Alan Metzel’s version of vacation is turning his phone off. 

He spent the last week in the Kerrville, Texas countryside with family, alternating from reading to pickleball while his phone sat without service. Useless. Metzel stands refreshed before the congregation now awaiting his Father’s Day sermon. The vacation is over, but the phones still don’t work. This Chapel is too deep in the East Texas piney woods to get a signal. 

“When you take away the hamster wheel of chasing time, it’s amazing how an hour feels like 60 minutes,” Metzel says.

Metzel doesn’t chase time; he attacks it. He juggles two full-time professions that require overtime hours – the head coach of the state champion Gilmer Buckeyes and the pastor at Chapel in the Woods. Metzel is the first call for anyone in these two communities enduring a personal battle and needing advice or prayer. He maximizes every hour a day has to give and, when night falls, wishes it had more. 

“You’d have to search all across America to find anybody that’s come even remotely close to impacting the number of people that Alan Metzel has,” Tim Russell, his longtime friend and coaching peer, said.

The preacher pats the mic pack clipped to his belt even though the football coach doesn’t need it. Metzel’s voice is strong enough to reach the 60 people hanging on every word.

God shows himself through our Fathers, Metzel says. His biological dad left the family. His stepfather, George Metzel, is the most important man in his life. 

In many ways, Alan and George couldn’t have been more different. George was 6-foot-4, 240 pounds. Alan is 5-foot-7. In what George referred to as his ‘BC’ (Before Christ) days, he got kicked out of three different high schools and played bass guitar for Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Barry. Alan was a rule follower who was passionate about sports. 

But father and son were identical in the most important way: their faith. George was a preacher, wicked smart even though he never saw himself that way. He used to study the New Testament in the mornings from the Greek lexicon, then found out he had dyslexia at 50. Alan’s hero was Roger Staubach because he, too, wanted to be the Dallas Cowboys quarterback and blend the elements of Christian faith and athletics.

Alan never made the NFL, but his Harmony High School coach, Jed Whitaker, inspired him to pursue a football life. He tells the church now about the worst game he ever played. A 15-year-old Alan sat at the back of the bus, despondent over costing his team, when Whitaker plopped beside him. 

“I’m proud of you,” Whitaker said, throwing his arm around him. “You’re a winner.”

His coach lifted him during what was, at that point, his lowest athletic low. And Alan has spent the ensuing four decades trying to give that moment to anyone who will listen.

“It is never about what you can do for him,” Russell said. “It’s about what he can do for you.”

His favorite sport is the one that’s in season. In fact, he earned a role on Gilmer’s football staff after then-head coach Jeff Traylor watched him coach girl’s basketball at Union Grove High School. Alan watched in bewilderment as the young, energetic Buckeyes’ coach walked into the gymnasium and sat directly behind the bench. He even noticed Traylor leaning in to listen to what he was saying during a team timeout. 

Traylor called him the day after the season concluded and offered him the head girls’ basketball job. And a chance to coach the Gilmer quarterbacks.

Before Gilmer was a football juggernaut, it was the perpetual .500 team with better athletes than the record indicated. But there was a new sheriff in town when Traylor took over in 2000. He refused to start practice if the two best players were absent. Alan’s job was to hop in his truck, drive up the hill, park at the player’s house and start rapping on the window until the curtains ruffled and the student shuffled out to the car.

“We weren’t going to allow less than the best,” Metzel said.

Gilmer won its first state championship in 2004. It hasn’t lost before the third round of the playoffs since the 2006 season.

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Jeff Traylor Stadium is a beautiful place to watch a Texas high school football game. When its namesake first got there, it took a brave man to walk around Gilmer’s athletic facilities. In the early 2000s, the field had duck blinds instead of press boxes. The field house was teeming with rats and snakes.

That might or might not be why the team’s maintenance man abruptly quit right before one of those early seasons kicked off. Gilmer was in a bind. So Alan Metzel came home that day and asked his father if he wanted to take over. George could fix anything. He and his sons had axed themselves a little enclave in the woods like an East Texas Paul Bunyan and built Alan and his brother Neal's house with their bare hands.

That’s how George became the Gilmer groundskeeper.

“We were the armpit of the world. And George, before all these facilities were built, he took care of us in that old facility,” Traylor said. “We had crappy lawn mowers back in the day. George was just finding a way. We didn’t have weed eaters, water, paint, just basic necessities. We didn’t have that, and George was trying to get it done.”

In all those years preaching, George’s ultimate goal was to plant his own church. After building Alan and Neal’s houses, he took the leftover logs and constructed a cabin just a hundred or so feet down the gravel path. Chapel in the Woods officially opened in 2000. 

Growing up, people always referred to Alan as a ‘PK’ or Preacher’s Kid, and told him one day he’d be a preacher, too. Alan would try to fight them over it. He had a close personal relationship with the Lord, but didn’t like the connotation that came with the profession – weakness. He was an athlete who prided himself on toughness.

As a coach he spoke about God at Fellowship of Christian Athlete events, baccalaureates and graduations, but left Chapel in the Woods in his father’s hands. Then one summer, George and his wife took an extended trip for doctor’s appointments in Florida and then to visit Neal, an Army general, in North Carolina. For six weeks, Alan filled in as the Chapel’s pastor. That was the first moment he felt preaching would be part of his life. Far in the future, of course, like when George was 90 and Alan had retired from coaching.

God’s timeline didn’t align with Alan’s.

At 8:00 a.m. one January Sunday morning in 2007, George called Alan asking his son to do the sermon for him because he wasn’t feeling well. He went into a coma that night. On Monday, doctors told the family George had advanced lung and brain cancer. 

George Metzel passed away on Friday January 22, 2007. That Sunday, Alan took the stage.

It wasn’t until a couple months later, once the grief and shock of losing his rock subsided, that Alan began wrestling with God about his new role with Chapel in the Woods. He didn’t like the timing. He didn’t have the bandwidth to be a football coach and pastor. It was too much pressure.

But he wasn’t alone.

Part of George’s mission was to minister to those ministering others. He envisioned Chapel in the Woods expanding from that log cabin to a worship center with bedrooms where pastors and their families could stay. He tasked Alan’s wife, Jana, with seeing the next phase through. Jana resisted for a while, until George insisted he needed to see something on paper. Jana prayed on it, got graph paper out, and drew up a building plan to show George. 

That’s it, George said. He died two weeks later.

The Metzels started the project in 2010, but only improved on it as funds were available. That meant the concrete was laid and sat for a while. Then, the metal siding was placed and stood for months. 

In 2016, nine years after George’s death, his ultimate vision came to fruition. The Chapel in the Woods George pushed Alan and Jana to create lies 50 yards from the original one he built with leftover logs. That first Sunday when the new doors opened, the congregation doubled from 30 to 60.

Alan’s led every service since that first grief-stricken one in 2007. But his role is different from George’s. During the fall football season, the church members undertake visiting hours that Alan can’t do because he’s coaching. Leading Chapel in the Woods is a team effort, just like Gilmer.

“If I was trying to do this on my own – there’s no way,” Metzel said. “Because there isn’t enough time. But when He calls you to do something, He does it in ways that are beyond what you would be able to do.”

Alan Metzel has spent the Father’s Day service leading the congregation through Acts Chapter 20, the final days before the Apostle Paul is arrested in Jerusalem. Before he embarks to the land where he knows prison awaits, Paul turns to the church elders with a final message.

“However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me – the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.” (Acts 20:24)

Rather than an admittance of a death wish, Paul means his worldly titles and human body don’t cross over into eternity. Purpose is the only thing worth anything, and Paul knows what his is.

Alan admits to the crowd how nervous he was to take over this church when George died, how he thought he needed more time. But George, like Paul in Acts 20, knew he had no time left. That’s why he had Alan do the sermons for a six-week period and convinced Jana to graph out the current Chapel in the Woods everyone is in now.

The phrase, ‘Leading = Obedience’ flashes on the two TVs above Metzel’s head. He’s balanced his two roles by doing what God put on his heart to do. That strips all ego from the process, even after winning a state championship.

“Whether it’s coaching at Gilmer High School or pastoring at Chapel in the Woods, it’s not about me,” Metzel said. “I could be taken out of one or both of those roles today and they’d both move on.” 

But that day hasn’t come, and only the Lord knows when it will. And until then Metzel will continue attacking the ticking clock one football game, one sermon and one phone call at a time.

“They don’t make them any better than him,” Tim Russell said. “It gives you great hope in our profession when the good guys win.”