About Us

Pastor Wayne Woods spent most of his growing-up years in the small east central Alabama town of Wadley, after moving there from New Orleans when he was entering the fourth grade. He and his mother and little brother had moved to his mother’s hometown to live with his grandmother. He enjoyed high school sports, especially football, being selected as an all-state player his senior year. He began dating his wife, June, in the tenth grade in high school. Pastor Wayne was saved at a youth revival at the Wadley Baptist Church at the age of 15 and not long after that, felt a strong call to ministry, even though he did not obey that call until years later.

After graduating in 1970, he attended Vanderbilt University for a year on a Naval R.O.T.C. scholarship, then applied to the U. S. Naval Academy. He entered the Naval Academy in the summer of 1971 and graduated in 1975. He and June were married at Wadley Baptist Church three days after graduation on June 7, 1975. After flight training, he was a U.S. Navy pilot flying P3 Orion sub-hunters in Jacksonville, Florida, until early 1982. By then the Lord had blessed them with two children, Stephanie, born in 1978, and Brian, born in 1981. He resigned from the Navy in 1982 only because he no longer desired the long family separations.

Although he did not yet realize it, the Lord’s call was still there, even though he was not walking close enough to Him to clearly hear it. That, however, changed, when the family moved to Greenville, S.C., in 1983. Pastor Wayne was working as an engineer for Michelin Tire Corporation. More importantly, the Lord had moved the family there to put us in a church where the call became so clear, he could no longer ignore it. Wayne and June said “yes” to His call during an invitation on Easter Sunday of 1984. They sold their house and moved to Memphis, Tennessee, to attend Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, which he graduated from in the summer of 1987.