Watersmeet Bible Church has new pastor

WATERSMEET — For the first time in many years the Watersmeet Bible Church has a permanent pastor. Robert Yerks was officially appointed to the position on March 1.

“His love of Jesus Christ, people, and the beauty of creation make him a great pastor for the Watersmeet community and area,” said Carol Mason Sherrill of Watersmeet Bible Church.

Prior to Yerks’ arrival as an intern in 2019, the church has had some difficulty maintaining a permanent pastor, he said. According to Yerks after a couple pastors came and left, the congregation was “very cautious as to who came in next,” he said. “We had an opportunity because we were so close (in Calumet), to come down here and just fill the pulpit a couple times while they were in between pastors.”

Yerks said that helped him get to know the congregation and let the people of the church get to know him.

Yerks, is from Westland, a Detroit suburb. A graduate of the University of Michigan with a degree in physics, he came to the U.P. with his wife, Pam, for graduate school at Michigan Technological University several years ago.

“Originally, I came to the U.P. with zero designs of being a pastor in mind,” Yerks said. “But the Lord had different plans.”

He said the graduate school didn’t work out for him, but he and his wife like the U.P. so much they were disinclined to leave. He got involved in ministry through Village Missions’ missionary program.

Yerks said he and his wife started attending Grace Christian Fellowship in Calumet, which is associated with Village Missions. He said that prior to joining that church they had a hard time finding a church that suited both of them spiritually.

“She was raised in a Catholic family; I was raised in a Baptist family and whenever we went to one of those denominations we saw it as an extension of attending the other one’s family church,” Yerks said. “We each had are own independent qualms about the traditions of that church and how they did things.”

He said both the Calumet and Watersmeet churches are non-denominational, and they use the Bible as their overall guiding document.

“That really appealed to us, that it wasn’t longstanding church tradition acting as the church’s governing body, but the Bible itself,” said Yerks.

He said that through the non-denominational church he and his wife were able to work out their differences, and save their marriage as they grew together spiritually in God.

“It really turned my personal life around, it really kind of straightened me out in a lot of respects and eventually made me useful for the work of the Lord,” he said.

In 2014, Yerks and his wife began studying with the Contender’s Discipleship Initiative. He said the initiative is a “set” of college-level Bible courses. The coursework is aimed at equipping people to go into ministry. He said the program took him about five years to complete. Through the program, Yerks said he could see that they were being “equipped for a purpose.”

“Because (Village Missions) had such a wonderful impact on our lives, we wanted to be able to join in with that same mission, as well and hopefully have that impact on other people,” said Yerks.

Yerks said the Village Missions helps keep country churches thriving at a time when most of them can’t afford their own pastor and often have to close. Village Missions has been helping smaller churches in North America find “spiritually-qualified” pastors at the invitation of rural communities since 1948, according to a press release.

“Most missions churches may be the only church within the entire community,” said Yerks. “So it becomes a mission not just of filling the pulpit on Sunday, but in growing relationships within the community and hopefully see people in the community come to Christ as well.”

Services at Watersmeet Bible Church are at 10:30 a.m. on Sunday, prior to service the church offers Bible study at 9 a.m.