After decades of church ministry, Herringtons support churches through local association

Coming from different religious backgrounds and different parts of the United States, Phil and Anne Herrington met while pursuing degrees at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and have now been serving together in San Diego for more than 30 years.

“I grew up in a very religious home, and yet a lot of chaos and conflict,” Anne described her Catholic upbringing in Ames, Iowa. “I was a God-believer but really that is about as far as it went.”

While in college at Iowa State University, where she was pursuing a bachelor’s degree in childhood development and psychology, a friend of Anne’s that she had run away and partied with during high school told her that she had become a Christian. Anne admitted she was skeptical.

“But God just used that to get me thinking,” she said. “I was seeking, I was struggling inwardly though no one outwardly knew that I was.”

Her junior year of college, Anne approached that friend and asked her to explain what she believed. Using the bridge illustration, she told Anne, “‘You know about God, you don’t have God. And the way to get God is Jesus.’”

That moment led to Anne committing to follow Jesus and making some radical changes as she became involved in the Baptist Student Union and a local church. Other believers she served with noticed her ability to minister to others and encouraged her to pursue preparation for such a call to ministry.

Anne came to Southwestern in 1981 on faith, not knowing anyone and having been a believer for only about a year. On Seminary Hill, she began to build up her knowledge of the Word and the history of the church.

“I was starting from ground zero,” Anne said, admitting some of her Hebrew and Greek courses overwhelmed her initially. “… It was a really good foundation for me to really find out the essentials of the faith. These are major doctrines that we’re not going to budge on.”

She said she also met other women who were students because of a love for Jesus and the Word of God and a desire to impact the world for His Kingdom. Anne said they mentored her and sharpened her through their friendships. She also met Phil early on, as he led a group of new students that she was a part of. Within a few months, they ended up joining Hope Baptist Church individually.

“God is so good to unfold His will,” Anne said of their meeting.

Meanwhile, Phil was saved at a young age, growing up Southern Baptist in Texas, where his father, a Southwestern alumnus, pastored First Baptist Church of Conroe for 18 years, pastoring churches for more than 50 years total.

Phil attended Houston Baptist University, studying Christianity and psychology with a desire to go into counseling. A conversation with his father led him to adjust that plan slightly.

“He said, ‘You know, Phil, if you just become a pastor, you’ll have all the counseling you want,’” Phil described that conversation. “And he was right.”

He came to Southwestern in 1980 to pursue a Master of Divinity, and there God continued to refine his view of the church and ministry, even using the circumstance of breaking his foot outside Fort Worth Hall to bring him to the same church Anne would join.

When Phil told his brother, who had already graduated from Southwestern and was a pastor, about the serious injury, he told Phil that he knew someone who would bring him a meal. That individual invited him to visit Hope Baptist Church.

“When bad things happen, you never know what God’s up to,” Phil said. “God used that broken foot to help me find my wife, but also find a church in the context of seminary that really changed my paradigm of how I would do church.”

Anne said that church is a sending and planting church, which “gave us a heart to want to be starters.”

Phil said he had been discipled well growing up, learning under a youth pastor who had graduated from Southwestern. But both Phil and Anne said their time at Southwestern changed their trajectory as their hearts changed toward ministry and dependence on God for guidance.

“Church planting and evangelism really got on my heart through some of the classes at seminary,” Phil said, pointing to evangelism professors such as Oscar Thompson, Joel Gregory, and Roy Fish who inspired him. “… All of those men really affected me. My dad was very evangelistic as well, and so that sort of defined a little bit of the character of what we would do over the scope of our ministry with evangelism and discipleship.”

Phil said their pastor, Harold Bullock (’77), was also a major influence, leading his field education class and teaching him practical things such as how to baptize a new believer, how to lead the Lord’s Supper, and even business-starting skills that would translate into planting a church.

“It was just extremely helpful to have this rich theological education at Southwestern, coupled with this incredible, application-oriented church,” Phil said.

He said professors such as Jack MacGorman made sure students did not just develop academically during their time at Southwestern, but in their character as Christ-followers as well.

“A lot of times in education, you don’t really get down to character,” Phil said. “There’s a lot of knowledge, there’s lots of skills, there may be a little bit of vision, but not a lot of character development, other than just enduring to the end and graduating. And some of these professors were godly saints and incredible leaders in their own right before the Lord, and the depth of who they were showed through the quality of their instructional ability.”

While still students and single, Phil and Anne went to Jacksonville, Florida, where they participated in a church revitalization effort, helping start small groups in the church and sharing the Gospel in their inner-city area. While it was a good experience, Phil said one of the biggest takeaways for them was getting to take part in that ministry together.

“We had done some ministry together, but out there we were doing ministry together every day,” Phil said. “It was great preparation for marriage and doing church life together.”

Phil graduated in 1983, and they were married a semester before Anne graduated in 1985. But at the time, he said he did not feel ready for a pastorate and instead started a painting and remodeling business.

As they remained in Fort Worth and at their church, Phil began working at Hope Church part time as the minister of evangelism and training. He continued working bi-vocationally for seven years, eventually transitioning to full time, content with serving as an associate pastor. But when the church faced financial struggles as area companies experienced a depression, the church had to let Phil go.

That circumstance was like a diaspora for their family, Phil explained, as they began looking for other opportunities for them to serve at a church outside of Fort Worth, having lived there for about 13 years. They heard of Pathways Church, a six-month-old church plant meeting in a grade school in San Diego that was looking for a pastor.

When they arrived in 1993, they found the original number of 60 people from the mother church who had committed to the plant had dwindled, and many of the people who were visiting were nonbelievers with broken home lives. But those non-Christians who were willing to visit the church meeting in a school became a fruitful ministry.

“We started seeing salvations, baptisms,” Anne said. “People that had had a real negative viewpoint of religion, and yet those were the people that started coming to church.”

Phil described California as a “very lost state.” Having grown up in Texas, he said he was used to churches being easy to find, but in San Diego, a city of 3.3 million people, he said the local association only has about 185 Southern Baptist churches.

Over the next few decades, the church plant grew to about 800 members, moving into a high school and eventually their own renovated store front. And while Phil led the church as senior pastor, Anne served alongside him in a variety of ways.

“Anne has been very integral in our ministry the whole way,” Phil said of his wife through their years of serving together. “She is a very able, ministry-oriented person. Has led women’s ministry, and children’s ministry, and done all kinds of things in the church.”

In 2024, after serving at the same church for more than three decades, Phil took on a new role as the director of missions for the San Diego Southern Baptist Association, meeting with pastors and churches on a regular basis to support them in their ministries.

“All this wisdom, practical wisdom of how we did ministry, lessons learned from mistakes we made and stuff like that, that he’s able to pass on now to these pastors,” Anne described her husband’s new role, laughing as she said that there is no retiring from a life of ministry.

Though he was no longer bearing the responsibility of shepherding a church, Phil said his director of missions role does still carry a weight, making him understand when the apostle Paul spoke of his concern daily for the churches in his letter to the Corinthians.

“I understand that verse a lot better because I have so many churches that I’m concerned about every day, pastors that I need to talk to,” Phil said. “It’s a different kind of weight; it’s a more joyful weight at this point.”

Anne said Phil is regularly praying and seeking God’s counsel on behalf of those churches as he strives to help the pastors be spiritually healthy on a personal level, which then impacts their church. Anne also participates by holding events and meeting with pastors’ wives and female leaders.

Though he visits different churches at times each month, Phil continues to serve in a teaching role at Pathways Church while mentoring the new pastor and was even able to move his association office to the church building. Their grown children are now raising their children in the area, allowing Phil and Anne to visit with them often.

“We’ve been very blessed,” Anne said of their family’s journey to San Diego. “There were definite bumps along the road, but we look back and we’re like, ‘Wow.’”

“We feel like this is definitely our mission field,” Phil said. “Lots of people are leaving California now because of the political climate and the cost [of living]. We just feel like we’re called to stay. This is our home now and we’re not leaving.”