From music videos to ministry: A radio chaplain’s journey to innovative ministry in Spokane
News Story by Cassy Benefield | FāVS News
Tyler Kern has a God story and he loves sharing it. However, it is not yet complete.
New to this story is his recent move to Spokane last April — with his wife and five children — to become Shine 104.9’s chaplain. At the same time, he serves the Upper Columbia Conference of Seventh-day Adventists as its new community outreach coordinator.
“I was really intrigued about the opportunity,” Kern said in describing the proposition Conference President David Jamieson offered him.
Jamieson said the goal of this new paid position in the conference is to minister to all Christian denominations and create a unique worship outreach aimed at seekers and young adults.
“We really don’t know where this is going to go,” Jamieson said. “We’re literally asking God to take this and do what he wants to do with it. It’s just an out-of-the-box thing that’s brand new. And so we’re just excited to see what may happen.”
Kern’s co-worker, Melissa Baskett, described the position as one that reaches out to those who may not have a faith community they belong to and provide opportunities for meeting together and growing in the Lord. She thinks Kern is a good fit for his dual roles.
“Tyler is kind, witty, easy-going and genuine,” she said. “He is thoughtful in his speech and action and works from a place of love for others.”
Home of Shalom
While Kern’s role at Shine is not Adventist-specific, his job to plant a new, unconventional church is.
When you start a new church within that denomination, new churches typically have a mother church providing them support and resources, he explained. Through the Conference he has the resources but not any contacts.
“The hardest part about my job is that, instead of a mother church, I have a radio station. So I have no connections. I have nobody. I moved here not knowing a single person,” he said.
When Kern accepted the job, Jamieson wanted him to also introduce his “Home of Shalom” concept in the region he and a few others began in Michigan, he said.
The idea with Home of Shalom is to meet people where they are. For most people, that means online.
“We’re a community of people doing life together. It’s 2024, and over 90% of the world is online, yet people seem more isolated and lonely than ever before,” reads Shalom’s website.
The idea came out of COVID.
“Post COVID, [the church] was very consumer-based, where you’re just watching on a screen in your PJs, and there’s not really a local community involved in that,” Kern said. “I wanted to figure out a way to do a hybrid service, where we could gather together in person but also have an online community.”
To do this, he created a Discord server, which most gamers use to talk to one another, while playing games together. He designed the space to be where people from all over the world can ask their hard questions and have open and vulnerable conversations.
“I wanted a safe space forum to where we could dialog and ask questions that we typically don’t talk about in church settings,” Kern said.
Doing church differently
He earned a master’s of divinity from the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary located at Andrews University in Michigan. He knew he didn’t want to do traditional church. And using his bachelor’s in filmmaking and his career in film production, he launched Shalom.
“I felt like I saw a lot of things that I thought were wrong with church and traditional church and organized church, and I wanted to do something different,” Kern said.
Not knowing why exactly God had called him to seminary, he soon realized it was because when he was there, COVID happened and he had the skills to change how ministry was done because of the restrictions.
“Church, as we knew it, changed, and it wasn’t going to ever look the same again, in my opinion,” he said.
He also wanted a place to foster a healing community for those who had been turned off by church. He realized that was a great need as many in his first community had been hurt by church.
That hurt resonated with Kern because before becoming a church planter and chaplain, before seminary and before committing his life to God, he, too, experienced hurt.
This is part of the story he really loves to tell.
Continuing his family’s Adventist legacy, with many starts and stops
Kern is a fifth generation Adventist. His paternal grandma — a devout woman of faith — had held his immediate and troubled family together. She died when he was 6, and that triggered the first of many losses to come.
The first one was his parents’ divorce, followed by his dad and brother leaving the church with Kern soon following.
He then discovered basketball in his teens and because of its weekend schedule, he stopped attending church.
“I still had that foundation of my faith. I still believed in God. I knew God existed,” Kern said. “I just wasn’t really, you know, having a close relationship with Him.”
When he turned 16, Kern experimented with drugs and alcohol as his big brother was 21 and made those things easier to obtain.
Eventually he met his wife, Amelia Kern, at the Illinois State University, where they became a couple.
Amelia Kern’s earthy, hippy vibe attracted him, Tyler Kern said. He said he was a stoner back then and had affection for the hippy lifestyle, especially love of the outdoors and pro-environment causes. For Tyler Kern, it was love at first sight. For Amelia Kern, not so much.
“I had been hurt from previous relationships and knew I needed time to heal. Tyler was willing to be my friend for a long time before we started officially dating,” Amelia Kern said. “I really do think having our friendship first drew us closer to each other towards a romantic relationship. We were still two broken people dealing with the challenges of the world without Christ. That part of our life would not come until later.”
‘Why not me?’
After earning their degrees in Illinois — Tyler Kern in filmmaking and Amelia Kern in political science — they continued to do life together, founding their own video production company and having their first three children there.
Their journey eventually brought them to Nashville for Tyler Kern’s new job as a music video producer. However, Tyler Kern said an “act of God” — a citywide flood — made the job no longer available soon after he arrived.
They tried to stay and create a life there, but it just wasn’t working out. Tyler Kern was unhappy. So, they moved back to Illinois to start their video company, Totally Kreative Video LLC, soon to be rebranded Totally Kreative Media LLC.
This was the season of their lives when Tyler Kern had a life-changing spiritual epiphany, inspiring him to follow Jesus with greater dedication. His stepfather, Larry Smestad, became terminally ill and in response to Tyler Kern’s question to him about why God allowed this to happen, Smestad responded with “Why not me?”
Tyler Kern couldn’t believe his stepfather wasn’t angry with the doctor who misdiagnosed him and could have given him five more years of life.
He told Tyler Kern he had a good life, a great relationship with God, and he’d rather let somebody else have more time to find that, Tyler Kern said.
“I’m over here just in tears. Like, how can you be so selfless? That doesn’t make sense to me. Like, how can you be like that?” Tyler Kern said. “He was confident in his salvation. So, that’s what allowed him to be okay with his circumstance, and that’s what was really inspiring to me.”
Saying no to Hollywood
Tyler Kern and his family were soon on a new trajectory, which included getting baptized into the Adventist church and living their lives for the Lord, he said.
During that time, Tyler Kern wrote a screenplay titled “Why not me?” After it was complete, Amelia Kern encouraged him to follow his dream of becoming a filmmaker in Hollywood.
The day he was set to meet a Christian producer to talk about his screenplay, he heard a voice, telling him to not go in there. Shocked but understanding it was the voice of God, he got in his car and knew his “Why not me?” story wasn’t finished. He had more to add to it.
He began to share his story in several churches in California. By now, he had begun feeling called to go to seminary to grow in his faith. Amelia Kern also grew in her faith in tandem with her husband.
“When Tyler decided to apply to seminary to deepen his spiritual growth, we were both on fire for Christ. I was completely supportive of his decision and even encouraged him whenever he was feeling undeserving. Once he had graduated and started getting job offers in ministry that is when we knew our lives would be entering a new season with new blessings and different challenges,” she said.
Walking through the valley of the shadow of death
After committing their lives to God, they faced numerous trials. In the Adventist faith, Tyler Kern explained these attacks come from Satan and are part of what they call the “Cosmic Conflict.”
“When Satan knows what you’re capable of doing, he’s going to do everything he can to stop you from achieving that purpose for God,” he said. “When I was at this point of following God’s call for my life, God doesn’t tell us that it’s gonna be easy when you accept the call.”
Tyler and Amelia Kern experienced a dark night of their souls when their fifth child was still born.
“We were just in a deep valley at this point, and it was really dark and really hard,” Tyler Kern said.
He used basketball to channel his grief until a torn ACL sidelined him. He gained weight and struggled through his prayer and devotional life.
Amelia Kern found some days very hard to get out of bed.
One night, he dreamt of a voice telling him he was going to have a daughter. He told his wife, and she took a pregnancy test that came out positive. Neither of them wanted this to happen, but God did, said Tyler Kern.
Their daughter arrived about a year after their son passed away, and through her birth, Tyler Kern said he found healing for the loss of his fifth child.
Tyler Kern also lost his brother around this time and before coming to Spokane. He died of a drug-related diabetic coma, leaving his three nephews fatherless.
In these valleys, the soil from which these struggles came nurtured and grew a new kind of church plant of a community without walls for the hurting, he said.
“So now we just have a heart for connecting with people that have gone through loss,” Tyler Kern said.
Getting to know the neighborhood
Within the first week they moved to Spokane, Tyler Kern attended his neighborhood council meeting located in the Minnehaha neighborhood. He introduced himself and wanted to understand how the community works and how he and his family could help.
At that time, the Minnehaha Neighborhood Council had a project in the works to refurbish an old, abandoned tennis court vandalized with inappropriate words and pictures. The goal was to paint over the whole court to give it new life.
“He was a big contributor to that,” said Tyler Tamoush, a neighbor serving in the Council as the community assembly representative. “They came at really the right time to help us with that. They were a huge help — his whole family — him and his wife and kids. They were an amazing help to that project. So we probably couldn’t have done it without him.”
Good deeds like these are part of what Tyler Kern calls S.A.K.E. or simple acts of kindness everywhere, an idea he put into action here. He promoted these in his previous Shalom community in Michigan, encouraging them to complete a different S.A.K.E. a week. Ideas included participating in a neighborhood clean up crew, praying for neighbors, volunteering at a food bank, etc.
Simple acts of kindness everywhere or S.A.K.E.
Now, on Shine’s website, there resides a list of S.A.K.E. events Tyler Kern organizes as part of his chaplaincy for the whole Shine community. This kind of outreach fit Conference President Jamieson’s ministry philosophy and the vision of station manager Darin Patzer’s vision for the role.
“[Darin] had a visionary idea to hire a chaplain for the radio station who would be able to invite people in the community to participate in simple acts of kindness, to lead our community to be serving more,” Jamieson said. “Our whole emphasis here at Upper Columbia Conference is ‘serve one more.’”
The next S.A.K.E. will be on Oct. 4, from 9-11:30 a.m., at Serve Spokane helping them sort, stock and prepare items.
Through these acts of kindness, Tyler Kern is also able to get to know people in the area well. He said he enjoys praying for them and letting them know they are fully loved by God in whose image they are created.
He enjoys the role of chaplain of a radio station much more than being the preacher of a congregation, he added, because that’s when he really feels like Jesus’ love shines through him toward others.
“I feel like I’m doing what Jesus called me to do, like I’m actually being the hands and feet of Christ,” he said. “This is what ministry is supposed to look like.”
UPDATED: This story has been updated to correct the name of the university the Kerns met, the name of their video production company and how many nephews he has.
Please consider supporting our local journalism with a tax–deductible donation. You can contribute here.
