Conway Ministry Center clients can’t tell Executive Director Spring Hunter much that she hasn’t experienced herself — drugs, divorce, poverty and homelessness are all part of her story.
Hunter, who started July 3 as head of the nonprofit organization, said she sometimes marvels at how far she’s come.
“At church the other day, I was saying, ‘How is this my life?’”
It’s a far cry from the situation she grew up in.
“I come out of a family of poverty and addiction,” she said. “We were very transient. I had a rough, broken home.”
Hunter, who was one of four children, said she grew up “everywhere,” but primarily in Johnson County. Her maiden name was Spring Meadows, and one of her sisters is named Sky.
Her parents were “going through a phase,” she said with a smile and a shrug.
Hunter said her mother, who ended up marrying eight times, was always looking for the next best thing.
“She was just as lost as she could be. It was just chaos,”
Hunter said. Her mother bounced from one man to another, one religion to the next.
When Hunter was 13, her mother announced she was getting married again.
“I was just done,” Hunter said. So she moved out.
“I was a homeless teen,” she said, and slept at friends’ homes.
She moved in with her Lamar High School boyfriend and was pregnant by age 15. They were married, and she gave birth to her first daughter at 16; she had another daughter with him at 25.
“We were kind of stable for a year or so. That’s when we started dabbling in meth,” she said. “I still kind of lived in that world of poverty and addiction.”
Hunter said methamphetamine wasn’t her main addiction.
“Alcohol was the big thing. I drank, drank, drank and drank,” she said.
The rock-bottom moment for her — the actual come-to-Jesus moment — “was when a couple of our friends were murdered, and a guy I’d been pretty good friends with just hung himself in his house. I said if God doesn’t intervene and rescue us, this is how Spring dies,” she said.
Her then-husband’s boss at the time, Leon Fancher of Russellville, invited her to church, where “God got ahold of me. I said, ‘I’ve got to have that.’ I said, ‘If it’s not this God, there’s no hope.’ When I gave my life to Jesus, I gave him this whole messy package.”
She said another person who had a major influence in her life is Teresa Hill, an executive real estate broker in Clarksville.
“I said, ‘I’m going to die if I don’t get out of this world,’” Hunter said. “Teresa got ahold of me and snatched me back out of it.”
Hunter became Hill’s personal assistant at the company. Hunter said Hill told her “that I was smart enough and better than the life I was living.”
Hunter said Hill also showed her how to live in a middle-class world.
“I’d never seen anybody balance a checkbook, have a savings account, do anything stable,” Hunter said.
Hunter earned her GED, then her real estate license and a broker’s license.
Hill said God brought Hunter and her together.
“I’m a very spiritual person, and I just heard that I’m supposed to talk to her,” Hill said. “I told her I needed a personal assistant. She was just a joy. She taught me a lot; she’d been through a lot. All I can honestly say is God connected our paths, and yes, she ended up my executive broker.
“When we’d meet people, we tried hard to make a difference in their lives instead of just making a buck. Spring just really loved people, helped people. She’d just do anything to make somebody’s dream come true.”
Hill said her friend got an offer to take a full-time position at First Baptist Church in Clarksville, “and I was so thankful.”
Hunter took an interim worship pastor’s position.
She divorced her first husband and met her current husband, Charlie, at the church.
“We were serving in a lot of ministries together. I never thought he’d be interested in me with my background. He just saw beauty instead of ashes,” she said.
They were married in 2011 and moved to Conway in 2013 for him to pursue medical school. He was accepted and was supposed to start in 2016, but then Hunter found out she was pregnant with twins, and he delayed medical school for a year.
“I went in to find a heartbeat, and we had two,” she said. “I had time to go from full-on panic to, ‘This might be cool.’”
In addition to their identical twins, they also have a 5-year-old son, Nile, who was diagnosed with autism when he was 2.
Hunter had started taking classes at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville while she was in Clarksville. After the family moved to Conway, she graduated with a degree in rehabilitation science and a minor in psychology. Something was missing, though.
“I mourned ministry,” she said. God was doing “incredible things” at her church in Clarksville, and she had been in the thick of them.
Hunter and her husband started attending Second Baptist Church in Conway, and she said the first time they went, a guest, Greg Pillow, spoke about a new organization, then called The Ministry Center, housed in the former Second Baptist Church building. The church had moved to a new structure in another part of the city.
“I had felt called for years to do something like this,” Hunter said. If God ever talked to her, Hunter said, it was during that service. “He said, ‘You need to go share your story and background with this man.’”
She told Pillow, “I don’t know what my role is, but you’re going to be seeing a lot of this face.”
Pillow called her the next week. He told her the board knew God was going to use the former Second Baptist Church building to help hurting people, and they wanted her to be interim director.
The Conway Ministry Center, as it is now called, opened April 28, 2014, the day after a deadly tornado hit Vilonia and Mayflower.
Hunter served April to July 2014 until Scott Taylor was hired as executive director.
“I did not want to be director,” she said. “I wanted to develop case management; that’s where my heart is. I work directly with individuals and families in poverty and addiction and homeless, people with mental-health issues, and try to assess their life situation and connect them to resources to help them get out and escape,” she said.
“We have exploded in three years,” Hunter said. In the beginning, the Conway Ministry
Center took 20 clients a month for case management. “Now we’re taking about 40 appointments a month and continuing our relationship, in some way, with hundreds of people.”
Hunter became executive director of the organization July 3 after Taylor took a position with Renewal Ranch, a residential, faith-based program for men with addiction. A reorganization of roles in the nonprofit organization allowed her to take the position, she said. And she still helps with case management.
“I think the reason I was set apart to do this … I know firsthand the complete and total transformation that takes place when Jesus intervenes by sending someone to invest personally, through relationships and mentoring,” she said.
Although Hunter wants to be make a difference in people’s lives, she knows she won’t reach everyone.
“I’m not their savior,” she said. “What’s my piece of this as case manager, and what do I need to let go of? I’ll tell someone, ‘I’m going to pray with you about everything else we talked about, but here is what I can do,’” she said. Hunter said she lays those concerns at “the foot of the cross every day.”
But she said the Conway Ministry Center’s goal is to connect people with the programs and people they need for long-term sustainability.
“There has to be a place where it all intersects,” she said. “God is drawing up the churches and the nonprofits; he’s just unifying them,” she said, bringing her hands together to make a circle on the table in front of her.
The Conway Ministry Center is primarily funded by churches. Its three main programs are the
Restore program, which is the case-management piece; Rapid Re-housing, which helps people obtain permanent housing; and The Storehouse, the client-choice food and clothing pantry launched in 2016. Hunter brought the idea of the client-choice pantry to the ministry center after seeing a similar program in Oklahoma City.
The Conway Ministry Center rents its facility to other programs and ministries, including Mosaic and Sold Out Church.
“We’re a catalyst. That’s what God called us to be — a catalyst between the people who have the resources, the people who have the skills and the people who need them,” Hunter said. “We have a lot of successes and a lot of — I won’t say failures — things don’t turn out like you hoped. It’s a hard job.”
But the successes make it all worthwhile, she said.
“Some you see radically transformed. One woman at church is not on drugs anymore. She just got married, she has a baby on the way, and she’s stable and healthy,” Hunter said.
“We’ve had to dramatically redefine success in an individual way. If they’re better than they were when we met them, it’s a win.”
Hunter is far better than she ever dreamed.
Her mother, who died three years ago of cancer, became a Christian in later years, and Hunter has a relationship with her father, who lives in Fort Smith.
Her husband will start medical school Aug. 1. Their twins turned 1 in June, and their other children are thriving. Her 22-year-old daughter is studying to become a missionary. The Hunters worship together as a family every Sunday.
This is her life, and she is a believer.
“God’s brought a lot of healing to our family,” she said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.