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He's not your average pastor

Brad Reid doesn’t look like you’d expect a pastor to be: in a polo shirt, jeans, shoes with red laces.
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Brad Reid is behind the pulpit as Zion Baptist Church’s new pastor.

Brad Reid doesn’t look like you’d expect a pastor to be: in a polo shirt, jeans, shoes with red laces and a huge smile that makes him look younger than his 36 years.

Laid back pretty much describes his personality and the same is what drew him up here to become the new pastor at Zion Baptist Church.

“You’re able to come in as you are,” he said about the attitude of the congregation toward themselves and visitors.

And the more he heard about the church and the great potential here, the more he felt God was calling him here.

So Reid and his family, wife Colleen and sons Carlon, 5, Noah, 3, and Iain, 18-months-old moved on up from the Lower Mainland.

Reid had been a youth pastor from 2004 to 2011 at his former church Bethany Baptist, in Richmond, and then became an associate pastor.

The church needed a Mandarin-speaking minister instead and his position was eliminated, after which he spent about a year unemployed.

“This is a great time to be here, what God can do here at Zion in the city and how the church can get involved with that and connect with people,” he said.

The church is looking to connect with the community with its first-ever Vacation Bible School, essentially a children’s day camp, in July.

And a longtime friend of Reid’s, youth pastor Chris Miller at  West Kelowna’s Lakeview Heights Baptist Church, is coming up with some young people to help out.

To help him build connections with the church and community, a facebook page and website have been started.

Reid went to church as a child and then quit for a while before starting again at age 15 and getting really involved.

He became a Christian and as he neared graduation, a youth pastor told him he should consider going into the ministry.

Reid figured he was going to study music at the University of Victoria and had to make a decision.

“God totally made it clear,” he said about becoming a pastor.

Then he ended up going to three different schools for his four-year degree.

He began at the North American Baptist College in Edmonton where he could live at home with his parents for his first year, then transferred to Northwest Baptist College in Langley for his second and third years and ended up at Briercrest Bible College in Caronport, Saskatchewan for his fourth year.

He’s in the midst of a Master of Christian Arts program at ACTS Seminaries in Langley.

And back to his being different than your usual pastor, Reid collects comic books, Marvel and DC superheroes, and has thousands since he started collecting when he was about five-years-old.

There’s even a few Marvel items on the bookshelf in his office at the church.

So he was pleased to see that there’s a comic book store in town.

He and his family haven’t had a lot of time yet to see the area, but have gone to the farmers market and he’s looking forward to fishing, which he hasn’t done for many years.