Five Years in Middletown

In January 2025, Ashley and I stepped away from Brookside Church in Middletown, Virginia. We had been there since August 2020, first as the pastor of First Baptist Church of Middletown, and then as the pastor of what became Brookside Church after a name change and transition we led in October 2021.

Nearly five years. And I didn't fully understand what that chapter meant to me until it was over.

I came in bivocational and I stayed bivocational the entire time. That's a particular kind of pressure that's hard to explain if you haven't lived it. You're never fully in either place. You're always splitting your attention, always carrying the low-grade guilt of whichever thing you're not doing at the moment. I won't pretend that was easy.

But what I didn't see until I was gone: preaching every week to that congregation stretched me in ways nothing else had.

Most of my ministry life before Brookside had been in recovery work. Talking to people brand new to faith, sharing my story, working with folks who were just finding their footing. I knew that context. Brookside was different. I was preaching to new believers, yes, but also to people who had been walking with Jesus longer than I had. People who had read their Bibles through more times than I could count. People who would go home and fact-check the sermon.

That will either sharpen you or expose you. For me, it did both.

The Sunday that stays with me most was one I almost didn't preach. I had been wrestling with whether to talk publicly about my own battles with depression. Not the cleaned-up version. The real one. The kind where you're supposed to be the pastor, the one with answers, and you're quietly white-knuckling it through a Sunday.

I decided to go for it.

I opened up that morning about what depression had actually looked like in my life. No tidy bow. No "and then God fixed everything." Just the truth of what I'd carried.

When I opened the altar, people came. A lot of people. More than I expected. Folks who had been sitting in those First Baptist pews for years, people I wouldn't have predicted, walking forward. And standing up there watching that happen, I realized something I should have known sooner: the transparency was the sermon. The vulnerability did what the polished version never could have.

That congregation was ready for honesty. I just had to be willing to go first.

By the end of 2024, Ashley and I both knew it was time. We had stepped back in to help with Teen Challenge part time and it needed my full attention, and Brookside needed a pastor who could give them everything. We made the announcement, and in the way that only God can orchestrate, the right person stepped in not long after we stepped out.

That's not always how transitions go. I know that. We got a clean ending.

We made some progress there. We made some mistakes too. But what I keep coming back to is how much we genuinely enjoyed it. The people we got to serve made it worth every complicated Tuesday.

I'm grateful for every person who sat in those chairs during the First Baptist years and the Brookside years. Middletown is a small town and that congregation punches above its weight. If you were part of that church during the time we were there, thank you. You gave me more than you know.

If you're in the Middletown area and looking for a church community, Brookside is still there, still doing the work.

Justin Franich is the Executive Director of Shenandoah Valley Teen Challenge, a faith-based referral ministry connecting families to recovery programs across the country. Learn more at svtc.info.