Daniel Gambrell

My parents are believers. My dad was an associate pastor at an SBC church so I grew up going to church. The only times we weren't at church were if we were sick or on vacation. My parents did their best to raise us in that environment and teach us about God at home. When I was in the 4th grade I attended a church camp, said a prayer, and thought I was a Christian. I was a typical good church kid on the outside doing all the mission trips, camps, and teaching in Sunday School. As I went through my teenage years, I started to have doubts and sin in my personal life.

In college, I went on a mission trip doing church construction. While I was there a testimony was shared about someone who had been active in the church for a long-time but realized they had never placed their faith in Christ for salvation. I couldn't get that story out of my mind and it surfaced in many of my own internal doubts about my standing before God. For the next few weeks, I hardly got any sleep as I thought about this. I was reading through John and the message I kept hearing was when Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again. One Sunday at church, when we were about to take Communion, the youth pastor was giving the typical intro for who could take it and if you weren't a believer then it was not for you. At that moment God made it crystal clear to me. I knew I could not take the bread and the cup, something I had done countless times before, because I was a sinner, dead in my trespasses with no hope of saving myself. This crushed me, but then there was hope. I had to be born again. I left the service, found my dad, repented of my sins, and placed my faith in Christ alone for my salvation. I was baptized a few months later.

I had a youth pastor in college that really set me on the trajectory I am on today. I appreciate how seriously he took the Word and how his doctrine drove his actions. It caused me to think a lot about my own theological convictions. After college, Mollie and I married and moved to Illinois for my school. We stayed there for 5 years. While we were there we were members of three churches, all SBC church plants, and all reformed in their convictions. While this was the opposite of the type of church I grew up in, after much thinking on my own part, I grew to adopt these convictions as well. It all started with the people. In one of the churches we joined, we left that first Sunday saying " that guy preached for a very long time, but the people were so welcoming”.

After moving to Greenville in August 2021, we visited roughly 15 different churches. We were looking for something similar to the type of churches we had come from - an expositional style of preaching, intentional about creating community, and supportive of local to global missions. After a few times visiting, Mark McCoy invited us to the Capps MC, of which we are still a part of today. We're thankful for the community God placed us in as newcomers to the area and appreciate how the church served us when Andy was born.