Today we’d like to introduce you to Scott Wolfe.
Hi Scott, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I vividly remember picking up broken bricks and construction debri scattered across the red-clay yard and throwing them into a rectangular brick pit, which would soon be covered with cement to make my great aunt and uncle’s front porch. I was five years old. That’s where it started. My father worked a full-time job as head maintenance man, but most every weekend and many nights he had my brother and me working on building projects. We basically built our entire street. We not only built houses from the ground up (Yes, from digging footings to final touch-ups. Dad used to say, “All you need to start building a house is a ball of string.”), we also roofed, painted, repaired and “flipped” houses throughout my teen years. We worked hard and long and were rewarded with FOOD! Dad knew every “hole-in-the-wall,” soul-food, family-owned, and country-cooked restaurant in South Carolina.
Building was not my first love though. I sensed a call to ministry when I was only fourteen and I began traveling all over South Carolina and eventually much farther away from home, leading youth “Lay Renewal” weekend events. This lead to Bible college and seminary, summers in Chatham, MA, and Winter Park, FL, working in churches as a youth minister, on the collegiant advisory counsel for the 1986 Billy Graham Crusade, and Student Discipleship Ministries where a national prayer movement—”See You at the Pole”—was born in 1990. In 1998, I woke up with a splitting headache, called a doctor-friend who picked me up, ushered me through a back entrance to the hospital in Conroe, Texas, where I soon had a needle inserted in my spine. I had meningitis. My strong work ethic had me renovating our beautiful, wood-saturated farmhouse in Cut-n-Shoot, raising our three sons while also leading a thriving youth ministers’ network, writing curricula, counseling individuals, and…well, eventually “burning out.”
While in the hospital, I began designing the logo and logistics of founding a non-profit: InYou Ministries. This also began a long inward journey into re-discovering who I was and what I was put on earth to do. And this lead to an outward journey back to South Carolina, where we immediately bought a dilapidated farmhouse which had remained empty, rotting, and rat and flying squirrel-infested for a couple years. After renovation, it eventually became a counseling and retreat center when in 2005, we moved into a 4,000 sq ft, much-more-modern farmhouse dream home I, a friend, my wife and boys designed and built in the back yard.
Again, I found myself doing ministry, but this time outside the church in prisons, youth detention centers, re-habs and rehabilitation houses, and among the “houseless.” My boys and I flipped several houses, started a painting company and to this day remain active in construction and renovating houses for profit or our own enjoyment. Building and rebuilding both houses and lives seemed to be the fruit of my calling. Both ventures bring me peace, purpose, and satisfaction.
But like so many amazing stories of great success, there coincides tales of tragic struggle. A bout with cancer, my father’s death by the hands of the Dodge Charger of a highway patrolman, and the dramatic ending a near 33-year marriage launched me on another layer of re-discovery. I made up a word for my son’s wedding message: “ciricula.” Life seems to go in circles, teaching and re-teaching the same lesson, but in deepening cycles. This time around, while digging out of a deep depression, an old mill house in the Northside of Spartanburg and the old farmhouse in the front yard of a now empty dream home offered me a refuge to pound out my issues with hammer and nails in hand. The Northside flip funded the “Original Family Farmhouse” (Airbnb/VRBO name) renovation and lead me to discover it was originally known as the “Whiffletree Farm.” There is no transformation without the death of something, and the end of my marriage has now birth a new, small wedding venue where couples can “get hitched at the Whiffletree Farm.”
This life story is extremely condensed. The lessons have all come hard-earned. Maturing faith is the process of expanding and expanding until it includes all things, for “all things are working together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose” (Rom 8:28-29).
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about InYou Ministries?
InYou Ministries exists to help hurting humans find hope and healing through discovering who they are and what they have in Christ, through conferences, counsel, and curricula. Colossians 1:28-29 best communicates my mission: “We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ. For this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.” The weakest person can embrace the strongest Truth for transformation, of Truth is a Person—Jesus Christ—through whom we have victorious and abundant life despite out past. Whatever the problem, the Answer is InYou! In Christ, we are all working from completion and not for it. This is the great mystery of the gospel. We can rest in Christ’s finished work, rather than succumbing to the enemy’s sole scheme: pursuing what we already possess.
Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Definitely Disney World! Our family visited the Magic Kingdom just three weeks after it opened in 1971, and we vacationed there every year since. We loved the freedom of transportation across the seven seas and over the entire resort on boats, monorails, trams and trains. We enjoyed the Fort Wilderness campground, basketball hoops on the loops, open fields, game rooms and campfire movie nights!
Pricing:
- Enneagram Caoching, $120 hr session
- Spiritual Growth Coaching, $90 hr. session
- Curricula online: www.inyou.org
- Airbnb/VRBO $220/night +
Contact Info:
- Email: scott@inyou.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/firmfoundation_jesuschrist/
- Facebook: InYou Ministries
- Other: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/862876124588313190
