(Photographs by ALLISON LEWIS PHOTOGRAPHY and CONTRIBUTED)

At the time in David Platt’s life when Hurricane Katrina submerged his house and everything he had, he had been praying a prayer that missionary David Brainerd had penned years ago.

“God, let me make a difference for you that is utterly disproportionate to who I am.”

Little did Platt know that a year later at 27 he would become the youngest megachurch pastor and, soon after, a New York Times bestselling author.

“I’d never pastored before, and I’m fairly clueless as a pastor,” said Platt, now 34. “But I think God had it set up this way so that in the end only He gets the glory for anything good that comes out of it.”

Platt serves as the pastor of The Church at Brook Hills, a Baptist church located off Highway 119 in Shelby County that runs 4,000 in attendance on Sundays. He jokes that being a pastor “was just not on my radar at all” when he and his wife, Heather, evacuated from New Orleans to Atlanta in 2005, then began filling in at Brook Hills.

“I was just supposed to preach there one week, and then they invited me back for another and another,” Platt said.

The rest is history.

Read more about pastor David Platt in the December issue of Shelby Living. Find your copy here.