Pastor Dan Wuthrich and his wife, Cheryl, have moved to the Eatonville area from Arizona to fill the open head pastor position at Tanwax Country Chapel, following the retirement of ministry mainstay Dan Tanner.
As a member of an organization called Village Missions, Wuthrich began his ministry career in 2012 after a more than two-decade’s long career in law, having graduated from Baylor Law when he was 30 years old, back in 1988.
“I just tell people I moved from law to grace,” Wuthrich said.
Before linking up with Village Missions, which is an organization that sends missionaries to rural churches in need of leadership, Wuthrich was living in a suburb of Fresno, California, attending an evangelical church in the area. There, he felt a call to ministry, which was upheld and affirmed by the elders of his church.
Knowing that he wanted to become a missionary, Wuthrich said he and his wife began preparing themselves for a new life in South America, or some other similar missions outpost.
However, he went through a process of discernment that led him to the rural church ministry of Village Missions back in October 2011. After vetting the organization, Wuthrich took the plunge and turned in an application to the ministry by December of the same year. By July 2011, Village Missions had placed him at a church in an Arizona town of less than 2,000 people.
“In seven months, we basically went from having just heard of the ministry to now living in the town of 1,400 in the middle of Arizona,” Wuthrich said. “Once God greased the skids it was, hold on... We had no idea where we were going and then suddenly we were there.”
Serving in Arizona for just more than seven years, Wuthrich and his wife accepted the position at Tanwax Country Chapel and moved into its parsonage last month.
Wuthrich said his potential move to Eatonville was repeatedly confirmed through reading Christian texts, while his wife had a run-in with a very specific Bible story that is about God calling a servant to move into a new land and begin a great nation in God’s name; the story of Abraham.
She had a question in her study guide of the story that said something like, “Abraham was willing to go. What are you holding on to, and what is preventing you from going?”
After that, the Wuthriches followed the call and made the move.
Above all, Wuthrich said he wanted to lead a Christ-centered church that serves people with scripture, instead of just telling them what they want to hear in some sort of spiritual consumerism.
“We want Tanwax to be a place where if our church shut its doors, the community would miss us, because we are making a difference,” Wuthrich said. “We are making a difference in the physical lives of people, we are making a difference in the spiritual lives of people. People know we care. People know we love. People know we stand for truth, but that we are a welcoming loving body – and that’s what we want Tanwax to be.”
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