Storm the gates podcast | Love & Laughter with Rev. Dr. Adam Knight
The art pictured in the header/feature image hangs in Pastor Adam’s office, it was created by Myrna Ellison and is a constant reminder of fun, adaptive challenges, and to embrace adventure!
When Pastor Adam Knight arrived at Coker Methodist Church in 2016, the church had been in a season of decline. The anxiety that tends to settle into a congregation during those seasons was there. And Adam’s response, in part, was to laugh.
Not to ignore the hard things. Not to pretend nothing needed to change. But to make room for joy in a place that had forgotten what it felt like.
One of the longtime volunteers at Coker pulled him aside not long after he arrived. She told him she couldn’t remember a time when the church had laughed as much as it had in the past few years. “It has just been so wonderful,” she said.
That sentence stuck with him.
The Lunchbox Sermon
One of the ways laughter showed up at Coker was through a children’s time tradition Adam started during the traditional worship service. Each week, he handed a lunchbox to a different child. Their homework was simple: take it home, put whatever you want inside, and bring it back the following Sunday.
Whatever was in the lunchbox, Adam had to build a children’s sermon around it. No preparation. No hints. The only rule: it couldn’t be alive.
What followed over the years was a running education in humility. There were moments when Adam looked at an object and had absolutely nothing. He would glance over at Pastor Damon behind him, see the answer written all over Damon’s face, and call in reinforcements.
Then came the Alexander Hamilton week. A child brought something Hamilton-related, and Adam launched into what he was confident was a solid children’s sermon about things Hamilton had accomplished as president. The kids were quick to correct him. Hamilton was never president. The congregation loved it. The church ran with the joke for months. Hamilton socks. Hamilton for Dummies. A recurring piece of Coker history.
“We try to have fun,” Adam said, “while we are doing this very serious thing of pursuing holiness of heart and life.” It’s no wonder his wife’s word of the year is “fun” fun is a part of who they are!
Discipleship That Moves the Baseline
Laughter is one thread of Adam’s ministry. The deeper work is discipleship, and that work has taken years to think through clearly.
When he was church planting, the instinct was to get people connected. Get them into a group. Build relationships. And that was good. But a question started nagging at him: are people actually growing? Are they looking more like Jesus?
That question led him eventually to his doctoral work at Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University, where he developed what he calls a Cultural Detox, a four-week experience he describes as a “spiritual Whole 30.” The idea is that for four weeks, people commit to living differently, going deeper in prayer, study, and community, and then measure what changed.
To do that measuring, Adam pulled together different fruits of the spirit inventories and created one for his group. Participants took it before the four weeks and again at the end. Across the board, people reported a much deeper sense of the fruit of the spirit in their lives after the experience. Two of the band meetings that formed during the project kept meeting long after it ended, even though those people had not known each other before.
Adam is careful about what to claim here. “You can’t cause this growth,” he said. “All we can do is create an atmosphere that allows the Holy Spirit to do that work in us.”
The goal now is to run the Cultural Detox twice a year at Coker, once in the spring and once in the fall. He compares it to event ministry at a church plant, where you hold a big outreach and the point isn’t to grow to the event-size number overnight. The point is to raise the baseline. Each time people go through it, the hope is that the spiritual baseline rises a little more.
Staying Grounded When It’s Hard
Adam is honest that this kind of ministry is not without its discouragements. Resistance is real. Not everyone wants to change. Not everyone participates. And after 22 years in appointed ministry, cynicism is something he has had to fight.
His main defense against it comes from something he heard repeatedly from Maxie Dunham, the former president of Asbury Seminary: the most important thing a pastor can do for his congregation is to maintain his own spiritual life. Without that, the pastor is not actually helping anyone.
For Adam, that looks like his own daily rhythms in scripture, following the Seedbed Wake-Up Call, and meeting every Monday with a band of two other pastors he has known for thirty years. They hold each other accountable. They confess sin. They push back on each other when one of them starts to sound more like someone with a grievance than someone with a calling.
“They’ve known me long enough to know they can be honest with me,” he said.
That accountability, paired with a genuine love for the people in front of him, is what keeps him going. He talked about leaving meetings where he wanted to make a point or defend an idea, and instead picking up the phone to call someone and ask how they are doing. That, he said, goes a lot further than being right.
Something Is Coming
As the conversation wrapped up, Adam landed on a note of genuine anticipation. He said he gets the sense that Coker, and the Global Methodist Church broadly, is on the edge of something. He was quick to say that “something big” doesn’t have to mean big numbers. It might mean depth. It might mean a community that looks different enough from the surrounding culture that people start to notice and wonder.
He is praying for boldness, not just to invite people into the first half of salvation, but into all of it. Into real transformation. Into a life that is being shaped by the Spirit and moving toward holiness.
“Come, Holy Spirit, come,” he said.
That’s the hope he is carrying for Coker. And if the last ten years are any indication, he’s going to keep chasing it with a lot of intention, a lot of love for his people, and probably a few good laughs along the way.
Pastor Adam Knight is the senior pastor of Coker Methodist Church in San Antonio, Texas. He is adjunct faculty at Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University, where he completed his Doctor of Ministry. This post is adapted from a conversation on Storm the Gates, the official podcast of the Mid Texas Conference of the Global Methodist Church.
