After two decades in youth ministry, Dan Pursley was ready for something different.
“I began to sense that I’d been doing ministry for a long time and I was ready for a change,” he recalls.
But the time wasn’t yet right. “I went to the Lord about it and the answer I got was ‘Not yet,’” he adds.
As he looked at his life, Dan recognized there were good reasons why he was not yet ready to pursue a new course. He and wife Connemara’s three children were then in high school and middle school, so they wanted to remain rooted in their long-time home community of Bellingham, Wash. Dan also wanted extended experience working under a healthy lead pastor after serving a number of years in unhealthy and transitional church situations.
There was one other major area of consideration. “The third element was schooling. I had wanted to do a master’s degree.”
An Opportunity for Further Training
But he needed a master’s program that would accommodate his work at the church and allow his family to remain in their community. That’s when Yellowstone Theological Institute came into the picture. YTI had entered into a partnership with Hillcrest Church in Bellingham, where Dan was then serving. A fellow staff member was also interested in pursuing a degree with YTI, and after learning more about YTI’s program—which included master’s courses offered right there in the church—they concluded, “Why don’t we do this together?”
There was an obstacle to Dan’s entry into the program, however. Master’s programs typically require a bachelor’s degree for admission, and while he had earned his A.A. degree, he had never completed his bachelor’s.
Many years earlier, Dan had been attending community college when, after several years of increasing responsibility in youth ministry in his hometown of Port Angeles, Wash., he realized God’s call to vocational ministry. “I had a moment at the altar where God just took the blinders off my eyes and said, ‘This is what I’m calling you to do,’” he recalls. “And that night changed everything.”
Following that call, Dan quit his college studies and turned his attention to pursuing ministry credentials with his church’s denomination, the Assemblies of God, while leading a growing youth ministry at the church and working at a grocery store to help make ends meet.
After years in church ministry, including a move to a new church position in Bellingham, Dan may have lacked formal education, but he definitely had experience in the school of life.
“I had my A.A. and had done a lot of credentialling, but those didn’t transfer over very well into a B.A. I had all this life experience,” recalls Pursley.
That life experience afforded him the opportunity to enroll at YTI in the fall of 2020.
“When I started at YTI I started on probation because I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree,” says Dan. “But I had a 4.0 the first quarter, and then I got off probation and I was able to maintain a 3.9 GPA the whole program.”
Developing Leadership Skills
Dan found himself drawn to one YTI program in particular.
“The degree that jumped out at me was Entrepreneurial Leadership—specifically the topic of turnaround church because I had inherited in my two youth minister jobs unhealthy situations, where something needed to be rebuilt and required time to help it grow to be healthy. So, when I was thinking about what was next in my career, turnaround church was my heart.”
Dan’s advisor, Dr. Derry Long, who has extensive expertise in church and denominational leadership, made a lasting impact on Pursley’s life and ministry.
“He just poured into me. I really respect him,” says Dan. “Derry, in all of his roles—being a pastor, doing turnaround church, being a denominational leader—he just had so much experience. So, we had many discussions about what it means to go into a church that has resources, that has people, that has a building, but change is hard.”
Putting It Into Practice
Dan graduated with his master of arts from YTI in June 2022, completing his academic training while serving under a new lead pastor that really invested in Dan. It wasn’t long before he was putting his new skills into practice. In September of that same year, he was called to serve as lead pastor at Life Church Bellingham, allowing him to stay planted in the community.
Life Church was a church in need of a turnaround.
“It was a 100-year-old church that year, had been in three locations around Bellingham, and had been through a lot of transition,” Dan explains. “When I got there, there were a lot of older people—some in their 50s & 40s. There were some teenagers, but no kids. There was no kids’ ministry.”
Under Dan’s leadership, changes started at Life Church, ranging from staffing to the way the church approached ministry.
“We started to recalibrate with a focus of evaluating goals. We did surveys, and we set some clear things about what this church is going to be about. The kids’ ministry was on everybody’s heart. … [We] focused on kids and youth, tried some small groups and missions; these were the things.”
As part of the church’s renewed focus on youth, Dan cast a vision for refurbishing their youth center.
“At my first business meeting, I presented this recalibration plan for six months. … [I] asked the church to donate, above and beyond tithes, $50,000 to remodel the kids and youth center to revitalize things.”
Dan had no idea how critical that remodeled youth center would soon be for the church.
Just weeks after the remodeling work began — and only ten months into Dan’s pastorate—the church building was extensively damaged after an arsonist set fire to a recycling bin in July 2023. Since it was summer, Life Church was able to hold services in a tent in the yard for several weeks. During this time, they set to work on the remodeling project—for which the funds were already in place—and by September the church was able to meet in the refurbished youth facility.
Reaching Out Through Challenges
Even amidst such challenges, Life Church has been reaching out to their community.
“We didn’t want it to be like ‘poor us, we had a fire,’” says Dan, “so we focused a lot on community outreach: doing block parties, partnering with the elementary school and buying school supplies for kids in our neighborhood, and changing our focus on Sunday to try and connect with the younger generation.”
What was a congregation of about 50 when Dan arrived, with few youth or children, has grown to where around 200 people are involved in the church, including 20 to 30 children.
The church’s outreach efforts have fueled that growth.
“It’s not just people switching from other churches; it’s a lot of new people from our neighborhood that have become rooted,” Dan observes. “A lot of people, I find, that have been hurt by other churches and they walked away, and they’re finding their way back.”
While the church has been reaching out and growing, they have also been remodeling their fire-damaged building, with plans for a grand opening in the refurbished facility in October 2025.
Prepared for the Journey
It’s been quite a journey the past three years at Life Church Bellingham, but Dan credits YTI with preparing him well for his role at Life Church.
“I can’t even begin to say how much YTI prepared me for this. It was very practical for what I wanted to do and what I immediately started to do as a job,” he says.
YTI’s program made theological education convenient and affordable for Dan.
“It was really amazing because the partnership made it affordable and most of the time the professors came to us. I literally walked down the hallway from my office to class,” Dan recalls.
In addition to benefitting from the church’s partnership with YTI, Dan also was awarded the President’s Scholarship, made possible by the institute’s generous donors.
“YTI was so affordable. I did have to pay some, but it was so affordable with a family of five and working full-time,” Dan says.
But it was the personal attention he received at YTI that made the difference. “That relationship with the professors—their ability to challenge me in my views on things—nobody was afraid to have differences of opinions,” says Dan. “Even if conversations went into theology, or worldview stuff, or political ideas—even if we didn’t agree there was respect there.
“They have a heart to prepare people to do what they are doing.”