Dangling a dead — but “nice 4-plus footer”— timber rattlesnake from a branch, Alabama pastor Matt Kelley declared the venomous reptile “almost got me.”
Kelley and a hunting buddy were recently checking a camera for one of his outdoor videos, and he walked up on the rattler while it was in the middle of finishing off a bird — a badly timed encounter that could have resulted in a territorial snake lashing out at an unwanted intruder. But Kelley, an avid hunter and outdoorsmen, promptly grabbed a “little ole sweetgum” branch and disposed of the slithering critter with a quick strike or two to its neck. Kelley then shared an impromptu object lesson on social media about how sin can sneak up on all of us when we least expect it.
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Whether discussing snakes or the finer points of scouting turkeys and deer, Kelley is always on the hunt for ways to help steer people, particularly young students, away from addiction and other sinful choices — and ultimately toward a relationship with Jesus Christ. Through his nonprofit Equip Ministries Inc., Kelley shares videos on social media and goes into schools and speaks at outdoor ministry events to share his stories — and how he’s been sober for nearly three decades.
“Listen, the Bible teaches us in 2 Corinthians 11:14 that the devil disguises himself as an angel of light. He doesn’t look like the devil y’all,” Kelley said in the Facebook video. “He looks like the people you’re in a relationship with … he looks like an addiction, he looks like a good job promotion, he looks like some type of status increase. You gotta be careful where he might be lying.”
Escaping pit of addiction
Kelley, pastor of Forest Hill Baptist Church in Linden, knows all too well the struggle to escape the pit of alcohol and drug addiction. He knows personally how it can start for a 15-year-old preacher’s kid from “the innocence of a few cold beers with some friends at a party.”
That struggle fuels his passion for helping others as he drives to schools and churches across the Southeast and beyond. Kelley said it was his past battles that ultimately led to a “vision from God” to launch Equip Ministries Inc.
“We started Equip and I told my wife, ‘Could you imagine if we could get 10 schools, we could be in front of 3,000 students,'” he told The Alabama Baptist. “And our first year, God put us in 18 schools (that year). In 2025, I was in 61 schools.”
Honest approach
While on the way to speak at Woodland High School in late April, Kelley shared in a phone interview with The Alabama Baptist his plans that morning to give his “turkey presentation.” In the fall, he typically shares about deer hunting.
“The whole point,” he noted, “is to give the student a visual of what it looks like to be tempted and then to have the end of that presentation end in the harvest of that animal … the picture is that it ends up costing them their lives.”
Kelley believes most church leaders get it wrong when jumping to the negative consequences of drug and alcohol addiction. He called it a well-intentioned effort to “scare their students away from trying drugs and alcohol.”
Instead, Kelley starts by telling students “you’re probably going to like it.”
“The adversary … does it one sip at a time,” he said during a phone interview. “He makes it look and smell and taste and feel good on the front end. Those are things we can’t deny. … Your brain will enjoy that feeling, which is why we have addiction.”
Identifying deception … before ‘the BAM’
On a turkey hunt, Kelley said, he’s using a similar strategy, “deceiving this turkey all the way in until the BAM.”
“I tell (students) that when that turkey sees everything with a decoy set up … everything he’s been hearing with his ears, well then he is 100% deceived — and when that happens, he’s probably going to die.”
Drew Dockery, pastor of education and spiritual growth at Valley View Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, told TAB that Kelley has a way of “tearing walls down” when he speaks to people — whether at a school or at a men’s event, where he’s often more free to share the gospel.
“Matt is a real outdoorsman. He doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk. He knows what he’s doing, both in his relationship with the Lord and the outdoors,” said Dockery recalling when Kelley spoke at one of the church’s men’s events. “That naturally lets the walls come down, and then he’s almost instantly got that relationship, got their trust as he’s built that common ground through the outdoors. Then he begins to present the gospel in a way that anyone can understand and relate to.”
What brings him back
And at the end of his 45-minute presentation in schools, Kelley also isn’t afraid to put students on the spot. He challenges them to stand up and take a pledge in front of their peers to live their lives sober.
He said he then tells them, “If you’ve got to look to your right or your left to see if your friend is going to do it, you’re not ready. This has to be your decision that you want to live your life sober.’”
During a presentation in Montana last year, a student told Kelley he had been sober for 352 days since the pastor last spoke at his school.
“Those kind of stories — and there’s countless others — that’s what keeps me coming back,” he noted.
For more information go to equiponeministries.org.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Shawn Hendricks, director of content, for The Alabama Baptist and The Baptist Paper.
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