BAR NUNN, Wyo. – Trent Fetherston had a reputation—the kind of reputation a man will get in an everybody-knows-everybody kind of town like Bar Nunn, Wyoming when he spends what seems like thousands of consecutive happy hours with a drink in his hand and a chip on his shoulder.
“People here had a term for somebody that got really drunk” Fetherston says. “They’d say they were ‘Trent-faced.’ So yeah, that’s what I was known for—getting very drunk and getting in barfights. As a matter of fact, you can name just about any bar around here and I’ve either been kicked out of it, or should’ve been kicked out of it.”
Bar Nunn, population 2,986, has zero stoplights, one convenience store, and not nearly the infrastructure that would at first glance seem to attract missionaries who’ve been called to reach as many people as possible with the gospel. And yet, several years ago Tyler and Ashley Martin left their home in Texas and moved with their three children to Bar Nunn to plant a church.
“We didn’t even know where Wyoming was on a map,” Tyler says. “But when we told God we’d go anywhere, He made it clear this is where He wanted us to come because people in small towns need the gospel, too. Ninety percent of the people in Wyoming don’t know the Lord as their Savior, and seeing how many communities here didn’t have a church of any kind just broke our hearts.”
When Tyler and Ashley first arrived in Wyoming, they discovered that planting a church in a town like Bar Nunn would come with its own unique set of challenges. In the earliest days of what would eventually become Outfitter Church, perhaps the most difficult small-town-Wyoming barrier they had to overcome was a lack of meeting space.
“There was nothing available for us to rent on Sunday mornings,” Ashley says. “So we started out meeting on Wednesday nights. And then when we decided to move to Sundays, the only available place in town was the Hangar.”
The Hangar Bar and Grill is a Bar Nunn landmark.
“It’s where people have their weddings and their birthday parties,” Tyler says. “Yes, it’s a bar, but it’s also really the hub and heartbeat of our town.” And as a location for a new church, the Hangar was both extremely unconventional, and unexpectedly perfect.
“One of their busiest times is Sunday morning breakfast,” Tyler says. “And it’s unique because the bar and restaurant is on one side of the building with the meeting space on the other side, and there’s a wall of windows dividing the space. So when we started meeting there, every Sunday we’d be singing and praying and preaching on one side while people on the other side of the building were watching from the bar. And we thought, ‘How perfect is that? We get to worship in front of a watching world.’”
Fetherston, who’d long been one of the Hangar Bar and Grill’s most frequent customers, was part of that watching world, and being that Bar Nunn was a small town, he’d already heard of Outfitter Church.
“They’d left one of their fliers on my door,” he says. “I’d taken it and left it on my table, and then one night when I couldn’t sleep, I went out and was sitting at the table, and I saw that flier and thought, ‘I’m going to go there.’”
That’s how one Sunday morning, not long after Outfitter had started meeting at the Hangar, Fetherston drove down to the bar that he knew all too well and walked over to the other side.
“That first Sunday, I heard Tyler preaching the gospel and it just opened my heart,” he says. “So I went back the next Sunday, and then the next Sunday and it was crazy. I just couldn’t take the conviction. And then finally one night, I came home and broke down and said, ‘Jesus, I’m so lost. I know I need you,’ and that’s the moment I was born again and my life changed.”
Fetherston became one of more than 60 new believers who’ve now been baptized at Outfitter Church. In an everybody-knows-everybody kind of place like Bar Nunn, he still has a reputation. Only now he’s known for better things.
“Five years ago, if you would’ve told anybody what I’d be like today, they would’ve laughed in your face,” he says. “Everybody knows I’ve changed, and God is using that to show those people who knew me back then, ‘Hey, this is real. Jesus is King and He can change you, too.’”
“I’m so glad I walked to the other side,” says Fetherston. “I sit in church now and look across to the bar and remember all those times when I was lost, and I love it because it reminds me of what Jesus did for me. And I owe that all to Tyler and Ashley answering God’s call.”
The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering® provides half of NAMB’s annual budget, and 100% of the proceeds go to the field. The offering is used for training, support and care for missionaries, like Tyler and Ashley Martin, and for evangelism resources.