Tony Evans is opening up about the unexpected love story that began in the shadow of extraordinary loss-and why he insists meeting his second wife, Carla, was anything but coincidence.
Appearing together on the July 14 episode of The Unbound Podcast With Dr. Tony Evans, Tony and Carla Evans pulled back the curtain on their relationship, revealing that their lives had actually been crossing paths long before either imagined they would one day become husband and wife.
Tony calls it "a series of providential connections."
"Providence is God's invisible hand orchestrating people, places, things and events to achieve his program," Evans explained. While some might call such connections luck, he believes something much bigger was happening behind the scenes.
And the connections are remarkable.
Long before Carla married Tony, she met her first husband, Robert Crummie, while visiting a relative at Tony's Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship. At the time, Crummie was interning for Evans. Carla and Robert later moved to Atlanta, where Robert became a pastor and president of Carver College-the same school where Tony had completed his undergraduate studies.
But years later, the lives of Tony and Carla would intersect again under heartbreaking circumstances.
Tony's wife, Lois Evans, died from cancer in December 2019, just weeks after Tony had lost his father. Carla remembers Robert telling her about Lois' death and saying they needed to travel to support the Evans family. They never made it.
On Jan. 2, 2020, Robert suffered a massive heart attack and suddenly died. Carla said he had not been experiencing health problems. His death came just days before Lois Evans' funeral.
Tony remembered learning that Robert had died while he was still trying to process Lois' death. "It was like a dream," he recalled. "I couldn't even grab it."
Both were suddenly navigating widowhood amid an almost overwhelming succession of deaths. Tony spoke of losing his wife after previously losing his mother, father, brother, sister, brother-in-law and niece. Carla revealed that her family experienced roughly seven or eight deaths within about a year and a half, including her mother, Robert and other close relatives.
Out of that shared landscape of grief, however, a new chapter eventually emerged. Tony and Carla began a relationship, announced their engagement in September 2023 and subsequently married. Tony said they have now been married for roughly two-and-a-half years and described their journey as a mixture of "grief and new chapters."
Their marriage has unfolded alongside another highly public chapter in Tony's life. The longtime pastor stepped away from his leadership position at Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in 2024 after disclosing that he had committed an unspecified sin. Following a restoration process, he returned to the church approximately 16 months later with the understanding that he would not resume a staff or leadership position. His son Jonathan Evans has since become lead pastor.
Now, Tony and Carla appear ready to tell more of their story together-not merely as a romance after widowhood, but as a testimony to what they believe God was doing long before either recognized it.
Looking backward, those seemingly unrelated connections-Carla meeting Robert at Tony's church, Robert's connection with Tony, Carver College, the deaths of Lois and Robert only weeks apart, and the two widowed spouses eventually finding each other-have taken on a different meaning for the couple.
For Tony Evans, there is a simple explanation: what might look like an astonishing collection of coincidences was, in his view, providence all along.
