LAGRANGE, Ky. — Bob Scott has what most pastors would think are unusual summers.

For three months, he and his wife Julie transport explosives to north Alaska. The tractor-trailer duo relies on those trucking trips for their annual income. Bob is a 60-year-old MDiv student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., while pastoring historic Eighteen Mile Baptist Church in LaGrange.

Bob has a long history of involvement in the trucking business, having owned and operated his own tractor-trailer for years. But pursuing ministry has been a long-term goal. 

The family moved to Alaska in 1993, and while there he went to Bible college. In 2013 the Scotts took a job driving trucks, where Bob says they made better money as employees than they did as operators. In 2014 he started taking online theology classes. “I would do my reading while she was driving. I downloaded lectures on my phone and would have Greek flashcards on the dash.”

As was the case with so many people, life took a dramatic twist when COVID-19 struck. “We had no plans to move (from Alaska) until COVID and everything stopped. We were making runs from Fairbanks, Ala., to Tacoma, Wash., then to Anchorage, Ala., and finally back home to Fairbanks — driving 6,000 miles a week, taking a day and a half off and doing it again.”

Then came a pivotal moment when the couple had a decision to make.

“One day while we were driving we realized we were burning the candle at both ends. We were not sure where COVID was going. We asked, ‘What are we doing? We are not serving in the church like we want to because we are working all the time.’”

He said the question they considered was, “Why don’t we move to Louisville and go back to seminary? I’d wanted to do that full time for 30 years.”

Their home in Alaska sold within 48 hours, and they sold all they had and moved to Louisville.

They arrived on campus, and Bob began classes. He noticed on Southern’s job board a post seeking a pastor for Eighteen Mile Baptist Church. A seminary student who was the pastor had graduated, resulting in the vacancy. “For a lot of years it was a seminary church,” Bob said, adding that every Sunday there would be a different preacher from seminary in the pulpit.

He called about it on a Friday and was told there was no one scheduled to preach on Sunday, and could he do that?

After preaching there a few Sundays, he was asked if he would stay on.

“We had a conversation about what they wanted,” he recalled. “I asked them to give me their expectations.” He told them that besides Sundays, he couldn’t be there all that much. “That was the reality of the situation,” he said.

In the meantime, a trucking company in Missouri was looking for drivers to haul explosives from the East Coast to Alaska and back. “That is what we used to do,” Bob said. “We love going back to Alaska.”

Their trip includes driving the Haul Road, established in the 1970s, going from Fairbanks to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. Pictures of that road give a depiction of the difficult weather conditions faced on that drive.

The company has agreed year after year to the arrangement that calls for the Scotts to leave Kentucky in late April and return to the pulpit in early August.

“The Lord has provided enough for us to make it through the year before we go back to trucking,” he added. That three months of revenue isn’t quite enough to pay their annual expenses. “We have to borrow from ourselves for us to make it through the year before we go back to trucking.”

While Bob is taking classes at Southern, Julie works in the food services department. They have three adult children and 10 grandchildren.

Bob said his goal at Eighteen Mile, which will be 225 years old next month, is “to be faithful — I want to preach the Word, as John the Baptist said in John 3:30, ‘He must increase, I must decrease.’ I like to put those two things together. I pray for everybody in the church individually and pray the Lord would somehow use this ministry He has given me to grow people so they will grow and know Him better, and when they know and love Him better, they will be more comfortable with reaching out.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — This article originally appeared in Kentucky Today.)