Luke Taklo, like his new church in North Bend, has put his trust in God, and found that faith rewarded.

“I never imagined pastoring a church in my hometown, but I am thankful and excited about the opportunity,” the 34-year-old North Bend native says, in the office at the North Bend Community Church.

He was, as a teenager, on a much different path, he said, one that included drugs and alcohol, and certainly didn’t end at the door of a church.

After he surrendered his life to God at age 17, Taklo’s path still seemed to take him far from home, and from ministry. He graduated from Mount Si High School in 1999 and started studying at a Bible Training Institute. After one quarter, “I left to start working, so I could get married,” he said.

He married his longtime friend and classmate Kelly, at age 19, and the two considered traveling as missionaries, briefly. They decided against it because they wanted to raise their future children among family, and because, he says, “God gave us the freedom to see that the work was here, wherever we’re at.”

Taklo started volunteering in a youth program at Snoqualmie Valley Alliance, which led to a full-time youth pastor job in Moscow Idaho in 2003. The family moved back to North Bend in 2007, where both Luke’s and Kelly’s families still live, just in time for the economy to crash. Jobs in his fallback vocation, carpentry, were as rare as ministry positions, and Taklo decided to pursue a career in music.

“Music is a big part of my calling,” he said.

The music business was no more successful for him, though, and in 2012, he returned to Moscow, this time as assistant pastor of his church.

The couple raised their family, a son, Isaac, now 12, and daughter, Meadow, 10, and had no plans to make a change until last summer, when Taklo began to worry that their contentment was overruling a call to action.

The family had been camping at Orcas Island with friends, Taklo said, and got caught in traffic near Bellevue on the way home that Sunday. “I remember thinking how happy I was to not have to deal with this kind of traffic,” Taklo said, “but maybe I’m so comfortable, I’m not listening to God any more.”

He decided to pray, and to listen, right there in the car, he said. Then the thought, “You could pastor North Bend Community Church,” came to him, although he didn’t know the church had been seeking a new full-time pastor.

The church, served by interim pastor Jerry Anderson, had been searching nationwide for more than a year when Taklo applied for the position, said church elder Harold Erland. It had been an ambitious church, but the congregation of about 70 knew, as Erland said, “God will provide, and He did!”

North Bend Community Church has a 9 a.m. Bible study, followed by a 10:30 a.m. service and fellowship, every Sunday.