In spring 2021, Capitol Hill Baptist Church (CHBC) in Washington, DC, had nine pastoral interns. Eight were 40 years old and under. Seven were coming out of—or would head into—seminary.
And one was NASA’s former head astronaut.
Pat Forrester was 63 years old. He’d been to space three times to put together the International Space Station. To do the internship, he’d stepped down from his job as chief of the astronaut office—the highest position an active astronaut can have—and moved from his corner office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to a white plastic table in a CHBC Sunday school room.
Pat didn’t make the switch because he was tired of liftoffs or spacewalks.
“I loved what I was doing,” he said. “It felt like I was serving the nation well. But I had a restlessness. I felt that there was more than this for me.”
A big reason for that was his church situation. As Pat and his wife, Diana, had grown in their ecclesiological convictions, they’d stopped attending their old church in Houston and hadn’t been able to find a new one.
When he made trips to NASA’s headquarters in DC, Pat would attend CHBC. He and Diana loved the expositional preaching and the feeling of community. Pat was in town so often he started coming to CHBC Bible studies and stopping by meetings of CHBC interns.
These guys are in the Word and in the church, Pat thought. It was so attractive that when the timing was right, he joined them.
“I loved being around the church, being here with a group of men,” Pat said of his fellow interns. “I didn’t know any fellowship quite like that. As an army officer and a pilot, I’ve had a lot of camaraderie—but not with that focus, where it was centered on the Lord. I loved it.”
And so when Pat finished the internship, the Forresters chose to stay in DC. Without a job in ministry, Pat accepted a position advising top NASA leaders in the DC office.
Then, this spring, he did it again, leaving his high-profile job to become the fundraiser for 9Marks, a ministry established by CHBC pastor Mark Dever to help pastors and church members build healthy churches.
“For however many years the Lord gives me, I would like to serve him with all that I have,” Pat said. “I want to be in an organization whose direct mission is the spread of the gospel.”
“God’s Word is true, he is building his church, and he is coming back,” Diana said. “Pat is now vocationally participating in that. It’s really cool to get this opportunity at this age in life—what a privilege.”
Growing Up Military
Pat was born to serve his country. His grandfather served in World War I. Three of his great-uncles fought—and one died—in World War II. Before Pat graduated from high school, his career-military father had spent a year in Korea, earned a master’s in public and international affairs from the University of Pittsburgh, and been awarded a Silver Star for commanding troops in Vietnam.
After high school, there was no question where Pat was headed next—the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. But even though he expected it to be hard, the transition was tough for a kid who had a great time in high school playing sports, dating, and not working too hard for his A’s.
For the first time, Pat realized he needed something or someone outside of himself. “I remember going to talk with the chaplain, and he put me in a Bible study,” he said. “That was the first time I remember using a Bible for something other than a church service.”
Pat’s parents had raised him in the Methodist church, but it was in late high school and college that he first felt the conviction of sin. “I became a believer then,” Pat said. “I understood about having a relationship with Christ.”
But he didn’t yet understand about church.
Pat and Diana
Pat was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, and preparing for Ranger School—the army’s toughest course—when the daughter of old family friends caught his eye. Both Pat and Diana fell hard.
“Pat was such a person of integrity and faithfulness,” Diana said. “You can see the trajectory a person has, even if their character isn’t fully developed yet. Even though we were young in our faith and hadn’t experienced intentional discipleship, I could see he loved the Lord.”
A few years later, they got married. But Pat and Diana didn’t settle down.
In their first decade, the couple moved to Hawaii so Pat could be a platoon leader and fly helicopters for the army, to Virginia so he could earn a master’s in aerospace engineering, to California and Maryland so he could learn how to be a test pilot, and to Alabama so he could be one. His job was exciting, and he was good at it.
Diana didn’t mind the changing scenery, except for at church.
“She’d talk about wanting a church home, and I was like, ‘Honey, I don’t even know what you mean by that,’” Pat said. He didn’t mind attending a local Protestant church one week and services at the chapel on base the next. What more could you want?
“I always felt loved, but I didn’t feel deeply embedded,” said Diana.
Embedded in Church
When Pat was 36, he and Diana and their two boys moved to Houston. His assignment was to work for NASA for three years as an aerospace engineer. When it was done, Pat—along with more than 2,400 others—applied for one of the 35 American slots in the 1996 class of astronauts. He got in.
It was exciting to be an astronaut—and fun to be married to one. But the biggest change Diana noticed was that, finally, they’d be standing still long enough to embed into a nearby Baptist congregation.
“We were in that church for 20 years,” Pat said. “It was there that I realized what she meant by a church family, a church home.”
He’d never been in a congregation for that long. He was able to serve as a deacon and teach Sunday school to middle and high schoolers. Diana found time, between working as a neonatal nurse and volunteering at church and the kids’ school, to join a Bible Study Fellowship group. She encouraged Pat to join her.
“That looks like so much work,” he told her, watching her do weekly lessons. “I’ll never do that.”
But after a while, that changed. “I think out of my love for her, I decided to go one time,” he said. To his surprise, he loved it.
“It became my favorite part of the day,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to get off work, go straight to Starbucks, open my Bible, and answer my questions. That’s when I came to really love God’s Word.”
View from the Top
On August 10, 2001, Pat climbed into the space shuttle Discovery and took off into space for the first time. For about 10 days, his team docked at the International Space Station, bringing supplies and a new crew.
On two of those days, Pat put on his space suit and floated out the door. His job was to attach containers of extra ammonia, heater cables, and handrails to the outside of the International Space Station.
“It’s high-altitude construction,” he said. “You’re going around the earth at 17,500 miles per hour—25 times the speed of sound. You come up on California and then a couple of minutes later you’re passing over New York. It doesn’t feel that fast inside the space station—you feel like you’re floating. But when you’re out on the spacewalk, it does. You feel like you’re falling, because you are.”
The view was spectacular. “Looking back at Earth is the most amazing sight to see,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
On his way back into the space station, he stopped to take a picture.
“And I thought to myself, after all the effort and all the work it had taken to get there, Is this all there is?” said the man who had chased down the most exciting, challenging, and interesting work on—and off—the planet. “Is this all that God has planned for my life?”
It’s the same question asked by a lot of people at the top of their professions.
The answer: There is more, but maybe not in the way you think.
Being a Christian on Earth
After Pat got home, he talked to Diana about his questions. She told him to talk to his pastor, who advised him to join his church’s short-term mission trip to Uganda. He liked it so much that he thought about joining Mission Aviation Fellowship after retirement. On his third and final trip to space in 2009, Pat took along a piece from Nate Saint’s ill-fated Piper airplane.
Back on the ground, Pat kept working his way through different jobs at NASA. In 2017, he was named the chief of the astronaut office—which meant he managed astronaut resources and operations, developed flight crew operation concepts, and made crew assignments for future trips to space.
To do this, Pat traveled regularly to consult with NASA’s headquarters. That wasn’t new to him—after spaceflights, astronauts regularly head to the nation’s capital to meet the president, testify before Congress, and lobby for the space industry.
Years earlier, he’d asked his son, who lived in DC, if he could recommend a church to visit while he was in town.
His son pointed him to CHBC. Pat tried it, then tried it again. The more time he spent there, the more he liked it. Now, with Pat’s increased time in DC, Diana started coming too.
“I didn’t have the language to explain what I was observing and experiencing there,” she said. “But I knew that it was good and right.”
The Forresters found in CHBC what they’d first met in Bible Study Fellowship—a love for digging into God’s Word. “We were sitting under expositional preaching,” Diana said. “The gospel of Jesus Christ was preached every Sunday. There was consistency—the right thing was being done over and over again.”
Back in Houston, Pat and Diana tried an expositional-preaching church plant. They liked it, but it was over an hour—sometimes two hours, depending on the traffic—from their house, which made it hard to embed themselves in the church family. Eventually, the long commute wore them out.
“We tried a couple of other places, but nothing stuck,” Pat said. “Then we just quit going to church. On Sunday mornings, we’d listen to a sermon from CHBC and pray.”
Internship
About a year into the Forresters’ online church attendance, the rest of the world joined them. During the pandemic, everyone began thinking and talking about what it meant to attend—or not attend—church in person.
Dever preached on Hebrews 10:24–25, and those verses convicted Pat.
“I think we’re living in sin at this point, not being in a church,” he told Diana.
He felt so strongly about it that he suggested they move to DC. Not only could he do CHBC’s pastoral internship, but they could also be members of CHBC.
At first glance, that proposal sounds ridiculous. Pat flew jets, planned trips to space, and sat where Alan Shepard once sat. The CHBC internship is five months long, pays $1,300 a month, and is meant for young men heading into the pastorate.
But whenever he was in DC, sitting in on intern discussions, he’d think, Wow. Here is a group of men talking about the Lord and the church, surrounded by the pastors of the church.
“I’d never been around anything like that,” he said. “What better thing could you be doing with your time than reflecting on God’s Word and the church, learning with mentors?”
Dever saw Pat’s interest.
“It was clear to me that Pat was a man of honor and concerned about local churches—particularly, the health of local churches,” he said. “Pat was immensely respected by his peers and carried great natural leadership abilities, with the humility still to learn from others.”
He asked Pat to join.
“It was very appealing to me,” Pat said. “[It seemed] the Lord was inviting us into church membership, deep fellowship, and a chance for me to grow in my understanding of ecclesiology.”
And maybe, at the end of the internship, he could work in ministry.
In December 2020, Pat stepped down from the chief astronaut position and took a leave of absence from NASA. He and Diana sold their house and moved to an apartment in DC.
Theology + Relationships
Before he even started, Pat was nervous about the internship, which requires reading more than 5,000 pages of text and writing about 100 papers.
“I’m a slow reader, and I’m not a great writer,” he said. “The internship was one of the harder things I’ve ever done . . . but to me it was like a dream come true.”
One key reason was his fellow interns and the CHBC staff. Pat felt as strong a bond with them as anything he’d experienced in the army or on his flight crews.
“Those are very close relationships, particularly within the astronaut office and particularly among crew members,” Diana said. “They are really, really intentional with those relationships. They work in close proximity to one another, share an office, and build so much closeness during that training flow.”
But few of Pat’s work colleagues—and even fewer of his shuttle crew members—were believers.
“When you don’t share the essence of who you are as a follower of Christ with another person, it’s like being in a family where they don’t know you,” Diana said.
Pat explains the gap in relational intensity between work friends and church friends like this: “It’s like the difference between loving your friend’s kids and then holding your own kid. It’s just different.”
This was the component he and Diana had been missing from online church. They’d had good theology. But now they were adding relationships.
“I loved being around the church,” Pat said. He enjoyed it so much he was hoping for a job in ministry at the end of his internship.
But that didn’t happen.
Back to NASA
At the end of Pat’s internship, he was offered a position at NASA’s DC headquarters.
“NASA had just selected a new head of human spaceflight, and her office reached out and asked if I’d like to be her advisor,” Pat said. It was a senior executive position with influence, authority, and travel to all the launches.
For the next three years, he was glad to do that job. But sometimes he missed the chief astronaut job—like when he listened to Dever’s talk at the 2022 T4G conference.
“Dever was talking about what good authority is and how it blesses others, and it hit me that was what I had been to the astronaut corps,” he said. “I had left the chief astronaut position not realizing the Lord was using me there as a believer. I treated people fairly. I spent hours talking with them. I knew their families. I loved them and led them well as a believer. When I heard the sermon and read Jonathan [Leeman’s] book, my heart sank. I thought, Oh, I left where I was serving the Lord best and didn’t realize it.”
Pat wondered if he’d done the wrong thing by moving to DC. He had to remind himself that he and Diana had prayed about their decision. That they hadn’t left a church home in Houston. That they’d both felt convicted about coming.
That the Lord knew about good authority and knew what Pat—and NASA—needed.
“We had to keep reminding each other to be steadfast, because we had prayed about it,” he said. “We had to trust that what we were doing was what we were supposed to be doing in God’s providence. The Lord is steadfast—we read it a thousand times. We knew we needed to be steadfast because he is steadfast.”
Pat and Diana also reminded themselves of the ways God was blessing their move.
“Coming to DC, my primary focus was enjoying being in church membership,” Diana said. “There is such a discipleship culture here—we’re always walking or having coffee meetings.”
“I’ve loved seeing my wife grow in theology and her love for the local church,” Pat said. He can say the same about himself: “I knew if I did the internship I’d know and love the Lord more. And that’s been true.”
Development Manager for 9Marks
As Pat and Diana got to know CHBC, they also got to know 9Marks. They met Drew Allenspach, the development manager, and learned he wanted to pastor a church somewhere.
“Knowing I wanted to be in ministry, I had a fleeting thought that it would be a kindness of the Lord to move into Drew’s job,” Pat said. “I didn’t even know what a development manager was. When I found out, I thought, No, that wouldn’t be good.”
That’s because “development manager” is another name for fundraiser. Allenspach’s job was to tell people about 9Marks and ask if they’d mind donating to the work.
In 2024, Allenspach took a job as an associate pastor at Ogletown Baptist Church in Newark, Delaware. Before he left, 9Marks began looking for his replacement. A friend, who knew Pat wanted to work for 9Marks, told him to at least call executive director Ryan Townsend to see what the job entailed.
Townsend told him to stop by.
“I got there, and Ryan and Drew were in the conference room with notebooks,” Pat said. “I got home and told Diana, ‘I think that was an interview—and I think I got the job.’”
Sure enough, Ryan called with a job offer. But Pat didn’t know how to raise money, nor did he have a desire to do it—“Man, it’s so hard for me to ask somebody for something,” he said.
“It’s true, he had no experience or background in fundraising,” Townsend said. “But I reckoned I could teach him the technical skills he needed to do the job. He has a pretty good track record at learning complex things. And the things Pat had that I could not teach—his character, experience, wisdom, humility—are priceless.”
Pat and Diana prayed about it for a few weeks. Then he talked to Ryan.
“I’ve thought about this, and I don’t think I’m the right person,” Pat said. “You should go with your No. 2 guy.”
“Brother,” Ryan told him, “we’ve got no No. 2 guy.”
Pat laughs when he tells the story: “You need to know that’s how I got the job.”
That’s how a senior NASA official left a highly decorated, hugely successful 31-year career—for the love of ministry and the local church.
For the Love of Ministry
Pat’s been the 9Marks development director for about nine months now.
Some days it’s hard. “Part of my flesh wants to move to the mountains and hike,” he laughs. “It helps that John Piper ruined that for all of us.”
Some days it’s uplifting.
“I’ve been in several elite organizations in my life, but 9Marks does more with a few people and a small budget for the kingdom than you could’ve convinced me could be done,” Pat said. “I love this organization, and I love the people.”
He does more than fundraising: Pat talks with every class of interns. He spends time with young men in CHBC, amazed that they want to hear his stories and his advice. Earlier this year, he shared his testimony with more than 10,000 young people at the Cross Conference. A few months ago, he and Diana spent a weekend in a cabin with three young couples from the church.
“I’m going, ‘All right, Lord, I guess this is how you are using us,’” Pat said. “I’m going to trust you.”
The more he’s around the church, the more he loves it.
“I’ve served with some fine people who dedicated their lives to service, but man, these pastors,” he said. “Honesty, if I could serve pastors for the rest of my life, how cool would that be?”