What Does Pastoring a Church Really Look Like? | Dylan Troncoso

We are back with another episode of Room for Nuance. Before we dive into today's episode with today's guest,

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Any press is good press. Am I right? Anyways, we are here today with Dylan Troncoso.

Say hi, Dylan. Hello. Is this your first time on camera? I don't even like FaceTiming. Okay. So, yes.

All right. Well, why don't we calm the nerves by opening with a prayer? That's what I do when I preach somewhere and I'm really nervous.

I just try to let my nerves settle down through prayer. I've prayed before. Okay. All right. Father, we thank you for just another day.

Lord, I pray and I ask that we would be wise with the way we use it, that we would just have a good time in this conversation, even if I'm not exactly sure why we're doing it.

Lord, would you allow us to be edified for other people to be edified, but most especially, would you be glorified in all that transpires here today?

Amen. Amen. So, right there in your prayer, you're kind of tipping your hat a little bit.

You're wondering, you like this? You tip your hat or is it tip your hand? I don't wear hats.

Okay. You're letting us know right off the bat that you're kind of like wondering, like, what am

I doing here? Aren't you? Am I wondering that? Yeah. No, I know why you're here. Okay, gotcha. Why do you think you're here?

You texted me and asked me if I would, and this is probably the first thing I've ever said yes to that you've asked me to do.

Okay. Yeah. Other than like working on my car, which the no's have been more than the yes's recently on that too.

Probably yes. Yeah. You have a mechanic in your church membership, I know, so. Yeah, but I don't get to spend time with you if they come over.

Okay. Yeah, so you are on Room for Nuance because, and I told you this in advance, and you said you wouldn't be offended by it.

We'll see if that plays out. I don't remember what you told me in advance, so let's find out. We're gonna call this The Ordinary Pastor. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

When you texted me about that, I felt like the average Joe gym members from dodgeball.

Remember that? Yes, I do. You just wanted an average, everyday individual, so that's what I pictured. Yeah, so Room for Nuance, I think the reason why you're kind of wondering why you're here is because a big part of what

Room for Nuance does is we have conversations with subject matter experts who have written a book or they've been involved in something such that it's good for us to sit down and talk for several hours about very complicated topics, right?

But I think... We have several minutes for uncomplicated matters today. Yeah. I think, no, we're gonna have, this is gonna be the longest one yet.

Okay. I think people are so trained to think about shepherding through like a celebrity pastor model, whether that's what, you know, whether they're aware of that or not, that they're probably gonna be really edified, really helped by thinking for an extended amount of time about what it looks like to just be an ordinary pastor, right?

And when I say they will be helped, I mean pastors, lay elders, and even church members.

It'll be helpful for them to think about the fact that their pastor is almost certainly not going to ever be anything like John Piper, right?

He's gonna be more like us. Okay. Right? Yeah. Right? I believe that. Yeah. We were recently talking, like very recently, talking about the

Southern Baptist Convention. Do you remember how many churches we said there are in the Southern Baptist Convention? I don't remember how many we said because I think you said it.

Oh, okay. Well, so I think we said, using the royal we, something like 44 ,000 churches.

Sounds about like what I remember, yeah. Yeah. And out of those 44 ,000 churches, the vast majority of them are smaller to medium -sized churches.

And if we were to just take small to medium -sized churches, I would say the vast majority of those are smaller, you know.

Even if you move outside of like the Southern Baptist Convention, which I'm just using because it's the easiest, it's the largest evangelical denomination in the world, most churches are probably small churches.

How would you define small? The way they do, less than 100. Okay. Yeah. Especially if you even consider like moving outside of our context the world over, the vast majority of churches are small churches.

And even if you look throughout history, right, the vast majority of churches, small churches, like parish churches, right.

So these kinds of conversations are needed because this kind of ministry is the most common ministry.

The local church is the manifestation of God's kingdom on earth, and that is rarely going to be in a group of 5 ,000 people.

It's more normally going to be a group of a hundred people or less. Right. So speaking of that, what's the name of the church you pastor?

Mosaic Church Decatur. How do you spell that? The way you are right now on that piece of paper. Mosaic Church in Decatur, Alabama.

It is Decatur, Alabama. But you're, by the way, a roaring metropolis, a population of 55 ,000.

Right. Been that way for 20 years, cannot grow, cannot shrink. Yeah. But you're not in Decatur proper.

We are still technically in Decatur, although you pull out of our driveway and go left for about 100 yards and you're in Priceville, Alabama.

Which is a city of how many people? About 3 ,500 -ish. Yeah, not many, but they are building houses on top of houses in Priceville.

It's just growing a lot. Yeah, it's gonna become a suburb for a much larger city in our area known as Huntsville. It kind of already is, right?

Yeah. But that's to say, this is also very typical, small church pastor in a small town.

Yeah, that's right. And how many members do you guys have? I think around 32 members. Okay. Lots of kids and extra people coming, but still less than 50 people meeting on an average

Sunday. Yeah. And how many visitors do you think you... Not visitors, how many children do you think you have? Well, too many.

No, never that. Although sometimes it might feel that way. There's 15 or 20 under 10 probably.

Wow. Yeah. Which with 30 adult -ish members, that's a lot of kids percentage wise.

Yeah. We're gonna talk more about Mosaic in a second. For now, let's talk about the...

I think what everybody wants to hear about, the story of me and you. Oh, do they? I think that's what people... Do I wanna tell the story?

Do you wanna tell the story? Do you wanna tell the story? You're the guest. How long have we known each other? I'm pretty sure

I was 15 or so years old when I met you. I don't know if you remember that. 15. I don't remember that. So I'm 33, and Luke can probably do the math better than I can, but it's been that many years.

Okay. And how did we meet at 15? So you're older than me by a little bit, although my kids would never believe that, because they see my bald head and they assume that I am obviously older than you are.

But I was attending a church here in Decatur and was hanging out with a youth pastor one day, and I believe the church secretary knew you somehow.

Yeah. And said, hey, my... I think I went on a couple of dates for their daughter when I just became a Christian. I think something like that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And she just mentioned to the youth pastor, hey, friend of mine or friend of my daughter's, Sean wants to come by, and you came...

Which is not what was true. Okay, I don't know. She wanted me to come share my testimony. Gotcha. Yeah. Okay, okay.

Well, I might be just misremembering. Yeah, yeah. So you wandered in on a bicycle, and I don't remember much about the conversation.

Why do you say it like that? I only remember the very end of our first meeting. Because? We walked outside, and this is a pretty traditional

Southern Baptist kind of environment. Yeah. And by this time, you were either shirtless or in a tank top,

I think. And you kind of rode away for a moment, and you kind of turned back on your bike, and you said, hey, how do you feel about tattoos?

I don't remember what the answer was. Yeah. I was just kind of witnessing all of this. I was asking the youth pastor. Yeah, yeah.

And he said something kind of generic, and you said, well, I'm about to go get this girl's name tattooed, covered up on my neck.

Covered up on my back. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I remember. And then not long after that, you did come to the church and share your testimony.

Yeah, because the youth pastor asked me to come have a speak. And I very much remember some of that, at least. Yeah. What was that night like? It was very dark.

You wanted all the lights to be off in the room. And... The exact opposite of what we do now.

Yeah, yeah. Just the very baggy clothes. Was I trying to set the mood? I don't know. I don't know if you were nervous or what.

For listeners or viewers, I was a brand new Christian. I'm talking like one day,

I'm walking around with a gun in my pants selling crystal meth. The next day, I'm on a little mini speaking tour of these churches.

There was one day in between where you got the girl's name covered up on your neck. Yeah, that's right. And in the first meeting, it was dark, and I remember certain people having certain looks about you being there, just kind of confused, not even really judgmental, but just like, who is this young guy?

I had gold teeth. Right, right. Yeah. And the only thing I remember you saying was, because of Jesus, I don't sin anymore.

But you didn't say... I don't think you meant it in the worst way of saying that. I think you just meant... I don't know. I was feeding the prosperity gospel, man.

Okay, okay. Well, you kind of even gave a list. I don't do this anymore. I don't do drugs anymore. I don't smoke anymore. I don't do this anymore. I don't have sex anymore.

Hey. And then you said... I said that to a room full of like thirteen year old kids. A bunch of young kids, and so everybody just kind of perked up, and you said, well,

I think I might have had sex one time, and then you just moved on. Well, I had to be honest. Yeah, yeah, so I appreciate the honesty, and you've been honest ever since, yeah.

How have we never talked about this? Oh, I have to other people. To other people. Yeah. And I think

I remember... It's over dozens of people here now. Yeah. I remember at the time, I thought that doing a good job sharing my testimony was being as gruesomely honest as possible and telling as many war stories as possible so that people could see like if God could save even me.

Right. So I would... There's hope for everyone. I remember I went to this one church, and I went up there, and I must have told a 20 minute story about robbing this guy at gunpoint, you know, and I'm like...

And he never went back, right? I'm acting out the parts. Yeah. Oddly, they never invited me back. So after that, you come around...

You came around a couple more times, just random things. I think you came around the church. To the church, yeah. And then by the

Lord's providence, you showed up in the little apartment complex that we were moving my step grandfather out of.

Yeah, we rented. And that's when you got to know my family, my dad. Yeah, that's right. I was still living at home, of course, still a kid. Yeah.

And you got to know them and really kind of hit it off with them, and then you were just around as almost a family member in a lot of ways.

Yeah. Good, bad, and otherwise. Because I didn't have that good, bad, and indifferent. Yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite stories as I was trying to figure out...

Because I'd never had a family, you know. Cue the... Luke, make sure you insert the sad song right there.

I remember my first family meal was with your family. I remember we're sitting around the dinner table, and I remember thinking while I was sitting there, this is like something out of a movie.

People were passing the green beans and the rolls, and it was just... I felt so happy and warm and full of life, and we had a great time.

And you know how I ruined it. I actually don't remember that part. Okay. But Aria, my wife, just read that in your book.

Yeah, so I have not read that. She had the advanced copy. She did. Yeah, right. And she shared that with me, and I told her that the only thing

I remember, and you said green beans, I just remember you picking up a handful of green beans... With my bare hands. Yeah, bare hands, and just running them through the mashed potatoes and shoving them in your mouth.

So I don't remember... No utensils. I don't remember the end, you know. No utensils. No, no utensils. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, dude, I was a feral cat.

It was crazy. I mean, yeah. I had no... And oddly, I don't know that I've ever told you this or would have had a need to, but there was a certain sense of, not responsibility, but I did know you before my parents knew you.

Yeah, that's right. So there was a little bit of just that, like, hey, who's this young guy? I just recognized you in the parking lot, then you got to know my dad.

So I was a little bit like, yeah, felt not responsible for you, but a little bit pressured, if you will.

Does that make sense? To like... To like just, I felt a little bit like, oh, what is he doing here? Yeah, making me look...

Bad. Yeah. But then it got to a point where your relationship with them took off to the point where you were your own problem. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. I passed gas at the table, super loud. I thought it was gonna be hilarious. Your dad, very kindly, just put his big man hand on my shoulder.

The one time he's been concerned that somebody passing gas was when you did it at the table that day. Yeah, because the whole table just...

They were having a great time and everything just got quiet. Yeah. That's better safe for every other environment in the household that I grew up in.

Yeah, that's right. Just not the table, I guess. Okay. And then I joined the army.

We didn't see each other very much. What was the next epoch in the Dylan and Sean saga? I think you joined the military and you kept a relationship with my parents to some capacity.

I don't know how, I guess phone calls or emails or something. Desiring to be adopted, loved. Okay, so you talked with them quite a bit.

And because of really more of that connection, when you came back, I just would be around you because you'd come spend a lot of time with them.

Yeah. And then we had the... And you came in as a great power and Calvinist. Controversy. Right. Yeah. By that time,

I had left the church I was at, the church that you rolled up on. Yeah. And I was serving as a student pastor, they say, at a church right around the corner from here, which my responsibility was to hang out with and entertain anybody over five or six and younger than me.

That was my job description. So I had left that other church on good terms, and then for some reason, you came back from wherever you were overseas and you ruined those terms.

Yeah. Yeah. But I became convinced of the doctrines of grace. Yeah. The Lord used you to bring my family, not just myself.

Yeah. Into that understanding, but when certain people caught wind of that, it was just not a good thing. And it wasn't really you that did that, of course,

I'm being silly. It was largely me. You went to try to resolve things, I think, and maybe inadvertently made things worse.

That did not go well. Yeah. But I did come to town guns blazing in a very unhelpful way. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's already a thorny issue as it is with a lot of people, especially in Southern Baptist churches.

Yeah. Calvinism was they drink beer and they don't tell people about Jesus. Oh, yeah.

That was what I understood about it. I knew nothing about it, and that was what everybody was coming at me with. I remember

I was newly reformed, and I got invited to go speak at this school for at -risk youth because the guy who was kind of running it was a

Christian. And so he sat me down, and he was giving me the rundown, and he's like, and I'm glad we got you here instead of those frozen chosen.

And I was like, oh, should I tell him? Yeah. But I think I had burned enough ridges and made enough mistakes. Wisdom. A little wisdom had been accrued there.

Okay. And then that was, I think, where our friendship really began to bud. Because at that point, you introduced me to your parents, but I was really just -

It's kind of weird. I'm friends with your parents. I'm your age, but I'm friends with your parents. You hung out with - There was a time where you would wander into that church that I was a member of enough where I kind of interacted with you there.

And then, yeah, you became friends with my parents. And then when you came back through all of that, in spite of all of that, we became better friends.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And so that was how long ago? Oh, I don't know. I was probably 20.

Okay. No. I don't know. Sure. And how did we get from there to here? What do you mean?

You tell me. You've done a lot more than I have as far as changing kind of where you are and so on and so forth, but you just keep ending up back in Decatur.

No, that's true. Because I would leave again and come back. Yeah. So I was at that little church right around the corner from here, and I was there for several years.

So you guys were attempting a church revitalization there of some sort, even if you weren't really aware of it as you entered into it.

Correct. Didn't even know the language. Right. Or at least learned it at that point. Yeah. It was a very traditional Southern Baptist church.

Yeah. It was dying. Yes. How many people were there on a Sunday morning? Before we came, 15. And they were all -

The young people would be mid -60s. Yeah. And the environment around it was all minority.

The neighborhood had changed. Church had not changed at all. Yeah. A predominantly old white church in a predominantly black neighborhood.

Right. They weren't doing any kind of outreach. Yeah. Black and Hispanic. Yeah. That's right. Increasingly Hispanic these days.

Yes. So I was there, and then even though you had done your best to kind of burn some bridges for me with people over at that other church, my former youth pastor, the guy who met you the first day that I did, he came over to be the pastor of this church.

So he was kind of leading it. You were his number two guy. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And you were there for how long?

I had been there before he came, three, four years. And then he was there almost exactly a year before things went

South. And what happened there? What caused things to go South? I would just say a lack of wisdom on everybody's part.

And I would go so far as to say, looking back from today where I sit, that as leaders, we had the most of the responsibility in that.

I think that if you were to kind of weigh faults, there would probably be more faults on the older generation side and just the way they did things, but we were still the ones that were charged with leading and did a poor job.

And out of that, in some weird way, was birthed Mosaic Church.

Yeah. So you guys showed up one day, doors are locked, can't get into your grass behind the building.

They had become just so dissatisfied and even angered by what was happening there.

And some of that was completely unfair. They were just so locked in a certain way of thinking that they should not have acted the way that they did.

I'll say that very clearly. However, there were some reasons and maybe a lack of sensitivity in the way things were done that could at least explain why they might feel as emotional as they did about things.

So yeah, but we showed up. By this time, the church that had 15 to 20 -ish people that I had been a part of for four years, there was maybe 40 or 50 people.

Many of them had become members, but a lot of them were just visitors that had come in when the new guy came, the pastor.

So now we're all just outside, 40 or so of us in the grass, and we had a couple church services.

And then there was who has the right to do this. So I think we might have changed the locks back and then they changed them again and it kind of went back and forth a couple of times.

Yeah, that sounds fun. At the end of the day, they literally said, hey, we will just give you some money to go do church the way you think you should do church if you just leave and leave us alone.

And they were in such a desire. They had such a strong desire to do that as quickly as possible that banks weren't open, or at least the church bank wasn't, and an individual in the church just wrote us a check out of his personal account and said the church will pay me back.

Which is like tens of thousands of dollars. It was like 20 grand. Yeah. So that's two tenths. Yeah, yeah. So it wasn't...

But it was still like... Yeah, that's just how... I mean, can't even wait till Monday, right? Till the banks open back up. We want you gone now.

So out of that, we did start the church and we call it a church plant. Yeah.

Because they gave us money to go plan a church. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So you guys were meeting in...

There's an area indicated apartment complex that's... It's basically the projects.

Right. And you guys were... That church building was right around the corner from there. That's right. And so you said we'll just go here and start having our services here.

We didn't go into those projects that you're talking about, but we really did have a heart or so we thought for that area. But you would do the backpack drives and stuff out there.

We would do certain things like that. We would do certain Wednesday night activities out there with the kids. I think we did a couple

Easter services even out there, but there was another park in town that we would reserve every Sunday morning and we'd go meet at the park.

And by the time we got into it, we had a cargo trailer stocked up with all the chairs and tables and we had a

We'd hang a TV on one of the eaves of the canopy there so we could have the lyrics above while we're singing.

So it was kind of a really fun and exciting time, but it was a lot of work, obviously.

And at the beginning, it was, we really wanna be in this area geographically, strategically, and we don't know and care if we'll ever have a building.

There was a lot of that kind of talk. And then, yeah, cold weather and rain just changed some things there.

So we had a church member who had a business with some space that we were able to use during cold weather and rain.

And then eventually, we stumbled into a building that we can use. It was a basketball gym.

Yeah, inside of a school. It was the school by this time had moved, sold their campus, but they leased the gym and then they subleased the gym to us.

Oh, okay. And it was like this whole basketball gym with one working air conditioner. The same thing, we would get there, we'd set up all the chairs, we'd break everything down every week.

We were literally scooping rats off the floor for the kids' room, just weird, strange things like that, because it was kind of just a forgotten and uncared for facility that they use for basketball practice.

And then after that, at one point, we thought, if the school's this kind to let us use this building for like pennies a month, maybe they have space at their new fancy campus that we can use.

And we reached out to them and they very graciously let us use their auditorium. So from gym to auditorium.

Yeah. That's a promotion. It was a promotion. Now, in the summertime, we were back at a gym, but the new gym, they used the auditorium for another thing.

That's right. So in the summer, we were back to pulling out bleachers this time. We actually sat in bleachers. Yeah, that's weird.

And what is happening with your theological, pastoral, spiritual development?

Because I went through all this with you. You're kind of summarizing it in a matter of five minutes, but you are changing and growing a lot.

It's only been five minutes. Yeah, theologically, I had already been kind of grounded in reformed theology and had been given, mostly by you, a lot of just really good books and helpful resources and kind of pointed in good directions.

So that helped me a lot. And then even though we had kind of started this new church and there was some seasons of uncertainty in what we were going to do, we did a couple things well.

We read some good books together at the front end. So on paper, we would say we desire to preach expositionally.

We wanted to have meaningful church membership. Practice church discipline, at least in theory. Right, in theory.

Most of these things were in theory, I would say. Yeah, something's done better than others. And then throughout the course of time...

So we just celebrated 10 years as a church just a couple of months ago. So somewhere in the middle of that time frame, we're at this newer gym, and we just kind of were rocking along, doing the same old thing.

We'd have a family or two join, and then we'd have a family or two leave. And financially, things just looked the same. By this time, there was two part -time guys, myself as the associate pastor, and then the other individual as the lead pastor, but he was also part -time.

So at some point, I guess just through reading and conversations with others, realized a full -time pastor is a very good thing that a church should have.

And so instead of two part -time pastors... Yeah, exactly. And he was becoming, by necessity, financially more driven to do other things, and that was becoming evident.

But I went to lunch with him or breakfast or something. I think this was right at COVID time, whenever that...

So anyway, we go to lunch or breakfast, and I just kind of share that, hey, I think we should have a full -time pastor.

Like, frankly, if next year we have another budget update and everything's just the same, and we don't know if we can continue beyond this or things of that sort,

I just wonder if somebody should be leading this a little more directly and be more involved because they have the more time to commit to that.

And he, to his credit, said, I agree 100%. And I think it should be you. Well, he said, but I don't think

I can do it. And then I said, okay, well, maybe we need to think about hiring somebody or... Now, was that genuine?

Oh, I wonder who we'll do it. Maybe we'll hire somebody. Were you in your heart thinking like, dude, I'll do this?

No, no, I had no desire to do it, actually. Yeah, so he said at that same breakfast or lunch, he said, what about you?

And by this time, I think I was preaching once a month, if you could call it preaching. And prior to that,

I was preaching probably once every six or seven months, just kind of randomly. So we'd hit some sort of a routine where I was doing it more often.

But when he said that, I was like, no, no, no. And you came to this conviction just because you realized that somebody with full -time could just better shepherd the church.

Yeah, two of us doing part -time things, it just wasn't working very well. Yeah, gotcha.

So it just could recognize that somebody needs to fully lead this. Yeah, we were just busy doing other things.

So he brought that to my attention, like, what about you? I would have never expected or seen that.

And I just kind of said, well, let's just kind of see what we're gonna do, and let's just at least maybe present to the church the idea of wanting to move in the direction of a full -time guy, and we can have more conversations about who that is later.

Because right now, at this time, you have a good job. You have a pretty large family. Your job is giving you good benefits, a pretty good salary for somebody.

All things considered, yeah. Yeah, all things considered. And I had that salary, plus it was small, but a little bit from the church as well.

So together, it was significant for me. So he kept bringing that idea up, though, about me doing it.

And we talked with the two people a little bit and give it all to one guy.

It's more or less a full -time salary. We could just kind of make a few adjustments. So we kind of knew that that was at least doable.

He was kind of unable and unwilling at that time. And he just kind of kept plugging that idea of me doing it.

And we agreed that instead of him preaching three times a month and myself the last week of the month, we would reverse that for a season.

And as conversations progressed, we just decided through the fall, like, hey, January 1, let's just see about maybe dealing, becoming the full -time pastor.

So by that time, the Lord had softened me to the idea. I had asked other people about it. And the congregation, how were they feeling about the prospect?

Nobody said anything negative. We probably... To your face. To my face. We did not have the culture of kind of open feedback and conversation.

Sure. A loving congregation, loving people. Many of us are family by blood or by marriage.

There's a lot of that going on there. Tends to be that way in a small town, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And in a small church. Right. So we had a lot of that, but we did not have like, we weren't doing service reviews and previews and offering criticisms or feedback in any capacity over anything, you know?

So the first time we ever even did anything of that sort was through this process. I think I drew up like a little questionnaire and we emailed it out.

I'm like, hey, what are your concerns? What are your worries? How do you perceive things to be going? And like the percentage of participation was like super small.

Almost nobody answered. So you got 30 people there. And like nobody wanted to answer. Yeah, because they're just not accustomed to actually being honest, you know?

There was one couple, both of them answered the couple of things that we did of that sort honestly, and I appreciate that.

And I still think about the feedback that they gave even today. But we did not have the culture.

So maybe everybody hated the idea except for like my mom and dad and my wife who were there. I don't know. You know what I mean? But most people at least said they were supportive and they were very charitable and gracious.

Your mom actually told me she was very much opposed to you. She would tell you that. Just kidding,

Erica. Also, she hates you. So yeah, I started preaching and they allowed me to learn how to preach, which was very kind.

And they're still allowing me to learn how to preach for sure. So we're a few years into this now. What do you think was the big hurdle there for you?

Like learning how to do true expositional preaching or? Yeah, I think expositional preaching for the church's understanding up to that point, even if at times

I might would say differently and try to get people to understand it. The definition was verse by verse preaching.

So we worked our way through books of the Bible, which was better than jumping around, of course. But the main point of the text was not always the main point of the sermon.

Almost was never the main point of the sermon, I would say. So very good things might have been said in the sermon, helpful things even, but not directly derived from the text we were covering necessarily.

So my desire was to make the main point of the text, the main point of the sermon, and certainly have not done that perfectly every time, but that's just the goal.

And that's what I mean that they were gracious and kind. They kind of let me, well, not only that, not only did I have to learn some of those things, but even just learning how to stand in front of people and speak, be the only one speaking for 30 minutes to 50 minutes or so.

That's all to be learned, to get more comfortable with. So this was presented to the church, they walked through it, and then they eventually took a vote.

We did vote. And the vote was... So we were congregationalist, even though we didn't know that word. Sure. Most of us, yeah. I think it was probably unanimous.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so what happened from there? January 1 of whatever year that would be.

Sure. I took over as the lead pastor. The year of our Lord 2017. Yeah. I had resigned from my other job and...

Big leap of faith. It was, yeah. And... Big, big cut in salary. Big, big, big, yeah.

And the intention was for the other guy to remain as a faithful member of the church, to remain as a layholder of the church, and to help musically with the church so he could sing and play an instrument and things of that sort.

So that was kind of the goal and the plan. And not long thereafter, some personal things in his life came up that just kind of forced him to do some other things and kind of be out of pocket for a while.

Okay. And then he just never came back essentially, never really recovered from that. So in the process of other things happening in his life,

I think he just said, and even he did tell me, hey, I thought I can just kind of step aside, but that's just harder for me to do than I thought it would be.

And to be fair to him, his Mosaic Church is called Mosaic Church because that was something that he had felt inclined to call a church and a lot of those things.

It was his baby. Yeah, it was for many years. So it was a very hard thing, but a very loving thing for him to do that.

I think so, yeah. And so that was, you have no idea how long ago that was?

How long have you been the senior pastor of this church? I think it'll be four years in January.

Four years in January. So about three and a half years ago. And how have things been since then? I don't know how old my kids are or any of those types of things either.

Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I struggle with that. Have you seen that Nate Bargatze? I have no idea who that is, no. The stand -up guy?

Right? Where he's - These guys know things. These guys know things. The school calls him and asks him a question and he's like, why did you call me?

I'm the dad. I don't know anything. You tell me how my son's doing. Yeah, that's right. So you've been there for four years serving in this capacity.

How have things been? It's been good, maybe three years. I think I'm misremembering, but either way, yeah, it's been good.

So nothing's just changed. I'm sure if I look back at day one, I could recognize a lot of change.

In fact, I know that I can. But if I just think about day to day or week to week, how things have changed, there's not really been anything that's just been crazy.

We did not lose many members. I would have expected to have lost more, frankly, when he left, when the former pastor left.

He's a dynamic dude. Yeah, and most of the people were there because of him, at least originally.

So we didn't lose many. We've gained a few, not very many, but there have been a few families that have joined, which has been, that's always just kind of a fresh wind in our sails, you know?

Yeah, that's right. We are now meeting in a building that is not ours. It's not a church building, but we actually rent it to be used any day of the week.

So you don't have to set up and tear down. I have an office. We can permanently leave our chair set up.

Yeah. And that's been just wonderful. And that's what's brought us into that still Decatur, but priceful area.

And that I believe was the Lord because we've always met in the greater Decatur area.

And there's just churches all over Decatur, obviously, as you know. And Priceville has churches and even a couple of healthy churches, but the growth that they're expecting in Priceville, those churches on their own could not sustain.

So we're just hoping to be another healthy presence and option for people as they move into the area. I mean, literally,

I can sit in my office and hear, you know, nail guns and air compressors where they're building all the houses around us. So if you are watching or listening to this in the

Decatur, Priceville area, and you are thinking about going to some very large, very healthy church, you're free in Christ to do that.

Sure. You are also, who knows, maybe the Lord is leading you to go to a church that could use some more help in its formation, and you can dig in and get your hands dirty.

Yeah. Help can mean so many things. Yeah. It can mean helping repair a rotten subfloor under a toilet or giving us some money.

Yeah. Or teaching a Bible study. Yeah. Of course, all those things as well. But there's just a lot of things to do. Yeah. So if you're listening to this, notice that Dylan is greedy for filthy lucre.

I know. For sure. Which is why you - We can cut there. That's the end of it. That's right. Yeah. So what would you say, and I haven't asked you any of these questions in advance, what do you think is the biggest challenge and maybe the biggest blessing that you've experienced so far as an ordinary small church pastor?

And by the way, if any of our viewers are like, man, that's a little pretentious of you to ask. I pastor a church of less than 100 people.

It's one small church pastor asking another small church pastor these questions. So ask it again.

Yeah. What would be the most encouraging thing for you? That you've like, man, pastoring a big church,

I don't know that I would get to experience this. Oh, okay. Or what's been discouraging, frustrating, difficult?

What are the challenges? So I'll tell you the encouraging thing. I don't know that this would not be the same at a big church. Okay. But just getting to see through consistently teaching the same things, you know what

I mean? And modeling the same model of how we're gonna preach, how we're gonna do church and so on and so forth. Just watching people recognize that there is a new normal for how we do things.

So that when those things do change, if for some reason something doesn't go as smoothly as we would hope for it to, there's a little bit of like, hey, what happened here?

What happened to that prayer we normally do at this point of the service? You know, that song wasn't very singable, you know?

Those are things that would not have been on anybody's radar. But you're building a culture. We haven't even taught those things intentionally.

We've just been doing them consistently and people have recognized that. I wouldn't say not intentionally at all.

I mean, we're not saying it that way directly. It's not a campaign. You make an application, you're modeling it.

I'm sure we've had conversations about why we're singing certain songs and not others and why we're singing certain styles of music and not others.

I'm sure I've had those conversations, but I never stood before the church and said, we're gonna cut out all of this and we're only gonna do these songs that really lend themselves to congregational singing, you know?

Or if you notice a change in my preaching, it's because of X, Y, and Z. Yeah, but we've modeled those things so well that when a song is not easy to sing, people will mention that.

Whereas before, I mean, quite literally, we might not have even known what songs we were gonna sing on a Sunday morning before Sunday morning.

All right, so that's the most encouraging thing. What's been difficult, frustrating, discouraging?

I very often, this is nobody's fault, but I very often just realize even in such a small church that I am not doing what

I need to be doing by the way of my people, you know? So like, you know, you see the memes and things of people waking up in the middle of the night and they're thinking like, where's my birth certificate?

You know, like in the middle of the night, you wake up and you worry about stuff, right? I'll wake up and I'll be thinking like, man, I forgot to check on so -and -so this week, you know?

And that's just a personal discouragement. You know what I mean? As far as the church itself and the way things, like maybe

I would hope for them to go and they haven't gone that way. I'd like to see growth just for things to be a little more easily sustainable, you know?

But I don't necessarily just desire growth for the sake of growth, you know? I just don't wanna be like a wasted space in that area either, you know?

So don't need to have hundreds of people, but don't, you know? Yeah, and you would expect that if we're growing deeper together, that we should be at some point getting a little wider.

Yes. Which you are. It's just not, you know, we're so - Not leaps and bounds. Yeah, yeah. We're so trained to think that like, you know, yeah, you go from 30 to 100 in a year and 100 to 200 in three years.

That's just not, it's just not the case. Yeah. Yeah, you can do everything wrong and grow and you can do everything right and not grow, you know?

Speaking of anxiety, I've known you to, especially in the last couple of years, to acutely experience past.

It reminds me of what Paul talks about after his long list of everything that he suffered in 2 Corinthians, you know? Beating, shipwreck, stoning, hunger, famine, you know, all that stuff.

Nakedness, exposure. And then he's like, on top of all of that, there is the anxiety that I experience for the churches.

Do you think that that anxiety that you experience is carnal? Or do you think it's born of like, just a sincere love for the sheep as a shepherd?

Or both? Yeah, maybe both. Maybe from one day, it's one and the other day, it's the other. I don't know. So I think what

I just described, even like the midnight's, you know, worry, I think that's probably genuine worry and concern for the people as well as an awareness that I have not done what

I need to do. Or maybe at least could be a little more intentional. With those people. But I'm sure there's matters of anxiety where I'm just not trusting the

Lord. Is that what you mean? It could be that. Or just, yeah, worried for all the wrong reasons.

Yeah. Well, brother, let me encourage you. I could have asked any number of small church pastors to come and do this interview, but I asked you particularly because I think you're a great pastor and I trust your character.

Appreciate that. Yeah, man. Now, education. What was your PhD thesis on? Education. None.

None? You dropped out at what grade? Well, no, I graduated high school. So you have more than me. I think, I mean, like I was homeschooled.

So I actually, I wanted to get a job. I was 18 and a job opportunity popped up where my dad worked.

And I remember going to like the homeschool office and the director of the co -op there gave me my diploma early.

And I went to work. Like how early? Not that early. I had all the credits. Oh. A few months early.

A few months early. Okay. So you finished high school kinda. I did. Homeschooled, if that means anything for anybody.

Hey, homeschoolers, huh? They're crushing it academically. And then I did a couple of classes online.

Where? With Calvary Chapel Bible College. Calvary Chapel. The Harvard of Bible College.

So I was born in California. That's where my parents grew up in the

Lord and they attended Calvary Chapel Church. And it was a very... Yeah. Looking back, I could recognize things that aren't great about that or those churches, but the

Lord used them in a mighty way in my family. Oh, I mean, they trained your parents. It's one of the things I learned from them.

I mean, they just were just Bible, Bible, Bible all the time, you know? So whether or not they really knew what expositional preaching is or not, they pointed people to the word.

And when you're doing that... It could be worse. It could be a lot worse. It made it hard even in the heart of the

Bible Belt where every church is Southern Baptist and all their theology, at least on paper, is great. It made it hard for us to find a church that would satisfy the desire for the word.

Yeah. There just really wasn't any. Yeah. And by contrast, today, it seems like the

Lord has just done, and I don't use this word lightly, a work of serious revival because although there are still many unhealthy churches, it seems like every time

I turn around, the new guy who's coming to town is really well equipped to lead a really healthy church.

Yeah. Yeah. It's good. Maybe a little repartee on that where you're excited too. I'm also excited.

Nice, man. So a couple of classes, Calvary Chapel Bible College. Yeah. Did those go well? I don't remember anything about any of them.

I remember sitting in my car. Must have been very emotional. I remember there's probably certain things that I learned that I even do to this day that I cannot credit to that, you know?

Sure. Or that you would credit to that. No, that maybe if I knew that it was because of that,

I would credit to it, but I might just have no idea where it came from. Yeah. So I don't remember how many even classes I did. At some point,

I became, you know, convinced that a little non -accredited Bible college for a church that doesn't exist anywhere around us probably didn't make the most sense.

So I did take four or five classes through Moody Bible Institute. Now we're getting a little more legit.

A little better, a little better. Stepping in the right direction. And then I just had a bunch of kids. But those weren't that formative for you either?

Probably in the same way. There were certain things that I remember in particular that I do think were like, oh, that was probably good.

Like what classes did you take? Oh, you should not have asked me that. Okay. Yeah. So let's just move on.

Did you take a class on how to do podcast interviews? I did. Can it, doesn't it show? Yeah. Do you remember like three, four or five classes?

I think I did like an Old Testament survey kind of a thing. Yeah. Survey says, don't remember anything else about it.

Yeah. Okay. Um, I honestly don't remember. It's been a long time though. It's been, you know, and I never did it consistently enough to really just kind of keep on, keep it on.

Like nothing really stuck very well because it was pretty sporadic. Yeah. Got married, children.

Yeah. How many kids? Six. Six. That's a lot. Not all from the loins of my wife.

Yes, the loins of your wife. From her loins, I guess. Okay. Yeah. And mine. Yeah. They come from different loins.

Yeah. You've adopted how many children? One. One. But I have another. That you... More or less. Yeah, more or less.

Not adoption. Yeah. So four biologically. Yeah. That's right. Uh, beautiful family. Watching, uh, your, your wife grow in grace over the years has been incredible.

Can you, do you think Aria would mind you sharing the story of her salvation? I don't know.

Well, go for it then. I think it's an incredible story. It's a witness brother to your ministry. So if I miss something that you're trying to, you know.

No, I just think it's incredible that she got saved the way she did. Yeah. So she grew up in a Christian home, faithful.

Well, her dad was not a Christian for, um, I don't know exactly when he became a Christian, but he wasn't always a

Christian. Yeah. He got saved late in life. He did. He did. In a very interesting way through a sermon through the book of Nehemiah of all things.

I think it was. Yeah. So, but her mom was a believer and very active in the church. Very faithful to take

Aria to church and did a lot of good things in that regard. And Aria, I think has the typical like kid that grew up in a

Christian environment, kind of a story of getting saved early, baptized early. Yeah. And was just always a good girl,

I guess by the world standards, never got in any kind of trouble or anything. When we started dating, Probably took pride in that.

I would maybe. Yeah. When we started dating, like we had all kinds of thoughts, like going into the ministry or missions or adoption.

Did y 'all meet in a youth group? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Eventually we did get married and maybe had our first daughter.

And I was working at that little church around the corner again. And I don't remember what happened, but we had some just drama between the two of us and not in like a super judgy kind of a way,

I hope. I asked her like, I don't even know if you're really a believer, just because the way she was responding and reacting to...

The way you guys would fight was not the way two Christians would fight. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And certainly there's times now, you know, that we people fight, you know what

I mean? And things get silly, but like something was just strange about the way she would act and react to things, you know?

And I think she might've even said like, well, maybe I'm not, you know what I mean? And then the Lord just softened her and yeah, she became a believer.

I don't know the day or exactly. But she came to you, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember it was...

We conversed about it. Yeah. I mean, this is this incredibly dramatic thing and you're playing it like somebody just picked up a bag of marshmallows from the store on the way home.

Like you're married, you're in the ministry, your wife is unregenerate. She comes to realize she's not regenerate and get saved.

And like, she comes to you and she's like, hey, I think I'm actually saved now. Yeah. It was a big deal at the time.

Your mom was like over the moon to tell me about it. Yeah. You should interview my mom next. Dude, don't tempt me.

Do not tempt me. Do you... So back to your education or as you would say the lack thereof.

You're married, you got a bunch of kids, which means that you just don't really have time. Right. Right. Yeah. And financial, you know, there's some financial strain with that.

Now my in -laws were very generous. I think the last few classes I took, they actually paid for. Yeah. They are very generous.

Very, very. But it was really just, yeah, time. So by this time, I'm working a full -time career type job.

I'm working part -time with the church. You got a family. We went from no kids to, you know, several kids within a very short period of time.

So yeah, it's just all about... And then at some point you just say, well, I'm doing all of the things that I would hope to do and be trained to do with this.

So that said, I still think to this day, like, man, I wish I can do something to learn a little bit more, you know?

But even if someone were to say like, hey, I'm going to get you into Southern and I'm going to pay for your classes, you just couldn't swing it.

I would just have to go back to the take a class online one at a time kind of a thing, you know?

And I might even enjoy that. I don't know. And maybe one day I will. Our last interview, maybe not as it's being released, but the last person that I interviewed,

Jamie Dunlop, you know, he was a pastor for at least a decade before he decided to start taking seminary classes.

And he started taking them to prove to himself that he didn't need them. And he was like, actually, this is really helpful. So he's just doing them.

There's got to be a reason people do that. Yeah. And he's, you know, 40 something. Yeah. You know, I don't have seminary.

I've wished that I could do it and thought, wouldn't it be nice if instead of carrying an

M16 around Iraq, I would have been doing college like a normal kid. But yeah, here we are.

And do you think, is your message to the wider world cemetery, seminary, more like cemetery?

No. Good delivery though. Thanks man. I've been building up to that for 30 minutes and I totally blew it.

No, no, not at all. I don't think I have that conversation with anybody at any time really, at least haven't thus far.

The interesting thing about it has been when I've asked people, maybe before I became the full time pastor, I would like try to make with people and kind of say like, what's been the hardest thing for you?

What can I expect? And almost, there wasn't many, but of the few individuals that do have, you know, educations far beyond mine, when

I would ask them like, hey, I don't have any, you know, they would all say, you don't need that. You'll learn how to preach.

That's really what they all said, interestingly. So I'm sure there's a lot of like church history things or other, you know, things that I could have learned that would prove to be very helpful to me.

But as far as, it seems as if the guys who stepped out of that into actual ministry work, maybe didn't have a lot that they were actually putting to use practically.

I'm sure they have a lot of things they're putting to use, but. And that could be for various reasons. They could be in a ministry model that's more carnal and pragmatic and biblical.

You know, I think the thing that I feel pretty often, what I feel most acutely is the need for more training for counseling situations.

It's good to be trained on preaching. It's good to learn the languages. I wish I would have learned Greek and Hebrew to a very high level, but here we are,

I don't have it. But like on a week in, week out, what do

I feel like I'm constantly like, man, I wish I had more training and discipleship on this. It's counseling. You're just sitting in there.

You're talking to this person. They're telling you the story about their situation, and you're just praying the whole time.

Lord, I have no idea. Even if you have a thought, like how do you apply that to them?

How do you give it to them, offer it to them in the right way that they'll actually... Yeah, I understand. I've been encouraged though, because I've gotten to know some biblical counseling ninjas over the years, and although they are better equipped than I am, and that's good, and I should strive to be as equipped as they are, they often tell me that they feel the same way.

They tell me that they often feel the same way. I have more tools, but I still often feel helpless when

I'm in this counseling situation. I'm utterly dependent on the Lord, praying for supernatural wisdom to say something or do something helpful.

They still screw up, drop the ball. All of us do. Have you thought about doing any

ACBC stuff on the side or anything like that? That just came up in conversation between me and another pastor in town.

It wasn't ACBC, I don't believe, but it was something of that sort that they might be putting on at their church.

Dane Hayes. Yeah, and he said, hey, I'll send you some stuff if you want to know more about it, and I'll try to probably.

Yeah, that's good, brother. I remember I was talking with one pastor about my future in ministry, and I was trying to pick his brain and get some wisdom, and he said,

I definitely don't think you need to do a PhD. Okay. How would you have taken that? I would say good.

Yeah, I was like, oh, don't worry. But I was also like, wait, hold on. But how many more steps are between there?

What makes you think, wait, I could do a PhD, which I can't, by the way. So he was a wise man.

He was a wise man, I guess. No, he's a wise man. That conversation was a little weird, though.

Maybe when you have kids out of the house. Maybe. And we started early. I mean, my wife and I joke about how like, hey, we're not going to be that old when they're gone.

Yeah, what do you think you're going to have a more or less empty house? Oh, I mean, my son, my youngest son is six.

Yeah. But he's getting out at 18. Right, maybe 17. But I mean, you're a frequent, you like to read, you're hungry, you want to grow in the

Lord. Yeah. Yeah, there's no part of any of this that should imply that I don't want to learn or haven't tried to learn.

That's the way I was taking it. You were telling me I don't want to learn. But okay, speaking of, now this is a big college word, the autodidactic nature.

Speak to me like I'm five. No, speaking of, I mean, you have, you know, listen, seminary has not been around for very long.

The MDiv program is less than 100 years old. The vast majority of church history, men were trained and educated for the ministry in the context of the local church.

And you didn't even really have a ton of that. But something maybe adjacent to that is discipleship and formative friendships and so on and so forth.

Yeah, Sixth Avenue, I think was probably one of the most helpful things. Yeah, yeah, well, you got to watch us make all the mistakes.

Well, and I got to learn from them. And even in a lot of ways, invited to participate in certain things you were doing with other guys here.

Yeah. You sent me to a weekender. Oh yeah, that was fruitful, huh? Yeah, it was. Yeah, what would you say, let's do this, the top five and take your time.

Okay. We don't have anywhere to be. Top five most helpful books for you. Oh my gosh. And helping shape your own personal theology or your pastoral philosophy or helpful for you doing essentially what is the church revitalization at Mosaic?

You said take my time. Take your time, buddy. Okay. I think I read a biography about Charles Simeon.

Charles Simeon? I don't remember the title. Don't you mean Charles Spurgeon? No. Don't you mean Sibbes? I think

I mean Charles Simeon, but now that you're asking, I might be wrong. Was it the Piper one? No. It was

Hopkins. I don't remember actually the author's name. I think David Platt on something recommended or something.

And I picked it up and I read it. One of the first few biographies that I read, but just his emphasis on the word of God to sustain and grow in spite of some horrible circumstances and so many difficulties.

So I think right when I became the pastor of Mosaic full time as the main preaching pastor, I read that and was just further galvanized in my understanding that it just needs to all be word centric.

Everything needs to be about the word. And it wasn't like the nine marksy kind of prescription of that.

You know what I mean? It was more of like an example of that taking place so long ago. It was like an enfleshed parable of Lehman's Word -Centered

Church. You saw Simeon doing what he describes. And I think Word -Centered Church, Reverberation.

I think I read both. That would be a helpful one. Really a lot of the nine marks titles.

We've read many of those as a church or at least leadership and individually.

So I gave you one actual title, didn't I? No more than that? I need to give you four more.

I would say Word -Centered Church. His book on Don't Fire Church Members was extremely hard for me to get through, but it was very helpful.

And when I became the pastor again, we didn't have anything in place. So we said we're, you know, congregationalist, and we want to do meaningful church membership.

We had no anything that kind of described how we would actually do that and what that would actually look like in a real world situation.

So that book kind of helped me think through some of those things. And it is a beast. Chapter two is...

It's all footnotes, first of all. Yeah. Yeah. That was him trying to be popular and academic at the same time.

At the end of the day, it was still helpful. Yeah. I mean, that's his basic systematic systematization.

Oh, that's a tough word. Of congregationalism, right? Yeah. Okay. And what else?

Dig. Dig deep down into the... So the question was to help me in my pastoring, right?

No, it could be even just personally. Like what was personally informative for you? I can't articulate a lot of what

I pulled away from this, but the book Even Exile was just one that made me think about things I've never thought about before.

Yeah. It made me think very specifically about certain families in our church, certain women in our church.

And, you know, just, yeah, I just... Most of that was just not on my radar at all to think about feminism and some of the effects of that and things, you know?

So that was just helpful. I think it's the one -stop shop on biblical femininity that kind of does everything.

It gives you a positive vision from the Bible that counteracts the most current feminist undertones that Christian women might be bringing into the church with them.

It promotes a glorious vision for work in the home while not completely ruling out the possibility of a

Proverbs 31 woman doing things outside of the home. That book helped me to understand things that I never thought about very well before, but it also helped me to understand that things don't have to look like the

American understanding of male headship either. Oh, yeah. So for me, the whole idea of, you know, maybe anti -feminism and the idea that the husband has to do everything and make every decision and he's the only one who can and should work and things of that sort.

I don't think I was just hook, line, and sinker into that the way others are. Yeah. But I think that a lot of maybe what

I had heard growing up was closer to that than I think it needed to be. The biblical version of complementarianism is at odds not only with feminism, but like many ways

American masculine stuff. Anything else? You got one more space left here.

I've made five little notches here for you to speak to five different books. So like my, I don't know why I would say this way, but my guilty pleasure in reading is just a good biography.

So I've read several of like the Ian Murray biographies. I don't think we can call reading Ian Murray biographies a guilty pleasure.

I think that I would benefit from reading other things a little bit more. Although I very much benefit kind of like the

Charles Simeon one of just seeing how certain things played out in the real world for an individual. Martin Lloyd Jones.

Yeah. Even like I read the John MacArthur one and there's so much there to pull away from. Which one was your favorite of all the biographies you've read there?

Of his? I haven't read the second volume of the

Martin Lloyd Jones, but the first one was probably the... Oh, the J .C. Ryle one was good.

Prepared to Stand Alone. Yeah. That was very good. Amy Carmichael. Yeah. Fantastic. And then, dang, what is his name?

Pink. A .W. Pink. Yeah. Learned a lot of things about him that I don't even necessarily agree with or find kind of odd, but it was a good book.

Yeah, edifying. Ian Murray is such a good biographer in many ways because he's just so mere, you know?

Yeah. Do you have a favorite

Christian biography overall? Probably not. Yeah. What sort of things do you do?

I would say that he would be my favorite, you know, author, biographer. Only because I've read most, like most of the biographies

I've read have probably been written by him. As you try to like educate yourself and grow in your capacity to lead as a small church pastor without seminary education, do you systematize that at all or do you just wait for there to be like a pocket of, oh,

I don't really know much about this. Let me dig into that and, you know, kind of cobble together resources.

It's probably if I just something pops up on my radar in some way.

Probably not even a topic so much as maybe a book, you know? Sure. So it could be at the monthly

Healthy Church Collective meeting that we're a part of that, you know, a guy might bring something up that sounds helpful or a book might be given away that even if I don't raise my hand and take,

I'll write down and try to grab that I think would be helpful. So a lot of good reading or resources come out of things like that.

You handing them off to me? Sure. Yeah. Websites that you found to be particularly helpful, like, oh, if you're a small church pastor who doesn't have seminary education, spend a lot of time here.

I'm so old school. I don't. Like MySpace? Yeah, yeah. I'm like pen and paper, you know?

Like, I don't have, I don't really do anything. Do you type your sermon or do you? Yeah, I do. Do you like movable type on a

Gutenberg? No, I got a fountain pen. No, I type a sermon, yeah.

But like, I'm not, I'll get on like Facebook and see things as they pop up from maybe Nine Marks or TGC or something, you know, and read some things here and there.

But I'm not like perusing anything very often. Gotcha. Looking for stuff. I should do more. Podcasts?

You used to spend a lot of time driving. I did. And so really my intake of things like that has really gone down a lot because I used to drive so much for work that I would listen to all kinds of podcasts and interviews and things of that sort.

Can you think of any that would be helpful to share? Pastors talk, you know. Pastors talk is very good. Preachers talk, yeah. I learned some very simple practical things from the,

I don't know what it's called, but the HB Charles podcast. It was just a different kind of perspective. And he would say things that would just be like very practical, you know what

I mean? So I listened to a lot of those. Audiobooks? Did you do audiobooks? I own a bookstore and despise the very idea.

No, I've tried to listen to an audiobook one time and I got like 10 minutes in and had no idea what was happening.

I think maybe if I wanted to maybe listen to a good novel or something fiction, maybe I could do it, but not with nonfiction.

Do you like fiction? I don't read a lot, but I do. Okay. Yeah. Well, you read a lot. You just don't read a lot.

I don't read a lot of fiction. Yeah. Sermons, do you listen to a lot of like, is that one of the ways that you learned how to be a better preacher?

Listen to other sermons? No, I wish I would do more. That's kind of one of those things. Like I always tell myself

I'm going to listen to a sermon or two this week and I never actually do. Nice. So I need to listen to more.

I have certainly listened to sermons. Like when you do, like what do you, Piper, Keller, like what do you go to?

Maybe. Sometimes I'll intentionally find somebody that I won't say that I've never heard of, but that's not

Piper, Keller, John MacArthur, one of those heavy hitters. You know what I mean? Sure. Yeah.

So good. Not a real, not something that I say I practice enough to be able to give you a solid answer.

Sure. For those who are listening, I think if you've never been through like formal preaching training, there is some of that that you can still have access to that's not a part of a seminary.

Simeon Trust. Yeah. I've done, I've actually, yeah. You did a Simeon Trust workshop? I did. Helpful? Yeah. You had, by this point,

I think come to understand a lot of the stuff that they were teaching. It's probably just reinforcing. Right, right. Yeah. But so if you haven't done a

Simeon Trust workshop and you're like, I think I could tighten up and be a better expositional preacher, but I don't want to go to seminary in order to do that, which by the way, you're probably not going to get much seminary, or I'm not going to be a part of an internship where they're going to help me grow there.

Go find a Simeon Trust workshop. I mean, they're everywhere these days. They're all over the country. So go, go check them out.

They're very helpful. So one thing that was helpful for me going back to some books, I wouldn't say that this was a book that just rocked my world and was extremely helpful in its entirety, but the book by Dever and Gilbert Preach.

Yeah. When I came to the end of that book, and there was a manuscript from each of them from a sermon that they had written, or of a sermon that they had written,

I read them and thought, hey, I can do this. You know what I mean? So it wasn't obvious that they had worked and that they had done their due diligence to think through and pray through these things and study hard.

It was obvious that they had done that. You know what I mean? But it seemed so attainable too. It wasn't like, you know, it didn't seem so artful or so crazy that even somebody like me could do it.

I read it. I'm like, hey, yeah, that makes sense. I think we could do that. That's good, man. And you got to even be careful.

Some of the, what you called heavy hitters, like let's take Piper, for example. Homiletically, Piper is kind of a mess, but he has...

So you say. And I'll say it again. Not bad, but like you put his sermon, if you were to lay his sermon out on a table, it would almost be like a skeleton.

But what he does, he does so fantastically well that he's an amazing preacher.

But 99 out of a hundred guys, if they try to preach the same, if they take the same manuscript that Piper has to preach it, it's going to be a disaster.

Yeah. Same thing with John MacArthur or Tim Keller.

I think for a lot of guys, what they need to do is make sure that they're just kind of dipping their toe and listen to H .B. Charles, listen to local guys in your area who nobody's ever heard of, and just try to sample and notice what their strengths and weaknesses are.

I don't think Tim Keller should ever be an example of how to demonstrate exegesis in a sermon.

He essentially doesn't do it. I don't know if he thought that people in Manhattan don't need to see where things come from in the

Bible, but he doesn't do it. But nobody does presuppositional preaching as well as Tim Keller.

Nobody gets ahead of people's objections and nobody makes a beeline to the cross like Tim Keller. In contrast, you have someone over here like Piper who he will spend 20 minutes trying to prove exactly how he got to this point.

But he's so light on application. We could add in some other critiques.

And then someone like the brother who discipled me, Mark Dever, he actually - Not just Mark?

Mark Dever, or Mike Devers, as he is known by many people that I speak to. He does a lot of those things well, but he has his areas of weakness.

Sample, just like anytime you're trying to learn an art and a science, you need to try to learn from as many people as possible and take the best of what they offer and put them together.

That's not for you. No, it makes sense though. Well, it's what I do. It's what I do. I'm still trying to learn and grow.

And yeah, we'll be till the day I die, just like you, brother. Okay, so shifting from that, let's talk about the makeup of your church for a minute.

Do you guys have elders? We do. We have myself and then one lay elder who is also my younger brother.

Ooh. Yeah. Is that weird? No. I mean, maybe it is weird and I just can't perceive it that way.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's fine. Yeah. And essentially you discipled him to the point where he was ready to be an elder.

Yeah. Was it weird for the church voting on him at all to be an elder? Was there any pressure like, oh, this is Dylan's brother.

We got to vote yes. I don't think so. He was the type where it was easy because he was already just loving people well, already even teaching a little bit in certain capacities.

And he's grown a lot too and the church has been as gracious to him as they had been to me and allowed him to kind of learn in some ways on the fly, if you will.

Yeah. But we didn't really have a lot of other options and he was kind of fitting that mold already.

So there was nothing about it that appeared like, oh, we're bringing this young guy or the younger brother of the pastor. Yeah. I think he had already kind of proved himself in a lot of ways, so.

And it's honestly really healthy. I think it demonstrates a level of health and maturity in that church because more churches would do well to let young guys come in and chew on the furniture a little bit and make some mistakes and learn along the way.

So many times, so many churches just want guys who are polished, professional. They've been trained.

They've been doing it for 30 years. But if that's the only type of pastor you hire, how are new pastors going to learn to do the job?

Now that said, I'm hoping and praying that the Lord will bring an older gentleman into the church just to kind of have that balance, you know, so.

Yeah, I think your dad was an elder. He was. Yeah. And he might be an elder again. Yeah. And he's older. He certainly looks older.

He is older than me. He's my dad. Yeah. Wait, what? Yeah. How much?

A little bit. Enough. But actually barely. Barely enough. And you're also discipling another young man,

OCL. Yeah. And you're pushing him in a good way to, and he aspires to be an elder.

Yes. Last we talked about that. Yeah. So, and how do you spell his name? O -C -L.

That's right. Okay. Or O -C -S -E -A -L. A lot of people say O -C -L. That's the correct spelling, but people call him

OCL. You think he's going to be blown away that he's getting a little bit of a shout out? I think he's going to hate it.

I don't know. He'll probably like it. And... He'll probably be the only one watching. Right.

And that's just because we told him, Hey, you said your name. Hey, tell all your relatives you're famous now. But that brother is so encouraging because he intentionally chose to join his family to your church when he could have been in other more established, healthier churches where he maybe could have taken an easier path.

But for the sake of the glory of God being manifested in your church, he chose to go to the church where, honestly, brother, the

Lord is using the foolishness of the world. Yeah. You know, the wisdom of God to shame the foolishness of the world.

Yeah. It was a big move for him and a hard decision and a very prayerful decision, of course, but super thankful to the

Lord for bringing him and his wife. And they now have a baby. Oh, and is the baby in elder training? It is.

And it's a woman. So no. So no. What's a young woman called? A baby girl.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a girl. Wow. This is going super great. I think Rick Warren's denomination by the time she's old enough to maybe be a pastor, there'll be maybe an opening for her if she still wants to do that.

And hopefully they're not. As of the time of this recording, he does not have a denomination, but I would be super surprised if that's not coming down the pipeline.

Church discipline. You guys practice it? Yeah, we haven't.

Why do you say that so reluctantly? We do have - I'm trying to think of if there's been circumstances where we've actually had to practice it.

Well, it's formative and corrective. So you're constantly doing the formative aspect. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. You're right. Yeah.

You haven't had to excommunicate anybody? So it's kind of weird. When I became the pastor, we did not have constitution bylaws, which, by the way, you have to have to be a church, but we didn't have any of those things.

Is that you mean in the state of Alabama? Yeah. So when I became the pastor, we established and wrote and adopted some of those,

I should say, with some slight editing. And we had some members of the church who were members, and everybody knew they were members, that had no opportunity to hear and learn those things in our practices, and they never came back.

So we did excommunicate them, and we voted on removing them from membership, but there was a lot less conversation with that actual individual because by that time, they were so far gone, and they didn't know kind of the criteria we were using.

So yeah, it was a little bit odd there. It was a shaky first venture out into the world of church discipline. Yeah. But I mean, it's -

But now if something happened, we would - Matthew 18, 1 Corinthians 5. It's really a testament to how far the

Lord has brought the church because there was a time when you had an active member of the church rob a bank, and you guys didn't do anything church discipline -

I feel like Jim, I should just look at the camera. Jim from the office. Yeah.

That reference is dated now, by the way. That's okay. I don't care. That did happen. Yes. Was there a question in there?

Yeah. I mean, first of all - We didn't - First of all, what? Second of all, how? You guys, you know, you have this guy.

He's a member of your church. He goes, and he robs a bank, and - He actually attempted a second one.

That's when he got in trouble. So he accomplished the first one. Yeah. And just nothing.

Because at that time, you were under the conviction. Like, yeah, church discipline. It's biblical. I think it was almost so laughable for most people because we didn't practice church membership the right way.

Not meaningful. Meaningful, correct. So the idea of a guy robbing a bank, and he was a young guy, it just was like, well, obviously he's not a member anymore.

He can't be a member of our church or rob banks. So I don't know that anything was really done. I think I'm sure there were some people that were saddened and burdened for him that maybe reached out to him in some capacity.

But as far as what the church did formally with that circumstance, nothing. Yeah, nothing. And when

I think about your development on the trajectory of ministry, I view that as one of several episodes that caused a sort of condensation of convictions.

That may sound stupid because I just thought of it. Okay. But, you know, things happen, and all of a sudden you start feeling the pinch.

This thing that you cared about, knew about, now it starts to actually matter more to you.

And you, I think, had several of those instances where finally... It's funny because when you were talking about the lead -up to you becoming a senior pastor, it wasn't just practically,

I'm convinced that we need a full -time guy. Part of it was also that you were coming under philosophy of ministry convictions that you really wanted to see in the church, and they weren't happening.

It was very easy to spot a lot of things that I knew should be happening that were not happening, or that could be done better than they were.

I think you were in a situation that... I wish the

Nine Marks guys would do an episode on this or a journal series on this. A situation that a lot of guys find themselves in where they're an assistant or an associate pastor serving under a senior pastor where they're not aligned convictionally, and they don't really know what to do with that.

Some guys, based on their temperament and personality, are gonna just be passive and try to ride it out maybe until the next guy or until they get a different job.

Some guys are gonna rip and roar and maybe try to reform the church, and a lot of people are gonna get hurt in the church.

As the second in command, is that what you mean? Yeah, as the associate pastor, they're coming to these convictions. Instead of handling them wisely, they're just gonna be like, and another thing, you're not doing this.

And then there's other guys. This is probably the category that you were in. They'll sort of wisely, patiently try to be like, well, what about this?

I think that is the position we were in, all by the Lord's grace, because I don't know that I would have said, hey,

I'm gonna slowly and methodically try to suggest these things and see what happens. I think the Lord just used maybe my temperament, other individuals at the church who were strong in their convictions in a similar way as me.

So I think we were kind of the tail very kindly and slowly wagging the dog, you know what

I mean, and kind of leading in that right direction in the way you just kind of modeled it. You know, like, maybe we should try this, but I don't know that I was doing that so much intentionally.

Yeah, just as things would come up, you notice, oh, I have these convictions about this. I think this is biblical, and you would try to influence.

Yeah, I think I tried to see those things implemented intentionally, but I don't think I was doing it -

It wasn't a master plan. Carefully as I did do it intentionally, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. In fact,

I think one time you mentioned to me like, hey, I think you're gonna be kind of capped by that, you know, leadership. You can't always be trying to kind of lead from below here.

And I didn't know, I don't know that I had realized that's what even was happening until you said it that way. But looking back,

I think that there was me and another individual, my dad, who was an elder at the time.

I think we were more convinced of certain things, and we kind of carefully led in that direction.

And the lead guy went along with that even happily in a lot of ways, but that conviction didn't carry over into actual practice, you know what

I mean? So like it was like, yeah, that makes perfect sense. Whoever's doing - But we didn't actually do any of it, you know? Right, and not only practice, but conviction.

Like whoever is the main teaching pastor in the church, I understand that not all churches function exactly like this, but most churches will have a main teaching or preaching pastor.

Whatever the church is doing needs to be communicated convictionally through the pulpit.

The way he's ministering. Yeah, that's right. You don't want a guy to be - You don't want the main teaching pastor to be like, oh yeah, that is a good idea.

Sure, we can do that. No, you want him to be sort of setting the vision, setting the tone. Yeah, I can illustrate that even with like, we always intended to have like a family type of worship environment.

So we have the youngest of kids might go into something because they might just be overly disruptive in a service, but really all the other kids, five, six and older are in our services.

And that was something that all the leadership, all the elders paid and otherwise we all agreed like, yeah, that's kind of the model we want to follow.

Well, as soon as this individual went to another church, it's kind of right into the program -driven style of things, you know?

So I'm sure that was never his intention, but that's what ended up happening. He kind of proved by practice that he didn't actually believe as strongly in what we had been doing for years, yeah.

Yeah, and you know, honestly, it's not the best way to serve that brother.

If the main teaching pastor of the church, the senior pastor, the lead pastor, whatever you want to call him, doesn't have these convictions, as a number two guy, you don't want to be in a position where you're perpetually, you know, for him, it's like death by a thousand cuts.

You know, you want to have elders who are on board with your vision, right?

That doesn't mean that they don't correct you. It doesn't mean that they don't help shape the vision of the church in any way. But you don't want to constantly be working at cross -purposes with your other elders.

If that's happening, somebody should probably make a decision to move on. And oftentimes, a lot of controversy takes place in churches because people don't want to be the one to go.

They don't want to be the one to move on, for good, bad, or indifferent reasons. So do you have any advice that you would give to someone?

I mean, you were in that role for a few years. Any advice to someone who may be listening to this or watching it who's in that role?

They're the number two. They have some convictions. They're trying to slowly bring about change, but they're frustrated or they're discouraged.

I don't know that I do. And I mean, I can speak from personal experience, but I had other people around me who

I loved and valued very much who offered a lot of wisdom, who I think at that time would have probably said, hey, maybe you should just leave.

You know what I mean? And I didn't. And I don't know. I think the Lord has used that, and we have come to the point where we are now.

Yeah. But I think at that time, even just maybe some practical wisdom might have just told us to step on, to move on.

So I don't know if I can offer advice. I guess just be careful, and maybe

I think I would have always, and I still do assume the best in that individual.

So maybe just assume the best. Assume the best of others, think the worst of yourself. Yeah. I mean, just know that, certainly there's guys that are just all in it for the wrong reasons, and they have no leadership qualities whatsoever, and you might should know and assume the worst.

But more often than not, they're probably doing what they think they should be doing. So just be careful and gracious towards them. Amen, brother.

That's good. For the members of your church, do you think their subconscious, they are self -conscious of, do you think they think about the fact like, oh, this is a small church?

Because I've found, weirdly, as our church has gotten only a little bit bigger, that -

It's a lot bigger than it was when you got here. True. Yeah. Relatively speaking, we went from 17, now we have 92 members.

But it was weird to see, I think some people really loved the idea of being a small church.

They almost kind of took pride in it. Have you experienced any of that? Yeah. We have had different seasons where we have felt, maybe not me as much, but I've observed kind of people rallying around a similar feeling about something.

So, you know, being locked out of a church building and gathering in the grass kind of does something to kind of create this camaraderie.

You know, like we were in this together, you know? Stepping out of that and meeting in a park for several months, or I don't know, a long time, and kind of being in the church without a building intentionally going.

I mean, we kind of rallied around that whole, you know, persona or what have you.

So like, there's been different seasons where we've kind of been this different little pocket of something weird. You know what

I mean? So we're finally at a time, 10 years down the road, where we don't mention and refer back to the time we were locked out of the church anymore.

We don't have to kind of liken back to that. And there hasn't been, I mean, we're at 30. We've almost consistently had the same number of members we have today, like almost this whole 10 -year span.

It's just a very different group of people now. There's a lot of people that are still there, you know, probably like 50 -50.

50 % have probably been here since day one. The others are kind of new people. But we're kind of not so much in the whole, we wanna be smaller, we love the smaller, this is just who we are.

But there is still that really familial kind of aspect of the small church environment, yeah.

Celebrity pastor culture, it's real. It's unavoidable. It's in the air we breathe.

Go on, what were you gonna say? Go ahead and say what you're gonna say. I think a lot of guys romantically love the idea of like,

I just wanna pastor this church. I don't care if anybody knows my name. You know, give me a marked gravestone or don't.

I just wanna be faithful. I'll get my reward on the last day. But in the celebrity culture that we live in, which it's in the church too, it's difficult to not sometimes see what's happening with other churches, with other pastors.

They're going to conferences or they're writing books or their social media account is blah, blah, blah. And to not have some sense of like,

I want that for myself or am I doing a good enough job if I'm not getting any of that? Do you ever experience any of that?

I've never known it. Yeah, you're speaking of the person who's actually speaking at the conferences and writing the books, right?

No, I'm asking if you ever experienced any sort of envy or self -doubt because you look at that.

I've never wanted to be the person that's known or recognized in any capacity. And I hope that's for the right reasons.

Like, I just don't care. Why did you beg me to do this? Yeah, that's definitely what happened. This might sound silly.

I'm almost more envious of the guys that get to go to the conferences and have a budget to even buy a plane ticket. So if you're watching and you want to donate.

That's right. So no, I never have. Now I have recognized things and people and recognize the bad attitude in myself where I might perceive that growth is happening for a certain church or a certain ministry or a certain individual because of their status.

And then I just kind of wonder like, is that sincere? Which is a sinful heart on my part, for sure.

Could be. I've never desired that for myself at all. I mean,

I legitimately hope that the Lord will grow Mosaic Church more for us to be a good presence in that community and for us to not have to worry about self -sustaining.

Otherwise, as long as we can keep on preaching the word and doing everything that we need to be doing, do the things that make a local church a local church, then

I'm satisfied. 30 or 100 or more, you know. Would you say that that's the biggest source of stress in your life?

The financial, pastorally speaking, being self -sufficient financially?

Yeah, we are self -sufficient financially, but just barely. Right, that's what I mean. So it's almost worse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I think so, but not because, not even really the financial aspect of it.

I mean, we have this building that we can use, but it's still, you know, we're signing like one year leases because we don't know if we're going to be able to move beyond that and do any longer.

I have no idea. If the guy says, hey, I sold the property, I have no idea what we're going to do beyond this. You know what

I mean? So there's some stresses associated with that. So it'd be nice for you to get a raise. Yeah, yeah.

We have a more permanent situation now than we ever have as far as like where we're going to meet, what it's going to look like, the structure, but it's still not permanent.

I mean, any of it could just end at any time. So yeah, that instability there is kind of a, I really don't stress about it a lot, but at times

I'll think about it, you know. Yeah, yeah. Have you ever felt like quitting?

Yeah, I never understood sadness and depression until I became a full -time pastor.

Really? Yeah. How come? I don't know. I just, I think the Lord has just been kind to me and I've never really had a lot of things to worry about and I've never been one that's,

I'm just, I don't think I'm a very dramatic person, you know? So one of the most helpful things for me pastorally, having become a full -time pastor, is having short, very, very short bouts of what

I think is depression. And it's just helped me to look at people who struggle with that each and every day in a much different light.

So I... Before, would you have been more like... I would have just been like, get over it, you big idiot. And just, you know, you're driving around in a fancy car and eating plenty of food.

Why are you depressed? You know what I'm saying? So, but having moments a day or two at tops of just unexplainable sadness.

Yeah. Yeah, it's just been... What do you think leads to that? I have, I don't know.

Yeah. I know where it starts for me personally. A lot of times it's probably just doubt whether or not

I should be doing the things that I'm doing. You know, I feel sometimes I'll feel fraudulent. You know what I mean?

Like... Imposter syndrome. Yeah, like why, you know, or I'll feel guilty about wasting resource.

Why are they giving me, even if I should be paid more, why are they giving me anything to do this?

Because I'm a big bum, I'm a loser. I'm a big dummy, McDumb face. Yeah. So, I have spent more time saddened by those types of things and just kind of confused and laying around.

Then I don't know that I've ever been depressed at all in any capacity before that, yeah. And there's been probably three or four times where it's happened in the past three years or so.

And do you typically reach out for help? I've gotten better at that. Okay. Yeah, at first, I didn't even know it was happening.

I just, it was completely new. You're like, oh, it's hard to get out of bed. Why do I hate everything, the idea of everything?

So now I think one time I went to lunch with you and several other men,

I think all of which are pastors around town. And I was in that moment or right out of it.

And I just shared it. And everybody's like, yeah, I've been there. And there was something very comforting about that to know that, yeah,

I'm not the only one that feels that way. Have you ever, how close have you come to quitting?

I live across the street from my dad, who for most of this time has been an elder, who is not an elder now.

And I've been at the point of saying, Aria, I'm going to walk across the street and talk to dad and tell him that I'm done.

And sometimes those are because of the depression or the sadness. Sometimes it's because I'm just so frustrated and sinful and whatever.

But yeah, I've never done it. I've never gone over there. And there's probably been like twice where I've, and I don't even,

I wouldn't even say it was an empty threat. I think I meant it even. Did Aria talk you off the edge of the cliff?

There's times where she's, her approaches can be different from day to day, depending on how I'm acting.

So sometimes she's very loving and kind. And then at some point she'll just say like, Hey, this is enough. And that's been actually the most helpful thing for me is when she could just say,

Hey, shut up, that's enough. You know what I'm saying? And then other times, you know, I don't remember all of the circumstances, but she might just be kind of quiet and let me have a moment and then it just passes.

But the last time that this happened was the time she got frustrated and that helped. She got frustrated with you?

Yeah, I mean, she's very kind, very generous, very patient, but then enough was enough. You know, the time before that though, she sat me down and opened the

Bible and I don't even remember what she read to me. And I remember just sitting there, like looking at the floor and crying and thinking, yeah, that's helpful.

And then we just kind of moved out of it. So that's huge, brother. The wife that you were married to, who was at once unregenerate is now one of the main things that the

Lord uses to strengthen you in your moments of weakness. Yeah, and probably to be honest, one of the biggest discouragements from time to time.

It's just the nature of our marriage, but. Yeah. But I love her very much.

Dude, watching her be a mom to all those kids and put up with you is one of the few evidences that God is real.

Lots of kids. Watching her grow in Christ as well, man. That's one of the benefits of being embedded somewhere with people for a long time, even though we're not members of the same church.

Yeah. Seeing that, you get to really watch the slow work of sanctification because that's what it is, right?

The Lord uses all these illustrations from agriculture to talk about the kingdom of God, and it's just a very slow, painful, is anything happening here process.

Then you look up one day after knowing someone for almost 20 years, and you're like, oh, wow, look what the Lord's done.

Yeah. Now I've not experienced any of that. I can certainly look at you and say the same thing. Whatever you're about to say is a lie. I've not experienced any of that slow growth.

I'm going from one massive surge of sanctification to the next. If you say so.

Amen. Sleep.

You don't typically struggle to sleep. I think also - That's another thing that's kind of new to this. Yeah. You think it's just due to the stresses of shepherding, what you were talking about earlier, wake up in the middle of the night, but also trouble falling asleep.

When your job is working in industrial plants and making sure the fire extinguishers are up to date, that doesn't keep you up at night.

No. It shouldn't, right? It shouldn't. You got your paychecks doing well, your benefits are taken care of, but when there's a couple in your church that seems like they are careening off of the cliff, and you've done everything you can possibly do to stop it, and it looks like it's not going to work, and then you're doing your best to distract yourself and not go crazy thinking about it.

You're trying to sit there and veg out and watch TV or whatever, but then your head hits the pillow. That's all you think about.

And that's all you can think about. At first, it was more of a matter of, what am I supposed to do all day?

I used to wake up and go to work at 7 and get off at 4, so part of me was just ingrained with this idea that I have to be starting my workload, whatever that is, at a certain time.

Sure. I used to literally just stress out about, what am I going to do tomorrow, and I need to wake up early and at a certain time and have a certain set schedule.

I was this pastor and doing something. So that's changed. I just realized that. So now you just do nothing and feel guilt -free.

That's right. I feel guilt -free. I'm just happy to cash them checks, baby. Now it is, and it was some of this too, but now

I do. I really do just wake up thinking about people and how I've lacked in my pastoring or what they're going through, like you said.

It'll just kind of weigh heavy on me. Or the sermon that you haven't figured out for the week. Yeah, yeah. A weird one is

I used to really think and dwell and stress and pray over what to do with the word, right?

And I would wake up and be like, oh Lord, what am I going to do? Is that the right direction? Is that the right point of the text that I'm going to preach on Sunday?

And then there was this weird moment where I guess I've just done it enough where I didn't have the same level of stress about it, right?

Then I started feeling stressed or at least a little worried about that. I'm not prioritizing this as much.

Is this not as important to me as it used to be? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it's just that practice makes it a little more comfortable, if not even better.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, but you never want to get too comfortable. No. Which is why

I think why I still write a full manuscript. I was thinking about that last night. So you write a full manuscript every week?

So I left the jail and I don't take anything in there except for just the sparsest of notes. Just so our viewers know, you and I alternate going in on Monday nights preaching in the jail.

Less you lately, right? Less me lately. True enough, bro. Call me out. Yes, yes.

So I've been going in there and I don't know that I've ever taught or preached anything in there that I haven't previously taught or preached to the church.

I'm pretty sure I'm always just kind of reusing, but I've pretty much just gotten to the point where I write a point or two down in the margins of the

Bible that I take in. Yeah. And then I just kind of extemporaneously. Extemporaneously. Yeah, yeah. That word's hard to say.

It is. If you would have gone to seminary - I thought I said it right, but I must have just fumbled. It's the mic. Extraterrestrially. It's the mic. So I was thinking all the way home like, man,

I feel freer with what I'm doing there, frankly, than I do with the full manuscript. But my fear about going away from the manuscript is that I'm just not going to work as hard in the week of trying to prepare and I'm not going to write myself clear and I'm not going to think as well about stuff.

You know what I mean? So - Have you tried manuscripting and then reducing like paragraphs down to bullets or anything like that? I've done a little bit.

I did a little bit of that this past Sunday, actually. I've probably done that two times that I could think of. How does it go? And in those times where I hit those bullets,

I think I more or less do feel that freedom a little bit more, but I'm still nervous about jumping full into that.

You should probably like tell some of the people in your congregation that you trust to give you good feedback that that's what you're doing and be like, hey, let me know.

And ask for it. Yeah. What do you think? Is this working or is it? Yeah. But even though I've gotten more comfortable, to bring that full circle, even though I've gotten more comfortable with, you know, preaching,

I think, and the idea of what I'm doing week in and week out, so I'm not waking up stressed out about that.

You know, I'm still like, I don't want to step away from that hard preparation work of writing everything out and everything because I'm afraid

I'll just get lazy. For sure. Yeah. Spiritual warfare. Is it real?

According to Frank Peretti. Yes. I wonder if that also has to do to some extent with your depression, you know, because I mean, listen, man, you're out here fighting for your life.

You're trying to lead people to Christ. You're trying to keep people in the flock. You know, you're doing everything that a pastor does, and Satan hates that.

He doesn't want you to be. He's out there rah, rah, rah, like cheerleading these terrible carnal pastors who are really just, you know, hucksters in disguise.

But a faithful pastor, even of a small church, is a real threat to his agenda. Yeah. I'd be surprised if,

I mean, just have you thought much about that? Probably not as much as I should. Well, yeah, you should do better.

If only I had paper, I'd make a note for myself. Do you want a piece of paper? I can get you one. I don't have a pen.

You'll have to supply your own pen. Maybe you can use the quill from your sermon writing stuff.

We are like -minded. In certain things. I think in most things. Would you not agree?

Probably. Okay. You're just trying to mess with me. Let's just see where this goes.

Okay. All right. We are like -minded. We are best friends.

Close. You have to say it in front of everybody. Should I look in the camera again? Yeah. And you're like seven minutes down the road.

Why aren't we just one church? Because I keep telling you no. Right? I say keep.

I've said it a couple of times at least. No, but I've floated the idea before of us combining churches, and you've come back every time and said, you smell funny.

Yeah. There's a little bit of, to go back to the story earlier, kind of earlier in our relationship, where you came back from Iraq or wherever you were, kind of hot and heavy with the reform things.

There's a little bit of residual drama associated with that. All these years later. Yeah. Yeah. It's much better.

But we do have members of our church today that would have been on the receiving end of some of that drama back then.

And it'd just be hard for them. I don't think that's as much of a problem as it would have been even just a couple years ago. So your main reason for rejecting me -

I don't like you. You don't? Yeah. No, I think that there's... I think that I'm more solidified in this understanding now than I would have been before we moved out into the area we're at.

But now I actually do see a need in that particular geographical area. So if that building collapsed tomorrow and we had nowhere else to meet in the kind of closer to Priceville, Alabama area,

I don't really know what we would do. Maybe we would look for a sister church here in Decatur at that time. And I can't say that with any absoluteness, but that might be something.

Now, I just feel very strategic. I think the Lord put us there. And I'm not the type of person that really over spiritualizes a lot of things, even though I know he's providential and sovereign over all things.

But there is people even around us that would say like, hey, have you thought about the Priceville area? And one of our members said, maybe we should look towards Priceville.

And I never considered that whatsoever. And then we drove past this building and here we are, being there for a year now.

So I just think we want to be there. It's like a mile away. I actually live in Priceville now. That's right. I want to be clear.

I think maybe three times you and I had that conversation. Every offer was genuine.

And it wasn't just for you to like shut down your church and come be members at our church. It was like merging and we would bring you on staff or whatever the case.

Yeah. I remember telling Aria like, hey, this is odd and encouraging because I think he means it, first of all.

And it's flattering to know that he would even offer something of that sort. Yeah. But I still said no. You still said no.

But I'll tell you at least one of the times that I asked you, there's a little bit of sneaky squirrel stuff happening there.

It was me trying to strategically, but maybe covertly get you to see your own commitment.

You know? Well, it was just kind of like, I mean, I was holding a pretty shiny apple out in front of you.

You know, this would be a really easy thing. And I think you were at like a low moment when this happened. This was early when you first came back to Decatur?

Is that what you're thinking? No, no. This is one of the times when you were having a pretty rough season at Mosaic. And, you know, you were struggling.

And I was like, well, you know, what about this? And I meant it. And I would have, you know, I think I had suggested it to you before.

But this time it was more like, it was almost like I was saying it because there's something in you considering that and going, you know, no,

I think God wants me here. Yeah. And I think the Lord used that. From my perspective, it seemed like the Lord used that to really solidify your commitment to what you're doing.

I think probably every time, I don't know that I remember that time specifically. But I remember actually...

Probably. Yeah. I remember when you decided you were coming back to Decatur and this was about a merger thing.

Yeah. And I was in one of those low points at Mosaic, you know, at that time. And you said, hey, you wrote something to the effect of in an email,

I don't know that I can come back and not foresee myself doing this alongside, you know, you and some other people. And I was like, let's go, you know?

And I think I probably even shared with you, I was excited about that idea. And within a couple of days, I was like, I'm not as excited about that.

And I don't know why it was. I mean, I do know why, but it was because I just would look at our people and think even

I wasn't the lead pastor at that time. We didn't even know we were doing a lot of ways, but I would think like, well, where would these people go? Because they would come, you know?

And maybe they would even stay here at that time. They would have, but I was kind of seeing that's probably not the greatest thing without some change.

And that's what makes you such a faithful pastor, brother. I know you didn't come on here for me to just, you know, compliment you to death, but I'll encourage you.

You know, one of the pastors are constantly growing in their capacity, but one of the things you can't grow, you can't train this in someone is a love for the sheep.

You know what I'm saying? Like you love your sheep. It reminds me of Grant Miller. Actually, that's what I was thinking of just now. And he was a specific example to me, whether he would know it or not.

Actually, yes, he should, because I think we went to breakfast one time and I said, we sat down, he goes, so are you coming to sixth?

I said, no, man. I just wanted to tell you that I think the Lord has used you to kind of show me that I can remain committed here.

Yeah. Oh, okay, cool. Well, you know, it's funny is I had the same conversation with Grant when he reached out to me about everything that, so for our viewers who may not know, the church that I pastor is a church revitalization, and it was started by another brother who grew up in this church.

His name is Grant Miller. And, you know, he, before we got seriously involved, he reached out to me, kind of generally painted me the picture of this very unhealthy church and was like, you know, my family is really struggling.

What do you think we should do? And I was like, dude, go find a healthy church. And nine times out of 10, that's the right answer, right?

Like, get your family out of this really unhealthy church, get them into a healthy church, be discipled, heal, all this stuff.

You know, Grant's response to me was, I hear you and on paper, that's right. But I just love these people so much.

I just, I just cannot leave them. Yeah. You know, which is why he's a great pastor. Yeah. Hey, this is, this might seem a little bit out of left field, but it's pretty important to me.

Did I tell you about my friend who is a starving artist? Do I want to hear? Well, he was a painter. He couldn't make any money.

I didn't tell you about him. Go ahead. He got into sculpting. He made six figures. Yeah. I get it.

Isn't that crazy? That's crazy. Hey. That's not even written down. How do you come up with this stuff? I just think of him on the spot.

Okay. Yeah. What? You're like Alexa. Hey, Alexa, tell me a horrible joke. I'm like Alexis?

Yeah. What a horrible joke you say? That's right. Did I ever tell you about my friend? She, she only eats plants.

You don't have any friends. You've never heard of herbivores? Okay. I laugh way too much.

What are you reading right now? Nothing. I am talking with you. Okay. You can do jokes too.

Authority by Jonathan Lehman. How is it? It's good. I'm about nearly half. It's very good.

I picked up a book at the last HCC from you. The Finding the Right Hills to Die On. Oh, by Gavin Orland.

Theological Triage. Which I'm finding helpful right now for some particular reasons in our church. So that's been good. So you would recommend?

I would. You went to seminary, so you don't have to. That's right. All these guys did.

I'm so thankful for them. I have a bad habit of reading so many books at one time.

Yeah. That I can't tell you all the rest of them. Do you have a system in place or you just kind of get bored with one? I normally will have a biography type book at least that I'm reading.

And then something that I might find to be more specifically helpful with what's going on in the church. And then maybe just some random stuff that just seems interesting.

If that's a system, then sure. So those are the two books you're reading right now? Those are the ones that I've read most recently.

I have other things that I'm reading, but those are the ones I keep picking up. I think I saw on your desk last time I was snooping around in your office.

You sent me an email, which we won't talk about on the... What email? I don't remember sending you an email. Oh no, I sent myself an email.

That's what it was. You sent yourself an email? I did. That's weird. When you were in my office. Okay. You are slowly working through Christopher Watkins' Biblical Critical Theory.

Yeah. Most of what I have read thus far, I read quite a while ago. I haven't picked that one up in a while.

Do you just leave the book on the desk because if it's there, you know you're going to... Just in case Sean DeMars wanders into my office, after he's done writing an email to me from me, he can see that I'm reading that book.

Yeah. Nice. Right now you are preaching through the life of Joseph. Yeah, how'd you know?

And yeah, I just... I just feel it. Did you have a dream? Oh, there we go.

A little Joseph joke. Okay. Hey, but just so you know, on my show, I do the jokes. Okay, buddy. Yeah. Favorite...

Maybe you can say, I don't believe in that. Favorite book of the Bible? Oh, I don't know. I would have said

Acts when I was 18 years old. Acts, like what you chop a tree with? Acts of the Apostles, the book of Acts.

Today I have no idea. I have found that as I'm preaching through a book of the Bible, I find it to be my favorite in that moment.

Yeah. Colossians kind of holds a special place in my heart because when we reversed roles before I became the lead pastor and I started preaching three weeks a month, that's the book we started.

I got to start... And actually, providentially, he didn't preach any of those sermons through Colossians for unfortunate circumstances.

But I got to preach the whole book beginning to end, which was something I had never done before. And that was the first time. So yeah, that one was kind of cool.

Wow. A book that you are afraid to preach? Revelation. Yeah. Revelations?

No, Revelation. What are you? Premill? Aumill? Postmill? I have no idea whatsoever. Millmill? Okay. What are you?

I'm a pan mill. Okay. It's all gonna pan out. Yeah. That's about how I feel.

What are you? But, you know, that's one topic that I tell myself often. I need to know what

I think about this a little bit more. Wednesday nights at Sixth Avenue, Russell Berger teaching through the book of Revelation, I've heard.

What does he believe? He's a partial preterist. You should just interview him, I guess. We already did.

I wish we would have talked about this. So that's the book you're afraid to preach.

I'm afraid of preaching. No, I'd be afraid to preach probably a lot of them, but that one just came to mind. And funny enough... Well, I'll be the judge of that.

Okay. Well, yeah, you tell the jokes, right? So this won't be funny. This won't be funny. But oddly enough, when

I became the pastor again, I had one guy tell me like, I don't remember who it was, but I remember him saying like, hey, let's not be afraid to try something a little bit out of the box, like Revelations or something like that.

Yeah. And like when he said that, I just thought, no, I don't want to do that. And here we are a few years later, I still don't want to do it.

Do you try to go back and forth between Old and New Testament? Yeah, more or less. Yeah. So we've done several books by now.

We've taken some breaks like halfway through or so, certain longer books and done kind of different things.

Yeah. Yeah. Easter play. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I wear the bunny outfit and all that.

There's a zip line in. That's right. Although it's a pretty low ceiling. It's a very low ceiling. Yeah. It's literally a mobile home.

You guys have a bookstall. Yeah. You put in a bookstall. What books do you have in the bookstall right now? We have a couple of the little

Nine Marks hard book covers like that. I think Conversion and Church Membership. Very good.

I have Knowing God by Packer. We have that out. The Easiest Way to Change the

World, I think is that what it's called? Yeah, about hospitality. Yeah. That one's been good. The Twelve Ways Your Phone is

Changing You. Tony Reinke, fantastic. Sold a lot of those. What book do you find yourself giving away most often?

I don't know. It just depends on the year. Yeah, I think so. And I'll find books in random places.

I do own a bookstore too, my wife and I. So we'll just stumble across stuff. And a lot of times the best books we don't try to sell at the store, they end up in my office on my shelf or I end up giving them away or something of that sort.

So it just depends on the day what I have to give away, I guess. That's good, man. Favorite candy?

I'm a traditionalist when it comes to sweets or snacks. So I'll... Reese's cup?

Yeah. Reese's? Reese's? I'm not sure. Judges? Reese's cup?

I was entirely wrong. Now, he said that with confidence. He probably doesn't know. Again, traditional.

So either the small little cup or the big cup, but I don't want anything else in it. I don't want the double -sized, you know, none of that nonsense.

You don't want the big cup Reese's? No. By big cup, I mean like the thick ones or what have you. No, I know what you mean.

Nah. Why would I? You're not going to do... Twix. I've been loving some Twix. Have you tried their salted caramel

Twix? I'm sure it's delicious, but I want the regular one, yeah. Like an Oreo? If you give me that double -stuffed nonsense,

I'm going to eat it, but I'm going to prefer the other one. I won't be happy about it while I eat a whole sleeve. I think

Luke's raising his hand about something, so maybe he's with me about this. So would you eat the Oreo thins? Oh, no.

No, it's got to be traditional Oreos. I went to a party at a church member's house the other day, like a little fall get -together, and they had those giant square marshmallows that are supposed to fit on the cracker for the s'more like better, you know.

And you're like, no, give me a regular marshmallow. Yeah. You want to eat just a plain Hershey's bar? Hershey's with almonds, actually.

So, all right. But I don't want things getting crazy. You're so progressive. Living outside the box.

So throw a few nuts in there, but let's not get too crazy. That's right. Okay. That's right. Favorite book of all time?

Like Desert Island, like I get one Christian book. It could be any book, but I'm assuming - I think the one book that I've read more than one time has been like The Hobbit, probably.

Oh. Yeah. That is a book you should do the audio loop. Yeah, that one I would probably enjoy. Andy Serkis narrates it.

It is phenomenal. I think Lord of the Rings is atrocious, and I loved it. Okay. I like Lord of the Rings, but not as much as The Hobbit.

So, okay. I don't know that that's my favorite book of all time. It's just the one I could tell you I've read more than once.

Well, do you want to then answer my question? I don't think I can. You don't have a favorite.

I don't know. You're not a fan of superlatives. I just don't know. Okay. I forget a lot of things. Okay. I wasn't as excited as I should have been about my wife's conversion.

You're asking me to be excited about my favorite book. No, that's a good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, she will write a book about her conversion story, and that'll be your favorite.

Wait, what's your book? Maybe that'll be my favorite. Which one? Yeah, probably not.

That was a big flex, right? Oh, which one of the three? Of the two. I wrote two books and a booklet.

Okay. Yeah. That's two and a half books. Are you going to sell my book in your bookstore? I have sold two or three copies, at least.

Nice. And you just pocketed the profit there? Well, what was I supposed to do? Give it to you? You want me to send you royalties out of my province?

Yeah. I mean, if you sent me royalties, I would get royalties. We have two copies of your book on our bookstall.

We started with two. We have two. So nobody's bought that one. Nobody wants to buy this guy's book. But I did. I did.

On a Wednesday night, I read part of it to the church. And even like, I mean, there's a lot there.

So the kids were even all hyped up about it. So one of my daughters picked it up and started reading it one day when she was bored.

She was so bored. So bored, she picked it up and started reading it. Well, brother, I guess finish rubbing by like a three -year -old.

You're putting me to sleep. So it's probably a good time for us. I still don't understand why I'm here. So that's okay. Yeah. No, I bet this is going to be the dark horse episode.

This is probably going to be the episode that bears the most eternal fruit. That's the most encouraging, most useful.

Because that's just the way the Lord works. Okay. I love you. I'm thankful for you.

And I pray that this episode serves many dozens of viewers. At least.

Yeah, let me pray. All right. Lord, thank you so much for my brother, Dylan. Thank you for the way that you've used him and will continue to use him.

Help us to remember that the wisdom of heaven is foolishness to the wisdom of this world.

I keep saying that because it's true. I feel it in my bones. Lord, I felt it in my own ministry.

Lord, you delight to take small churches and ordinary pastors and use them to do extraordinary things for the glory of your name.

So we pray that you'll bless Dylan and his pastoral ministry. Help him to be holy, even as you were holy, and to lead from a position of holiness and strength in that holiness to grow more and more in his understanding of your word and how to apply that faithfully to the lives of his sheep.

We pray that you'll raise up more elders, that you'll bring more church members, that you'll bring more finances, all of this, if it be your will.

And that that Mosaic Church will be a useful, faithful presence right where you've planted them.

Lord, help me to be a good friend to Dylan. Would you bless this episode? Lord, use it in ways that we couldn't even begin to imagine.

We pray all these things with great hope and confidence in the name of Jesus. Amen. Amen.

Let me record my immovable conviction that this is the noblest service in which any human being can spend or be spent, and that if God gave me back my life to be lived over again,

I would, without one quiver of hesitation, lay it on the altar to Christ, that he might use it as before in similar ministries of love, especially amongst those who have never yet heard the name of Jesus.

At 10 of those, we want to serve the local church by equipping your church family with great resources that are going to point them to Jesus.

So we'll come and set up a pop -up bookstore in your church. There's no charge. We'll come for your

Sunday services. Maybe you've got a weekend retreat or a conference. We would love to come and then make recommendations.

This is one I've read three times now. It's called Incomparable by Andrew Wilson, and he goes through 60 characteristics of God.

It just wonderfully takes our eyes off the world, off ourselves, and puts them on our saviour.

Now, we've got lots of things for families and kids. For parents, I want to recommend this series.

This one is Raising Kids in a Screen -Saturated World. Our passion is to get good books that hold the

Bible read by as many people as possible. We hand -pick our bookstore. It's curated so we know everything we sell will point to the

Lord Jesus. Everything's discounted. And as we make recommendations, we're seeking to serve your church family so that they may be excited and equipped to read good books.