This coming Sunday I am going to present my testimony to my church as I come up for consideration as an elder. For a number of weeks now I’ve been planning to share this testimony with you, but just days ago in God’s providence, a leading King James only extremist made a whole 70-minute video questioning my salvation. I mention that only to clarify that I was going to make this post anyway and I’m not responding to him whatsoever—though I confess I couldn’t resist the clickbait opportunity in this post title and thumbnail. I’m going to share with you the exact words I’ve been planning to share with my church for literally months.
Potential elder testimony
I was raised in a Christian home, and my life followed a familiar American evangelical Protestant pattern: I professed faith in Christ at a young age, even telling my parents that I wanted to be a missionary to the island of Martinique as a young boy after a missionary gave a presentation at our church; but I didn’t really make the faith my own until I was 14 or 15. Rather, that seems to be the time when the Lord clearly made me his own. My heart began to yearn for God.
I knew as a teenager that I was not mature in my faith, so I sought and found a good Christian college. I wanted to serve the Lord, and I loved graphic design, so I made that my major and my goal: to serve the Lord as a designer. The Lord gave me many benefits at that Christian college: godly friends, challenging classes, a sort of greenhouse atmosphere for Christian growth. And for the first time in my life, I chose which church to attend. There were and are many good churches in Greenville, SC, and I tried several. But the night I landed at Mount Calvary Baptist Church, I knew something was different.
I heard for the first time what I now know is called “expository” preaching. I do not mean to dismiss all the preaching I heard before throughout my lifetime. I had good pastors who taught God’s Word with faith and zeal. But the pastor at Mount Calvary dug in deep and preached all the way through Bible books, much the way we do at our church. I was still a teenager. But I sat on the edge of my seat. Literally. I took careful and extensive notes that I still have. I was being fed rich Bible at a time when I was deeply ready for it.
I jumped into ministry at that church, joining AWANA and, especially, our many evangelistic ministries to the neighborhoods around our church. And I kept filling notebooks, as, beginning my freshman year, our pastor took us through the book of Ephesians. He took us to the Himalayan heights of God’s plan for the world—that in the fullness of time, God would unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth in him. Our pastor was adept at explaining the text in such a way that you saw it for yourself. You didn’t come away impressed with his cleverness or rhetorical ability. Instead, time after time I left preaching services saying, “I see it! That’s what that passage says!” I began to gain Bible study knowledge and skill not just through my college classes but through simply listening to my pastor model good interpretation.
I kept studying graphic design; my goal was to use it to serve the church. Then came the spring of my sophomore year, my fourth semester at the school. It was the day before the graphic design sophomore check, meaning we had all submitted portfolios to the art and design faculty, and they would tell us Monday morning which of us was going to continue in the program and which did not make the cut.
That Sunday night, After nearly two years, my pastor had reached Ephesians 3. I know the exact date, because I have a recording of the sermon, titled “Stewardship of the Ministry.” It was preached March 28, 1999, when I was right at 18 and a half years old.
In Ephesians 3, Paul follows up on his grand teachings about God’s plan to do what he told Abraham he would do. He said he would bless all the families of the earth through the Jews. In Christ, he did it. There was hostility between Jew and Gentile, and Gentiles were strangers and aliens, far from God. But in Christ, by faith in his blood, God made the Jew and Gentile into one body, the church, so making peace.
Paul follows up with a “therefore” in Ephesians 3:1:
For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles …
He goes on to say that he simply had to share with Gentiles the revelation God had given him about the gospel of Christ. Those Gentiles—no, we Gentiles, for I am nothing if not a redheaded American Gentile mutt—get to be fellow heirs of God’s promises with the seed of Abraham. That is the gospel, the best possible news!
Paul was made a steward, a manager, of this knowledge of the gospel. Paul felt bound by the knowledge he’d be given, bound to give it to others.
And then my pastor turned to application in a particularly pointed way that was not common for him. The church was full of dozens, if not hundreds, of Christian college students like me. So many of them are my friends to this day. And my pastor said:
The average student at [your Christian college] … sit[s] in classrooms under formal Bible instruction for right around 300 to 350 hours in the course of 4 years. … And folks, I am burdened about what we’re doing with that.
I was, too. I listened intently to my pastor—on the edge of the edge of my seat.
My pastor was not one to overuse the heads-bowed, eyes-closed, come-forward invitation. He did this very rarely. But at the end of the sermon, he asked us to bow our heads. There was a sober but electric energy in that room as we did so.
I wondered if the Lord was putting his finger on my own heart. And that’s when my pastor said,
Are there men here tonight and God has been working in your heart? … I’m sure there are young people here who years ago at a missions conference stood up or walked forward and said that by God’s grace and leading, you would be a foreign missionary. And today, you’re majoring in graphic design, interior decorating, cosmetology, woodworking, or all manner of other things.
I don’t think that because my pastor mentioned my major, God was speaking to me. God was speaking to me because the argument Paul makes in Ephesians 3 resonated with desires he’d placed in my heart: I knew I had been given great opportunities to study God’s word, and I knew at some level, that night, that I wanted more of them, and that I wanted to help others know the Bible.
My pastor acknowledged that night what I then and now believe with all my heart: that God calls most Christians to be graphic designers, interior decorators, cosmetologists, bovine podiatrists—that to have a “secular” job is not to be a second-class citizen in the kingdom of God.
But then he made an argument that I knew referred to me. He said,
But … the world is devoid of workers. Jesus Christ himself said [this was true], and nothing has changed. … How can it be that we have so many young people who answer invitations like that, but when it gets down to the training time in their teenage years, such a vast number of them are diverted?
I went to that church for a total of 18 years, from age 16 to age 34, when I moved to Washington State. I can remember only one time when he asked those who felt the Lord speaking to their hearts to stand. He did that night, and I stood. I experienced that night what I can only describe as a call to full-time ministry. I found out the next day that I passed my sophomore check, that I could continue as a graphic design major. But I didn’t. I knew that a call to ministry meant a call to ministry preparation. I changed my major from graphic design to Bible.
I have always felt called to serve both the church I’m in and the broader body of Christ. So I worked for Christian textbook publisher BJU Press, then for Logos Bible Software in Bellingham, then for Crossway, makers of the ESV. In 2025 I launched out on my own as a Bible teacher in various online venues, and I also have a tent-making ministry that pays most of the bills: I design websites and logos for churches under my business, Forward Designer.
I married my beautiful and godly wife, Laura, in 2008 after meeting her on a mission trip in Europe. We fell in love in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and Lithuania. Now we have three children, two ferrets, 15 chickens, and one micro-urban flower farm. We dearly love it here in the PNW, and we have come to dearly love this church.
My prayer for the future
That’s it. That’s what I’m going to share at my church in a few days.
This testimony is not necessarily meant to be a salvation testimony or a presentation of the gospel. If it were I would make sure to mention my repentance and faith, Christ’s death for my sins and his resurrection for my justification. Instead this was meant to explain the calling I feel I have to serve Christ’s body with my life.
My wife is wise and godly, a trained biblical counselor who is very much a helper suitable to me. I had her read through this testimony more than once. She observed that I have never cut a hard line between a call to local church ministry and a call to ministry to the broader church. I have always freely intermixed both.
And at the end of a more personal post than most I want to tell you that literally this morning I had a conversation—one that lasted exactly as long as that King James only video, as it happens—a conversation with a leader in conservative evangelicalism who is interested in exploring a position I might take for a Christian organization that doesn’t totally exist yet. It sounds like it might start part-time and move to full-time if it’s successful. I could stay living where I am, stay invested in my church and community, but would have to travel some.
I have worked extremely hard for the last year and a half after going out on my own, and my prayer has been that I will be given by the Lord more and more work in the Bible space and a little less in the design space. I’m still interested in doing your church website, but I’ve now got a little team around me who can handle some of the time-consuming administrative tasks.
The idea is to free me up to do more Bible stuff, continuing on YouTube but also adding my gifts, such as they are, into organizations that support the church in various ways. That is my calling, rooted in Ephesians 3.
If you got this far in this post, would you pray with me that the Lord would somehow give me more time for Bible work—writing, teaching, editorial, etc.? If you didn’t get this far in the post, you have no idea I’m saying any of this.
An extra tidbit or two that are not on YouTube
My wife noted that it’s a risk to post this—I might not get voted in as an elder. This is true! I do not take it for granted that the church as a whole will agree that my calling amounts to a calling to serve this particular church in this particular role. If that were to happen, I would do some serious self-evaluation.
The men who have influenced me the most in ministry, were all men with advanced academic training who were deeply invested in their local churches—usually as pastors. I never want to let academic biblical studies popularization and local church ministry to get prized apart in my life.