February 2026 | 15
even just their members. We weren’t members. We weren’t paying tithes. We weren’t attending consistently at the time, but they still invested in us.” The marriage classes helped the couple learn to have healthy arguments and how to bring everything back to God, she said. Though they had premarital counseling and had a church background before, they “still didn’t understand what God’s calling for us as husband and wife was until we took that marriage class and learned it.” “When I finally stopped being stubborn and being rebel - lious and I truly had a conversation with God, I know that things really started to turn,” Charles said. “It was foolish of me to take God out of my life.” Baker sees the change in Charles and Brandy and says their lives have made a 180-degree turn from when he met them only a few months ago. “It’s like a totally differ - ent couple, and they both serve in the church now.” Change City is a 10-month-old church plant drawing as many as 135 people on Sundays. People are building re - lationships with one another, the pastor said, and “we’re seeing homes totally be changed, not just individuals.” “We believe that if we can get strong marriages, it will build strong families, strong churches and strong com- munities,” Baker told BP. “We’re going back to the basic building block of what God did in Genesis – Adam and Eve.”
“We have the answers right there. I tell our congregation it’s an open book test, and the answers are right there in the book. Get back to the book. Let’s focus on getting people biblically literate because we live in a biblically illiterate generation.” “If people can learn what God’s Word says, they can ap- ply it to marriage, parenting, finances, and other areas of life that present challenges,” Baker said. “When I think about it,” Charles said, “I really just can’t believe that we’re here because if you had asked me months ago, I would have bet my house that I would not be in this place.” If he had gone to God when his marriage got rocky, “maybe I would have saved myself from years of torment and anguish, but I wasn’t speaking to God at the time,” Charles said. Going into Christmas as a restored family, Brandy said, “When you feel you have absolutely nothing, you do have something. You have God. I had to learn again that I’m not alone in this world and read His Word and see what it says.”
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