“The Gospel Is the Answer”: Rev. Tony Myles (MDiv ‘06)
The Christian life is, among other things, a life of learning how to listen for and answer God’s calling. For Covenant Seminary alumnus and current doctoral student Rev. Tony Myles (MDiv ‘06), that journey of listening and answering began the day two Mormon missionaries knocked on the door of the Myles family home when Tony, who was not raised as a believer, was a teenager.
Today, Tony is the Senior Pastor of Christ Central Church (PCA), a multi-ethnic congregation in Charlotte, North Carolina—the most recent call in a four-city tour of duty that has also included St. Louis, Missouri; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is also back in the classroom, finishing a Doctor of Ministry degree in the Compelling Preaching Cohort at Covenant Seminary. It is a long way from where he started.
To his mother’s chagrin, the teenaged Tony opened the door to those Mormon missionaries that day in his native St. Louis. “I sat there with them and talked about religion in general and their religion in particular,” Tony says. “I ended up going to their worship services for a little bit before discovering through a Pentecostal pastor that Mormonism was not orthodox Christianity. I would say that in both of those contexts, I didn’t feel like I connected as much with the message of Christianity as much as I just relationally connected with those folks.”
It wasn’t until a friend invited Tony to a Baptist Church that he understood what it meant to be a sinner in need of God’s grace and what Jesus had come to offer to all those who put their faith in him. Even as the only practicing Christian in his family at the time, Tony remembers, he developed a zeal for the Lord and a serious desire to grow in his faith such that the pastor of that Baptist church took notice and began to help Tony discern a call to ministry. “I didn’t know what that meant at the time. I just had a desire to share my faith with people in more meaningful ways. He started letting me help lead youth Sunday school and other youth meetings, and that grew into eventually wanting to preach and being given the opportunity to do so.”
Tony met his future wife, Tanya, in this context as well. At a Baptist State Convention in Kansas City, after finding out they were both from St. Louis, Tony and Tanya struck up a friendship. They fell out of touch for a few years before reconnecting at the University of Missouri–St. Louis (UMSL), where Tanya was working in the school’s financial aid office, and Tony, who had taken a year off school, was re-enrolling. Tanya helped Tony get back into school where, over time, their rekindled friendship grew stronger. Their mutual love for one another and for the Lord eventually blossomed into the desire to spend their future together serving him, so by God’s grace they were married.
Besides reconnecting with Tanya, it was while at UMSL that Tony also reconnected with a call to ministry. He recalls this period as a time of deep searching—trying to discern what God might do with the desire he had felt as a young man but seemed to have long since left behind. Tony had taken a job sorting packages at UPS while, providentially, Tanya had discovered the radio ministry of John MacArthur. “He was expounding the Bible in ways I hadn’t heard before,” says Tony. “Tanya and I were both Baptist at the time, so we didn’t know anything about Calvinism or any of that. So, I started listening to John MacArthur. On his website, he was promoting some books by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I bought those books and started reading them and was just captivated by Calvinism and this Welsh preacher. Listening to his old sermons, I just really fell in love with his teaching. That led to finding R.C. Sproul and some of the other Reformed guys. So, then I said, ‘Okay, I want to go somewhere that teaches this.’ But I didn’t know where that was.”
Two of the other workers on Tony’s sorting line at UPS happened to be students at Covenant Seminary. When they discovered that Tony was a believer and, moreover, considering vocational ministry, they encouraged him to enroll at Covenant. He did, earning his MDiv while Tanya worked on a Master of Arts (Theological Studies). The couple also began attending a PCA church in St. Louis, New City Fellowship, where God was cultivating in them a passion for cross-cultural ministry.
“What I found so refreshing about Covenant was the way the professors taught. You could tell they had very pastoral hearts. They were teaching you great theology, but they taught it as pastors who wanted you not just to connect with the academic aspect of things, but to work that out pastorally in your life and ministry. That shaped a lot of how I think about ministry.”
Tony graduated in 2006, and the couple moved to Knoxville to plant a multi-ethnic church before moving back to St. Louis in 2009, when Tony accepted a call as an Associate Pastor at New City Fellowship. There, he provided pastoral oversight for community groups, adult education and discipleship, and ministry partnerships. He later served as New City’s Senior Pastor from 2017 to 2020.
Tony also spent time at a New City congregation in Grand Rapids before, in 2024, becoming the Senior Pastor of Christ Central in Charlotte.
“Much of my ministry career has been in multi-ethnic churches—shepherding and pastoring churches that are trying to engage in cross-cultural ministry. So, the vision here is to build a strong church that is multi-ethnic and where people are learning how to live out the good news of the gospel and love each other across lines of division.
“I always have that picture of Revelation 7:9 in my mind. We are trying to—on this side of eternity—press into that calling to learn how to worship our great Triune God together as a united community of people. That means dealing with the things that seek to divide us from that. And we deal with that through the gospel.”
The desire to think carefully and biblically about the cultural issues that sometimes divide congregations is also what led Tony to consider whether doctoral studies might be helpful to his ministry. At a Mission to North America African American Ministries LDR (Leadership, Development, and Resource) weekend event, he heard a presentation from Covenant Seminary professor Dr. Thurman Williams about the Seminary’s Doctor of Ministry (DMin) Compelling Preaching Cohort. “I had been wanting to do a DMin for years and just never had the time,” Tony says. “But I heard the presentation about this cohort in particular and was really grabbed by it.”
Made possible by a grant from Lilly Endowment’s Compelling Preaching Initiative in 2023, the Compelling Preaching Cohort is designed to help pastors sharpen their preaching skills and communicate the gospel effectively across cultural contexts. The cohort structure means that participants take all their classes alongside one another, coming together in St. Louis a few times a year for a community learning experience. “I just love the cohort approach. It seems like, with our group, it has built a sense of camaraderie. We communicate outside of class—I’m on a text chain of all the guys in the cohort and we’re texting each other about stuff that has nothing to do with the class, just encouraging and praying for each other. So, while we’re learning these really deep sorts of academic, theological things, we’re also building relationships.”
By God’s grace, Tony has already been able to see some of what he has learned in the doctoral program worked out in his ministry, both in the “iron-sharpening-iron” aspect of the cohort experience with fellow pastors, and in the week-by-week preparing and delivering of sermons at Christ Central: “One of the things we did in a recent class was to give each other feedback on our sermons—thinking about ‘What was good? What do I need to work on?’ and trying to put some of that into practice.”
If there is one thing Tony has learned in 20 years of pastoral ministry, it is that a stable, grace-centered, community of support is essential to ministry health and longevity—whether for current or future pastors—and that preachers of the gospel need to be energized and refreshed by the same gospel that they preach.
“I think ministers burn out quickly from lack of support and lack of being able to walk with other ministers. The other thing is that you’re always preaching the gospel, but you also need to be drinking from that same well. If you’re not reminding yourself that gospel truth applies to you and not just to the people you’re preaching to, it’s easier to burn out because you are only seeing yourself as a giver and not as someone who needs to receive.”
The Compelling Preaching Cohort, Tony says, has been helpful for reminding him that as one who preaches Christ, he also needs to hear Christ preached: “One of the things Dr. Williams asked was, ‘Who are you listening to? What preachers are encouraging and inspiring you?’ I was thinking about it and I realized, ‘I’m not listening to anybody right now!’ And that just helped to remind me that I need more than to just preach the gospel. I also need the gospel preached to me.”
Tony’s hope and prayer is that, ultimately, God will use his time as a student at Covenant Seminary not only for Tony’s benefit, but for the building up of those to whom he ministers in Christ’s name. At new student orientation, Covenant students are often told: “You are not the end of your own education.” For Tony, this is just as true as a doctoral student as it was when he first graduated from Covenant two decades ago: “I think I’m more convinced today that the gospel is the answer to all our divisions. The more I read the Scriptures, the more I understand the gospel and what Jesus came to do, the more I realize that the gospel is the answer.”
Note: This article first appeared in the spring 2026 edition of Covenant magazine. Get your copy or subscribe to Covenant here.
