BOXING MATCHES CAN HAPPEN REALLY FAST, SOMETIMES TOO FAST. Mike Tyson was known for knocking out his opponents in the first few rounds of the fight. Sometimes it would be in the first few minutes of the first round. Fans would pay all kinds of money to watch this live or on Pay-Per-View, but it was worth it even when it seemed to go too fast. Why? Because the explosiveness and intensity in a moment can electrify memories for a long time. 

I have mentored a young boxer in Kansas City for the past 4 years. We have spent a lot of time together, talking about life and about Jesus a lot. He’s flown to conferences and speaking engagements with me in between his training. He’s shared meals with our family. My kids were with him the first time he stepped into the Pacific ocean. I was there when his daughter was born 3 months premature and saw him hold her for the first time out of the incubator. We’ve shared a lot of life together. 

I’ve encouraged Chris in his amateur boxing career and in his pursuit of pro fights. Stephanie and I attended most of his amateur fights and I’ve walked with him through the difficulties and nuances of trying to get a pro fight schedule. The boxing business is shady to say the least and so many bouts get scheduled and then canceled later. It’s hard for a fighter to spend months training for a fight only to get let down by the lack of an opponent. This is what made the night of Chris’s first fight so electrifying. It was preceded by years of waiting and let downs. 

The night of his first professional fight went by so fast. It was at a casino in the middle of Kansas and there were a lot more people in attendance compared to his local amateur fights in KC. In the locker room, his head bobbed to the music playing in his earphones while his trainer Alex wrapped his hands. He was nervous but confident. Alex told him to not use all his energy in the first round, but Chris told both of us that he would get at least a Technical Knockout (TKO) and end the fight in the first round. 

I was eager to assist in his corner during the fight. It was my job to throw the stool in the ring for him to sit on in between rounds and to give him water when he was thirsty. His whole family was present. Right before we went out to the ring, we talked about how long he had waited for this moment and how he wanted to represent his daughter, his family, and his city in this fight. 

THE FIGHT DIDN’T LAST 30 SECONDS. All the joy, anger, frustrations, training days, wins, losses, and let-downs welled up from deep within Chris and exploded on his opponent. In the first five seconds the other guy was on the ground after he caught three of Chris’s punches. He tried to get away from Chris but was caught with another. Finally he got stuck in the corner where Chris hit him repeatedly with left hooks to his ribs and to the head. The ref had seen enough in only 29 seconds and jumped in front of Chris to stop the fight. (watch the fight here)

As a professional sports chaplain I see a lot of things. I get to watch the Kansas City Chiefs outperform people all the time. But Chris’ performance made my jaw drop. Literally. I was embarrassed when I realized that I was standing next to the ring with my mouth open while I was holding the stool and the water bottle. I was dumbfounded with my mouth wide-open. 

The reason why I explain this to you is because this is how life has felt for our family. A lot of things have happened really fast for our family in the last 18 months and I want you to hear our hearts and be caught up to speed. At times we have felt like Chris’ opponent, catching painful punches that we can’t respond to. At other times we feel like Chris, experiencing victory that is rooted in a lifetime of prayers, and work and hopes and dreams. 

Here are a few huge things that have happened in our lives since late 2016.

• I left the Fellowship of Christian Athletes to become a pastor at a Church in the middle of the city of Kansas City. 

• After leading as a part of this pastoral team for 2 years, God was revealing deep desires for inner city ministry and revealed a call for me to plant a Church in the inner city. (November, 2018)

• We stepped towards an indefinite period of time for preparation, discovery, and assessment in order to eventually plant a Church on the Eastside of Kansas City. (January, 2019)

• We sold our house in Brookside to move to the East Side of Kansas City. (March- May 2019)

• I transitioned off of our Church staff to work for an inner city ministry and to work towards starting a boxing gym to serve our new neighborhood. (August 2019)

That’s the 29 second version. It felt as fast to us as it took you to read it but let me slow things down in order to catch you up. 

When we moved to KC in 2011 we sold our house in Illinois and quickly bought a beautiful home in Brookside. For those of you who are not familiar with KC, this is a nice part of the city. The homes are old, the trees are big, and the coveted Plaza shopping district is close. We felt so loved by God that He gave us such a beautiful house. We only had 2 toddlers and were so excited to fill this house with more kids. The house had a row of huge windows in the back of the house that filled rooms with tons of natural light. The hard-wood floors were pristine, the kitchen was huge and updated. It was so easy to host big family gatherings and be proud of the home that we lived in for 8 years. My career at FCA was on an upward trajectory and we were comfortable in a lot of ways. We added two children to our family while we lived in that house. We all loved our walks in the neighborhood and being able to bike to school or to Whole Foods on the gravel trail that stretched a few miles in each direction from our house. 

While we loved that home and that life-style we always prayed about living in a rougher part of Kansas City. We would talk about doing that “some day.” Sometimes we would even drive around and look at houses in the inner city and talk about making the move. In 2013 we came close. The Hope Center is a powerful ministry in the urban core that serves youth and families in the neighborhood where we would search for homes.

This ministry was intriguing to me and Stephanie because its original founder had a relationship with Lawndale Community Church, the Church I grew up in, and that my dad pastored when I was a kid in Chicago. It was founded on some of the same Christian Community Development principles that my parents instilled in me.

It had an empty house that we thought we might be able to move to in order to be more involved with that part of the city while I was still working for FCA. It didn’t work out and we kept just maintaining our normal life in Brookside. 

By 2016 I was the Fellowship of Christian Athlete’s state director for Missouri and Kansas. It was our 6th year in Kansas City. I was growing professionally but I also felt pulled towards pastoral ministry in an urban context. At an elder retreat in the Fall of 2016 God made it clear that I was to go on staff with the church, Redeemer Fellowship, where we were members since 2011.

My time as the “staff pastor” at Redeemer Fellowship was mainly focused on leading the staff at our main congregation. Our main congregation is in the urban core of the city but we serve mostly suburban people. All the while, the fires in my heart for the inner city continued to burn hot. I was spending a lot of time with boxers that I mentor. I would bring these young men to our Church and they would politely sit and listen but it is too big of a cultural jump for them to consistently attend or get involved in the life of our Church. This was a really frustrating season for me. I spent a lot of energy pursuing people I loved and they didn’t have a place to go to Church with me. At the same time Stephanie and I intensified our prayers and our searching for homes in the inner city.

I was processing a lot during this season. There was a lot of anger inside of me about the racial divides in our country, in Kansas City, and in the Church. I felt like I was being pulled in two directions and being split between two worlds.

There were a lot of feelings that I had about who I was as a man of color in America. Feelings that I realized that I had hidden for the majority of my life. At the same time, I was ministering in dramatically different spaces. On the one hand I would sit in meetings with my Church staff discussing the growth of small groups, Church parking lot volunteers, and coffee volunteers. Then I’d drive across town to support one of my boxers or find one of them sitting at a bus stop frustrated because they didn’t have somewhere to sleep that night. On our yearly pastors’ retreat in the Fall of 2018, I went on a walk with one of our pastors who also owns a coffee shop in Kansas City. He lovingly asked me how I was doing and in roundabout ways challenged me to look deeper into what God had for me vocationally.

Within the next 24 hours of the retreat I was surrounded by brothers praying about me planting a Church on the East side of Kansas City. There were powerful prophetic signs and prayers prayed as we worshipped God together.

This was a life changing weekend for me. I cried my eyes out while we were praying and I felt God’s presence moving in me. 

About 6 weeks after the retreat, my lead pastor and I were wrestling with the specifics of what my role should be at the Church. We knew that it would take at least three years to prepare me to plant a Church and we needed to find an interim role that had flexibility for preparation and that served towards the goals of our Church. I preferred to spend those 3 years of preparation engaged in work in the inner city in order to build relationships and understand the neighborhood. I didn’t know how to fit those desires into staff scenarios that we were trying to make work. The geography didn’t work. The mission didn’t work. It was a frustrating process but it was a time when Jesus was really close to me and speaking to me in profound ways. Around the same time, Stephanie and I found a home to buy. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn't as nice or as grand as our Brookside house but we felt that we should purchase it. 

Over the course of 2-3 months we bought a new house, prepped our old house to sell and then moved after it sold. We moved out of our dream house, and moved into our new house. We all cried a lot. We walked through our house in Brookside and cried in every room as we stopped in each room to share memories as a family. It was hard. It got even harder on our first night in the new house when Stephanie took a shower. While she was in the shower I suddenly heard water draining downstairs. I went downstairs to find water pouring into our living room through the light fixture. We cleaned up all the water and I fell asleep that night holding her as she cried out her grief. The next day, we cleaned up more water, threw out a rug and a plumber quickly fixed what was only a minor issue. It was our baptism into God’s new life for us. We have to trust Him everyday.  We trust Him every night when we fall asleep hearing gunshots that are too close to our house to ignore.

Our new house happens to be across the street from The Hope Center- the ministry that I referenced earlier that had a vacant house we had considered living in. We visited that house in 2013 but now the ministry uses that house as its office building. A few weeks after the move, I began to feel that God was going to provide an opportunity for me to give myself vocationally to something in our new neighborhood. So we prayed. I walked through the neighborhood a lot and prayed. On one of my walks, God told me what to do in a clear way. He told me to work at The Hope Center and to start a neighborhood boxing gym. After hearing this I didn’t have the courage to share this with anyone. I only wrote it in my journal. 

The next week we decided that I would start a transition process off of our Church staff. From that point I had about 4 months left at the Church to figure out what my next steps would be. God told me what to do but I didn’t know how to start a boxing gym and I didn’t know if the Hope Center had any job openings or even wanted me to be a part of their ministry.  We took the next few weeks to pray more and I put most of my vocational focus on plans towards starting a boxing gym. 

A few weeks later I walked across the street to meet with the CEO of The Hope Center, Marvin Daniels, to ask him about using one of the ministry’s facilities to start the boxing gym. He told me that they would be happy to help. Then the conversation took a jaw dropping turn. He told me that they had a job opening that he had been praying that I would take. His board met a few months prior to my meeting with him and they decided to hire a Chief Operating Officer to assist Marvin with the leadership of the ministry. On the day that we met he didn’t even know that I was leaving my job at the Church. After two more weeks of prayer Stephanie and I decided that I should accept the position. 

Now we live in a house that is directly across the street from the vacant house that we prayed about moving into in 2013. You can’t make this stuff up. We bought our house before we knew about the job, and we knew about the job before we knew about the opening. It’s mind boggling to even type this out. 

This has been a fun year for us as a family. At this point we are settled and content. We go to the same Church, Redeemer Fellowship, that we have been in since 2011 where I am still an elder. We are continuing to prepare our hearts to plant a Church in this neighborhood in God’s time, but we are not in a rush. God has lined up a great opportunity for us to do ministry in this context in order to build genuine relationships with families and the youth that we serve at The Hope Center and through the sport of boxing. While we are eager to open a gym in the neighborhood, Chris is already teaching youth at a location a few blocks away. Once we open a physical location in the neighborhood, Chris will be our head coach. You can see some of the impact here at this link.

Also, I’m still serving as the chaplain for the Kansas City Chiefs. Stephanie ministers with me in deep ways with the Chiefs’ wives and girlfriends. Serving as the chaplain has made the last 3 years really fun and I’d like to tell you more about that later. Especially the part about when we went down to Florida and won a game at the end of this season. Until then, we pray that this story of God’s faithfulness encourages your faith and helps you pray dangerous prayers. We believe that God is doing a great work in our world and we want to see revival in our lifetime.

Marcellus & Stephanie Casey
3133 Benton BLVD
Kansas City, MO 64128

Psalm 37:3-5 
Trust Delight Commit