When Michael Lindsay left Starkville High School about a decade-and-a-half ago, he was destined for big things on the soccer field.
A Division I career was a certainty.
A professional career? It seemed very possible at the time, although the Indianola First United Methodist Church pastor kind of scoffs at the notion these days.
“I knew that I wanted to play after high school,” Lindsay said during an interview with The Enterprise-Tocsin. “I wanted to play in college. I started getting recruited. I went on a few visits, and I wound up committing to and playing for the University of South Carolina.”
Long before Lindsay occupied the sanctuary of FUMC, a call that came last spring, his sanctuary was the soccer field.
He played soccer from a very early age, eventually competing on a travel team out of Tupelo.
His parents, of course, were supportive of his athletic dreams.
Lindsay’s father was tall, very athletic and had even played collegiate basketball. He wasn’t much of a soccer fan, that is until his son started playing.
“He fell in love with the game of soccer the more I played it,” Lindsay said.
That entire world came crashing down when Lindsay was in high school.
“My father was diagnosed with multiple myeloma cancer when I was 15,” Lindsay said. “A year after he was diagnosed, he passed away.”
Lindsay said that his parents had both been faithful Christians, and they had raised him and his sister in the church.
But as he dealt with pain from his father’s passing, Lindsay said he veered away from the church and used soccer as his way to escape the world around him.
“The soccer field was kind of like my sanctuary,” Lindsay said. “When I was on the soccer field, even if I was just playing pickup with some friends, it was kind of like my problems or depression or anxiety just kind of went away. It was certainly an escape for me, even after college.”
Lindsay finished out a stellar high school career, and he followed that with four seasons at South Carolina. Even into his senior season, he thought he might have been on a professional tract.
“I never got to find out,” Lindsay said. “Five or six games into my senior season, I broke my nose, dislocated my ankle and broke my leg all in one play.”
After the season-ending injury, Lindsay graduated with a double major in marketing and management.
Without many prospects, Lindsay returned home to Mississippi, where he earned a license to sell insurance.
He likely could have made a career selling policies, but he did not have the fire and passion he often felt when he was on the soccer field.
As God has a way of doing, though, Lindsay’s brush with the insurance business may very well have been the start to his return to his faith and his life as a minister.
Lindsay said that he entered the insurance business at the same time as a Baptist minister named Gary. Gary was much older, but they were both novices in the industry.
As part of their training, they had to conduct roleplaying exercises.
“He would ask me about my family and needs,” Lindsay said. “The pastor kind of started coming out in him when he asked me those questions.”
When Gary asked him about church and his spiritual walk, it struck a nerve.
Lindsay said he made it very clear to Gary that he did not want to talk about his faith.
“He backed away,” Lindsay said. “He was a kind man.”
A couple months passed, and Lindsay ran into Gary at a convention in Jackson. Gary approached him again.
“He said, ‘The Lord has been tugging at my heart, asking me to come and pray for you in person. I just couldn’t shake it. Do you mind if I pray for you?’” Lindsay recalled. “I don’t even remember what he prayed, but it was then that something kind of broke. I had to drive back to Starkville, and on the way back, I cried — all the way back to Starkville.”
It wasn’t long after that Lindsay left his insurance job altogether — in January of 2014.
The next month his best friend invited him to spend the week with him at Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. His friend was enrolled in seminary classes there.
He drove north, “directionless” in life, and he pulled into his friend’s neighborhood not knowing what to expect.
“I pulled into the neighborhood where my best friend lived, and he was waiting on me outside when I got there,” Lindsay said. “I pulled up, and he came and hopped in the car, and he said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to go to a small group.’”
Without even unloading his suitcase, Lindsay drove to where the small group was being held. It was a group of young men from Mississippi, he said.
“They went around the circle, and they asked how is it with your soul,” Lindsay said.
Just a few months earlier, Lindsay had shied away from talking about his faith with his colleague.
Something was different with this group.
“I hadn’t been a part of a group like this since I was in high school, over seven years,” he said. “So, I get thrust into this place. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Okay, you don’t have to answer.’”
But he did.
“I kind of opened up and shared,” Lindsay said. “I didn’t want to cry, but I did just that, and that was another peeling back of another layer of the onion. Being real with other people, opening up and allowing God to continue the healing process.”
Lindsay would go on to sit in on several of his friend’s classes.
The two even did a fast together that week. His spiritual life did a complete 180.
“By the time I left, I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that was where God was calling me to be,” he said.
Lindsay returned home a changed man.
Not only had he returned to Jesus Christ, but he knew that he was going to become a pastor.
One of the first people he told was his mom.
“That’s what she had been praying for, not necessarily that I would become a preacher, but that I would come back to Jesus,” Lindsay said.
His mom told him about a mission trip to Honduras that was in the works for the following month.
He told her he wanted to go.
The church checked with the travel agent who had booked the flights “There was one seat left on the flight to Honduras, and it was in first class,” Lindsay said. “I flew down to a mission trip to Honduras in first class.”
Better than that, the trip was even more of a confirmation for Lindsay that he was heading in the right direction.
“I ended up staying an extra week with a missionary my mom was friends with,” Lindsay said.
He returned after two weeks, already in the candidacy process, thanks to the support of his home church in Starkville.
He was able to start classes at Asbury the next fall.
During this process, he researched Asbury University, which is a college also located near the seminary. The school had men’s and women’s soccer teams.
“The women’s coach was actually from Mississippi,” Lindsay said.
He sent her an email, offering his services if any positions came available.
And the Lord provided such a position.
“It felt like almost immediately, a job opened up. I got hired on as the assistant women’s soccer coach at Asbury,” Lindsay said.
While at seminary, Lindsay would meet his wife Kaylyn, who at the time was enrolled at the university and also worked there full time.
Lindsay graduated in 2019, and he returned to Mississippi to accept his first appointment as associate pastor at First Methodist Church and Trinity United Methodist Church in Greenville.
The two dated long distance that first year. They became engaged in the summer of 2020, and they were married in January of 2021.
The couple now have an 11-month-old (at the time of this writing), Charlotte “Lottie” Joy Lindsay.
Two days after Lottie was born, Lindsay said he got the call to become the lead pastor at Indianola FUMC.
Lindsay said the following Sunday was emotional, as he had to tell his two churches in Greenville that the family would be moving.
As sad as that day was, Lindsay said he and his family have been overwhelmed by the welcome they have received in Indianola over the past several months, since taking over for Rev. Trey Skaggs and his wife Heather, who was also involved in church leadership.
“One of the things I asked Trey when he was leaving was what are some things we can work on?” Lindsay said. “Not long after his tenure began here, COVID hit. There were some really great plans in place to launch some local ministries.”
Lindsay said that he hopes to build on those plans by strengthening partnerships with local ministries like Delta Grace and Delta Missions.
“I’m kind of envisioning starting up some more structured partnerships with (them). That’s right here in our backyard,” he said.
Lindsay, who admits that he has been more comfortable in a traditional service, said that he is growing a newfound love for contemporary worship thanks to The Vine worship service on Sunday morning.
That is thanks, he said, to church staff members like Michael Davis, Kyle Wilson, Hannah Smith and more.
Lindsay said he hopes adult and children’s ministries grow, but he said any chance he sees to help grow the church’s relationship with its youth, he will take full advantage.
Lindsay hopes FUMC will provide the same foundation in Christ to its youth that he received when he was a child, a foundation that held during tragedy and was still present during a time when God seemed so distant.
The community is blessed with Lindsay and his family because of that foundation.
