Nolen’s Ripple Story
NEW ENGLAND, USA | TL1 GRADUATE
I signed on with Nolen & immediately appreciated all the beautiful plants & light in his home that I could see in the background. Nolen & I met virtually, but he also resides in NH, working as the worship director at a church in downtown Nashua for the past four years. Nolen is originally from Dallas, Texas but around the time when COVID hit, he & his wife were open to a new adventure, & they packed up & moved to New England.
Nolen shared that his love of music began in middle school when he started taking guitar lessons & it just clicked. He grew up in the church & described being the kid in youth group that “knew music”, so he began leading worship at a young age. Having led worship for so many years, I asked Nolen if he had a personal philosophy, or hope for what music can be for the people in his church. He shared how he has had many over the years but that today he resonates “with St. Augustine’s words that when you sing you pray twice…my preference is trying to choose songs that are more vertical focused, praising God for who He is.”
Over the years, Nolen has had many experiences that have helped him to fall in love with worshipping through music. Nolen explained how, growing up, he attended a church that was much more charismatic so they sang the 3 songs, but took 45 minutes to get through them. Nolen chuckled a bit at this but described that “what was meaningful about those times, I think sometimes in other spiritual disciplines like centering prayer or something like that, it can almost get like really boring or really tiresome & then all of a sudden something clicks & it’s like new life & you can get that in worship too.” A beautiful example of music as a spiritual practice!
Nolen’s pastor is a PAX TL1 & TL2 graduate, so when an opportunity came for Nolen to participate in a grant funded TL1 cohort, he jumped right in! Nolen shared, “there are a number of things that I was introduced to in TL1 that I think about over & over again.” He loved feeling more equipped to interact with people one on one & “trying to become a listening place for them to share, allowing questions to be a way for them to dig deeper…” He also loved the idea of hospitality & housekeeping & appreciated the level of trust & humility that is present in the overall ethos of spiritual direction.
I asked if leading worship can be an important way of hosting people. Nolen affirmed this, & said that something he is thinking about a lot right now is the idea of repetition. He shared that in order to ingrain a song to lead worship, he might hear it about five times to the congregations once. For Nolen, “a big part of hospitality is, you know what it is okay if I get completely sick of this song, they’ve only heard it four times so we can keep going.” What a beautiful example of keeping the focus off of yourself to hold space for others.
Nolen also shared with me that he first began to dive deeper into the world of Christian spiritual formation when he “was in a season of spiritual renovation.” He described having “to tear down a lot of old scaffoldings & rebuild new assumptions” & how spiritual practices were really helpful in this journey. I asked him why this was particularly needed at this time, & Nolen responded that it was helpful to have more avenues, & a framework, to become a person who more easily does the things Jesus did. He also said how John Mark Comer’s podcast & writings were a refreshing way to look at Jesus as the center in a culturally divisive time & it “became a place for me to feel safe to reenter spirituality.”
One of the things Nolen is currently excited about, is thinking through with his pastor what prayer looks like in the church. He feels like this is an area he was able to see a new perspective in of how to lead a spiritual discipline in a different setting. They are introducing new ways to pray in their weekly staff meetings across their three campuses & Nolen feels that, while it is early days, “because we are engaging in these different ways to pray together there has been a certain amount of camaraderie that it comes with which has been really great.”
Something that also characterizes Nolen’s church, is that they are present in a downtown area. This has created many community outreach programs as well as just being a warm place for someone to come in off the street to sit & have a cup of coffee. Nolen shared how he feels like his pastor “has done a really good job of allowing people to take charge & start their own thing which means what it ends up being is a large percentage of our congregation are actively involved in serving.” This indeed rings true with what we have heard from other PAX graduates at this church!
As someone whose experience in TL1 was made possible by a grant, I asked Nolen what he might say to someone considering investing in soul care for themselves or to support others.
For the person interested in a program, Nolen would say that it “teaches you how to listen really well in one on one settings & how to become a value add to another person. So often we have these relationships with people we really care about & yet we are, at least I feel this way so often, ill-equipped for social interactions. But I felt like after TL1, just like wow, I can have this conversation with this other person & I feel like I can actually give to them in a way I didn’t feel like I could before & hopefully I can be a space, be a sounding board, a questions asker, that helps them actually make progress in their life or at least feel that a weight has been lifted.”
Nolen went on to say, “for the donor or someone who is interested in giving to fund other people’s journeys. There was a moment I was with my lead pastor & I asked, shouldn’t we do something like a curriculum or discipleship, kind of a step 1, 2, 3 & get people on the journey?…he was like, honestly I have found that spiritual formation & that whole aspect of things has been way more effective across the table rather than in a classroom setting. But of course not everybody can meet with the lead pastor, & so there is kind of a practical sense of the more people we have in our congregations that are actively listening to others, becoming that hospitable safe space to engage, maybe we could all start looking more like Jesus.”
Thank you to everyone who has supported the ministry of PAX & our participants—financially, prayerfully, & relationally. Many of our current donors were once recipients of these soul care grants. The ripple effects of your generosity are truly endless! If you’d like to learn more about giving a soul care grant & read more stories like Nolen’s you can do so below!