If You Love Andrew Peterson’s “The Sower’s Song,” Read This

February 2023

After the most trying season of church ministry most pastors had ever experienced due to COVID, my church finally saw hope on the horizon in October 2022. After three years of no salvations or baptisms and many, many months of a half-empty sanctuary on Sundays, we finally baptized two people. One was a child raised in a healthy Christian home, and the other a man who never ever imagined himself attending a Baptist church. But did so at the invitation of a complete stranger from my congregation. He truly found Christ and has been as zealous a young Christian as I can ever remember pastoring. He loves our church.

Sunday School attendance was back up. We reinstituted a mealtime during our Wednesday Bible Study. Morale was high. Others seemed very close to deciding to get baptized. Including the wife of the man from the previous paragraph. People loved her and served her, and she loved also our church. It seemed only a matter of time before she followed her husband.

Considering all of this, it should come as no surprise to anyone who has truly dedicated their life to following Jesus, that Spiritual Warfare directly from Hell was unleashed at my church soon after.

For context, my second child was born in October of 2022, and he was but a few months old at this point. Anyone who has a newborn and/or multiple small children can testify that in many cases, sleep is hard to come by. Even these circumstances alone create mental and emotional warfare for the average person. Which makes what happened next much harder to assimilate.

It started with politics creeping into one of our small group Bible studies. And after it crept in, even with some proactive bomb-diffusing by our leadership, it still somehow got worse. It ended with a volatile exchange of words one night that resulted in some of the hardest conversations and decisions I’ve ever had to make as a pastor. There are wounds from that time that still haven’t healed in more than one person.

Then, a few weeks later, I got a call at 9 pm one Saturday night from the wife of one of the members of our church. Frantically, she said her husband had gone off the deep end, had taken a gun, was out drinking, and was talking of killing himself. She begged me to go look for him. I called his cell, and he was already drunk and cussed me out before hanging up.

I told my wife I was going to look for him. She called another lady in the church, because she was scared for me to go alone, and her husband came and went with me. He actually drove so I could call 9-1-1 and keep trying to reach the man.

We did find him before anything bad happened, but I didn’t get home till almost midnight, the night before the biggest day of the week for me. This was one of four suicidal people I dealt with that year, but this was clearly the most traumatic experience. Most years, I have not dealt with anyone like this. But in 2023 Satan was at war at my church.

Then, a month later, one of the core people in my church went through some kind of family trial. To this day I do not know what it was. But it caused her to not be able to come to church for months and months. She was in charge of several kids’ discipleship events. We had people to cover, but the stress about the whole situation was heavy.

Then, two months later while I was at our denominational national convention a thousand miles from home, a wife called me about an indiscretion committed by her husband. I tried as best to counsel her on the phone, but then the husband got on another line, and the conversation went south very fast.

Then, the next month, a leader at my church got a DUI.

And while all of this was happening, no one in my church was getting saved or baptized. Despite weeks of fasting and numerous prayer efforts. Despite a very enthusiastic evangelism class, many in the church took on Sunday nights.

My desperation about this was highlighted by the wife at the beginning of this article. Because she kept showing interest in making the decision, but things kept getting in the way. The church kept loving her and her husband and helping them. But every time we were ready to discuss baptism, something would prevent the conversation. The warfare was overt at times, and subtle at others.

By August I was in shambles spiritually. Defeated. Burnt out. (I would later that year start developing sharp pains in the back of my head that weren’t normal headaches. Praise God that after my church prayed over me, they went away.)

One thing I kept doing because I wasn’t going to quit was listening to my favorite melancholy but edifying worship music. “The Sower’s Song” by Andrew Peterson was one I had on repeat many days. I love it. It fits. I had to keep reminding myself of the God who, in both testaments, emphatically reminds us of the importance of sowing, reaping, and trusting Him.

One hot late August afternoon I was prayer walking with my headphones in. “The Sower’s Song” was playing. I do not recall many moments in my life where I was in a deeper abyss as far as my role as a pastor. And after the two verses and choruses, my phone rang. I paused the song.

It was the wife. She wanted to get baptized. She and I talked about it for a while because she had some questions, but it was settled in her mind. That Sunday, I baptized her, to a raucous celebration response at my church. The love we had for her and her for us was palpable.

But before that, after the conversation ended, my phone automatically turned the song back on.

And as Peterson sang, “And the rain and the snow fall, down from the sky…” I felt chill bumps like I’ve never felt. I started walking again, almost running.

And as he got to “Instead of the thorn now, the cyprus flowers…” I started crying.

And as he got to “What is sown in the garden grows into a mighty tree…” I stared bawling. Ugly, uncontrollable tears.

And as he kept repeating “It will not return void” I fell to my knees, lifted my hands to heaven and shouted like I was at a championship football game. These are things I had never, ever done in worship before.

After the song ended, I lay down on the floor in the quiet for a long time. It was just me and God and no words were needed. Andrew Peterson had said it all. It was one of the purest, rawest, realest nights of worship in my life. There wasn’t an ounce of ego in that room. I was still low, but now Jesus was high. As high as he’s ever been in my quiet moments.

I am glad to report that most of the negative events of 2023 saw God turn evil into good. There was a lot of love, grace and repentance. Many others have gotten baptized since then.

For me, I love pastoring more than ever, but discouragement still comes. But most of the time it has no tangible impact on me. Because I know who God is and how he works. My faith is my sight. And my church will not give up on our mission, no matter what Satan violently attacks us with.

Because the Sower leads us.

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Gowdy Cannon

I am currently the pastor of Bear Point FWB Church in Sesser, IL. I previously served for 17 years as the associate bilingual pastor at Northwest Community Church in Chicago. My wife, Kayla, and I have been married over 9 years and have a 5-year-old son, Liam Erasmus, and a two-year-old, Bo Tyndale. I have been a student at Welch College in Nashville and at Moody Theological Seminary in Chicago. I love The USC (the real one in SC, not the other one in CA), Seinfeld, John 3:30, Chick-fil-A, Dumb and Dumber, the book of Job, preaching and teaching, and arguing about sports.

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