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It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Conversations with Donavon Kack

He was raised largely in the great state of Alaska.

He's been a logger, a commercial fisherman.

In fact, it was while he was a commercial fisherman that he sensed God's call in his life.

He became a pastor and is today an It Is Written affiliated evangelist.

I'm John Bradshaw, he is Pastor Donovan Cack, and this is our conversation.

Pastor Donovan Cack, welcome to Conversations.

Traveling on the road with your family, sharing the Word of God with people.

But your story goes way back beyond that.

I want to talk with you today about evangelism, about soul winning, those great stories of people coming to faith in Christ.

We'll talk about the Bible, but why don't we go back?

You're from the Pacific Northwest, really.

So tell me a little bit about how things got started for you, where you spent your youth.

My dad was a minister, and so I grew up back in that day.

Every few years, we'd move to a new place.

I was born there, moved to Wyoming, moved to Oregon, and moved to Washington State.

Pretty much the Northwest was our home after that.

Yeah, so you followed in your dad's footsteps.

You have a brother, Jim, who's a pastor as well.

When you were a kid, like, you know, 8, 9, 10 years old, did you ever think, I'm going to be a pastor like my dad?

I can remember as a boy, I had the absolute best parents that anybody could possibly want.

You know, sometimes people talk about being a PK.

To me, it was the absolute best experience possible.

My parents lived what they taught, and they put an enthusiasm in our lives for the Gospel.

I can remember going to Bible meetings at our church, and I can remember coming home from those meetings, and we'd be praying for the people that were coming to the meetings.

And my heroes were those evangelists and John the Baptist and Elijah.

And I was like, yeah, I want to be like that when I grow up.

You might have already answered my question, but for parents wondering how to turn their children towards a love for the Bible and a love for ministry.

I know you covered it briefly, but talk to me some more about how your parents were able to give you a love for the church and a love for faith and a love for ministry when it often doesn't work out that way.

Looking back, I think the thing that was big for me, they loved it.

I mean, it wasn't, hey, this is 1 thing that we do when we're here and when we're home, it's a different thing.

They had a passion for leading people to Jesus Christ and seeing them fall in love with it.

And looking back on it, that was a massive influence in my life and my younger brother as he ended up moving in ministry too.

So what is this with the Pacific Northwest?

You were born in Iowa, but I mean, every step you took was further from Iowa and closer to Russia.

And you ended up in Alaska, and you've ministered in Alaska and the Dakotas and Montana.

Tell me about the Pacific Northwest, you must love it out there.

I do love it out there, you know, and we grew up around the mountains, you know, in Wyoming, big time mountains.

My grandpa was a sawmill man, and so mountains, logging, trees, mountains, that was just born in us.

And then my mom's family lived more in the Pacific Northwest, and when my dad's parents retired they moved out to the Northwest, and so there was a couple things I think that kind of were drawing that way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I know that somehow you kind of got off the track.

But before we get into the details, as it were, of that, you ended up logging, which if you live in the Pacific Northwest or you're in Alaska, you kind of have to or they'll boot you out of the country, and you ended up on commercial fishing boats, which isn't terribly rare for somebody in Alaska, but it may be a little rare for someone who is planning on getting into ministry full-time.

Well, at that point, I had no idea ministry was in the cards when I went into logging and commercial fishing.

At 16 years old, I finished my ninth grade.

My older brother had just graduated from high school, and my uncle was moving to Alaska.

He was moving his whole logging operation up there.

And so he asked me if I wanted to come along.

And that summer, we were doing right-of-way logging.

My older brother stayed in it many years after I did.

You know, after logging for a while, my parents moved up to Alaska up near Anchorage and when they went up there, of course, I was really intrigued on what more was in Alaska and there were some people that lived there that I knew that were commercial fishermen and my brother and I both went and spent our first summer and we got hooked.

Hey, so what's that life like for those of us who've never been near a commercial fishing boat in Alaska?

The way that it works is this, typically commercial fishing season, at least for us as gill netters in Bristol Bay, was from basically from around May to around the end of July.

The summers are cool, but you have daylight.

The way that it typically works is they have government fish people that count the fish when they go up the rivers.

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Conversations with Donavon Kack

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