The Story

I was saved as a teenager in a conservative Free Will Baptist church — and like a lot of young men, I spent a few years in what the Scripture calls the far country. But in the fall of 1998, I felt a deep and undeniable call to come home. To rededicate my life to Christ. To stop drifting and drop the anchor.

The call to preach came shortly after — early 1999. I sought counsel from my pastor, enrolled in seminary, and on the last night of that year — the watch-night service welcoming the year 2000 — I preached my first sermon. I have always considered that an extraordinary gift from the Lord. A built-in milestone. Going on 26 years now in the preaching ministry, and I have not yet run out of things to say.

My first years in ministry were spent with young people — teenagers, then college-aged men and women. A team of us traveled to churches across the region doing ministry: skits, special music, and I would preach. It was some of the most formative work of my life. Then came my first pastoral assignment — lead pastor of a church here in Eastern North Carolina, where I served for seven years.

In time, I felt the Lord leading me toward a ministry I had long admired: Pathway Ministries, under the direction of Dr. T.D. Worthington. What followed has been the most diverse season of ministry I have ever known. My responsibilities at Pathway span several roles:

• Associate Pastor — Pathway Baptist Church, serving alongside Dr. Worthington
• Administrator — Christian Bible College, a home-study based conservative Christian college
• Pastor of Students — Pathway Christian Academy
• On-Air Announcer & ministry team member — GoMix Christian Radio, a full-power FM station reaching over 40 counties and within hearing of more than 2,000,000 souls across Eastern North Carolina
• Consultant — helping small Bible colleges and institutes get established through our accreditation work

It is a full life. A blessed one. And every part of it has shaped what you read on this site.

Why This Site

The honest answer is apathy — and the devastation it leaves behind on both sides of the church door.

Those outside the church don't seem to care — and yet they are hopeless. Those inside the church don't seem to care — and yet they are powerless. Two groups, separated by a theological line, united by the same dangerous indifference to the things of God. And the Lord Himself, speaking to the church at Laodicea, made clear that lukewarmness is the one condition He finds most intolerable. Not cold. Not hot. Just — passing through.

I look at our culture and I see a people passing through. Going through the motions of citizenship, of faith, of family — without the conviction that any of it is connected to something eternal. And I cannot stay quiet about that. I have never been built for quiet when the stakes are this high.

The commentary you'll find here is not angry. It is urgent. There is a difference. Anger wants to win an argument. Urgency wants to wake someone up before it's too late.

I started The Watchman Post because the church needs voices that treat the conservatism of the Bible as normal — not as a fringe position to be defended and apologized for, but as the baseline from which everything else is measured. Too many Christians today have been made to feel that their convictions are the problem. I want to stand alongside them and say: your convictions are not the problem. They are the answer.

Amber & the Home We're Building

None of this exists without my wife, Amber. She is my everything — a precious gift given from above, and the best decision I have ever made outside of salvation itself.

Together we are raising four children, and the work of building a warm, loving, peaceful, and godly home is the most important work either of us does. We have watched dysfunction become the default setting of the American family — children thrown about by selfish and absent parents like a rag in a washing machine — and we carry a deep, heartfelt burden for that reality every single day.

Amber loves our children with a burning, sacrificial passion I have never seen matched. She is the kind of mother this generation desperately needs more of, and I am grateful beyond words to be her partner in all of it.

We have also served together in the public square. For nearly three years, we ran a ministry called Intervention for the Innocent — a Facebook-based effort focused on the abortion crisis, doing live broadcasts, calling attention to the ongoing destruction of innocent life in this nation. The catalyst was the law passed in New York that permitted abortion virtually up to the point of birth. We spoke until we had said what could be said. The burden has never left us. It simply found a new home — here.