Welcome to the seventh edition of Mockingbird’s preacher interview series! Since the fall, we’ve been interviewing some of our favorite ministers from diverse church contexts around the country to find out more about what is really working in American Christianity today and how to do church well. (See also eps. 1–6.) Our seventh interview is with longtime Mockingbird contributor and senior pastor of City on a Hill Church in Fort Worth, TX, Derrick Bledsoe.
…
M: Derrick! Thanks so much for doing this, man.
DB: Happy to do it.
M: So, in addition to your day job as a pastor and part-time professor, I hear you’ve been working on a PhD?
DB: Yeah, I don’t sleep much…
M: How would you characterize your congregation?
DB: City on a Hill is part of the Baptist tradition. We like to say, “We’re Baptists. We’re just not mad about it.” We do a lot of recovery work. It’s one of the things that we’re most widely known for in our community — trying to not only reach but also minister to and provide a pathway for virtually any kind of addict. So we have somewhere around 40 different types of groups that we offer over the course of the year, but not all at the same time. We also partner with other secular organizations such as AA, NA, and SLAA and have space in our church throughout the week for those types of meetings to take place. Many of our congregants are members of those meetings, and we also have 12-step oriented groups that are more Christ centered.
And so, this kind of recovery ministry that we do, it’s part of our DNA, and it’s been such a blessing. I think one of the reasons why we’re often mistaken for not being a Baptist church is that we’re not very concerned about Baptist culture or, you know, the politics of the SBC. I couldn’t care less. When you deal with people at a very fundamental level that are willing to say this is just how broken I am, it’s like all the other things don’t matter as much, and you begin to see people for people. It doesn’t really matter what political side you’re on or what cultural currents you’re imbibing. You’re just a broken person that needs the gospel, that needs grace.
That’s what attracted me to Mockingbird to begin with, actually. We used to have some members of our church — they moved away and are part of a church in Tyler now — but they introduced me to Mockingbird, the magazine and the website. And I eventually got onto the Mockingcast, got hooked on that, loved it. And then a few years ago, in 2021 or 2022, I flew up to New York for the conference, and I took some of the staff with me. And you know, they were all from a very evangelical, mostly Baptist background, and I just told them: “Guys, this is going to be totally different from what you’re used to culturally. But you’re going to hear — within the first 30 minutes — a profound recognition of grace that is going to stir and encourage you in exactly the work that we do.” And man, after that trip, they were all blown away by the work of Mockingbird.
M: That’s awesome. It’s really interesting to me that the first thing you mentioned in characterizing the culture of your church is its connection to recovery. That’s something that I think a lot of churches do somewhat but only over on the side. Lots of churches host 12-step meetings, for example, but it’s not really connected to anything else.
DB: Yeah, that’s right. I don’t want to disparage other churches — I mean, everyone’s doing their thing according to how they feel like God is leading them. But the problem that I see with so many other churches’ approaches to recovery is that it is a side thing. It’s almost a segregating factor in the church, where it’s like, hey, if you’re messed up, then you go over here. And our contention at City on a Hill is like No — I, the senior pastor, am messed up. I need recovery. Everyone needs recovery. You’re either ready to admit it or you’re not ready to admit it, but it’s there. Because everyone deals with sin. Everyone is fallen. Everyone has made mistakes and done things they regret. And so it’s not a matter of whether this would be helpful to you, but whether you’re ready to open up the can of worms that it’s going to inevitably open up in your life.
So we don’t want to segregate people. We don’t want to make a separate place for the sick addicts. Everyone is a sick addict. Everyone is a broken person in need of this kind of help.
M: Totally. So then, there’s a lot of overlap in the people who go to these various recovery meetings you host and the people who go to church services on Sunday morning?
DB: Yes. Huge overlap.
M: I love that. Bridging the gap between recovery and church — seems like there would be such a natural fit there.
DB: Yeah. Have you read Grace in Addiction by John Z.? Our men’s group went through that book and it was so, so good. What a gift to the church.
M: So, you have two main Sunday services at 9:30 and 11 a.m. How would you characterize each of those services, and how do they vary?
DB: The services are fairly similar. Let me say this: they’re planned the same. We don’t have different styles of worship or anything like that. We don’t do a contemporary and a traditional service. I have some ecclesiological commitments that prevent me from that. I want the church to function in such a way where if you regularly attend 9:30 and you happen to come one Sunday to the 11 a.m. instead, you’re still getting the same thing. Like, we’re still one church. I don’t want people to get into that mode of thinking “I go to the contemporary service” or “I go to the traditional service.” We all go to the same church.
That said, the 9:30 is definitely rowdier. They tend to be more the kind of people who’ve been around a long time, whereas there are definitely more guests at the 11. As a result of that, I think there’s just less congregational response during the 11, whether that be during worship or during the message. At 9:30, the congregation will talk to me. They let me know they hear me. At 11, sometimes I’m like, are they even awake? Haha. But there’s a lot of overlap too. We also offer Bible studies during both of those hours, so typically people will either go to church first and then a Bible study, or go to Bible study and then to church.
M: How would you describe the format? Are there certain prayers or songs that you say or sing every Sunday? How often do you do communion? What does that all look like?
DB: I think that’s a great question. I always like to point out when I teach ecclesiology here at the seminary that every church has a liturgy. There are no churches without liturgies. Some of them are just ill-defined. Some of them are so modernized that it doesn’t necessarily feel like a liturgy, but it is. I mean, it’s the same repeating pattern. Our church is not the most liturgical, certainly not as much as what you might experience in the Episcopal world. And I will tell you, as a Baptist pastor and professor, I lament that to some degree, because I think that there is real power in liturgy. There are certain aspects of Episcopal/Anglican liturgy that I think are so profoundly beautiful and wish that my tradition did more of that. And we’ve actually been subtly working it in.
For example, we do confess the Nicene Creed occasionally. Not every Sunday, but it is something that I’m trying to develop within our congregation’s context. I think that the power of ecumenism centered around the earliest creeds is really important. It pushes back against tribalism in a way that I think is really good for the church. When you realize, oh, I confess the same creed that my Roman Catholic friend does, then we may not see eye to eye on everything, but the most standard orthodox statement of faith in history is something we both agree on, and that’s a good thing.
M: Yeah, especially if you both actually believe it.
DB: Right! We Baptists are, you know, well known for saying really idiotic things like “No creed but the Bible.” I hear that a lot. And I’m like, that’s a creed. That’s just a really bad creed. It’s a very vague creed, actually. So let’s have creeds that actually are founded in orthodox faith and history.
So anyway, we do the Nicene Creed some. We take communion once a month — and that’s a shift from before. Under the founding pastor of our church, they only did communion about three or four times a year. But I wanted to establish more regular communion, and I think that goes hand in hand with the DNA of our church. Again, if we’re all broken, and if there is this desire to be sanctified — to receive grace in the midst of our brokenness — one of the things that more regular communion does is put me before texts like 1 Corinthians 11, which is going to challenge me to discern myself, that I don’t “eat and drink judgment” upon myself…
It’s because there’s that pressure. Every time we do the Lord’s Supper, they are reminded that if I take the Lord’s Supper and I’m living this sort of duplicitous double life, that I’m potentially eating and drinking judgment on myself. So there’s this sense that I need to deal with this. Not in a condemning way, but with a sense that this is not okay. And of course, every time they come into the office to confess those things, we are very quick to say to them: “Thank you for confessing that. God forgives you.” Right? This is, again, something our tradition doesn’t do very well, but I will tell people “You’re forgiven” — not because I’m forgiving you but because God’s word says that you’ll be forgiven when you confess these things.
As far as music, our church has a contemporary worship style. We have a full band, drums, the whole nine yards. We do play a mixture of hymns and more modern songs.
When it comes to sermons, I am mostly an expository preacher. So, most of the time, our sermon series just go verse by verse through whatever book of the Bible we’re in. We started Hebrews two weeks ago, and we cover every verse. There’s no verse we leave out. We walk right through it. And I usually preach for about 30 to 35 minutes. Sometimes there’s a call to worship afterwards. Sometimes there’s a reserved time of prayer. Sometimes there’s a benediction. There’s no definite pattern we follow. We just have sort of a template of rotating things that we might plug in or take out to keep things interesting.
M: I like it, man. I have to say though, your sermons are a lot longer than ours. Our priests have maybe 15 minutes to work with, max.
DB: Well, in my tradition, I’m actually on the shorter end. When I first started preaching, my sermons were like 50 minutes.
M: Wow, that’s hardcore.
DB: I think that’s a young man’s thing, like, I’m going to preach an hour. But why? You can say a lot in 30 minutes, and often I find that guys that preach for 40–45 minutes could easily have cut out 10–15 minutes.
M: Undoubtedly. So, when you do have new people come to your church, how do you make them feel welcome and encourage them to keep coming back?
DB: Well, we have a host team — all volunteer — and a hospitality team that puts out coffee and oatmeal and bagels and different things that people can access for free. Food is welcome in the sanctuary. We don’t have an unwritten rule against that. I drink coffee in the sanctuary, so anyone should be able to drink coffee in the sanctuary. And then we have greeters that are at all the doors and parking lot attendants as well. Again, they’re all volunteers that just love to welcome people into our space.
For guests, typically, we’ll give them the rundown of what we have to offer in terms of Bible studies and other things they can access. If they have kids, do they want to take them to the kids’ ministry? We have our own separate building for the kids’ ministry that is fully locked down, so it’s very safe. We also have student ministry during the 11 a.m. service that meets on the third floor of our gym building. That’s been fun. If people are in need, we have something called the City Life Center. So, we just kind of try to give them the information.
I have a younger person on our staff that develops all of our media stuff. She’s great. She puts out things that are very appealing looking, and that sometimes brings people over as well for further conversation.
There are just a lot of different people stationed in our main areas engaging folks that they don’t recognize and inviting them to other things. We do have cards that people can fill out. If they’re wanting prayer requests, they can do that and put their information down, and we’ll follow up with them. We have a deacon that does all the follow-up every week. We also engage people online. We have a YouTube channel and a Facebook presence, and we do a lot of really silly things on those channels.
One of the pastoral pillars that we try to lead by, and I say this all the time, is: we take what we do very seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. And we really want that to be the culture of our church. Like, we’re going to take God’s word seriously. We’re going to take worship seriously. But we’re not going to take ourselves very seriously.
M: In your mind, what is the single most important thing that happens on a Sunday morning?
DB: Worship. Now, I define worship as not just singing songs. I think we worship when we open God’s word. I think we worship when we pray. I think worship is something that is to be done collectively. I try to push back against the age of individualism as much as I can…
There’s a lot of other great stuff that can take place on Sundays — community and outreach and so forth. And I think outreach, evangelism, mission, all that stuff should not be relegated to Sunday but should really be relegated primarily to Monday through Saturday. Sunday is where you gather and you are encouraged, maybe in the midst of hardship from doing those other things. And you’re reminded this is why we do them.
M: I love that. I will say: I think that one of the critiques of evangelical or more “contemporary” worship styles — and I’m not just talking about music, I’m talking about the whole tone of the service — is that it often seems like it has to be relentlessly happy and upbeat, right? So is there a way for that worship to encompass a broader range of emotions?
DB: Yeah. I mean, if it’s only happy, it’s dishonest, right? Read the Psalms. David is joyful one moment, and then the next moment he is like, “I’m dying. My bones are withering away.” So yeah, absolutely it must do that. And that’s one of the compliments we get all the time from people. They’ll say, “I don’t feel like I have to put on a mask when I come to City on a Hill.” And again, I’m not putting on a mask. There are days where I’m struggling and I’m very up front about it. Like, I don’t feel like worshiping today. I don’t feel like standing here and singing these songs. I’m going to do it, because I believe God’s worthy of it, but I’m not going to be happy about it. So yeah, I think it absolutely should engender all of the feelings. We’re whole humans, not just happy humans.
M: What’s your overall vision for children and youth ministry? What are some approaches that seem to work well for you guys?
DB: First of all, we’re very big on reminding our parents as much as we can that we are not the primary spiritual caregivers of your children. You are, as the parent. You are the primary disciple maker, not me. My goal is therefore to help you steward that great responsibility you’ve been given, and to encourage your children both in their love for the Lord and his word and in how to think Christianly for as much as I’m given the opportunity to do so. So that’s one side of it … Then it’s like, yes, Mom or Dad needs to be a spiritual caregiver of their child, but maybe Dad just got out of rehab and is holding on for his life right now, and maybe he doesn’t even know the Lord. So how do we engage a family and empower parents to do their God-given role while at the same time recognizing that maybe they are woefully incapable of it at this point? So that’s where we also step in and think programmatically about what we can give these kids that their parents are almost certainly not giving them right now.
In terms of teaching, for example, our youth meet on Wednesdays and Sundays. Wednesday nights are expository lessons through the Bible. They’re going to learn the Bible. Whatever book we’re in, they’re going to work through it. Then on Sundays, they are going to engage more in bigger worldview questions that are suited to each age group. So, middle schoolers are starting to ask that question of Who am I? High schoolers are starting to ask questions like Why am I here? What was I made for? What is my purpose? Young adults are wondering Where am I going? What does God want me to be? Who am I marrying? Where am I going to college? What is my career going to be? So on Sundays we try to approach different life stages with different worldview questions to help young people think about those things, while also providing a place on Wednesdays for them to just learn the Bible.
We also have other opportunities for engagement. We have one ministry called True Mark. This is the most Texas thing you’ll hear in this interview, but it is what it is. True Mark is actually a hunting ministry, and it’s been a very, very important ministry for us, way more important than I ever dreamed it would have been. What happens is we do father-son hunts, father-daughter hunts. We do veterans hunts. We do hunts with inner city kids that sometimes aren’t even a part of our church. For the father-son and father-daughter ministry; sometimes mothers come if there is no father figure whatsoever.
Anyway, there are a few things that happen on these hunts. One is it’s just an amazing experience. Kids almost always get their first deer on our hunts. We have really solid trained field guides that teach them how to shoot and then take them out, and they actually go hunting. And the properties that we are partnered with through various people are loaded with deer. So it’s an exciting memory-making thing. It’s also really good bonding time between parent and child, and especially if they’re coming out of a rough familial background, that is so critical. They also take food home. We process all the animals. Our youth minister actually processes everything. He knows how to do it all. So they each get many pounds of meat to take home and have for free, which is great.
M: This sounds fantastic. Hilarious, but also fantastic.
DB: It is, yeah. And there’s a powerful ceremony we do the first night of the hunt. If they’ve already shot a deer, we’ll start cleaning the animals — we teach them how to do all of that. And they each get a Bible. And we do this whole ceremony with the kids where we talk about the deer that they shot. We’ll ask them, like, “Did the deer know that you were there when you shot it?” And they’re like, “No.” “Did it do anything wrong to deserve to be shot?” “No.” “So it was an innocent animal?” “Yeah.” “And yet we killed it, right?” And we’ll have them dip their fingers in the blood and we’ll say, “The deer’s blood is not capable of doing anything for you as a person in need of forgiveness.” And then that’s when we’ll transition: “But the blood of the Lord is. He was innocent as well. He did not deserve to die. And yet his body and blood is infinitely more powerful than this animal you’ve killed.” So it’s just a powerful illustration for kids.
We’ve also done hunts with some of our inner-city kids in the neighborhoods that don’t have dads, and we’ve paired them oftentimes with retired law enforcement officials, because oftentimes kids in the inner cities have a very strained view of law enforcement, sometimes for good reason. So pairing them with an individual that represents something that they maybe have suspicions about and then developing these relationships with them down the road has been an amazingly powerful thing to watch. The grace that is exchanged between both of them is really cool.
M: That’s all very fascinating, and I definitely don’t want to get into the weeds here, but, no offense, Derrick, you don’t look like the most natural hunter. And you don’t sound like you’re from rural Texas. So how did this ministry even get started?
DB: Haha, yeah. My executive pastor Brian Duncan and a couple of the other guys in our church — one of them was a ranch manager for like ten years in Del Rio, and he is that guy, like everything you would imagine a ranch manager would be, an incredible guy — they just saw a need: we’ve got a lot of single parents with young boys especially that have never been fishing, have never been hunting, have never done the things that they grew up doing that meant so much to them. And it was like: we know how to do these things. So let’s try it with people at our church and see if there’s an interest. And there immediately was. Then it sort of developed from there. And then we were like, what if we did a father-daughter hunt? What if we did this or that? And it just sort of exploded into this amazing ministry. But yeah, the guys that lead these hunts, they are the guys that really know what they’re doing.
M: Switching gears: what is your best advice on preaching for someone right out of seminary? Other than, as you said, maybe don’t preach for an hour.
DB: Yeah, please don’t go an hour. So there are a few things. I don’t know how much of this is prevalent in your tradition. In my tradition, I hear a lot of guys who will be very hesitant to manuscript their sermons. Because, you know, I want to leave room for the Spirit, right? But that is the worst excuse I have ever heard in my life. I tell guys all the time: “You know the Holy Spirit is present in your planning as well, right? Like, he will also speak to you Monday through Saturday.” So I find that that’s just an excuse to be lazy and not thought-through or articulate in your sermons. Certainly, there are times when I preach where I feel as if the Spirit is leading me to really drill down into something that was not in my notes. But by and large, I feel like the Spirit leads me when I’m writing the notes as well. So, trust the ministry of the Spirit Monday through Saturday. That would be a big thing that I would say to pastors out of seminary…
Also, I would say preach Christ and his gospel. Always. Don’t miss the opportunity to proclaim the gospel to people. And there’s a saying that, again, is prevalent in my tradition, which is “Don’t bleed in front of your congregation.” Meaning, don’t be too transparent about the things that you’re struggling with. But I think that is the most antithetical Christian preacher posture you can have. Jesus bleeds in front of everyone. Obviously there are limits to how explicit you should be, but the idea that we should somehow present ourselves as not hurting or wounded is insanity to me. When I’m weak, he is strong. I mean, this is just basic Christianity. So yeah, bleed in front of your people. Be real. Be a human person. And remember that you’re speaking to real people.
You know, I preached a sermon on Sunday that was very theologically weighty. Hebrews 1:5–14. It’s like seven Old Testament allusions that present Christ as greater than the angels. There’s a lot to unpack and a lot that is theologically rich and wonderful. And I did all of that. But as I was working through it last week, I was like, man, this just feels like seminary. What is the single mom going to take away from this? What is the person who’s scared about the current political climate going to say about this? And in the end, I felt like the Lord just gave me the takeaways I needed to make it relevant to those people. It was the most theologically dense sermon I’ve preached in quite a while, and yet it was so applicable because, at the end of the day, when you distill down the supremacy of Jesus, there’s a lot of comfort in that. In a world full of chaos, Jesus is seated on the throne. He’s not worried, pacing around. In a world full of distractions, Jesus is exalted. There are so many things that want your attention, and yet the only one really worthy of your worship is the Lord.
So this is another sidenote for the new pastor out of seminary: you can do deep theology. You may be told that the average person doesn’t want all the theology, that they’re not going to understand it. No, they do want it, and they will understand it if you teach them. You just have to meet them at their level. You can’t assume they’re seminary students. But my experience has been that people are starving for rich theological beauty. It just has to be done in a way that they understand. But then don’t neglect to take that rich theological beauty and turn it into something that really pierces their heart.
M: Something many churches struggle with is how to talk about finances and fundraising in a way that is both healthy and not heavy-handed. What are your approaches on that particular topic?
DB: This is actually a very appropriate question for us right now. We just remodeled our gym, and it took money that we did not have. Now, normally, in especially evangelical traditions, money is a major thing. You feel like you hear about it all the time. Whereas in our particular context at City on a Hill, you never hear about it. That was a decision of my founding pastors — they were like, we’re never going to talk about it, we’re never going to ask people to give, and the Lord has provided for us, and it has been a very good thing. So, I would rather not hear about it than hear about it every Sunday.
But it occurred to me at some point that, if we’re being honest, in the evangelical and even non-evangelical American context, money is probably the number one idol in the life of the majority of churchgoers. So if the church is not instructing, if it’s not discipling its people on this issue, then we’re essentially just letting the biggest idol in their lives go uncontested. And that to me feels like not a fundraising issue but a discipleship issue. So last fall, I preached a four-week series titled “Money Myths.” And the point of it was not like “Give more money.” It was not “We’re building a building, and we need you to pony up.” In fact, I don’t think I really referenced the building at all…
With regard to our building project: we’re done with phase one, and we’ve got two or three other phases that we want to do to bring the campus into a more accommodating level, which is important because we’ve grown a lot. You know, three to four years ago, we had 250 people on Sundays, and last week we had almost 700 — and that’s just adults, not kids and students. So, we have really grown, and there are things we need to do to the campus to make it more accommodating for our current rhythm.
As far as the approach we’ve taken, what I typically will say is, “Listen, if we have been a blessing to you, if the ministries here have meant something to you and you’ve never financially contributed, I’m just going to ask you to consider what that would look like. It does not have to be a large amount. It doesn’t have to be any amount. We’re not doing this to earn your money. But if you feel led and would like to partner with us in this work, we would really be very grateful for that. These are the phases of work that we want to do. Right now we have enough money for this next phase, and then we’re going to halt the remaining things that we have planned until we have enough money to do those things. And so, really, the ball is in your court. If you want to see these things done more rapidly, then I encourage you to give.” We’re a debt-free church. We will not take on debt for those things, and so it’s just sort of in their court.
M: That’s great. What do you wish you’d known when you first started your ministry?
DB: Man, that’s a really good question. I wish I’d known that God does not always operate in the box that I think he’s going to operate in. I think I went into ministry thinking that, like, if you do A, B, and C things that honor the Lord, then God will probably respond in these other ways that directly correspond to that. And in my experience, sometimes God has done the exact opposite. And at the time it felt like, am I missing the mark? What is happening? But then over the course of time, I look back at some of the things that have happened and feel like, man, I am so glad that the Lord did that in that way. That was such a blessing in disguise.
Something I say to my staff all the time is “We just need to stay out of the way of what God is doing.” You know, in my tradition, there is this assumption that preachers are going to weigh in on every cultural thing that’s happened. And I had that same intuition when I first started in ministry — like, I got to make a statement! I got to weigh in on this! And the more I’ve lived and ministered, the more I realized it’s just a tactic of the enemy to draw us offside.
M: Yeah, it’s a trap.
It is. And the very moment you weigh in on something, you ostracize a number of people. And then the moment you criticize your own tribe, your own tribe turns on you. And so one of the things I tell young pastors all the time in the seminary here is “Don’t make ministry harder than it already is.” Ministry is hard. There are days where you’re tired. You’re like, what am I doing? Why am I here? Do I want to keep doing this for the pay that I get? There is zero need to make ministry even harder than it already is. And so I always try to ask myself, is my voice really needed in this thing? Because if it’s not, I’m not going to give it. Because I’m just going to piss someone off, and then it’s just extra work for me, and I don’t have time for the work I’ve already got. So I think, in ministry, let the main thing be the main thing. If I had to distill that answer down — what do I wish I’d known when I started? — just let the main thing be the main thing.
M: Totally. So, as a church that preaches grace, how do you manage difficult people?
DB: Haha. One of the things that we say a lot here is that “City on the Hill is a great place to heal. It’s a terrible place to hide.” What I mean by that is that problematic people — people that are living duplicitously for the sake of personal gain, perhaps — they get sniffed out faster than I know their name in our church. And the reason why is because every one of us were all really shady people at one time. Like, I know shady when I see it because I was it, right? You know, when sex addicts come into our church and have no interest in healing and they’re just there to maybe prey on people, well, I have like 25 recovering sex addicts that are like, “He’s a predator.” Like, “I’ve had five minutes of a conversation with him. He is not interested in any of this.” And that immediately puts him on our map. We don’t automatically kick him out, but it’s like, okay, let’s see where this goes, and let’s keep close eyes on them.
That’s, again, one of the benefits of being a messy church: messy people recognize messy people. It’s really difficult to carry out that kind of behavior in a place where everyone is like “A month ago, I was you.”
I will also say that we have removed members of our church, to be totally candid. We removed two of them last year. And I know that if you asked the people involved in the circle of those individuals “How did the church handle that?” the one critique they probably would say is the church waited longer than I would have liked for them to finally remove the person. I always want to err on the side of grace. So yeah, we do engage in discipline when necessary, but we really try to exhaust every effort before we get to that point.
When it comes to difficult people who are just on the more annoying side of things, we try to remember grace. We remember that their concerns are coming from a place of a felt need in their life, whether the sound is too loud or the room is too dark or the room is too bright or the chairs are this or that, or whatever … It’s like, you’re entitled to that frustration. I’m so sorry that that is affecting you negatively. If there’s reason to listen and hear actual critique, then we certainly will. We’re not above that.
M: Okay, last question: what aspect of your job do you hate the most, and what aspect do you love the most?
DB: I’ll start with what I love the most. I love teaching. I love seeing people get it for the first time. I love seeing people walk in obedience for the first time in such a way that they didn’t believe they could, and then they do and they’re like, “I can’t believe that just happened!” I love the joy of discovery and studying. I love God’s word.
The part of the job that I hate the most is probably the social pressure to, again, weigh in on everything, the social pressure to address certain political issues, to reduce faith into these very human categories. Having to contend with the overly religious right and left is so tiresome. Another thing I hate is seeing people destroy themselves. I hate seeing people in a place of rebellion that is so strong that they’re just unwilling to be reasoned with, and then to watch the fallout of it occur. Because it’s just so unnecessary. I hate seeing addicts lose their lives to overdoses. I’ve had to bury addicts that we were discipling that relapsed and died. And it’s just the senselessness of it that gets me, and yet it also highlights the real nefarious nature of sin and Satan. But I hate that, seeing people destroy themselves. That’s one of the worst parts of the job.
M: Well, Derrick, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thanks so much.
DB: I’m grateful. Please give Dave a big hug for me.
What a wonderful ministry you have! Recovery and hunting so unique and so faithful. Thanks for sharing!