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A homecoming is set to take place in early September when longtime Centralia Community Church pastor and former Major League Baseball player Darcy Fast will hold his first service as the lead pastor of his new local church.
On Sunday, Sept. 7, Heritage Community Church will hold its first service at the Veterans Memorial Museum in Chehalis starting at 10 a.m.
To Fast, it seems things have come full circle as he remembers the founders of the museum, Lee and Barbara Grimes, were once his parishioners during his 30 years as pastor at the Centralia Community Church. He seems eager to build new connections much like the ones that have led to his relationship with the local museum.
After Fast and the church helped the museum get off the ground financially when it started in the 90s, the local institution will now play a vital role in supporting Fast and his new congregation by offering its event space as the location for Fast to give his sermon on Sundays.
“I’m excited about working with new people and helping and working with them at any time in their life,” Fast says. “I enjoy my relationships with people and encouraging them. When that’s in your heart as a pastor, that really never leaves you.”
Fast said the new church will start with just him as pastor but will do its best to create a community, hosting coffee at 9:30 a.m. on Sundays before the service and greeting its new members. He added that while the church is hosted at the Veterans Memorial Museum and looks forward to welcoming many veterans, he hopes the church will attract people from throughout the community across all ages and backgrounds. To this end, Fast says he hopes to quickly expand the church to add both youth and children's ministries.
While Fast will be the only pastor to start, he will also be joined by his younger brother, Dallas, who also joined Fast at the Centralia Community Church and led the musical side of things.
“He will be attending the services,” Fast said of his brother. “He was a minister of music at our church for some time and really did an outstanding job.”
The opening of the new church and homecoming for the local spiritual leader comes more than 10 years after Fast retired from his previous role as lead pastor at the Centralia Community Church. Since then, Fast spent time living in Arizona and traveling with the Major League Baseball Alumni Association.
Outside of the local community, Fast is best known for his MLB career and his book titled “The Missing Cub.” Fast played for the Chicago Cubs in the late 1960s.
In Fast’s book, he discusses the Cubs’ 1969 season, when the team seemed poised to win the World Series. The team, however, would lose the series to the New York Mets. Fast, who played most of the season, was absent for the series.
In order to avoid being reclassified and drafted into the Vietnam War, Fast left the team to enroll in college in Portland and join the local National Guard. In a previous article about Fast by The Chronicle, he said even when he was on the cusp of a long career in Major League Baseball, he felt something was missing and a call back to the church.
After his MLB career and getting an education, Fast began looking at places to begin his career as a pastor and accepted an offer at the Centralia Community Church, where he became a fixture of the community for 30 years and helped grow the congregation from 70 members to 700.
