Pastor’s family and influence grows during 30-year tenure at local church

by Dan Holland

Pastor Mark Ashley was surprised by his congregation following a Sunday service in March, when they honored him for his 30 years of service at Northfield Baptist Church. The church plans to hold a more formal celebration over the summer.

“I told the congregation that I attribute my longevity – among a number of things – to them as a congregation, their love, their support, their encouragement and their participation,” said Ashley. “All of those things contribute to the longevity of a pastor.”

Mark and wife Debbie first came to the church in 1991, when Mark accepted an assistant pastor’s position under the leadership of longtime pastor Lynn Rogers.

“My predecessor, Lynn Rogers had pastored the church for over 30 years,” he explained. “There was a feeling that they may have been getting ready to look for his successor at that time even though there were no promises made one way or another.”

After serving under Rogers’ tutelage for a few years, Ashley was offered and accepted the lead pastor role upon Rogers’ retirement in January 1994.

The Ashleys, who will celebrate 35 years of marriage this summer, had one young son, Jonathan, when they first came to the church. That was followed by the birth of their second son, Joel, just two months after their arrival. Daughter Jenna was born in 2001. All three children were brought up in the church.

Although in-person gatherings were limited last year due to COVID-19 restrictions, the church did not miss any services as the staff took advantage of online streaming platforms.

“We shut down in-person in March 2020,” Ashley said. “We began livestreaming, and although it was prerecorded, we were still live-hosting. When we began to offer in-person gatherings again in July 2020, we continued to do the prerecorded service and live-hosting. By August, we had enough things in place that we began to livestream, and we’ve been livestreaming ever since.”

Ashley said the church has always strived to make connections within the local community through a number of outreach programs and annual events.

“There’s always been a desire in our church to connect with people in our neighborhood,” he explained. “For years, we did a big event on Memorial Day called ‘Community Day,’ and if the weather was good, we could sometimes get up to 500 people on the lawn. That was really just trying to establish some connection with people and making a positive contribution to our community.”

Despite a global pandemic and other recent challenges, Ashley is optimistic about the future of the ministry.

“As I look to the future, there are a lot of things that I believe are changing on the church landscape as a whole in our nation, and it’s going to impact on the local levels,” he explained. “We’re trying to position ourselves to be a church that can continue to minister effectively and have a presence that hopefully blesses our community. We are a church that is very much committed to doing the best we can to give people God’s word and to let people know that they are loved.” ∞