WHEN GOD FULFILLS HIS PROMISE

By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Insider

Somewhat of a late bloomer in the gymnastics world, Holly Murray was coming off a gold-medal performance in the floor exercise at the 2010 national championships, "but I felt so low."

Without a college scholarship or even an invitation for a tryout, "I thought this might be the end; I might be done."

That's when the graduating high school senior from Harrisburg, Pa., had "a little conversation with God in the gym," promising that if He could help fulfill her dream of being a collegiate athlete, "I'll use going to that new environment to figure out this whole faith thing."

In July, Murray got a call from the Rutgers gymnastics coach with the welcomed news that the Scarlet Knights had a spot for her: "Would you like to come?"

"I was prepared to start at (Harrisburg Area Community College) and be done with gymnastics," she said. "I got that phone call, and within three weeks, I was moving in on campus, which is crazy. Still to this day, I don't know how they did that. I never submitted an official application."

And then, sitting in the first gymnastics team meeting of the year, Holly listened to Missy Maurer talk about sports ministry, having a relationship with Jesus, the team Bible study and the Athletes in Action organization. Her immediate reaction: "She seems kind of weird. I'm not interested in that."

"Somewhere in the next three minutes, the Holy Spirit was like, 'Yeah, you are. Do you not remember the prayer you prayed? Go talk to Missy,''' Holly said.

That led Murray (Holly McKenzie, as of November 2022) down a path in sports ministry that included eight years in Wisconsin and the last two years at Baylor, fulfilling the Director of Sports Ministry role since August 2023.

"We speak the same language; we finish each other's sentences when it comes to ministry," said John Maurer, Missy's husband and Baylor's Assistant AD for Sports Ministry, "just because we think very much alike. She's tremendously gifted relationally. I constantly have people coming up to me saying, 'Holly's incredible!' And that's student-athletes, that's coaches, that's staff. She just has a great ability to connect with all kinds of people."

But it was that momentary connection with Missy Maurer nearly 15 years ago that led Holly into a life of Christian service.

Growing up around the church, Holly always loved God and knew that He loved her, "but that's where my faith ended."

"If you asked me who Jesus is to me, I wouldn't have been able to answer that question," she said. "No one taught me how to read the Bible. The gospel, I didn't even know what that word meant. . . . Throughout my junior and senior year of high school, gymnastics consumed my whole life. I put 100% of myself into succeeding."
Holly McKenzie

Success certainly came Holly's way. As a member of the Artistic Sports Academy Plus club team, she captured the Pennsylvania state championship on the bars and in the floor exercise and placed third in the all-around in 2010.

And while injuries derailed most of her collegiate career, Holly continued to grow in her Christian walk, "getting into Christian community with people who cared about the things that I cared about; got connected to my team Bible study; got connected to a local church."

"Within the first three months of my first semester in college, my whole world flipped upside down," she said, "to the extent that when I went home for winter break, my mom was like, 'Wow, college has been so good for you. You're such a different person.' That was Jesus."

John and Missy Maurer, part of the Athletes in Action program that ministered to the Rutgers campus in New Jersey, were the ones who initially cast the vision of Holly getting involved in sports ministry.

"I guess that's one of the joys of being involved in God's work," John Maurer said, "is you never know what God is going to do. How many student-athletes over the years have we ministered to, connected with, and you never know when and how the Lord is going to work in specific ways."

After years of resisting the calling, at times even running away from it, Holly finally realized that discipling her teammates and leading the team Bible study is what filled her cup.

"It just came to the point where I said, 'Wait, if I love this, why don't I actually make that my career?''' she said.

With injuries keeping her from being the "gymnast that I wanted to be," Holly stepped away from competing and became more of a team manager or student assistant coach in her final year at Rutgers.

"It got to the point where I was not in love with the sport anymore," she said. But in her new role as a student coach, "I ended up falling in love with the sport again."

Motivated by that renewed love of sport, Holly joined the club gymnastics team at Rutgers, but suffered a compound fracture of her tibia and fibula in a "really horrible career-ending injury."

"That was just a testament that I probably should have stopped when I stopped," she said.

Graduating from Rutgers with a degree in community nutrition in 2014, Holly initially did an internship through Athletes in Action that worked into a full-time position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

"I felt like the best thing for me would be to step away from Rutgers, at least for a season, and become an adult rather than stay where I was a student-athlete," she said. "I had known the other Athletics in Action staff at the University of Wisconsin. And I thought, 'Hey, I will be with them for two years, I'll get experience, I'll get trained, and then maybe I'll come back to my alma mater or come back to the East Coast.'''

Two years turned into eight as Holly worked her way up from an apprenticeship to director and team leader, supervising a staff that did sports ministry at Madison and the other college campuses in the state of Wisconsin.
Holly McKenzie

"God kept me in the frozen tundra of Madison, Wisconsin, for a long time," she said. "It was funny, because I tried to leave Wisconsin multiple times. And each time I did, the Lord made it abundantly clear that it was not time."

Staying in Madison with an established staff also gave Holly the opportunity to start an online seminary degree through Denver Seminary. She also met her future husband, Parker McKenzie . . . twice.

While there was noticeable chemistry and "we had things to talk about" on a first date in 2016, Holly said she could tell from their conversations that "we weren't in the same place with our faith. And that was so important to me. So, we did not go on a second date."

In a strange twist, two years later, Parker was baptized at the local church where Holly was going. Two years after that, Parker was working at the church, when Holly asked him to "fill in the dots" of his life in the four years since that first date.

"It was not a romantic interest type of conversation," Holly said. "It was just, there's an elephant in the room, and I'm going to name it. And I think it gave us permission to be friends."

Going to church events once things opened back up after the COVID pandemic, Parker eventually sent Holly a text saying, "So, would you like to go on a second first date?"

"I wasn't totally sure where it would go," she said. "But he and I joke all the time, had we continued dating back in 2016, it would have been a disaster. Now, it was just easy. At that point, we had so many mutual friends, and what we didn't know is behind the scenes, we had little puppet masters trying to orchestrate putting us together. . . . And it worked."

Holly McKenzie

Married in November 2022 at beautiful Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Ark., Parker and Holly had a "mountain biking honeymoon."

"Parker is an avid mountain biker, and I am more of a road cyclist," Holly said, "but we have encouraged each other to do both. And that area in Arkansas is really good mountain biking. So, we did a destination wedding in Arkansas."

And while they were busy preparing for the wedding, Holly accepted the job at Baylor and moved to Waco, Parker found a position with the Waco Police Department, and they located housing.

"Two days before moving down here, I got engaged," she said. "And we were like, 'Okay, we're figuring out this next chapter.' But looking at my first six months in Waco, I'm thinking, 'There is no way I could move across the country, start a new job, have Parker find a new job, plan a wedding while we were in a long-distance engagement, get married and find housing.'

"And all these things came together so seamlessly, that had to be the Lord, because it was crazy. We planned our wedding so quickly."

As Director of Sports Ministry at Baylor, Holly works with John Maurer in leading and facilitating all the ministry programming; teaching two chapel sections for student-athletes; doing iDisciple, which helps student-athletes become spiritual leaders on their teams; and helping plan and lead mission trips, retreats and "any other one-off events that come up."

But she also ministers to athletics department staff with a weekly Bible study and specifically the equestrian and acrobatics and tumbling teams that both have large rosters.

"There's a piece of me that I love working with those two teams," Holly said, "because when you have teams of that size, you have people that are all across the map spiritually – from zero faith or maybe growing up in a faith that is not Christianity, to maybe they believe in God and there's interest but they're a little skeptical, to kids that have grown up in the church and showing up to campus ready to have a life that is on mission for God. I love the variety."

The same way that Missy Maurer trained her all those years ago at Rutgers, Holly also works with spiritual leaders on each of the women's teams in following the message from 2 Timothy 2:2: "And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others."

"My philosophy is I want to invest really well into those few, so that they can invest really well into their teammates," Holly said. "And if I'm being honest, as a student-athlete, I was way more receptive to learning something or having a spiritual conversation with a teammate that I knew and trusted and I saw every day, than I was with the random pastor that just showed up sometimes.

Holly McKenzie

"If you think about how Jesus did it, He had his 12. And Paul invests in Timothy, encouraging him to invest in faithful men and women who will be able to teach others. I really feel confident that these four or five athletes on each of those teams that I've been investing in, that when they move on from Baylor, they're going to continue living a life that is missional and has Christ seated at the throne. That is the definition of Preparing Champions for Life."

Partnering with the Faith and Sport Institute at Truett Seminary, Baylor's sports ministry team will do a five-day mission retreat in May for student-athletes, "introducing them to five Biblical virtues . . . and what it would look like to be formed by Jesus in sport."

And then in August, Holly will team with Director of Mission Impact and Enrichment Josh Ehambe and softball director of operations Dani Price in leading a mission trip to Costa Rica with 16 student-athletes.

While she is working on finishing up a seminary degree through Truett, Holly said she knows that God brought her to Baylor "for a specific purpose."

"I know for a fact that God has called me into ministry," she said. "And I feel confident that that calling was never to any specific place or location or, quite frankly, never even specifically into sports ministry. But that's kind of where He has led me.

"There may be a day in my life where I shift and change and go in another direction. But I feel confident that God has brought me to Baylor for this specific purpose. And I will be here until He makes it abundantly clear that He wants me somewhere else."

WHEN GOD FULFILLS HIS PROMISE

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