Tennessee Golden Hour

What if the greatest measure of a healthy church isn't how many people come through its doors, but how deeply it impacts the community beyond them?

In this episode of Tennessee Golden Hour, hosts Matt Tullos and Beth Moore welcome Dr. Daryl Crouch, Strengthening Healthy Churches Team Leader for the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board, for an inspiring and practical conversation about church renewal, spiritual health, and the power of collaboration.

Drawing from more than 28 years of pastoral ministry, Daryl challenges churches to look beyond attendance, budgets, and programs to rediscover their greater calling: advancing God's kingdom.

From the importance of spiritual renewal and prayer to the need for churches to work together rather than in isolation, Daryl offers a hopeful vision for congregations of every size.

You'll also discover the See Tennessee map, a powerful resource helping churches understand the spiritual and social needs of their own communities, and learn how pastor cohorts across Tennessee are working together to strengthen churches and multiply gospel impact.

At the heart of the conversation is a simple but transformative conviction: Healthy pastors lead stronger churches, and stronger churches help transform communities.

Whether you're a pastor, church leader, or someone who simply loves the local church, this conversation will encourage you to ask a different question—not just How can our church grow? but What is God already doing in our community, and how can we join Him?

Learn more and connect:

Tennessee Baptist Mission Board: https://tnbaptist.org

See Tennessee Map: 

https://seetnmap.com/

Email: [email protected]

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.”
-Psalm 46:1Disasters arrive without warning, instantly changing everything. Recently, Tennessee Baptists responded to two rapid crises, showing up when needed most.

In Hickman County, an explosion at the Accurate Energetic Systems plant killed at least 16 people. Within hours, Tennessee Baptist Disaster Relief (TBDR) volunteers deployed a mass feeding trailer to serve first responders, while chaplains offered critical emotional and spiritual support.

Months later, Winter Storm Fern crippled the state with ice, leaving 380,000 homes without power and claiming 21 lives. TBDR chainsaw and feeding crews were deployed across a 150-mile corridor, while local churches mobilized to evacuate vulnerable nursing home residents.

This is the church in action – showing up fast, staying long, and sharing Christ. The Golden Offering for Tennessee Missions funds the vital training, equipment, and facilities that enable this constant readiness, ensuring Tennessee churches are prepared to move whenever the next disaster strikes.

Pray for Recovery:

• Pray for families rebuilding after these storms, and for TBDR volunteers serving them for weeks and months.
• Ask God to sustain those who have grown weary.
• Pray that everyone receiving meals, cleared roads, or rebuilt walls experiences the hope of the gospel.
• Ask God to raise up a new generation of disaster relief volunteers in Tennessee Baptist churches, understanding that the church showing up on someone’s worst day is the sermon. We must be ready.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”
-Luke 4:18Tennessee has one of the nation’s highest addiction rates, leaving our prisons full. Behind every statistic is a person experiencing seemingly permanent brokenness. But grace runs deeper.

Through restorative justice, recovery programs, and Christian Job Corps, Tennessee Baptist churches enter our state’s darkest corners to set people free. In Clinton, 81-year-old volunteer Fred Owenby has led a team of 30 to the Anderson County Detention Facility weekly for sixteen years. Through the 180 Program – funded in part by TBMB Compassion Ministries – incarcerated men and women engage in Bible-based curriculum focused on personal transformation.

The results are life-changing: inmates started mid-week prayer groups, led three peers to Christ, and continue attending church after release. Their handwritten letters echo a powerful truth: “I know God has always been with me and He loves me.”

The Golden Offering for Tennessee Missions funds these vital ministries, providing Bibles and resources, bringing the gospel where no one else will go. 

Pray for Healing and New Beginnings:

• Pray for Tennessee’s incarcerated men and women encountering the gospel through faithful Tennessee Baptist volunteers.
• Ask God to break through every wall.
• Pray volunteers do not grow weary in doing good.
• Ask God to raise up more churches for recovery, restorative justice, and healing ministries.
• Pray Tennessee becomes known not for its brokenness, but for God’s transformative work in the midst of it.

“The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
-Matthew 9:37–38

Right now, in the rural fields of West Tennessee, something remarkable is happening. The Ford Motor Company’s BlueOval City facility – the largest automobile manufacturing plant in America – is under construction. It will draw more than 10,000 workers and an estimated 90,000 new residents to a region that has never seen growth like this.

Tennessee Baptist churches in the seven-county BlueOval City impact zone are praying and planting – with a goal of four new church plants every year for ten years. New congregations are already launching. Workers from around the world are arriving, searching for community, for meaning, for something that will hold in the midst of such sweeping change.

The Golden Offering supports church planting training, assessment, coaching, and funding for planters and their families across Tennessee – including this extraordinary moment in West Tennessee.

Pray for God’s Kingdom to Come:

• Pray for the new church plants in Brownsville, Gallaway, and Stanton – young congregations still finding their footing, led by church planters who left comfort behind to follow the call.
• Pray for a pipeline of church planters to emerge from Tennessee Baptist churches.
• Ask God if you – or someone in your congregation – might be the answer to the very prayer you’re praying.
• Pray that Tennessee Baptist churches would catch the vision for every unreached community in Tennessee having access to a healthy, reproducing, gospel-preaching church.

“Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.” 
-Jeremiah 29:7

The church was never meant to be a refuge from the community — it was meant to be a force within it. When Tennessee Baptist churches engage their neighborhoods, communities change. Hunger gets addressed. Loneliness gets interrupted. Darkness gives way to light.

Across Tennessee, TBMB Compassion Ministries is helping churches discover practical, relational ways to meet real needs — feeding ministries, school partnerships, English language ministries, restorative justice programs, and more. These aren’t just social services. They are doors that swing open toward the gospel.

Every meal served, every child tutored, every family helped carries a message: You are seen. You are loved. There is a God who sent His people to find you.

The Golden Offering for Tennessee Missions funds these compassion ministries throughout our state, equipping churches to be the most loving, most transformative institution in their community.

Pray for Communities Transformed:

• Pray for your church to see its community with new eyes, as a mission field right outside your doors.
• Ask God to show you one family, one school, one neighborhood where your church could plant a seed of His kingdom this week.
• Pray for compassion ministry leaders and volunteers who serve faithfully, often unseen.
• Ask God to transform the communities of Tennessee one act of Christlike love at a time, until entire neighborhoods look different because a church decided to show up.

“Pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
-James 1:27There are children in every county in Tennessee right now who need a home. Children who have known instability, fear, and loss – who are waiting to experience what every child deserves: safety, love, and belonging.

At the same time, thousands of women across our state are facing unplanned pregnancies, often alone, often afraid, often lacking a single person to walk alongside them. Pregnancy resource centers – many supported through the Golden Offering – are meeting those women in the most vulnerable moments of their lives, offering practical care and the hope of the gospel.

God has always had a special heart for the vulnerable. And He has always intended for His church to be His hands extended toward them. The Golden Offering supports the Amy Hood Adoption Endowment, which provides funding to Tennessee Baptist couples pursuing adoption, as well as resources for foster care support and pregnancy ministry across the state.

Pray for the Vulnerable: 

• Pray for the thousands of children in Tennessee’s foster system.
• Ask God to stir hearts in your church toward foster care and adoption.
• Pray for the women walking into pregnancy resource centers this week, that they would encounter the grace and truth of Christ.
• Pray for the families who have already opened their homes, that they would have endurance, joy, and a community of support surrounding them.

“Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full.”  
-Luke 14:23

Here is a sobering reality: right now, more lost people live in Tennessee than at any point in our state’s history. Our population is growing. Our churches, in many cases, are not keeping pace. In dozens of counties across this state, there is one church for every 10,000 people — or more.But Jesus said compel them to come in. Not wait for them to show up. Not hope they find their way. Compel them. That word carries urgency — the urgency of a host who knows the feast is ready and the chairs are empty, who cannot bear the thought of anyone missing what has been prepared.

Tennessee is full of people who have never been compelled. They’ve driven past our church buildings for years. They’ve never been invited. They’ve never been sought.

The Golden Offering for Tennessee Missions funds evangelism strategies, church planting assessments, and missional training to help Tennessee Baptist churches stop waiting and start going.

Pray for the Lost: 

• Pray by name for someone in your life who doesn’t know Christ. Ask God to give you the words — and the courage — to compel them toward Jesus this week.
• Pray for Tennessee Baptist churches to feel the holy discomfort of a community full of lost people.
• Ask God to raise up bold witnesses in every county of this state, and pray that your church would be known as a place where the lost are genuinely welcomed and pursued.

“After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.”
-Acts 4:31There is no strategy more powerful than a church on its knees. Spiritual awakening has always begun not in programs or plans, but in prayer — desperate, believing, expectant prayer that God is not done with Tennessee.

For 125 years, Tennessee Baptists have cried out for revival in this state. Today that cry feels more urgent than ever. Our churches need fresh fire. Our neighbors need to see what genuine transformation looks like. Our communities need to feel the shockwave of a people who have truly encountered the living God.

The Golden Offering for Tennessee Missions supports prayer initiatives, evangelism training, and tools that equip Tennessee Baptist churches to be centers of spiritual awakening in their communities.

Pray for Spiritual Awakening

• Ask God to shake your church the way He shook that upper room in Jerusalem.
• Pray for a hunger for God’s Word to spread across Tennessee — in sanctuaries, in living rooms, in jails, in dorm rooms, and in recovery houses.
• Ask the Holy Spirit to move with such evident power that people in your community ask, “What is happening at that church?”
• Pray that this Week of Prayer is not just a church tradition, but a turning point.

What happens when a pastor who didn’t grow up in the Southern Baptist world discovers the power of churches working together?

In this episode of The Tennessee Golden Hour, Matt Tullos sits down with Jimmy West, pastor of Edgemont Baptist Church, to talk about his journey into ministry, his transition into Southern Baptist life, and what he has learned through ten years of faithfully serving the same local church.

Jimmy shares why he has become such a strong believer in cooperation among Southern Baptist churches—and why the Cooperative Program allows churches of every size to accomplish far more together than any one congregation could accomplish alone. From supporting missionaries and training future leaders to strengthening churches and reaching communities, cooperation multiplies the impact of the local church.

The conversation also explores the value of pastoral longevity: staying through changing seasons, building trust, loving people over time, and seeing the fruit that often comes only after years of faithful ministry.

It’s a conversation about calling, cooperation, perseverance, and the conviction that when churches work together for the Great Commission, the work is worth it.

In this episode: Jimmy’s journey into Southern Baptist life • ten years at Edgemont Baptist Church • the value of pastoral longevity • why churches need one another • the Cooperative Program • missions and ministry • the strength of cooperation • Tennessee Baptists • the Great Commission

From Gavel to Grace: Addiction, Recovery, and the Church with Brett Knight

What happens when justice and grace meet in the life of someone struggling with addiction?

On this episode of Tennessee Golden Hour, Matt Tullos and Beth Moore sit down with Brett Knight—attorney, former prosecutor, city judge, minister, and author of From Gavel to Grace. Purchase here.

After years in courtrooms, Brett began to realize something that changed the direction of his life and ministry: you can’t punish away pain.

Addiction has real consequences, and accountability matters. But behind destructive behavior there is often trauma, brokenness, shame, and a person who desperately needs to rediscover who they are—and whose they are.

Brett shares what he has learned from walking alongside hundreds of men and women through long-term recovery. The conversation explores why incarceration alone cannot heal addiction, the danger behind some versions of “tough love,” the importance of healthy boundaries, and why relationships are so essential to lasting restoration.

Most importantly, Brett challenges Tennessee churches—large and small—to recognize the unique role they can play. A church doesn’t need a treatment center, a huge budget, or a professional counseling staff to make a difference. Sometimes ministry begins simply by becoming the church that refuses to let someone recover alone.

You’ll also hear an extraordinary story of a woman Brett once helped prosecute who later experienced transformation through Christ and now ministers to women inside jails herself.

For anyone struggling secretly with addiction, Brett offers a simple challenge: tell somebody today. And for families exhausted from loving someone caught in addiction, he offers both permission to establish healthy boundaries and encouragement not to give up hope.

The episode concludes with Brett praying for those struggling with addiction, their families, and churches seeking to stand in the gap.

⏱️ Episode Chapters

00:00 — Welcome to Tennessee Golden Hour
Matt and Beth catch up and talk about the 125th anniversary of the Golden Offering for Tennessee Missions.

01:05 — Meet Brett Knight
Attorney, former prosecutor, judge, minister, recovery advocate—and grandfather.

03:06 — Seeing Addiction from Different Chairs
How serving as prosecutor, defense attorney, judge, and minister transformed Brett’s understanding of addiction.

05:41 — From Gavel to Grace: “You Can’t Punish Away Pain”
Why consequences matter—but punishment alone cannot heal trauma or transform a heart.

08:20 — Why People Struggling with Addiction Fear the Church
“If you really knew me, would you still want me here?”

11:23 — More Than Behavior Modification
What pastors and churches need to understand about repentance, identity, discipleship, and long-term recovery.

14:07 — The Lie of “Tough Love”
Why loving someone doesn’t mean enabling them—and why healthy boundaries don’t require abandoning them.

17:20 — What Incarceration Can—and Cannot—Do
The proper role of the justice system and why courts and prisons cannot replace healing, discipleship, and community.

19:56 — What Can a Small Church Actually Do?
Brett offers practical ways churches with limited money and staff can become powerful partners in recovery.

22:04 — Building Sustainable Circles of Care
Why the people surrounding someone after treatment can make such a difference in long-term restoration.

24:18 — “But What If I’m Afraid to Get Involved?”
Brett talks candidly about the fear church members may feel when entering the messy world of addiction and recovery.

27:01 — A Story of Redemption
Brett shares the remarkable story of a woman he once helped prosecute who now ministers to women inside jails.

30:33 — To the Person Secretly Struggling with Addiction
“Tell somebody today.” Brett addresses the deadly power of shame and the importance of bringing struggles into the light.

32:13 — Hope for Exhausted Families
What Brett would say to parents, spouses, and loved ones who feel worn down by someone else’s addiction.

34:29 — One Step Every Tennessee Baptist Church Can Take
A simple vision that could create a statewide network of churches ready to walk alongside people and families in recovery.

36:15 — From Gavel to Grace & Prayer for Recovery
Brett closes by praying for people struggling with addiction, their families, and churches called to stand in the gap.

38:35 — Golden Offering Week of Prayer & Closing

Tennessee Golden Hour tells the stories of Tennessee Baptists serving their communities, sharing the gospel, meeting needs, and seeing God transform lives across our state.