By Steve Rees —
At Love Thy Neighbor church, children are welcome to join adults on the platform – even sit on the tattooed, one-legged pastor’s lap – as he preaches the Word of God and his wife leads worship with little ones, each with a microphone.
Brought from the pastors’ home, teens from difficult family backgrounds sit in front. For some it’s their first time attending church. Some of them help with set-up and operate audio and visual devices. Others take turns acting as ushers by serving communion.
Meeting in a one-room schoolhouse, the small but growing congregation led by Scott and Amanda Nix worships the Lord Jesus as a little girl – one of a handful of frolicking children – climbs on and off the pastor’s lap during his sermon. Others spontaneously join Amanda Nix on stage singing praise to Jesus.
Three-year-old Evie, who frequently sits on Scott Nix’s lap, is typical of kids who run to hug him when they enter the “sanctuary” – a one-time classroom in what was a prairie town in northern Colorado.
Nix sees and hears the children roaming among adults who’ve come to expect – even welcome – a fun worship service with kids and teens in their midst.
“Church was done this way for eons up until probably the 1950s, when they started separating kids out from their parents. In my mind, that causes a parent to compartmentalize who is responsible for his or her child’s spiritual growth,” says Nix.
He’s grateful they hear about God. He sometimes tells them the story of how he lost a limb at age 21 and received a prosthetic leg – one of the ways the Lord was preparing him for future ministry.
Some of the church teens live with the Nixes, who’ve opened their hearts and home as foster parents to more than 30 boys since 2019, when their unique ministry began feeding hungry souls and bellies.
Ready to preach from the time he was called to ministry by the Lord, Nix needed more than a Bible college degree and good doctrine; he also needed a pastor’s heart for people.
“I tell people all the time, ‘If you want a crash course on how to be a shepherd, then become a foster parent,’” says Nix.
He points out thousands of kids are living in the streets in America. “To us, this is a clear calling. We pray regularly that others will take up similar outreaches to America’s forgotten and abused homeless teens,” Nix says.
Pride in a diploma and in his biblical preaching skills were stripped from Nix as he and Amanda began caring for hurting, broken, abused, rejected and drug-addicted teens.
“I was ready to be a preacher, but I was not ready to be a pastor,” says Nix, who with Amanda, has four biological- and three adopted-children – in addition to the foster kids who live perpetually in their home.
The teens who come to the Nixes’ home figure out quickly their foster parents are Christians and pastors. Faith, church, family and love are obvious to kids who are sorely familiar with separation, violence and abandonment.
In the Nixes’ experience, only one kid who came to their home openly defied them, saying nothing would convince him God is real.
Completely unloved by an imprisoned father and a mother who blamed him for everything, including an uncle’s suicide and his younger brother’s muteness, 16-year-old Brandon bared his heart to the Nixes after coming home high on drugs, a regular occurrence until one powerful encounter.
“I remember Amanda saying, ‘I love you,’” says Nix, who then hugged Brandon in a long embrace, maybe for the first time in his life.
“Brandon may have lived up to that point thinking nobody loved him,” says Nix.
After running away from the Nixes’ home, Brandon was returned to his mother by the county social-services department. He also returned to gang activity. During a burglary, Brandon was shot in the leg. Friends gave him a lethal dose of fentanyl for pain.
“He died knowing somebody loved him. I like to think maybe he’s with Jesus,” says Nix.
Love Thy Neighbor Community Church and the Nixes in some ways mirror the 2024 Christian movie Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot. Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot (2024) | Official Website | Now Streaming on Angel Studios
The film relates the story of an East Texas church and its pastors who committed to solving a crisis in foster care. They stirred the souls of rural parishioners for foster kids nobody would take. The pastors and church members adopted 77 kids, demonstrating how love wins the battle for America’s at-risk children.
The Nixes attended a packed theater pre-screening hosted by America’s Kids Belong.
Pastor Scott and Amanda Nix say the film is remarkable in that it portrays foster care as both rewarding and challenging – emotions they’ve experienced with the most difficult and easiest-to-love children.
“The movie beautifully portrays how we, regardless of earthly wealth, can reflect God’s riches by displaying His love. We all have the capacity to make a positive impact on the lives of others, no matter how small,” says Amanda Nix, who came to faith in Jesus in 2005 after living much of her life as a Mormon.
Before they started the church in 2019, the Nixes launched their first ministry endeavor, Love Thy Neighbor “project,” in which they cooked and served tons of free barbecue meals for citizens of two small towns – Milliken and Johnstown. They were fulfilling Jesus’ words in Mark 12:31: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
At the same time, Amanda Nix encouraged her husband to pursue the Lord’s call to ministry. In his mid-40s, Scott Nix enrolled in a well-known Bible college, even though he’d already been preaching for a while.
“I had my Bible and the Holy Spirit, and I knew that God was speaking into me. But I wanted sound doctrine and to know my theology was good,” says Nix, who first heard the voice of God when he wasn’t even serving Him in 1996.
Armed with a degree, Scott Nix and his wife started a front-porch ministry serving tacos and teaching Bible studies to 50 people.
“We’d feed everyone tacos and talk about Jesus. Then Covid hit. It all fell apart when we couldn’t be together, but the intense Bible studies continued” until the small but growing church moved into a vacant schoolhouse, says Nix.
The grandson of a preacher, Scott Nix sometimes attended church as a kid. But he didn’t really know the Lord until something changed at age 21 while working for his father’s small-trucking company.
On his last trip hauling produce from the West Coast – Nix was a plumber by trade – he wrestled with God in the sleeper of a semi-tractor as another driver handled the rig.
Grabbing Nix’s heart and speaking to him, God warned of great pain and trials with assurances that He would never leave nor forsake him.
Praying 24 hours a day in the sleeper, Nix was clueless about God’s words – though He now had his attention.
Arriving in Denver Nix, who was very violent at the time, got into an argument and assaulted his partner – an employee of his father’s company; Nix had to be pulled off of the man.
Headed toward the same dock, Nix’s brother calmed him by suggesting he help the driver back to the receiving area.
Making eye contact with the driver, Nix thought he was communicating non-verbally. Straight enough to open its doors, the trailer began flying backwards.
“There was a moment when I could have let the doors crunch; it would have saved me,” says Nix, whose body bore the brunt – one bone after another popping. Then a big pop with what felt like hot lava poured onto his lap.
With no air in his lungs and unable to speak, Nix tried to walk off the injury like he had done playing football.
“I had no pelvis. It was gone and my left hip was gone. It’s hard to walk without a pelvis or hip; mine was shattered,” says Nix, who remembers telling his brother “I’m dead” while waiting for an ambulance.
Nix was awake for three days at the hospital before doctors put him in a drug-induced coma. For the next 50 days he received morphine for pain. On day three of being unconscious, Nix’s leg was removed.
His dreams during this two-month period of morphine sedation find their way into sermons today.
Out of the coma, Nix remained speechless for a period. He wrote that he didn’t care about losing his leg.
“I’m writing down, ‘I’m fine. I know God,’” says Nix, who believes he met Him in the truck sleeper. “He told me that He would never leave, nor forsake me,” Nix says.
After a few years of doing okay – isolated in his parents’ basement after moving back home – Nix tried everything he knew including heavy drinking and drug abuse to drive away God. Cocaine, opioids and alcohol abuse strained his relationships with everybody for years.
Though Nix kicked addiction to cocaine after his father learned of his habit, other abuses nearly destroyed his marriage and family.
In 2017 after the death of a son, Nix says he went from “sitting in a stadium watching Christianity happen to moving onto the field and following Jesus,” thanks to a fellow pastor who encouraged him in his walk and later in his ministry call.
One of Nix’s children invited him to a father-son night at church. There wasn’t one but the pastor, Shane Cavillo, encouraged Nix to stay. There, Nix grew in relationship with Jesus, knowing the Lord was calling him to ministry, including foster care.
On both his arms Nix is inked one tattoo upon another with serious and playful images of his children, wife Amanda, parents and grandparents – even some of the kids who’ve lived with the Nixes.
Pablo, a boy who lived with the Nixes, told Pastor Scott he wanted to be art on his arm too – a roach smoking a roach. “It was his way of asking, ‘How much do you really love me?’” Nix says.
The answer is a tattoo is on Nix’s arm.
The Nixes’ lives are demonstration of the truth: “A man or woman’s actions speak far more loudly than their words.”
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