Years ago, Chad Watson was standing outside a club with his band before going on stage when a stranger walked up and started condemning him.
“That’s fire,” she said to him, pointing to the flame tattoos on his arms. “You’re going to hell. That represents the devil. You’re evil. You’re wicked.”
Chad admits his shaved head and tattoos can make him look intimidating, but experiences like that drove him away from church when he was 15 years old and kept him away for 35 years.
“The only time I went was to see my wife Courtney sing, when someone got married or someone died,” Chad said. “That was it. You wouldn’t get me to church. I didn’t care about it, didn’t like it, didn’t like to hear about it, didn’t want to be around it.”
But about a year ago, things began to change for the self-professed agnostic.
While working a job in Massachusetts that kept him away from his home and wife Courtney in Georgia, Chad began to feel unsettled. The job wasn’t working out, and he began feeling an unexplainable nudge to attend church.
So when he came back home, he suggested to Courtney that they check out Grace & Purpose. Courtney knew pastors Travis and Tina Hall from her time at Life Church International before COVID.
When they arrived on their first Sunday, Chad had encounters of God’s grace he wasn’t expecting.
“I immediately got hugged before I even got inside the building,” he said. “And then I got hugged again when I was inside the building, I’m like, ‘What’s going on here?’ It just made me feel at ease.”
That morning, Pastor Travis spoke about being the one reaching someone who needs Jesus, teaching on the Parable of the Lost Coin from Luke 15:8-10. The words echoed the welcome Chad had just experienced.
“We have to love people as they are so they’ll discover how good Jesus is,” Pastor Travis said during the sermon.
Chad knew they’d found a place where the actions matched the message.
“And we’ve just been coming ever since,” Chad said, “building friendships and relationships and just feeling the acceptance that I had never felt before.”
In the past year, the sermons, Bible study and conversations have slowly begun to chip away at the wall Chad put up over the years. He’s in “discovery mode” he said, but after 35 years, he’s coming around to the truth of God’s grace more clearly.
“You’re never too broken,” Chad said. “I thought that I would die an agnostic, and I feel like this journey that I’m on means that I won’t.”
Courtney has been on her own faith journey. She grew up in church and professed her faith at a young age, but under pressure from her parents.
“I didn’t really understand what was going on,” she said.
At home, she watched her parents fight constantly, while at church they put on a facade of happiness.
“My background was, if that’s the way a Christian marriage is supposed to be, I don’t want anything to do with it,” Courtney said. “I kind of started just to write off Christianity altogether when I was younger.”
Still, Courtney continued attending church — even singing on stage during worship. But she struggled to connect, too often finding that others would shun those who were imperfect or looked different.
Grace & Purpose has helped shift that view. She’s found genuine acceptance and love from others, and has learned that “it’s not Jesus who causes hurt, it’s people, and people are the ones who need the help,” she said.
“We’re all going to be in heaven one day and just loving each other, and that’s the way any church should be,” Courtney said.
A verse that has resonated with her through this experience is 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”
For her, it’s God’s grace on display in her life. It’s a promise that He loves and accepts her, no matter her past.
She’s even planning on getting a tattoo on her arm to symbolize it: a butterfly, representing a new creation in Christ.
It’s a symbol she hopes someone notices — and asks her about.