No Chance of Survival: How a Deadly Plane Crash Yielded a Growing Spiritual Harvest

News Anchor

Breaking news, a Germantown church is in mourning after four of their members are killed in a small plane crash in Texas

Four midsoutherners killed in a plane crash, and we’re learning they all attended harvest.

Some breaking news from Germantown, where a church congregation is now mourning the loss of four leaders. This is Harvest Church. They say this loss leaves him, as you can imagine, without words to articulate,

Small plane crashed around 11am Tuesday morning, about a mile from the Yoakum Municipal Airport.

Sarah Zylstra

Two years ago, a plane went down near Yoakum, Texas. That was odd. Planes don’t often crash, especially when, like this one, they’re well maintained and have an experienced pilot. Even more unusual was the collection of men on board the pilot was a church elder. In the seats around him were a lead pastor, an executive pastor, and two serious Christians, all of them belonged to Harvest Church in Germantown, Tennessee. That was enough to grab news headlines, but it wasn’t even the strangest part of this story, the plane, a six seat Piper, Malibu Mirage, hit the ground with a G force of 90, which means the pressure at impact was 90 times the force of Earth’s gravity. It was so fast that the plane’s wings were severed, its nose demolished and its cockpit roof blown off. For most of the men, Death was instantaneous. Later, an insurance company expert determined the odds of survival were 0% and yet,

Kennon Vaughan

a couple things hit me in waves, the shock of just a moment he was saying, Hey, we’re gonna land. Here’s we’re doing, and all of a sudden we crashed. And with that shock, the shock that I was still alive, it hit me in an instant that this is a miracle.

Sarah Zylstra

Kenan Vaughn is a graduate of two seminaries, the founder of downline ministries and the planting pastor of Harvest Church. He’s a son, a husband, and the father to five boys, and for some reason he’s alive.

Kennon Vaughan

I don’t think it was any fluke or any Lucky man, your body was at the perfect angle. I just think God’s hand kept me alive because of a divine purpose, that the gospel go forth through this in a unique way, that I believe God’s sovereign over

Sarah Zylstra

it already is in the aftermath of this crash, many people have already come to know the Lord, and it isn’t a stretch to say that this harvest is just beginning to come In. I’m Sarah Zylstra, and you’re listening to recorded you.

Let me tell you a little bit about Ken and Vaughn. He was born and raised in Memphis, where tragedy came early. When he was 16 years old, his father sat the family down to tell them he had brain cancer. Kennan was a young Christian, and he prayed constantly for the Lord to save his dad. God didn’t. The doctors estimated Kennan’s dad had three months to live, and they were right, but God also did. Just weeks before Kennan’s dad passed away, he reconnected with his faith and truly surrendered his life to Christ without his dad around, Kennan made his way through Auburn University wondering if he should be a teacher or maybe a coach on an athletes in action mission trip to South Africa. He learned how to share the gospel. God moved, and Kennan saw people come to know the Lord. He came home consumed with a desire to tell everyone about Jesus. After graduation, he took a job as a youth pastor, but quickly realized he did not have the depth of knowledge or maturity to minister effectively to the students. Here

Kennon Vaughan

I am every week trying to come up with a message for the kids, and just felt overwhelmed. Knew I needed somebody to help me understand the Bible for myself, much less to teach it to the students.

Sarah Zylstra

His senior pastor suggested that he ask a few older men to help him. The first name on the list was soup Campbell, a well known Christian leader who lived in one of the most difficult impoverished neighborhoods in Memphis. He

Kennon Vaughan

came. He brought a couple van loads of kids out of his own neighborhood. Shows up, taught out of John 15. He walked verse by verse through the first half of John 15. I had never heard anyone teach in that way, exegetically expositing God’s word. He knew the original language. He had such insights. And at first, for the first half of teaching, I was like, how do you know the Bible like that? His delight in the Lord was so tangible and. And authentic. And I started thinking, I just want to know Jesus like that.

Sarah Zylstra

Kennan asked soup if he could study the Bible with him. He was asking the right guy, soup was a true disciple maker. When

Roy “Soup” Campbell

I saw disciple making, I saw a ministry that would be multiplying done right if it’s done after the biblical standard of Jesus, and it will continue until they came again.

Sarah Zylstra

Soup and Kennan started studying the Bible together at 5am every Tuesday. It

Kennon Vaughan

was someone I could follow, and for the first time in my 10 years of being a Christian, my spiritual life began to really grow. Things were heading north, and I wasn’t just kind of bouncing around, struggling and wishing I knew more, and wanting to learn more, and wondering where I was and just kind of drifting all of a sudden, there was great intention and just being able to follow a man more mature in Christ than me. Kennan

Sarah Zylstra

loved it. He started dreaming about all his youth group students being discipled by mature believers in the church. Excited. He started asking around if anyone would be interested. The

Kennon Vaughan

more I asked men and women our church, really good men and women, really godly men and women, I kept coming into the same two objections, if you will. They would say, first, hey, you know, what do you mean that you want us to disciple? What does that look like? So I would kind of share with them. Well, you know, here’s what I see in Jesus’s life and ministry. And, boy, I’m experiencing this with soup. It’s the most life giving thing. You don’t have to be perfect, just to be honest and authentic and follow Christ right before them in an intentional relationship with them. And, you know, applying scripture in the context of this life on life relationship. And then they would say, gosh, well, okay, you know, I want to do that. I want to love on them. But hey, I don’t know the Bible that well either I’ve never been formally trained. I can’t tell you how many folks said that. Never been to seminary. I don’t have any formal theological training. Kennan

Sarah Zylstra

told soup what people were saying, and soup suggested asking other pastors in town how they did discipleship training. Kennan called up about a dozen pastors, and

Kennon Vaughan

I had these honest pastors that were just going, Oh, wow. You know, that’s not something we do real well. Our church is good in certain areas, but I would say we’re weaker here. We don’t have many folks doing with the next generation. What suits doing with you, what you’re trying to build. Our people would probably have the same questions that you’re getting. You know, I’d love to hear what you find out. Kind of

Sarah Zylstra

a thing. Kennan sensed the need to see discipleship rekindled in the local church, but he didn’t know what to do, so he prayed. He got connected with Tommy Nelson’s Young Guns program, which trains young men in the word from Genesis to Revelation. Over the course of nine months, he began to see how the whole story of the Bible fits together, and it came alive for him. After that, Kennan went to seminary, but he noticed there were no classes on discipleship. He prayed some more. Finally, he went back to Memphis in 2006 with a vision for a parachurch ministry that would teach the whole story of the Bible four hours a week for nine months. By the end, participants would have the ability and confidence to teach their kids, students, friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone about the Bible, he called it downline. And over the past 19 years, more than 5000 people have enrolled. Here’s why I’m spending so much time on this part of the story. The elders at Kennan’s church noticed that he loved shepherding his students. They asked if he’d want to plant a church, and in 2013 Kennan launched harvest in a suburb of Memphis. For the next 10 years, the congregation grew rapidly, and as they did, Kennan and his team focused relentlessly on discipleship. They held Bible studies, they arranged small groups, they modeled one on one discipleship, and they sent as many people as possible through the downline training by January 2023 Harvest Church had about 30 staff, 30 elders and 1500 members. These were not casual cultural or Christmas and Easter Christians. This was a congregation whose roots were wrapped around expositional preaching classes that explicitly explain scripture and hundreds of small group Bible studies and one on one mentoring relationships. A couple of weeks before the crash, elder Steve Tucker asked Kennan if he’d like to ride along on his work trip to Yoakum, Texas.

Kennon Vaughan

Steve Tucker was one of the godliest men I knew. He was an elder at our church. He was the very first elder at our church. And we had a group of men that were voted in his elders first group, and he was in that group, and he was kind of like an elder statesman, you know, he was, he was a patriarch even among our elders. And so we all looked up to Steve. I wanted to get any time with Steve. I could

Sarah Zylstra

like Kennan. Steve was all in on discipleship. For decades, he’d been meeting weekly with men in his home to talk and laugh and pray together. Steven Kennan also shared something else in common, Texas,

Kennon Vaughan

my family has a four generation cattle ranch in Texas. It’s my favorite place in the world. Grew up going there in the summers. I just I love it. There, and I almost never get there because it’s a ways away. And Steve Tucker owned the largest saddle company in the world, which was in Yoakum, Texas, just 40 minutes from my family ranch. So we had made that connection one day. He also piloted his own plane. He flew to down to yokum every single week for the better part of 1518, years, and that was the way that was his rhythm at work. He was in Memphis half the weekend there, and when we put together that connection, he said, Hey, anytime you want to go down with me for a day trip, Kennan

Sarah Zylstra

did want to, and he’d hopped in with Steve about half a dozen times over the past decade. So here’s something Kennan knew about Steve’s plane. It could fit five passengers.

Kennon Vaughan

I had met a guy recently, gosh, maybe within the last two months at the church, a young guy, it started coming to harvest. He was on the college rodeo team at Mississippi State, and he had said to me, I had just love to get some time with you. And that’s kind of a normal thing young men will say in our church to older men, and I’m starting to move into the older man phase. But he said, Love to, love to get a little bit of time with you. Get to know you and and, and I said, Yeah, I’d love that. And it came to mind that Steve had just said, what he had said. And I thought, you know, this would be fun. Weren’t you a rodeo guy? And he was like, yeah, he was a bull rider. And I thought, I thought this would be too much fun. I could, you know, I love to get to know him in the context of going to see a range in Texas with Steve Tucker. And I just thought so I asked Steve Tucker, could we take this young guy, Tyler? And Steve says, Sure. And then Bill Garner was my very best friend. He was our executive pastor on like, my last three trips to the ranch. I’d invited him to go when I’d go with Steve, and he never could. And so he always said, I’m gonna go on the next one. Go on the next one. And so sure enough, he was able to come on this one.

Sarah Zylstra

The group was shaping up, and Kennan asked if it would be okay to invite one or two more. With Steve’s blessing, he asked Jamie Trussell, then the ministry development and teaching pastor at harvest, to hop in. Jamie said, Yes.

Jamie Trussell

I was in Bill’s office, you know, typical daily routine. I was in there. We were just ragging on each other, talking lots of trash. And then as I was leaving, this was Thursday afternoon, at like, 515 leaving, about to go home for the day, I remember Bill stopped and he looked at me. This is 200% true story. He said, Hey, Jamie, me you and Ken, and probably shouldn’t all get on the same flight. I then mocked him for being a worry wart and just left his office. If you’re counting,

Sarah Zylstra

that’s one pilot, Steve Tucker and four passengers, Kennan Tyler, the former college bull rider, with a young family, Bill the executive pastor, and Jamie, the teaching pastor. They could fit one more, literally,

Kennon Vaughan

the Sunday before the Tuesday we left, there was one more young guy who was in my D group, my discipleship group, for 567, years, enough to really become part of our family. That was 15 years ago. Then, you know, he grew up, became a part of our community and a church. And great adventure, had not gotten married, and was one of those guys that always had an itch to go into travel and to see and so he had just been on, like hiking, you know, some some trails and in Asia, and he’d been on this long trip, and I didn’t realize he was back, and Sunday morning he was sitting in the front row, and that just got my spirit excited. After church, I was talking to him a little bit, and he said, I gotta, I gotta go over to Dallas, you know, on Tuesday, because about to have a nephew born. And he said he did not have a plaintiff yet. I thought, I wonder if you could go with us. Because oftentimes we would stop for gas right there. So I just ran that past Steve and who knew this young man? And Steve said, oh, yeah, that, you know, that’d be a lot of fun. You know, always love having Tyler around. So we had a we had a full crew.

Sarah Zylstra

It was meant to be a day trip. The guys would spend half the day at Steve Tucker saddle company and the other half at Kennan’s family’s ranch. On the way home, they’d stop in Dallas for gas and drop Tyler Springer the Globetrotter off to meet his new nephew. I go back

Jamie Trussell

up on Monday. That’s Martin Luther King Day. So offices were closed, but we had a huge conference. We were going to host for downline, you know, like Russell Moore coming in and Sean McDowell and several so we were trying to get some last minute details together, and I was meeting with Kennan about that, and the workload kind of crystallized. And I remember Monday afternoon looking at Ken and saying, Hey, man, I can’t possibly go with y’all tomorrow. There’s just too much for me to do here. And so kind of in that moment, Monday afternoon, before Tuesday morning, made the decision to stay behind

Sarah Zylstra

at 7am on Tuesday morning, January 17, 2023 five guys arrived at the airport. Steve Tucker, the elder and pilot, Tyler Patterson, the young father who loved cattle ranching. Bill garner the executive pastor, Tyler Springer, the free spirit and Kennan Steve packed their bags into the back, showed them how the doors worked and told them where the seat belts were, and then they climbed in. There was no reason to worry, and nobody did. Over 20 years of flying, Steve had logged more than 3000 flight hours. He knew this route well. He’d owned this plane for three years. Not only was he meticulous about maintenance, but he’d also upgraded both the engine and the control panels. Tyler Patterson, who climbed into the co pilot seat, was also an experienced pilot. At 7:48am they took off.

Kennon Vaughan

The fellowship was rich. I sat in the back of the plane with Bill and Tyler Springer, who had been on the trip, so he’s telling us all about his travels. We had a great conversation that I’ll never forget, and Bill, in typical Bill fashion, was was speaking into Tyler’s life in some good ways about being intentional and missional and helping him see that that’s where his joy came from, versus just, you know, just worldly endeavors apart from the gospel. And so we were just talking through that and and connecting some dots, and, and, and we, you know, two hours passed really quickly, and, and then we were coming towards the landing. Steve had gotten on the earphones with us and said, Hey guys, about 20 minutes, we’ll we’ll land. We’ll go the bathroom, and it’s gonna be a pickup truck there. We’ll jump in. And you know, y’all want to go eat first. You want to go to the company first. And we just said, Let’s go eat. And

Sarah Zylstra

around 10:30am Steve began his descent to the yokum Airport. The town of Yoakum has a population of less than 6000 so as you would expect, the airport, about a mile outside of town, is tiny. The two runways are strips of asphalt on a flat, brown, scrubby plot of land, and the markings on them are faded. There is no control tower and no personnel on the ground. It’s meant for small planes, which was all right, because that’s what Steve had. While the airport wasn’t a problem the weather was it wasn’t raining or windy, but the humidity was around 95% and a thick, heavy fog was sitting unusually low. In some places it was only 100 feet above the ground. Since it was impossible to see, Steve began his approach with the autopilot engaged, but when the plane finally broke below the clouds, probably at about 500 feet, he could see the plane was too far to the right. It wasn’t lined up correctly with the runway about a mile out, he disconnected the autopilot and began a right climbing turn so he could come around and try again. This is when things began to go wrong. In the thick fog, the plane climbed too steeply and turned too sharply. It is not clear exactly why we

Kennon Vaughan

kind of came to this almost stop in the sky and just turned over and pitched straight down. And what now I’ve learned, come to learn, is we stalled, and we didn’t have the altitude necessary from our stall to recover. So when we were pitching down, we poked through that cloud cover really quickly, and right when we did, I mean, the ground was right there, coming up at us really fast.

Sarah Zylstra

When Kennan said they stalled, at first, I thought he meant the airplanes engine stalled, that it quit running. But that’s not what an airplane stall is. Let me quickly explain some physics, airplanes rise into the air because when their engines propel them forward, the air moves around their wings in such a way that pushes and then keeps them aloft. When an airplane moves smoothly, gradually up into the sky and then down again to another airport, the air is continually pushed around those wings and the plane stays where the pilot wants it to but when an airplane angles too rapidly, either up or down, that airflow is broken and the plane begins to drop. Or if a plane is moving too slowly, the airflow is not strong enough, and the plane begins to drop. As Steve’s plane pitched up, it also slowed to 16 knots, or about 18 miles per hour, it was both angled too steeply and going too slowly to stay up to fix a stall, the pilot needs to point his nose down and step on the gas to regain that flow across his wings. It seems Steve did both his plane needed about 1000 feet of airspace to regain enough wind speed to level back out, and Steve didn’t have that much room at this point, alarms were blaring from the co pilot seat. Tyler Patterson was calling for Steve to get the nose up, and Steve was yanking hard on the yoke. But for all that, the atmosphere in the plane did not feel panicky or chaotic, and all

Kennon Vaughan

of this happened really quickly, and it’s the grace of God for sure. If you told me I was gonna be in a plane crash, I would I would have thought there’s not much I can think of that would be more terrifying to me than that. But there was, there wasn’t any any guy. I don’t know how to say this, but there was no fear. There was definitely no panic. There was a real peace. Made eye contact with Bill. His eyes said a lot, and I just realized in that moment we were gonna crash. I didn’t have time to think, but my boys faces flashed before my eyes, and I just saw each one of them, and just just kind of breathed out, oh God, let me be there for them. I think that that’s what came out of me. Uh, without thinking, because I love him so much, of course. But my dad died and I was 16, and had been on my heart a lot lately. My oldest son was about to turn 16, and then we hit. And it was, it was, there was not time to consider anything beyond that. I

Sarah Zylstra

You already know this plane hit the ground with 90 times the force of gravity, the force of the impact, pushed it back up. It came down again, and then was pushed up again, finally, on the third collision, it stopped when

Kennon Vaughan

we hit became real disoriented. It was literally spinning my eyes open, but the plane was spinning. And then when things got still and came into focus, it was just so, so quiet, so, you know, eerily quiet. I was coming to my senses and realizing we had just been in a plane crash. And then I looked and I could see all four of my friends, and the peace of that moment, I knew that they were gone, and not just that they had died. I knew they were with the Lord. And I had the strangest sense in that moment, in the plane, that was very palpable, that I was in this sacred moment, and I was knee to knee with my best friend, and I was thinking, he is right now meeting Jesus. Their Faith’s becoming sight. And I was, I was just sitting there with them, thinking, I want, I mean, I want to see what they’re seeing right this second, like I knew Paul says Philippians, one to depart and be with Christ is far better. This is so many motions. I was shocked. I was devastated. I was overwhelmed. And I had this sense of, oh my goodness, my buddies are entering the very presence of Christ. All that was kind of washing over me. And then the moment after that kind of just sacred, quiet moment, the next two things that kicked in were, I need to try to get up and get out, and I couldn’t breathe. Kennan

Sarah Zylstra

was scared to look down at his own body, afraid of what he’d see, but his arms and legs were still attached, and nothing was obviously awry. He wasn’t even bloody. The main problem was that he felt like the wind had been knocked out of him and he couldn’t get it back. Every 20 seconds or so, he’d get a little sip of air. He didn’t know this yet, but all of his ribs had been broken and both of his lungs had collapsed every time he was breathing in air was leaking out into his body, between his lungs and his chest wall. As it did, it decreased the amount of space available for his lungs to fill with a fresh batch of air. Kennan was slowly suffocating himself just by breathing. So I

Kennon Vaughan

just unbuckled and tried to crawl out. My body was kind of working with me, and I pushed my lower half over the threshold of the of the entrance in the plane that the door had blown off, and so I kind of slid over onto the ground. I landed. My knee landed in a puddle of gasoline. This

Sarah Zylstra

is worth noting. When they landed, the left fuel tank had broken open. Not only were Kennan’s legs in gasoline, but it was sloshed all over the field. The likelihood of a fire was immense, sparks from the friction of landing, from the engine or from the electrical system, all could have ignited the gasoline on the ground or the gallons still in the plane’s tanks, but it didn’t, and

Kennon Vaughan

I remember I almost fell over into it. I remember thinking, if I can’t catch myself, I won’t be able to move and and I won’t make it. But I kind of braced my forearm, and I was leaning back into the plane, and I didn’t really have a plan. I thought I was just kind of moving. And then I stopped right there, and two cell phones were on the floor in front of me and that I kind of thought, I need, you know, I need to call. I need to call 911,

Sarah Zylstra

he absolutely did, because the plane had landed in a pasture hidden from the road by the fog and a little hill. Nobody saw the plane go down, nobody heard the crash, nobody was coming to help. Kennan picked up one of the phones. It was bills and it was locked. Kennan didn’t know the password, and so he put it back down. I’m going to pause here for a public service announcement. If you are ever in an emergency situation and you can’t get into someone’s phone, just tap or swipe it, which will bring up the screen where you can input a password. At the bottom of the screen will be an emergency button you can push to call 911, another option is to push the power button five times rapidly. Kennan didn’t know that then, and

Kennon Vaughan

so I picked up the other phone, thinking, if this phone’s locked, this is it for me, and I turned it over. It was Tyler Springer’s phone, and it was on GPS was open, and he had been maybe looking at where we’re, you know, landing, or weather or whatever. And so I scrolled out and called 911

Sarah Zylstra

at 10:47am, the 911 dispatcher picked up and asked Kennan what his emergency was. But Kennan, who had no air, couldn’t speak. She asked. Where he was. He was in a field about a mile and a half from the yokum airport, but he couldn’t tell her that. She asked what happened, and he couldn’t say anything. All he could do was make a little noise. She started guessing. She asked if he’d been in an accident. He made a little noise. She asked if it was a crash, a plane crash. He made a little bit louder noise.

Kennon Vaughan

She stayed on the line with me. She sent two units to the place, dispatched them to where the the cell phone was sending a signal from that kind of gets him in the area. And sure enough, about 15 minutes later, maybe 12 minutes later, I heard an ambulance busting through the fence line and coming down this, you know, rough coming rough terrain of the hay pasture to where I was, and then they tended to me immediately in the field.

Sarah Zylstra

By tended to Kennan, means, one of the emergency responders recognized why he couldn’t breathe, and quickly inserted a needle into his back to remove the air so his lungs could expand. Later, they told him he’d probably had five minutes of air capacity left. Immediately, the medics radioed for a helicopter to airlift Kennan to the nearest level three Trauma Center, 40 miles away in Victoria. Sorry, the helicopter crew radioed back. We can’t fly in this fog. By the time Kennan was loaded into the ambulance that would take him to Victoria, the saddle company guys waiting at the airport knew something was wrong. One of them called Steve’s wife, Kathy.

Kathy Tucker

He was screaming on the phone. All he could say was, the plane went down. The plane went down and I was calm as cucumber, and I said, Darryl, just tell me they’re okay. So the plane went down, okay. Just tell me they’re okay. But all he could say was, the plane went down, numb

Sarah Zylstra

with shock, Kathy couldn’t even cry, but she could use the phone. She called Kennan’s wife, Katherine, who was at the dentist. I had

Katherine Vaughan

a message from her when I got in my car, and she said, Katherine, honey, I need you to call me right away. Please call me as soon as you get this, you’ve got to call me immediately. And so I called her back, and she said, Honey. She said, The plane has the plane has crashed. And I can remember hearing that and saying, No, it hasn’t. I mean, just complete denial. I go, Kathy, no, it’s not. No, it’s not. The plane has not crashed. And she said, Sweetheart, we don’t know any details yet. She said, but you need to get somewhere and keep your phone on and with you, I’m going to call you, and I just sort of began to panic. And she said, can you tell me who was on that plane? Kathy

Sarah Zylstra

began to alert the women just in time. Yoakum isn’t a big place. Word spreads fast, and it didn’t take much longer for it to spread to and through harvest. Jamie was in his church office that day. He’d been texting the guys to see if they’d made it, and the silence was starting to make him feel uneasy.

Jamie Trussell

So I’m sitting there meeting and out of nowhere, one of my really good friends, Tony Fisher, who’s a worship pastor at Harvest Church. I mean, my office door flies open, and Tony’s head pops in, and it’s a look on his face, but you could tell he was completely disoriented, and he goes well, somebody, you know, my cousin, just texted me that something happened in Texas, and and my phone and Tony’s phone just start message after message after message after message. And I remember looking at Tony and saying, Man, we’ve got about a three to five minute window before everybody out there, and I kind of pointed to the harvest offices, before all of them start hearing stuff from people that aren’t us.

Sarah Zylstra

So Tony ran through the offices gathering the staff. I

Jamie Trussell

mean, at this point, I don’t know actual details, other than, you know, Steve’s planes gone down. And so I told everybody say, hey, look bill and Kennan and Steve and Tyler Springer and Tyler Patterson, they flew out for Texas this morning. And I just I looked at the staff, and I said, I can confirm for everyone right now we do know that plane has crashed, and I mean the spectrum of sounds and emotions, and it was wild in that room. I mean, it was just combustible in that moment,

Sarah Zylstra

while Jamie was talking, his phone started ringing, he ducked out across the hall into an old choir room.

Jamie Trussell

That’s when I learned that everyone had passed away, but that Kennan was a sole survivor, and obviously in extremely critical condition. And so I sat on the phone, and I gave myself like 30 seconds of crying extremely hard, and then I took a deep breath and hung up the phone because there were 30 something people waiting across the hall, and so then I had to go back in, and at that point actually let them know the details of Bill and Steve and and Springer and Tyler Patterson were with the Lord and that Canon. Was alive, but in critical, really critical condition.

And if I thought the first reaction was kind of otherworldly, it looked like a scene from the Old Testament, that idea, which we don’t really do in the west of wailing. I mean, people made sounds that I’d never heard before. I mean, there were some members of the staff that were physically unable to stand, and so that was an intense, intimate and intense moment.

Sarah Zylstra

The staff was able to grieve for about half an hour, and then they had to get to work over the next hours, days and weeks, they disseminated information, figured out which ministries to take offline and which to keep running, and wrote sermons and funeral messages. They fielded news requests and kept an eye out for people coming to look at the tragedy, sometimes literally peering in the office windows. The staff canceled the downline conference. They planned and conducted Bill’s funeral, and then Tyler Patterson’s and then Steve’s. They drove to Denton, Texas to help with Tyler Springer’s funeral near his family’s home. They called stopped by and cried with Kathy Tucker, Elizabeth Garner and Emmy Patterson. Right away, harvest culture of discipleship began to pay dividends. So

Jamie Trussell

discipleship in my life was normal once I came to faith, all these little deposits that people have made along the way, all of those small deposits that have been put into your leadership bank account all get withdrawn in a singular moment, and you realize, Oh, my word God’s put so much more there than I thought was there. And look, I tell you what, those are, so great. We have a lot of elders at harvest. I’m talking about multiple men going, Hey, look, I’m owning Kathy Tucker and y’all don’t worry about a thing, like, I’ve got it. I’ll build the team. I’ll make sure. And another guy going, Hey, hold on, Emmys worked in my vet clinics for years. I’m owning Emmy and don’t worry about a thing. Another guy going, hey, I’ll, I’ll be at Catherine’s house every day when the kids get home from is just kind of like, that’s where, I don’t know how a church, I’m not advocating for an ecclesiological model, necessarily, but we don’t do it without a plurality of elders to that degree. We just don’t, and that was such a gift, just to sit back and watch, because you trusted those men were going to do fantastic at that, and they were stepping into hard stuff. These aren’t by the way, these aren’t staffers. These are finance guys and CEOs and whatever else, right? They these are just godly men who took their role seriously and immediately stepped in. And then our members, just the people of harvest, kind of shined towards one another and towards us in ways that we we hadn’t had to before, and you never really know right until you’re in it what something like that will do for your church. But here’s what I think this kind of strange paradox of Christianity is that our church thrived and was vibrant and joyful, while also lamenting and grieving in unprecedented ways. Church

Sarah Zylstra

members prepared food, took care of children and made phone calls. They helped with the funerals, wept with the families and donated money to help with the kids’ education, they prayed together, sang together and shared scripture with each other. Most of all, they were together at church or at the houses of the women, and the whole time they were waiting for Word on Kennan

after the crash, Kennan traveled by ambulance to Victoria, which immediately sent him on to Brooke Army Medical Center, a level one trauma center in San Antonio. Jordan. GEIS was his surgeon. He took

Jordan Guice

quite a shot. The vector of force that went through his right upper quadrant was tremendous. Angled up a little bit, his liver would have been cracked completely. I mean, his liver had cracked some holes, but would have been cracked completely. Probably would have bled and died in the plane angled more towards the centers. Aorta was right there. I mean, he he had a devastating injury, but you could think of how the vectors of force, if they would have been just a little bit more off, you know, a few centimeters here and there, he wouldn’t be here. Yeah, that was that was pretty amazing.

Sarah Zylstra

Even with a good vector of force, Kennan’s insides were a mess. Two of his ribs had been broken clean off and were floating around. His kidney and liver were shredded. One of his collapsed lungs was punctured. It. There was a two inch hole through his diaphragm. Two thirds of his colon was in such bad shape, it had to be removed throughout several hours of surgery, Dr Geist took Kennan’s organs out one by one and repaired them. We

Jordan Guice

call it damage control surgery, basically, you stop the immediate life threatening things first and assess how he’s doing, and as we were doing the dissection for the colon, I remember that we saw a little bit of bile. Bile is the stuff that drains the liver into the small intestine through a tube called the common bile duct. And I remember I looked up at Connor, my chief resident, and we both looked at each other, kind of looked down at it. It was just a small amount. We both kind of smiled. And I remember saying, like, man, that would be bad. And I just put a, we call it lap pad. It’s a piece of cloth, basically that helps soak up blood and stuff. I just put one right there. And I was like, we’ll come back, you know, let’s finish what we’re doing. We did colon stuff. We took some colon out, put it back together. We fixed this diaphragm, put some chest tubes in, and then as we were coming this was, you know, a few hours, maybe a couple hours into the operation, came back, and it was a large amount of bile. Now at this point, you know me and Connor, the chief resident, are like, it’s the problem.

Sarah Zylstra

It was a huge problem, not only because Kennan needed that bile to have a way to move from his liver to his intestines to digest his food, but also because bile that is floating around in your abdomen will damage or infect the other organs. You can live without your appendix, but you cannot live without some kind of bile duct and cannons had disappeared. All Dr Geist could find was one end of it, which in itself was amazing because the bile duct is only five millimeters in diameter. In fact, it is so small and well insulated with fat and organs that it hardly ever gets injured. When Dr Geiss presented Kennan’s case later to a worldwide gathering of military doctors, nobody had ever seen anything like it in the operating room. When Dr Geiss called for backup, his superiors had never seen it either. While Kennan was still on the operating table, they did some research and found bile duct replacements had been documented less than 20 times. In those cases, surgeons had tried basically three different strategies to fix it. None was great. All of them led to complications later. Finally, Dr Geist MacGyvered an answer. He skipped the bile duct all together, attaching Kennan’s liver directly to his small intestine, and then he sewed Kennan back

Jordan Guice

up. I thought we were going to be in for a really long hospitalization with a lot of complications.

Sarah Zylstra

Instead, Kennan would be out of the hospital and back home in just three weeks. There weren’t complications, at least not physical ones.

Kennon Vaughan

Gosh, day three, day four, right there, in the early days, when I was first sitting up in the bed, my pain was stable for the first time. Couldn’t believe what had happened, and just was thinking about how those men were gone, and the reality and the gravity and the finality of their earthly death. I got real emotional. I just started crying, just my own longing to see them. And then I was kind of thinking about, I invited every single one of those guys. I started thinking, Ah, if only bill had gone on one of the other ones. Or if I hadn’t invited, if I’d taken him on, you know, one of the made him go on one of the early ones, he wouldn’t have been on this one. Or, Why did I invite Tyler to come with us? He had his own plans. He would have done just fine, and I invited him to come with us, and we’d drop him off in Dallas. And it seemed like such a good idea. And wish I’d just gone to get a coffee with Tyler Patterson. And not everything was a why, why? Why? And if only I had not done this, and there was a knock on our door right in that moment, and this guy stuck his head in there, and I was just a mess. He said, Dr Vaughn, would this be a bad time for guests? And I said, Yes, I can’t see my right now. And he said, Okay. He said, Well, just want to let you know that a soup Campbell and Steve Winstead were here to see you. And I was like, Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hold on. Yeah, no, let those guys in. And they came in, and for a second I tried to kind of pull it together. And, you know, wipe, wipe my face. And they sat down, and soup was right there at my bedside, right at my arm, and Steve was at my feet. And then I just lost it again, and I just started balling, and I started saying the same things I’d been saying in my head. I was saying them out loud, man, super, I’m the one that invited every one of them. I wish, I wish I hadn’t said that I’d even see Tyler till Sunday morning. And he stopped me, and he put his hand on my right, on my knee, and he said, he said, Look at me. Now. I’m just blurry mess. I look at him. And he said, Look, man. He is or he ain’t. He said, you feel me. And I thinking, and I said, What? No, what? And he said, he is, or he ain’t say your God is sovereign over every single bit of this thing, or he ain’t sovereign at all. Then

Roy “Soup” Campbell

that’s when I asked him. I said, Jenny, I said, you’ve preached several times, you studied the word, and you know about God’s supremacy and his sovereignty. So easy is or easy he’s not. That’s the only question. And he may have had to circle back through and repeat it, but his expression changed.

Kennon Vaughan

I called that phrase to mind pretty much every day. There’s always times that I’d get overwhelmed with that loneliness and that heaviness, and I just have to say to myself, he is where he ain’t, and I believe he is, and that’s an area I got to trust him

Sarah Zylstra

with. It is impossible for us to know the mind of God to ever say this is why God allowed this certain tragedy to happen. That line of thinking just leads to a logical quagmire. For example, we could say God allowed Kennan to live so his boys would have their dad. But what about Tyler Patterson’s kids? Why do they have to grow up without their dad? Or we could say God allowed this to happen so people could hear the Gospel proclaimed during the funerals. But couldn’t the Lord have reached those people another way? Of course, he could have a more fruitful train of thought then is to acknowledge that while we’re on this earth, we will never know why God prevents specific tragedies and allows others, but we do know this, he never leaves us. Elizabeth Garner Bill’s wife was a young widow. When he married her, she was on a trip with friends when she got the news about Bill. I

Elizabeth Garner

was on the way to the airport when my dad called me. I can remember exactly what he said. He said, Elizabeth, this is Daddy. I’m so sorry that was killed in a plane crash, and like the the walls of this SUV were like caving in on me, and all I could think was, Lord, I cannot do this again. My children can’t do this again. It is grace. It’s been sufficient every day, even in the midst of unthinkable suffering, pain, and since January of 23 the Lord has actually filled my life abundantly. He’s sustained me, he’s comforted me, he’s provided me with a new community in a college town with opportunities to share about his faithfulness, His goodness, His love, His grace, His mercy, even in the wake of a tragedy, Emmy

Sarah Zylstra

Patterson also found light in the darkness. Here she is at Tyler’s funeral service, and

Emmy Patterson

in what has been the most painful 13 days of my life, there’s been a surprise. I’ve found joy. My Heavenly Father has left zero doubt in my mind that Tyler Patterson was supposed to be on that airplane on January 17. He orchestrated too many critical details and sweetly gave me knowledge of those to make this trip possible for Tyler. We prayed over this trip on Sunday, not for safety, but that God would be glorified through this trip and through these men.

Sarah Zylstra

A brand new widow with two toddlers, Emmy, said she woke up each morning with a new lie in her head. You’ve lost your helper, you lost your friend. You can’t do this by yourself. The

Emmy Patterson

Lord has answered each of these lies with truth, whether it was by the obedience of fellow believers or through his word. What I’ve clung to past two weeks,

Sarah Zylstra

the Lord sustained Kathy Tucker, in part, through a new friendship with an older woman, Becky Cook, who had also lost her husband. They talk or see each other nearly every day, and on Sundays, Kathy sings with the worship team

Kathy Tucker

Isaiah, 49 verse 13, and it says, shout for joy. O heavens, rejoice. O earth burst into song. O mountain, for the Lord comforts his people and will have compassion on his afflicted ones. The whole first year I was paralyzed. I was paralyzed physically. I was paralyzed mentally, and I would either be on the sofa downstairs or in my bed, just curled up like a fetus in the womb, and it was just unreal, you know? And but then on Sundays, buddy, it was time for me to go sing, and they would just let me show up and sing with the group

Sarah Zylstra

on Easter this year, Tyler Springer’s parents shared a message with their church. Here’s his father, Brad.

Brad Springer

God called me out. He took me to the valley, and then I believe I felt the breath of God come upon me in peace like a river flowed through my life. Because I still believe, yes, we’ve lost Tyler, yes, we’ve lost a big chunk of our life. But do we really believe that Jesus Christ came and died for our sins and that we have an eternal destiny? Do we really believe that we believe this is it here on earth? No, I don’t. I’m blessed to be able to go that deep with God and to see how God’s work and whatever tragedies happen in your life, I want you to bow and ask God to use that tragedy for His glory, and I believe that he will, maybe in a big way, small way, but always know that God is going to be there for you, and he is for you and not against you. It

Sarah Zylstra

is a comfort to know the Lord’s presence in times of tragedy, but sometimes in His grace, He gives us even more, and we can start to see him working things together for good. About a week after the surgery, Dr Geist visited Kennan’s hospital room. He was finding it hard to believe that Kennan had survived not only the crash but also the surgery with no physical complications.

Kennon Vaughan

He comes in, and he takes his first time I ever seen his face. He took off his surgeon mask, he pulled it back and flicked it towards a trash can, and he said, Tell me your story. And I thought it was a really interesting question. I said, What do you mean? How you feeling? Does this hurt? What’s going on? And he said, your story. I want to hear your story. And I thought, I don’t know what he means. I’m gonna share my testimony with him. And so I did. And at the end of it, he was just really contemplating what I was saying. And I said, Hey, are you a Christian? He said, I can’t say that I am. I said, huh? And this is what came to I said, you know, Doc, I don’t know that I would say it this way to be theologically precise, but maybe, maybe God used you to save my life, and maybe he’s gonna use me to save your life. And he said, I think you’re right. And I was like, whoa. And I remember the sweetness of that moment and thinking a week or so in just some little tangible fruit of God’s gonna, God’s gonna redeem this,

Sarah Zylstra

Kennan got another glimpse of that around Memorial Day 2024 nearly a year and a half after the accident, he was in Texas for Tyler Springer’s memorial service, and he asked The owners of the pasture where the plane crashed, Mitch and Larissa harbus, if his family could stop by to see it. Mitch and Larissa said, Sure. They all went down to the pasture together, where they listened to Ken and tell what he could remember. They cried and prayed and added to the memorials that Mitch and Larissa had erected. Then Larissa shared that while she and Mitch were both raised Catholic, when they had watched the live stream funerals of the four men who died on their land, they had been struck by the personal way everyone who spoke talked about knowing the Lord. She and Mitch came to the conclusion, we want to know Jesus like these men did.

Kathy Tucker

I have actually always told myself, even way before this happened. I wish you could buy cliff notes on the Bible. I wish somebody would just sit down and explain some of that stuff. Some of that stuff is so confusing to me. Like Catholic, I mean, we preach the gospel, definitely, but we’re not one of those gospel driven churches, so it’s like I don’t get that explanation in my mass or my homilies. So it was like I was missing it. Just talking to him on a few things out here in the pasture, he was explaining more to me in minutes than I had kind of understood all my

Sarah Zylstra

life. Larissa signed up for downline, where she is learning the story of the whole Bible. Even though he’s not an official student, Mitch is learning too. Even

Kathy Tucker

Mitch is like, wow, the way they profess it, it just, it’s easy to understand, and it just has so much meaning and value, stuff, little things that we just didn’t even know or pick up on. I mean, like, I read the book of Ruth before, but I never understood it until Shannon explained it in like, four sessions. He explained the book of Ruth, and now it’s like, I totally understand. While

Sarah Zylstra

they were still standing in that pasture together, Larissa said to Kennan, hey, Mitch, and I do not think that plane crashed on our land by accident. Do you want to build a church here on our land in this pasture? We think God may want the gospel to go forth right here.

Kennon Vaughan

And I’m looking around and I mean, they’re not a there’s not a structure in sight, and it’s so beautiful and so crazy. I said, Larissa. I said, I don’t know what to say. I said, who, who would come to church? And she said, I don’t know. She said, but there’s got to be others. Week later, I’m I’m back home and I’m back home, I’m actually. Uh, cutting and stacking firewood with one of my mentors. I said, you know, the craziest thing happened, I tell them the story I just told you. And I said, I mean, we wouldn’t actually plant a church in that field, right? Like, I’m real big on all the things that Tim Keller’s written about, you know, trying to plant churches in populated areas makes a lot of sense. And he said, Well, he said, Gosh, I don’t know. He said, I mean, plane crash there. And these people are saying they they’ve God awakened them to a desire to know him through it. And they think there’s others, I feel like she wants the gospel preached. Hey, Let’s preach the gospel there

Sarah Zylstra

on January 17 and 1820, 25 two years to the day after the plane crash, Kennan preached a revival style meeting in that field in Texas. Ellie Holcomb, whose husband is Emmy Patterson’s cousin, sang. So did Aaron Watson, who had recently connected with the new owner of Steve Tucker’s saddle company. 200 harvest members drove the 11 hours to volunteer, and another 200 harvest members came just to be part of it. In the end, the weather wasn’t great. It was cold and windy, but nearly 4000

Kennon Vaughan

people came. We saw over 100 people committed their lives to Christ. We had cards they filled out, and we had a whole lot of folks communicate encouraging things to us about how God was, setting them free from addiction, bringing them back to a faith they had, maybe once had, that had grown dead, coming to Christ for the first time. I just just poured through those thinking of my buddies and thinking God, he will not waste an ounce of our suffering before the ages began. God knew each one of these stories. You know that first fruits of Dr Geist and of Mitch and Larissa, all of a sudden turned into this incredible harvest

Sarah Zylstra

Steve Tyler, Bill and Tyler did not die, so those people would be saved. Jesus did that. But in the fullness of time, the Lord called those men home, and in the fullness of time, he used their deaths to bring others to himself. Here’s how soup thinks about it.

Roy “Soup” Campbell

They weren’t martyred for their faith, but but their faith was planted, just like the martyrs life would be planted. Their faith was planted. So these guys lives are still ministering, and it will be for a long time.

Sarah Zylstra

It has been more than two years now. Emmy Patterson just got remarried. The Lord has provided another father figure for her little ones. Elizabeth Garner’s daughter attends Auburn University, where Elizabeth has found renewed purpose discipling young women in her church. She is actively working to establish a downline Institute in Auburn Tyler Springer’s parents, three brothers and sister, have grieved together and been knit closer by the tragedy and the baby he was flying to see. They named him Tyler.

Dr Geiss is deployed to the United Arab Emirates. Before he left, he visited Harvest Church and heard Kennan tell the story about soups. Question, is he or Ain’t he?

Jordan Guice

That’s really the one part that I really remember and

Sarah Zylstra

think about quite a bit. It’s changing the way Dr Geist thinks about his patient’s suffering. There’s

Jordan Guice

a saying I say in trauma, like, I didn’t shoot him, I didn’t wreck his car, I didn’t cause him to get drunk and drive into a tree. You know, bad things happen. Patients die. I think we have to be a little bit impersonal to be able to do the job. And I think that maybe that now, and I voice it out loud, maybe I should reframe that and being like God is sovereign, and this happened for God’s plan,

Sarah Zylstra

Kevin’s boy, boys are growing up, and his marriage is sweeter than ever after Kennan was able to retake the reins at harvest. Jamie Trussell moved two hours northwest of Yoakum to a small town called Dripping Springs, where he’s leading a church revitalization. Larissa continues to work through downline classes. She and Mitch are still lobbying for a gospel preaching church in Yoakum. We’ve

Kennon Vaughan

actually started, started two live downline institutes that within half hour from right there. One’s in serving the shiner yokum area in a building that works for us in China right, right up the road, and another 120’s 25 minutes. Wayne Gonzalez, we’ve got over 100 people right now, some that don’t have a church, a lot of farming community folks, some that are from some rural churches in that area that are saying, hey, we want to know God, like those men, and we’re teaching them the Bible.

Sarah Zylstra

Of course, they are at Harvest Church in Memphis. That’s what they do. For the past decade they’ve been. Showing up to early morning Bible studies, evening small groups and Saturday coffees at church, in restaurants or in each other’s homes. They’ve been asking each other, can I get some time with you? Day by day, week by week, they’ve been pushing each other into a deeper understanding of the Bible, a deeper knowledge of their own sin and sanctification, a deeper walk with the Lord. And when their storm came, like it does for everyone, they cried to a god they knew would comfort them. They asked why, but they didn’t actually need an answer, because they trusted the good will of their father in heaven. They raged against the brokenness of a world where this could happen. And then they trusted in a sovereign God who would one day put things right. And then, because this was the rhythm of their lives, they went to church and sang with Cathy, when peace like a river. And yet not I, but through Christ in me, they listened to sermons from Jamie Trussell, whom the Lord spared, they got with their small groups and one on one mentors to pray and talk and read the Bible.

The Friday after Steve’s funeral, Kathy woke up to find the men in his discipleship group parked in her driveway, just like they had done for years and years. What are you guys doing here? She asked them. We didn’t know where else to be. They told her. She told them to come on in and to this day, more than two years after his death, Steve Tucker’s discipleship group still meets in his home every Friday morning. They read the Bible, drink coffee, talk, laugh and pray. Kathy told them they were always welcome and gave them a key, don’t stop. She told them, I hope you don’t stop until Jesus comes back. You Sarah,

thank you for listening to this episode of recorded which is part of the gospel coalition’s Podcast Network. This episode was written by me Sarah Zylstra and edited by Colin Hansen, Megan Hill and Cassie Watson. Our audio editor was Scott Caro and our producer was new bridge studios, recorded is made possible by generous donations. If you would like to join in supporting this work, we would love for you to do so at tgc.org/donate.