Alumnus Matt Beasley uses Southwestern education, missions experience in pastorate

Two-time alumnus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Matt Beasley went against the career field of petroleum and oil of many in his family and instead became the first from his family to graduate from college and to enter the ministry.

Born in the small town of Many, La., Beasley moved to Norway when he was just 3 years old for his father’s work and would spend the next 11 years in Europe, including Scotland. At the age of 7, he became a Christian while attending North Sea Baptist Church, an international church in Norway pastored by a then Foreign Mission Board missionary.

His family returned to Louisiana, this time the southern city of Lafayette, when he was a teen, a large culture change for Beasley after spending most of his younger years attending a small private school in Europe.

His senior year of high school, Beasley’s family moved to Texas. Upon graduation, Beasley started college with the goal of becoming a dentist, but during the first year of his time at Sam Houston State University (SHSU), he began to further experience a call to ministry that had first begun when he was a sophomore in high school.

“So, I decided to be the black sheep in the family, doing ministry,” Beasley joked. “And I really didn’t know what that looked like.”

Beasley lived in College Station, Texas, during his studies at SHSU and attended Central Baptist Church, where Chris Osborne, Southwestern’s professor of preaching and pastoral ministry, was then serving as the senior pastor.

“Chris is pastor, and I’ve never heard verse-by-verse exposition,” Beasley said of that key moment in his call to prepare for ministry. “And really got a hunger for the Word and a desire to be able to teach the Word in such a way that would help it make sense to people. So, Chris had this really kind of formative impact on me and on my life.”

His first response when responding to the call to ministry was to enter an “understanding” with God that he did not intend to enter the mission field or be a minister to middle school boys. But according to the Lord’s humor, that is exactly where he would start as, just a couple weeks later, he began to work under his previous student pastor leading a discipleship group for junior high boys.

Upon completing his undergraduate studies, he was encouraged by a former pastor to look into attending Southwestern to further his education and prepare for ministry, pointing out that as a Southern Baptist the Cooperative Program would help make his education more affordable.

The idea of higher education was a novelty for Beasley.

“No one in my family had gone to college, certainly nobody had pursued anything beyond that,” Beasley said of this decision.

He first became a student at a Southwestern extension campus, getting married halfway through the first semester. While his wife Valerie was finishing her student teaching, Beasley worked at a truck shop while also driving an hour each way to attend class.

But in December of 2004, they moved to the Fort Worth campus, where he would work in the Riley Center as the conference coordinator and assistant director. During that time, he began to experience a change in his earlier resolve to not be a missionary.

“While I was going to school, my wife and I were trying to figure out what to do next,” Beasley said. “I knew I wanted to pastor a local church. I was also keenly aware that a lot of the churches I’ve been a part of, they would maybe not say it, but would communicate that they accomplished the Great Commission by giving, but not necessarily by going.”

Having grown up in Europe and participated in some mission trips while in college, Beasley realized that even though he was called to pastor, he wanted to be able to share with future congregants the importance of missions not just theoretically, but from the experience of having participated in missions.

“I felt like to be able to say that convictionally and be able to say that authoritatively, I needed to go myself,” Beasley said.

After completing his Master of Divinity in 2007, Beasley and Valerie served as missionaries with the International Mission Board in Prague, Czechia, for two years. Beasley said they prayed that it would be a full term to give them a picture of what it looked like to serve as a missionary. During that time, they both had knee surgery, their first child was born and had to have abdominal surgery when he was just two weeks old, and a reorganization of the IMB led to their having three leaders and two apartments in those two years.

“I would never pray that again,” Beasley admitted.

But despite the hardships they face, Beasley said they also got to take part in planting an international church in the heart of Prague that he pastored. As a church, they ministered to the community through events and service such as cleaning and helping the homeless.

“We tried to build our church on community action and community involvement,” Beasley said of the mission of the church. “So, the Gospel is something that had been around Czech Republic for a long time, obviously, but they really lost a sense of what difference Christians would make in their community. … We found that lost people wanted to just spend time with us. They didn’t really understand why we wanted to be part of the community, an agent for positive change and impact. But as they saw the impact of the Gospel on our lives, on our marriages, we saw lost people come to faith.”

Upon their return to the states, Beasley was offered a position as the director of the Naylor Student Center at Southwestern while he began pursuing his PhD in 2010 with Matthew McKellar, professor of preaching, as his supervisor.

“So, I came back … and really just kind of dug in and enjoyed being back at Southwestern and reconnecting with friends and trying to help propel the mission of the seminary to equip the saints for the work of the Gospel,” Beasley said.

While studying, Beasley said McKellar began mentioning different churches that were looking for pastors, but Beasley said he had no desire to begin his pastoral ministry until after he finished his degree, convinced he would not be able to complete the PhD while leading a church. But the continual encouragement from McKellar and a pointed question from his wife led Beasley to reconsider.

“She said, ‘Why are you going to work on your PhD? What do you want to do?’” Beasley said of that discussion. “I said, ‘I want to pastor.’ ‘So why would you not be open to this opportunity to step into the pastorate and also work on your PhD?’”

Another call from a church came, and Beasley began pastoring at a church in Greenville, Texas, where he would serve for about 10 years. By the end of that time, they had two more sons and Beasley had completed his PhD in 2018.

Beasley said one of greatest impacts Southwestern had on his ministry was “getting to know several of the professors during my MDiv, and then different professors here in my PhD, and seeing their love of the Word of God and love for God’s people.”

Former professors including Calvin Pearson, Paul Hoskins, and others had impacts on him through preaching classes and in learning the original languages of Scripture.

“They taught me a love of the Word, how to study the Word deeply, and how to communicate the Word clearly,” Beasley said.

In 2022, Beasley accepted a pastorate in Elizabethtown, Ky., at Severns Valley Baptist Church, which was founded in 1781 and is the oldest, continuous Baptist church west of the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia.

“For a person who never really wanted to leave Texas, I’ve really come to love Kentucky, really love the people of Severns Valley,” Beasley said. “And being able to use the things I learned as a previous pastor, and the things I learned working on my MDiv and working in my PhD, to propel the church forward.”

Beasley said Severns Valley has been considered a flagship church of Kentucky, but beginning in 2015 it had begun to experience an almost invisible decline as numbers began to drop very slowly before suffering a much more significant decrease during the Covid pandemic.

With his arrival, Beasley said he had a desire “of helping the church step back and remember its roots and to launch off and continue to be impactful. The church has done a lot of really great things historically.”

In the three years since joining the church, Beasley said they have started the process of looking at their membership rolls, making sure they accurately portrayed those in attendance and professed to be believers, corrected the church’s financial state, and built a partnership with other churches, praying weekly for them and participating in joint mission projects.

“We think that our community is better, the Gospel is more prominent, if all the churches of Christ are doing well,” Beasley said.

“Severns really has been great,” Beasley added. “It’s a lot of fun working with people who are excited, people who are open to try something different. And really, I’m just trying to be faithful in walking through the Word and engaging open, honest conversations to people about the state of where we are, where we’re headed. Things are going well.”