Working 4 a Living | Meet Pastor Trey Kelly and the Wellspring of Life

Trey Kelly is an introvert.

He is also lead pastor at Wellspring Church in Myrtle Beach. As he explains it, the apparent dichotomy is not hard to understand.

“Public speaking is easy for me, so if you put me on a stage in front of 10,000 strangers, I am completely at home,” he said. “But I am very quiet around people I don’t know. I had to overcome that.”

Kelly, 36, grew up in Florence and majored in political science at the University of South Carolina. He later attended seminary in Texas and joined the staff of Keystone Church in Keller, Texas.

“Keystone was a new church, and I helped start it in 2004,” he said. “That’s where I was working, and my wife and I thought we’d be there forever.”

But in 2008, Kelly said he and wife Danielle Kelly very clearly felt like God told them it was time to leave Keystone and move to Myrtle Beach to start a new church.

The Grand Strand originally came into play in 2000 when his father Bobby Kelly moved here to become a State Farm agent.

“I would visit, but I never lived here. When my wife and I moved here in 2008, we knew him and that was it. He was the only person we knew in Myrtle Beach.”

He said that Keystone was incredibly supportive of his move, and that church continued to pay his salary for roughly six months while he put the plans in motion to start the new undertaking. After a year of team building, Wellspring Church [www.wellspringchurch.tv] launched in June 2009.

“Our hope is that we want to be a church that unchurched people love to attend,” he said. “We gear everything to people who either don’t attend church or stopped going because they had a bad experience or thought it was boring or irrelevant. We are geared for them.”

Well aware that there are already so many churches in Myrtle Beach, Kelly said he has never invited anybody who already attended church here.

“That’s not who we are here for. We moved here for all the people who for whatever reason didn’t attend church. We tried to create a church for them.”

Wellspring Church does not have memberships either, and one of their core values is inviting people to belong before they believe. Put simply: if you are there, you are family.

This approach seems to have legs. Almost a year ago, Wellspring moved into a new building at U.S. 501 and River Oaks Drive.

“We have averaged anywhere from 50 to 70 percent growth over a year ago, so we have really exploded since we moved in here.”

But how are they getting the word out?

“The No. 1 way is through our people,” he said. “We really try to create experiences here on the weekends that people want to talk about – that people want to go tell their neighbors about.”

He said that everybody is encouraged to tell their stories.

“Everybody has different opinions about God,” he said. “You can argue the historical accuracy of things, but it’s really hard to argue with somebody when they say ‘God is changing my life.’”

Facebook is also an important catalyst for Wellspring’s marketing efforts, especially because the church is so photo centric.

“One of the things we do a lot at our church is that we take pictures – of worship or kid day,” he said. “We just finished a series called Picture Perfect Family, and for four weeks we had a little set and professional photographers. You could get a family portrait taken. We put these on our Facebook page – so everybody would go to the page, tag themselves and share it. When they do that, they share with all of these other people who then find out about our church.”

Part of the lease negotiation resulted in the use of a billboard in the parking lot.

Wellspring has added a third service to its Easter program.

The Kellys live in Myrtle Beach with their three sons, David, 10, Jonathan, 8, and Jacob, 5.

“We love what we do,” he said. “My wife is on staff full time as well. My three kids love coming up here, and that was really important. We definitely wanted them to feel like it wasn’t something that competed with them.”

He feels like Myrtle Beach will be home for the rest of his life.

“I believe God pairs a pastor and a people, and that the way you are most effective in reaching those people is to embrace who you are created to be.”

This story was originally published March 22, 2016 at 1:00 AM with the headline "Working 4 a Living | Meet Pastor Trey Kelly and the Wellspring of Life."