Former Prodigal Returns to Royal Rangers Calling

Ryan Q. West, 43, excelled as a Royal Ranger in his youth, earning top honors in the AG’s flagship program for boys. But while pursuing a successful performing career, he fell into addiction and depression before returning to Christ — and to the ministry that helped form him. Today, he serves as Royal Rangers director for the Kentucky Ministry Network in a full-circle story of waywardness and redemption.

“I loved Royal Rangers growing up,” West says. “I learned about leadership and serving. I made friends. It gave me an identity and a purpose, and I saw Christlikeness modeled in the men around me.”

West’s father served as Royal Rangers commander in their local church, and the younger West earned the gold medal of achievement, the program’s highest accomplishment.

“I was your model Royal Ranger,” West says. “I walked very closely with the Lord all through high school, served in Royal Rangers junior leadership, and was heavily involved in church.”

He also displayed talents for acting, singing, and playing musical instruments which opened doors to musical theater. In his teen years he was heavily involved in the drama department, on the speech team, and in the choir, then attended a well-known university to study classical acting. There, he befriended a girl who was questioning her Christian faith, and West chose to pursue that friendship in spite of the Holy Spirit’s warnings he says.

“That started a 20-year prodigal journey,” he says.

His path initially shone. He was cast in the Chicago company of the Broadway hit, Jersey Boys, because of his ability to sing tight harmonies and play instruments, namely the guitar and mandolin, live on stage. The production became the second-longest-running Broadway show in Chicago history, and at its height West performed in eight shows a week.

“I tell people I know what it’s like to walk out of the stage door and have everyone want your autograph, or to go into a bar and everybody wants to buy you a drink,” he says. “On the outside people would think this guy is doing okay. I’m making $100,000 doing Broadway, traveling all over the place. But on the inside, I was a mess.”

He had begun using drugs and alcohol, and “felt utterly alone,” he says. “Depression and anxiety crept in.”

Eventually, the Jersey Boys run ended and West’s managers and agents dropped him — not least because he began showing up to auditions inebriated and couldn’t remember lines.

“I was waking up in hospitals wondering how I got there” after being pulled over driving high and drunk, he says. “Only by the grace of God I didn’t kill myself or someone else. I was far away from the Lord.”

The path ran low and, at age 35, West returned home to live with his parents. They and an army of friends had been praying for him for years.

“My mom had been given words of knowledge and prophetic words that I would return home and the Lord would use me,” West says. “She hung onto that promise.”

But even while living under their roof, West surreptitiously used substances — until he experienced a supernatural encounter one chilly morning on the way to work. Before leaving the house that day, he stuffed a bottle of mouth wash into his down jacket, intending to drink it for an intoxicating effect. As he headed out, his mother told him, “Son, if you go back out and start living your life the way you were before, and I can’t trust you, it will kill me.”

“I heard in her voice and saw in her countenance that she wasn’t lying,” West says. After twenty years of putting his parents through unwavering heartache, West states, “That hurt me deep.”

As he drove to work, he prayed a desperate prayer, threw the bottle of mouth wash out the window — and then “began to weep uncontrollably,” he says. He describes seeing and hearing a manifestation of God’s presence. “I’ve never had another experience like this of the glory of the Lord,” he recalls.

The next thing he knew, he was in the parking lot at work.

“I knew I had been in the presence of God,” he says. “It wasn’t a program, a pill, or a pastor in a pulpit that saved me. It was the presence of God in my life.”

He never desired to use substances again.

“It’s completely gone,” he says. “There is no sign physically that I ever did any damage to my liver. I was not only spiritually regenerated but I believe I was physically healed, too. I look younger now than I did then.”

Working a full-time forklift job for a home improvement store and coaching gymnastics part-time, he felt the Lord slowly calling him back to ministry — and specifically to Royal Rangers. The leader of his church’s Royal Rangers outpost, who knew West from childhood, asked him to help with the program, then made him outpost coordinator. West resisted further involvement, but one Sunday he was down at the altar when a woman he’d never met and never saw again said she wanted to share with him a message she believed was from the Lord. Her words struck his heart: “I have three words I’m really supposed to tell you: reach, teach and keep. Does that mean anything to you?” she asked.

“I absolutely know what that means,” West replied.

Those were words from the original statement of purpose of Royal Rangers: to reach, teach, and keep boys for Christ. Today, due in part to West’s leadership, the outpost in his church is the largest in Kentucky, averaging 60 boys on Wednesday nights.

Earlier this year, West agreed to head up the program for the entire district.

"Ryan brings strong and freshly energized leadership to the Kentucky Royal Rangers,” says Joseph S. Girdler, superintendent of the Kentucky Assemblies of God. “[His] diverse personal and life experiences coupled with his clear and God-given giftings allow opportunity for life-impacting relationships and inspirational and effective influence with those he ministers to. He exemplifies a disciple who desires to make other disciples."

West believes every boy in every community has the right to hear the gospel and make a decision to accept Christ as his Savior.

“Men need to catch a vision that if we don’t disciple our young men, someone or something else will,” he says. “We’re in a battle and the enemy is trying to undermine what biblical manhood is.”

In 2020, West married a girl from his childhood church, and they have a young son. West’s mother continues to co-lead a women’s prayer group for prodigals, even as her own former prodigal carries the Royal Rangers ministry forward statewide.

TOP IMAGE: Ryan is first from right.