Grace for Any Obstacle: How the Lord Brought Tage Herrington to The Master’s Seminary and Legacy Academy
You can’t tell the story of how Tage Herrington ended up at The Master’s University and then The Master’s Seminary—or even how he became a follower of Christ—without talking about a Herrington family meeting in 2011. That red-letter day, his parents gathered him and his three siblings and asked them a question that would completely change Tage’s life, though he couldn’t have possibly known that at the time. If anything, the 11-year-old thought what they were proposing would be fun. Sure, there’d be some challenges. His parents told him this was going to be a big responsibility and they didn’t want to proceed unless Tage and his siblings were comfortable with it. But in his naivete, Tage couldn’t imagine anything being too hard for his family. God had always taken care of them. There was a lot of unity and harmony between him, his siblings, and his parents. They had wonderful friends and a church in Anthem, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, where his dad was the pastor. Tage figured this new arrangement his parents were proposing wouldn’t change much: add more chairs at the dinner table, change the car they drove, and, best of all, give him more kids to play with. So when his parents asked Tage if he’d be ok if they adopted the seven children of his father’s step-sister—none of whom he’d ever met before—he signed on to the plan.
It would take two years for the adoptions to become official and all seven kids to move into the Herrington home. The oldest was 11 when they moved in. The youngest was just over a year old. They’d been scattered in foster homes throughout the state of Kansas, due to challenging circumstances at home. Tage’s father was the next-of-kin, which was why the state of Kansas’s child services eventually called. Tage quickly realized that the experience of adopting seven children from such a traumatic background was going to be a lot more difficult than he, or his family, could have imagined.
“[My new siblings] had never been in a stable home,” Tage said. “They went through a lot of trauma with their biological parents, and then several of them experienced even more trauma when they were taken from their foster parents and put together in one house. It was like a bombshell that kind of went off in our house. There was a lot of disobedience and rebellion. My parents had to figure out how to establish trust with each new addition to our family.”
Many nights, Tage would wake up to screaming as one of his new siblings wrestled with past pain, insecurity, and fear. He had to stay home more to help care for his siblings. Since their parental responsibilities had nearly tripled in size, his mom and dad couldn’t spend as much time with him as they used to. Tage began to feel angry, jealous, and bitter, particularly against the God who had brought this into his life.
“It wasn't fun those early years,” Tage said. “In my mind, I said to myself, ‘If this is what it means to be a God-honoring family, if the true essence of undefiled religion is taking care of orphans, I don't want anything to do with God or Christianity or anything’. So I began to reject in my mind what my parents had been teaching me my whole life.”
Throughout high school, Tage began to read atheist writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. He began to question the very existence of God. When he turned 18, he moved in with his grandfather, a self-proclaimed skeptic of Christianity.
“I was using atheism as a justification to sin without guilt,” Tage said. “I was deliberately trying to dampen my conscience by convincing myself that God didn’t exist.”
Of course, if someone doesn’t worship the one true God, they, inevitably, worship something else. That was certainly true for Tage. As he left home and rejected God, athletic success became his god. Specifically, Tage gave all of himself to American Ninja Warrior, a national competition and TV show that uses a series of obstacle courses to test each contestant’s agility and strength. From ages 17 to 19, Tage spent most of his time at the gym, training. He took on the self-improvement mindset embraced by the friends he made through American Ninja Warrior. But even as he ran from God, the Lord set his love on Tage.
“As I’m listening to atheists on YouTube, I decided I better listen to a few Christian apologists, to make sure I knew how to respond to their arguments,” Tage said. “As I’m doing that, I realize that without God, there’s no basis for morality. Without God, there’s no foundation for ethics. Of course, the moral argument can point you to God, but it can’t give you a new heart. That didn’t happen to me until one of those apologists pointed me to Job 38. There God asks Job, ‘Were you there when I set the foundation of the earth?’ I realized how prideful it was to think I knew better than God, who created everything. That’s when I really understood the depth of my sin, cried out to God, and asked for forgiveness, and came, for the first time, to the faith my parents had told me when I was young.”
His life redirected from athletic success, Tage had to figure out what God wanted for him. One of his older sisters had an idea: go to the same university she had gone to.
“Through an employer, my sister had found out about The Master’s University,” Tage said. “So she went to TMU. She loved it. Met her husband here. He went on to attend TMS. So by the time I became a Christian, I knew a little about The Master’s University, but I didn’t think I could afford it.”
Thankfully, a generous scholarship paved the way for Tage to attend TMU. What he experienced there changed his life and set him on a course that would lead him to The Master’s Seminary.
“At TMU, I studied to be a teacher. I never thought I’d do ministry, but I fell in love with theology,” Tage said. “I fell in love with my Bible classes. Combine what I’m learning at TMU with a missions trip I took to Kenya and I realized I wanted to give my life to missions.”
Two more ingredients led Tage Herrington from The Master’s University to the seminary. The first was the local church. Specifically, Placerita Bible Church, the congregation that’s yards from The Master’s University campus. Two TMS alumni pastoring there—Adam Tyson and Joshua Daugereau—encouraged Tage to attend TMS. Their discipleship of Tage was a big reason why he decided to go into ministry.
The second ingredient was the MacArthur Trust Scholarship. The full-tuition scholarship has relieved a significant financial burden and freed Tage to focus on his studies, ministry in the local church, and the elementary students at Legacy Christian Academy, another of the family of ministries supported by the John MacArthur Charitable Trust. Tage is wrapping up his first year of teaching elementary Bible at Legacy. He has the privilege of teaching God’s Word to kindergarten through fifth-grade students at Legacy.
“For a lot of my students, my class is the first time they’ve ever heard the Bible taught,” Tage said. “It’s sweet to be able to break it down and to see their eyes light up when they understand what the Bible is saying.”
For Tage, there’s a sweet symmetry between his education at TMS and his responsibilities at Legacy. At TMS, he’s learning so much about the Bible. At Legacy, the challenge is to break down what he’s learning and communicate it in a clear, compelling way for elementary students. It’s ideal training, particularly for Tage’s future plans to minister overseas in a context where the people know little about the Bible and salvation in Christ. And no matter where God takes Tage, he knows his life and ministry will forever be shaped by the extraordinary sacrifice his parents made, adopting his siblings, bringing them into a loving home, introducing them to the love of Christ.
“By God’s grace, several of my siblings have professed Christ and there is genuine fruit of salvation,” Tage said. “That certainly makes the sacrifice my parents made worth it.”
More than a decade after that life-changing family meeting, Tage can see all the providential ways God used what happened to break him of his pride and, eventually, lead him to Christ, then The Master’s University, The Master’s Seminary, and Legacy Christian Academy. God’s goodness along that journey gives Tage confidence that no matter what the future holds, God will provide and use it to cultivate more personal holiness and effectiveness as a servant of Christ.
