Country preacher Jeremy Farley, author of Hay Bales and Holy Rollers, joins Wayne Shepherd in conversation about his life and testimony. (click for more...)

Website: www.JeremyFarley.com

Jeremy Farley, a pastor from Wytheville, Virginia, and author of the memoir Hay Balers and Holy Rollers. Farley was born to a teenage mother in 1985 after she rejected pressure to have an abortion, and he grew up on his great-grandfather's Virginia farm after being raised partly in West Virginia coal country. His great-grandfather, "the Old Man" (Tom Farley), was a hard, self-made, "black-and-white" man who taught him toughness but dismissed church as being "for weak men." Jeremy had a false conversion as a teen under social pressure at a legalistic Christian school, then genuinely surrendered to Christ in college on October 15, 2004. He describes founding Restoration Church of Wytheville in 2019, which weathered pandemic setbacks (meeting in a cow pasture) before growing into a two-service congregation. The interview's emotional centerpiece is his 2014 hospital-bedside conversation with his dying great-grandfather, where he shared the "Romans Road" gospel passages and learned the old man's own mother had shared the same verses with him as a child before she died — leading the great-grandfather to profess faith in Christ shortly before his death.

NEXT WEEK: Cheryl Tinsley

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