After 22 years in Great Bend, pastor Dwight Dozier and his wife Dottie are retiring and moving to Oklahoma to be closer to their children and grandchildren. A special service is planned for their last official Sunday at Encounter Church, 601 South Patton Patton Road. After the regular worship service that starts at 10:30 a.m., friends are invited to stay for a meal and social time.

“This is a new adventure for us,” Dwight said. “We’ve been here so long and walked through a lot of things with people in life and life experiences. We’re not leaving here to pastor another church, so we’ve never been down this road before.”

“People ask, ‘How do pastors retire?’” Dottie said. “We don’t retire; God just repurposes us.”

The Doziers have spent 46 years in pastoral ministry, including the last 22 at Encounter Church, which used to the called the First Assembly of God.

“We married young and started ministry young,” Dwight said. “We both grew up in southeast Kansas, in Independence. We met at Vacation Bible School – we went to school together from sixth grade on. We were high-school sweethearts after I convinced her to quit running. We’ve been married 48 years now; I’m abundantly blessed.”

Dwight said he knew as a teenager that he would go into Christian ministry.

“I came to Christ as a follower of Jesus when I was 16 and received the call to ministry when I was 17. We got married when I was 18 and she was 17, right out of high school, and then we pastored our first church two years later and became full-time ministers. So it’s been a whirlwind.”

Dottie was a teacher in public schools before they moved to Great Bend and she taught at Riley Elementary School when they moved here. Then she went on to serve as the principal at Central Kansas Christian Academy for nine years, retiring from that position last year. Sherry Pruter is now the school principal.

Family

They moved here for the ministry but were able to reconnect with one family member. Bruce Dozier, who used to own a winery and vineyard in rural Ellinwood, is a cousin on Dwight’s father’s side. There was a big age difference so they didn’t know each other well until they both lived in Barton County. Bruce Dozier has since moved to Arkansas.

The Doziers have three married daughters and seven grandchildren (ranging in age from 1 to 19 years old), located in Oklahoma, Missouri and North Carolina. “We’ll be closer to all three of them,” Dwight said, noting their new home in Choctaw, Oklahoma, is only 20 minutes from the Oklahoma City airport.

Their youngest daughter, Elizabeth, graduated from Great Bend High School while her older sisters, Charity and Stephanie, graduated from Baxter Springs High School before the family moved here.

Community connections

The Doziers have been active in the community. Dwight was a member of Rotary. They were both involved in Community Outreach, a coalition of about 20 area churches, and helped organize two Super Sunday events.

There would have been more Super Sundays, but they stopped during the pandemic, he said. For those events, congregations combined for a meeting at the Memorial Stadium at Great Bend High School. “We had up to 1,800 people gathered there for the service,” Dwight said. “We were also part of the steering team that put together Hope for the City events that we did for a couple of years.” Those events featured free distribution of groceries and school supplies, and free haircuts to anyone who wanted one.

Dottie was the women’s coordinator for the Kansas Assembly of God for five years and Dwight served on its state board of directors for 12 years. They both served on the board of directors for the Central Kansas Dream Center and Dottie has served on the board of Live Like Jesus Today Ministries since its inception. Dwight served with Freedom Ministries, a prison ministry, and was on the state board of directors for Chi Alpha Ministries, a campus ministry.

Supporting rural churches

The Doziers will continue to support rural missions, helping congregations that have plateaued or are in decline to become healthy again. “That’s our heartbeat,” Dwight said.

“God called us here to lead this church and its mission, and we’ve seen some good success,” he said. They’ve built a healthy church with strong community engagement, both at the Patton Road location and the Hispanic campus in the southeast part of town that’s under Encounter Church’s umbrella.

Encounter Church took over a campus in Sterling that was struggling and made it a satellite of the Great Bend church. They did the same thing at Lyons for about five years. “(The Lyons church is) now independent again, healthy and strong, but both that church and the Sterling church were at risk of closing. We’ve been able to see those churches become healthy again and impacting their communities.”

They also worked with Randy and Lisa Parr to start a church in Ness City and that church has gone on to start another church in WaKeeney.

The Doziers worked at smaller churches in Texas and Kansas early in their ministry, so they know how important support can be.

“One of the things that we’ve seen, especially through COVID, is the number of pastors that have gotten discouraged and quit,” Dottie said. “The numbers are staggering. Maybe if they knew they had friends to come alongside them, to strengthen them and pray with them, they might not have quit.” 

Changes at Encounter Church

Jake Newman was hired as the youth pastor at Encounter Church three years ago and will take the reins as the lead pastor on Nov. 12.

“He’s going to do a great job,” Dwight said. “He’s got a good team around him and the church is in an upswing right now, gaining momentum. Jake’s the next-generation leader for us, just what the church needs.”

“I’ve known Pastor since I was about 16,” Newman said. That was in Baxter Springs, and Newman went on the become a pastor at Kinsley and then followed Dozier to Great Bend. “He’s got a lot of experience and a lot of wisdom that I do not have yet. ... And he had told me multiple times, when he moves, he’s just a phone call away.”

For the Nov. 12 service, the Doziers’ children and grandchildren will be there and Dwight said he hopes his daughters will sing.

Newman said the superintendent from the Assemblies of God denomination will be there to honor Dozier, along with some other people he has impacted over the years.

The meal after the service will be catered, with a suggested $10 donation, but he stressed that everyone is welcome.

Community Connections is a regular feature of the Great Bend Tribune, showcasing people who live in the Golden Belt. We welcome readers to submit names of individuals who are active in the community that they would like to see featured in a future story. Send suggestions to news@gbtribune.com and explain their “community connections.”