Venture Unfiltered #7: Fight Pastor

Hey, Venture Church. This is Pastor Brandon or PB here. Today we

are filming our Believe seventh podcast. We have not been canceled yet, but

today I am minus my co host, the great legendary bald Tony Matar.

Tony is on vacation. He's either laying on a beach getting pictures with Mickey

Mouse. I don't really know what he's doing, maybe golfing, lying on

his golf score, something like that. But the show must go on without

him. I have special guests today who will introduce in just a moment,

and we also have a special guest next week. I think you're going to

enjoy today's episode. I've been asked several times over the last couple of weeks

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I think my handle is the same, but my handle is at fight Pastor

f I G h T P A s t O R. At fight Pastor.

You're you're probably wondering why my handle is at Fight Pass Raiders Roll.

It's one of the number one questions that I get asked. We do this

thing at the church called Discover one oh one That is our internal language external

language. It's called Dinner with the Pastor. So whenever anyone's new to the

church, we invite them to dinner with dian I and we host this incredible

dinner at the church. In fact, we have one this Sunday night,

and there's usually anywhere from thirty to fifty new people checking out the church.

They want to hear about the history, vision, mission values of the church,

and then we open up the opportunity for them to ask questions. And

the number one question that I always get asked every time we do Discover is

why is your handle fight Pastor? Or? They said, I heard that

you used to be known as the fight pastor. What is the deal with

fight Pastor? This is not something that I talk about very often. It

really is a season of my life, something that was really fun that I

enjoyed while God opened up that door. But it's not something that I talked

about very often. And I thought, what a great resource for people in

our church if they ever want to know about fight past or they can go

back listen to Venture Unfiltered and hear me and my special guest, my good

friend all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii, Travis Kerwin. Good to be

here. Thank you, Travis. Let's start off right away. What is

your mixed martial art nickname? And why the heck is that a nickname for

you? So? My nickname when I used to fight was Kermit, and

everybody had really cool nicknames. I get the Viking, night Train attack,

Kodiak, you know, Hawaiian punch, one punch whatever, and they called

me Kermit and I was like, well, why did you pick Kermit?

And he goes, I kind of remembers with Kerwin. It's like okay,

so it stuck. So your NI name is Kermit. You and I've known

each other since you were in junior high school? Correct, And you ended

up moving to Hawaii because you and I would travel to Hawaii together a lot,

and I would always dream about planting a church in Hawaii, and I'm

there waiting for you, and one day you just never left Hawaii. What

are you doing in right now in Hawaii? So I'm an EMT and I

work in an ambulance, and I've been doing that for about seven years.

And you're married to a teacher teaches seventh graders and they're awful little people.

Well, we are here and we are going to tell the fight Pastor's story.

That was a crazy season of our life, wasn't it. Let me

Let me start it off by saying the church had been about five years old.

I had been teaching on the foundation of the church is we want to

be missional. So whenever we talk about being missional adventure church, what I'm

trying to help people understand is that where you are is not an accident,

but you and I are to be missionaries in our sphere of influence. That

if God has you at Boeing, if He has you at Microsoft's, he

has you at a hospital as a teacher, it's not an accident that you're

there, but you and I are to be missionaries and our sphere of influence.

And one of my personal mission statements is that I exist to make Jesus

look good that I want to do my best to do that. And so

as I was teaching our church about living missionally, a revelation hit me that

our church had grown to the point where most of my interactions were with other

church people. It's one of the most challenging things that happens when you work

at a church. After a while, you wake up one day and you

look around and think, I'm only hanging out with Christians, And how am

I supposed to practice what I'm preaching about living missionally? Do you relate curly?

Why do I call you curly? Fill them in, somebody, go

get curly some water too, so he doesn't I. So back in nineteen

ninety six, you're the youth pastor, and I was a freshman in high

school and we had a retreat. The guest speaker Roosevelt Hunter, and I

was sitting in the front row freshman is about one hundred and ninety pounds maybe,

and he used me as a sermon illustration. Who just picked me up

out of my seat, started tossing me around. And then later on in

the sermon he put his hands in my head waiting around. He's like,

oh, I lookt this little curly pumpkin here, and that nickname stuck,

and ever since then, I have called you curly. So, if you're

listening to this podcast and you're thinking, who is this person who is known

as Travis to a civilian, Kermit to MMA people, and Curly to me.

That explains why. So in the middle of all of this, I

thought I wanted to live missionally and I want to do my best to be

an influence in my sphere of influence. And I have always been an enormous

mixed martial arts fan, an enormous UFC fan. In fact, I started

watching UFC all the way back during UFC one, and so I had this

idea, since I'm always getting the pay per view fights, why don't I

invite people to my house to watch the fights. And at this point in

time, while I'm doing this, you are now a missionary in Mexico,

right Yesterly coughing up a lung, right now, tell them what you were

doing in Mexico. So I went to Mexico originally with the youth group,

just as a chaperone, and I just felt really strongly God called me to

just go there for a season, and I went to a Bible school there

and then stayed on for another year working as a missionary, helping you know,

to build churches, schools and houses and stuff, and then leading small

groups. And one day Brandon you know. So I mean an email and

said, hey, we got this fight Pastor thing. We started this blog,

can you write something? And so I was trying to think, you

know, what could I write about? And I just decided to write what

would happen if different characters from the Bible fought each other? So I had

like David versus Goliath, and I just had other random ones that I'd picked

two like what would happen if these two Bible characters decided to fight leading up

to the fight, going into the fight. And I thought it was hilarious,

and so I sent it off to Brandon, not really thinking anything was

going to happen after that. So he's referring to our fight Pastor website.

So I started hosting these fight nights at my house, and eventually these fight

nights got so large we'd have like thirty forty people come in, and I

thought, why don't I Why don't I start showing these at the church instead?

And so back then, there was probably one UFC fight a month.

It's not like today where it seems like there's two a week. There's only

one a month. And I called the UFC and I had to negotiate a

licensing fee. Now what happens is like when a bar shows a fight,

they pay a significant amount of money to be able for the rights to show

that fight. But we were the first and only church that had ever requested

to show UFC fights. So I actually negotiated a contract with the UFC for

a discounted rate that you know, we wouldn't charge anything. Obviously, we

don't drink. There was no alcohol there or anything. But we would show

fights at the church. And so I started showing these fights, and the

thirty people that would come to fights at my house blew up into a couple

hundred that were coming to fights at these UFC fight nights at the church.

And so after a while I started a blog where I would do fight predictions,

and then I started you know, that was when I invited Travis,

Hey, I need more content on this blog. So this is back when

blogging first became popular and our blog was new as novel. There wasn't a

lot of blogs out there, and we would get thousands of people reading these

dumb blogs. Mine weren't dumb, they were all kind of crazy. So

he would blog under Kermit and I would blog under Fight Pastor, and people

always say, how did you end up getting called the fight pastor. Well,

people would come to the fights and they would bring friends, and after

a while it just kind of became something that local, like D list celebrities

would start showing up, and sometimes we'd have radio stations that would be there

before our fight nights and kind of advertise our fight nights, and so it

just kind of became this really fun kind of missional thing. And so I

was always referred to as the pastor guy. So it moreh from Hey,

that's the pastor guy there too, Uh, that's the fighter pastor. That's

the fight pastor, and so it just kind of bloomed from there. And

uh, I remember UFC one hundred was coming, and UFC one hundred was

the biggest event in the history of the UFC at this point in time,

and you would not moved back yet, right, correct. So I had

a crew guys, and we were going to UFC one hundred, And while

I was there, I met a bunch of the fighters that were on the

new season of The Ultimate Fighters. So many of you, if you're listening,

you probably heard of The Ultimate Fighter TV show. This was now season

ten, and this was up to now the largest season they'd ever had.

It was an all heavyweight season. And at the UFC one hundred there was

this big, huge fan expo, which is now over the years morphed into

International Fight Week in Vegas. In fact, it was literally just there last

week for UFC two ninety for International Fight Week, went to the fight.

It was awesome, it was a blast. But this is UFC one hundred.

It's the first fan expo and they're featuring all of the contestants in the

Ultimate Fighter Heavyweight and lo and behold, some of them were from Seattle,

and that's how we got connected to our first fighter, Demiko Rogers. And

what ended up happening as these fight nights started growing, local fighters started coming

to these events. And as local fighters would come to the fight nights,

they would start asking me, Hey, can I pray for Will you come

and pray for me before my fight? And so that's when the whole idea

of being a fighter chaplain started. Now, you got to remember that this

was probably like fifteen years ago, and back then when you went to your

pastor and your pastor heard you say, I believe God wants me to be

a professional fighter. Christians have a fallback and right or wrong, this is

our gut reaction to anything we don't understand. We are naturally against. And

because mixed martial arts, the UFC was kind of out side of mainstream athletics.

Pastors would hear you want to be a fighter. It didn't make any

sense to them, and they would say, you probably shouldn't come to the

church anymore. So they became all these disconnected from church Christian fighters and they

just started showing up at these fight nights and started asking me to chaplain,

and so I would pray for them before a bunch of local fights and things

like that. But Demico was our first big fighter that we had ever been

asked to chaplain. And it was right around now where I convinced and I

realized that this was going to get pretty big and I needed help. So

it was right around now I started recruiting you, right yeah, came back

for Christmas to visit my family, and you kind of laid out the plan

of what you had of just being, you know, chaplains to these different

fighters all around the country and the local area. And I, you know,

used to do mixmrtial arts. I have a amateur record of O and

two. But you know, I knew the guys from my gym, and

so I knew people. And you know the way you described as like you

would just be chaplains for him. Like they have a strength and conditioning coach,

they have a nutrition coach, a boxing coach, aspiring coach, a

jiu jitsu coach, but they don't have a spiritual coach. And that's what

we would be is we would go be there for him when loser draw,

We're there. We've got your back. You know, Jesus has your back.

Jesus still loves you even though you're fighting. You know, we're not

going to shun you because of what you do. We want to show you

Jesus love in this way. So at UFC one hundred, when I first

met Demiko, I was down in the area where all the fighters kind of

hang out and things like that, and I was talking to fighters, getting

selfies with fighters. And this is before you got really good cell reception around

any of the hotels in Vegas, and it was really hard to get the

Internet, so you're kind of disconnected from the outside world. And there was

because it was a huge UFC event, there was tons of reporters there,

and reporters up coming down and wanting to interview fans, and most of the

fans aren't used to talking to people, so they would always defer to the

pastor guy. They would say, don't we don't want to, don't ask

us, ask the pastor guy. So I end up doing all these small

interviews just as a fight fan. I got interviewed by one of the main

sports reporters for Yahoo. I didn't know who he was, but I got

asked if I would do an interview, and I did a three minute interview

with this guy from Yahoo Sports, and I then go on, kind of

do my deal. That's it. Unbeknownst to me, it made the front

page of Yahoo dot com, and it made the front page of ESPN dot

com, and that was the first time where it became I was publicly called

the Fight pastor. Apparently, when this hit, it went sort of viral

and people started reading about this and started calling the church, and they got

ahold, found out what church I was pastoring, and start calling the church

like crazy. While I'm running around Vegas, I don't have any cell reception,

and my wife is frantically trying to call me because there's all these interview

requests that are coming in. And finally that night I call my wife.

I see a bunch of messages from her and she's like, Brandy, you

don't know what happened. When that article hit the phones at the church blew

up. Everybody's trying to get a hold of you. In fact, it

led to the point where she said, Fox News in Vegas wants to have

you live in the studio. So then the next day I get a hold

of Fox. They picked me up, they drive me to the Las Vegas

studio and then I'm doing this live interview on some local Fox affiliate and this

is the way it goes. It goes something like this, So, how

often do you have fights at your church? And I'm explaining that I show

viewings and they're like, no, no, no, live fights. We

don't never do that. Okay, when do you fight? Like, how

often do you fight? What's your history as a fighter, And I'm like,

I don't fight. Do you remember like in the middle of a fight,

pastor. That was one of the biggest mistakes people made is they kept

thinking I was a pastor who fought, but I don't. You wrestled in

high school. I know, but it wasn't our stick is that I chaplain

fighters. I represented Jesus as well. I just want to represent Jesus as

well, and so they that news report ends really quickly, and then there

I got interviewed by the Las Vegas Review Journal. End upon the front page

of the Las Vegas Review Journal. This is all around UFC one hundred.

So then we come back. The opportunity with Demiko and his first big fight

comes. And it's a few months later. Ye're now involved. I think

I just moved back and I met Demiko, so you move back. We're

about ready to chaplain our first big fight. It's all around Demiko. He

had just come off being on The Ultimate Fighter. It was Monday of that

week. I did an interview with Kis a W. It was a show

they used to have called The Men's Room, and they'd gotten a hold of

your blog where you had talked about these different biblical characters that would fight and

so. On the Men's Room, they would quiz me, if so and

so fought so and so, what would happen? And so I end up

on this kis w interview that was Monday. You're here on Wednesday and Friday,

we go to the fight. Our guy is the main event fighter.

There'd been a newspaper article in the Everett Herald about us. In fact,

I have it right. Here is the newspaper article. It says Church with

a kick, and it's all about leading up to that Demiko fight. There

was an article in the Seattle Times, there was one in the PI all

Demiko. Well, you remember the fight? I do. I remember we

went to the casino and we got to pray for him beforehand. It was

awesome. It's like, you know, the first time. It's like a

big fight for me as mostly did amateur stuff. And we go there,

we get great seats, go and remember Demiko goes for a head kick,

kind of whiffs. It ends up losing, and it was like, oh

crud, no. I remember. This is the first time I thought,

huh, this chaplaincy idea of mine. It's not as fun because I know

how to help people when they win, but how do I help people when

they lose? And you realize really quickly that that's when you're needed. Yeah,

And when you're needed is when guys need to be picked up. That

was what we talked about in the beginning. And you win, lose or

draw, We're there for you, yeah, because what often happened to these

fighters is if they lost fights, they would lose sponsors, they wouldn't they

wouldn't be invited back to a promotion. And there's small promotions, then there's

medium sized promotions. Then there's the UFC or Bellatour or Pride. Those are

the three big ones back then, and now it's really kind of just the

UFC. And Demico was really two fight wins away from being full on UFC.

Yeah. And I remember I was driving with Justin Wren, another one

of our guys, and we met Justin at that fight. We met him

a little bit beforehand. I think Demiko brought him for a photo shoot,

and so Justin I were driving around and Demiko calls and says like, hey,

you know, I need to find a fight so I can get in.

Do you know of anybody in the heavyweight class? And I was like,

I'll fight you, like, I'll jump in there, I don't care.

And he's like, oh no, no, that's good, that's okay.

I don't fight friends. That's what he said. But I think what

he really meant is like I will destroy you. I don't want to kill

you and have that on my conscience because leading up to that first fight that

he had, I did a training session with he and Justin just got the

snot kicked out of me. But it was awesome because it was like good

train but they were just fresh off the Ultimate Fighter. They've had some of

the best trainers in the world. I haven't fought in three years, you

know, completely out of shape and I'm like trying to step up with them

and did not go well. Yeah, And because of that relationship we developed

with Justin, we started chaplaining Justin's fights, and Justin he went on a

winning streak and you and I flew to Nebraska for one of his fights.

Do you remember that one? I do. Yeah. We got to the

stadium and is even bigger stadium than the one that Demico fought in, and

remember just being down there praying for him before the fight, watching him warm

up and he was the main event, and then just watching him win and

just give a huge shout out. And that was awesome. And that was

when this began to take on a life of its own like we had been.

I would call it local popular, like people in the fight scene and

maybe in the church world kind of knew about our fight nights and knew about

some of our local fighters that we were connected to. But then justin winning

that pretty big event end and shouting us out on kind of national TV kind

of took it to another level. And it was then where I started getting

a phone call from a reporter from the New York Times and people back then

it was it was the juxtaposition of fight and pastor, which was intriguing to

people because they could not wrap their head around a pastor who represents Jesus,

and in their mind, Jesus is this like glorified hippie pacifist, and then

you've got like fighter. And when you think of fighters, you think these

like brutal, tough guys. And then they're trying to deal with the juxtaposition

of fight and pastor together. And one of the lines that we would always

share is Jesus was the ultimate fighter. And kind of a theme of fight

Pastor was don't quit, don't give up, be courageous, be fearless,

bold that you know. The devil tried everything he could to stop Jesus,

but Jesus fought death, hell in the grave and he won. And those

were like the themes of what we would frequently talk about. And so the

New York Times interviewed me three times over a month period of time. I

would say the total amount of time that I talked to this reporter was the

equivalent of one month. No, the equivalent of one half hour. Excuse

me. I didn't know when the article was going to come, and you'd

never know is an article going to be in the back page of the New

York Times? Is it even gonna make the New York Times? What's going

to happen? Well, what we didn't know is that the article when it

dropped, here it is. It was on the front page of the New

York Times, and I have a copy of it. Here. Here's how

I found out about the article dropped and that made the front page. It

was about six in the morning. My cell phone rang. I was sleeping

and my wife picked up my phone and on the other line it was high

this is Howie Mandel. Can I speak with Brandon Beals please? And my

wife is an enormous Howie Mandel fan, so she wakes me. If she

goes Brennan. You're never gonna believe this. Howie Mandel is on the phone.

I'm like, why the heck is Howe Mandel calling me? And I

pick up the phone. He says, this is how I Mendel. He

said, I have my agent on the other line, and so kind of

conference called me in and he said, I just read the article about you

in the New York Times and we want to sign you to an exclusive reality

TV show con contract. We want you to do a reality TV show.

Well, the New York Times article hits, and the thing go bonkers,

and at this point in time, you're involved. We're chaplaining. Fighters are

fight nights are becoming kind of local, super popular events, and it just

kind of takes on a life of its own. Do you remember those days.

Yeah, we weren't prepared for it at all. Like we just thought,

you know, dude, local stuff and kind of get some big name

fighters, and then all of a sudden, we get these news crews or

documentary crews from all over the world that want to follow us around in film

stuff. It was eight straight weeks there was a film crew at a Sunday

service adventure and I remember the one that sticks out the most to me is

the Germans. It was these three people from this big news company in Germany.

I guess it was the largest TV station in Europe. That's good for

them, and it would ended up also being on Sky TV, which at

the time was the TV station that was in all the airlines as they would

fly. But so you had some speaking engagement out of town. So you

sick the Germans on me. And I'm not very eloquent or comfortable in front

of a camera. Yeah, you were my guy that worked one on one

with the fighters. Yeah, I was the one that did all of the

press conferences. You were. You were the face. I was the fight

pastor. You were Kermit. I'm just the insecure, nervous guy that kind

of does stuff behind the scenes. And so you get these news crews following

me around and they're like, Okay, well we're gonna go. We want

to film you guys praying for a fighter, Like, well, we don't

have any fighters going on right now. So they'd go to the gyms in

the area and say, you know, we're doing a documentary with the fight

pastor guys. They told us we could come here and film and they're like,

no, we get out of here. So they getting us in a

lot of trouble and then they're pressuring us, like, we want to film

some fights, and so we found a fight we didn't know anybody fighting.

We go pray for that guy. Like, that guy doesn't know me,

not gonna want me to go up and pray for him. That's weird.

So just to please them, what we did was we packed the church with

as many people as you could, probably thirty, and we showed my two

fights on the screen, and I stood up there and talked about it.

And I don't really remember a whole lot of what happened during my fights,

and so I'm trying to talk about what was going on in my head.

And I was like, I don't remember this. Was it super fun to

have a group of people evaluating your fights that you already knew you'd lost.

Yeah, I'm like, oh, this is a cool fight, this is

right, Okay. So I get knocked out, like okay, this one

sucked. Like I remember. They started interviewing my staff, and they interviewed

my media guy, Sky Holzinger, and Sky is like you, he's an

introvert, but Sky's an intellectual and Sky thought he was being deep and philosophical

when he insulted Gandhi on German television. Do you remember that. Yeah,

he ad made a correlation of you know, Jesus was a fighter. He

kept going he wasn't as sissy like Gandhi. Apparently that made the Germans angry

again, and yeah, we got a lot of emails and angry notes about

that, hurtful comments, super delayed drum roll. I just remember I'd come

back and I watched this this like ten minute thing that the German television stations

did on Fight Pastor, and the whole thing is built around Sky insulting Gandhi.

Gandhi like one of the most respected, revered world leaders and a pacifist

any insultimate. Yeah, we had lots and lots of phone calls about that.

Moving on, we actually had many different film crews that came. I

remember, I think it was her name, Greta van Horne is that who

came. She was doing these half hour documentary pieces and she ends up doing

a documentary piece on me and one of our fighters. And one of the

things that had really cool is we have all this crazy things going on,

but real legit ministry is happening. Like fighters are coming that are hurting and

struggling, and they're like legitimately giving their life to Christ, getting baptized,

becoming a part of the church, and so you were kind of involved in

a lot of those guys getting saved. Yeah, so I remember, you

know, when I was used to fight, they knew I was a Christian.

And in the height of all this, I'm driving the church one day

and one of the guys calls me and he's like, hey, you know,

I want to talk to you, and so I invited him to church

and he ended up getting saved, like radically saved. And then he brought

somebody else and he got radically saved. And just kind of more people kept

coming from the gym that I used to train it and it was cool just

to see like all these people just come and just get saved radically. Yeah.

I remember when she does that documentary, she features me and one of

the guys that was really articulate. He'd been a drug addict but got radically

saved. It was really a charismatic guy, just a great speaker. I

don't want to say his nameau I don't have his permission to tell his name,

but I was super excited about everything that God had done. And they

shared this documentary. It goes on TV, and it was one of those

that if you're flying on an airplane and they have the on demand options.

For years, it was one of her featured documentaries that was on that on

demand thing. So oftentimes I would have friends that would be flying on airplanes

and they would be scrolling through and they would see this GREATA Van Horn documentary

on Fight Past, and they'd watch it and send me pictures and that was

really cool. The next major thing that happened was before UFC one fourteen.

Now UFC one fourteen is a year after UFC one hundred, so everything that

we're talking about this is all happened in a year. So this thing has

gone crazy bonkers in a year. This idea that we had to honor Jesus

to live missionally, it's kind of an example that if you're willing to kind

of put yourself out there and represent Jesus as well. I always talk about

there's a difference between being in the bless me line versus the tesame line,

and this was God really like blessing our efforts and God would open a door.

We would walk through a door and another door would open and we would

just kind of walk through it and it was just kind of this fun,

crazy journey and a guy that was fighting on UFC one fourteen heard that we

are now like the first was the fan Expo the year before. We now

have a booth at the Fan Expo, and as we're gearing up for the

fan x but one of the fighters is a Christian guy's name is Joe Bramer,

we get asked to be a primary sponsor for that undercard. So we

end up going to UFC one fourteen. We have our entire crew there because

we have a fight pastor booth, and we're also chaplaining our first UFC fighters.

So this was like we went from the undercards to the medium cards and

now we are at the peak fighting stage with a UFC fighter. And in

the week leading up to UFC one fourteen, there was a magazine called Fighter

Magazine, and this was at the time like the Bible for fighters. It

was like if a fighter got in Fighter Magazine, it was a huge deal.

And Fighter Magazine wanted to do an expose on me and Joe Bramer,

so they actually paid for me to fly to San Diego to go to one

of his training camps leading up to is the week of the fight, and

so I flew to Alliance MMA and San Diego and had a photographer fly with

me, and I was at his huge mma, Jim, which is they've

probably got about twenty UFC fighters that are a part of this gym, and

their main fighter is Joe Bramer's buddy, Jeremy Stevens. And Jeremy Stevens was

known as the little Heathen like this infamous guy, but Jeremy was rising up

the ranks, was a few fights away from a championship fight, but he

is known as the little Heathen. And I am the fight pastor, and

the fight pastor guy shows up at this gym. And at this point we

now have gear. So we have fight pastor gear, like I actually have

a bunch of our old school fight pastor gear, our basic fight pastor's shirt.

By the way, we're gonna give all this away, so if you

give us a review, you can have fifteen year old, unused fight pastor

gear. That's our fight pastor logo. We have this really cheesy one.

It was actually the Justin Wren fight shirt. It says my spiritual gift is

ground and pound. Where do we come up with this cheesy stuff? It's

so cheesy, so just then I know, and then there is the famous

Joe Bramer Freight fight shirt from that. So basically we're posing and all the

shirts, we're doing all these photo shoots, and the whole time, Jeremy

Stevens, a little heathen, is making fun of me, just kind of

mocking me, and I start like making fun of him, and we're kind

of going back and forth, and after a while he says, let me

have some of your shirts, and so he would put on the shirts,

he would jump in and these photo shoots and things like that. So the

whole thing was done, and Joe and I and his promoter we are going

out to lunch and so we're walking out of the gym and lots of people.

There's people taking pictures and stuff like that, and Jeremy Stevens runs up

and grabs me and says, with tears in his eyes, he says,

Pastor, I really need God. And I looked at him, I went,

are you kidding? And he's like, I really need God and he

falls down on his knees and right there in the middle of the gym with

photographers there, I pray the Center's prayer with him. And actually that ended

up being the picture that they used for the middle of that Fighter magazine.

I have it to this day. It's over here picture of it. If

you ever google Fight pastor and you find this picture, you'll find a picture

of me and Jeremy or Jeremy Stevens kneeled down next to each other praying.

Anyways, we end up going to UFC one fourteen and the main card was

Rampage and you and I met Rampage. We did. That is a scary

man. Tell him about when we met Rampage, Jackson. So Brandon talks

about going down and meeting fighters, but we really did was we stocked fighters.

We'd go down the bowels of the casino in the basement where they'd go

in and out so the fans wouldn't attack him. And that was us.

And we get a picture taken with him, say hi, and the guy

before us put his arm around Rampage for the picture and Rampage just lost it.

He's like, get your hand off me, I'm not your prom date

started yelling at this guy. So the guy kind of left and then I

was next and I'm terrified because this guy's angry and he's huge and I'm like

standing next to him, shaking, trying not to touch him with getting the

picture, and I think you went after me and you did the same thing,

like just don't touch him. Date the weekend goes on, Joe loses

his fight, so once again major thing, lots of publicity, and we

got a cherifighter on and coat you know, passed him through losing, which

was always a challenge. But that began our relationship with Jeremy Stevens, who

we started chaplaining Jeremy as Jeremy starts moving up the ranks. Jeremy a few

weeks later was the main event fighter for a huge numbered UFC fight and we

were as primary sponsor. In fact, sitting here right now, I have

the shorts. Like back in these days they didn't have fight kits, you

actually had sponsors, and we were in the main sponsor spot was on the

butt of the shorts, and we were the main sponsored spot on the butt

of his shorts. And I couldn't go to that fight. You couldn't go

to that fight, but we were doing a fight night at the church and

it was a huge deal. Is the largest one we ever had because the

main fighter we sponsored and at that particular fight. Now we had every local

spider fighter that we sponsor was there. Demiko was there, justin showed up

there. Demiko did a sign, and so we have like it's it's pandemonium.

I movie have radio stations out front all of this, and then it

leads up to our fighter fighting in the main event of a UFC card.

It was like, in less than a year and a half, this is

where this thing, this crazy idea to Chaplin fighters. Now we have a

main event fighter, five round fight and Jeremy's losing going into the fifth round,

and I will never forget pulls out this miraculous come from behind knockout win

and he wins the fight. I will never forget Jeremy doing his interview front

of everybody that was at this Fight Pastor event. And I have never heard

a human being dropped more f moms than he did in those few moments while

he's wearing Fight Pastor on his butt. It was in that moment I just

thought, we have really raw people involved. A couple of the things I

want to talk about before we wind this down with Fight Pastor is it is

right around now we start getting all these reality TV show offers. In fact,

we had four major production companies that did sizzle reels and we actually got

offered a six episode reality TV show on Spike. Do you remember that because

you were part of the sizzle reel. So I don't think they really fully

understood what we did. So I think they thought that we had, you

know, fights at the church. Now everybody always thought we were doing fights

at the church, and so what ended up happening. They've kind of manufactured

this thing is like, Okay, well, you have this issue you want

to get worked on. You know, we'll talk to the pastor Brandon,

he'll kind of help you through that, and then we'll have you fight somebody

too, you know, show you can conquer this physically so you can conquer

your other problem mentally. A good idea. And so we just got me

and this other guy from the church who also used to fight, and neither

one of us have trained for three years, and we're like, okay,

we're just gonna, you know, do some interviews, just talk about whatever,

talk about your problem is, and then Brandon will kind of coach you

through it and mentor you, and then you and the other guy are gonna

fight each other and We got two of our guys who were in our church

and they were each a cornerman for each of us, and we went to

one of the local gyms and it's like, okay, now you're gonna fight,

and they filmed it, and my wife, with my girlfriend at the

time, I was like, oh, hey, you should come down.

They're filming this. You can watch me fight, you know, not realizing

Oh, my girlfriend's gonna come watch me get my butt kick, which is

what happened. Well, the thing is, you guys hadn't even trained.

This was like the worst idea imaginable. I mean, they bought a subway

beforehand, and then you know, we warmed up for about a half hour

and like, okay, go fight. Well, my favorite part was is

that we got a couple of the fighters that we chaplain that were local and

they were the cornermen. But the film crew was Spike did realize that I

wasn't a cornerman, that I really didn't know anything about fighting. So they

kept wanting me to give you guys fighting tips, and I'm like, I'm

not, I don't know, and ah, we declined. When it was

all said and done, I think they declined us do you remember how like

every time these reality TV shows would opportunities would come, you and I would

just be consumed with anxiety. And part of it is you're an introvert hardcore.

I'm an extrovert who also likes to be an introvert, and they want

you to be larger than life on these camera Like we have these reality TV

show stars in our church, Lindsay and Leslie with unsellable homes, and you

put a camera on them and those girls light up and they just they become

They're awesome normally, but they're better than normal on camera. And you and

I kept hearing be bigger, be bigger, be bigger, and I as

the offers came in for the reality TV v shows, my wife was highly

against them, so we never seized any of those opportunities. But it was

flattering. I think they wanted us to be characters like the tap out guys.

Yeah, and that's what they were expecting, you know, us to

be these characters, and you know, then you get me and I'm shy

and introverted. Well I was just you and I were talking before we filmed

and we were kind of reminiscing, and the weird part was is we would

have real life, and then we would have fight pastor life, and I

would have to become this fight pastor guy, and you'd have to become Kermit

And it just wasn't who we were, and we really weren't super comfortable.

We were fight fans and we loved people, and we loved the opportunity to

minister to people, but we weren't those guys. Yeah, And I mean,

at its peak, you and I were probably going to Vegas eight times

a year because we had fighters there. There was some fight car and were

One time Justin Wren had a fight on a smaller fight card and then five

days later we had a UFC fighter on the main numbered UFC card, and

so we were just in Vegas all the time straight that time. I know

it was too much. Yeah, it was. Um. We did it

all for about three years. Yeah, and then we just stopped. I

share the story every once in a while why I'd no longer do the fight

pastor thing. So people say, hey, I heard you're the fight pastors

that the thing, and I always say, I'm the guy formerly known as

the fight pastor. We really stopped doing this when it was at the peak

of it. I would say, quote unquote popularity. And it really led

up to we have the reality TV show opportunities that we knew if we pursued

there would have been a reality TV show about it. But then in addition

to that, I had a book company that offered me a book deal.

And I remember this that I don't have any desire to write a book.

My friends asked me all the time, are you ever going to write a

book? I don't really enjoy writing, so I don't want to. And

so I told this book company, and I had had several companies kind of

flirt with me about it, but this company was ready to make me an

offer, and they hired a ghostwriter for me. They let me pick a

ghostwriter, so there was a Galloner Church. Her name was Princess, which

should have been the number one. I should have realized when your name is

Princess, that says a lot. And love her she ever hears this,

I doubt she ever would I forgive you for all of this. But we

hired Princess to write the first chapter, and then I was to take the

first chapter and go share it with the book company in New York. All

this is scheduled, so she comes in. It's Monday, about two weeks

before him to fly to New York and meet with this company. And what

I was supposed to do is tell her a story and then she would make

it into a book chapter and again, Fight Pastor was all about not quitting

and you know, persevering and not giving up. And so what they wanted

to do is have a bunch of stories from my life or from my fighter's

life where we didn't give up and we persevered through a hard time, and

again Jesus would cross our path and intervene. And it was making Jesus the

hero of the story. And that was kind of what it was. And

so I meet with Princess. We meet for an hour and a half.

She brings out a recorder. She's recording the whole thing, and she's gonna

give me the chapter in a week. And I remember a week later,

she comes in and she slides in front of me less than a page.

And I looked at this and the first thing I thought was I talked for

an hour and a half and that was the only usable content that I gave

you after an hour and a half. And that was when Princess looks at

me, and says, I forgot to hit record, and so all I

did was tried to redo your story from memory, and that was the most

that I could remember. So that was disappointing. Because I'm Friday. I

was meeting with this book company and Christen Lindbeck, who's my senior associate at

the time. He and I put our heads together and we wrote a chapter

together. Then I flew to New York and honestly, I went with a

buddy and he is actually our current network leader from our for Our Denomination and

the Assemblies of God, and at the time, this is back when he

was a civilian. But Don and I went together and meet with this publisher

pitch it, and they pitched me on the book. And what they were

gonna do is they have four books a year that they feature, and they

traveled the author around and have book signings and things like that, and so

this was going to be one of the featured things and if they A few

days later, they helped me find a literary agent and they sent a contract

to the literary agent. And I had that contract sitting on my desk thinking

about these reality TV shows, and it was in that moment I had to

ask myself who I was. And one of the things that I always teach

people is there is a difference between what is good for your life versus what

is God's best. One of the things that happens when you and I are

as followers of Jesus is that our life we're in this series called wander Lust,

and it's really kind of navigating God's will for your life. And one

of the hardest things about being a follower of Jesus is life is not a

matter of do I decide between this good decision or this bad decision. No,

it is navigating through all of the good opportunities that God presents to you.

And the good is the enemy of the best. And everything we were

doing our Fight Pastor was good and I enjoyed it, and there were things

about it that I really loved. The are things that I didn't love as

much. But God really brought me to this point where I had to make

a decision was I going to be Pastor Brandon who leads venture Church or was

I going to be the fight Pastor? And clearly, if we would have

went the route of doing Fight Pastor, we would have had to move to

Vegas. There's no question about it, because Vegas was the center of the

fight world, and we found ourselves in Vegas. It seemed like at least

a week a month, and we're gonna have to move to Vegas. And

I remember in that moment, I just went back to what God had called

me to do. One of the things that I always tell our church is

I say, if God isn't saying anything new, go back to the last

thing that God said and do that. And the last thing that God told

me is Brandon, I've called you to be a pastor. I didn't call

you to be a fight pastor. The fight pastor thing was me and you

kind of stepping out and just saying Jesus, we're willing, we're available,

will tell people about you, will represent you wherever we are, And it

just got kind of larger than life. And I remember book contract, reality

TV show, opportunities. Do we want to do this? And I remember

just thinking, God's called me to pastor venture. And by this point in

time, you were pretty worn out of all this. Yeah, like just

really pulled out of my comfort zone almost every day, and you know,

people tell me like, be bigger, be bigger, be more, give

us more. And then wanting me to be like this character. Yeah,

and then I'd gotten a different job, and I had a fiance and then

wife towards the end of it, got married and just kind of for me,

my priorities shifted kind of more towards my family. It like the way

I would describe it is it was super fun, but it wasn't real life.

Yeah, It's like we would go do the fight pastor stuff, and

we'd be at shows and we'd be in photo shoots and interviews, and then

we would just go back and you'd be husband and I'd be dad and trying

to pastor and you're the one on one stuff with the fighters. That was

awesome, Like that was the best part. If we could have just done

that and like stayed under the radar without you know, the reality shows,

the interviews or the photoshoots, that's kind of what got me. Yeah.

I always think, like when I look back, the blessing of the whole

thing is there's still some of the fighters that go to our church. And

one of the hard things about working with fighters is there's a life expectancy when

you fight. I mean these guys they fight for a couple of years and

then they either get beat up or things don't work out, or they need

real jobs. Yea, they just can't. They can't spend their life just

training. They need to make an income. And it is fun having some

of the fighters be a part of the church, and these are fun stories.

So that is ultimately why we kind of laid this thing down. We

stopped doing blogs, we stopped chaplaining, and I just became Pastor Brandon,

husband to die, dad to Judoli, J and Rachel, and you became

no longer Kermit, you became Travis. I remember a couple of years ago

I tried to go on the Fight Pastor website to pull up my blogs and

it was like a Korean stoape company. I know. I was going to

try to own the domain name forever. People asked me, so, why

didn't you ever change your social media handle? This is one of those stories

the guys want me to share it. This is the honest, the goodness

truth. And that is because number one, I already had a bunch of

followers another Fight Pastor thing. But I googled Brandon Beals and discovered that Brandon

Beals had become a porn star's name. Different person not you, not me,

and so I always tell people if you ever google Brandon Beals, don't

hit the image thing. And none of those are me, I promise.

But yeah, so I just kind of kept it because the handle was not

available anymore and no variation of it. I I wanted, should is this

something? Should we? It's all true? So okay, Greeney's giving me

thumbs up. Nicole's not here to do any editing, so I don't know

what to say. But yeah, that was It's fight Pastor. So we'll

refer this to people if you ever want to know about Fight Pastor. There

it is. I hope that was interesting. Travis and I have a lot

more stories, a lot of other people. We met a lot of events,

We went to, crazy opportunities that we had happened. But if you

will give us a five star review and mention Travis's fighter nickname, which is

in that review, you might get the Zuckerberg Versus Musk shirt. But if

anyone does it, we will at least give you some fight Pastor gear,

because there's still boxes of it that currently are in storage above my office at

the church. And who if you keep the stuff long enough, it's like

totally retro. So you might see David Diaz leading worship on Sunday wearing the

Joe Bramer fight shirt. We had the Chick ones with like the deep V

cut. You should make them wear that. Yeah, those were expensive to

make and so I've given all those ones away. Are we even allowed to

say fight chick anymore? So we had a we had a brand fight Chick

that none of it worked. It's just it's amazing. Hey, thanks for

listening. Next week we have a special episode where I am interviewing my children

and they are talking about what it's like to be a PK. We'll talk

about what it was like to grow up as the kids of church planners,

what it's like to grow up as a pastor's kid, if you've ever wondered,

I think you'll enjoy that. You're gonna hear from Elijah and Rachel and

Judah is our program manager, so he'll be the one on the Buttons Raiders

roll and so you'll get Judah his contribution that way. But it'll be fun.

Thank you guys. Looking forward to seeing everybody at Venture this Sunday.

I am excited to be back in the pulpit preaching and I'll be here,

move back, Travis. We want you here, cold, here