Finishing Well
But before Tommy, whose wife Karen pastors Abundant Grace, could see his dream through to reality, he caught COVID. On January 22, he died, leaving his family, church and youth in shock and heartache.
So, Kentucky Ministry Network ministers joined with grieving congregants and other area evangelical clergy not only to make the ride possible, but to do it in lavish fashion.
Karen Wix met Michele Nally of Henderson, 40 minutes north of Madisonville, while both were attending Kentucky School of Ministry; their friendship grew when they saw each other through the years at district council. Nally knew Tommy Wix’s death left Abundant Grace congregants devastated; many of the teens in the youth group did not have the means to fund the excursion.
But when Nally saw Kentucky district superintendent Joseph S. Girdler at the funeral, she shared her heart: “I told Brother Joe we need to do this in honor of Tommy,” she recalled. Girdler encouraged her to move forward with the excursion, calling it the Tommy Wix Memorial Ride.
Everybody loved Tommy, 71, a retired coal miner. He’d been married to Karen Wix, also 71, for 52 years. At the funeral she heard story after story about the impact her quiet husband had had on those in his church, the community and former workplaces; they could scarce believe he’d passed so quickly. Mourners shared pictures of themselves with Tommy, including a particularly memorable image of him praying with a boy at the Wednesday night church youth gathering, “Treasured Possessions.”
Many of these midweek attendees aren’t otherwise part of Abundant Grace, which has an average Sunday attendance of 90. Students began to return post-COVID after youth pastor Angie Bruce’s adolescent son Ayden Masoncup invited his friends from school, some of whom played football with him at North Hopkins High. Sometimes 20 teens would show up. When a youth ministry volunteer grew sick, Tommy rushed to help, taking the teaching role after the volunteer died.
“We were doing a study on fruit of the Spirit,” Bruce recollects. “Tommy asked if the kids wanted to accept Christ. Six got saved.”
Witnessing the transformation likewise impacted Bruce. “When you provide something like that in the house of God, it gets them off the streets and away from bad influence,” she says. “It’s really changed my life and blessed my life.”
Bruce made sure the youth group attended the funeral. “A lot of them don’t have father figures,” she says. “Tommy was just a really amazing person.”
Karen described herself at his funeral as being “at a crossroads: grieve the rest of your life or celebrate the time he had, people he witnessed to, how Tommy had impacted their lives,” she says. “He always said the most important thing we can do for the kids is feed them and love them and get a little bit of Jesus into them.”
Nally had received an honorarium for officiating a funeral, which she donated to the project; that and another friend’s contribution covered the entire cost of the trail ride.
Nally asked a couple who regularly volunteer and grill for many AG summer kids camps to provide the meals. She reached out to pastor friends in her community to fill “swag bags” with Bibles, devotionals and other gifts.
While the 20 teens, mostly boys, who took part knew in advance about the trail ride, Bruce didn’t tell them how they’d travel the 30-mile journey to Circle T Ranch. When the stretch limousine pulled into the church parking lot, the youth group thought the fancy ride was simply looking for a place to turn around. The local limo company donated the rental.
Most of the teens had never ridden a horse. At the trail ride venue, Tommy’s nephew Danny Wix shared a James chapter 3 message on taming your tongue. The illustration was the bit in the horse’s mouth—something the kids now understood. What Danny Wix didn’t know was that was the very message Tommy had planned to deliver to them, Bruce says.
For Nally, the takeaways from the trail ride are many: “Honoring what God started in somebody else’s heart.”
“It’s not our church; it’s not my town,” Nally says. “But that didn’t mean we couldn’t be hands and feet to help another church that’s hurting. We as the Body of Christ need to do that, not just in times of grief and disaster, but at all times.”
As youth pastor, Bruce herself felt blessed on the receiving end of their help. “Jesus said they’d know us by our love,” she says. “It just really felt like a bunch of people loving us that day.”
