Church in a bar: Island pastor reflects on journey from addiction to redemption

Pastor Mattew Wyatt found his calling amidst the endless tribulations of his active addiction. After many years fighting for his sobriety, he now uses the darkness of his past to show people God’s light.

He aims to meet people exactly where they are, illustrating his belief that God unconditionally loves the broken and imperfect. So, every Sunday for the last three years, he’s delivered his sermons at the Rockin’ Cigar Bar on South Padre Island.

But it was a long, challenging road to his current ministry.

THE JOURNEY

Decades prior, Wyatt was introduced to Vicodin after a work injury. He says the addiction was instant from the first time he took it.

Eventually, he was taking around 20 pills a day, struggling to financially support his habit. Wyatt resorted to stealing from the jewelry store where he worked to exchange merchandise for the pills. It wasn’t long before he was caught, as $85,000 worth of inventory had gone missing.

While waiting for his court date, Wyatt hacked in the the Drug Enforcement Agency website, and sourced countless doctors’ DEA numbers, so that he could impersonate them at pharmacies to acquire more Vicodin.

By this point, he was taking 40-100 pills a day. He’d supplement his stash by doctor shopping, visiting three offices a day. This scheme worked for five weeks, but two days prior to his court date, he was caught once again.

He served three months for the theft, and was facing a total of 10 years. However, “only by the grace of God,” according to Wyatt, he was sentenced to half a year of community service.

He says after meeting a supplier from his work crew, his addiction skyrocketed to unprecedented heights.

He and his wife Krystal moved to California, in hopes that a new environment would be the answer to his problems, but after being sober for three months, Wyatt relapsed again.

The first time he overdosed, he had taken 112 of the 10-milligram Vicodin in a six-hour period. The last time he overdosed, he was in an airport parking lot, with his young daughter in the backseat.

‘HE NEVER LEFT ME’

The last year and a half of his addiction, he couldn’t get his hands on enough pills to satisfy his compulsions, so he turned to alcohol. One morning, he woke up with a single thought in his mind: he was going to take his life that day.

Coincidentally, Krystal had something on her mind as well. She had inadvertently discovered Wyatt’s stash of empty bottles, and had divorce papers ready.

Krystal had taken off with their daughter to her grandmother’s home, clueless to Wyatt’s plans. He wrote his suicide note in the front page of his Bible, what he called a “middle finger to God.”

But, once again “by the grace of God,” right before he committed the tragic act, Krystal came back to check on Wyatt. He says she gave him his “next breath.”

“I hit the floor, just gasping, crying, and I was like ‘Why’d you come home?’ I was angry. She said ‘there’s something that came over me and I felt like I had to get back to you,’” Wyatt recounted.

The next day, Wyatt checked into a faith-based rehab clinic, where he “realized the love of God was so powerful.”

“He was pursuing me this whole time, even through all the addiction. He never left me. He was always there.”

Wyatt says for the 90 days he was in rehab, he fell in love with Jesus. He began to dive into the Bible. He was introduced to a new perspective: That God loved him the way he was. That didn’t have to work to “earn” God’s love. He believed through allowing God to love him, he could be transformed.

“So I made a commitment. I said ‘Wherever you call me to go, I will follow.’”

A NEW CHAPTER

A week after leaving rehab, Krystal saw a change inside of him, like he was “a brand new person.”

Wyatt recalls her telling him that one day, he was going to become a pastor. Wyatt thought the premise of this idea was borderline insanity, believing there was not a chance that God would want to use a man who “caused so much brokenness.”

However, six months out of rehab, Wyatt was approached by a local pastor seeking his assistance. From there, Wyatt became a youth pastor, and then an associate pastor. In his seventh year of sobriety, he was working HVAC, training to become a manager, with a six-figure income, but he felt God’s call.

“I came home and I told my wife ‘I feel like God’s calling me to quit my job, and we need to go into ministry.’”

Two days before his last day, a church in Washington, in the same city where his addiction started, asked for his help. Wyatt answered the call.

The church initially only had 12 people, but after he began teaching God’s unconditional acceptance, that number increased exponentially to 300 attendees in a town of 1,000.

In October 2020, Wyatt and Krystal planned a trip to Pensacola, Florida, but two weeks prior, a small hurricane had hit, and it only damaged the hotel they had booked. This miraculous occurrence led them to their discovery of South Padre Island.

During their ten-day trip, Wyatt felt God’s call again. Two months after leaving South Padre, Krystal recognized another shift in Wyatt.

“So I finally opened up and said, ‘I feel like God is calling us to go to that Island and start a church.’ And she said, ‘I have been feeling it this entire time, and was just waiting for you to catch up.’”

Wyatt wasn’t ready to leave Washington, but he remembered the commitment he made 11 years prior after leaving rehab.

Months later, they departed for their new journey, unsure of what their church would look like. On their way down, the owner’s of Cigar Bar offered their building for a Sunday church service. Wyatt was elated about the premise of holding his church in a bar, because he knew that would be the perfect place for his unique message.

They held their first service on Aug. 14, 2021 with a crowd of 13 people. It didn’t take long for them to build a following, filling the bar every Sunday, and streaming their service to 3,500 people all over the world.

Years later, after 80 baptisms in the Gulf of Mexico, and “miracle after miracle,” the Wyatts are feeling the call once again, and will be departing to Boise, Idaho on April 14.

They will be leaving OneTwo church in the hands of Pastor Shawn Reinsel.

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