The 2025 Living Here is out now. Read the full magazine here https://publisher.etype.services/Toccoa-Record/e-paper-special-edition/0B7A7DBE27177BC7 .
Sometimes, you leave your hometown only to find yourself coming back years later.
That was the case for the Brent and Katherine Sanders, who were born and raised in Stephens County and returned more than a decade ago when he got a call to be the senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Toccoa, located at the intersection of Tugalo Street and Prather Bridge Road.
Brent graduated from Stephens County High School in 2003 and went on to attend North Georgia College and State University.
Post-graduation, he completed a master of Divinity program at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.
“I want to live a life where I am daily dying to the world and constantly living in light of what Christ has done for me, by foremost leading my family closer to God, and then discipling friends that God has placed in my life, so others who don’t know Christ will see Him through me,” a statement by Sanders says on the First Baptist of Toccoa website.
Katherine works in the Habersham County Schools System as a teacher at Habersham Central High School.
Brent and Katherine have been married since 2007 and have three children, including Jacob, Ressie, and Charlotte.
“We were in the same fourth grade class together, graduated high school from here, and then both went off to college,” Brent said. “She went to Clemson and then I went to North Georgia [Technical College] in Dahlonega, so we did long distance dating for four years.”
During his time at North Georgia, Brent said he felt God was calling him to the ministry, but he did not know in what way.
“We joke now, but when we moved to seminary, I said, ‘Lord, I don’t know what you have for me, I feel like you’re calling me to something, but the thing is I don’t want to work in a church,’” Brent joked. “I may have been the only person in seminary saying I don’t want to work in a church.”
He considered being an Army chaplain, but to do that, he discovered he would need two years of experience working in a church.
So, Brent and Katherine worked in a small church outside Wake Forest, and that’s when things clicked. He fell in love working at a church and realized that is what God had in store for the Sanders.
“During that time, we had our first child, Jacob, and were getting ready to graduate seminary,” Brent said. “We were thinking, where are we going to land?”
The couple began searching for churches about an hour out from Toccoa only to realize that, in the end, there was nothing wrong with coming back to their roots.
Brent has been with First Baptist of Toccoa since August 2012, starting there as a youth pastor, and said he loves the community he has been surrounded by in Stephens County. He has been the lead pastor since former pastor David Ritcey retired.
That is evident when he and his family are shopping at the grocery store and he gets stopped by community members or his church parishioners.
“We’ve always loved Stephens County, and I think both of us would have always, if you had asked us, said we’d love to move back to Toccoa,” Brent Sanders said. “It’s familiar, it’s where we grew up, we love it here. We love the small town feel of just being able to know people and just having that sense of community where, anywhere you go, there’s someone you know.”