Would this man have become a ‘big-time’ pastor in SC if not for his career in the NFL?

Twenty-five years after he retired from the NFL, Derwin Gray swears up and down that he has never missed playing.

It sure can seem like he wishes he was still in the game, though.

While hosting a guest inside his office at Transformation Church — where he has been lead pastor since founding the Indian Land, South Carolina, church with his wife, Vicki, in 2010 — he offers a business card: One side has him in plain clothes and notes his church credentials; the other features him in an Indianapolis Colts uniform circa 1994.

Then the man who played five seasons as a defensive back for the Colts before retiring with the Carolina Panthers grabs an NFL game ball off a shelf behind his desk.

“Man, I throw a football around here all the time. That’s all we do,” says the 52-year-old Panther-turned-pastor, grinning. “Matter of fact, lemme show you this. This is from Sunday.” Gray pulls out his cellphone. “Our music tuner said, ‘How far can you throw the ball still?’ So I was like, yeah, lemme warm up and see. So we went outside, and ...”

He hits play on a video that shows him heaving a ball skyward as onlookers shout “Wooooo!” and as cars enter the parking lot for services.

Gray laughs as he sticks his phone back in his pocket. “I can still cut it loose. I can still rip it. ... And my shoulder didn’t fall off the next day.” He laughs again as he cradles the ball in the crook of his arm. “I tell our team, this is part of leadership development around here. You gotta catch the ball and run routes.”

But while at first blush it might appear that Gray is perhaps hanging onto his football past too tightly, the truth might be that he’s simply honoring it.

After all, if he’d never played the sport, he almost certainly never would have met Vicki. Almost certainly never would have met Steve Grant, the Colts teammate who introduced him to religion. Almost certainly never would have ended up in the Charlotte area, where he created a church that now reaches a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural congregation of more than 10,000 people — and that soon may experience a significant growth spurt.

Here is a look at the many ways in which his relationship with football has molded Gray into the man of faith that he is today.

Football opened the door for him to go to college. “It wasn’t until about 10th grade (at Judson High School in Converse, Texas, outside San Antonio) that I began to develop, I began to mature,” Gray says of his football skills, “but I also had coaches that saw in me what I didn’t see in myself. And what they saw in me was the potential to be really good. ... So my sophomore year, I got better; junior year, I got better. Junior year to senior year was like a quantum leap: I was team captain, first-team All-State, we won a state championship, and I was getting recruited. But I had trouble passing my ACT. I had to literally take my ACT three times, and on the last time — in the spring, before I could accept my scholarship to Brigham Young — they combined various scores ... and I got a 16. It was like 3, 2, 1, last shot — buzzer-beater.”

Football led him to an athletic program where he could stand out. “People were like, ‘Wait — Derwin, bro, you’re Black. Why in the world are you going to BYU?’” Gray recalls. “I answered the question simply: ‘It was the best school that offered me a scholarship.’ ... Texas, Texas A&M, Baylor? They didn’t recruit me. So in God’s purposes and plans for my life, the best thing for me to do was to go to a school where I would be a big fish in a small pond. ... And as a sophomore, I was second on the defense in total points, I led the entire conference in interceptions, and I was like, Wait a minute. I’m pretty good. The NFL, for me, started to become realistic.”

Football helped introduce him to his future wife. “The first time we met was when we were both in the athletes’ weight room at BYU,” says Vicki, who also came to the school for its athletics (not because of its Mormon affiliation) and threw the javelin for the school’s track and field team. “I remember thinking he was cute. ... Then I saw him playing pickup basketball one day, and ... we went up in the bleachers and sat and talked. ... I just remember thinking for about the first nine months, He cannot be this nice. Nobody is this nice. But he really was!” They were married two years later, while still enrolled at Brigham Young.

Football laid the groundwork for his idea to create a multi-ethnic church. “The high school I went to was very ethnically diverse,” Derwin says, “because it was near a military base. Ethnically diverse, but also socioeconomically diverse. You had the welfare kids like me, but you had wealthier kids, Asians, Latinos, Blacks, whites. It was an incredible mixture. As I look back now, I see how Jesus was preparing me then to lead a multi-ethnic church. Because that football team was a multi-ethnic church. ... Then when I went to BYU, it was like culture shock.” He says only about a dozen of the hundred-plus players on the team back then, between 1989 and 1992, were Black. “That first semester, I’m like, What in the world? But as I look back now, it taught me how to be curious about people who are different. ... I was able to learn about Mormons and what they believe and the different cultures they come from. When you take time to learn about other people, they know that you care about them.”

Football put him in Steve Grant’s line of sight. Grant was a linebacker for the Colts when Gray arrived as a rookie in 1993, and had a reputation for openly professing his religious faith while wearing a towel — routinely enough that he earned the nickname “The Naked Preacher.” Says Grant: “We lived at the team facility more than we stayed at home, so I treated the locker room like I was home — and sometimes that meant walking around in a towel. ... It was just spur of the moment, where if I felt the prompting I would just share the gospel with a towel on.” Gray, who didn’t come from a religious family, originally showed no interest in Grant trying to witness to him. But he gradually became more open-minded, Grant says: “He wanted to be better in his marriage, and as a father, and when he connected Christ to him being a better person, it was like a spark of fire that caught. He just took to it and ran with it.”

Football set him up for an epiphany. After a couple years of Grant’s mentoring, Gray had what he calls “this existential crisis. I’m 25. And it hits me. Is this it? You got the nice clothes, but you still feel poor on the inside. You got the girl, but her love isn’t enough. You’re still angry at your dad who abandoned you. You still got dysfunctional family issues. The money didn’t fix them. I lived with incredible fear, ‘cause the NFL stands for ‘Not For Long.’ So I was like, What am I gonna do when I’m not a player anymore? ‘Cause you can’t play forever. And if your life is built on what you do, I thought, What happens when you can’t do it?“ He continued his conversations about the Bible with Grant for two more years until, Gray says, “it finally sunk in. And it sunk in on August 2nd, 1997. I remember it because August 1st we played the Cincinnati Bengals and I stubbed my big toe trying to tackle Corey Dillon. He was a freight train. I remember walking off the field thinking, Man, God’s trying to tell me something. The next day ... my soul was just ... empty. ... And I called my wife and I said, ‘Sweetheart, I want to be more committed to you and I want to be committed to Jesus.’ ... I cried myself to sleep for three nights with this thought: How can someone like Jesus love somebody like me? Knowing everything that I’ve done, how could he love me? And I came to understand ... all of us are broken. All of us are in need of God’s grace. My life hasn’t been the same since.”

Football gave both him and Vicki perspective. “At first, you think, Oh, the NFL is gonna be the greatest thing ever,” says Vicki, who coincidentally was having her mind opened up to Christ by a coworker at the inner-city health clinic in Indianapolis where she was a registered dietitian. “But we had been in the league between four and five years and we were like, This is all there is? It’s kind of a letdown. I mean, when I share our story with our new-members’ class, I say, ‘I think God set us up, because he let us achieve the dream we thought would be the pinnacle — and it was not that fulfilling.’” Adds Derwin: “God’s seen my game film of life, and he goes ... ‘I want you. I’m gonna make you a first-round draft pick. Not because of anything you’ve done, but because I love you. No strings attached.’ ... Football and the promise it made — and the promise that the money, the houses and the cars made — they all failed. Only God’s promise has been unfailing.”

Football paid him to study the Bible. “In ’98,” Derwin says, noting that by this point he and Vicki were reading the Bible together all the time, “I came to the Panthers as a free agent. That was in the Dom Capers era. ... I ended up tearing up my knee against the Dallas Cowboys, so I got put on injured reserve for the rest of the year. I like to say that I got paid the most money I ever got paid in one year, and it was to study the Bible and rehab my knee. And a lot of that money we got that year was used to start Transformation Church 12 years later.”

Football was easier to walk away from than he expected. “When I got injured,” Gray says, “it was like I was weaned off of the pacifier of ‘I can’t play because my family needs the money. I can’t play because it makes people feel good.’ This has to be between me and God. So when I was done playing (he retired after the 1998 season), I no longer wanted to play. The desire to play was gone. ... When you’re a football player, you envision yourself making plays. I was starting to have visions of me speaking in front of auditoriums. ... And I never wanted to cheat the game. There were young players who deserved to play. I didn’t want to just take a job because I could do it. I wanted to take a calling, not a job. ... I just knew I wanted to read the Bible, I wanted to know Christ, and I wanted others to know Christ. So when doors would open, my wife and I would walk through them.”

Football did indeed open doors, almost immediately. “A few weeks go by after I retired,” Gray recalls, “and the Panthers call me and say, ‘Hey, we got a call from a church organization in South Carolina that’s looking for a player to share their testimony. ... They want you to come.’ ... I went down there and shared my story, and asked the kids, ‘Do you want something like this to happen to you?’ And before I knew it all these kids just are like, ‘I want to come to Christ, too. I want to follow Christ.’ When I got done, the youth pastor said, ‘Get ready, God’s gonna start using you.’ The very next day, the phone rings. The next day, the phone rings (again). Next day, the phone rings (yet again). For 1999, I ended up doing 150 speaking engagements. I didn’t know I was in ministry. We were just going, ‘Man, listen, if Jesus can change our lives — if his love can do this to us — I want him to do that to everybody. So whoever would call, I was there. ... And eventually, we were like, ‘I think this is what God wants us to do.’” The Grays started a nonprofit ministry called One Heart at a Time, for which Derwin would do the speaking engagements and Vicki would do all the administrative work. They started planning for their church in 2005; five years later, using the money he saved from that final season with the Panthers, they opened Transformation in Indian Land.

And football continues opening those doors, to this day. “The culture we live in,” says Steve (“The Naked Preacher”) Grant, “whether we agree with it or not, they worship sports. They worship athletics. ... And even if you’re a retired, former NFL player, it really doesn’t matter. I’ve been out the game for a long time, but when they do that introduction — ‘former NFL football player Steve Grant’ — it just gets the attention of people. Especially the young people. So yeah, it is a platform and a door that God has used to get me into many venues normally that I wouldn’t.” Same goes for Derwin Gray. “To this day, if I say ‘I played in the NFL,’ it opens up conversations. There’s been a lot of people that I’ve been able to introduce to Christ because the conversation started with, ‘Oh, you played in the NFL?’ So that’s not just my story to keep, it’s my story to give.”

Transformation Church was one of the fastest-growing churches in the greater Charlotte metro area in the 2010s, and today it is one of the largest.

In fact, Gray says they are in the process of looking for another facility in another part of Charlotte where they can simulcast his sermons but also provide live music. “We’ve run out of room here,” he says, adding that there’s a possibility they could expand to even more “multi-site” locations over the next several years.

Grant, for one, is surprised but thrilled with what’s become of the former teammate he helped bring to Christ so long ago.

“I was with a guy recently who, when I mentioned Derwin Gray’s name, these were his exact words: ‘He’s big-time,’” Grant says, chuckling. “I never would have imagined. But isn’t that the wonderful thing about God? ...

“God said, ‘Hey, go to him and just say something. I’ll take care of the rest.’”