ENTERPRISE — As John the Baptist baptized Jesus, John said, “He must become greater; I must become less.”

That’s the philosophy David Bruce and Darin Frey have adopted as Bruce steps back from his position as lead pastor at Enterprise Christian Church and Frey steps into the vacancy.

Longtime pastor

Bruce, who turned 70 this year, has been the church’s senior pastor since March 2002. In January, after making the church elders aware of his plans, he announced to the congregation that he would be stepping down at the end of the year. That gave the church the time and the opportunity to find a new minister.

Bruce and his wife, Melody, came from Dayton, Washington, having been born and raised in Walla Walla, Washington. Asked what brought them to Enterprise, David simply gave the names of two men who were church elders at the time.

“Tim Melville and Joe Collins,” he said. Melville is still active in the church, while Collins has died. His son, Trevor, is now an elder, as are Melville’s sons, Kevin and Kurt.

But initially, Bruce said, he and Melody weren’t interested in coming to Enterprise.

“We’d been in Dayton for 18 years and we knew that our call there was ending,” he said. “The Lord was working in that. It was a great situation … But we knew we had done pretty much what we were called to do. We put out resumes to other churches that we were interested in and in that process, Enterprise got our name. The other churches said ‘No’ to us and Enterprise said, ‘Would you be interested?’ and we said ‘No.’ “

“I wasn’t interested in Enterprise; wasn’t interested in Wallowa County,” he said. “Who’d want to live there? That was our mindset. We came down once a year to Wallowa Lake and they said, ‘Would you be interested in Enterprise Christian Church?’ and I’d never even driven by it.”

At the time, the church was located where Abundant Life Assembly of God Church is now on East Main Street. In 2016, farmland was donated by the Melville family to construct the current church building along the Joseph Highway.

“So we waited three or four months and they came back and said, ‘Would you pray about it?’ OK, we prayed about it and came down and talked with them and the Lord was in the call, so we came.”

The Bruces married in 1976 and have two daughters. Crystal lives in Teton, Idaho, and teaches at the Sugar-Salem School District. Younger daughter Heather works in the marketing department of a major property management company in Florida.

Newer in the ministry

Frey, 37, is originally from Turner, southeast of Salem. His most recent church was in Hillsboro. He and Becky married in 2010 and have seven sons.

He said his story of how he came to Enterprise was very similar, “although many years apart.”

In Hillsboro, he said, “we felt like our work was finishing there. Unless you’ve been in the ministry, you can’t really know that. … It really is a work of the heart and God has to be in it and there’s this calling that has to be a releasing of the call” at their former church.

“So for us, it was very much we were being released from the ministry, and we thought we were going to be going to Indiana. That changed and we spent about six months in this limbo phase as we researched the churches we thought we might be interested in and all of those came back ‘No.’”

A second church in Indiana became a possibility, but that fell through, too.

But they also were working with the elders from Enterprise Christian Church and came for an interview in late August.

“We knew they were praying for us and said, God is always opening doors or closing them, so we decided to go ahead and apply and go through the process. Even during the week we were here, Becky and I had this thought, ‘Can we really do this or not?’ We prayed hard that God would settle our hearts and say that this is where we needed to be. In that week we were here, we got an offer from another church and declined that offer to continue to pursue coming here.”

Of their sons, the oldest, Eric, just completed Army basic training. The two oldest at home are fraternal twins Jayce and Jole. Jayce is a musician, and plays “things with strings,” his dad said. Jole was on the Enterprise High School football team this fall. Then, there’s Winston, 10; Hudson, 6; Oliver, 4; and Luke, almost 1.

The transition

Bruce and Frey liken the change in leadership at Enterprise Christian to passing the baton among runners.

“There’s that warm-up period where you begin to run and then pass the baton,” Bruce said.

He said he and Melody want to remain living in Enterprise.

“That can be a very scary thing to follow a guy who’s been here for 22 years,” he said. “You don’t want to be the unintentional interim minister. … We need to be able to transition from being the leadership here to being part of the community. That’s the key for us and I think it’s the key for his ministry.”

But he’s not going to be in Frey’s way. Beginning in January, the Bruces will disappear from the church, if not from Enterprise.

“Traditionally, a pastor says he’s going to retire on this day and then he’d be gone and then the church would try to find somebody. We elected to try to find somebody and work together. The great motto is, ‘He needs to become more while I become less,’ so this three-month period of time we’ve given ourselves has allowed for that to happen. It allows him to learn the congregation and the people to a degree. It allows me to be here in case there’s anything that he would like to learn that I can share or mentor.”

Frey is finding the transition helpful.

“I would say that over the past three months, when we’d have our morning staff meetings and devotion times, we didn’t even know what to talk about,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden the prayer requests would come in … and I get to download all this information whether it’s directly church-related or community-related about events that happen here, all these various things. Again, unless you’ve been in a pastoral job, you don’t really understand or appreciate all the nuances that can be there. I’m in that position of I’m supposed to be a pastor in this community that I don’t know, so I’m getting all this experience and that’s a huge blessing to me.”

He said the image of passing a baton are truly what is going on at Enterprise Christian.

“Those two hands with the baton, they’re taking the legacy into the future,” he said. “The whole idea there is you can’t spell succession without success. The visual there represents the successful succession that we’re looking for, so this baton is passing. This is not something that every church can do well.”

Reporter Bill Bradshaw is a member of Enterprise Christian Church.