It didn’t start like you’d think a pastor’s life might.

Jim Morgan was 6 when his parents divorced. Then he was 14, smoking pot every day. By 17, he’d moved on to cocaine, crystal meth and LSD. He was kicked out of one high school after another and spent his early 20s living in a friend’s garage in southern California.

But when he was 22, someone gave him a bag of Bible studies on cassette tapes — and eventually, that changed everything.

“I’d never heard anything like it before,” says the Rev. Morgan, now one of the leaders at The Edge Christian Fellowship in St. Joseph. “My interaction with religion had always shown me that it was something I didn’t understand or someone screaming on TV for money. This was the first time I’d ever really heard the words of Jesus.”

His life didn’t change right away. But he realized something about his thinking had changed when he was at a party, watching people drink and get high, and thought, “God didn’t create us to live like this.”

He committed his life to Jesus the next day, and it was transformed — going from one “as unstable as water” to one without any desire for drugs or alcohol. Within a year, he enrolled in Calvary Chapel Bible College in California.

“There wasn’t anyone then who was really talking about the things of the Lord in a way people like me understood,” the Rev. Morgan says. “So I said, ‘Lord, if you’d let me, I’d really like to do that.’”

Fast forward more than a decade, and he’s doing that at The Edge, which he began in 2005 (He also started St. Joseph’s Calvary Chapel years earlier, after feeling led to plant a church in the Midwest). At The Edge, he and two other pastors teach verse-by-verse through the Bible, “explaining what it means and why people should care,” he says — just like the Bible studies on tape that made such a difference in his life.

“You don’t really have to make the Bible interesting; it is interesting if you just stay out of the way,” the Rev. Morgan adds.

Even the church’s name comes from a Bible verse, one in Leviticus that instructed God’s people not to completely harvest their crops but to leave the edges for the poor and the stranger — something that serves as a reminder of God’s compassion and grace for those in need. And the church’s mission falls along the same lines: To love God, love people, serve the King and tell the world (To learn more about The Edge, go online to www.EdgeCF.com).

“The church leadership has made this mission basic, easy to understand and remember, as well as easy to apply to daily life,” says Niki Butner, who has been going to The Edge for about a year and a half. “Everyone in the church has opportunity to know the mission and practice the mission in all areas.”

Everyone in the church also had the opportunity to witness something exciting a little more than a year ago, when The Edge moved from its original location in the upstairs of an office building to its current location at 2501 S. Belt Highway, in a building that formerly was a farm and feed store and is near where the Belt intersects both U.S. Highway 36 and U.S. Highway 169, as well as St. Joseph’s Parkway System.

In addition to all the traffic this brings by the church and the steady stream of Sunday-morning visitors it brings in, the location also happens to be one that backs up to a field — an unlikely occurrence for a site in the middle of the city and one that serves as a physical reminder of the church’s and the Rev. Morgan’s mission.

“He really desires to be in the doorway of people’s lives,” says the Rev. Steve Sewell, pastor of New Hope Foursquare Church in St. Joseph.

New Hope is one of several churches with which The Edge has a close relationship, and the two of them, along with McCarthy Baptist Church, came together to host a carnival for families in their neighborhoods earlier this month — one in which they handed out Bible studies on CDs.

“I always get a kick out of giving out some sort of recorded Bible study,” the Rev. Morgan says. “The irony’s not lost on me. It seems kind of like a lame, silly, worthless thing, but I’m a great example of what God’s Word can do.”

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at ewisdom@npgco.com.