It Is Worth It
By Ben Cox , Seth Norris and Caroline McCrorey
From the Winter 2024: Stories From the Storm
BEN COX: I’m here with Seth Norris. Seth is the pastor at Perkinsville Baptist Church in Boone. But he’s also the Volunteer Fire Department Chief of the Deep Gap Volunteer Fire Department. Can you share a bit of your personal testimony of how you came to faith in Jesus as your Lord and Savior? And how did that lead you to become the pastor here? And how did that inform your decisions to become a member of Deep Gap Fire Department?
SETH NORRIS: I was in emergency management and fire service full time before I was a believer. I started volunteering right after 9/11 at age of 18 and that became my career path that I continued for several years. I was an adrenaline junkie for sure—still am. So, I ate it up. I started pursuing all the certifications I needed. I got my college degree in emergency management and ended up on hurricane task forces. I went to where disasters were; in many ways I viewed that as an important part of society, just doing good. That was the extent of my theology at the time. Growing up I wasn’t connected to a local church in a meaningful way. My wife, Staci, is a lifelong baptist, she was the kind of kid who was in the church anytime the doors were open. I saw a picture of her and knew I wanted to marry her. But, to do that I had to figure out what this odd devotion to the church was. When we started dating, I would have never denied God, or even Jesus as a historical person. My now father-in-law gave me a CD of Ray Comfort sermons, Hell’s Best Kept Secret and True and False Conversion. By the time he had given them to me I had started reading scripture, hearing sermons, and realized there was something special amongst the people at Staci’s local church. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the way people loved one another— it was John 17 in real life. At this time God the Father had started actively drawing me and the Spirit started to convict me.
As a twenty-two-year-old, when I listened to Hell’s Best Kept Secret, Ray Comfort said that Hell’s best kept secret is to keep people comfortable in the church pew, believing they have a living relationship with Jesus, when, in fact, all they have is religion. This was the first time I had heard that church attendance and participation have nothing to do with a man’s heart. I was driving down the parkway listening and I stopped, it was the first time where I recognized and understood Ephesians 2:8-9, and that is that faith in Christ—faith alone—is the only thing that saves a man’s soul. The sufficiency of Christ, sovereignty of Christ, the goodness of Christ, all became real in that moment. There was no turning back.
“HELL’S BEST KEPT SECRET IS TO KEEP PEOPLE COMFORTABLE IN THE CHURCH PEW, BELIEVING THEY HAVE A LIVING RELATIONSHIP WITH JESUS, WHEN, IN FACT, ALL THEY HAVE IS RELIGION.”
The first thing I knew I had to do was tell others. I said to myself, “if I didn’t know this, and now I do, others have to know this.” I couldn’t help it; my life trajectory changed. I was saved at 22 when I understood the reality of sin, my sinfulness, and recognized grace not just conceptually but as grace that was given and afforded to me. I recognized Jesus isn’t just a historical dude like George Washington. I think a lot of people view Jesus like they do George Washington, they know he did good and is historically important. But the difference is critical, Washington did not step out of a grave. So, Jesus is living, and He is active. He sits at the right hand of the Father, and when the Father looks upon Seth Norris, He no longer sees Seth Norris, He sees the righteousness of Christ. I had to tell everybody that.
Secondly, I expected the church to be amped about this message of hope but I found that over the years the church had become almost numb to it and so I felt led to do something about that. I think my call to ministry began the moment I was saved; I just didn’t have the language for it. But I just started. Within the first year of becoming a believer, I was teaching evangelism courses in the local church and taking teams out to share the gospel. I did fire service and emergency management. During that time, I also did army chaplaincy. I didn’t really know what to do, so I was just doing stuff and sensing the Lord’s faithfulness to me in obedience. That ultimately led me to New Orleans Seminary in my late 20s and I knew it was time to deal with this–God’s call on my life. My diploma says I graduated seminary on July 28th, 2012, and my first day at Perkinsville was on July 29th. That’s God’s timing. I didn’t apply to Perkinsville Baptist Church. I had never even been in the building before; it was just a brick building with a steeple to me–which are everywhere. But my name was thrown in the hat by the search committee. I also knew that in mountain culture, particularly in Baptist life, I would be a square peg in a round hole. I wasn’t raised Baptist. I didn’t know who Lottie Moon or Annie Armstrong were. I didn’t know their language. But I did know that I loved historical Christian doctrine and the Baptist expression of faith. I became Baptist because of the Baptist Faith and Message, not because of the potlucks even though they are very good. Mark Chaney, pastor at Howard’s Creek Church at the time, who has now passed, was mentoring me, discipling me. He was an unconventional guy himself, but he was the first guy to show me what discipleship was. Without him I wouldn’t have been able to pastor, or it at least would’ve taken longer. He discipled me through the whole journey. It was the power of discipleship. I think we have a lot of un-discipled Christians. I think a lot of times what we may think is a false conversion is just an undisciplined faith.
S: The Church, and I am not talking about a church, I am talking about the Church, is the largest and most active disaster response and recovery organization in the world. It has been and will be. Here is the beautiful thing about it, the church is here to stay. As homes are mudded out, as lives are put back together, and lives are lost, mourned, and grieved, the church is here and it’s going to stay here as efforts turn into rebuilding. The church is the biggest response and recovery organization because disaster recovery is inherently theological. Whether or not it’s the church, the act of rebuilding from a disaster is biblical. So even FEMA is doing what we know as a redemptive act, putting back together what is broken and restoring what has been lost. The church doesn’t have to hide that fact. We are in the business of proclaiming the Kingdom on Earth as it is in Heaven and seeing the Kingdom come.
At Perkinsville our mission statement is, “To love what Jesus loves and do what Jesus does.” I have a strong inclination to think that Jesus would be mudding out houses, ministering to people, and being the hands and feet through this. We are just following his lead in that. We and others sent teams over to churches to mud them out so they could become lighthouses in their communities.
On the Friday morning that the storm hit, I was working at the fire department, and I got a call from Todd Unzicker, the executive director of North Carolina Baptist, asking “what do you need?” I said, “I don’t know exactly, but I know we are going to need disaster recovery teams and feeding operations.” By five o’clock that day I got a call that they were on the way. Within the first 72 hours we mobilized immediately as a church. We had specialized teams from churches across North Carolina arriving on our doorstep and we were deploying them to hard-to-reach places to make access so we could serve people. They were coming in fully self-sufficient for three days. They did not require food, lodging, bedding, anything. We were sending them out as far as Yancy County. We were working with Watauga, Ashe, Avery, Yancey, and even parts of Mitchell—the hard-to-reach places. These guys were prior military Christian brothers; so they came up in full sleeve tats and camo proclaiming the name of Jesus. I had told Todd we needed high speed guys who loved Jesus to come up with side by sides (a type of four-wheeler) and chainsaws. And they delivered. We also started delivering generators.
The first week we were doing these high-speed operations to gather intel, serve people, and figure out where to send people to work and serve. That’s just within our church. Churches all over Western North Carolina have stood up in different and similar ways. But it is even more than just local people. I know right now in our building we have Christians from all over the country sleeping here, and that’s not just happening here. So, the church has staying power. There are so many wonderful organizations serving, but there is only one that holds the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. So, we bring not only mercy ministry, we bring not only food, water, mud-outs, and rebuilds, we bring with it the words of eternal life. There’s only one organization that can do that. We are here to stay. That is what the church needs to hold up to. We stay in the name of Jesus. We have been doing it for 2,000 years. So, we have the most experience.
B: I heard you on a nationally televised interview a few days after the storm describing the checkerboard nature of this storm. Can you share a bit more about that and what you mean by that?
S: I know that multiple organizations have never responded to a disaster like this before, where you can’t get to the places you need to get to. After a typical, coastal hurricane you push the sand out of the way to get to a home. Here, you can’t do that. There is no road, it is washed out. There were a lot of landslides, which are categorized as earth movements. They are more like earthquakes. So you will have a perfectly undamaged home and 50 yards away a home will be washed off the mountain. Helicopters have been everywhere to do damage assessment. There are communities like Lake Lure or Chimney Rock that are gone and have been absolutely devastated, but by and large throughout western North Carolina, it isn’t from one neighborhood to one neighborhood, it varies from house to house. The landslides are what make it so checkerboarded. Mountain flooding is different, the flooding roars. There is nothing like it. It is very dependent on the rivers, creeks, and waterways. This is why the damage and needs assessments are taking so long. You have to enter literally door to door to figure out that this house flooded, and the next one didn’t.
B: Is there an example of a particularly dramatic rescue that you either participated in or know about that you could share with us?
S: Well, you know mountain folks are resilient and a little stubborn. I think there is a fine line between faithfulness and stubbornness. I can say that I am one. We sent a team out from Mercy Hill Church in Greensboro to a way-out mountain community in Avery county. They came across these sweet older ladies, several of them widowed, and gave them food. It was the first food these ladies had received since the storm hit. It had been almost a week. The team asked them if they would like to go to one of the shelters set up. In classic mountain fashion, they said they were good and figured there were probably others who needed it more. I have heard that statement a lot.
We’ve also had some hard stories. We mobilized a lot of college students—well over 100 the first day. There were times when they were talking to locals and saw some sad stuff. Some of them saw a body under the mud. For all the beautiful rescues, there have also been really grounding moments. The best and worst of humanity is seen in disaster. You better have a theology of suffering for a storm like this. We have had to teach that and show that.
B: Let’s talk about how you see your church moving forward from here. What is your collective church vision?
S: We have been reminded of how important it is to offer water and a meal to folks as a bridge to gospel conversations. We have been reminded of the power of mercy ministry, providing the physical needs to share spiritual truth. Within a mile of our church building, 90% of the people are 24 years old or younger. A few years ago, we began to reflect on this. I tell folks all the time I am not a smart guy, but when I look around if 90% of the people are 24 or younger, Sunday mornings ought to reflect that. So, our vision became to equip every generation to reach the next generation. Just last night I spoke to our college students, and I told them “You’re not college students, that is not your identity, you are the church.” When I say church, it is a people called out, not a building or a thing. So, I think it has strengthened our vision. This church has changed a lot particularly in the past five years and post COVID. At times when a church changes so radically, you have to say, “is it worth it?” And within the last two and half weeks it has been a resounding yes, it is worth it.