By Michaela Gordoni
Dude Perfect’s Tyler Toney recently shared his testimony with his viewers.
“I was back at…church in Plano [Texas], and I was just asking my dad questions and stuff, and I remember going…How will I know when it’s time for me to accept Jesus as my savior? …He was like, ‘You’ll know. You’ll understand it,’” the YouTube star recalled.
His dad prayed with him and left the room. Then, Toney decided that he wanted to follow Jesus.
“I brought him back in, asked him if he would help me pray to receive Christ as a 7-year-old,” Toney said.
The Dude Perfect channel got its start as college guys making trick shot videos. Now, nearly two decades later, they are still a huge success, which they credit God for.
Related: DUDE PERFECT’s Tyler Toney Describes How Faith Sustained Family Through Miscarriages
“There’s no reason that 38-year-old guys should still be popular on YouTube, making videos that kids want to watch,” Toney said in a podcast. “But for whatever reason, God has allowed us to continue to do this for so long.”
He said the channel would have fallen to pieces if the members didn’t all pursue faith. Eventually, they shared that with their fans.
“I remember I was driving on the tollway, and I called Coby [Cotton]…and I said, ‘Hey, I’m driving to the office right now, but I just felt like I needed to call and tell you that I feel like God’s putting on my heart that we need to share the gospel on tour,” Toney recalled. “I don’t know how, I don’t know when, I don’t know where – I don’t know what’s an appropriate way to do that. But I felt like, if I didn’t call and tell somebody that, then I would 100 percent try and get out of it, dismiss it.”
“What we basically landed on that day was we were going to finish the show just like normal, and then we would tell people at the end, ‘Hey, if you guys have got time to stick around, some of you guys in here already know this, but the five of us are Christians – our faith is very important to us,'” he explained. “”‘t’s the reason we feel like we’re still doing this today. We’re going to run backstage real quick, grab a drink of water and come back out, and we’re just going to share that with anybody that wants to hang around.'”
When they got back, 10,000 people were still in their seats.
He said, “We’ve done that every tour since 2022.”
In an “I Am Second” video, Toney confessed that he hadn’t always prioritized God over the channel and wasn’t the spiritual leader his family needed. After a nudge from his wife, Toney sought God and made some important changes. He started a Bible study and meets with a group of men every week.
It is “irreplaceable in my walk to have those 11 guys, that we can come together and be vulnerable with and be humble and share wins and losses and all of those things together,” he said.
Now, Toney knows that his success isn’t rooted in views. It’s in Christ.
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