did your wife react to your decision?
BB: She thought I was making a very sudden and not-thought-out move. She didn’t definitively say no, but she definitely had some questions. So we began a process. I talked to the chairman of our board of elders and the senior pastor and others. I reached a point where I decided that God was either calling both of us or neither of us, and she was not ready. So I wrote the seminary and asked them to keep my application on file. In the meantime, the church gave me every opportunity in the world to try different ministries. It became confirmation that this is what I was supposed to be doing. About seven to nine months later, she said she knew that ministry was the right thing. 

ATTL: When did you become interested in church planting? Was it while you were attending Dallas Theological Seminary?
BB: Our church in Houston had been very active in church planting. They had planted or helped to plant 25 churches in greater Houston and out to 100 miles away from Houston. When I started seminary, I had this crazy idea that everybody wanted to plant churches. So I decided that I would work in existing churches because nobody wanted to do that. It took me about two weeks at seminary to realize I had been in an unusual world and much of the rest of the world was not interested in church planting. So I decided that God had given me the freedom after all to pursue church planting. Also, one of my professors had a passion to see churches planted on the East Coast, and he mentored me in the process and arranged for an internship for me with a church in Baltimore, Md. The idea was that after graduation I would go back to Baltimore and plant a church.

ATTL: So this was the beginning of your church planting missions for the next several years?
BB: Not quite. Over a 22-year period, I planted three churches in the Washington, D. C. area and helped plant another seven churches. On a given Sunday there’s probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 8,000 or more people in those churches. But before that, I had a very traumatic experience and almost died.

ATTL: What happened that almost resulted in your death?
BB: The internship went well, but I started getting sick all the time. Then two weeks after returning to my last year at seminary, I was hospitalized and almost died. The doctor told me, “Your kidneys have failed; they’re not working anymore.” And he basically told me I would be dependent on the care of other people for the rest of my life. I went through denial and anger and lots of other emotions. I ended up in surgery to put an artificial vein in my arm for dialysis.

ATTL: How did this impact your plans for full-time ministry and church planting?
BB: The church in Maryland said they had made some mistakes and didn’t have the funds to bring in church planters. And I began to realize that nobody was going to hire a pastor with a part-time job of dialysis. So, since I was an attorney and knew how to do it, I decided to form my own mission agency, East Coast Church Planting, Inc. While I was on dialysis, we used that organization to raise funds to support us as missionaries to go back to the East Coast to plant churches in conjunction with the church where I had been an intern.

ATTL: It must have been very rewarding when you planted your first church.
BB: Actually, the first night’s service at the first church I planted was interrupted by a dramatic event. I went to the mother church that Sunday morning and while my wife was preparing lunch after church, the transplant coordinator at Johns Hopkins called and said they had a kidney for me and I needed to be there in two hours.

I was stunned, shocked. They had just told me on Wednesday that I wasn’t even on the list yet. And I was also thinking I needed to start the new church that night. I had the keys and the overhead projector, I was the only one who had seen the facility and knew the musician who was coming, and I was supposed to speak.

ATTL: How did you get a kidney transplant so quickly? Many people wait years for transplants.
BB: They put me on the list on Friday, and the first available kidney was a near-perfect match with me, so I zoomed to the top of the list. Things are different now. At that time, the success ratio for kidney transplants was low; so because the risks were so high, if you were the best possible match, you went immediately to the top of the list.

ATTL: Now serving as a pastor, what do you say to give hope to people who are still waiting on transplants or who have life-threatening illnesses?
BB: I don’t know that ultimately I can give anybody hope. God gives people hope. And I can’t tell them ultimately what is going to happen. What I talk to them about is the situation that they are in and the fact that God can, and will, and is using that in their life. And I tell them how they respond to that situation will make a great difference.

We all hit moments in life that can be described as an “abandonment crisis” – a point at which we have to determine either of two positions: I have been abandoned by God or I will abandon myself to God. When we abandon ourselves to God’s hands and trust in his care, we simply trust in the fact that he is control and that he is working a greater plan than we can see or understand, one greater than we ever had for ourselves.

I never promise people that their situation is going to get better. We don’t know his will, his sovereign ways. What we need to know is that God is behind what is happening and understand that he can bring wonderful things out of awful circumstances if we will abandon ourselves into his hands. I think of Corrie Ten Boom, who said there is no place so dark that God is not there. God is always there. There’s a place for hope, but hope is not in wishful circumstances or things being the way we want them to be. The hope is in God; the hope is in his love.

ATTL: How did your kidney failure and your transplant impact your ministry?
BB: What I went through produced in me compassion and understanding that would not have been there before. I would not have been capable of being a minister otherwise. I would have been capable of being an orator or a teacher, but not being a minister having a compassion for other people.

I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t being cursed with this illness and that actually in a strange way it was a blessing, a gift, from God. A painful gift, but nevertheless a gift.

ATTL: How did you come to this conclusion?
BB: It was while I was on a gurney in the hallway, waiting for the arterial surgery for dialysis. My surgery was delayed because other patients’ conditions were more urgent. During those two hours, God and I did a lot of talking. He brought three Bible passages to my mind.

The first is in 2 Corinthians 11 where Paul talks about the thorn in his flesh given to keep him from exalting himself. I learned that sometimes God brings circumstances into our live to remove our pride, to humble us so we will lean on his power. To be honest, I was somewhat of a celebrity in some areas as an attorney at seminary. It was easy to be prideful.

ATTL: What was the second passage?
BB: 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, where Paul talks about “… the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.” There is something about having gone through such experiences that creates a level of understanding and connection with others going through similar circumstances that would not be there otherwise. Sometimes he lets us go through things in order for us to be able to minister to others.

ATTL: What was the third passage the Lord brought to your mind and what did you glean from it?
BB: It was 2 Corinthians 4:17-18: “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” I learned that God gives us afflictions – gifts – so we will not focus so much on this life but on the ultimate gift beyond this life. Suffering can be one of the greatest gifts God gives us.

ATTL: From a missions perspective, is there a difference between planting churches in the United States and being a missionary on a foreign mission field?
BB: In Acts 1:8-9, Jesus talks about the early Christians becoming his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the earth. That also set the pattern for the church thereafter. We are to reach our Jerusalem – the people who are around us who are just like us. We’re also to reach our Judea and Samaria – the greater area around us that may involve people who are culturally different from us in some fashion. As a missionary – and a church planter – you need to understand the culture into which you’re going and figure out how to engage with that culture.

America is now one of the largest unchurched nations in the world. Unchurched Americans are a different culture. The post-modern culture that’s emerging is very different from the culture inside the church.

ATTL: Why do you think more congregations don’t plant churches?
BB: Because we’re totally focused on ourselves. It’s all about keeping the people in the seats in the church happy. It comes down to the question: what business are we in? Are we in the congregation-pleasing business, or are we in the culture-impacting business? Do we exist for ourselves, or do we exist for those outside of the church? How you answer those questions will then make drastic differences in what you do. The average pew-sitter basically asks, “What did I get out of it?” instead of asking “Who did I impact?” The church has become dreadfully consumer oriented.

ATTL: What led you away from church planting in the D.C. area to become senior pastor of Reno Christian Fellowship in Nevada?
BB: I’m someone who likes and needs change. I reached the point where planting another church was not going to be change for me; it would be simply going back through the stages I’d been through before. I also felt that God was calling me to transition an existing church to be more contemporary. We began exploring that after our daughter graduated from college and got married. Three churches significantly responded to me – all out West. We visited here and felt a connection with some of the people here and felt God was calling us to make this change to come here.

ATTL: Please describe this church that is in transition.
BB: It’s 38 years old. It had been a very radical church in its early days but has become a very traditional church. I’ve been here three years and four months, and we are definitely still in transition; it’s still more traditional than not. Transition is hard for a church and for a pastor. And it’s also hard to be a new pastor and hard to have a new pastor.

ATTL: This is July, when Americans focus a lot on patriotism. Do you think that Christians have or should have a different view of patriotism?
BB: Yes. As a Christian, I’m a citizen of another kingdom. I am also a citizen of America, and I love my country. But I don’t buy statements like “My country, right or wrong.” True patriotism for a Christian involves calling our country to a higher standard. As a Christian and a lawyer, I’m appalled by some of the things our country has done and yet how we criticize others for what they do. There is no basis for violating people’s rights. We have to operate on a higher standard.

ATTL: Do you have a favorite Bible verse?
BB: A passage that’s become my life verses is Psalm 37:4-5: “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD; trust in him and he will do this.” What I’ve found is that if I delight myself in God, if I pour myself into pursuing God, his Word, his people and prayer with God, he plants his desires within my heart. Then his desires become my desires. When I examine my life, I look at whether I am delighting myself in God.

ATTL: So often, people twist that verse and say that the desires of one’s heart would be what that person wants.
BB: Yes. It’s not an original thought with me. When I was engaged to my wife, she gave me a book called “The Shadow of the Almighty.” It’s the story of Jim Elliott. He had come to the conclusion that God places his desires in our heart. That has always stuck with me. He also wrote, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” I was not a fool to give up my legal practice, my income, etc. – that which I cannot keep – to gain what I can’t lose – an eternal reward from God.

To learn more about Reno Christian Fellowship, visit www.rcfnv.org. To download Pastor Brooks’s sermons, visit www.rcfnv.org/sermons.asp.