Hi, I’m David.

I am deeply passionate about three vocational tasks.

  1. Coaching future church leaders by encouraging them to care for their soul, excavate the ancient wisdom available, and develop the skills necessary for leading in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world.

  2. Teaching + Preaching the story of God as revealed in the Scriptures and inviting people to participate in the story of God.

  3. Writing reflections and observations on a variety of topics I find personally fascinating and worth sharing with others.

My Story

When I was seventeen, I imagined myself pastoring. That vision stuck. For over 15 years, I have been on a journey of learning what it looks like to faithfully pastor right here, right now.

While earning my M.A. of Theology at Talbot School of Theology, I began an internship which led to job at a megachurch in Southern California. Within this context, conversations on organizational leadership overshadowed discussions on pastoral work. I began to develop my driving passion for learning what it means to truly pastor in our time and place.

Since then, my mind has often occupied by these three questions:

  • What did church leaders/pastors/elders do in the early Church?

  • What is a pastor supposed to do with his or her workday?

  • How do we develop future pastors for the ancient duties and modern/future skills required for pastoring in our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world?  

This led me to pursue my Doctorate of Leadership at Portland Seminary. I researched and developed a mentorship curriculum to provide future pastors with the training I wish I received when I was in my early twenties. This curriculum is based on The Paideia Framework I developed, which explores the personhood and work of a pastor.

With pastoral roles being vacated for a plethora of reasons, there is a pinch in the pipeline for developing future pastors. My desire is to help solve this problem by developing future pastors who will lead communities of Jesus-followers in an increasingly post-Christian, VUCA world.