(Folsom, CA) What happens when a pastor is also a hip-hop artist, MLB chaplain, songwriter, author, former college baseball player and a guy who intentionally plays softball with people who don't go to church?
For Pastor Brannon Shortt, those things aren't competing identities. They're all part of the way God has wired him to communicate the hope of Jesus.
Check out the conversation with Pastor Brannon Shortt and Monika Kelly:
Shortt is the pastor of Bayside Folsom in northern California and the author of the upcoming book Hope Made Visible. His story is one of redemption, an unexpected call to ministry, creativity and a deep desire to see Christians live their faith beyond the walls of a church building.
God has a unique calling on each person's life
Shortt didn't initially want to become a pastor.
After coming to faith as a teenager, he was passionate about Jesus and wanted everyone around him to know Him. But ministry as a career? That wasn't part of the plan.
“I want to play professional baseball, and if I don't make it, I want to be an agent, but I do not want to do ministry vocationally,” he recalls.
Then came a moment he says he will never forget.
A guest preacher was speaking at his church when, in the middle of the service, the pastor pointed Shortt out.
“He looks at me in the sermon, double takes, and then points me out in the middle of the crowd,” Shortt says. “I'm not trying to be weird, but God has called those two kids into ministry, and He wants to use this moment to confirm it.”
For Shortt, it was confirmation of something he had already been wrestling with.
“God gave in His kindness me an answer in a way that I could hear Him,” he says.
From Rebellion to Redemption
Shortt's teenage years had been difficult. Although he grew up in church with what he describes as great parents and a great home, he reached a point where he simply gave up.
Between sixth and ninth grade, he says he received 14 or 15 school suspensions. He was fighting and spending time around older friends who were involved in drugs and dealing.
“I wasn't a dealer. I wasn't using,” he says. “That was just who I was around all the time and fighting a lot. It was bad, and I'd given up.”
His struggle wasn't necessarily that he didn't believe in God. Instead, he says, he believed God had given up on him.
“I definitely believed God didn't believe in me,” Shortt says.
Then, at about 14 or 15 years old, everything changed
It happened at a house party—not a church service or youth retreat.
“I have a wake-up moment by the Holy Spirit,” he says. “I walked outside of the home, literally fell on my knees in a grass patch in a cul-de-sac, and started scream-praying at the sky.”
Shortt remembered hearing a youth pastor talk about Romans 5 and the power of God's grace.
“I asked God that night, I was like, if in the midst of all that my life has become, your love is more powerful than my sin is, and you love me with what my life has become, not only am I sorry, and I repent, but I'm in, and I want to change.”
He says that prayer changed his life.
“God has a plan for your life. It's what you don't expect.”
A powerful message from Pastor Brannon Shortt, January 2026.
Shortt became a pastor at just 21 years old. By 24, he was leading a team and launching a campus.
Nearly 13 years into pastoral ministry, he says the job has been both more beautiful and more difficult than he imagined.
The hardest part?
Relationships.
“I think the hardest thing for me, if I'm being honest, is the functionality of what a pastor is,” he says. “People will see me as a function in their life rather than a person.”
That can make pastoral relationships uniquely vulnerable.
“There have been times in my almost 13 years of being a pastor where I've thought, wait, you love me, right?”
Shortt says sometimes the painful answer is that people loved what he did rather than knowing him as a person.
“We loved you as a communicator, or we loved you as a visionary, but then when we disagree, then somebody can just walk out of your life.”
He compares it to family.
“That doesn't usually happen at the family dinner table,” he says. “But it does sometimes happen at pastor's tables.”
Yet the other side of pastoral ministry has been profoundly rewarding.
“It's more beautiful than I ever imagined and more rewarding and more soul-deepening to see the amount of life change that a pastor gets to see,” he says.
Living in the Age of Outrage
Shortt believes the difficulty of maintaining relationships isn't limited to pastors.
He points to a culture increasingly shaped by social media algorithms, division and what he calls “the age of outrage.”
“We are largely discipled by algorithms,” he says. “We are very divided.”
He believes people can begin to feel that disagreement itself is reason enough to walk away from relationships—even when the disagreement isn't about something essential.
“We may disagree on something that's not even essential—certainly not essential theologically or biblically,” Shortt says. “And people feel that to make their own stance and to put their own flag in the ground that they need to separate from people they disagree with.”
For pastors, he says, there's an additional challenge: people can treat them like a service provider.
“I think pastors get a little bit of that,” he says. “Well, actually, honestly, I think we get a lot more of that than doctors do.”
His answer isn't to expect everyone in a church to become a close personal friend.
Instead, it's about cultivating a healthy inner circle.
“You just—you got to know who your circle is,” he says.
Shortt says his wife and a small group that meets in their home are among the people with whom he can truly be himself.
“You have to have enough of those that you don't ask everybody to fulfill the psychological, human, spiritual needs that you have,” he says. “But you have to have places that you can go.”
A Church That Shows Up
Shortt says Bayside Folsom has become deeply involved in the surrounding community.
Two years ago, the church was named a partner of the city—the first time, he says, the city had given that designation to a faith-based organization.
He remembers a city official telling him something that stuck with him:
“The crazy thing about Bayside Folsom is that no matter where I go, there they are.”
Shortt sees that presence as a picture of what the church can be.
“That's the beauty of the body of Christ,” he says. “You need on-fire believers in every sphere of society.”
The church's outreach includes Celebrate Recovery, Trauma Reboot, community beautification efforts and other partnerships.
“We want our block to change because of where we exist and the fact that we do,” Shortt says.
He also points to cooperation among churches throughout the area.
“Almost every Sunday we're on a pastor's thread praying for one another, asking what's going on,” he says. “It's not sandbox-ey, it's really linked arms.”
His hope is that what God is doing in Folsom will spread beyond the city.
“We just want to see in our prayer is that what the Spirit is birthing here continues to spread, and it changes everything about our city, our state, our county, and that it trickles down to the rest of the world.”
Getting Outside the Church Walls
Shortt is intentional about spending time with people who don't attend church.
His strategy is surprisingly simple.
“I won't go to a Christian barber,” he says with a laugh.
Why?
“It just forces me that once a month I have to be in somebody else's shoes, on somebody else's turf, without asking them to come into mine.”
The same goes for sports.
“I will not play on the church softball team,” he says. “I play on the city team, and I'm the only believer on the team, and that's on purpose.”
He wants to be present with people where they actually live their lives.
“I want to be there. I want to be with people as they're going through hard times.”
That approach recently opened another door: he was asked to officiate the wedding of someone from his softball team who has no faith background.
“I can't wait to go in there and talk about what I think God is affirming in their relationship, and who God is, and how He made covenantal connection, and how He gave us that as a gift,” Shortt says.
He also serves as a chaplain to Major League Baseball players (Athletic's baseball team) and has spent years writing and performing hip-hop.
“I've spent years in hip-hop, both writing for other artists, and I've released three studio albums of my own.”
Now he's adding author to the list.
Hope Made Visible
Shortt's upcoming book, Hope Made Visible, is scheduled for release in the spring.
The subtitle is expected to focus on being Christ's ambassadors in what Shortt describes as “a beautiful and broken world.”
That idea is central to his ministry philosophy.
“It's really important to me that Christians' whole life are not just a church,” he says. “I think that silos us off. We were always meant to be light in the world.”
For Shortt, that means both the silly and the serious moments can become opportunities to live out faith.
“I'm not abandoning the church. I'm trying to do both.”
Humor, Heart and a Little Dolly Parton
Shortt's ministry style is creative, conversational and often poetic.
When the topic of Dolly Parton came up, he immediately connected her public persona with two qualities he considers important in his own life and ministry:
“Humor and heart.”
“Dolly Parton was hilarious, and had all of these pieces of a beautiful heart,” he says.
He believes those qualities can make faith approachable.
“I think it's a unique person in the world that just operates from that humor and heart place. I think that's approachable. I think it's connecting.”
And Shortt believes Jesus Himself had a sense of humor.
“I have to think Jesus is walking with His disciples down the road, making jokes and jabbing people on their side and making fun of the fact that somebody doesn't like sand in their sandals.”
For Shortt, faith doesn't mean avoiding sorrow or difficult realities. It means bringing the fullness of humanity into the journey.
“We are humans, and we experience all of it.”
A Creative Soul
Shortt describes himself as someone who has always experienced life through language, music and art.
“I love art. I love music,” he says. “Everything I do is a song.”
That includes leadership.
“If I'm building a spreadsheet out for vision, what it's going to cost and how we're going to get there, risk over reward, independent variables, all of those things, I still think that's a song.”
His sermons are part of that same creative process.
“When I'm writing a sermon, the practice of homiletics, I think, is a song.”
But perhaps the most important part of his communication style is that he isn't trying to manufacture it.
“Life's too short to fake it,” Shortt says.
He gave an example from a recent sermon on marriage. With a two-year-old son and five-month-old daughter at home, he wasn't about to present himself as an expert.
“I don't know how to be a couple in the family right now. I'm just figuring it out,” he says. “I cannot stand up here and be like, I'm the marriage guru. I feel completely lost and together all at the same time.”
Instead, he says, he communicates what God is doing in him.
“I communicate to me,” Shortt explains. “I'm preaching in the way that God or the Spirit, He has pierced me that week in study. And I just trust that if I preach at me, He'll be good and kind to use it for you.”
From a .9 GPA to Author
Perhaps one of the most unexpected parts of Shortt's story is his journey as a writer.
He says he had a 0.9 GPA as a high school sophomore and didn't take academics seriously until college and graduate school.
But he always had language.
“I think God gave me a poetic soul,” he says.
He remembers listening to a babbling brook and hearing music in it. He connects deeply with the poetry of the Psalms.
“So when I read the Psalms, I feel akin to David,” he says. “I'm like, oh my gosh, yes. My soul feels like a deer panting by the water. I understand that.”
The fact that he is now writing a book isn't lost on him.
“As a guy with a .9 GPA that failed English, to now have the opportunity to be a writer also is a giggle from heaven.”
The Revival That Started With Athletes
Shortt's passion for reaching people outside the church started during his college years.
He attended a Christian university where about 60 percent of the campus was made up of athletes. Shortt noticed that many students weren't necessarily living out their faith.
“I was like, none of my dudes know Jesus. We got to start something.”
So he and a few friends started Bible studies in the dorms.
He didn't even know established campus ministries like FCA existed.
“We're creating the curriculum, not knowing there's downloadable PDFs online,” he says.
But something remarkable happened.
“We had seen about 80% of our team come to Christ within a couple of years and other teams and saw it spilling out into other dorms.”
He remembers writing a goal on a baseball goal sheet that had nothing to do with baseball statistics.
“Me and another guy wrote down, we want to see the campus reached for Jesus.”
He says God answered that prayer in ways he never expected.
“I saw both those gang members come to Christ,” he says of two men he had previously mentioned.
Years later, his college ministry experience came full circle when he had the opportunity to become a chaplain for professional baseball players.
“When I was interviewing for that chaplaincy role, I'll never forget, they were like, what makes you want to do this with athletes?” Shortt recalls.
His answer was simple:
“Honestly, that's where I started.”
“If You're Alive, He Ain't Done”
Shortt is now a pastor, husband, father, artist, chaplain and author.
But underneath all of those roles is the same message that changed his own life as a teenager: God's grace reaches people in unexpected places.
“I just think if you're hearing this somewhere, God has a plan for your life. It's what you don't expect.”
And then he offered what may be the simplest description of the Christian life in the entire conversation:
“The goal of our life with God is not try harder, try harder, try harder. The goal of our life with God is always come closer, come closer, come closer.”
Then he added:
“The arms are open wide. He's never left nor forsook you, and He's there.”
And perhaps the line that best captures the heart of his story:
“If you're alive, He ain't done. Keep going and press in further.”
For Brannon Shortt, the calling is clear: take the hope he's received and make it visible—wherever God sends him.
Learn more about Bayside Folsom at folsom.baysideonline.com . Hope Made Visible is scheduled for release in spring 2027.