When Todd Tilghman was crowned the Season 18 winner of The Voice, perhaps no one was more surprised than he was. The ordained minister knew he had a gift, but had no idea that it would ever translate to a national platform –– or that he would be crowned the winner of one of the most popular reality TV talent shows.

“I don’t think for a minute that I deserve any of it,” Todd told Country Now. “It’s just so cool and it’s like a dream. I can’t believe it’s happened to me. It’s just all unreal.”

Todd’s victory feels especially unreal to him because, not only did he not think he would win, he didn’t think he would make it past the first round of auditions.

“I was frustrated when I went because I knew they were just going to turn me away at the open call,” Todd recalled. “I do want to clarify: I don’t think that I suck at singing. It was more of just, there are so many people out there who are so good and developed professionally. I sang in church my whole life and in my mind, I just assumed that those would be the people who would make the cut even there in the open call. That day was one of the more intimidating days of my life.”

The Mississippi native might never have even auditioned if not for the encouragement of a friend, who reached out on Instagram after she saw Todd attempting to play piano, and suggested he try out.

“As mundane as it seems, I started out by trying to teach myself how to play piano, which still is not really going well,” Todd said. “I would basically just bang out the songs on the piano, and just sing them on Instagram. A friend of mine was watching them and she reached out to me on Instagram and said, ‘You should sign up for The Voice.’ She sent me the open call audition dates and the link for registering. I went on and I registered for the show. That was probably close to a year ago that I did that.”

Still, even after Todd signed up, he had to keep convincing himself to actually show up for the big day.

“I had sort of decided not to audition,” Todd remembered. “Time passed and you get busy and you get preoccupied with your life. Secondly, I’d taken my wife to a conference in Colorado and so we were out of town. We drove, so from Mississippi, that’s a pretty long haul. We got back home from that and my audition was scheduled for [a few days later]. I just told my wife, ‘I don’t think I’m going to go.’ It was just an open call in Atlanta, Georgia. And Atlanta is about four and a half, five hours from where I live.

“So I basically just told her, ‘I don’t think I’m going to go. It’s too much,'” he continued. “My wife just really encouraged me. She was like, ‘You’re going to regret it. I think if you don’t go, you’ll regret it.’ And I was like, ‘How would I even know?’ I wouldn’t even know to regret it cause you don’t know what would have happened. But anyway, she sort of talked me into it.”

Todd and his wife, Brooke, are the proud parents of eight children, who are getting accustomed to having a famous father.

“They’re loving it,” Todd said. “A lot of times I think people are just sort of blown away that we have this giant family. But you know, I try to tell everybody, even though we have eight kids, we don’t have octuplets. We’ve got a kid that’s 20, we’ve got one that’s 16, and so we all kind of team up. Basically everybody in our family is sort of just doing their part. My older kids are all excited about it all on social media. My younger kids are painting pictures and drawing pictures and stuff, but everybody’s all in.”

Todd was on Blake Shelton’s team. He has yet to publicly announce if he will continue serving as a pastor or pursue music full-time.