Tennessee board member depends on God for the little things

Keith Bradshaw works high tech and prays low tech.

The Samaritan Ministries Board member performs information technology services for HP, but when members of his rural Tennessee church gather for prayer, frequent topics are livestock and the weather.

“We often laugh at our prayer time and wonder what some of the urban churches would think about our concerns about drought or animals,” Keith says.

Keith and his family live in a 100-year-old house outside the small town of Centerville, Tennessee, southwest of Nashville, on 160 acres, half of which is pasture. Sons Kyle, 18, and Luke, 11, oversee the livestock operation of cattle, hogs, and chickens. The Bradshaws and other members of Heritage Covenant Presbyterian Church often share concerns about the health of their livestock and good weather.

But the rest of the week, Keith is busy working for HP’s enterprise application services division. His division maintains health care management services for various employers and insurance companies.

That job isn’t where he thought he’d end up, but he’s not complaining. He started working with computers in high school just as machines like Radio Shack’s TRS-80 (affectionately known as the “Trash 80”) were hitting the market and found them “fascinating.” A standardized test toward the end of high school, though, showed he had engineering skills. Since his hometown of Tullahoma, Tennessee, was home to an Air Force ground-based flight-test facility and the many engineers who worked at it, he moved in that direction.

“My friends’ dads were engineers, so engineering was kind of in the forefront of my mind as a kid,” Keith says.

He graduated from Tennessee Tech University with a degree in mechanical engineering, but found himself in IT anyway. Keith worked for 20 years in missile defense as a contractor building classified networks and information systems to catalog and analyze data. More than four years ago, he switched to working on health care management systems, such as WebMD-like portals and call centers for corporations’ employees needing health coaching, dietary advice, and other medical information.

“To me, it’s an information system,” he says. “It’s data.”

The job allows him to mainly work from home, so he’s not away as much from his family. Keith says he and his wife, Mary Susan, are in the process of “trying to launch our three younger children into adult life.” They’re still homeschooling their youngest, 11-year-old Luke. Kyle, 18, tends to the livestock and plays in a bluegrass band with his sister, Claire, 20, who also lives at home. Claire and Mary Susan are working on selling environmentally safe cleaners at farmer’s markets and are looking at selling other homemade items as well. Their oldest child, Laura, is married to Samuel Evans and expecting their first child in December.

The Bradshaws didn’t start out being homeschoolers or farmers. Laura went to a public school through first grade, “but we were concerned about some of the socialization she was experiencing in government school.”

They talked to homeschooling friends about their concerns and decided to make the switch.

“Over the years, we have become more and more convinced it was a good thing for us,” Keith says.

They’re convinced that farming was a good choice for them as well, even with a learning curve attached. Keith’s hometown of Tullahoma, Tennessee, was centered around the local Air Force testing facility and Mary Susan was a Methodist minister’s daughter and thus always on the move with her father’s new ministerial appointments. They shared a yearning for more land and a country setting, and Kyle seemed to have an inclination to tending animals, so they found the land they now have.

They also found out about God’s provision, something they hadn’t considered much while they were living in the suburbs.

“One of the big lessons we had to learn was coming through several years of drought and how devastating that can be, especially when you have a large number of animals depending on you for hay,” Keith says. “We had to plan for the worst on the amount of hay we would collect and set aside. You see how dependent you are on God for His provision—rain and those types of things.”

God has been gracious to the Bradshaws in other ways.

“It is amazing,” Keith says. “He grows us and He directs our paths. It’s not the path we would have imagined 30 years ago as we were starting out. Yet there are blessings all along the way. We’re so thankful for that.”

That’s been true in their walk and growth as believers, too.

“As we grew as Christians, we became hungrier and hungrier for sound teaching and a Biblical church,” Keith says. “That hunger survived for many years in the midst of our church. We were utterly committed and faithful church members, but we were looking for something more—more commitment to the Word and the preaching of it. So that led us down the path to where we are now.”

Heritage, the church they ended up attending, is small—less than 20 families, with about 120 or so people—but that’s an advantage in many ways, Keith says.

“The shepherding is more intimate and intense,” he says. “The Word is highly regarded. There’s accountability with other members in the church. We’re able to practice the ‘one anothers’ taught in Scripture. It’s a beautiful thing.”