The first time Richard Pope read Desiring God by John Piper, he hated it.
“I read it like it was homework,” Pope, then a pastoral intern, recalls. When he reported back to the associate pastor who’d asked him to read it, Pope told him, “It was the most boring book I’ve ever read.”
Pope had only been a Christian for a few years by then, saved at 15 years old. Before that, he’d endured a dysfunctional family, sexual abuse, his cousin’s suicide, and several stints in mental health facilities.
His pastor looked at him. “Now read it like you love Jesus,” he said.
So Pope read it again. This time, he worked harder, looking up every Scripture passage Piper referenced.
“And I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, this is the best book I’ve ever read,’” he said.
Piper’s Christian hedonism isn’t prosperity theology. Instead, it’s built on the idea that God is sovereign over everything—that there’s nothing God doesn’t see, know, bring about, and control.
You might think a guy with Pope’s past wouldn’t love the idea that God allowed those things to happen to him.
But he doesn’t see it that way.
“I believe God allows suffering because I read about the Garden of Gethsemane,” Pope said. And he believes in God’s good sovereignty because he’s seen it all over—both in the Bible and also in his life.
In the last three years, he’s seen his God’s providence in his growing church plant and in the 115 people he’s baptized. But he’s also seen God’s hand at work when, a month before his church launch, he got the worst news of his life.
Growing Up Rough
At first glance, it’s hard to see any good providence in Pope’s childhood.
Before he was born, Pope’s mom left his abusive dad. She was working at a carnival and regularly using cocaine when a friend raped her. When she became pregnant with Pope, she didn’t know what to do, so she went back to her husband.
“My first memory is . . . hearing my mom scream, and crying,” Pope told NAMB podcast producer Tony Hudson. “I’m sitting in a crib in some dingy motel and [her husband is] just beating the living crap out of my mom.”
Pope’s mom left her husband but had nowhere to go. She bounced between friends and family members before moving with relatives to a house in Seaford, Delaware. Pope was around 5 years old when his uncle approached him. It was Christmas Eve.
“He sodomized me, right there in front of the Christmas tree,” Pope said. His mom found out, alerted the authorities (who pressed charges), and took Pope to counseling.
He needed more counseling in high school, after his cousin’s suicide led Pope to several of his own suicide attempts. He spent so much time in mental health facilities that he missed nearly a whole year of high school.
“I was a kid who hated the idea of God,” Pope told TGC.
Saved in a Burger Joint
When he was 15, Pope got hired to work in a burger restaurant. A few weeks later, so did a homeschooled kid named Harold.
“He’d been saved for like three or four weeks,” Pope said. “I think he’d heard [KB’s] ‘Church Clap‘ too many times and really felt like he had to share the gospel. . . . He just wouldn’t leave me alone.”
Harold was patient with customers when Pope wasn’t. He was calm when things went wrong. He was persistent when Pope told him to go away. And he kept talking even when Pope told him not to—mainly, he told Pope he loved him because Jesus did.
That was both annoying and also compelling.
“I knew he was trying to convert me,” Pope said. “And I had no defense to that because it was genuine. He 100 percent meant it.”
In the back of a burger shop, Pope started to believe him.
After an especially rough week, Pope ended up going to church with Harold. There, he heard that Jesus took our sin and pain on himself at the cross. He believed it and, two weeks later, he was baptized.
Ministry and Theology
Immediately, Pope was just as enthusiastic about the gospel as Harold was. Over the next year, he began to read his Bible, pray, and be better about helping his mom. At school, he was patient and calm with the kids who made fun of him. At Harold’s multisite, nondenominational, growing church—which was now also his—he found his place helping with the middle school kids.
Pope loved Jesus so much that he started thinking about entering the ministry—maybe as a military chaplain. After high school, he joined the Army National Guard.
“That didn’t last long,” he said. Because when Pope was about 20 years old, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. It was a blow, but not a terrible one—the cancer was easily treatable, Pope was young, and he bounced back quickly.
While surgery took care of the cancer, cancer took care of his fledgling military career. “Maybe it was a God thing,” Pope says now. With that door closed, he focused instead on interning and working in a few local churches.
It was at Laurel Wesleyan Church in Laurel, Delaware, that an associate pastor named Chris Countryman first handed Pope Desiring God and talked with him about theology. Pope, who was bright enough to finish high school on time despite all the mental health disruptions, loved that.
“The two of us just hit it off,” Pope said. Countryman explained ideas like total depravity, limited atonement, and perseverance of the saints. Pope dug in, reading Grudem and Spurgeon, Piper and Keller. He taught himself Greek and Hebrew.
Pope especially loved the idea of God’s sovereignty. Yes, it meant God allowed terrible things to happen. But it also meant God was lovingly working his purposes through them (Rom. 8:28). Pope hadn’t wanted to live in a world with random acts of tragedy. But living in a world where a perfect God orchestrated everything? That was a different story.
And living in a world where God chose you before he even created you (Eph. 1:4)? That was amazing. Pope couldn’t stop talking about what he was learning.
“Our first dating argument was actually over the eldership of women,” said Payton, who met Pope when they both worked at Laurel Wesleyan. She was the children’s ministry director; he was the pastoral intern. “Our second dating argument was over election.”
“I was so uncharitable,” Pope said.
Payton remembers it more graciously. “Since we didn’t have the same theology, he took the time to answer my questions about what he believed,” she said. “At first, I was angry, upset, and confused. But he showed me the Scriptures on male eldership and on election and practically walked out how those two things are God’s plan for us. Now, I am undoubtedly reformed—and way less anxious.”
Pope, too, has matured as he’s lived into his theology.
“Election for me was probably a pride point, and that’s pretty frustrating to think about now,” Pope said. “I think my theology was stronger than my actual faith, if that makes sense. . . . But God put me into a situation that sucked, and it really gave me the heart to match with my brain. I was like, Oh, wait, election isn’t that I’m so great. It’s that God is so kind. And total depravity isn’t just for them. It’s also for me, because I suck at this.”
What was the “situation that sucked”?
Pope’s first attempt at a church plant.
Canvas and Cancer
Almost as soon as he entered ministry, Pope knew he felt called to plant a church. He knew he needed a core team of people. And he knew he wanted to reach the creative, artistic community in Salisbury, Maryland, just down the road from his hometown.
With about 33,000 people, Salisbury is the largest city on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It’s diverse ethnically (about half white, 40 percent African American) and economically (the median income is above average, but so is the percentage of people in poverty). It feels both urban and rural—Pope describes it as “an old, decrepit, industrial town that has become this robust, artistic, young community.”
Pope didn’t know a lot about church planting. But at first, it seemed like he knew enough.
“I remember one Saturday we had about 60 people,” he said. “I’m like, Wow, we should meet every week. This is gonna work. And like six people showed up the following week.”
Six people wasn’t a church—it was barely a small group. They didn’t grow much, and Pope didn’t know what to do.
“I had people we had baptized, who called me their pastor,” he said. “And I was like, Well, if people are calling me their pastor, I should probably pastor them. But I had no model, no systems, no financial support, no real training on church planting.”
He also didn’t have a sending church. To make ends meet, he was selling copiers during the week and doing pulpit supply on Sundays. His tiny group of Christians, called Canvas, was meeting once a month on Saturday nights.
Around this time, his cancer returned. The prognosis was good, but he was back in surgery and back in chemo.
Pope was frustrated. He didn’t know what God was trying to accomplish. He didn’t know why everything had to be so hard.
But, like the psalmist, he kept coming back to God’s good sovereignty. So he kept going.
“There’s a photo of me—bald, without eyebrows—proposing to Payton,” he said. “I remember thinking, If she says yes when I look like this, she’s a keeper. I looked like a naked mole rat.”
She said yes.
Pope beat back the cancer.
And he got connected to the Southern Baptists.
Send Network
One night at a creative arts event in Salisbury, Pope watched the band from the Oak Ridge Baptist Church perform.
That’s the biggest church in town, Pope thought. I’m going to ask their pastor if he can help me figure out what to do. If he can’t, then nobody can.
He contacted lead pastor Brian Moss, who passed him straight through to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Send Network of church planters. Over the next year, while COVID shut down the world, Pope was interviewed, vetted, trained, supported, and mentored.
“As soon as we were done with our first meeting, I felt like this guy was going to do something special,” said Jamie Caldwell, Pope’s Send Network mentor. “His theology was shaped by the furnace—hardship, and suffering, and having to answer really difficult questions on a regular basis about his life. . . . There’s a deep well of gospel beauty that flows out of him because he preaches it to himself and other people over and over and over again.”
Pope’s theology was reinforced as he watched his sovereign God provide in a thousand ways: A deep friendship with Caldwell. A sending Southern Baptist church willing to adopt Canvas. A physical space, then an inexpensive contractor to renovate it. Chairs. A brotherhood of pastor-friends at Send Network. A small but enthusiastic core group. And a new launch date: April 4, 2021.
Cancer Again
Five months before his launch date, Pope picked up the keys to Canvas’s new space and went in for his one-year cancer-free checkup. He was looking for an all-clear. What he got was the news that his cancer was back.
Pope was devastated. How was he going to tell his new wife, nine months into their marriage? How was he going to tell his church—this tiny group who had just followed him into a lease?
Maybe it would be fine.
He took the medicine he was given. He had surgery again, and his medical team tested some lymph nodes to see if they’d gotten everything.
When the tests came back, his doctor called him in.
“Do you pray?” he asked.
Pope looked at him.
“I don’t have a word for this, but it’s like an anti-miracle,” his doctor said. The cancer had spread all over his body. It was impossible to eradicate. Pope probably had two to five years to live.
Sovereignty and Sanctification
“I have never been angrier at God, since becoming a believer,” Pope said. “Here’s where my theology hurts. In his complete sovereignty, why would God do this to me?”
Payton felt the same way: “Richard is spending his whole life dedicating himself to God, and this is what you get?”
Pope called Caldwell, wondering how Send Network would react.
“It was one of the more unexpected conversations I ever had,” Caldwell said. “It was shocking.”
Once he grasped what was going on, Caldwell assured Pope that nobody would be angry if he didn’t plant the church or cut his funding if he wanted to continue. “How are you feeling?” he asked.
Pope sobbed, telling Caldwell he was terrified and angry. “Why would God do this to me?” he asked.
“To make you more like Jesus,” Caldwell said. “Everything you experience is sanctification. And that’s what Romans 8:28 means—that all things might not be good, but all things—even bad things—are working together for your good.”
That was the “most aggravating and wise thing” Caldwell could have said, Pope said later. It helped him to think straight.
“If God called me to plant a church, and God knew that I was going to get cancer,” Pope said to Caldwell, “then God must want me to plant a church with cancer.”
If God called me to plant a church, and God knew that I was going to get cancer,” Pope said to Caldwell, “then God must want me to plant a church with cancer.
But it almost seemed irresponsible to ask his launch team to stick with him. When Pope told them the news, he offered them an out: “If you want to leave, we can help you find a good, Bible-preaching church to join.”
Not a single person took him up on it.
So on Easter Sunday 2021, with a pastor who was dying of cancer, Canvas Church launched.
Church Planter with Cancer
Having cancer makes some things about church planting much harder—for example, on days when Pope doesn’t feel great, he brings a trash can with him to the pulpit in case he needs to throw up.
But it makes other parts . . . not easier, but more interesting.
For example, to raise money to renovate his space, Pope did a preach-a-thon. For 24 hours on Facebook Live, he preached through every old sermon he had.
“Part of what made it work, in a weird way, was the cancer, because I was actually getting sick on the livestream,” he said. When asked by another planter if he’d recommend it as a fundraising strategy, Pope told him, “Never.” But people did watch, and he did raise the $10,000 he needed.
Four months later, Pope’s cancer helped garner attention for the 100-mile walk he did to raise awareness of the darkness of suicide and the light of the gospel. That adventure started with the suicide of a local community relations police officer, which brought up Pope’s grief over his cousin’s suicide.
“It was already a large passion point for me,” he said. “And a lot of people in my church were struggling with mental illness. I was like, Man, we could do something really simple, but really unique and beautiful.”
He made a cross, attached wheels so he could pull it along, emailed out a press release, and started walking.
“It got so much attention, and at the end of the day, I struggled—because there’s a line between self-promotion versus gospel platforming,” he said. “My cancer is a really unique story, and it definitely added to it: A terminally ill pastor is carrying a cross 100 miles to raise awareness for suicide.”
By the last mile, about 80 walkers had joined Pope. One was the mayor. Another was the head of the local LGBT+ Pride organization.
“All these people who had never stepped foot in our church—they didn’t just step foot our church; they walked with us with a cross,” Pope said. He ended at Canvas, with a 20-minute message and Chick-fil-A.
The cross walk started a growth spurt at Canvas.
Canvas Community
When Canvas first launched, it attracted people who were broken—desperately poor, addicted, or abused. Their stories weren’t so different from Pope’s. When he talked about what he’d been through or what he longed for, they could relate.
After the cross walk raised Canvas’s visibility, “we went from being a church for really broken people to being a church for questioners and doubters and seekers,” Pope said. Attendees were less likely to be addicted and more likely to be exvangelical.
Many came to see what he was doing and returned because they “liked the experience,” Pope said. He tried to keep them there with good coffee and good gospel messages.
These days, Canvas looks like a swirl of different paints.
“My church has people who would never sit together at dinner,” Pope said. “If I quote a politician or a president, I know I’m going to tick off half the room. I have a church of Republicans and Democrats, and radically poor, and people who make six figures. I have a church where you might hear the F-bomb dropped in the lobby, and you might have a mom who homeschools her kids.”
He describes it as “gospel awkward.”
“I think it’s like Jesus gets together 12 guys who couldn’t be more different, and he tells them, ‘I’m going to use you for a far greater purpose than you could ever imagine,’” Pope said. “That’s gospel awkward.”
It’s also his niche. He can see it’s different from the other Send Network church in town. His people are artists and hipsters and college students; theirs are families with three kids who love sports and rock ’n’ roll. His worship sounds like a version of Mumford and Sons; theirs sounds like Journey.
“Those differences aren’t competition points,” said Pope, who’s close friends with the other pastor, sharing his theology and his love for their city. “They’re just contextualized.”
Both churches are thriving.
In the first two and a half years, Canvas’s attendance has grown to 140 people. Once in a while, the space is so crowded that people have to stand outside and listen to the service through open doors and windows. Pope has seen more than 115 people come to know Christ—one was his mom.
“That was a huge restoration moment for me,” he said. But to some extent, they all are. Pope, with his broken past and broken body, is reaching a demographic not everyone can.
Looking Ahead
This October, Canvas planted their first church.
“I really do believe that if God calls us to do the work, he’s going to equip us,” Pope said.
He’s right. But sometimes, like King David longing to build the temple, we want to do more than we can.
“At the end of each day, the reality remains that Richard might not see through to fruition the things that he wants to do for the gospel,” Payton said. “He might not even see Canvas as an established, self-sufficient church.”
Pope worries about that. Unlike most planters, he’s already thinking about his church’s death.
“My hope and my prayer is that the work we’ve done at Canvas will outlive Canvas,” he said. “I tell our church that if we plant ourselves out of existence, if we send so many missionaries that there’s nobody left, I will happily go down with the ship.”
Canvas has already deployed a college missionary and a church planter. They’ve got a few more in the pipeline.
“Maybe we could send out so many people that we run out of money and we close, but that’s a good, gospel ending,” he said.
Until the End
Because Pope is doing two hard things at once—living with cancer and planting a church—it’s easy for him to feel down, Payton said. Some days it seems like he’s stuck in a wilderness of exhaustion, nausea, and discouragement.
“But there’s lost people in the wilderness, and God is with me—so I’m not really alone,” Pope said. “When Jesus was in the wilderness, I don’t believe the Father abandoned him. He was not alone. His Father as with him.”
You can find people like Rob in the wilderness, too, Pope said. Rob came to faith on Canvas’s launch Sunday. Since then, he’s led his daughter to the Lord and joined Canvas’s pastoral training program. Pope hopes Rob will eventually plant a church.
“If I had to go to the wilderness to have this story, to have this testimony, to have this witness, then send me again, Jesus,” Pope said. “Just be faithful—like you will, because God is always faithful—and walk with me.”
Every day, Pope leans on that faithfulness, knowing that every soul saved or lost, every cell healthy or cancerous, is under God’s control.
“Reformed theology keeps Jesus on his throne,” he said. “And when Jesus is on his throne, everything else will work out. . . . Every theological camp says Jesus wants to be your friend. But if Jesus isn’t on his throne, then his friendship is meaningless. If God’s not sovereign, I’m just dying of cancer and it’s pointless.”
Those closest to Pope have no doubt about God’s sovereign working in his life.
“Every step of the way, God put him right where he needed to be—to sanctify, to educate, to prepare him for what was coming next,” Caldwell said. “I do not think what he did at Canvas would have worked in Annapolis, or in Baltimore, or in DC. But God didn’t plant him in any of those places.”
“What keeps him going is, undoubtedly, the Lord,” Payton said. “Having such an imperative need to rely on the Lord has made him more like Jesus—and being more like Jesus has changed the lives of the church plant congregation through Richard’s preaching and pastoral shepherding.”