Meet The Pastor
Senior Pastor Allen Widdows
Sixteen years is a long time to wait when you receive a call from God to do something; but that was how it was with us. All those years ago, the Lord laid a burden for the people of Utah on my wife and me, and then we had to wait for His timing to move—and it was not easy.
Both of us were born and raised in Southern California; neither of us ever even considered living where it snowed, though we were both willing to leave the growing hustle, bustle, and traffic of the Los Angeles area behind. But pastoring in Utah? That wasn't going to happen. Yet the burden was still there; even Pastor Richard, out of Calvary Chapel Monrovia, felt it and urged me to pray and to seek where the Lord was leading us as a family.
Well, it has been said that if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. And that was kind of how it was with us. We loved Utah and really wished we could live there, but how? About 2012, the Lord started pushing us more to explore the southern part of the state, allowing us to seek His will by seeing the lay of the land. We got in contact with Calvary Chapel pastors in St George and Cedar City to talk with and ask for guidance. One one of these trips, after Christmas of 2013, Pastor Rick from CCSG had a long chat with us and mentioned his burden for a place further north than where we were looking—a little town along I-70, that most people knew only as the half-way spot between Los Angeles and Denver. A little place called Richfield, Utah. "Look into it," he urged us, and look into it we did. When we rolled into town, it was 16°F (-9°C) and 6 inches of snow on the ground, though everything had been plowed. And the Lord was quietly telling us, "Here you are; what do you think?"
What did we think? We loved it, cold, snow, and all! At last we knew where the Lord wanted us; and further, as we explored around the Richfield area, we discovered a little city called Monroe, and we knew that this was truly where the Lord wanted us—Monroe, Monrovia? Even the name was a sign.
Of course, it was still all in God's timing. In 2014, He sent Pastor Ryan to plant Calvary Sevier Valley in Richfield, and I was wondering, Were we wrong? I thought that the Lord wanted us here... He did, but He still had His timing, not mine. I waited, attending faithfully to my duties as an elder, and later, assisting pastor at Calvary Chapel Monrovia; and then, right before Christmas of 2016, the call came—Pastor Ryan reached out to me and wanted to know if we were still interested in coming up to Sevier Valley. The time had almost arrived.
I retired as a teacher in June 2018, after 30 years in the California public school system, and we moved up to Monroe in July of the same year. Since that time, we assisted Ryan and his wife Sara with the ministry of Calvary Sevier Valley, again waiting for God's timing to begin a work for Him in the south Sevier Valley area. So here we are, two years after coming up, serving the Lord by planting Little Green Valley Calvary Chapel in July 2020. We were blessed as we met at the Joseph Town Community Center, then the Lord gave us a place of our own in the center of town in Monroe in September 2024. Our prayer is that the Lord continues to use us all in His Service until He returns.
—Pastor Allen Widdows