Long Hollow Church: The Sky’s the Limit

Orphan care is more than a mission for Joey Watson and his wife, Kellyn. For them, he said it’s a calling.

“We’ve been adoptive parents now for over a decade and have handled a lot of behaviors and trauma that comes with that,” Joey said, “Our youngest son has special needs, and so we have a lot of experience in that world now as well. I grew up with four foster brothers that my parents eventually adopted, so I’ve been around this world for a really long time. 

“God has called us specifically to orphan care,” Joey continued “And this is 100%—we understand we are living in our calling, and we are walking in our calling. And this is what he has designed for us.”

With that calling, the Watsons have served as support-group leaders for the adoption and foster-care ministry at Long Hollow Church in Hendersonville, Tennessee [Long Hollow], for the past four years. Joey said it’s been a blessing to serve parents walking similar paths to his and his wife’s.

“We all have kids who have similar traumas, similar behaviors, all unique stories,” Joey said. “But it’s been truly a blessing to be able to lead that group and to just be—whether we’re just there, sharing joys or struggles or if we’re literally coming alongside families and offering them some babysitting, so they can go on date nights.”

Joey said Long Hollow’s orphan care goes beyond support; it branches deeper into equipping and training parents to be trauma informed along the way. Joey said he and his wife have been parenting through the teachings of Dr. Karyn Purvis and Trust-Based Relational Intervention^® (TBRI^®), which are at the core of Hope for the Journey, since 2016 when they traveled across the world to Hungary to adopt their first child, so when they found out about Show Hope’s Hope for the Journey, they couldn’t wait to bring it to Long Hollow.

In 2024, Long Hollow hosted its first Hope for the Journey gathering, calling it the church’s pilot program, testing it with families in its adoption and foster care support group. Then in 2025, the church rolled out the resource to the entire body and community as a whole. Long Hollow Church is now gearing up to host its third gathering this summer, and Joey has big dreams for future Hope for the Journey events.

“I have a vision for Hope for the Journey for a Long Hollow worship center to just be packed out and us to have each table filled out with facilitators from our support group at each one,” Joey said.

In addition to hosting future Hope for the Journey gatherings, Long Hollow is growing their adoption and foster care ministry. Long Hollow Church Missions Specialist Kenni Cavalier said the church is working to grow the ministry beyond volunteer-run to allow the whole church to say yes to God’s call in James 1:27.

“We really want to help grow and stabilize the ministry so that it can really flourish and so that we can help mobilize more people,” Kenni said. “So we’re putting a lot of different structures in place. But our main goals with the ministry are to come alongside and care for our foster/adoptive families within our church, and then also to help better mobilize the church as a whole to find what their yes is in this call since it is for everyone and not just for those that are directly involved by fostering or adopting. We want to help everyone in the church find whatever way that fits into their life and calling for them to find a way to say yes.”

For Joey, he couldn’t be more excited about the growth.

“It’s been a long time coming, and again, at a mega church, trying to steer a ship into a—maybe not a new direction but a direction that we need to get back to after incredible years of Long Hollow’s tremendous attendance and membership growth—it takes some time,” Joey said. “And so we want to make sure that we are scaling up correctly, and Hope for the Journey has actually just been one of the many things in the foster and adoption space that God has allowed Kellyn and I to be a part of in our church.”

Kenni said the Watsons have been crucial to the adoption and foster-care ministry at Long Hollow.

“I know that we wouldn’t be in the spot to be able to be launching these things if it wasn’t for the two of them having carried it and pushed this so hard,” Kenni said. “And so we’re incredibly thankful for them because we know that the ministry wouldn’t exist without them.”

Joey said he cannot wait to see more lives touched through the partnership with Long Hollow and Show Hope through Hope for the Journey.

“They’re really awesome to work with, Show Hope is,” Joey said. “And just kind of continuing that partnership between Long Hollow Church and Show Hope, being able to continue to cultivate that, to make this what I have dreams for it to be, I really feel like the sky’s the limit.”