My name is Ross Knudsen.  When your name is Ross Knudsen your name will regularly get butchered (both of them…”Knudsen” I can understand, but people find the most creative ways to get “Ross” wrong), so you’d better just learn to be OK with whatever comes.  But for the record it’s Ross not Russ, you say the “K” just like in the Old Country, and that’s “s-e-n,” son.

I am a disciple of Christ, a husband, a father, and a pastor from Idaho.  I’m almost a native Idahoan, but a land war in Asia temporarily relocated my folks to a naval base in Long Beach where I suffered the first great indignity of my life: Being born in SoCal.  But things got better after that.  Before I knew anything was amiss the family moved back to Boise where I belonged, and there I was raised and educated.

Growing up only a couple of miles from Boise Bible College, in 1990 I enrolled for “a year or two” to learn more about God and the Bible before going off to whatever the next thing on my agenda was at the time. As I have learned along the way, the Lord sometimes has other plans. After graduating with my B.A. from Boise and then my M.A. from Cincinnati Bible Seminary, BBC (for reasons I still can’t explain) hired me in 1998 as their student recruiter.  My longer-term duties at the college took shape starting in 2004 when I shifted to the registrar’s office, and the following year I began teaching history. I did that stuff, while collecting a second M.A. from Lincoln Christian University, for over twenty years. But recently God—who, you might remember, sometimes has other plans—has messed with my life a bit. I am now the executive pastor at Nampa College Church, and am working on a D.Min through the Talbot School of Theology’s Institute for Spiritual Formation at Biola University.

Stacie and I met in 1997 when she was a junior at Northwest Nazarene College—where she now works, and across the street from the church where I am a pastor—and we were married the next year.  We have three children—a son who who is all grown up and adulting, a daughter who is in college and home part-time, and a daughter in high school. We live in Nampa, Idaho with whatever children are home at the time, a grumpy old Labrador retriever, a diligent young border collie, and a well-traveled suburban swaggerwagon.