April 23, 2017 - Pastor Dave's Method of Preaching

Pastor Dave’s Method of Preaching

I doubt Dave knows I’m writing about his preaching style.  I am not sure what he will say when he discovers that I am writing a blog about it.  But he is a good man and I think he will understand.

The year was 2008, my stepfather had just died and my mom wanted me to move into an apartment she has attached to her house.  She loves living in the country, but doesn’t always feel safe.  I moved in over the Christmas holidays.

Dave and his beautiful daughter, Heather

For months, my mom had been talking about how amazing Dave was as a pastor.  I had met him before and he didn’t impress me that much.  He seemed an ordinary man, down to earth, and friendly, but I didn’t see him as the pastor type.  I should have remembered the scripture that says God uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.  I guess I was a confounded wise man.  But I did visit over the Christmas holidays.

I was hooked the very first service.  When Pastor Dave gets up to speak, he is a different man.  Watching him week after week and year after year, I realize what it looks like to be filled by the Holy Spirit.  Weekly Dave allows the Holy Spirit to guide what he says to the congregation.

There is a method that Dave uses and I hope he never stops using.  He teaches through a book of the Bible.  He doesn’t teach a chapter a week.  He goes into more detail than that.  When I first started attending Bristol Baptist with him as the pastor, he was starting in 1 John.  It is one of my favorite books of the Bible.  It is only 5 chapters long, but that doesn’t mean he spent the month of January on that book.  Instead he spent an entire year!

Some Sundays Dave will teach only two or three verses and the next week five or six.  But the week after that he might go back to the verses from a week before and teach it from a totally different angle.  His idea is that God’s people need to understand God’s word deeply, not just a few feel-good passages here and there, but get to the meat of the word.  That means he teaches it all; the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Learning 1 John with Pastor Dave caused some changes in my life that I am ever grateful for.  There was a person in my life, a fellow Christian, that I hated.   In 1 John chapter 4 it reminds us that if we love one another, the love of God is in us.  What kind of Christian hates another Christian?  That caused me to do some serious praying.  I can’t say I changed, but God changed me.  I can truly say I love that person dearly today.

Since then Dave has taught other books of the Bible.  Mark took two years!  He was teaching in Matthew when I left for Bolivia in June of 2016.  I told Percy, my Bolivian pastor, that Dave was in chapter 5 and I thought he’d maybe be in chapter 10 when I returned for Christmas.  He was!  So I am guessing now, he is somewhere around Matthew 15.  Will he be finished when I go home for a visit?  I doubt it! 

What Dave has taught me is that the Church needs to know God's word.  They need to be as familiar with it as they are their children's faces.  They need to know that the plan of salvation is not just found in the Roman Road, but in every chapter, every verse of the Bible.  Teaching Sunday school for a few years at that church showed me that the teaching Pastor Dave brought to his flock made them stronger.  It is what the Church needs today, not feel good sermons.  The Church needs meat.

Thank you Pastor Dave for teaching us week after week and helping us learn to live God’s word.