By CAROL STUART
For Brentwood Home Page
Mike Glenn says he's pastored probably "three or four different churches" in his 20 years shepherding the Brentwood Baptist Church congregation as its senior pastor. When he arrived, things were done more informally than they are these days at the church which grew from a building on Franklin Road to a sprawling campus with multiple buildings on Concord Road at Interstate-65.

But the mission has remained the same – it just has a wider focus and an opportunity to make a bigger impact, he said. The church will celebrate Glenn's 20th anniversary on Sunday at Brentwood Baptist, where he continues to help people find their calling, equip them to carry it out, and support them in that purpose.

Brentwood Baptist will celebrate senior pastor Mike Glenn's 20-year ministry at the church on Sunday.

"You usually think in terms of 5- to 10-year chunks,” he said. “I told somebody the other day: You just kept getting up and going to work. There was always something more to do. Before you knew it, 20 years was gone."

One of the things Glenn is proud of when he recalls his two decades at Brentwood Baptist is something symbolic: placing the cross in the steeple of the new sanctuary building.

"You know, not many people get to do that. That cross is 9 feet high, 6 feet wide, and 175 feet, 4 inches high. And when you're up there it looks a lot higher than that," he said, laughing.

And yes, it did stir the emotions of what it might have been like for a battered and beaten Jesus carrying the cross to his crucifixion.

"It does cross your mind. It became a deeply moving moment," Glenn said.

Glenn also thinks about his and wife Jeannie’s twin sons, Craig and Chris, growing up in the only church body they’ve known – from second-graders to now married 27-year-olds. And he takes pride in mentoring pastors such as Jay Strother, now at the Station Hill satellite church in Thompsons Station/Spring Hill.

“There’s one thing to celebrate you’ve been somewhere 20 years; it’s another thing to celebrate 20 years and still be excited about the future,” Glenn said. “In a lot of ways, the first 20 years has been focused on building the foundation so we can get to the some of the things that we know God has been wanting this church to do, like starting the other churches.”

Always knew he'd be a pastor 

Growing up 1½ hours away in Huntsville, Ala., Glenn said he has “always known” he wanted to be a pastor. He says he was like someone who said they had a “drug problem – I was drug to church on Sunday, I was drug to church on Wednesday.”  He remembers his dad sitting in a chair with his bible open preparing a Sunday school lesson, and his mom often playing hymns and gospel songs on the piano. He said he was even taken off the ball field to go to church.

Glenn said he learned about business from working at his father’s television-appliance shop and how to work within the system from his dad’s involvement in city politics. Plus, his mom was “an extraordinary strong lady.”

Glenn, who grew up in a strong Christian home, always knew he'd be a pastor.

He professed his faith in Christ at age 7 and told everyone in high school he was going to be a pastor.

“Funny thing about it, everybody knew it,” Glenn said. “ ‘OK, I’m going to do this.’ ‘Well, sure you are. We’ve known that about you for a long time.’ ”

Before going to seminary, Glenn majored in speech and drama, which was supposed to help with preaching. But he says it actually helps with pastoral care, “because you can keep a straight face no matter what anybody’s telling you.”

He admits that there are a lot of details to the worship experience now at today’s church, and he credits the team around him.

“There are things that you have to be sure don't get in the way that hinder people from listening,” Glenn said. “A bad sound system keeps people from listening. A cluttered stage keeps people from paying attention. Those are the kinds of things that everybody goes, 'Ah, you shouldn't be worried about that, you should just be worried about the spiritual aspect of it.'

“Well, fact of the matter is, people are people, and if there's a fly in the room, they're going to watch the fly, not you,” Glenn said.

He plans his sermons a year in advance around a title and scripture, and then the staff wanted to know how he’d interpret the passage. So it became “annotated” with a paragraph summary – and before long someone wanted it 18 months out due to the website and other support details.

 “This church has grown so exponentially under his leadership but that’s in large measure due to his ability to continue to morph, reinvent and adapt himself; re-priortize his time; and rethink the things that he values,” said Jim Baker, executive pastor for eight years. “And not everybody is able to do that. Many people that can grow something initially can't sustain it.”

Baker describes Glenn as vulnerable, transparent and authentic, which “draw people to him.” He also said Glenn is “relentless” in his focus  of “praying, preaching and teaching,” but still shepherds the church in a remarkable way.

“I’ve never served with anyone who knows his people better. It’s astounding when you consider the thousands and thousands, not just members, of people come in these doors, and he knows names and faces and life situations and that informs his preaching, it informs his teaching. It’s a remarkable gift.”

'This is the coolest church around'

Glenn followed the church’s founding pastor Bill Wilson at Brentwood Baptist – and Wilson came back and served on staff with Glenn. And that’s part of what makes the congregation unique, he says: “That never happens in a church.”

“This is the coolest church around, and a lot of people think it's me or whatever, and it's not. It's the church,” Glenn said. “This church has a real strong sense of who it is, and who it's not. And because of that, we don't waste a whole lot of time. I know what they'll do, I know what they won't do, they know who I am, they know what I'm about.”

Brentwood Baptist's first building was at 409 Franklin Road, now Otter Creek Church.

Under Glenn’s pastorship, Brentwood Baptist has launched a number of programs and ministries, including a Hispanic church, a Chinese church and a deaf church – all meeting on the campus. Another successful outreach has been the creation of a Kairos worship service on Tuesday nights aimed at young adults.

“When you've been here long enough, a lot of these kids grow up and they were in their careers now, and they were vice president of this and that. They came to me and said we have a vision for reaching the people in our age group. There's nobody in town doing anything for our age group,” Glenn recalled.

The idea had been well-thought out and there was a PowerPoint presentation, but Glenn said he told them he didn’t have time to do it.

“Well, that was 8 years ago,” said Glenn, who delivers the weekly message at Kairos, where more than 1,000 now attend.

“We've never done any type of advertising for that, it's simply word of mouth, and it's friends bringing friends. When a young person, just out of college, shows up on a Tuesday night, they're showing up because they want to be there. And they're serious about what they're there for. So there's kind of a rawness to it, a freshness to it. Nobody's pretending, everybody's trying to deal with reality. And that's a lot of fun, a good place to be.”

Glenn says there’s an appreciation for and understanding at the church that “God has brought you to this place for a reason. So let's help you find a reason, let's help you get engaged in the mission that God wants you to do. And that has been the fun for us – watching people grab hold of their identity in Christ and share that in missions.”

Brentwood Baptist has the opportunity to make an impact on not just a few but on “tens and hundreds and thousands,” he said. There are gifted and talented people in the congregation who are No. 2 or 3 in the nation in doing certain things, Glenn added, and when asked they step up to the plate.

“Then they'll grab hold of it and blow by it so fast, and do it so much better than you would have done that,” he said.

An example is the overseer of the Concord Road building plans, Joe Hudson, who retired from building Ford plants. Now more than a decade later, Hudson is still managing things, Glenn said.

The master plan has been built out but the church has 16 acres in back that might become ball fields, Glenn said. The next step is to start other churches around Middle Tennessee, and the church’s location at an I-65 exit gives it reach all over Williamson and Davidson counties, he said.

People's problems haven't exactly changed 

When he became pastor at a much-smaller Brentwood Baptist, decisions were made over coffee in the hallway or handshakes among friends, he said. During the 20 years, membership has grown from 900 to more than 7,000.

“When you stay at a church like this and go through the transitions we have, you end up pastoring three or four different churches at the same address,” Glenn said. “The church that I came to was very, very different from the church that I pastor now.”

The church moved into its sanctuary on the new campus at 7777 Concord Road in 2002.

Decisions are more complicated and complex now, he said, and a person walking in the door may not know where to go next. The church changed its governing structure several years ago, including adding Baker’s position to manage day-to-day operations so Glenn could concentrate on preaching, teaching and mentoring.

But the church is still as mission-oriented. “The DNA hasn't changed. The way the DNA is expressed and seen has changed. It's much more world-focused and rather than what can you drive to in a day kind of focus. And the church has the strength and the opportunity to make some impact,” he said.

Glenn said people’s problems haven’t changed over the 20 years, either, but he says “the speed of the problems have changed.”

“What I used to see young people deal with at 15-16, now they deal with at 12. What they used to deal with at 40, now they deal with at 25,” the pastor said. “The problem is that they haven’t the maturity or capacity yet to deal with those type things, so we’ve got kind of a double-edged boom sword of things coming at them faster than they’re able to handle them, and they’re not growing up as fast.”

His dad was a man at 14, he was a man at 21, and now 30 is the age of maturity, he said.

Glenn also said problems used to be on the other side of town and it was an adventure to try to get there and come back without getting caught. “Now, with a couple of keystrokes, a lot of that stuff comes into your house.”

The pastor says that the culture today, such as television, music and video games, constantly chips away at self-esteem and self-worth.

“They used to talk about the culture being anti-God; now I’m convinced that the culture is more anti-human,” he said. “… Our culture seems to enjoy in destroying lives.

“All of the shows are ‘How can we put people in embarrassing situations so we can talk about them the next day?’ ”

And although Williamson County is a place many people move to for quality of life, Glenn says that as chaplain for the city's fire and police departments he sees that Brentwood isn’t immune to today’s problems – “You  find out what you used to think was far away is not that far away.”

“People are still people, and they make the same mistakes and they do the same kinds of things that people do anywhere,” Glenn said. “Now, they’re a little more sophisticated in how to deal with it, they’re a little faster to cover it up.”

The pastor also said Christians have “an obligation to the kingdom” to help changes other people’s situations and circumstances for the better. And he sees those actions being fulfilled by Brentwood Baptist members near and far away – including with a job training program in South Africa.

“Sometimes you walk in and you look around and you hear some of the things that the folks are doing, and you realize that God could have sent a lot of people here, but in his goodness, he sent me,” Glenn said. “And I’m just very grateful.”