Henry Lowery, third from right, leads the Detroit Burns Falcons Pathfinder Club. On Sabbath, July 12, he joined the Motor City Drum Corps in performing opening and closing numbers for the "Parade of Nations" at the General Conference Session in St. Louis. | Katie Fellows
Debbie Michel
July 15, 2025Lowery didn’t hesitate. “I got with the other leaders that same day to see if they could support it,” he said. “They said ‘yeah, that’s something we could do.’”
But it was an opportunity he almost missed.
Just weeks earlier, he told his pastor and other leaders at the Burns Church he attends that he planned to step down. “I told the church this was going to be my last year because it felt like a lot,” said the 28-year-old. In addition, the club was getting smaller. It had once boasted more than 20 Pathfinders and today has just six members. He had revived the club almost two years earlier but didn’t see the growth he wanted. "I thought maybe it was time for someone else.”
From anger to a mission
Lowery knows better than most how much Pathfinders can transform a life. Growing up in Detroit without his father, he struggled with deep anger. “I used to get in fights all the time, probably weekly,” and was even suspended from public school "for a couple months while they decided if they were going to expel me from the whole district.”
Things began to shift when he enrolled at Peterson-Warren Academy and joined Pathfinders. “My Pathfinder director Rick Fuller and my teachers Arthur and Alice Strawbridge all poured into me,” he said of the Adventist teachers at the K-12 school located in Inkster, Michigan. “Their guidance let me let go of a lot of that anger. I always think, what if they hadn’t been there? Where would I be now?”
Starting a drum corps by faith
So when youth at Burns Seventh-day Adventist Church kept asking for a drum corps, Lowery couldn’t turn them down. “They kept coming to me saying, 'Everybody’s had a drum corps, we’ve never had one,'” he recalled. “I told them, 'Even if we got drums, we didn’t have a leader.'”
But they kept asking.
He decided to take a leap of faith, learning to play the drums on his own. “I spent a summer watching practice videos, learned three cadences on all the different drums. I just wanted our kids to have all the experiences they could. I never want them to go without.”
The rush to get ready
When the call came in May, it took some months for the trip's funding to materialize. With the financial obstacle out the way, they had about three intense weeks to get ready. Lowery’s club and another from Inkster, a community club of non-Adventist youth, practiced four hours at a stretch, driving 40 minutes each way to merge. They loaded drums on buses, lined up chaperones and squeezed rehearsals around Vacation Bible School, board meetings and other church work. “Finding time was the hardest,” said Lowery who also serves his church as an elder. “We still had all our other obligations going on.”
By the time they pulled out of Inkster around 9 p.m. the Thursday before their Sabbath performance, everyone was exhausted. They rolled into St. Louis at dawn, spent the day waiting in the exhibition hall and still didn’t know exactly how they’d perform. Organizers were still working out details of the program. “We didn’t even get a chance to do a real walkthrough,” he explained. “One of the guys pointed and told us, you’re going to come in from this side, but we never actually got to practice on stage.”
A moment that reignited his purpose
Lowery didn’t think the kids understood how big it was until the day of the performance and they saw the crowd of several thousand in the cavernous dome at the America Center. “Even backstage taking pictures with the world church president [Erton Köhler], it didn’t really hit,” he said. “But once they got out there, they understood.”
The weekend did more than thrill the kids. It gave Lowery new purpose. At the Black Adventist Youth Directors (BAYDA) youth service where motivational speaker Eric Thomas preached, every song and message seemed aimed right at him. “It all hit my objections, telling me don’t give up,” he said. “It was like God saying, not yet. This is why you’re still here.”
Seeing his young drummers on that giant stage sealed it. “These kids never would’ve had this chance if I gave up,” said Lowery. “Who knows what other moments would be missed?”
So for now, the IT freelancer who keeps his schedule flexible so he can pour into Pathfinders isn’t going anywhere. “Sure, I’d like to make more money, start a family, all that,” he said. “But as I pray, I hear God saying not yet. This is where you need to be right now.”
Watch an interview right before the drum corps' performance with Pathfinder Cecilia Bramlett and Lake Region Pathfinder Executive Coordinator Rufus Brown.
You can view the performance here.
We also interviewed Sandrew King about the Inkster Community Pathfinder Club. Watch HERE.
Debbie Michel is editor of the Lake Union Herald.
