Pastor-turned-author navigates life with humor and Jesus
News story by Emma Maple | FāVS News
Spokane pastor Zac Minton has not had an easy life. As a kid, he was physically and sexually abused. His mother was a drug addict and a prostitute. His dad could have been any one of three people. He experienced homelessness as a kid. His mother committed suicide.
On top of all this, Minton started a serious battle with depression about four years ago.
“My story is way different than a lot,” Minton said.
However, Minton is anything but shy about his life’s challenges. In fact, God’s presence even in the darkest moments is the subject of his book, “Hope for the Broken Soul.”
“When it comes to this idea about Jesus, we need to think of it kind of like a restaurant,” Minton said. “Just because we’ve had a bad meal at a restaurant doesn’t mean we quit eating. Just because people have had bad experiences with churches doesn’t mean it’s with Jesus.”
Minton navigates his life challenges with a southern accent, a little bit of humor and a lot of Jesus.
Joe Ader, chief executive officer of Family Promise, has been friends with Minton for about eight years. He describes him as funny, super friendly and engaging.
“His personality is very disarming for people, and then him being so open about sharing really tragic, hard stories about his past really helps him to be relatable to people that have hard stories of their own,” Ader said.
Minton’s southern roots
On top of being an author, Minton has been a pastor for 17 years. But even his journey into ministry was a non-traditional one.
Minton grew up near Memphis, Tennessee “on the Arkansas side.” He wasn’t religious, and his mom wasn’t religious, but he said in the south, everyone knew about and respected religion.
Minton began seriously thinking about Jesus when he was 13 and his mom committed suicide. At that point, he began to wonder “if God’s not in control, then who is?”
At that point, Minton said he began to believe that “there was some sort of purpose with the chaos.”
Fast forward to when he was 17. At that point, Minton still wasn’t a Christian, but he said he had a feeling that God wanted him to preach.
At 18, Minton married his high school sweetheart, Nicole. He then went to Arkansas State University to become an electrician. While in college, Minton happened to go to church one day.
“I don’t know what the preacher said,” Minton said. “I heard all the same stuff as before, but just so happened that day was different.”
That day, Minton put his faith in Jesus. A month later, at 19, he started preaching. A year later, at twenty, he was a lead pastor.
Minton said the only thing he knew at that point was that “I didn’t need to know it all.”
“I was reading Acts chapter three, but I was preaching Acts chapter 2,” he said.
‘God broke my heart for Spokane‘
Minton had found his life calling. While preaching, he attended Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary and later remotely attended Gateway Seminary.
In 2014, Minton’s church sent him to the northwest to find a place to send money and missionaries. He came to the northwest through the North American Mission Board (NAMB), which he said is a “church planting arm for the Baptist.”
NAMB had 32 northwestern focus cities, so Minton and his wife decided to check some out. They flew to Seattle and Portland, but Minton said “none of those really clicked with me.”
Minton asked NAMB if it had any other focus cities in Washington. NAMB recommended Spokane.
When he came out to look at the city, he was immediately drawn to it.
“God broke my heart for Spokane,” Minton said.
Minton felt especially called to the struggles that individuals experiencing homelessness were facing, given his own experience being homeless as a kid.
“It just seemed like with people that were down and out, or people that had lost hope … it seemed like they just didn’t have a place,” Minton said. “There’s a lot of brokenness, a lot of homelessness.”
Minton said he also saw people in Spokane who reminded him of his mom. He wanted to be there for those people like he wished someone would have for his mom.
“I just felt like, with my mom, if she had somebody to walk with her and like, put up with her mess, literally just love the hell out of her, I think she wouldn’t have went through so much,” Minton said.
Making the move
After visiting Spokane, Minton joked to the elders in Arkansas that they should send him as a missionary instead of sending money and going on mission trips.
A year later, Minton and his wife had quit their six-figure jobs and started over brand-new in Spokane.
“There was a lot of tears,” Minton said, “but after a lot of praying, everybody felt like that was what the Lord was leading us to do.”
Their survival plan, according to Minton, was to “pray and rely on individuals to send money while we start churches.”
“So that’s what we did,” he said.
Since coming to Spokane, Minton has started three Bapstistic churches: one on-campus at Eastern Washington University, one at the luxury retirement home Evergreen Fountains and the third in Spokane Valley.
Minton served as lead pastor of the Spokane Valley church, The Rock Church Spokane, until about a year ago. Now, he works for the Northwest Baptist Convention (NWBC) as a domestic missionary.
In this role, he serves the NWBC’s 538 churches spread across Washington, Oregon and Idaho. He also trains people how to plant churches and studies what type of church would work best in certain communities.
“We study a lot of people and a lot of data,” Minton said.
‘The purest form of what you believe’
Minton is also a father of two kids — something that he considers an essential part of his life. He said his adopted father/grandfather taught him that “who you raise is more important than who you reach, because that’s the purest form of what you believe.”
Minton is now also an author, something that originated from a bout of depression he faced in 2020.
When COVID hit in 2020, Minton said he wasn’t really affected because “chaos was what I grew up with.”
In August of 2020, however, Minton said “I woke up one morning and I was just dark.”
Minton called a counselor named Joe Chambers who he had met a few years prior. Chambers lived in Colorado and specialized in intensive Christian counseling. He immediately told Minton to come visit.
Minton took five weeks off. He had to call his supporters, who were paying Minton’s monthly salary, and tell them he was mentally struggling.
“In the culture, there’s this taboo around all this mental health stuff,” Minton said. “Well, it was so bad that I didn’t care.”
During his time in Colorado, Minton said he learned how to slow down and trust God.
“The average human walks around three miles an hour, and I don’t need to be going 100 miles an hour,” Minton said.
After getting around the curve of the mental health crisis, Minton started writing articles about rest and mental health awareness. Then he decided to write a book.
Using his mental health crisis for good
He sent the finished manuscript to a few publishing companies who told him to ‘tone it back a little bit.”
He took their advice. Then they told him to tone it back even more. At that point, Minton said he felt like the publishers wanted him to take everything real out of his book and just leave the “surface stuff.”
“I didn’t feel like that was what we needed to do,” Minton said.
Ader also didn’t agree with the publisher’s feedback.
“What really does need to be heard in our faith-based circles is real life stories, real hard stories, but how God redeems those and uses them for good,” Ader said.
“I think sometimes, us as Christians, we sugarcoat and try to pretend that everything is good all the time,” Ader said. “I think that harms the message.”
“The whole point of the good news is that we’re broken and we live in a broken world, and Christ came to reconcile that,” Ader said.
Minton decided to publish the book through a British company that didn’t make him tone it back. After they launched the book, with very little marketing, Minton said it hit the number one new release on six different lists.
Minton said he didn’t care for the personal attention that the book garnered.
“I just wanted to write a book, and I wanted to help people find purpose and let people know everybody’s jacked up and we all need hope,” Minton said.
