Bret Shook’s 23-mile commute took him up to an hour and a half each way to get to work in Washington D.C. When he finally would get home, he typically worked through dinner and into the evening.
This draining routine was having a negative impact not only on Bret but also on his wife Margaret and their two kids. At the same time, they felt their kids’ public school wasn’t teaching them necessary academic skills. So, they began to reconsider their way of life.
When the pandemic hit, the Shooks bought a fifth wheel trailer and spent the next two years gradually adapting it for life on the road and off the grid. By the time the pandemic moved from a boil to a simmer, they were ready to sell their house. In June 2022, they hit the open road full-time.
The Shooks represent a growing number of young families that are choosing to live life on the road. In fact, 38% of the 40 million Americans who own an RV are millennials, and 18- to 34-year-olds make up almost a quarter (22%) of the current market.
Of the estimated 25 million people who go RVing every year, 1 million of them do it full time. Those numbers are set to grow even larger in response to the confluence of several cultural shifts, including the increased cost of living, the availability of remote work, and the ability to homeschool children. Plus, more families are deciding not to wait until they’re retired to travel, and some people just want to experience the adventure of RV life.
But one of the difficulties of life on the road is staying connected with community. Networking with others online and being intentional about seeking out relationships is an essential lifeline.
Matt MacDonald, an RV missionary who travels with his family, says, “We realized there was no church for the RV community. And it was dry. You are self-sustaining entirely out there. You don’t have your support system. It’s a very exciting loneliness, but you’re very lonely.”
All this adds up to an untapped opportunity for the church to reach out to people who have chosen a nomadic life. Though there are exceptions, most RVers are not trying to escape community, but actually are open to finding it in new ways. Unmoored from many of the normal time constraints of modern life and interdependent on each other for things such as repairs, this group is uniquely available to those who seek them out. A network of traveling domestic missionaries called Gathering of Nomads aims to do just that.
A Church for Wanderers
As the Shooks were prepping for life on the road, Shane Boyd was on the cusp of his own life-changing detour. Two years prior, he had taken a job as senior pastor of a church in Roseville, California. He, his wife and his two kids planned to move there, but they couldn’t afford the cost of living. So, they purchased an RV, expecting to live in it only until they could find a more permanent solution.
But as the Boyds began to connect with people who had chosen the RV lifestyle, they discovered a vibrant community largely unreached by brick-and-mortar churches.
“These young families were out experiencing the world, but they didn’t have church,” Boyd says.
He began to wonder, How do you reach a community of people without a ZIP code? As he wrestled with the question, it dawned on him that even if you couldn’t plant a stationary church and expect RVers to find it, you could plant people strategically at campsites.
Why not reach wanderers with other wanderers? he thought. Why not disciple and train Christians who were already traveling in RVs to go from campsite to campsite serving, praying for, sharing meals with and spreading the gospel to other nomads?
“We’re the mobile doctors, if you will, trying to go find them and bring healing [and] reconciliation back to Jesus,” Boyd says.
Most pastors spend much of their time trying to get their congregations outside the walls and into the community. They also are wringing their hands over the “Nones” and “Dones” who have left the church. But RVers make up a community that was already out there, just waiting to be equipped to minister to others. Boyd began to envision a ministry made up of a network of RV families who would operate much like the early church.
“People [in the early church] just moved around,” he says. “They didn’t set up buildings, they ministered and witnessed to people, spent life with them, trained them up, told them to go back into their cities, their hometowns to continue to do the work, and then the disciples continued on.”
So, reminiscent of the early church, the Boyds packed up their RV in October 2022, and hit the road to field-test a concept that eventually would grow into Gathering of Nomads.
“There are more missionaries coming to America than America is sending out of the country right now. And that tells us that there’s a lot of lost people here in the United States,” Boyd says. “We found one community that’s only going to be reached by the people that live in that community.”
Restored Vision
Dani Deuter has always had the heart of a nomad. Throughout her childhood, her family would regularly go camping in a schoolie (a converted school bus), and she passed along that love of camping to her three children.
In December 2013, her eight-year-old son, Ethan, died in a car accident in which Dani and her other two children were also injured. The family began to camp more regularly to heal and spend time together. As she got to know other campers, she began to realize the depth of their need.
“God kind of laid it on my heart that there are people in campgrounds who have never experienced Jesus, or who have been hurt and will never go back to a church,” she says.
So, five years ago, she started a ministry called Redemption Journey, hoping to reach out to fellow nomads around a shared campfire. But seven months into traveling, she had to stop, and the ministry was put on the back burner.
In 2023, she stumbled across a Facebook post Boyd made in which he talked about Gathering of Nomads, and realized that this was what she had been looking for. She reached out to Boyd and spent the next several weeks meeting with him weekly to hear his heart and vision for the ministry. She discovered that there was a growing network of families that shared her longing to reach nomads, and she and her kids jumped at the chance to become one Gathering of Nomads earliest chapters.
“We’re interested in the heart of people, growing the kingdom and allowing people to walk through things that are hard, with love, in a community to help build them up,” Deuter says.
Food, Fellowship and Fire
Although each chapter of Gathering of Nomads operates differently based on the unique giftings of each family, food, fellowship and fire are the common threads.
Barbara Rhoads, who leads a chapter with her three kids, says, “My grandmother taught me when I was little: Feed them and they will come.”
Typically, a Gathering of Nomads chapter will land at a campsite for a couple weeks and get connected with the activities director or join a Facebook group for the campsite and introduce themselves. They make themselves available to anyone who needs help or prayer.
“If we’re going to replicate ourselves in the name of Jesus, we better serve like Jesus and meet those needs like Jesus,” Boyd says.
Then they invite fellow campers to come over for a potluck and to spend time around the fire. Sometimes there’s worship or a Bible study, but there’s always the guaranteed entry point of conversation over their shared love of travel. The Boyds in particular take note of the exit dates of fellow campers and make sure to pray with them on their departure day.
Many chapters make their first connections with other families through their kids playing with other kids they meet at the campsite.
“When new people come [to a brick-and-mortar church], it can be awkward if you’re not really good at saying hello and inviting people in,” says Carl Diebold, “But when you’re out on the road, you live that life constantly. You’re at the playground with your kids, and you see another family with their kids, and you just walk up and say hello. You start talking, because that’s the only way you’re going to get any community.”
Diebold and his wife Kristian fell in love with the idea of tiny living and traveling, but as a director and producer of music videos and live concert recordings, he was skeptical he could get consistent work. But when the pandemic hit and his mom came to live with them, the disruption of his normal life made him reexamine his priorities. When his mom passed away, the Diebolds decided to sell their stuff and give life on the road a try.
They had been traveling with their two young daughters in a remodeled bus for about a year with two other families when they stopped at Natchez Trace RV Park in Hohenwald, Tennessee. The Boyds happened to be there, and Shane came over and introduced himself. The two men immediately hit it off.
“It felt like we were lifelong friends, and we have been like that to this day,” Carl says.
The Diebolds were already in the habit of hosting Bible studies in their Clam pop-up shelter. They found that people opened up and asked questions they’d never feel comfortable asking in a church setting.
“[There was] natural conversation that would happen. So, you know that you planted a seed, whatever that looks like,” Kristian says. “[There were people who] probably never would have walked into a church, but they walked into our Clam.”
When the Boyds came to their Bible study, Shane told the Diebolds about Gathering of Nomads, and since they were already living out his vision, they were excited to join the network.
A Support Network
The first year they were on the road, the Shooks visited as many National Parks as they could. Many Gathering of Nomads families camp at RV parks in the Thousand Trails network, but to save money, the Shooks practiced off-the-grid camping or boondocking—camping without hook-ups for water, electricity or sewer in remote places.
Soon some old wounds began to resurface. Margaret, in the midst of a yearslong struggle with alcohol, decided to go to a treatment facility in Maryland while Bret and the kids traveled west in their RV. A friend suggested a place on the California-Arizona border where they could winter. It was a reasonable distance from the Phoenix airport where they planned to pick up Margaret over Christmas when she was finished with her program.
During this time, Bret discovered Gathering of Nomads after Boyd posted about it in a full-time RVers Facebook group. Bret reached out to him and started a friendship, discovering a whole network of likeminded Christians who also loved to travel. When Margaret rejoined the family in Arizona, she was welcomed by a new network of friends, online and in person, already in place to support her and her family as they healed. She also got connected with Celebrate Recovery.
Going Places
Just a year and a half in, the ministry of Gathering of Nomads is already growing and bearing tangible fruit. For example, the Deuters’ 16-year-old son, Kyle, organizes outdoor events for teens at the campsites they visit. On one occasion, he organized a game of paintball. Five teens were baptized and several others rededicated their lives to Christ, simply because Kyle had given a 15-minute devotion on the armor of God in the middle of the game. He is also studying to be an RV technician in hopes of starting his own RV-repair business.
Earlier this year, Trevor Arilotta, a friend Boyd had met during a stay in Tennessee, developed the Gathering of Nomads app. Before that, the chapters had depended on a Facebook group and regular online meetings to stay connected. Now the app allows people to share their travel plans and location safely and securely with other authorized members, gives updates, and points users to churches that have signed up to welcome nomads.
Additionally, Aug. 12–19, Boyd hosted the first Gathering of Nomads rally in Manton, Michigan, where all the chapters met up for encouragement, equipping and fun. The ministry is now up to 14 chapters with several more in the works. And because most full-time families come off the road by the five-year mark, Boyd is developing an offshoot ministry called Gathering of Neighbors to help the chapters apply what they have learned on the road to their neighborhoods when they return.
From Receiving to Giving
This past year, the Shooks traveled to Libby, Montana, to meet up with some of the friends they wintered with in Arizona. While there, the Shooks experienced a powerful revival that brought people from all walks of life together in worship.
Margaret and their daughter were baptized in the nearby Kootenay River—Bret and his son also plan to be baptized there this summer.
“God took us not only through our struggles, but took us to places that were amazing and to people that were amazing to help us,” he says.
Margaret adds, “Instead of just being the ones receiving the bread, now we’re trying to help plant seeds and help others too. That’s how it grows, and we see it growing.”
5 Ways Your Church Can Bless Nomads
- List your church for free RV parking on Harvest Hosts (HarvestHosts.com).
- Join the Gathering of Nomads app as a nomad-welcoming church.
- Create nomad-specific welcome bags for families that stay with you.
- Invite nomads to participate in planned events while they are with you.
- Be deliberate about staying connected with nomads you meet or send.