Many Yell Leaders have come and gone, but not all have returned to make a life in College Station. Patrick McGinty, Class of 2015, was a Five for Yell candidate both in his junior and senior year and has since come back to College Station to further his professional career.
Now serving as the college minister at Central Church, he resides with his wife and four children and looks back at his time at Texas A&M with pride, eternally grateful to start, and develop, a beautiful life, he said.
“I think the Core Values of the university play such a foundational role in shaping who I am,” McGinty said. “To embrace those core values, and as a Yell Leader, embody those Core Values.”
McGinty has experienced a whirlwind of life events, both during and after his time at A&M. He traveled all over the state utilizing his seminary teachings and business mindset to find his calling — and it eventually led him back to College Station. His most impactful moments in his college years focus mainly on the friendships and unity he felt in Aggieland.
“If you were to say most impactful,” McGinty said. He then spoke about the passing of his friend, Luke Urbankowski, and the profound reaction of the student body. “Seeing thousands of students who did not know him write letters and stand in silence was just profoundly impactful to me.”
McGinty said it was an honor to be a student in Aggieland and an even greater privilege to serve as a Yell Leader. Soon after graduation, he felt a calling to rework his career path to better suit his personal beliefs and his desire to help others.
“I’d grown up wanting to be a physician because I was drawn to the opportunity to help people and serve people as something that has always been important to me,” McGinty said. “The more I prayed about it, the more I felt like that [seminary] was the right next step.”
McGinty then enrolled at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky with the goal of going forth into the ministry. Yet right when he moved to Boston for further schooling, he said he felt a calling elsewhere.
“There was a church called Emmanuel Baptist Church in the Houston, Texas area,” McGinty said. “And realized pretty quickly [that I] would love to do vocational ministry one day, but now is not the right time for that.”
Despite serving in the church, McGinty wanted to involve entrepreneurship into his career. After moving to SanAntonio to help a friend creating a church plant, he said he found ways to pave his own path into the business world.
“I started a shoe company, designing and selling men’s dress shoes on the internet,” McGinty said. “The company still exists, called William Ross shoes, named after my granddad … As I’m driving to San Antonio, moving from Houston, the pastor that I was going to help start a church tells me, ‘Hey, the Lord is calling us to Fort Worth.’”
Though his shoe company was still profitable, McGinty felt there was a better way to make an impact with his profession. He soon would move back to his hometown, and continue his career path there.
While he felt called to ministry, McGinty’s heart was set on San Antonio, so he began working at a small church there as a youth pastor. He then was given an opportunity to work in store leadership through H-E-B, but there were more opportunities that struck him that he could not pass up.
Despite beginning to climb the corporate ladder, he soon received word from an old friend who worked in ministry. His friend offered him a new opportunity to return to working alongside the church, where his life would continue to change rapidly.
“I get a text from a pastor named Nathan Leno who pastored Northeast Houston Baptist Church in Houston,” McGinty said. ”The only thing I could think of is that he was going to ask me to move to Huberman to go and serve at Emmanuel Baptist Church.”
McGinty felt called to return to Emmanuel Baptist, as he had worked there once before his seminary where he had befriended John Powell, the pastor at Emmanuel Baptist, prior to Powell’s passing. He returned to Huberman and soon found his future wife, Katherine.
“[Katherine] was John Powell’s widow, and I was speechless for the first time, really in my life, because I had started to develop feelings of interest towards her in the months leading up to that call,” McGinty said. “But after that phone call, I was like, ‘Okay, I think I know who I’m gonna marry.’”
He did in fact marry Katherine, and he adopted her four children to complete his newfound family. McGinty knew he would have to move back to College Station where his soon-to-be-wife and children called home.
“I quit my job at San Antonio, moved here to College Station with the purpose of marrying her, and then the morning of our first date, the college pastor role at Central Church looked like it might be opening up,” McGinty said. “The opportunity to minister to college students and serve at a great church here in the community — and working with Aggies. Like, it just was really an answered prayer and an obvious next step from the Lord.”
