Nik Fraustro

Last updated: November 6, 2024

Nik Fraustro remembers when Sunday traditions changed in his family growing up. According to him, Sundays were for football, baseball, and other sports. His family didn’t go to church and his father was a corpsman in the United States Navy, meaning they were accustomed to moving. However, at his dad’s last duty station in Georgia, he discovered the church. “We actually started going to church for some reason,” Nik says. “And it was a big change in my family’s life. I started trying to figure out, what was this God thing all about?” 

Nik describes himself as more of a factual person, but the experience of beginning to go to church had a profound effect on him. “It just seemed like God grabbed ahold of me,” Nik says. However, ministry work was not within his view. He already had hopes of going into the medical field as both of his parents worked in medicine in the Navy. He began to envision himself doing something similar, but as he worked as a certified nurse assistant to prepare himself for the medical field, the Lord began to quietly stir his heart. Nik began to wonder if he was being called to be a pastor.

“Nobody else knew about it,” Nik says. “For some reason, when I was serving breakfast this one time, this lady I’d never met before at the nursing home, she said, ‘Hey, you’re going to be a pastor.’ And I was just like, I don’t even know who you are.” However, he took this unexpected voice as the Lord speaking to him. “And so I was like, okay, God, if you’re talking to me through her then I’ll follow you,” Nik says.

Discovering Military Chaplaincy

With this new call in mind, Nik applied to Point University in West Point, Georgia, where he would eventually earn a dual bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies and Preaching. While he was studying, military recruiters visited the campus. Despite now being sure of his call to be a pastor, at a friend’s insistence, Nik went to speak with the recruiters. To his surprise, when the recruiters learned that he wanted to be a pastor, they asked if he wanted to do so within the military. “I was just like, I didn’t realize there were pastors in the military,” Nik says. “And he responded, ‘Well, they’re not really pastors. We call them chaplains.’ And I was just like, that’s very interesting to me.”

Nik recalls that around that time there was a video being shared among his fellow students that highlighted the fact that 22 veterans take their own lives every day. He began to sense a need and discern a call. “That really hit me to my core because I have a lot of family, friends, people who are serving in the military,” Nik says. “And for me, what it means in this calling was God was [putting] this on my heart that I needed to shine some light in the darkness.”

Nik learned that a Master of Divinity degree was required for chaplaincy, so he set his sights on finding a seminary. Fortunately, Asbury Seminary had a connection with Point and admissions representatives occasionally made campus visits. Additionally, one of Nik’s professors, Dr. Carey, was an Asbury Seminary alumna who shared her appreciation for the Seminary. After discovering that many of his undergraduate classes could be credited to his M.Div., Nik was sold on Asbury Seminary. “[Dr. Carey] was one of the professors I truly looked up to,” Nik says. “She was very smart and knowledgeable about everything. And I was like, well, she went to Asbury. Asbury’s got to be more than good enough for me to go to.”

Nik applied and was accepted to the Seminary. The following August, he drove through the night from his home in Texas to start as a residential student on the Kentucky campus. 

Nik especially found the pace of learning preferable to his undergraduate experience. The course load allowed him to make friendships and work as he needed. “We’re only in class Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I was just like, well, what do I do with the rest of my time?” Nik says. “I went from taking 22 hours a semester to 12 or eight almost. But it gave me a very big opportunity to make a lot of friends and build my community.” 

Nik’s now-wife and girlfriend at the time, Sydnie, hoped to join him in Wilmore after a year or so. Instead, she applied to Asbury Seminary the same semester that he started and she was accepted as a student for the spring semester. She moved to Kentucky, and they got married at a small local church in Lexington where Nik worked. “All of our friends and family came up [for the wedding,] and then we moved into Kalas Village and joined the rest of the married group that’s over there,” Nik says.

Becoming a Navy Chaplain

While attending the Seminary, Nik began the chaplain candidate program. After a year of preparatory work, completing paperwork, and dealing with COVID-19 pandemic-related delays, he was finally commissioned into the Navy in December 2020. However, the road to becoming a full-time Navy chaplain had only begun. In January 2021, he and Sydnie traversed the path back to Texas. As part of nurturing his call and fulfilling his mentored ministry requirements for the M.Div., Nik took a position as a pastor at a church in Caldwell, Texas. Sydnie, who completed a Master of Leadership degree and a certificate in worship leadership at Asbury Seminary, served as the worship leader. “The church had about 10 people showing up on Sundays,” Nik says. “And me and her working together and working with God and his plan, we got the church to almost a hundred people on average.”

At the same time, Nik was going through Navy officer school, based in Rhode Island. Working hard both in ministry and officer school, he was looking forward to completing the latter and stepping into full-time chaplaincy. However, as officer school came to an end, he learned there was an extra unexpected step in the process. In order to become a chaplain, Nik needed two years of ministry experience after completing his M.Div. “So even though I had ministry experience as a lead pastor [and] as a youth pastor before my master’s degree, they didn’t start the clock on my ministry time until after I got my Master of Divinity,” Nik says. “So to the Navy, I only had a month of ministry experience post-master’s degree.”

This was an inconvenient setback, but Nik was still dedicated to the end goal. He returned to his church and with them figured out a plan for him to remain in ministry. Nik’s father, who had also become a pastor and recently finished planting a church in Florida, took the lead pastor position, and Nik became the associate pastor. This allowed Nik to continue to invest in the church, continue to gain ministry experience, and work side jobs. Additionally, the Navy allowed him to get some on-the-job training for chaplaincy. He flew to Pensacola, Florida, and shadowed chaplains, including those from other religions. Doing so gave him further insight into the collaborative mission of military chaplains to support service members’ spiritual needs and the value of working alongside those with different viewpoints and beliefs. “I got to learn from a Muslim chaplain. I got to meet one of my best friends, he’s a rabbi chaplain,” Nik says. “And that’s what was just so beautiful about seeing this was that all these chaplains from all different religions, they’re coming together to support each other. And I just thought it was so beautiful.”

Finally, after two years of ministry experience following officer school, Nik was eligible to be interviewed by an interview board, a group of captains that ultimately decide if a chaplain candidate will move to active duty. The experience was scary, but Nik says that it was largely a good learning experience. “And so a month later, I got the call saying, yep, you’re going to active duty chaplaincy,” Nik says. “I told my wife, ‘Here it is; there’s no more waiting.’”

A New Chapter in Guam

Nik was commissioned as a chaplain in the United States Navy in October 2023 and went to chaplain school in February 2024. After completion, he had the opportunity to be stationed in Guam, where he and his wife now live. According to Nik, there are four vital things that an active-duty chaplain does for service members: provide, care, facilitate, and advise. “What that really means is providing and facilitating what our service members need to practice or worship because it’s our constitutional right to have the freedom to exercise our religion,” Nik says. “Another big aspect of the chaplain corps is the care side, counseling and being there doing services, whether it be a memorial service or a field service or whatever it may look like.”

Nik emphasizes the care part of his ministry with special attention to the specific needs of those who have given up much to serve the county. “We’re caring for our sailors because ultimately—and this is what I tell a lot of them—we truly care for them,” Nik says. “They put that uniform on and serve our country and serve those people that they don’t even know their names, but they go out and serve the country for them.” He adds, “Sharing that ministry of presence, that’s exactly what Jesus’s story is about, right? He came down to us. He was present with us. And so that’s exactly what I try to follow and show in my own ministry here as a chaplain.”

Nik hopes that he can serve the military in this capacity for the long haul. The typical age cutoff is 65 years old, but his plan for now is to shoot for at least 20 years of service. As their first station, Guam has certainly been an adjustment, especially for Sydnie. However, they are reassured by the belief that the move was from God, and they are seeing the bright side of what He is doing. Sydnie has even started to lead worship at the church she and Nik have been attending. “When it comes to transitions and moving, it can be a lot,” Nik says. “It’s definitely been an experience, but it’s also been a realization of, God’s called me to this—called us to this for a reason.

And he has truly just been showing me things almost every day.”