Aaron Box spent the summer before his senior year of college leading outdoor worship services at Glacier National Park in Montana. The “sanctuary” consisted of a semi-circle of wooden benches surrounding a cross, and Box had only a bag of hymnals and his guitar.
Box was working with A Christian Ministry in the National Parks, a student-led ministry that sends members to 45 national parks to work and serve employees and visitors through interdenominational worship services. For Box, the formative experience demonstrated a simplified expression of church and awakened in him a love for the outdoors as a place to connect with God. It also helped him realize what it meant to live out his faith.
As one of three or four Christians among the 40 employees, Box was among the few who chose not to party every night. Box recalls drinking Pepsi at the end of summer party and talking with a guy who said Box’s example caused him to consider God’s existence.
“That moment marked me, like, ‘This isn’t complicated; it’s just hard,’” he says. “I felt called to love these students. This was one of the first times I had to stand on my own two feet.”
Throughout his life, Box has had faith-building opportunities to say yes, including moving cross country to plant a church, pastoring the church he grew up in and now, leading the USMB family as national director.
“We have something unique to offer in our culture if we can be the kind of people we celebrate from our history.”
Steps of faith
Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, Box found it more profitable to have spiritual conversations while snowboarding on the slopes than distributing tracts or describing the four spiritual laws.
“I had to figure out how to live out the gospel because nobody wanted to hear it,” he says.
Box’s studies took him from engineering to psychology to music composition before landing on ministry. Homework was a challenge in his seven-year journey to complete his undergraduate degree—a struggle he later learned stemmed from undiagnosed attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
At a retreat before his summer in Glacier, Box committed to a life of service.
“I came to this place of understanding that a life following Jesus wasn’t just about agreeing to some ideas and believing something,” Box says. “Jesus said, ‘I want you to give your life to serving for me and my name.”
Fresh out of school with a bachelor’s degree in Bible/theology and youth ministry from Multnomah University, Box served as a youth pastor on a military base in Germany. However, the transience made relational longevity difficult. After a year, Box moved to Seaside, Oregon, where, after he married his wife, Jenn, in 2001, he served as a youth pastor and later, interim lead pastor.
In 2009, Box said “Yes” to church planting in Virginia, which meant selling the beach cottage he had spent five years remodeling.
Box co-founded Restore Community Church in Sterling, Virginia, designing service and outreach initiatives and leading a church plant focused on service, generosity and relationships. His plan was to move to another planting work after two years.
During a support-raising trip home, however, Box was approached by Rick Eshbaugh, then-interim pastor at North Park Community Church, Box’s home church in Eugene. Eshbaugh invited Box to apply for the lead pastoral role. The couple sensed a call to say “Yes.”
So, in 2011, Box and his family (wife Jenn, daughter Elizabeth and son Charlie) moved back to Oregon, where the North Park congregation numbered 20 following a church split. One of the first things Box did was lead the congregation to invite its neighbors to join in serving a nearby school.
“We’re called to be people who are willing to step in at personal cost and sacrifice to bring peace (and) reconciliation and to show the way of Jesus in how we live.”
“Our first event was a cleanup around the school right before teachers came back from summer,” Box says. “Then we started focusing on addressing food insecurity for kids in our neighborhood elementary school.”
Box helped clarify the church’s mission, establish a vision and advance a healthy organizational culture.
“North Park is still a small church, but it’s a pretty vibrant place,” Box says. “It’s gone from being completely unknown in the community to being part of the fabric of the neighborhood.”
Part of the story
As a new MB pastor, Box was drawn to the Mennonite Brethren story at the National Pastors’ Orientation.
“Between the story of who we are and the Confession (of Faith) I felt like these are my people,” he says.
Box served on the USMB Leadership Board from 2014 to 2022, where he helped develop USMB’s three core commitments: church multiplication and evangelism, leadership development and disciple-making. He also went back to school, earning his Master of Business Administration from Bushnell University in 2022.
Now as national director, he calls Mennonite Brethren to remember their history.
“We’re called to be people who are willing to step in at personal cost and sacrifice to bring peace (and) reconciliation and to show the way of Jesus in how we live,” Box says. “We have something unique to offer in our culture if we can be the kind of people we celebrate from our history.”
Box is working to connect people in the Mennonite Brethren family in order to share resources and ministry, and to de-silo structures between districts, national office, agencies and schools to work together instead of unintentionally competing for resources.
“If we can be the best of who we are, we have such a beautiful expression of the gospel to present to our communities,” he says. “I want us to understand our story better so we can see our place in the one that’s being written.”
To hear more of Box’s story, listen to LEAD Pods Episode 105.
Connie Faber joined the magazine staff in 1994 and assumed the duties of editor in 2004. She has won awards from the Evangelical Press Association for her writing and editing. Faber is the co-author of Family Matters: Discovering the Mennonite Brethren. She and her husband, David, have two daughters, one son, one daughter-in-law, one son-in-law and three grandchildren. They are members of Ebenfeld MB Church in Hillsboro, Kansas.
