Salvation Stories: Sojourn’s Mary Marshall Revell

We will celebrate another Baptism Sunday on March 4. If you would like to take this important step in identifying with Christ and His bride, email baptism@sojournchurch.com by February 28.

One of my first memories of church is being peeled off my mother’s leg by the children’s minister because I absolutely did not want to go back to Sunday school.  My parents are solid believers and understood the importance of raising their children to understand the gospel.  Needless to say they patiently and lovingly brought me back every week, and while my experiences with church never really improved, I did grow in my understanding that there was a God who sent His Son to make a pretty significant sacrifice for me because I was definitely less than perfect.

Fast forward to high school and I began to get involved in Young Life (the organization that was the catalyst for both of my parents to become believers when they were younger) and I finally felt like I had found a group of people where I didn’t need to have it all together.  My Young Life leaders had no expectations (unlike our church youth group where you needed to act a certain way and have the right answer), they just focused on the gospel and knew that through a relationship with Christ my heart (and thus actions) would be refined.

I was sitting under the stars one night at Frontier Ranch in the mountains of Colorado after a particularly devastating talk about how sinful I was and it hit me that my relationship with the Lord was not really a relationship at all.  It needed to be more than something I believed because it was what I had grown up with. I needed to develop my own personal walk with the Lord.

I had heard that “sin talk” numerous times throughout my life, but that evening the Lord opened my heart to what it meant for ME.  From a young age I had taken for granted that Jesus died for my sins but it was at that point that I started a personal relationship with Christ and began to understand what it meant to surrender my life to Him.

Not long after that I left for college and had the incredible fortune throughout those four years to be discipled by strong women who challenged me in my sin, encouraged me in my walk with the Lord, and taught me what it meant to dig into the Word and grow in my relationship with Christ.

After college I moved to Louisville and got involved in Sojourn.  It was here that I first saw what church, done biblically, was really supposed to be like.  Of course it’s not perfect, no church ever will be, but it was a stark contrast from what I’d grown up knowing and the walls I had built up against the church slowly began to crumble.

At Sojourn I have experienced community that challenges me to open up in new ways, dig deep into the lives of those around me, and “preach the gospel to myself” every day.  Here, I am continually learning through community and the preaching of the Word what it means to walk in obedience to Christ. It is for this reason that I have chosen to be baptized today: to proclaim that Christ is my Lord and in him I am forgiven and redeemed.