Darin Wood follows winding road to pastorate in Midland with key stops at Southwestern

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Southwestern News.

Darin Wood’s (’93, ’06) first memories of visiting the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary campus are as a five-year-old, cutting across the Student Village Apartment complex with his grandmother while walking to worship at Gambrell Street Baptist Church. Those first treks across campus came full circle when Wood later attended and graduated from Southwestern, and in June 2024, was named a distinguished alumnus of the institution.

Wood’s life, starting as a young boy and continuing throughout his ministry including his current pastoral ministry at First Baptist Church in Midland, has been closely connected with Southwestern Seminary on so many stops along the way.

Wood says his grandmother treasured the opportunity to live so close to campus and was respectful of the professors who attended her church. Her proudest moment was when Wood enrolled at the seminary, though she did not live long enough to see him graduate.

Wood said he was humbled and felt like he had done little to earn it when he was named one of the recipients of the distinguished alumni award for 2024, but he felt honored to receive it specifically for his grandmother and mother, who had also previously passed away but supported him on his journey.

“I’m just a pastor,” he says, expressing his gratitude for the opportunity to serve at First Baptist Church of Midland, a church with a historical partnership with Southwestern. “I regard myself as a shepherd, and it just so happens that I serve this church.”

The path that eventually led Wood’s family to Midland in 2016 was one that traveled all over the state of Texas, as he sought out what God’s calling in his life meant.

“When I was 15, I felt like God was calling me to ministry,” Wood said. “And didn’t really understand all that that meant, but just said, ‘Okay, Lord, whatever you have in mind, I’m willing.’”

Wood went to Dallas Baptist University for his undergraduate degree, and when a scholarship was given to him, he returned to what he calls home to get his Master of Divinity at Southwestern.

“My parents were thrilled, and so coming to Southwestern just seemed natural,” Wood said, adding even today his father and his sister both still live near the seminary, his father having worked at the Bruce Lowrie Chevrolet for 35 years. “It’s very much like home.”

Wood says his time at Southwestern, starting in 1990, was transformational as he studied under professors such as Bill Toler, Tommy Lee, Earl Ellis, Grant Lovejoy, and James Leo Garrett, who Wood says taught the first class he had to record because he could not take notes quickly enough. Each one was a treasure to the school and himself in different ways, Wood says.

“The men who invested in me in that time period, while I was a master’s student, they awakened something in me that I didn’t know existed,” Wood said. “And really helped me understand my role and my calling in a new way. … In so many ways I’m a better man, a better pastor, better husband, better father for the example they left.”

He credits Bruce Corley with convincing him to continue his education with doctoral work. Wood had a proclivity toward Greek at that time, and said Corley approached him one day after class to ask about when he had completed a recent assignment. Wood answered that he had done it during the eighth inning of the baseball game the evening before—his way of expressing how little effort and thought it had required.

“He saw right through that,” Wood said. “And he said, ‘Listen, if you ever decide to get serious about being a scholar, will you just call me? Because I don’t think you are right now.’”

Years later, Wood would ask Corley to be his reference for the doctoral program, and he was.

Prior to beginning his Doctor of Philosophy, after completing his MDiv in 1993, Wood worked for the Baptist General Convention of Texas offices and then served as a youth pastor at Immanuel Baptist Church in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

After a couple years in Oklahoma, Wood returned to Southwestern to begin working toward his doctoral degree in the fall of 1999. During his first semester in the PhD program, Wood’s father-in-law, a director of missions, informed him that he knew of a small church in Corsicana looking for a preacher and a pianist temporarily until they filled those positions, and he believed Wood and his wife, Julie, a Southwestern alumna with a Master of Arts in Religious Education, could assist.

Wood took that interim position, saying he believed it would only be for a few weeks while he continued pursuing his degree. His plan had been to teach. Wood even recalls a preaching class where he did his best not to sound like a preacher. But that first pastorate lasted for eight years and steered him and his family in a new direction.

“We’d been there a couple of years when Julie said to me, ‘You know, Darin, it seems God has called you to pastor, and you’re the only one who doesn’t know it,’” Wood says of that time. “I really wanted to teach, and still probably will one of these days, but it was clear to me that pastoral life was a fit for who I am, and God shaped me this way.”

At that time, Wood says he was not looking for a job and the church was not actively looking for a pastor, but Wood believes God drew them together and says he still considers his time at the 25-member church some of his best pastoral work as they loved and served each other selflessly, with the church paying for his tuition, though they could offer him little else.

But while that tuition payment and the close relationship with the small church was a precious time for Wood and his wife, eventually they recognized that the side jobs they had been working, including teaching and coaching in the community, were not enough to support them for the long term.

This led them to an East Texas church where Wood faced a number of challenges and strife in a congregation, which resulted in him again questioning whether he should continue pastoring. At one of those moments of doubt, Wood says he had a moment where he experienced direct encouragement from God.

“I sat up in bed and was getting ready for the day, and just felt like God whispered into my heart, ‘You were made for this,’” Wood says, remembering that he glanced around to see if it was his wife speaking to him. “… I was like, ‘What? What is it that you’re trying to say to me, God?’ And I just felt like the Lord said, ‘This is what you were created for. So don’t look back over your shoulder. Don’t look around. Look ahead.’”

That moment of affirmation gave him the strength to persevere through difficult trials that he faced during his two years at that church.

What followed was again a time of encouragement at a church in Jacksonville, Texas. There Wood’s son Joshua was born, and Wood was heavily involved in the community, not just as pastor of their church, but also president of the rotary board, member of the board of directors for the chamber of commerce, and member of different committees at the local school district.

But once again, in early 2016, Wood felt God pulling him to a different place of service, this time in Midland, Texas. Wood admits Midland is an acquired taste for some. And again, Wood wondered if he had left a good situation to go to a difficult one, as the community in Midland had just come off a difficult year for the oil market, which dictates the success or failure of the area as the producer of more than 40 percent of the United States’ oil and gas supply.

“Goodness gracious, it was tough” Wood said. “And there were a couple of days I was like, ‘You know, I wonder if we could go home to East Texas. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.’ But there were opportunities for us to change and move and grow, and indeed, we did.”

Despite the initial hardship of the boom-or-bust nature of the city, Wood and his family soon discovered First Baptist Church of Midland is a generous congregation with a mission-minded focus that stretches back decades.

“It’s like God said, ‘Hey, we’re not going to put anything above the ground that’s going to be worth seeing,’” Wood says of the barren, oil country in West Texas. “‘So we’re going to put a beautiful spirit in the people who live there. And this generous, loving, missions-minded people will be what I use to accomplish My purposes in so many other places.’”

Already, during the almost nine years Wood has served there as pastor, his family has witnessed the community go through two booms and two busts and seen the city’s economy swing from there not being space available in any hotels or restaurants to the devastating impact a bust has on morale and financial stability for families and businesses.

But despite that fluctuation, Wood says the economy provides a great opportunity for churches to touch the world when they come to them for oil. The Midland/Odessa area also has more non-profit organizations per-capita than anywhere else in the nation, he says.

“Part of it is there’s money here, but another part of it is there’s generous people here who love missions, who love Jesus, who want to be active in the kingdom of God,” Wood says. “… Because of some of the generosity of the people who live in this community and the opportunities God has given us, it gives us the chance to use that missions heart in some really bold ways.”

Wood says FBC Midland gives generously to the Cooperative Program, but is also involved in about 80 other partnerships with nonprofit organizations and ministries such as a seminary in Mexico, orphanage in Kenya, schools and other projects in Uganda and Ethiopia, and ministries in the Middle East and East Asia that Wood, which require careful partnership due to security concerns in those countries.

About 20 of those 80 ministries are local to the Midland and Odessa area, including a crisis center, soup kitchen, food bank, and a crisis pregnancy center. Since the 1980s, the congregation also has partnered with the North American Mission Board SEND initiative in Toronto, planting about 40 churches in that area. That effort started even before SEND existed, when a deacon of the church frequently did business in Toronto and used that as an opportunity to share the Gospel and plant a church, which has since multiplied in partnership with NAMB.

Since the early 1950s, the church has also been a financial blessing to others through the Noble Scholarship Fund, a trust established by the Noble family when they found themselves experiencing great financial success because of their oil and gas wells and decided to use that money, through the guidance of the church, to help others. Due to the instability in the oil market, that fund has waxed and waned over the decades, but Wood says just before his family arrived at the church, those wells had begun to generate revenue once again and the church decided to grow its partnership with Southwestern specifically and increase their support in local and international missions and ministries.

“That gave us a chance, in the time that I’ve been here, to reevaluate and say, you know, the Lord offers no rewards for arriving home in heaven with a full bank account,” Wood says. “So we don’t regard those funds as ours. They are the Lord’s money, and we will be held accountable for how they’re spent.”

Wood says this year, the church has begun to focus some of those efforts on the Midland area. That area of Texas did not have a Baptist association that could work with the area churches and partner them together, so FBC Midland launched one, funding a director and providing an office on its campus, though the director does not work for the church but for all churches in their new West Texas association.

“That’s really exciting to me personally, and I’m really hopeful for next steps,” Wood says of this new partnership with the Baptist association and area churches. “So it’s a real opportunity for us to embrace God’s calling to reach our Jerusalem, and we intend to.”

In the last few years, Wood says the church through that Noble trust and the trustees overseeing it, became more aggressive in partnering with Southwestern, specifically with President David S. Dockery. Today, Wood says the congregation sponsors approximately 55 students according to their needs.

Wood says the church is honored to send not just money and students through scholarships to Southwestern, but also some of the church’s own members who are enrolled at Southwestern as students.

“It’s a reflection on the long relationship that Southwestern and my church have enjoyed,” Wood says of that partnership, mentioning that the brother of Southwestern’s second president, L.R. Scarborough, was once a member of their church. “… We love Southwestern and what God is doing there and we’re looking forward to how God will use the partnership that we have.”

Darin Wood’s sometimes circuitous ministry route to Midland began as boy being led by his grandmother across the Southwestern Seminary campus—the place he considers home—and continues today as a seasoned pastor of First Baptist Midland, which he gratefully leads to love and support future ministers of the Gospel studying on Seminary Hill.

Michelle Workman is the managing editor for Southwestern News.