Style:

My preference and the best fruit is when I go through books of the Bible one paragraph a week. I would describe it as very akin to that of Mark Driscoll from Mars Hill Fellowship in Seattle. I am getting better at “felt needs” topical preaching, but this is not yet as good. My model in this is Craig Groeshel from Oklahoma City. I also try to preach a narrative sermon 4 times a year. I always have a creative PowerPoint and use media clips every week.

My philosophy is this:

• Exegetical preaching teaches people how to think biblically and thus assures them and affords them the ability to know what God is saying in large chunks in context. In this way people get the whole council of God and learn to think biblically over time. I usually go through rotating preaching from the Old Testament and New Testament making sure I also hit the poetic books of the OT in regular fashion.

• Topical preaching allows people to think with some sense of systematic theology and gives people the breadth of Gods wisdom through gleaning the Bible from front to back. I try to use the concept of a "runner" series 4 times a year that addresses felt needs and is used by the church family as very pointed times to invite thier unchurched friends with more urgency.

• Narrative sermons bring the Bible back to its original presentation-storytelling and oral tradition.

Preparation:

I am typically preparing several sermons at the same time. In regard to weekly preparation I do the following: Read the text and go pray and walk around for an hour. Do the language research usually with the critical commentary series and life application commentaries; and reference at least 4 other commentaries on the passage. This takes about 5 hours. I then sketch the sermon out in PowerPoint and place all the scripture within it. I also try to plot the path for the intellect, heart, and will for the entire sermon. I then get a group of people together for a brainstorming session about what the passage means, how it is relevant, and what creative applications it may bring to the table. This is around another 2 hours. I then do a final draft and try it out once and try to fix mistakes and spend time praying that I got it right. I also make sure I actually integrate and apply the sermon to my own life so that there is some spiritual fruit to illustrate my thoughts and to be a benchmark for integrity as a teacher. Total prep time per sermon and service averages 10-15 hours a week

No law but love...no Creed but Christ

Confession of Faith / Creed / Mission Statement / Rant …The gospel is the epicenter of my being. Christ is the catalyst of all that I am. A fire is trapped in my veins, it rages like flaming adrenaline, and it must be exposed to a bloodletting. I must die that Christ might come alive in me. I must be a part of a more radical, militant, and authentic expression of the Christian faith. I want to be the 2nd coming of Francis of Assisi, Dietrich Bonhoffer, and Saint Patrick. I want to grow out of the roots of the early church as well as the various traditions that have followed in their wake. I must carry the heritage of the Moravians, Quakers, Methodists, etc. I want to be a resurrected Huss, Justin Martyr, Jim Elliott, Luther, Fox, and Spurgeon. I want to carry the undying fire of the martyrs deep in my hearts convictions. I want the furnace of my soul to be ablaze with the memories of Church history and the quickening of the Holy Spirit. I want to think like Augustine, Merton, and Pascal. I want to feel like Teresa of Avila, Ignatius, and Wesley. I want to act like Francis of Assisi, Dorothy Day, and Mother Teresa.I want to be a worshiper with my hair on fire dancing with the holy rollers in an ecstasy of laughter and tears. I want to pray like the anchorites and the mystics with deep stillness, awe, peace, wonder, solitude, silence, and reflection. I want to be an evangelist who bravely and boldly pierces the darkness with arrows of poetry, art, dialogue, and example. I want to be a discipler who helps people really catch fire with God, grow fully alive, escape the Matrix, and explode unto the scene of this fallen planet with reckless ardor for God and maniacal zeal for Jesus’ kingdom. I want to be a minister of God’s mercy, justice, and redemption; to be a catalyst for Aslan’s majestic love-parade through the citadel’s of Satan’s former territory. I want to be a combat marine, besieging hell, storming Lucifer’s Bastille, and with bloody hands tearing down the very gates of Hell. I want to be part of a fellowship that brings out the best in each other-mining our mutual potential for the diamonds of destiny found deep in the caverns of our darkness. To be a part of a group that challenges and chases each other into greatness; and a group that offers deep agape mercy and compassion to those wounded and twisted places deep in hearts and minds. I want to drink from the fountains of grace till I’m dizzy and punch-drunk on God’s goodness, and I want to lead everyone I can to the meadows of his healing and hope. I know who I am and who I am not. I am a prophet alive with a deep searing and seething fire for God’s holiness and truth and I must release it to be verbally blazed out and into the hearts of saints and sinners. I am a preacher with a passionate need to be an open vessel for God to lead His people to the high and deep places. I am an administrator who wants to see the kingdom up and running with a full head of steam, actively and efficiently marching God’s army from victory to victory-but sober and mindful that God does not just build up…but also tears down. I am a poet mystic who needs to feel the reflective, mysterious, ineffable, and silent things of God in the recesses of my stormy heart. I am a cultural architect and artist trying to find the pulse of my generation and to sculpt a bridge from that place into the kingdom of God. I am a man of passion and purpose lunging after God awkwardly and haltingly as best I can. I am a man of reflection and action in balance, grace, simplicity, and unflappable elegance. Or at least these are my aspirations. I am a liturgical, spontaneous, charismatic, liberal, and conservative Christian. I stand in the traditions of the social gospel; the contemplatives, liberals and evangelicals, and I seek to find the brightest and best in these traditions. I am the entire kingdom, now and through the ages…the blood of Quakers, Methodists, Martyrs, Monks, and others flows hot and steaming through my veins. I am a Son of God, His friend, and am becoming His lover. My job is nothing short of bringing every single person on this planet to Christ, to make every church the greatest church it can be, and to be transformed myself into a resounding echo, shadow, and a template of the very essence of Christ in His words, thoughts, feelings, and lifestyle. I am legalisms worst nightmare, and licentiousness’s living hell. I am an embarrassment and an open sore to the cult of religious veneer with their primping, posing, and pathetic hypocrisy. I am a thorn in the side of false worship, tepid commitment, and the double minded. I am a professional assassin and arsonist-attacking consumer Christianity and easy believism with all of its orchards of withered fig trees. I deeply struggle with the 1/2 baked, the “tomorrow” people, and the perpetual and professional “weaker brother.” I admit that apathy and passivity makes me carsick…rebel or follow but I share my Father’s stomach for being nauseated by Laodiceans. I am a pastor of healing, nurture, and renewal. A bruised reed I will not break. For people who will be “in-process,” and on a journey I offer comfort, balms of healing, patience, and covering. I dream of peoples destinies, and it keeps me up at night, travailing through tears of intercession that God would make whole the brokenness in people’s lives. Like Jesus I long to lift the chin of the shamed, naked, and abused. In my pastors heart is a furnace of love and compassion, though it mixes with the prophetic, it ever bends its knee to the whispers of God. Like the description of Aslan-Christ I want to be good, but I am not safe. I offer comfort, not being comfortable; hope, not insulation from reality; and nurture, not a winking at sin that makes my life easier while starving people of the deliverance they truly need. I am a catalyst for change and a steward of God’s next wave of impact. I am a frontiersman for the unexplored territory and an apostle for a unified renovation of the global body of Christ. I will stand every day with those in the 10/40 window, I will pray for the persecuted church, and pray that amnesty and justice would come to those wicked places and powers that stand against God’s will. I am unhinged, unshackled, unintimidated, and unstoppable in His power. I am immortal in his blood, and untouchable until Gods sovereignty determines the day has come to draw my shimmering soul home to heaven’s shores. And when I give my gift and it is received, everything in me centers into a fusion of my life’s purpose and I come fully alive. I am also melancholy, broken, depressed, lonely, frightened, faithless, seduced, rebellious, and exhausted. I deeply need those around me to minister healing, hope, and renewal to my soldier’s soul. I openly, nakedly, transparently, and honestly confess I need people. I need the flow of their hearts, spiritual gifts, wisdom, experience, and lives to mingle with my own. I need to sweat, work, be embarrassed, worship, bleed, suffer, sit, rest, stand, and laugh in the company of the saints. I need to be taken cared of, prayed over, challenged, rebuked, edified, encouraged, cried over, kicked in the _____, kissed on the lips, hugged, and slapped in the face. I have a tendency to be a hermit, an island, and a fortress of isolationism. I need God and my brothers and sisters in Christ to scale the battlements, cut through my barbed wire, and beat down the doors of my life. I want to believe I can make it without you…but I must confess, I can’t. I also confess that apart from God I can do NOTHING. Everything I am, have accomplished, or ever will is a testimony solely to Gods goodness, grace, longsuffering, and tender compassion. I am and have nothing, my pockets are empty…yet the glory of God overshadows and blinds me to my sin, wretchedness, and shame. He alone is worthy, and I am but clay in the His hand. Like Paul, I consider all of my credentials as ____ compared to the honor of knowing God. This is my creed, my mission, the gospel according to me. I cannot and will not bend from these visions, convictions, and callings. This is who I am. So help me God!

It's a hard night to blog. But I am committed to transparency and so I will blog. Upon further review, after looking over the day in slow motion. It's just been a bad day across the board.

in it:

• I failed to understand how to handle someone today and didn't understand it till late in the evening. Ultimately, I failed them because I was in the flesh and not spiritual. I wanted to win instead of wanting them to win.
• One of my best friends is stepping down from leadership at a church and is just really mangled right now. And his reasons are good reasons, that some just don't understand.
• I let my anxiety about selling the house and other things turn into anger that I let slip out a few times.
• And someone I barely know is in pain and I don't know how to help them

That's enough for now. I could list more, but there's no point.

So what do we do when this happens? All I can do is tell you what I do.

• I reflect and ask God to show me "if there is any crooked way in me." And he shows me.
• I confess with tears and as much emotional and intellectual honesty as I can withstand.
• I embrace grace, forgiveness, restoration and hope.
• I let go of judgment, vows, bitter-roots, and the temptation to guard my heart or sear my conscience.
• I think through what I must do to make things right or better.
• I agree that we all take 3 steps forward and 2 steps back as we plod along in becoming better followers of Jesus.
• I take comfort in that fact that Jesus was "a man of sorrows."
• I deny myself, pick up my cross, and move forward.

I wonder what you do? Believe me, you can tell more about a person from how they face adversity and pain than any other single thing.

so if you failed at something today, here is a prayer:

"God we come before you like Nehemiah did, full of blunt confession and true heart humility. Our tears are real, but not as real as your grace. Your great love opens up and swallows all of our pain and mistakes at the cross. That you loved us while we were yet sinners is amazing enough, but that you still love us after we fail for the 70 times 70th time is just amazing. We are not worthy of it, and never will be. And tonight Father I pray for all our failures. Knowing that you will reach down and make us white as snow again. It is so hard to accept being made pure again by you, and yet it is also everything we dream for. We dare not be flippant with your grace and love; nore shy and rejecting. Help us to fully embrace the blinding heart and soul adrenaline of your grace. Help it to go into every wounded and dark place of our hearts and minds and fill us with light, fire, and healing. Root out all the footholds of the enemy, and battle within us for your Lordship of our hearts. We believe, help us in our unbelief. We hope, help us in our hopelessness. We start again, help us in our stuckness. Because that's what you do and that's who you are. That is why you are called Saviour."

1st of all I very humbly accept your calling me as your pastor and servant leader. My heart longs to be with you, but for now we will both have to wait. Hang in there, God has great plans for us. Epic-Adventure plans that are greater than you can imagine. Like waiting in line for the roller-coaster; each moment brings us closer to the coming thrill.

While we are in line waiting, here’s what I’d like you to do. I’d like you to read my blog.

Why have I started a blog? To answer that I have to ask what it means to be a pastor, as I see it in the Bible. The primary pastor I see in the Bible is the apostle Paul. Church planter; theologian, and architect of the revolution. What Jesus did through him is the template I always try to lay my life before so that the Spirit can make me more like Jesus by making me more like Paul. Paul was crazy enough to say “follow me as I follow Christ.”

In so doing I get to enter into a new phase of pasturing I have never entered into before. Paul had to write letters to churches he couldn’t be at all the time. The Epistles, books in our Bible like Corinthians and Galatians were simply letters to friends he had to pastor from far away.

That’s where I am at for a season. Where we are at for a season. So I am asking you to read them because for now they are all I have to touch you with besides prayer. I am going to spend 2 hours every day really thinking and praying about what to say and I truly believe it will matter in the short term and long term.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. And every time I write my heart is being more fully rooted in you. I would humbly ask that you try to read at least some of them and unite your heart with mine. There is room for comments and my e-mail so start talking with me as you feel led.

Your pastor,

David